The Inside Story of BitTorrent Inc's Collapse - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/the-inside-story-of-bittorrents-bizarre-collapse-a0766a5442d7#---199-286.jihd0r4lo <comment><USER2> I wish BitTorrent Live was made open source. There are a number of companies working on "P2P CDNs" for live streaming[1][2][3], but all of their work is proprietary. The companies' sales pitches are usually around efficiency: it allows providers to pay for less CDN capacity.

I'm more interested in the decentralization aspect. It makes live streams hard to censor and easy to distribute.

The closest open source equivalent we have is PPSPP (Peer-to-Peer Streaming Peer Protocol), or RFC 7574[4]. Unfortunately, the reference implementation, libswift[5], was seemingly abandoned a few years ago. In addition, PPSPP only deals with a stream of bytes, and while it was made with video in mind there is no implementation that handles video well: making different swarms for different quality levels, intelligent chunking, perhaps even deterministic encoding[6].

[1] [https://www.peer5.com](https://www.peer5.com)

[2] [https://viblast.com/pdn/](https://viblast.com/pdn/)

[3] [https://www.streamroot.io](https://www.streamroot.io)

[4] [https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7574](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7574)

[5] [https://github.com/libswift/libswift/blob/devel/TODO](https://github.com/libswift/libswift/blob/devel/TODO)

[6] [http://www.ndsl.kaist.edu/~kyoungsoo/papers/mmsys14.pdf](http://www.ndsl.kaist.edu/~kyoungsoo/papers/mmsys14.pdf)

<comment><USER3> It's not just P2P-CDNs it's all live streaming video, HLS and MPEG-DASH. Open source tools for these technologies are sparse.

Even good HTML5 players that match YouTube's feature set are few and far between.

Bitorrent Live is excellent btw. One of the best performing video apps on iOS.

<comment><USER4> I think this may be because:

\- Doing adaptive bitrate like YouTube does means doing many transcodes.

\- Transcoding is either extremely CPU intensive, bandwidth heavy or low quality.

\- Transcoding in realtime requires further compromise on the above, to the point where distributing the transcode over multiple machines is necessary.

\- There doesn't seem to be an agreed upon, browser supported protocol for live DASH. Static is easy enough but live is more difficult, especially when you add seeking, pausing etc.

\- The above means you need both a backend and a frontend system.

\- Running a system like this is very expensive. The entities interested in running it and able to do so are usually willing to pay for it.

All this said, Emby[0] can stream a transcode and perhaps its stack would be a good place to start.

[0]: [https://emby.media](https://emby.media)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Bittorrent is an amazing protocol, but it seemed like creating a 'Bittorrent' company is like trying to start an "Http" company.

<comment><USER6> They should have picked one single niche application for BitTorrent and built a killer product around that.

<comment><USER7> Peer-to-peer only ever made sense for popular stuff that people won't pay for. By definition there is little business opportunity in markets where people don't want to pay.

<comment><USER8> Yeah. The article is like "everyone at BitTorrent Inc said Cohen is brilliant, so he's brilliant". BitTorrent is a shit way to move files that only makes sense if your users are willing to subsidise your bandwidth for you. If you look at how big files are moved on the net in practice it's all professional CDNs. BitTorrent is hardly used outside piracy.

<comment><USER9> _BitTorrent is a shit way to move files_

How so? As far as I know it's actually pretty efficient.

 _If you look at how big files are moved on the net in practice it 's all professional CDNs. BitTorrent is hardly used outside piracy._

And when the first CDN appeared, they were also hardly used. That approach would disqualify any business except copycats.

<comment><USER10> Not only efficient, but also supports file integrity, resuming, parallelization, etc. It's a fantastic protocol.

<comment><USER11> Exactly - I live in an area where lots of people have 50+ Mb symmetric connections, and BitTorrent gave us all a dream that we could all use those connections without everything having to be transferred over the backbone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> so let me get this straight:

receive controlling interest of a company with $33million in cash reserves by using a $10million promisory note to gain shares.

proceed to spend $18million in cash, some of which is spent to pay your buddies.

when time comes to pay $10million promisory note, shrug your shoulders, and no actual penalties are involved for not paying up.

am i missing something? sounds like a great scam.

<comment><USER13> how does buying 500Mil chain of stores with its own cash reserves sound to you then?

[https://foragerfunds.com/bristlemouth/dick-smith-is-the- grea...](https://foragerfunds.com/bristlemouth/dick-smith-is-the-greatest- private-equity-heist-of-all-time/)

<comment><USER14> For those not aware of the current situation: Dick Smith Electronics went bankrupt about 12 months after this article.

They were like the Tandy or Radioshack of Australia at first, and followed a similar path - killing off their electronics hobbyist roots, and became pretty much a generic consumer electronics store.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> One good thing that came out of the disappointment of bittorrent inc is the open source syncthing which I believe was inspired by bittorrent sync's failings.

<comment> m-p-3 I'm glad it exists, but it's definitely not as intuitive to set up.

<comment><USER16> I wish they would improve the story around the official distributions.

I'm attempting to migrate away from an aging, single user, files-only OwnCloud instance to Syncthing, and the end user client is not nearly as painless. Syncthing distributes CLI binaries for a bunch of platforms, which is great. But there's no unified GUI for end users that's officially sanctioned. Instead, there's a bunch of 3rd party repos that one hopes they can trust. And, glaringly, zero iOS clients. (I'm working around this by adding a WebDAV server to my always-on system, but it's a workaround for sure.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What a crazy twist for a startup that was doomed from the start. But the article doesn't really do a good job explaining how Johnson and Delamar were given control of the company. I get that Accel wanted out, but why just hand it over to a couple of bros with a plausible plan? I feel like there had to be deeper relationships involved, or else one hell of a pitch deck.

<comment><USER18> Whenever I read stories that involve guys like these that come in swinging and think they can change things and end up just spending everyone's money, I've always wanted to label this behavior and you got me thinking ... "Broxecutives".

<comment><USER19> CE-BROS?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had been wondering a bit about the reason for the BitTorrent / Resilio split and this article did a decent job painting some of the picture.

</comment><comment><USER21> For some reason, this reminded me of "Pied Piper" of "Silicon Valley" fame.

<comment><USER22> Pretty much. Let's hope the next season doesn't develop in such a dreaful way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I wonder what's happening with Bittorrent Live. Maybe the economies of scale of the large companies have made P2P streaming a hard sell?

Why install a weird temperamental app when you can just stream video from Twitch (Amazon) or YouTube or Facebook? They've all invested tens of billions in networking infrastructure and have the necessary advertising structures to recoup the costs.

<comment><USER24> The economics have definitely changed. CDNs are dirt cheap and are technically simpler and more reliable than P2P. And for live video you probably want transcoding which is also easier to do in the cloud.

<comment><USER25> As former eng lead at a live streaming company, I second the idea that transcoding is a big deal.

Streaming bandwidth _is_ super pricey, and the money is enough to really matter. Even a startup can easily get to five or six figure expenses. Bittorrent Live gets that right.

However transcoding is critical, given that every OS and browser has its own format quirks. BT Live can't remotely do this.

Check out Zencoder for the real competition.

Maybe BT Live will find a niche with use cases that just produce no money at all, or where servers get shut down for political reasons. Marches, samizdat, and, uh, questionable copyright.

<comment><USER24> Twitter is trying to claim the political niche but maybe BT Live can become the home of "too hot for Twitter" streaming.

On a personal note, it's great to see the old decentralization crew on this thread.

<comment><USER26> Lucas and Wes talking p2p and Bram, I think I woke up this morning in '99...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I used to know and work with Delamar at a startup but for the music industry and ringtones... also, with similar concluding results. SMH.

</comment><comment><USER28> BitTorrent was, and is still, remarkable technology. Not focusing on the ethics and costs of piracy (that affects one part of what BitTorrent is used for), it has helped all kinds of content (entertainment and otherwise) have a massive reach globally (and across country borders) like nothing else has. I only feel sad for Bram Cohen in this whole series of events, and more so considering his condition (Asperger's syndrome) and how much he would've just put up with (in silent frustration) while others ran the show. In this article, I was surprised to see no mention of uTorrent, the BitTorrent client, and how it changed from the time it was bought by BitTorrent, Inc.

P.S.: Off topic, but I dislike these Medium hosted sites with large blurry images on page load that come into focus later.

</comment><comment><USER29> Weren't they the ones to buy the beloved uTorrent client and ruined it with adware?

</comment><comment><USER30> I think it would've worked if they had started off in a SAAS model, like, pay $1 for exchanging 1GB of data, $10 for 10GB of data and so on. At the time it launched there was still requirement for moving data across sites , but no reliable way. For ex: most software/trailware/shareware came in CD ROMS bundled in magazines !

</comment><comment><USER31> Kind of a similar story happened to Diaspora Inc. It didn't manage to become a product or a company. But technology was good and open and it lives on today.

</comment><comment><USER32> bt television is sorta sweet.

<comment><USER32> what the hell is "one America news"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Very clickbaity title. This refers to BitTorrent Inc, the company, not the file sharing protocol.

<comment><USER34> Well, that's probably why it says "BitTorrent Inc" in the title?

<comment><USER35> The original title was "Unbelievable story of how BitTorrent failed"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Meta, but did backchannel change the title, or did the submitter? It seems like a weird editorilization, from the current "The Inside Story of BitTorrent's Bizarre Collapse".

"Unbelievable story of..." feels very click-bait to me.

<comment><USER37> Backchannel could have changed the title, wouldn't be the first time a title's been changed somwhere. The URI includes "the-inside-story-of-bittorrents- bizarre-collapse" which makes me believe otherwise however, unless they've been flip-flopping the title, or A/B testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> BitTorrent Inc was ethically shady from day one. Call me old-fashioned, but the investors got what they deserved by trying to profit off of piracy while pretending to be legitimate.</comment>


Creating a Blog without a backend - <AUTHOR> http://shamadeh.com/blog/blogging/2013/12/24/MovingToJekyll.html <comment><USER2> Maybe I'm noticing a trend that doesn't exist, but it seems to me that the web industry is slowly realizing how much the original designers of the web got right.

RESTFUL services bring back the focus on URLs and HTTP methods. For a while there was a craze of embedding content in awful Flash and Java applets, but that died out because of convenience, better browsers, and SEO. I wonder if the future of the web is going to look a lot more like its history than we thought.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. In my opinion, HTTP's success is due to its platform- independent nature and its simple yet effective text-based communication protocol. Standardized solutions are the way to go.

Flash died because it was private and for Adobe. Java will not remain a strong web language as long as it is for Oracle.

I predict a great future for HTML5 WebSockets, as well as other open-source API's and protocols.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> " When I first read about that, it was impossible to believe. The site was saying that the blog works without data, which is essential for any blog."

What? There's never been any really good reason for blogs to be database- backed in the first place. Blogs are just static websites with new pages added frequently.

<comment><AUTHOR> It may be evident for you since you probably have seen many frameworks and implementations. Before hearing about Jekyll, I only used Blogger and WordPress, which relies on the database for almost everything.

<comment><USER4> Once upon a time, Pyra Labs' Blogger was a tool that generated static pages and FTP'd them to your server. This was back in the heyday of Movable Type.

<comment><USER5> I remember using ppwizard on OS/2 :):

[http://dennisbareis.com/ppwizard.htm](http://dennisbareis.com/ppwizard.htm)

Nowadays I am using Hakyll, it's a natural progression from Jekyll and is much easier to customize (it's basically a Haskell DSL for static site generation).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really don't see the benefits of a blog without a backend. Don't get me wrong, I used jekyll a while back and when I used it, everything was awesome.

But then I wanted to do simple stuff like editing a post from another computer that didn't have access to my server because one of my post had a typo.

Then I wanted to list all my blogs by published date and have a different place where I could list post by [type|tag].

Some of those features are available through jekyll, but seriously, what's the difference between parsing a database for post of type X and having jekyll build a list of post on XYZ requirements?

I hope you don't think that database backed blog are slow because on 128mb RAM I had over 20k unique per day on my site. Running Wordpress, without any caching.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey pothibo. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.

Honestly, I chose not to go with Wordpress for 2 reasons. First is that it needs a server. Using Jekyll, I am able to leverage Github pages to serve my website for free. The second reason is that Wordpress is not easy customize (from a programmer's perspective). I tried to learn Wordpress themes but stopped after sensing how much time this would take me. Jekyll's themes were self-explanatory code, allowing me to plug my website's same CSS files and HTML template into the blogging platform. For Wordpress, I had to use PHP and learn theme functions and learn how to package the theme beforehand.

I know Wordpress has wide collection of plugins, but coders like me always prefer to write their own stuff.

<comment><USER6> You seem to think that I'm rooting for Wordpress, I'm not. I just used it as everyone knows what Wordpress is. I'm currently using my own blog engine ([https://github.com/pothibo/ecrire](https://github.com/pothibo/ecrire)). What I wanted to say is that as soon as you need some feature for your blog, you'll end up using something that is powered by a database.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Have you looked at Octopress? Curious to know what your thoughts are. When I Google for static blog hosting in general and Jekyll in particular, many results say 'Use Octopress, which is a lot more convenient'.

</comment><comment><USER8> @salehhamadeh One small nitpick: the Twitter portion of the social media bar, on mouseover, slightly covers up the "S" in your first name while viewing in 1280 x 800 res and on Chrome.

<comment><AUTHOR> @wyclif Thanks for letting me know. I added this box last week. I used a jQuery plugin called Tweetable that grabs tweets without authentication from www.getmytweets.co.uk. I noticed that this is very slow. Over summer break, I plan to write my own Twitter API wrapper for unauthenticated requests that is fast enough to cover my blog's needs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My blog is backed by github and jekyll.</comment>


The 15-hour working week predicted by Keynes may soon be within our grasp - <AUTHOR> http://www.aeonmagazine.com/living-together/john-quiggin-keynesian-utopiav1/

<comment><USER2> It will never happen, due to the enormous jealosy of the ones that have all, they rather kill off all the non productive people on this planet than to share their wealth in form of reduced working hours.</comment>


Oral history interview with Marvin L. Minsky (1989) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://purl.umn.edu/107503 <comment><USER2> You might also like hearing from Minsky himself, starting at [http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/1](http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/1) .

<comment><USER3> It's interesting to see his take on Chomsky's work on linguistics, how it transformed a useful field into a useless one almost overnight: [http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/33;jsessionid...](http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/33;jsessionid=16AF389B48EC505B99C9D18C36F6D904)</comment></comment>


Creating a visual map between code and its parse tree - <AUTHOR> http://blog.loadzero.com/blog/parse-tree-vis/ <comment><USER2> Nice. Would be good to do it with Python.

<comment><USER3> Author here. I am guessing you mean display the parse trees for python snippets?

It wouldn't be too difficult to do in backend code, using something like [https://docs.python.org/2/library/ast.html](https://docs.python.org/2/library/ast.html).

It might be tricky to get it to work completely in the frontend, like the demos in this article.

<comment><USER2> Yeah ... I've turned the parse tree output from Baron ([https://github.com/PyCQA/baron](https://github.com/PyCQA/baron)) into HTML -- using span elements to represent the subtrees in the Baron AST. It was quite trivial (less than 200 lines including comments). I am now trying to see how I can add different representations to the rendered html output. I would like to show the abstract syntax tree, the data dependency graph, the control flow graph; the output of git blame; perhaps deltas over time; test coverage and various bits of requirements and test results traceability information alongside the code somehow. Lots of stuff. :-)

<comment><USER2> All in the back-end --- I just want it as standalone single-file HTML w/ no server infrastructure required.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Yelp 'pay to play' pitch makes shops scream for help - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/13/yelp_sales_pitch/print.html <comment><USER2> So Yelp puts businesses up for public criticism and simultaneously try to sell advertising to those same businesses.. that puts them in a tricky spot of trying to stay fair and still make money.

The local advertising market is hot, but maybe they should be exploring other revenue ideas if they want to keep from descending to Citysearch's depths of mistrust - licensing the data they collect (like InfoUSA), data mining (like Macrosense), maybe even selling a product?

</comment><comment><USER3> I mistrust Yelp because they scrape reviews from other websites. I have found a couple of reviews that I posted elsewhere under fake user names on Yelp.

<comment><USER4> Considering that things like "elite status", which is based on contribution, is coveted by some users, it's entirely possible that the content in question was posted by an actual user who cut and pasted it from another site. It would be pretty hard to verify that someone's review is truly their own. If you notice something out of the ordinary, there are tools available to flag content.

Disclosure: I work for Yelp.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah thats why I'm not that big on online reviews, because most businesses are now savvy enough to know that they can game the system

</comment><comment><USER6> This is quite an interesting read. Looks like a lot more business owners will realize the importance of negative reviews, start putting fake negative reviews on rival businesses and flood their own yelp page with good comments.

What will be bad for yelp down the road if that happens? maybe an online guide of business reviews with no credibility and guininity.

<comment><USER7> The key to using yelp isn't to just read the first few reviews, but to find reviewers that either match your tastes, or have observations that appear to be particularly trustworthy. That can sometimes be determined by reading the user profiles and other reviews.

I wouldn't recommend anyone just reading every review on yelp. You have to come up with some sort of filter.</comment></comment>


Australia's Owen Gun - <AUTHOR> https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/australias-owen-gun/ <comment><USER2> Ian McCollum of forgottenweapons.com has a great video showing disassembly of this firearm [0]. His youtube channel [1] is also a great resource if you like seeing the insides of all the crazy firearm designs there are (and were), with a good dose of geopolitics and history thrown in.

[0] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_3AoDf7CeE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_3AoDf7CeE) [1] - [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrfKGpvbEQXcbe68dzXgJuA](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrfKGpvbEQXcbe68dzXgJuA)

<comment><USER3> I really like his content. The research is awesome and detail is next level, what sets it apart for me is that there so little actual shooting.

<comment><USER4> For more shooting, and also discussion & commentary on weapon ergonomics & action match shooting, check out the _InRange TV_ channel[1], where Ian is a co-host with Carl Kassarda.

Sadly, the _InRange TV_ has to self-limit on Youtube due to rather stringient rules; for example, some of the build (including WWSD) series got either hidden or censored.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeUNM9NqJqZXfRNeuW4_2sg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeUNM9NqJqZXfRNeuW4_2sg)

<comment><USER5> Another channel worth checking out is C&Rsenal, which does longer form videos with _very_ in-depth research and shooting. Right now they're trying to cover every gun issued during WWI, though I think they're close to completion with that. I learned about them from Forgotten Weapons[1].

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD4gyzCqHwk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oD4gyzCqHwk)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This video shows how the Owen Gun works: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5kW4sKd- sQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5kW4sKd-sQ)

I think the Owen Gun is not just interesting because it was a successful indigenous Australian design, but also because it was so clearly designed for reliability. The Sten Gun in comparison was designed to be extremely cheap to manufacture and did not have a reputation for reliability.

</comment><comment><USER6> Wow, look at the stark simplicity of that gun. As an engineer/programmer, there's something appealing about simple, durable machines like that.

</comment><comment><USER7> Great article. One small mistake in it. Pretty sure it only fired 700 rounds/minute, not 7,000.</comment>


Pornhub is planting a tree for every 100 videos you watch - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailydot.com/lifestyle/pornhub-arbor-day/

<comment><USER2> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRJ_QfP2mhU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRJ_QfP2mhU)

</comment><comment><USER3> I heard you can plant a tree for a dollar or less...</comment>


Show HN: Brubeck – a free simple blogging Wordpress theme - <AUTHOR> https://www.grovepixels.com/demo/brubeck/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hello, I'm the creator of this theme. If you guys have any questions or feedback please let us know, we want to make this theme better.</comment>


Carwoo (YC S09) raises $6MM - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/12/14/carwoo-raises-6-million-to-spare-you-the-car-dealership-blues/

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting concept and more interesting is that this is something that had been tried successfully a long time back.

In 1997, at Trilogy Software, a bunch of new employees as part of their training program (Trilogy University) pitched this idea. The CEO wasn't sure about it but the team went ahead and implemented it. It was an insanely successful project until due to some political lobbying by car dealers there was some law passed or something due to which they had to shut it down.

It would be interesting to see how big car dealerships in US react to this now.

Ref - <http://www.cyberwink.com/don/reading_trilogy.html>

</comment><comment><USER3> I am not sure how you scale this business. People are not often in-market, and they don't stay there very long. The ads to reach people in-market are prohibitively expensive.

I think I would take the money and blow it on a Super Bowl commercial. I think that is how Lending Tree got off the ground.

<comment><USER4> Carwoo is a service that matches customers with dealers.

Why should there be any dealership ads? Brand/model ads make sense, but customers on the market for the best deal ought to be able to quickly find which dealer in a convenient radius is willing to offer the best deal. No hassle, no misleading price quotes, no bs.

Disclaimer: I bought my last car via carwoo after reading about it here and I will definitely use it again for future car purchases.

<comment><USER3> I don't doubt it is a good and useful service, but how do they get their name out there? Advertising to people who are searching for new cars is insanely expensive.

<comment><USER4> word of mouth. I saved around $1000 and have told tons of people about it.

<comment><USER3> If the business plan is "word of mouth" then why raise money? This is a company that has a good product, customers that are willing to recommend it, and plenty of dealers signed up. Now they need scale. "word of mouth" is not a very good plan for new auto sales because not many people are in-market, and they aren't in-market for very long. To put that in a simple way, let's pretend I am your friend, and I want to buy a new car. I will likely complete the transaction before me and you are at the pub, and I tell you that I am shopping for a car, and you tell me about carwoo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So is this for cars only? Or also used?

<comment><USER6> This service is for new cars only.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> honestly, it's difficult to buy cars from dealers? that's one of the easiest (and more expensive) i can think of.

but i think 6mm tells me i'm wrong.

i'd like to see someone solve the problem of buying used cars. solving buying new cars just get a meh from me.

<comment><USER8> _i'd like to see someone solve the problem of buying used cars_

What do you feel is the problem?

There are _lots_ of problems, but I think they can be largely segmented by demographic.

Edit: The problems also extend to dealers and there are many demographics that have problems there. Many women, in fact. Dealers are unfriendly places, I spent a very short tour of duty within the industry and have lots of experience as an enthusiast and consumer.</comment></comment>


Washington Post to be sold to Jeff Bezos - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/washington-post-to-be-sold-to-jeff-bezos/2013/08/05/ca537c9e-fe0c-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html?hpid=z1

<comment><AUTHOR> Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; "Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60 days. The Post Co. will change to a new, still- undecided name and continue as a publicly traded company without The Post thereafter."</comment>


New iOS Google Authenticator update deleted all my accounts - <AUTHOR> https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/google-authenticator/id388497605?mt=8 <comment><USER2> To avoid this issue, make sure you've logged into all your 2factor accounts, and have the new Authenticator QR code ready -before- updating.

eg. For Google accounts: 'Move to a Different Phone' at [https://accounts.google.com/b/0/SmsAuthSettings](https://accounts.google.com/b/0/SmsAuthSettings)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good tip. I just wish I had known this before I updated...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> IIRC this happened with an update to Google Authenticator for Android as well. They rolled out a new version that discarded all your old accounts, and removed the old version from the store. Quite a nasty surprise...

</comment><comment><USER4> I believe this is related to iOS 7: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6112077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6112077)

</comment><comment><USER5> Other discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6325760](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6325760)

</comment><comment><USER6> Same thing happened to me. Presumably I can restore the older version from a recent backup, but this is pretty weak.</comment>


Acetaminophen may hinder the brain's error-correction mechanisms - <AUTHOR> http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20160308231517.shtml <comment><USER2> Acetaminophen metabolizes to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM404](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM404), which may act indirectly on endocannabinoids or CB1 receptors.

Acetaminophen has been shown to have an effect on social pain/rejection as well: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20548058](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20548058)

It's an interesting drug.

<comment><USER3> Also appears to subtly alter our moral judgment:

[http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/whats- tyle...](http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/04/whats-tylenol- doing-to-our-minds/275101/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It says "painkillers" \-- a very general term -- but the study was on acetaminophen (tylenol). Obviously the results don't directly hold for aspirin, ibuprofen, etc. Although, it would be interesting to do a similar study of other painkillers.

<comment><USER5> What are some of the differences between the various types of painkillers? I've never thought about it.

I'm hoping for a highly technical answer, but anything would be interesting.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure if you have any biomedical background so I will start from the beginning. Looking for details on "how a medicine works" the key phrase is "mechanism of action". This is a description of known interactions of a medicine with protein molecules in the body. DNA is code for proteins and proteins are the interactors in the body (a rough analogy is DNA is the source code, proteins are the binary).

So, the mechanisms of action are the key to both major effects and side- effects. If a medicine works well, it mediates a single pathway of protein interactions and produces no degradation products or side-effects in other pathways. Here are wikipedia descriptions of mechanisms of action for different medicines:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol#Mechanism_of_actio...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracetamol#Mechanism_of_action)

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen#Mechanism_of_action](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibuprofen#Mechanism_of_action)

They do have COX inhibition in common. COX is a protein enzyme that mediates pain and inflammation response:

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

However, they have slightly different side effects (secondary interactions) and some may have additional primary interactions (those that mediate pain). For instance there is evidence that tylenol has direct interaction with receptors in the spinal cord to mediate nerve signaling (separate from inflammatory and pain response sources via COX).

So, the indication of a side-effect with acetaminophen does not imply there is a definite side-effect with all painkillers (or even all COX inhibiting painkillers). Although it is a good indication that other painkillers should be evaluated for the effect and if it is common to all COX inhibiting painkillers then it may be that specific path.

Living animals are a beautiful and complex interaction of proteins and small molecules. It is exciting when we determine how one piece of the puzzle might work. The complexity involved makes it difficult to broadly apply results until the broader context has been evaluated.

<comment><USER5> This was a wonderful comment. Thanks very much!

<comment><USER6> Just to clarify, all over the counter painkillers are NSAIDs, non steroidal anti inflammatory drugs. And like OC said, they all inhibit COX1 and COX2. Selective COX1 inhibitors have been created as prescription drugs to avoid effects of stomach ulcers and liver damage but were pulled off the market due to studies showing increased risk of heart attacks. Ie. Celebrex

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celecoxib](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celecoxib)

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAID](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAID)

<comment><USER7> [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAID](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSAID)

> Paracetamol (acetaminophen) is generally not considered an NSAID because it > has only little anti-inflammatory activity. It treats pain mainly by > blocking COX-2 mostly in the central nervous system, but not much in the > rest of the body.[3]

<comment><USER6> Personally I take Naproxen Sodium (Aleve.) It has a long half life and high anti-inflammatory activity. One thing to note is that NSAIDs are best taken in high doses sparingly rather than a temperate dose daily. Inflammation is best defeated by impulse of NSAIDs. I suffer from chronic pain due to herniated discs. When I notice it is due to inflammation I take 2 Aleve extra strength gel caps. And the inflammation subsides for at least a week or two. I know this isnt totally related and slightly anecdotal but as hackers I figure that you guys would like to know from a fellow hacker that did the research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> another-one I have OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder). Where a normal person may have a fleeting thought about something and discard it, my brain can get "stuck" on that thought.

I view it as the check mechanism NOT kicking in as it should.

I have found that acetaminophen helps to put the check mechanism back in place. It can slow down or stop the runaway train.

</comment><comment><USER8> Some people have been saying this for a while: "The Alzheimer Pandemic: Is Paracetamol to Blame?" \- [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3921468/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3921468/)

<comment><USER9> No, that's [probably] caused by anticholinergics: [http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/common-anticholinergic- dr...](http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/common-anticholinergic-drugs-like- benadryl-linked-increased-dementia-risk-201501287667)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's interesting to consider what we might learn about the mind/brain by tying this result to the one that came out a few years ago - acetaminophen reduces 'existential anxiety:

[http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/...](http://www.psychologicalscience.org/index.php/news/releases/experiencing- existential-dread-tylenol-may-do-the-trick.html)

</comment><comment><USER11> Anyone know the best way to open a ".spv" file? The data for this paper is "free" as long as you have SPSS apparently. I was able to get the .sav file opened, but many of the column names mean nothing to me. [https://osf.io/xpmd2/](https://osf.io/xpmd2/)

<comment><USER7> IBM have a free viewer. [http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21479879](http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21479879)

I have no idea how useful that is.

> Question

> How does one view IBM SPSS Statistics output if s/he does not have > Statistics, or has an earlier version than that which produced the output?

> Answer

> For output produced by versions of SPSS/Statistics 16.0 and later (i.e., > *.spv files), the free IBM SPSS Smartreader is available for Windows, Mac, > and Linux from the SPSS Community > (www.ibm.com/developerworks/spssdevcentral). Look for the Download materials > for IBM SPSS Statistics.

<comment><USER11> Anyway, I figured it out by comparing the means of the columns to the tables in the paper[1]. I was wondering about the claim that "the magnitude of an individual's Pe correlates positively with omission errors", since they do not show this plot.

You can see it by plotting "pe.diff.meanpz.cpz" vs "percent.omission.errors" from the data.sav file at the OSF link (I used the R "memisc" package). There is a correlation, but just slightly (eg the subjects with the highest error had middling Pe).

Also, the error rates correspond to the control group _not_ clicking (on average) when they saw an F instead of an E 1-2 times out of 60 vs 3-4 times for the acetaminophen group.

They say "the effect of acetaminophen on errors of omission, while robust, was unanticipated". So this was the result of exploratory analysis. Personally I wouldn't put much stock into the idea that acetaminophen "hinders the brains error correction mechanism" based on these results.

[1] [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26892161](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26892161)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Newbie here. Not sure If I understand correctly. So, there is a reason to not take painkillers at work?

<comment><USER13> Ia there a reason TO take painkillers (at work or not)?

If you are not seriously ill, like having cancer or a broken bone, why do you take painkillers?

Imo, by taking pain killers you shut of the bodys built in protection thats telling you either to eat, drink or rest.

Few people should require to do this.

If you require painkillers to get through the day (or year) you should consider your position and how youre treating your self and your body.

<comment><USER14> I've suffered from semi-regular headaches -- sometimes every week, currently about once a month. I don't know what's causing them; the neurologist said it's migraine, another doctor said it might be allergies, other people told me that they are probably related to tension in my spine and another well-meaning friend told me I should just drink more water.

Ibuprofen lets me get rid of my headache 90% of the time.

Sure, frequent painkiller use has side effects (stomach troubles for me), but the alternative is spending two days in pain unable to concentrate.

I know a few people who have been suffering from headaches all their life, and there just isn't a simple lifestyle change that will get rid of it.

<comment><USER15> I have a very similar story. Have you tried any medicines against anxiety? It could be something as simple as magnesium and water. Or Atarax or Buspirone. I've discovered these reduce the chance of a headache breaking out by quite a bit.

But if there's a real tension/migraine headache, ibuprofen is the only medicine that I've tried that helps.

But these days I'm very careful about taking ibuprofen, it hurts my stomach and I've already suffered vitamin B9/12 deficiency once. Not fun at all.

<comment><USER16> Have you tried something like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omeprazole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omeprazole) when eating ibuprofen? I am not a doctor, but I have understood that it is recommended if you have issues with ibuprofen and stomach.

<comment><USER15> Yes I have. It works ok most of the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think this title can be misleading, be sure to read the article closely. From the article, what when they say "error correction," all they mean learning a new task while under the influence of aspirin is lower.

Which to me seems obvious given that it's a social-pain reliever. Frankly, a psychology experimentee has no motivation to "score well" other than pride, so any drug that reduces the sensation of shame would make an experimentee try less hard.

<comment><USER18> Just a note, acetaminophen isn't aspirin. Acetaminophen is known as Paracetamol in some places, and is sold as Tylenol brand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Has anyone looked at the article and can comment on how large the effect is?

</comment><comment><USER20> According to science, they may...

According to my personal experience, they definitely do.

<comment><USER21> Care to explain further?</comment></comment>


Why Zoom Chose Oracle Cloud over AWS and Maybe You Should Too - <AUTHOR> https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/why-zoom-chose-oracle-cloud-over-aws-and-maybe-you-should-too/ <comment><USER2> This is legitimately making me think twice about using Zoom far more than their privacy debacle did.

All jokes aside, it is a good thing that AWS has competition.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm a fan of what AWS does in most respects, but their 1998 bandwidth pricing drives me freaking nuts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for the analysis QuinnyPig. That AWS bandwidth price is outrageous. Wow!</comment>


If GoDaddy had a command line interface - <AUTHOR> http://thechangelog.com/post/4391932134/if-godaddy-had-a-command-line-interface

<comment><USER2> If anyone's looking for a registrar, NameCheap sucked enough less than GoDaddy to make me go out of my way to mention here. Which is to say, substantially less.</comment>


Your Smart Light Can Tell Amazon and Google When You Go to Bed - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-12/your-smart-light-can-tell-amazon-and-google-when-you-go-to-bed <comment><AUTHOR> This is the line the concerned me:

> In other words, after you connect a light fixture to Alexa, Amazon wants to > know every time the light is turned on or off, regardless of whether you > asked Alexa to toggle the switch. Televisions must report the channel > they're set to. Smart locks must keep the company apprised whether or not > the front door bolt is engaged.

<comment><USER2>
      Televisions must report the channel they're set to.

TV ratings demographics are highly valued and can make big money. Years ago, Nielsen viewers received stipends plus free repairs on all metered TV/cable equipment.</comment></comment>


SpaceX's historic Demo-2 astronaut launch live on Wednesday - <AUTHOR> https://www.spacex.com/launches/ <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322948](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23322948).</comment>


DNA from hagfish being used to synthesize bulletproof slime - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/dna-from-this-ugly-fish-is-being-used-to-synthesize-bulletproof-slime?trk_source=popular <comment><USER2> It'll be very interesting to see how efforts to create "biological reactors" for replicas of natural fibers progresses. Thus far, there have been a number of successful attempts at synthetic replicas of natural fibers. These successes have been spawned from chemical vs biological approaches. For example, rayon[1] was one of the first attempts at a synthetic silk, with nylon appearing just a few decades later[2], and eventually a number of other synthetic fibers. While there have been undeniable commercial successes, all of the pretenders remain worlds worlds apart from the look, feel, and even function of natural silk.

Likewise, I've heard occasional reports of teams working on synthetic spider silk[3]. That I've heard, none of these have developed into viable products much less replicated the properties of the original fiber.

Artifacts like this fabric woven from golden orb spider silk[4] remind me of tales of early plastic artifacts being collected and valued as rare treasures (which they were). Now plastics are absolutely ubiquitous. At what point will we create synthetic fibers that fully replicate or even surpass natural fibers? Interestingly, while a "plastic treasure" seems like a joke today, I expect that golden spider silk cloth will remain an impressive object both for its history and its amazing character as a physical object.

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

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

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_silk#Attempts_at_produc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider_silk#Attempts_at_producing_synthetic_spider_silk)

[4] [http://www.wired.com/2009/09/spider- silk](http://www.wired.com/2009/09/spider-silk)

<comment><USER3> This make me wonder what the functional layers of abstraction IN synthetic biology are. Currently we think of intra-species gene sequence swapping as an applicable layer. But It seems the _truly_ functional bits are when we can biologically encode and express control over organ development. Something like building a spider with X*N body mass to support Y clusters of silk glands.

<comment><USER4> Biological abstraction is simply _not a thing_. You must understand that the fundamental difference between digital logic, software, etc. and biological systems, reaction mechanisms, signaling, and the like is not simply about sorting out how the different things are connected together. The biggest differentiating factor is by far is how deeply fundamental high-order nonlinear dynamics and complexity are within biological systems. The topology is an implementation detail and isn't want causes us problems.

Consider the nature of digital logic for algorithms of a low computational complexity. There might be a simple state machine, some kind of input, and one or more terminal states. Let's reduce this even further to the level of logic gates. NOT, AND, OR, and all the like are extremely simple and trivial to calculate. As far as the physical implementation of these goes, I have to admit that my knowledge of EE is fairly poor. I know there are some rather involved mathematics. AFAIK, however, the ultimate determinate of "on" or "off" state is a thresholding function. It's really not that bad of a problem.

Now let's consider one of the lowest possible levels of what we would consider to be a biochemical system: two chemicals involved in a reaction. For our sake, we would probably make it an acid and base problem, since acid-base chemistry is prevalent in biochem and it's quite easy at the freshman level.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_equilibrium](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_equilibrium)

As you can see, the treatment is a little bit more complicated than Boolean algebra. There are terms for Gibbs free energy, chemical potential, activities, solubility potentials, etc. to consider for a system sitting in some glassware. I won't get into the details, but do make note of the math. Can you think of how to compute these quickly in silico or by hand? Probably not too hard.

We're just getting started though. Things get rather noisy as we start to consider more than a few chemicals. As we trend up towards approximating an in vivo system, we also have to developing a model for interaction. To do that, we have to understand each component. At both ends, we enter into the realm of statistical thermodynamics. Here you'll encounter much more complicated models and concepts such as canonical ensembles:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_canonical_ensemble](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_canonical_ensemble)

You know can't simply consider aggregate systems as pairwise interactions or summations or any other trivial model. For one, there are too many incredibly localized chemistries within solution that produce rich behaviors. For example, here's a decent figure that presents a chemical transport process: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2980713/figure/f...](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2980713/figure/fig1/)

All of the familiar, easy math typically involves equilibria, and equilibria systems are nice and easy systems to study. But to be alive is to not be at equilibrium--one facet of biology is to push against that state as long as possible. Nonequilibrium systems present further computational and modeling challenges for us. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_equation](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_equation)

I've presented a bunch of math, and I'm not done yet. It's known that Metabolic pathways, the interplay interacting metabolites, happen to be NP- hard. Typical of graphs, fairly orthodox. The computational complexity of the topology isn't really isn't expressive enough to convey the beauty of a graph edges themselves--that they are in constant flux, connected through a chemical calculus. Chaotic, transient metastabilities that arise and collapse. Digital bits blink, but chemicals dance.

Do you know the breadth and depth of this machine? Here's a wonderfully illustrative map of the known metabolic pathways--at a glance it'll give you an instant perspective if you didn't already have context: [http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bio_sim/articles/metabolic_pa...](http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~turk/bio_sim/articles/metabolic_pathways.png) (When observing the forest, be careful not to forget what the trees actually represent. There is unfathomable complexity to be found in the small interactions.)

It probably dawns on you now that we're _not going to live to see the answers_. I've only really introduced metabolites here. Gene regulation, proteins... I never even mentioned the word "cell". That's far too much.

If it doesn't make sense why bioengineering is slow-paced, then I did a poor job at conveying how hard the problem space is. Yes, we can make certain gene products and achieve simple little results that still dazzle us. It's not quick, it's leagues away from what we want, and it's definitely not abstractly or generically portable. (I don't refer to the assays/methods.)

I suspect the only way to enter into the biological renaissance requires that we get better at everything else: math, low-level logic, algorithms. I imagine we'll have to find ingenious new ways of greatly contracting the problem space, reducing dimensionality, operating over compositions of subgraphs, etc. in order to deal with computing the complicated nonlinear dynamics at interaction level. Integration into an acceptable holistic model is mind- boggling. How to do this and get meaningful results, I have no idea. Whatever far future tools that might be effectively applied to this will appear to have bent the Matrix.

Thinking of today's "big data", I can't help but feel dwarfed at a truly astronomical scale. The depth of ignorance we'll eventually have to cross in order to solve the problems presented by a single cell... it puts everything into perspective.

Sorry for the long post. I hope I illustrated that the core tendencies of electrical engineering and computer science towards simplification and logic reduction are simply not very amenable to bioengineering. You can't simply tweak one thing or edit the binary. Everything touches everything, and you can't adjust the weights and levers without understanding the ultimate runtime behavior. You already know that line from Jurassic Park about the weather...

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the chart. That really hammered the complexity home to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I have been made deeply uncomfortable by hagfish since reading Cruz Smith's _Polar Star_ [1] in high school, where they feature in a minor but electrically memorable plot point.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Star_(novel)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polar_Star_\(novel\))

</comment><comment><USER7> Hey y'all hackers. If any of you want to work on this type of science in the bay area, my startup Synthego wants to talk to you. Contact me at email@example.com if you are interested.

</comment><comment><USER8> "Try on this dress honey."

"Ooooh, is this silk?"

"Um, not exactly..."</comment>


Ask HN: Should you strive for perfection when you are experimenting with an idea - <AUTHOR>

If you are experimenting and not sure of your idea, do you need to strive for perfection (UI, flow) or just hack to make minimum viable project and release. <comment><USER2>
      Ship > Feedback > improve
      Ship > Feedback > improve
      Ship > Feedback > improve

x n times

<comment><USER3> It is nearly impossible to get UI/UX or 'flow' right the first time. You'll go through a few iterations. But it is best to whiteboard your options or use something like balsamic to play with a few of your potentials and see what feels best. Show it around to friends and get feedback.

Then build. go back to those people you showed it to and add a few people to the list and watch them interact with it, get feedback. Repeat.

At first the changes may seem minor, and then when you really get it out into Beta, and start getting more feedback and ideas, that's when things will really start moving.

I took a look at your site, and I think you are coming at it from the wrong angle. You go right to 'how to get started' but I don't even know what it is yet or why I'd use it. Doosra Cricket means nothing to me. 'Pick a fixture' also has no meaning. What's a 'fixture'. I may not be your target market, but anybody who comes across your site should know what the purpose is without trying to decode your lingo.

Then you go into asking for email right off the bat with a sign-in, before I can even start doing anything. That is not good. Let people see what is happening on the site, get them interested and then you'll get sign-ups.

Hope that helps

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for looking into the site and giving early feedback. The reason I asked this question was I found myself spending too much time trying to get things like login, fb like on the front page and organizing the layout. It is good for learning but it is preventing me from addressing other key issues.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I always make sure the interface actions and flow is near perfect even before I even begin to develop. Artwork and graphics are easily changed at any time, but how the user interacts with the interface is much more complicated and much more important.

If you piss off the early adopters, they aren't coming back and you're going up a creek without a paddle.

</comment><comment><USER5> Love this question. I have a partner who comes from the retail world and he is constantly leaning toward perfection before launching for an idea that may or may not be a good one. I agree with kingsidharth but it's hard to convince him. Seems most people who build a retail location need it to be as close to perfect when you open as possible.

</comment><comment><USER6> What platform? Whats your goal for the idea? What do you _need_ from the idea? How much time do you have to put into it?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is on Ruby On Rails. The idea is simple and niche. If it has user acceptance I would be interested in continuing with it. I am getting sucked in just trying to make the UI better. Just in case if you are interested but it is work in progress <http://doosracricket.com/></comment></comment>


With ePrivacy looming, German publishers scramble to get users logged in - <AUTHOR> https://digiday.com/media/eprivacy-looming-german-publishers-scramble-get-users-logged/ <comment><USER3> > _lose upward of €300 million ($372 million) in yearly ad sales_

I really like these euphemism, talking about lost ad sales when it's really about losing personal data sales.

</comment><comment><USER4> I don't understand the outcry. Cookies are not required to show users ads or track clickthrough rates. Why will there be a loss of ad revenue? We had ads before privacy invasive techniques like retargeting.

<comment><USER5> > Why will there be a loss of ad revenue?

Presumably the privacy invasive techniques are done specifically because they increase ad revenue, not because the newspapers want to be nefarious.

<comment><USER6> But it can easily be argued that it's been a zero-sum game, where one actor has been forced to use more targeted ads because others have been more efficient (cheaper) by doing so. It's not like ads spending has increased; unless you're arguing that consumption has increased due to targeted/invasive ads?

<comment><USER5> It is difficult for me to see how it would be zero sum. Instead it seems very likely to me that the total amount spent by users online is higher with invasive ads than non-invasive ones: if no ad you see is relevant to you then you are less likely to buy anything online at all.

<comment><USER7> There's an argument I've seen - no idea whether it's correct - that users acclimatise to new advertising technology and eventually regress back to the mean. I suppose this would mean that newer and more invasive ads cause a spike in consumer spending, which drops over time until the next innovation.

<comment><USER8> I've never seen someone make that argument for better targeting, which is what they're saying cookies enable. You're not going to acclimate to being more interested in the ads you're seeing.

<comment><USER9> The argument for better targeting is simple: targeting works (whether directly or just through being a novelty), and those who engage in it get ahead of those who don't.

The argument for getting used to ads is mostly psychology/neuroscience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> If Wikipedia is right that _" no consent is needed for non-privacy intrusive cookies improving internet experience"_, then that's a good sign EU is finally adopting ethics-based regulation instead of the old capability-based regulation that threatened to cripple the Internet. It also means they are now specifically targeting advertising business instead of legislating universally technophobic nonsense.

<comment><USER10> That was always the case (consent only required for _third party_ cookies), but nobody understood it. Or was willing to give up Google Analytics. The EU has a bit of an issue with communicating to the public.

<comment><USER3> Where is it written that it applies only to third party cookies? AFAIK the old cookie law only allowed cookies without permission, first party or third party, where they were _required_ for website to function, e.g. shopping cart cookies. I interpret this as banning even those cookies that improved user experience, but that weren't strictly required for the website to function.

<comment><USER10> See [http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm](http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/basics/legal/cookies/index_en.htm) which lists various examples. I've got to admit that I'm struggling to come up with an example that "improves user experience" that would genuinely not be allowed.

<comment><USER3> Actually coming up with an example is quite easy. Consider website with huge catalog that customizes recommendations based on your previous activity on the website. This makes user experience better, but it is not strictly required for the site to function. None of the exceptions on the page you linked apply to this case.

<comment><USER10> If the user has an account cookie that would be subsumed in there, along with the consent notice that the site was storing your activity.

If there is no other cookie, then it gets interesting - you're storing a chunk of their browser history, which if you can identify it to a particular user becomes _personal data_. Then you need their permission to store this - <USER2> that's the intent of the GDPR.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Browsers should have taken that space long ago. Mozilla tried with Persona, but inexplicably it was abandoned. We could have granular control of our real and pseudo identities.

<comment><USER12> Persona is exactly where my mind went with this as well. While Yahoo was flailing, trying to find some new vision, one of the few good things they did was partner with a company that really has a vision in Mozilla. Yahoo could have moved to align the significant portion of the web under their control into compatibility with Mozilla's various efforts, such as Persona.

To me that's going to go down in internet history as one of the ultimate what- ifs. I feel like it was a missed opportunity for both companies.

<comment><USER13> We don't need companies controlling the internet, and we _certainly_ don't want them controlling our identity systems. The current status quo is already bad enough. Where is the implementation that allows _me_ to own my identity? Why are my user records locked away in some (many) corporation's database?

<comment><USER14> You're right that we don't need companies Co trolling g the internet, but it sure would have been nice to have a good login system backed by a company with the intentions and motivations of Mozilla (a non profit).

Businesses aren't going to trade their content out of the goodness of their heart, they want something in exchange. I would much rather trade ad views through Mozilla using a list of my interests that I control than to allow excessive tracking and profile building by some untrusted third party.

What we apparently have now is login collectives starting up, but who's to say how good or bad the practices are for each, or whether they have the ability to adequately secure their system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What is this about? What is this ePrivacy thing? How is it related to logins?

<comment><USER11> i think they re talking about this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regula...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Protection_Regulation)

<comment><USER16> If that is true, why not throw things into some P2P cryptographically secure user account system like this[1] (disclaimer: ours).

From a technology perspective, it is non-trivial for corps/companies to do this (since they don't value that). But the technology to do it already exists, so if laws are forcing people this direction, what is the best way to market the availability of systems like this?

Any thoughts/clues? Thanks!

[1] [https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter- wi...](https://hackernoon.com/so-you-want-to-build-a-p2p-twitter- with-e2e-encryption-f90505b2ff8)

<comment><USER17> That's a good idea, but if I were a German citizen I'd rather they use something that's tried and true like shibboleth. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but shibboleth is what most of America's colleges and universities use to allow students to access research material the institution has paid for. Something that isn't obvious though, is anyone can setup a shibboleth identity provider, the only difference being that it's not on the whitelists that academic identity providers are on.

<comment><USER18> The general term for this property is "federated identity" and academia is probably the most mature and widespread implementation - academic institutions regularly allow visitors from other institutions to use their home institution's credentials, for example in the worldwide "eduroam" WiFi network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I really don't understand what the EU's goal is here. Someone said that it's to model the "walled garden of regulation" approach that China has: Make regulations so tough and block out outside actors, creating an internal market that can thrive. Also wanting to break out the dominance of American tech companies within EU, and foster innovation.

However, I have yet to see a single argument where these regulations (both GDPR and ePrivacy) don't hurt EU businesses, and favors companies outside that don't have to abide by these stricter regulations.

So why has EU adopted this extremely hard line approach? What is the best case scenario?

<comment><USER20> The reason for this regulation is the privacy of EU citizens. Businesses (both in EU and outside) don't "behave well" by themselves, since there's an inherent profit motive in violating users' privacy and interests, so this regulation is forcing them to do this.

The best case is just that - businesses serving EU citizens (this includes most large multinational businesses as well, companies hosted outside _do_ have to abide with these stricter regulation at least for EU users, since almost always they also have EU customers or EU presence) have to obey these rules. They don't get to (ab)use user's data that much and are unhappy about this, but figure out on how to live on without that data.

<comment><USER19> I absolutely agree that privacy is important. However, what I'd like to understand more is: What are the regulators actually expecting to happen? Looking at the first version of the cookie law, basically the end result was a worse user experience across EU websites. Large warnings that take up large screen real estate, people learning to just blindly accept without reading. I was trying to explain to my SO that I'd been to a presentation about GDPR and ePrivacy, and said "It's the new version of the cookie warning" "Oh is that those awful warnings? I hate those I don't even understand what they are trying to say"

From a pragmatic standpoint the result of these new regulations seems to be not that publishers and other ad-financed businesses are saying "OK, ads are bad, let's do less of those". They are finding workarounds that abide by the law, but still allow them to target ads as optimally as they can.

The true winners in this are obviously the platforms with the largest database of users and user interest: Google and Facebook. The two companies are are dominating already, and in essence killing smaller local (EU) publishers. So from that perspective, are the regulators hoping that publishers and local companies band together, creating cookie pools and sharing user information amongst themselves to strengthen their position against FB and GOOG? Or are they hoping that EU companies come up with the holy grail of new revenue streams that nobody has though of yet?

TL;DR: In my mind: T stop bad things regulators make laws against something, and also to promote the "right way". Example: People get hit by cars crossing the roads anywhere. They invent a crosswalk and make it illegal to cross the road anywhere other than the crosswalk. What is the ePrivacy version of the crosswalk?

<comment><USER20> The main cause with the "cookie law" is that the law as written failed to implement the intent; the intent was to reduce tracking by cookies, but the actual requirement could be satisfied by those obnoxious warnings while doing tracking as before, and so it was. If the concept of "consent to cookies" was worded more strongly, as in the current laws, then many websites would actually have not made these warnings and simply made do without the cookies, since they wouldn't be able to obtain consent from most people anyway.

The new laws seem to avoid this mistake (of course, only time will tell for sure) - they are harsh enough to ensure the strategy "figure out what legalese we need to add to keep doing the same things" is not viable, and they have to actually stop gathering and using that data.

In my reading, GDPR seems like it will _not_ enable workarounds that still allow targeting ads as optimally as they could in 2017. They'll still try to target them as optimally as they can, they'll probably figure out _some_ workarounds for parts of it but that will by necessity be ads that are less targeted and use less private information (at least for EU residents) than last year. Also, the intent of lawmakers is clear - whatever workarounds the ad industry figures out to circumvent that intent are likely to be closed in 3-5 years with the next iteration of this directive.

The regulators are _not_ "hoping that publishers and local companies band together, creating cookie pools and sharing user information amongst themselves" \- they are explicitly creating conditions to ensure that it's almost impossible to get consent for that sharing of user information, and also that Facebook and Google will be able to get much less information than they could before - for example, the GDPR has a big impact on information gathered by all the FB like buttons and google analytics snippets in third party websites; and the "4% of global turnover" clause is included explicitly so that it has leverage to force Google and FB to change their behavior (at least for EU residents). There's no such thing as a "service-wide" opt-in for everything anymore; I will be able to deny Google consent to use my gmail data for targeting ads on google.com, and Google will have to obey; I will be able to ask Facebook for the data they've gathered about me on third party websites and get them to remove that data.

Since it's expected that most EU consumers will not give that consent (why would they?) it will pull Google and FB down to the level of those ordinary publishers; they will lose the data that historically gave them this advantage. They're not hoping that EU companies will magically grow new revenue streams, they are taking away those revenue streams (regarding EU customers) for all companies, EU and foreign.

This seems like what the regulators are actually expect to happen, and from what I've seeing in the internal activities of local businesses, it's going to happen - pretty much everyone here has major ongoing IT projects that will reduce the amount of private data that they are gathering and storing. _That_ is the ePrivacy version of the crosswalk - stop gathering private data about users, anonymize/cleanse the data you already have, and do your advertising in a more coarse-grained manner.

<comment><USER21> I think you are expecting too much. Folks are going to click consent buttons in order to use the websites they want to use and never think to go to privacy dashboard and view/modify/delete their data.

<comment><USER20> No, GDPR quite explicitly plans for that.

First, there's no such thing as "click consent buttons in order to use the websites they want to use" \- if clicking that button is needed to use the website, then it doesn't count as freely given consent. I.e. either the choices are "Agree and proceed" and "Disagree, but still proceed" or you might not have bothered with asking, since that click is not consent. If the data is not inherently needed to provide the service (i.e. a delivery address if you want something delivered), then users must have the option to refuse.

Second, there can be no single "consent to do everything". You have to explain every single usecase _separately_ with _details_ and _specifics_ , and get consent for each use case _separately_. This is a big issue. If a small company has something particular in mind, it's not a big deal. But if a megacorp has (had) a habit to use your data everywhere for everything, that's not going to work. As GDPR states, "A purpose that is vague or general, such as for instance 'Improving users' experience', 'marketing purposes', or 'future research' will – without further detail – usually not meet the criteria of being 'specific'". If the list of use cases and their details doesn't fit on a single screen, users simply won't accept them. For an organization like Facebook, it'll be a major challenge to simply list the places and ways where they are _already_ using my data - and they'll either have to give that full list to me and somehow convince me that I should agree (as the default option is to refuse with no consequence to me) or stop doing it.

In essence, you have to bring them to the privacy dashboard first. And everything has to be opt-in (default off). If you have a random consent button like the classic "Agree" under terms and conditions - well, that doesn't count as informed consent, so if that was your system then you don't have consent from _any_ of your users, and your use of their data was prohibited. Even if most users won't care, a few activists can force you to change the behavior for everyone or risk major fines - i.e. if I see that you're using my data without my consent, then it doesn't stop at you removing my data; the regulator can ask you to prove that you got informed, specific, freely given consent from all your other users.

Third, previous consent doesn't imply future consent - if you want to use the data for something new, previously this was done by quietly amending the terms and conditions, and adding a new option to the privacy dashboard (often pre- selected). Under GDPR, every new use requires new consent.

Fourth, a lot of the tracking has historically been done by third parties. I can see myself giving consent to use my data on some forum or blog that I frequent; however, the consent that I give _them_ doesn't count as consent for all the ad networks running the ads on their site. The ad networks would have to ask permission separately (which they won't realistically get, ever) and they also can't count on getting the site owner to give them my data, since site owner needs my (separate! opt-in! specific instead of "may share with third parties"!) consent for that.

<comment><USER21> What if your website doesn't work without cookies?

"We are collecting this data in order to provide relevant stories and advertisements on this website and partner websites. Please click Yes to enable your personalized feed".

<comment><USER20> Each purpose must be listed separately; the fact that user gave you the data and consent to use it for one purpose doesn't imply that you're allowed to use that data for another purpose.

In your example:

"This data is absolutely required for the service you requested" >> no consent needed, you're just informing the user;

"Also, we'd like to use that data to personalize your feed" >> opt-in;

"Also, we'd like to use that data to personalize your advertisements on partner websites" >> a separate, different opt-in. The user can enable the personalized feed while denying you consent to share that data with advertisers.

<comment><USER21> And if they say no along the way, what prevents the company from blocking access? Also, how does law differentiate between something that has to be separate or AND'd?

<comment><USER20> If the company does block access when you decline, then this means that the regulator is exceedingly likely to consider that any "consent" the company got from those who agreed was not freely given, and so it does not have the right to use any user's data for this purpose; which would expose the company to substantial fines.

The law intentionally doesn't set out explicit conditions to differentiate between what needs to be separate, and other conditions as well, to prevent gaming for workarounds. Instead, it lies out general principles and rights of the users, and gives a lot of leeway to the regulator(s) to evaluate if the usage of data was in accordance to the user's wishes.

In essence, the question is quite simple - did the user _want_ you to use that data for whatever you did? And, can you demonstrate to the regulator that they _intentionally_ gave you _informed_ consent by freely opting in to that use?

If they genuinely wish you to have and use that data, then it's ok (and they're not going to complain) and if they did not actually want you to use that data but your process somehow managed them to click all the required boxes, then your process is wrong, since whatever it measures is not informed, freely given opt-in consent. E.g. if I'm the company, then it's my duty to show why I have the right to user other's private data. If the only justification I can provide is that they clicked on "We are collecting this data in order to provide relevant stories and advertisements on this website and partner websites. Please click Yes to enable your personalized feed", then that's a lousy justification - it demonstrates that users wanted me to enable their personalized feed (so I have permission to do that), but it doesn't really show that those who clicked 'Yes' _wanted_ me to use their data for advertisements on partner websites, which is the criteria that matters. Any regulator will reasonably assume that it's likely that some of those users wanted the feed but did not want their data to be given to advertisers, in fact, they might have some evidence in forms of complaint from such users. Maybe some of them really wanted me to do just that (e.g. they freely wished to support my site in this way by donating access to their data), but that question did not give them the ability to clearly express this intent. If I had separated those things, I might have gotten consent from some users to share data with advertisers, but with the combined question I did not; so it'd be in my interests to separate those questions.

All the consent-related articles of the law and comments to them pretty much amount to repeatedly stating that if the user doesn't wish you to use that data, then the only way out is not to use it (or use it under some of the non- consensual use exemptions) - the law doesn't provide any option to claim consent if the customer doesn't actually want you to do what you did with their data.

For a crude comparison, the consent criteria seem to be comparable with those of sexual assault - no means no, a lack of answer is not consent, consent must be freely given and not coerced with some threats, consent can be withdrawn at any time, etc, etc; essentially it's only consent if they actually want to do that, no tricks or technicalities. The answer to "what prevents the company from blocking access if they say no along the way" is somewhat analogous to "what prevents your boss from firing you if you say no to requests of sexual favors" \- they _can_ do that, but the (implied) threat of it means that the act was not consensual and unacceptable even if you didn't say no.

<comment><USER21> I am not sure you intepretation is correct but I really appreciated your detailed answers and reasoning behind them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is the article switching half way from talking about _login_ cookies, to ad sales (which presumably is about tracking cookies of other kinds)?

I wish the law would just attack the problem at the root: remove _all_ incentive to track users and gather their personal data. E.g. don't allow advertisers to show ads to people based on anything they haven't given that site. If I haven't told the newspaper I'm visiting that I like fishing, they can't show me fishing ads because I liked it on Facebook.

And if they can't risk showing targeted ads, then the value for anyone to trade in this information vanishes.

This would also solve the problem of more and more advertising being harder to block because it's "native".

</comment><comment><USER23> Portugal is heading to the same route unfortunately ([https://digiday.com/media/portugals-media-companies- alliance...](https://digiday.com/media/portugals-media-companies-alliance/)).

There is already a website warning for the privacy issues of the platform ([https://nonio.pt/](https://nonio.pt/)).

</comment><comment><USER24> Logins for news sites was tried in the 2000s and it failed miserably. The only ones who could survive such a strategy are news institutions with a large subscriber base like WSJ or the NYTimes. But even they are struggling.

Would a login collective be any better? I highly doubt it.

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm pretty ad-friendly compared to most on HN (people have shown countless times that they don't want to pay if they don't have to, and microtransaction/favor/tipping systems are a giant mess and likely always will be), but the "people have to track to keep stuff running!" view strikes me as naive.

a) Right now we have "content" created and tailored more to pull in ad revenue than to do anything user-beneficial. That's not ideal, most pure clickbait going away would not be a net negative. Consider news: was the internet of 15 years ago meaningfully devoid of news content compared to today, or was it better off cause it wasn't flooded with as much polarized crap?

b) There's an assumption here that ad spending will decrease. One alternative possibility is that ad companies have been stuck in arms races for years now, without actually increasing yield. Look at the reasons why companies are "pivoting to video" \- even with all this tracking and "AI" garbage, online display ad effectiveness still sucks. As long as every network and publisher has to follow the same rules, I don't believe any advertiser is truly worse off. And from a principle-based view, I think any sort of smart-enough tracking to produce truly well-targeted ads (vs today's "here's that thing you already bought, let me show you it on every website now" crap) is too far on the creepy side to be something we want anyway.

c) The other side of the "sites won't make money anymore" side is that with a more even playing field there's a chance for some of the money to shift away from the people playing tech games and _to_ the people producing the content. There's not a ton of effective competition in ad networks right now, look where all the revenue goes. A Facebook and Google duopoly also only makes the implications of the tracking worse.

d) Finally, from the advertiser's perspective: where else are they going to send that budget? TV? Newspapers? Please. And even the worst case here - a net decrease in ad spending - is hard to paint as such a huge loss since there's a _lot_ of more productive things out there than showing ads.

There are a few other trends that will need to be ultimately addressed separately, though. One is the shift to video even for stuff that's rather stupid to force into the video format, just because the audience is more captive to ads, and this is a big problem IMO. Not really relevant to what we're discussing here, though. A more interesting debate may be around fraud prevention, I could see a plausible claim that if you have less history on the user you have fewer heuristics you can apply for fraud-fighting. I'm mostly meh on that, though, and willing to let fraud be the cost of business with internet display ads and hope it just washes out in the long run. (I'd prefer if it caused people to shift to paid models, but I'm not optimistic.)

</comment><comment><USER26> Oh no, those poor advertisers! Won't someone think of the advertisers?

<comment><USER27> That's not what the article is about. Advertisers will always find a way to advertise.

The article is about what _publishers_ to do, and speculates that smaller publisher may not be able to create a business model, but larger publishers will be able to adapt ad systems.

<comment><USER28> The paradox is that part of this was brought by large German publishers, or at least one of them, including the election of Juncker.

<comment><USER29> Why a paradox? It seems like classic rent seeking.

<comment><USER28> Yeah, but all these years the targets of the publishers' ires were and have been US tech companies. That includes an op-ed claiming that the publishers are afraid of tech. The same publishers that bragged about swaying elections and decision making in Brussels.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>