Apple's Ad-Targeting Crackdown Shakes Up Ad Market - <AUTHOR> https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-ad-targeting-crackdown-shakes-up-ad-market?pu=hackernews4qs3ac&utm_source=hackernews&utm_medium=unlocka <comment><USER2> > Only about 9% of Safari users on an iPhone allow outside companies to track > where they go on the web

> In comparison, 79% of people who use Google's Chrome browser allow > advertisers to track their browsing habits on mobile devices through > cookies.

Something to keep in mind the next time you see someone from Google complaining about how Apple won't allow Google Chrome to run natively on the iPhone.

<comment><USER3> And when there is a security vulnerability which exploits webkit by just visiting a website, one has to wait till Apple releases an OS update(if it decides to acknowledge and fix it[1]), where as one on Firefox 'if Apple had allowed its own engine' could get updated via the AppStore.

What Apple has done with the trackers is commendable, but the security argument when it comes to browsers is always in favour of allowing browsers with their own engines; which apple doesn't.

[1][https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2019/09/apple...](https://arstechnica.com/information- technology/2019/09/apple-takes-flak-for-disputing-ios-security-bombshell- dropped-by-google/)

<comment><USER4> What's the practical difference between an OS update that can be one tiny patch and an app update? Not only does iOS 13 support all phones back to 2015. They released a patch for older devices going back to 2011 less than 6 months ago.

<comment><USER5> One requires you to restart your phone and one doesn't. One allows you to get the security patch without other unwanted changes to the OS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As someone who worked in ad tech for half a decade, I fail to understand the fuss about cookie based targeting. We're speaking of databases mapping data to random numbers stored in a file that can easily be deleted. The real issue is ad targeting by a handful of large companies that have personally identifiable information.

It's not like cookie based targeting is very effective either. It's very difficult to get cookie based ad targeting right – you have to make significant investments into product, technical integrations and data buys. Given the fact that the cookies to which you are tying these investments can vanish at any time (and a large % do so regularly), it rarely makes business sense to make the right sort of investments. Instead most companies do the bare minimum and try to make a guess that is slightly better than a coin flip. I actually remember seeing a deck from a data company boasting how their gender data was ~ 60% accurate.

Why are we worried about this? Contextual targeting is far more effective. As an example, targeting an ad on Elle.com is more than 60% likely to reach women than an ad targeted based on cookie data.

Genuinely curious so would appreciate calm, non-aggressive responses. I'm wondering whether this is due to a generally poor understanding of cookie targeting effectiveness or if I'm missing something.

<comment><USER7> What if I want to target women who recently bought Chanel perfume? How would I go about doing that unless I do cookie targeting?

<comment><USER8> Is this a serious question? Just because you want to target something doesn't mean it is ok to do it. Geez, the arrogance. You want to do X, so the rest of us have to give up our privacy? Technical feasibility is not the same thing as ethical, courteous, or just plain being respectful of other people. The whole industry seems to have done some sort of massive mob rationalization of inappropriate behavior. It's not ok.

If I am on a tech site reading about disk drive failure rates, feed me an ad about an SSD sale. If I am reading about mountain climbing, show me ads about climbing equipment. Fine. But don't start following me around the web with adds about ascenders for the rest of the afternoon. Or travel insurance. Or ... It is none of your business what I browsed half an hour earlier.

Thank goodness at least one business (Apple) has enough customer focus left to try to address some of this nonsense. All the better that it helps them against some of their competitors. That just makes them more motivated. Bully for that. At least we are still the customers rather than the products with Apple.

<comment><USER9> Couldn't agree more. I hate it when people respond to concerns with "I make money that way, how could I possibly go on otherwise" as if it somehow legitimitized their unscrupulous activity. Their profits are nobody's problem but theirs and there is absolutely nothing wrong with putting them out of business if that's what it takes to stop their abusive surveillance capitalism. If people's use of privacy-focused software and products reduces their revenue, so be it.

<comment><USER7> You got too emotional when reading my response.

I was just asking the question because I was genuinely curious whether there was technically a way to do so w/o cookie targeting. I have no interest in doing such targeting. I was interested in whether a HNer had a creative workaround.

<comment><USER9> The way you asked the question suggested you were trying to find alternative methods to track people. That implies the method of tracking (cookies) was the problem rather than the tracking itself. My response to that is tracking people isn't something that should be done to begin with. People should not _want_ to track others. It should not be _possible_ to track people in any way, let alone make any money from the practice.

<comment><USER7> Ok I understand. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > _The cost of reaching Safari users has fallen over 60% in the past two > years, according to data from ad tech firm Rubicon Project. Meanwhile ad > prices on Google's Chrome browser have risen slightly._

This is a great metric for privacy.

<comment><USER11> I'm confused by this. If Safari users are harder to target, and demand for targeting Safari users hasn't changed, shouldn't the price go up?

<comment><USER12> The demand for highly-targeted users is what drives up prices. Since Safari users all look the same now and can't be highly targeted, they have lost that high-end demand and prices have fallen to generic display rates.

<comment><USER13> I would disagree. "People who can afford Apple gadgets" is a desirable high- income audience. I wouldn't be surprised if it was broken out as a special category for purchase by FB and GOOG soon.

<comment><USER14> The point is they are less valuable because you can't track them, so you can't take advantage of their potential value.

Lets say an average Android user is worth 100 value units, and you can get lots of uniquely identifying information about them, say 90% of the ideal amount of info, so their effective value to you is 90 value units each (90% of 100).

Uniquely identifiable Apple users info is potentially much more valuable, say 200 value units. However you can only get a very small amount of actionable information about them because they are so hard to track, due to Apple's security and privacy systems. So maybe you can only get 10% of the information you would ideally like to have about them. That makes their actionable value to you only 20 value units each (10% of 200).

<comment><USER15> > The point is they are less valuable because you can't track them, so you > can't take advantage of their potential value.

This is simply bullshit. So-called "targeted" advertising is a giant scam pulled on non-technical marketers who don't understand it at all and use "measurements" provided by the ad networks themselves.

Targeted ads don't actually work in any meaningful sense: [https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble- is-h...](https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its- called-online-advertising/13228924500-22d5fd24)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Sometimes I wonder if the entire ads racket isn't a case of the emperor with no clothes.

Has anyone here actually had a meaningful increase in users and revenue by using targeted-ad services, that they couldn't achieve by more organic methods (e.g. posting on places like Reddit, word of mouth)?

<comment><USER17> The real goal for the big players using these services isn't actually increasing their own users and revenue. They have better ways to do that.

Rather, the goal is to lock everyone else out from even possibly doing so.

For example: AdWords isn't about reaching new audiences, it's about staking a claim on an audience in perpetuity (as long as your budget allows). This is completely apparent from the pricing model.

Google's brilliance is that via the ubiquity of their search platform, they have effectively managed to leverage a property tax on attentional real estate. If you don't pay, someone else will move in and hopefully develop the attentional property further, raising the value Google can charge you for it until you're priced out and someone else comes along to hold onto it.

<comment> Joe-Z That's like the 1000th ad-targeting article I've read, but the first time to hear this perspective. Absolutely fascinating, thank you!

Here's one question though: If you're the established player in one field and don't really need the online ads other than for staking a claim, would it really influence your sales that much if a competitor takes over that space? Probably just a downturn in number of sales to new customers? (Who presumably haven't heard about the other players in the field and just go with the one that's shown to them in online search results?)

Okay, that's more than one question, but maybe you'd like to elaborate a bit.

<comment><USER14> I very much doubt the small bump in sales of Coke after a major ad campaign actually pays for the campaign. That's not the point.

Lets suppose CocaCola stopped advertising completely. No TV adds, no product placement, no billboards, nothing, but Pepsi and the other soft drinks companies kept up their rate of advertising or even increased it to fill the gap. The only time anyone ever saw the name Coke would be when they saw it on a shelf. It might take a while, but the outcome would be inevitable.

<comment><USER16> > _The only time anyone ever saw the name Coke would be when they saw it on a > shelf._

Or, when it was posted/mentioned by people who liked Coke.

<comment><USER14> Or when someone digs up an old coke bottle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Similar to the other day ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725985](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21725985)), we asked The Information to unlock this article for HN readers and they agreed. Thanks!

(Submitted URL was [https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-ad- targeting-...](https://www.theinformation.com/articles/apples-ad-targeting- crackdown-shakes-up-ad-market))

</comment><comment><USER19> Breaking News: Advertisers concerned feature is working as advertised.

<comment><USER12> Advertisers don't care and have never worried about this. It's the adtech supply chain, and the publishers who get paid that worry about the revenue and targeting.

<comment><USER20> Depends on the advertiser! Big brand who mostly wants to reach everyone in a geographic area? Targeting doesn't matter. Retailer that wants to bring someone back in to complete a purchase? Without targeting they won't buy ads at all.

(Disclosure: I work on ads at Google)

<comment><USER21> You suggest this as if the majority of ad spending comes from small businesses trying to retarget their customers; when the vast, vast majority of ad spending comes from big brands; and your mom and pop business isn't running a sophisticated ad targeting campaign.

Adtech is for the establishment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How has this been so effective, when Panopticlick still says my Safari browser has "a nearly-unique fingerprint"? (And based on what I've read from other users's experience, this is normal.)

<comment><USER23> When you load Panopticlick, you'll notice it takes a minute or so to fingerprint you. That's a pretty long time and a lot of CPU.

Re/Targeted ads require the decision to be made in milliseconds, including network transit time. They just don't have the time to fingerprint you on every request. They could do it once, but then they are back to the problem of having to set a cookie to keep track of you after that.

<comment><USER22> Thanks, that actually explains a lot!

<comment><USER17> It's not accurate though. See other replies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Related. The next big change for privacy and ad targeting is the removal of the IDFA by Apple and the GAID by Google. Removal or aggressive randomization, but there is no way those IDs remain as persistent as currently.

It's a matter of months, maybe a couple of years.

When this happens, what is happening with Safari now will look like a minor issue.

<comment><USER25> You can set the IDFA on iOS to all 0's in Settings. See: [https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205223](https://support.apple.com/en- us/HT205223) under "Opt Out of Targeted Advertising" (at the end).

<comment><USER24> Yes indeed. And reset your GAID when you want and know how to do it. But my point is that such a behavior will be forced by the OS rather than offered as a choice.

It's what is happening with Safari (and the other browsers). First, knowledgeable users are empowered to make a decision, then, that decision is rolled out automatically to the masses. E.g., https.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Let us not forget that Apple isn't doing this out of altruism, but 50% because it hurts their competitors and 50% because it makes their users happy. That said, being 50% motivated by making their users happy is more than can be said about Google or Facebook.

Edit: To be clear, I am an Apple customer and it's mainly on privacy grounds. I just like to keep realistic expectations about their present and future behavior, instead of buying into Tim Cook's rhetoric of idealism.

<comment><USER27> At an Apple all-hands around 2005, an employee asked Steve why they made the iPod, and he said "because we love music." And the answer was so simple and so earnest, that you just knew it was true.

Apple, for better or for worse, makes products based on what its executives _personally_ want to use. That's not the only consideration, but it's unusually salient compared to other companies.

My guess is that Apple works to limit ad tracking because its executives _personally_ do not want to be tracked.

<comment><USER28> Apple under Steve Jobs 2005 and Apple under Tim Cook now are different beasts. Steve would go crazy at the executives releasing all the buggy/unpolished products Apple released recently. Imagine the Macbook keyboard or the Touchbar being released under Steve.

iPod was a great product. But time has changed, and I would be cautious in extrapolating that experience to Apple today. I can't imagine Apple executives saying "We change the keyboard because we love typing".

<comment><USER29> I feel the same way. Imagine how Steve Jobs would feel if he found out you could go to an Apple store, buy a Macbook and an iPhone, and still have to buy an additional cable to connect them together!

<comment><USER30> No, Steve would correctly point out that the supplied cable isn't for connecting to a computer, it's to charge the phone or dock with a car.

Connecting an iPhone to a Mac is a niche activity these days, and anyone who needs to do that surely understands what USB-A and USB-C are.

<comment><USER31> "The future's USB-C! Convert!"

"So, the iphone charging cable will connect to USB-C?"

"What, are you crazy? Literally everything is USB-A."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> People are going to unpleasantly surprised by the way the internet changes after tracking for personalized advertising stops working. Already, I see tons of complains about paywalled news sites, micropayments everywhere, and the death of the "old internet". Just imagine how much worse it'll be when _only_ two or three giant social media companies can make money with advertising (since they can rely on first-party data) and everyone else is relegated to a high-friction ghetto. If you're sad about the death of the "old internet", look out, because you haven't seen anything yet.

As for tracking: the current "privacy" push looks like a moral panic to me. I've yet to see any _actual_ personal harm come to anyone as a result of cookie-based tracking. I have, on the other hand, seen billions of people benefit from the monetarily-free services that personalized ads enable. Whipping up an anti-cookie hysteria is making the internet worse for everyone but the big established giant companies.

<comment><USER33> I've yet to see any harm from that lion hiding in tall grass over there, stop panicking and get back to grazing.

I have yet to see any harm from eating badly and not excercising for this young person, stop panicking and let them enjoy their double-upsized extra- bacon Monsterbuger.

<comment><USER32> Is there supposed to be an argument in there?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> All of that cookie blocking makes for smaller, and sometimes fewer requests. In total that represents a non-zero effect on battery life (and bandwidth) that Apple gets to use to bolster their battery benchmarks.

</comment><comment><USER35> > For instance, a publisher can track what people do on their own site—just > not on other sites. So they can sell targeted ads based on the information > they have.

This is what I believe is fair. Unfortunately we are seeing the difference between first-party cookies and third-party cookies gradually vanish. Publishers are already encouraged by ad tech companies to set up CNAME records so that a subdomain on a publisher site points to an ad-tech company domain.

<comment><USER36> That may help the one adtech company but they still wouldn't be able to "sync" ([https://www.adpushup.com/blog/cookie- syncing/](https://www.adpushup.com/blog/cookie-syncing/)) their cookies with other companies in the supply chain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Does this cover iOS apps, too?

If so, that could mean fewer iOS apps will get written.

If not, is that only on technical grounds (it may be easier to hide what data apps send out) or (also) because it is good for Apple if one has to write an iOS apps to better track users?

<comment><USER38> iOS apps have an advertising identifier that can be reset by the user.

There are of course other ways to fingerprint the devices, but they will get your app removed from the App Store if you're using them for advertising. (If you're caught of course.)

<comment><USER39> Apple is "cracking down" on ad targeting, while simultaneously helping iOS apps track and target users through a unique advertising ID.

<comment><USER38> It keeps the advertisers happy while still allowing users to opt out of tracking.

<comment><USER39> Safari "opts out" of (blocks) tracking by default iirc. But users have to explicitly choose to opt out of iOS tracking.

Most people don't even know about the tracking ID.

Edit: Apple ought to prioritize the privacy of users over "keeping advertisers happy."

<comment><USER40> The difference is that users can go to privacy, and switch a single option and they are opted out.

In Android, and with Google in general, you have to go through many different menus and hidden option in different places. And then, you can't really stop tracking either, because you'd need to also go to several of these "ad alliance" scam websites and try to disable tracking for hundreds of services. And of course, these websites never actually work for more than a couple of those.....

From my perspective, coming from Android, iOS is really good. I am soo jaded by Google and Android that I just expect a company to try to obfusicate options and generally be hostile to my privacy.

I regret using Android for many years, especially since Google, while I wasn't lookin, quietly moved from innovative and user-friendly to literally user hostile.

<comment><USER41> Nobody is talking about android here. The point is that Apple doesn't care about privacy because it allows ios tracking (Why is that even a thing?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> > A Criteo spokeswoman said that by making the ad-blocking feature automatic > in Safari, Apple "does not truly promote choice for the users of its > browser."

That's an... interesting take on the situation.

<comment><USER43> Whenever I hear a lobbyist or business person talk about "choice" or "freedom" it's usually bad for people....

<comment><USER44> You've forgotten to include politicians.

<comment> munk-a I think it's reasonable to think of politicians as mouthpieces for lobbyists - most of them will become lobbyists after losing a reelection anyways.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Breaking: more updates to ITP, including the ability to block all 3rd party cookies— [https://webkit.org/blog/9661/preventing-tracking- prevention-...](https://webkit.org/blog/9661/preventing-tracking-prevention- tracking/)

</comment><comment><USER46> Is this Apple's subtle revenge for Google's Android ripping off the early Iphone?

<comment><USER47> More likely that Apple employees simply hate their data being shared with every advertiser like the rest of us do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> You can read the article for free if you make up an email. It does not ask for confirmation.

<comment><USER49> I was enjoying the irony of reading the article on safari only to have it cut off so they can ask me for my personal information to track me.

<comment><USER12> It's a paywalled site. They're not tracking you other than to ask you to pay for the content. This will only become more common as sites shift from ad revenue to subscriptions.

<comment><USER50> I'm not too sure about that. There's no guarantee they won't both get your payment _and_ then track you (with confirmed personal details you provided during payment).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I was talking to my friend about this the other day. He's an executive at an ad company (not Google). He had an interesting take on this:

Yes, it is in fact working and breaks targeting and retargeting. But what is the outcome of that?

The CPMs (how much the website makes) are 10x higher for re/targeted ads. So as they stop working, do you think the website will cut their revenue? No, they'll either put up a paywall, or put 10x more ads on their page. And those ads will frustrate you even more, because they aren't targeted to you.

And in the meantime, Google and Facebook will still know everything about you. It's just the smaller websites who suffer by not getting ad revenue. And they weren't even getting your personal data in the first place.

I still side with Apple on this one, but he has a good point. Overall what they are doing will probably just make things worse for everyone that isn't Apple, Google, and Facebook.

<comment><USER51> I'm not _nearly_ as anti-ad as many people I've interacted with on HN and Twitter. I like the idea of getting free-to-me content supported by ads. I resisted running ad blockers for a very, _very_ long time.

But.

The ads just got bigger. And bigger. And more intrusive. They approached 50% of the visible content (and that's on the desktop, not mobile). They played more video. They played more music. _They started blocking the content I was trying to read,_ all in an effort to get me to click.

So I gave in. I run an ad-blocker, too.

Your friend inadvertently pinned what I personally think is the original sin of online advertising: measuring an ad's success through the number of clicks it gets. Ads in other mediums aren't designed with the idea that the only successful ad is one that makes you go AAAAH MUST GO BUY RIGHT NOW RIGHT NOW DROP EVERYTHING AAAAAAAA... but 20 years ago, some dingdong decided that because it was _possible_ to measure "direct engagement" with ads on the web in a way you couldn't with TV or print, it was _appropriate_ to measure ads that way.

Think of how different the web might be if, instead, we'd just sold ads by the number of visits to an _article_ the ad is on... or better yet, by the number of visits to the web site, period. "But that's not an exact measure! We can't tell if it's really worth what we're being charged!" You also have no way of knowing whether or not that full-page color ad in the New Yorker is "really worth" what you're being charged, but you know what? You got along fine that way for decades. You did. Your business was fine.

<comment><USER23> > So I gave in. I run an ad-blocker, too.

Me too. I worked for a company that made almost all of it's revenue from advertising. It felt hypocritical to run an ad-blocker. But it just got so bad I had to do it.

I'm just worried about what will happen to the web for all the people who don't run ad-blockers. I care about them too, especially since they are the customers in a lot of cases, and if they go away from the web completely because it's so bad, what then?

> Think of how different the web might be if, instead, we'd just sold ads by > the number of visits to an article the ad is on... or better yet, by the > number of visits to the web site, period.

That's actually how many ads are sold. By CPM (cost per thousand impressions).

<comment><USER51> I've heard the ad industry has been moving toward that model rather than clicks, which seems good -- but it doesn't seem to be appreciably helping make the ads suck less. For years Daring Fireball paid its bills and then some with a simple, non-moving, square sidebar ad; obviously that wouldn't keep the lights on at Vox, let alone the NYT, but I can't help but think ads could have been... better.

There are places that at least strike a balance that doesn't make me want to poke my eyes out -- The Outline, for instance, at least now that they've toned down the over-engineered JavaScript woo they launched with -- but it's depressing how uncommon that is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Seeing more relevant ads => good

Getting your data sold to a data broker => bad

free web sites & internet => good

having to pay for quality content => bad (gee, who pays for NYT or WP after they're put behind a paywall?)

Getting the best ads possible without any human involvement => good

discovering the best products & services => good

microtargeting => bad

getting manipulated through political ads => bad

Look, ads ecosystem is the sponsor of free internet. Internet behind a paywall is very low utility. If anything, today's big ad tech are great democratizers & sponsors of the free web. That is, only if they can do the "good" and avoid the "bad".

Disclaimer: I work for an adtech company.

<comment><USER53> > Look, ads ecosystem is the sponsor of free internet.

They are the sponsors of the shitty part of internet. They usually lead to the creation of crap articles and websites that use SEO to grab and resell traffic.

I think that even without ad revenue enough people are willing to put quality content online that we don't need to fear. There are more reasons that making ad money to create content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Overall this doesn't make much of a long-term difference. Ad serving will shift to first-party with DNS or entire reverse proxies and is already in progress.

Apple has made some solid improvements but should now focus on not letting Safari become the next IE. The real impact changing the adtech industry is new regulations around data and privacy. That will change everything in a few months.

<comment><USER54> Good. If the ads are served from the first party domain that should make it a hell of a lot easier to attribute mal-action to that specific first party instead of offloading blame elsewhere.

<comment><USER12> Domains have nothing to do with the businesses and vendors behind them. The vast majority of publishers don't have the resources to run their own adtech infrastructure.

1st-party serving won't change anything with regards to chain of custody in ad content but the new regulations should at least make the chain shorter and more restricted in abilities.

<comment><USER54> > _Domains have nothing to do with the businesses and vendors behind them._

TLS certificate says different. If malware comes from a TLS signed domain, then the owner of that domain is at-fault. Getting reparations from that domain is of course a different matter. But this should simplify the blame game.

> _The vast majority of publishers don 't have the resources to run their own > adtech infrastructure._

I strongly disagree. Where there's a will, there's a way. And Google has the will.

<comment><USER12> No. TLS certificates have nothing to do with domain ownership or the businesses providing services behind them. Anyone can buy and transfer certificates. Besides there are actual business contracts in place so there's no need for such tenuous connections over domain names in the first place.

As for your disagreement, what's your basis for claiming that publishers can build, operate, and scale their own adtech infrastructure and salesforce?

<comment><USER54> > _No. TLS certificates have nothing to do with domain ownership or the > businesses providing services behind them._

> _Anyone can buy and transfer certificates._

The registrar has a business relationship with the domain because the domain was purchased. The domain's owner uses DNS to point to an IP address. The client connects to that IP address and verifies that the IP address knows about the domain. "I paid for you to see example.com at 220.127.116.11" and "126.96.36.199 is responding to the name of example.com" completes that relationship.

With Letsencrypt, anyone can get certificates for free. And you certainly can transfer your private key and certificate information to a third party. That won't stop you from being liable for any malware served by them because _you_ are the one who owns the domain. Unless you transfer the domain too. Then it's all on them. The third party. Hope you transferred the IP address payment too.

> _Besides there are actual business contracts in place so there 's no need > for such tenuous connections over domain names in the first place._

Business contracts don't mean shit to me because I can't inspect them. I can inspect DNS, however.

> As for your disagreement, what's your basis for claiming that publishers can > build, operate, and scale their own adtech infrastructure and salesforce?

Publishers can just as easily create advertisements and host them on their own website the same way they host any other static content. Scaling advertisements is just as easy (or hard) as scaling any other web services. Once upon a time businesses actually employed _people_ for their sales departments instead of offloading it to a third party.

<comment><USER12> > " _Business contracts don 't mean shit to me because I can't inspect them. I > can inspect DNS, however._"

Your personal beliefs don't overrule how global business is conducted. Domain name ownership has nothing to do with business operations, liability or regulations. You can blame a certain domain all you want but it's ultimately meaningless.

> " _Publishers can just as easily create advertisements and host them... > Scaling advertisements is just as easy_ "

I have 15 years of experience in adtech and know 100s of publishers personally. It's not that easy and it's only getting more complicated as advertisers, campaigns and measurement get more sophisticated.

Please don't underestimate an entire 12-figure industry as if everyone else is clueless and you figured it all out. It would be no different then walking into Boeing and telling them how to design a plane or telling Dropbox you can code it all in a weekend.

<comment><USER54> > _I have 15 years of experience in adtech and know 100s of publishers > personally. It 's not that easy and it's only getting more complicated as > advertisers, campaigns and measurement get more sophisticated._

Advertising doesn't need to be sophisticated or complicated.

> _Please don 't underestimate an entire 12-figure industry as if everyone > else is clueless and you figured it all out._

Please don't assume I don't understand how advertising works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Is apple offering an alternative for blogs to make money or should they have cake instead? Brave browser does it better than apple. I can already see webmasters sending users to download brave instead of safari

Apple doesn't care about the web (why should they?). Their iAds thing went nowhere.

(please enlighten me if apple is offering an alternative. i d love to use it)

<comment><USER56> There's another way to think about this. Privacy is a human right. If your business model is built on violating human rights at scale then I'm not going to have a lot of sympathy for you if technology kills your business.

The lesson from Apple is build something great, something that people love, and they will pay you for it.

<comment><USER55> Agreed about privacy. So how is apple helping websites get paid?

<comment><USER27> See Privacy Preserving Ad Click Attribution For the Web:

[https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click- att...](https://webkit.org/blog/8943/privacy-preserving-ad-click-attribution- for-the-web/)

<comment><USER55> looks good. i d love to see them building an ad exchange on top of it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I'd like to see a p2p mesh network where articles stripped of ads are upvoted, annotated, and shared. Something like outline, but truly distributed. The markup doesn't allow for embedded javascript or cookies.

If it were to get popular, a microtransaction system could be built on top to pay the authors. In fact, payment could serve as one kind of ranking heuristic.

Store articles in a blockchain and garbage collect them from your node when they're no longer being actively read. Content will of course always be available as long as some node has the full history. This has the added benefit of making future updates or redaction without explicit change logs impossible.

You could even distribute comments the same way. All participants have keys, everything gets signed, natural interest graphs form...

This type of application of bkockchain tech seems more immediately useful than currency and brings us back into alignment with the old web paradigm. Distributed, experimental, hobbyist, not commercial.

<comment><USER58> in your system, who would write the articles?</comment></comment>


Americans Renouncing Citizenship Hits New Record; Tax Bill Won't Change That - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2017/11/03/americans-renouncing-citizenship-hits-new-record-tax-bill-wont-change-that/ <comment><USER2> I know several people who were born abroad and raised abroad but are US citizens because their parents are citizens. Every year they have to report every cent that they own. In foreign bank accounts, foreign retirement funds and foreign investments. They have to file taxes every year, which means paying several hundred dollars for a tax attorney. They are unable to open several local bank accounts and several of them won't even hire US citizens for any possible job at the bank.

If renouncing citizenship was free then they would do it in a heartbeat, but alas the US wants to steal even more money from them.

<comment><USER3> When I was living and working outside the USA, I found the process quite simple and straight forward. As long as you didn't earn over 127k USD (limit has increased) you were fine and didn't have to pay any additional taxes. If you earned more you were entitled to all the write offs you would get in the US. It was basically just filing a 1040 and 1 other form. I never had to pay any additional taxes that I already payed in the country I was living and working.

I'm not sure why anyone would need a tax lawyer? The process is very simple and explained in detail on the IRS website.

[https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international- taxpayers/u-s-...](https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international- taxpayers/u-s-taxpayers-residing-outside-the-united-states)

<comment><USER4> People that write these articles always fall into a few camps 1) they don't understand their tax position 2) they've received some extremely dodgy advice 3) they're trying to be 'clever' with their money or 4) are extremely wealthy and have very complicated finances and they're trying to dodge US taxes but retain the benefits of citizenship

<comment><USER5> Is holding a mutual fund in your home country dodgy?

It subjects you to the punitively complex PFIC rules. These are largely a protectionist measure for the US financial system but you get caught up in them regardless.

To do your US taxes correctly as an ex-pat is really complex. If you just file a 1040 you've missed a number of forms to document your foreign holdings.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When I was growing up, one of the arguments made for why the Soviet Union's people weren't free was the existence of an exit tax [0].

I'm curious if anyone has / shall sue the U.S. government on Constitutional grounds regarding these policies.

[0] [https://www.nytimes.com/1972/09/28/archives/jews-ask- nixon-t...](https://www.nytimes.com/1972/09/28/archives/jews-ask-nixon-to-bar- credits-to-soviet-until-exit-taxes-end.html)

<comment><USER7> What would the constitutional argument be?

<comment><USER8> As a US citizen you're taxed even if you stop living in the US. In many states, you have to show proof of residency to vote, so there's taxation without representation.

You have to renounce your US citizenship to stop being taxed on income you earn abroad.

<comment><USER9> There's nothing in the US constitution that prohibits taxation without representation.

<comment><USER10> There's a lot in its existence's justification that does...

<comment><USER6> IANAL, so I'll just ask: has the SCOTUS made rulings that they justified based on the Declaration of Independence _rather than_ the U.S. Constitution?

<comment><USER11> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarationism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declarationism) . I also found [http://www.members.tripod.com/candst/doisussc.htm](http://www.members.tripod.com/candst/doisussc.htm) which says "that there are at least 100 United States Supreme Court cases that mention the words "Declaration of Independence" somewhere in the dicta of that opinion. Yet, not one single case can be found where the authority for the holding in that case was the Declaration of independence."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> >Their American status can make them untouchable by many banks. Many foreign banks do not want American account holders.

This is an understatement.

Some years ago, I was a citizen of Pakistan and had a green card in the US. I never had any accounts in Pakistan. My father in Pakistan had passed away, and I traveled there to visit family. All of my share of the inheritance money was sitting in my brother's account in Pakistan. So we went together to a bank to open an account in my name and transfer my share of the inheritance over.

Now in Pakistan people have an ID card similar to the Social Security Card. They provide a different one for overseas Pakistanis. So when they asked for my ID card, I gave them my overseas ID card. Things were going smoothly until the person got to the address field.

"Oh, I see you live in the US?"

"Yes."

"Sorry, we cannot open a bank account for you."

I talked a bit more, and explained to them that I'm a Pakistani citizen, and not a US one. Nope. The laws were clear. No bank accounts for US based persons without special approval from some senior officials.

I asked would this apply even if I didn't have a green card and was merely a student in the US?

Yup.

The reason they gave me? US tax laws.

<comment><USER13> The cost and risk banks take to ensure that US citizens comply with US law is absurdly draconian. It is massively safer for a bank to simply deny participation than to risk fines and expulsion from the global financial system that would effectively cripple it. Banks and other businesses globally are forced to become extensions of the US government without receiving funding to do so.

This is economic warfare. The United States is a great place and the people are amazing (as people have been everywhere I've travelled), but the institutions have essentially enslaved the population and strong-armed the rest of the world.

Thankfully, it ends soon with internal reform or collapse under its own paranoia and resource-intensive policing. I'm expecting this within a decade and am hopeful that it is the former.

<comment><USER12> Do you have any details about this? My impression was that the Pakistani government felt that requiring US based people to report details of foreign accounts was a way to gather intelligence about other countries, and they didn't want to give them a way to do it. I did not think it was that Pakistani banks themselves had any reporting requirements to the US.

<comment><USER11> [https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/sep/24/americans- chas...](https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/sep/24/americans-chased-by- irs-give-up-citizenship-after-being-forced-out-of-bank-accounts)

> The Foreign Accounts Taxation Compliance Act required all foreign banks to > disclose the financial information of any American with assets over $50,000 > sitting in banks outside of the US.

> Steep penalties add muscle to the law. If a foreign bank – not just in > Canada, but anywhere – fails to report even a single US citizen as a > customer to the IRS, the US Treasury department would withhold 30% of the > banks' US income as penalty.

<comment><USER14> I actually work in this field, and I interact with banks regularly.

The FATCA requirements are actually quite simple, and the theoretical penalties are just that--theoretical.

As a practical matter, the FATCA US customer report is satisfied by a relative spartan list of names, tax ids, account numbers, and balances. In other words, something a simple report should be able to generate in about .000001 seconds.

If a bank can't handle that type of compliance, you should take your money elsewhere because it indicates serious internal control issues.

<comment><USER11> Your answer seems to be that "yes, banks and other businesses globally are forced to become extensions of the US government without receiving funding to do so" (quoting miscreanity) and "Pakistani banks themselves [have] reporting requirements to the US" (quoting throwaway676980) ... so long as they have an account in the US (my link). I believe that includes Swift accounts?

I don't think they are really asking about the ease by which a bank should be able to generate that report, but rather the necessity to do so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> summary: expats are renouncing due to the difficulty of filing US taxes abroad. the article doesn't state it directly, but likely these are people who have decided to permanently move abroad, whose lives have changed, and don't want the burden of filing US taxes any longer.

it's a useless article. the fact that there is a "record" is meaningless at these insignificantly small numbers. the fact that tax reform won't change it is just clickbait. congress doesn't and shouldn't care about such a meaninglessly small number of people.

<comment><USER16> > congress doesn't and shouldn't care about such a meaninglessly small number > of people.

Maybe "doesn't care" is accurate. "Shouldn't care" is a pretty ignorant statement.

<comment><USER6> > Maybe "doesn't care" is accurate. "Shouldn't care" is a pretty ignorant > statement.

AFAICT, the GP was stating a political/civics position. Are you literally saying that it's based on ignorance, or just that you disagree with the position?

<comment><USER17> Some opinions betray ignorance. I'd say this is one case of that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The sad thing is that the renouncers often don't mind paying tax, they just can't deal with the crazy amount of paperwork and costs involved, especially if they have investment income.

<comment><USER16> Yea, typically we don't owe. Many of us live in "socialist" countries with higher taxes so we get credited for that. Where it hits us in accounting fees and (after FATCA) an inability to have investments outside of registered retirement plans. Also a bunch of other crap. Imagine having an additional tens of thousands of dollars of accounting fees in your lifetime because 'murica.

<comment><USER19> Can anyone expand on this inability to have investments outside of registered retirement plans?" I have never heard of this.

<comment><USER20> I'm an American who is a permanent resident of Germany, and the main reason is that the level of assets a normal middle-class wage earner can accumulate (think six figures) is not worth it to banks here to deal with the US-mandated paperwork, and so none of them will sell me stocks, mutual funds or index funds, despite my openness with both the country of my residence and the country of my birth. The only realistic savings mechanism I have given Europe's current near-zero interest rates is real estate; I can buy property, but I'm a bit hesitant to do that at the moment, given the disparity between purchase prices and actual rents. After FATCA started being enforced more heavily, there were Americans whose banks closed their checking accounts! Fortunately, I've not had a problem with very basic financial services, but no one wants to open a brokerage account for me once that American passport comes out.

If I had eight figures to manage, no matter where I was actually resident, they'd probably figure out how to deal with the bureaucracies on both sides of the ocean...

<comment><USER19> That's interesting. What prevents you from just opening a Vanguard account like any other American? Friction on the German side?

<comment><USER20> I have my retirement accounts from back when I was still living in the US, but I cannot add to them.

Anything I make on a non-retirement account has to be reported to the _German_ tax authorities, too - and I'll probably have to pay German taxes on those gains when I pull money out of them. Germany taxes all income earned by its residents, no matter where the source, but if my husband (German citizen) were a US resident, they would not tax what he earned in the US.

<comment><USER13> I am considering citizenship options for the same reasons - access to financial instruments that US institutions such as the SEC prohibit, despite some of those instruments being far better than can be obtained domestically.

It can be difficult to achieve but the optimal situation is to be a citizen of a minimal or tax-free country, reside in a separate country and do business or work in a third.

Treating countries/governments like companies that have to vie for your business is a perspective that helps protect oneself and family.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Is it odd that the IRS is mandated to publish the full names of all who renounce US citizenship? Not that names are necessarily private information, but most other times when government agencies publish names, it's a wanted persons list.

<comment><USER16> You should hear the "patriots" who try to justify the stupid US laws in any online discussion. I've been called a traitor for living in Canada.

<comment><USER22> Yeah, I don't get it either. I'm an anarchist, and would love to one day be able to renounce my citizenship and purposefully become stateless. Doing so requires _significant_ financial resources though, and I doubt my family situation will ever allow it.

Still, discussion of that desire has led to many aggressive but interesting conversations on both right- and left-leaning platforms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Ah, that classic list of countries that only contains USA and Eritrea.

</comment><comment><USER24> This article is dated and didn't contain full-year numbers. The tax bill does in fact appear to have considerably changed the rate of Americans renouncing their citizenship: renunciations plunged by 71% in the fourth quarter of 2017 vs the fourth quarter of 2016, 16% in 1Q18 (vs 1Q17), and 38% in 2Q18 (vs 2Q17).

The tax bill became a near-certainty in the fourth quarter of 2017, and was formally passed at the end of the year.

Here's the rest of the story:

"For the first time in five years, the number of Americans renouncing their citizenship decreased in 2017, government records show. Renunciations for the year fell 5.1 percent, to 5,133 — after a four-year climb to a record 5,411 in 2016, according to the IRS."

"But the real story lies in the fourth quarter, when the number of renunciations tumbled 71 percent from the same period in 2016."

Further, for the first quarter of 2018, it fell considerably:

"The total for the first quarter of 2018 was 1,099."

That compares to the 2017 rate of 1,313. A decline of 16%.

In the second quarter of 2018, 1,090 persons renounced their citizenship, a huge drop from 1,759 in Q2 of 2017. A decline of 38%.

Full year 2018 expectations would be for roughly a 29% decline vs the record 2016 figures (around ~3,800 vs the 5,411 for 2016).

[https://nypost.com/2018/02/09/fewer-americans-gave-up- their-...](https://nypost.com/2018/02/09/fewer-americans-gave-up-their- citizenship-in-2017/)

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2018/05/14/fewer- ame...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2018/05/14/fewer-americans- renounce-citizenship-but-taxes-still-drive-them/)

</comment><comment><USER25> We should make it free and then immediately exchange 1:1 with new immigrants who want to come to the U.S.

</comment><comment><USER26> "Your tax deficits at work"

Reference: [https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/your-tax-dollars-at- work.h...](https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo/your-tax-dollars-at-work.html)

</comment><comment><USER27> What happens if you don't pay?

<comment><USER6> > What happens if you don't pay?

I guess you'd be an illegal emigrant?

It's very disappointing to contrast how I now perceive the actions of the U.S. federal government with the view I was fed growing up in the 1970s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> "Some observers may want to blame President Trump for the spike, but it is much more likely that longstanding tax issues are the real culprits." he claimed, completely sans evidence or even a coherent argument</comment>


U.S. bans WeChat, TikTok, citing national security reasons - <AUTHOR> https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/u-s-bans-wechat-tiktok-1.5729249 <comment><USER2> Previous discussions:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24515540](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24515540)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24519307](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24519307)

</comment><comment><USER3> This is very bad news for Silicon Valley.

Allow me to explain: As long as TikTok was around any talk of controlling or splitting the big tech could have been diverted by saying if you regulate or break us, China will take over the vacuum left behind.

With TikTok not only gone but also will be used as a precedence, big tech have lost the "China will take over" argument. Because the answer would be, no, we won't allow China to fill the vacuum and at the same we are going to heavily regulate you.

Whoever is coordinating (if it's coordinated) the future demise and break up of big tech has definitely earned their think tank salary.

<comment><USER4> I think this is good news.

When corporations are too big, this cause the same kind of bloat, corruptions and anti-innovative climate as when states are controlled by too powerful bureaucracies.

There is a threshold, of course, but unfortunately we've allowed a few companies to go well past this deleterious threshold.

<comment><USER5> I'm much more worried about a corrupt state that has the power to take away my freedom, liberty, and life than a corporation. A corrupt company can't take my property through eminent domain and civil forfeiture or declare some phony "War on $X" that disproportionately is used against one group. The current administration is not going after Big Tech "for the people". It is doing it expressly because they think Google, Facebook, and Twitter are being unfair to conservatives.

In what universe is _Twitter_ any type of monopoly that needs to be reigned in by the government?

<comment><USER6> Twitter needs to be reigned in when it is considered the only good option, and there's no chance for a competitor.

Suppose some company had cornered the web search market, and nobody would even try to use some other web search, and used that position to control advertising and all sorts of other access to the web. Perhaps they even come to control the most commonly used web browser; the most commonly used mobile OS. In that environment, where a single company controls the OS and the search and the vast majority of access to the web, are you really more fearful of "eminent domain" than you are of the company wiping you out before you have a chance to capture a piece of the pie by our competing them?

When was the last time a tech company had to worry about civil forfeiture or eminent domain?

<comment><USER7> Search, to tell the truth, is relatively easy to displace. Users are fickle, they easily migrate to whatever they consider a better option. See all these "I moved to DDG and it's OK" comments here Even controlling user data is not that much; one can move the entire email archive, and the entire documents archive, elsewhere. Not easy but doable, and has been done a lot of times.

The real power is controlling the user's _identity_. Think about all the hundreds of places where one would need to replace a "@gmail.com" address. To say nothing of all the places where one used to use "login with Facebook" and where using another method of logging in means losing the previous account.

<comment><USER8> I moved, I left my gmail address up forwarding my email to protonmail for about a year, I figured if someone hasn't switched over to my new address by then (or I've changed it with them) I don't need them. Everything has a price.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Reminder that Facebook lobbied for this:

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg- st...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-stoked- washingtons-fears-about-tiktok-11598223133)

I'd you can't beat 'em, ask your buddies in government to ban 'em, I guess?

<comment><USER10> And here the opposite where Zuckerberg actively says that Would Set "A Really Bad Long-Term Precedent" [https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/zuckerberg- face...](https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/zuckerberg-facebook-all- hands-tiktok-ban)

<comment><USER11> Don't confuse either of the statements with a "belief" he holds.

The two statements were to two different audiences. The one stoking fear of his competitor was in Washington D.C. The other was to his own employees.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If the ban ends up happening (seems unlikely that they won't make a deal with a US company before the deadline) gen Z in the US will grow up with a better understanding of VPNs and other workarounds.

<comment><USER13> You don't need a VPN for this. They are only banning providing the app via the app store, so Android users can just download the app directly from wechat.com instead of the Google store.

(Sorry iOS users -- you use an OS designed by a dictator. You can maybe try switching to the App Store in a freer country than the US, e.g. Canada or UK.)

<comment><USER14> If you think the iOS users and just gonna cry and tiktok's just gonna be used by Android users -- or iOS users are going to suddenly switch -- you are deeply mistaken imho.

iOS is a status symbol.

<comment><USER5> Yes it is a status symbol with a 50% market share. Aren't status symbols suppose to be something that make you stand out from the crowd?

<comment><USER8> They're also needed to be in a crowd. If you other upper middle class classmates catch you using a cheap ass android device instead of the latest iPhone you could get ostracized.

<comment><USER5> Has Apple survived _40+ years_ selling more expensive electronics than the competition by being a status symbol? Why are adults also buying iPhones then?

Would students really be "ostracized" if they had high priced Samsung phones?

You realize the $349 iPhone SE is more performant than any Android phone at any cost.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Commerce officials said they will not bar additional technical transactions > for TikTok until Nov. 12, which gives the company additional time to see if > ByteDance can reach a deal for its U.S. operations. "The basic TikTok will > stay intact until Nov. 12," Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told Fox Business > Network.

<comment><USER16> > _" The basic TikTok will stay intact until Nov. 12,"_

Seriously, what does that even mean?

<comment><USER17> The people who have the apps installed now can keep using it and it can still talk to their servers. But no new features, no app updates, no new apps, probably can't negotiate a new data center contract or form a new partnership. But the basic app still works.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> While I wish open internet prevailed, reality is that there are abuses with national security implications. That being said, this won't be the answer to the national security quagmire. US needs to out-innovate faster than ever before. It's high time we got our shit together, cut the bureaucracy and leap frog.

</comment><comment><USER19> It seems unreasonable that US government can dictate what apps one can use or not use, and also there is no semblance of a transparent due process being followed for this.

Also TikTok has not broken US laws as per US courts. How can the President ban something which is not app/anything which does not run afoul of existing laws? That's why this is essentially an arbitrary move.

The national security threat seems a vacuus argument as per many data security analysts, tiktok not being that different from instagram, etc.

The president/executive should not have authority to ban anything at all without a legislative process.

</comment><comment><USER20> HN is very quick to criticize the administration (which believe me has a _ton_ to criticize) for this move but also defend China's blocking of international apps.

<comment><USER21> I remember when the US was the one for a free and open internet instead of a segmented one.

<comment><USER22> I'd argue that banning apps from non-free and non-open economies encourages a free and open internet by aligning incentives.

Really, reciprocity (and the paradox of intolerance) is an implicit expectation in many situations and we need to talk about how to deal with it.

<comment><USER23> I believe in freedom of speech. Should I stop people who don't believe in it from speaking to encourage alignment of incentives?

<comment><USER24> If the question is framed, Should I stop someone trying to stop someone from exercising their freedom of speech? Definitely. This is the paradox of tolerance. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Everyone says that people will use workaround like VPN's but if content creators can't make any money anymore won't that affect it? I guess there will always be content creators that don't care about money but I'd be surprised if US traffic wouldn't drop by more than 50%

<comment><USER26> You don't need VPN, it's just the app stores that cannot offer it anymore, you can still side load it. The States don't have a "Great Firewall" equivalent... yet.

<comment><USER25> Can they not force payment processors to stop doing business with them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> WeChat is the 'do everything' app that's essential for the Chinese. No WeChat, no Chinese customer. Looks like Apple is going to lose its Chinese market completely. Without that big market, Apple's future is on pretty shaky ground. (The Chinese market alone is as big as the _whole_ of the West.)

That's the law of unintended consequences.

<comment><USER8> Not gonna cry any tears for Apple that's for sure. They'll do just fine without the Chinese market.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> > The Commerce Department will not seek to compel people in the United States > to remove the apps or stop using them but will not allow updates or new > downloads.

Don't they have a self-updating mechanism independent from the store? I implemented that on all my apps to make them resistant to Google's rage bans.

<comment><USER29> I guess it's time to install Chinese app stores...

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Why is this the top story right now? Is there anything new here that wasn't mentioned this morning?

<comment><USER31> Because the presence of one's own smartphone reduces available cognitive capacity.

<comment><USER32> This is the best snark comment today. Nicely done referencing another front page item from today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> How about let's take the next step and ban the malicious collection of US citizens' data by _US_ companies.

<comment><USER8> I'm all in for that as well

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> How do you implement this ban. Was about side loading apps. Will they firewall the apps comms?

<comment><USER35> By telling the app store owners that they must stop distributing it.

[https://www.commerce.gov/news/press- releases/2020/09/commerc...](https://www.commerce.gov/news/press- releases/2020/09/commerce-department-prohibits-wechat-and-tiktok-transactions- protect)

<comment><USER36> Do they have power to ask for arbitrary removal from app store?

<comment><USER37> Sure. A simple "You are hereby required to cease distribution of X by <deadline>. Failure to comply will result in a fine of $2,000 per day until compliance."

It's basically what they did to -- uhh, what was it called? The encrypted email service Snowden used when he was smuggling NSA docs. $2k per day, increasing over time, adds up fast.

Once you're staring at an executive order, questions of whether they really have the power fall to lawyers. In the meantime, corporations comply.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Target the web, not app stores

Cryptocurrencies for payments

</comment><comment><USER39> As a thought expreiment, what if Apple and Google quite simply did not comply?

Could they really ignore an executive order? Could they sue the government and get some sort of injuction?

How could the government compel them? With fines? With a police raid?

<comment><USER40> Disobeying a national security order from the federal government typically lands you in jail.

Police raids and injunctions are both on the table.

<comment><USER41> Could these big tech firms challenge this in court? It seems like a very ambiguous use of "national security reasons".

<comment><USER42> Yes they can. And they may, but we don't know for sure whether they disagree or care to react at all.

Given the administration tends to make decisions based more on xenophobia than empirical evidence _and_ there's good reasons to think these apps have shady data practices, nothing about this situation is clear cut.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Share Your EBooks and Other Content Securely with Your Employees - <AUTHOR> https://www.bookfusion.com/business <comment><AUTHOR> Let us know what you guys think. Startups that use the platform with less than 5 members are free and we are offering 50% discount to HN members for the next 2 weeks.</comment>


Ask HN: Why not use Graph DBs as a general purpose DB? - <AUTHOR> Am investigating some db technologies for an application I'm working on and just came across Graph DBs (note I'm not a db guy). Just playing around a bit with neo4j's online REPL felt a little more natural to model out data. However, as I dig into it, people seem to take the stance of GDB being particularly well suited for certain applications but stick with Relational where possible. Is this mentality more about Relational being much more widely adopted in society today (and thus more tested, optimized, understood, etc.) as opposed to some deficiency in modelling problems with graphs (I'm inclined to make a comparison between functional language vs object oriented vs procedural programming languages where thinking in Graphs these days causes a bit of a mental shift and therefore dissuaded b/c it "feels" different -- much like going from C (procedural) to C++ (oo) and now C++ (oo) to F# (functional) )<p>For example, if we just take a simple case: Modelling out a Restaurant Menu that serves Breakfast, Brunch (on Weekends), Lunch, Dinner, Desserts, Drinks, I can see both GDB and Relational being able to solve the problem but why would I necessarily choose Relational over GDB (or vice/versa)? <comment><USER2> Because graphdb are not good at listing/scanning single types e.g. Lunch, Dessert, Drinks, etc. Simple queries have similar complexity but there is no optimization for the mildly complex queries:

> SELECT COUNT(drink.id) FROM lunch, drink WHERE lunch.id == drink.lunch_id > ORDER BY lunch.delivery_date, lunch.total_price

Everything that is not recursive is better served by RDBMS.

My understanding is that it's not that it's impossible to optimize the RDBMS usecase in graphdb implementation but that it's difficult in terms of query language to express both the traversal and scan. Arangodb want to be tackle that area through AQL.

You can also build somekind of graphdb schema, a specific graph topology that alleviate the need for specific optimization by basically denormalizing the schema.

> I'm inclined to make a comparison between functional language vs object > oriented vs procedural programming languages

IMO tinkerpop and neo4j looks like Python (dynamic oo and functional language) vs Java (static typed and class based) which look like RDBMS. ArangoDB and OrientDB (multi-model) looks like Scheme Guile.

Even if graphdbs have weakness, like dynamic programming, they allow to build things more quickly.

> where thinking in Graphs these days causes a bit of a mental shift and > therefore dissuaded b/c it "feels" different

Yes definitely. That said from my point of view, it's clear where a graphdb "is the right tool for the job" whereas functional programming is a writing style that can be applied to procedural or OO languages; It's not clear what's the pragramatic purpose of purely functional language.

<comment><USER3> Your query actually doesn't make sense as you can't aggregate and then sort by something that's not returned. :)

I mean expressing this is easy and the execution is also straightforward, e.g. in Neo4j:

MATCH (lunch:Lunch)<-[:PART_OF]-(drink:Drink) RETURN lunch, COUNT(drink) ORDER BY lunch.delivery_date, lunch.total_price

this would be a more efficient variant:

MATCH (lunch:Lunch) RETURN lunch, size((lunch)<-[:PART_OF]-()) as drinks ORDER BY lunch.delivery_date, lunch.total_price

So I don't agree with the statement, that everything which is not recursive is better served by and RDBMS.

There is more than one use-case for your data most use-cases in real applications are more than mildly complex.

And GraphDBs might not be much faster on those types of queries but they are also not tremendously slower.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Using or developing for "Personal Internet Viewers" Sony Dash, Chumby... - <AUTHOR>

1) Do you use a "Personal Internet Viewer"? What's the most interesting use for you?<p>2) Are you thinking about developing for these devices? <comment><USER2> I hadn't heard of either of those, so I looked them up. Looks somewhat interesting, but I think I'd personally rather have an iPad.

Links for others that haven't heard of these devices:

Sony Dash [http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryD...](http://www.sonystyle.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/CategoryDisplay?catalogId=10551&storeId=10151&langId=-1&categoryId=8198552921644695998)

Chumby <http://www.chumby.com/></comment>


IBM CEO Joins Apple in Blasting Data Use by Silicon Valley Firms - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-26/ibm-ceo-joins-apple-in-blasting-data-use-by-silicon-valley-firms <comment><USER2> That's two CEOs from two powerful, long-established, tech firms. Whatever her reasons, I hope this starts a trend...</comment>


Qt's new open governance model - <AUTHOR> http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2011/05/20/open-governance-roles-and-responsibilities/ <comment><AUTHOR> I find this very inspiring:

      [The maintainer's] duty: ensure that the codebase is *always* ready for beta.

There's really something to learn here.</comment>


VR Game Devs know you want better games – here's why you don't have them yet - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/Vive/comments/53thb7/vr_game_devs_know_you_guys_want_biggerbetter_game/d7wigjb <comment><AUTHOR> Originally posted as part of discussion of [0].

[0]: [https://medium.com/@Fr0z3n/vr-game-development-is-not-a- groc...](https://medium.com/@Fr0z3n/vr-game-development-is-not-a-grocery- store-f288da369efd)</comment>


Why computer programmers need to stop calling themselves engineers already - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/why-computer-programmers-need-to-stop-calling-themselves-engineers-already-2015-11 <comment><USER2> Original article posted days ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10513371)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've got to call bullshit on this one. Sure SOME engineers need certifications, but most do not. Pretty much just the ones that build buildings/bridges here in the US. I've got 2 engineering degrees(CE/EE) and when I got out college, I took the first half of the PE exam (need to take the second part after 5 years in the field to be a PE) but the only reason I took it is because it is almost impossible to pass after you leave college since it covers the entire field, not just your specialty. It was a "Better off safe" sorta thing. All my professors basically said an EE/CE will never need a PE but you never know...

That said the term Engineer is definitely watered down, but this has been the case at least as long as "Custodial Engineer" has been a term.

</comment><comment><USER4> I would welcome an ABET accreditation for software engineering with open hands. It would get rid of the whole debate on what Computer Science degrees should teach.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm pretty sure all Engineers in Canada get to wear the iron ring, including Software Engineers.</comment>


My New Year's Resolution – read a research paper every weekday - <AUTHOR> https://blog.acolyer.org/2016/12/29/my-new-years-resolution-read-a-research-paper-every-weekday/ <comment><USER2> You can read one paper a day, but I am not sure you can understand one paper a day.

At least for me during my PhD I spent more than a full-time day to completely understand papers that were interesting for my research.

<comment><USER3> I'd state it with a bit more nuance.

From my experience in physics:

You can read a paper in 15-30 minutes and get the main points and contributions.

For good papers, you can spend multiple days to really understand the paper.

And for really good papers you can spends months to completely understand them, then extend them, and then publish your dissertation.

<comment><USER4> My bet is OP meant the surface read. I'd say that's a fine thing to do.

<comment><USER5> i feel like you could read the summary section and the results section in about 15 minutes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Question: What are the selection criteria people use to determine which papers to read.

I went through a period where I tried to get in the habit of reading research papers regularly. Two issues I found that lead me to eventually dropping this:

(1) At least in my industry (generative architecture & building performance modeling) it's frustrating how often papers don't include technical details, and resort simply to a high-level overviews of implementation and go straight to detailing their outcome. I don't learn much from such papers.

(2) Low return of value of simply just reading the paper. I went through a period where I tried to read a paper everyday. By the end of this period I had a massive stack of highlighted, and annotated research papers I kept in a folder on my desk. And that folder has remained there untouched to this day. So I find there is low value in simply consuming research, and the key for me at least is to actually struggle through and implement the research I read. Which is why point (1) is key for me.

I'm inspired by your post though, I want to start getting back into a slightly modified version of this. Identify research papers with algorithms I can play with/experiment - and then implement it, aiming for something like a paper per week or so? This process means I won't be able to do a paper per day, but it'll be a lot more valuable/interesting to me. This calls for a new git repo...

<comment><USER7> >resort simply to a high-level overviews of implementation and go straight to detailing their outcome

Those don't sound like research papers but articles... What Journal(s) are you finding these papers in?

<comment><USER6> Is it only a research paper if it is published in a journal? What about conference papers?

Here's an example I was reading recently which doesn't go into much detail: [http://www.ibpsa.org/proceedings/asim2012/0097.pdf](http://www.ibpsa.org/proceedings/asim2012/0097.pdf) from the International Building Performance Simulation Association (IBPSA) conference.

<comment><USER8> Conferences certainly count if they are refereed (peer reviewed).

I don't know anything about that field, but that paper certainly doesn't pass the first glance test that others have mentioned in this thread. Good figures, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Spend some time on context. Reading papers in isolation maybe makes you appreciate the idea that it presents, but understanding how that idea came about and what alternative ideas it replaced or subsumed primes you for extending or applying it. For that it's perhaps more valuable to scan more background material loosely, rather than just adding today's references to your reading list. Also it's very helpful to pay attention to names and affiliations when doing this.

Another pitfall I've had with regular reading like "a paper a day/week" is not to discard papers fast enough. Often the abstract either oversells the results, or the details are simply too obvious to you to learn anything new from them. Learn to recognize "weak" (to you) papers early and skim through the rest of it quickly or look for better sources on the topic.

I'd suggest aiming to understand an idea a week, which maybe involves reading 2-4 papers, and skimming 15-20 more, plus background material in textbooks and Wikipedia. Doing that in 8-12 hours would already be pretty efficient.

</comment><comment><USER10> You should try writing these on authorea.com (get DOI and permanent archival). Basically, turning them into official pieces of open post-publication peer review. Could cross-post to your blog too still!

</comment><comment><USER11> Andrew Ng on this topic:

"...if you seriously study half a dozen papers a week and you do that for two years, after those two years you will have learned a lot."

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/13/andrew- ng_n_7267682...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/13/andrew- ng_n_7267682.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> I've been reading Adrian's blog for about a year now, I honestly I don't know how he finds the time.

</comment><comment><USER13> I don't know about CompSci research. However I do [http://outcomereference.com/](http://outcomereference.com/) which is just a side-project and read about 2-3 medical research papers everyday and the biggest challenge is open access to papers. It is possible to find the PDFs on various research sites but the vast majority is costly (avg $40 per paper). Not sure if there is free & open access for CompSci research?

<comment><USER14> I like the idea of scientifically vetting foods, but as you said it might be hard coming up with a balanced viewpoint if you are not considering all the research. Also might be helpful to consider the impact factor of each paper you are citing.

<comment><USER15> Let me get my smart-ass instinct out of the way first: journals have impact factors, not papers :)

But it doesn't really matter because it's a somewhat-empty vanity-metric anyway. For assessing clinical trials (and aggregating their results) the Cochrane collaboration is probably the gold standard. Here's something I found on their method to evaluate trial quality: [http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d5928](http://www.bmj.com/content/343/bmj.d5928)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > If you like the idea of being exposed to more research and cutting-edge > ideas over 2017...

Why not just read abstracts? It doesn't seem like his goal is more than "Let's see what people are up to."

In the context of AI / ML / DL, white papers were useful for me when I had a very specific task in mind and wanted to see the cutting edge approaches. Outside of that, I wasted untold hours I wish I had back reading white papers because they seemed important. I don't think I really got anything useful at the end of the day, in terms of advancing my projects. I also believe some deep learning papers completely exaggerate their results while being intentionally vague on how they implemented, and I wish had those hours back too trying to replicate.

I don't know, I disagree with the notion that it's inherently good to read a bunch of white papers. Better I think is work on your project, and when there are gaps go searching for papers.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would say that he's insane, but his blog already summarizes a research paper every weekday. I had thrown around the idea of doing this with my own field, but I found that it took me the better part of a day to really understand the paper, much less commit a summary to prose.

</comment><comment><USER18> This should be a movement.

I will try to read at 1 paper per month. Good enough for a beginner.

<comment><USER19> You might be interested in Fermart's Library:[http://fermatslibrary.com](http://fermatslibrary.com)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> In my field (Software), I find more profitable to me to watch one 40 min video from a conference rather than trying to understand a paper where the author had to compress all the information in a silly 10 pages limit from a random conference.

As an author it is amazing how I feel I can communicate my work more efficiently, and with pedagogy in a talk with slides (or in a blog post maybe) than in the constraints of an academic paper.

</comment><comment><USER21> Are there any good feeds of newly written machine learning research papers that are worth reading and that is regularly updated?

</comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if a higher level equivalent of this could be to read a full IEEE article every day (from the right publications, of course), since these often seem to be more accessible writeups of academic papers anyway and a lot of the hard work of curating and picking out the key details has been done.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm not sure that one can derive significant value from reading a research paper per day. Great research is not easily grokked or appreciated upon first read. I think one would derive far more value from reading a single paper for an entire week.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a good stackexchange thread [http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what- papers...](http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/1168/what-papers- should-everyone-read)

</comment><comment><USER25> Anyone know of good online libraries to find research papers?

<comment><USER26> [http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I agree wih the rest : this is too hard. Some papers will take a long time to grasp. More so after we have been conditioned to read things fast on he web.

</comment><comment><USER28> Yes, I'm planning to cut back too. - An academic

</comment><comment><USER29> You're right, that does sound crazy.

</comment><comment><USER30> Just read or read AND understand ?</comment>


Introduction to A* - <AUTHOR> http://www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/a-star/introduction.html <comment><USER4> Excellent article - I recently worked on some pathfinding stuff and the material I found on A* was not that great but this is very well laid out.

Important side note: A* or other "best path" algorithms are not always preferable - there are some situations where it makes sense to use even less ideal paths in exchange for greater speed and less memory usage - even ones that are faster than greedy-best-first search with A* shown here.

If you use recursive backtracking with a decent set of heuristics (i.e. choose the node with the closest distance to the goal, "as the crow flies"), it can be be fast and ideal in many situations (it will always give an ideal path when there are few hook or concave shapes to deal with, which in many games or applications is often the case). It can be done in linear time and memory - <USER2> is important to note the cost of adding and searching nodes in the algorithm as well. It will never "fail" but it will produce very bad paths sometimes in complex situations, although even then it occasionally produces ideal paths. In many situations where having an ideal path is not critical (say, townspeople just walking about doing their business) this can work well. Of course, you can use multiple algorithms or even mix them depending on what you are trying to achieve. RBT can be a good starting point just because it is so easy (maybe the easiest fail-safe algorithm outside of brute force?).

Secondary note: it is also good to subdivide your space - it does not need to be something complex like a sparse octree (in fact, that will make it harder to write and get good performance with in many situations). Rather consider something like two levels of nodes. On a 2D map, say you were to divide it into subsets of NxN grids of nodes. Each one of these node grids attaches to its neighbor based on whether or not it is traversable in that direction (i.e. no matter where you enter the node grid, there is a path out in that direction). This allows you to easily find a "high level" path which can be rapidly changed or discarded based on changing circumstances.

<comment><USER5> > _Important side note: A_ * _or other "best path" algorithms are not always > preferable - there are some situations where it makes sense to use even less > ideal paths in exchange for greater speed and less memory usage - even ones > that are faster than greedy-best-first search with A_ shown here.*

Another example is when you are dealing with large crowds. Vector fields tend to shine there. A simple example is using a vector field when dealing with a large swarm with one goal:

[http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/understanding-...](http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/understanding- goal-based-vector-field-pathfinding--gamedev-9007)

Something more slightly more advanced yet incredibly powerful would be "continuum crowds", where the agents in the swarm are also obstacles for each other, affecting the vector field:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGOvYyJ6r1c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGOvYyJ6r1c)

[http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/crowd- flows/](http://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/crowd-flows/)

The intriguing part here is that these potential field can have any source - so it's relatively easy to get complex behaviour, such as pedestrians avoiding cars, or prey/predator behaviour.

Again, these are more relavant with large crowds, so as stated before: the best approach all depends on the particular use-case.

<comment><USER4> That is an interesting example with the fluid pathfinder - had not considered a fluid solver for that application but it seems to work really well - <USER3> perhaps mimicking nature. If you look at a large flock of Starlings their movement is almost fluid-like: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH- groCeKbE](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH-groCeKbE)

<comment><USER6> Thanks for that link. It was a marvel and a delight.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not immediately obvious, but all the diagrams on that page are actually live and interactive demonstrations. You can move the entities, and you can reshape the walls as much as you like.

</comment><comment><USER8> Since Amit's apparently here reading, great job on updating your A* introduction (which was already excellent!), I really like how you break it down piece by piece. While it's a very simple algorithm at its core, there are some really subtle nuances that are easy to miss when you first approach it, e.g. the difference between a search node and a map coordinate (assuming classic 2D game maps).

I had some fun earlier this year implementing A* in 6502 assembler, starting with Python and working my way down through Objective-C and C before finally hand-optimizing the critical paths in asm. Articles are here for those who enjoy that kind of thing:

[http://magervalp.github.io/2014/05/02/priority-queue-in- asm....](http://magervalp.github.io/2014/05/02/priority-queue-in-asm.html) [http://magervalp.github.io/2014/05/07/astar-in- asm.html](http://magervalp.github.io/2014/05/07/astar-in-asm.html)

The code is available on github too: [https://github.com/MagerValp/AsmAstar](https://github.com/MagerValp/AsmAstar)

<comment><USER9> >I had some fun earlier this year implementing A* in 6502 assembler, starting with Python and working my way down through Objective-C and C before finally hand-optimizing the critical paths in asm.

Oh, that's a really great idea. I'm going to do that with a few interesting algorithms now, starting with Python and working down via Rust and maybe C to assembly.

I'm actually doing a take on that with several network clients (Stomp and mqtt) at the present, starting with Python and then moving to Rust.

But I'm really interested now in embedded programming so I should pick a challenging algo and work all the way down to assembly to run on bare metal. Algorithms are nice for this type of exercise since they typically have limited IO.

Great idea, thanks!

</comment></comment><comment> dj-wonk Again, a great article, but I feel like some of the general thinking behind heuristics is getting lost. Heuristics can be significantly more interesting than distance between two points. This isn't a huge criticism. In this context -- pathfinding on a grid -- complicated heuristics may not be needed.

When I first read about A* a long time ago I remember, for example, reading about how static summaries of chess board positions may be useful heuristics. Developing pieces towards the center of the board is often better, for example. To me, seeing this was an "ah ha" moment for heuristics: use them if they are cheap and (sometimes) informative, relative to the search cost.

<comment><USER10> I once wrote an A* algorithm to solve a 15-puzzle (the thing with 15 sliding tiles and 1 empty space, often depicting a picture, or just the numbers).

An easy heuristic that vastly improves the search: the sum of the manhattan distances of the pieces' current locations to their final positions.

So, as you said, rather than thinking about distance only in a Euclidean space, A* heuristics are much more general -- any metric that measures "done- ness".

<comment><USER11> For an AI course we had to write a solver for a puzzle using a heuristic. We had a reference solution step count to aim towards. After many hours of tweaking I still could not solve it. I had writ and rewritten quite complicated heuristics but to no avail, until at one point I stumbled on a nearly optimal solution. Upon reading my code again I noticed that a stray parenthes and a forgivinv lisp parser had caused most of my heuristic's code to be ignored. The simplest thing Just Worked :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Programming nit: The posted code should use collections.deque() rather than Queue.Queue(). The former is a high-speed C-coded datatype that is ideal for a search queue. The latter is a pure Python wrapper that adds thread synchronization around an underlying collections.deque() object. The wrapper overhead is only worth it if you're actually using multiple threads that share the same queue.

<comment><USER6> In the author's separate page of implementation notes, a Queue class is created that doesn't have threading overhead. That would be great, but it uses list.pop(0) which is an O(n) operation. For O(1) performance, it should use collections.deque.popleft() instead.

Otherwise, the article is first-rate :-)

<comment><USER12> Ah, thanks! I've been focusing on simplicity rather than performance, but deque is just as simple here, so I should use it. :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For those who haven't implemented A* before it can be quite an enlightening experience, and actually isn't too difficult once you dive in. It's a good introduction to priority queues too if you haven't played with them before.

I threw together an implentation of A* as a library in Go [1] for a game I've been doing, it has automated tests which mock up a game world and check the length of paths with visual output.

[1] [https://github.com/beefsack/go-astar](https://github.com/beefsack/go- astar)

</comment><comment><USER14> An earlier version of this article by Amit was posted to HN a few months ago:

[http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/AStarCompa...](http://theory.stanford.edu/~amitp/GameProgramming/AStarComparison.html)

<comment><USER15> Thanks; I thought it looked familiar, and didn't want to bookmark the same page twice. :)

</comment></comment><comment> dj-wonk Excellent! One suggestion. The article mentions "inadmissible heuristic" but does not talk about what that means.

Per [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admissible_heuristic](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Admissible_heuristic), "In computer science, specifically in algorithms related to pathfinding, a heuristic function is said to be admissible if it never overestimates the cost of reaching the goal, i.e. the cost it estimates to reach the goal is not higher than the lowest possible cost from the current point in the path.[1] An admissible heuristic is also known as an optimistic heuristic."

</comment><comment><USER16> The author, Amit Patel, makes awesome stuff! His writeup on hexagon grids is excellent also. Plus for some retro gaming Solar Realms Elite is one of the finest BBS door games of it's time.

</comment><comment><USER17> Great article. This is the first A* article I've seen online that has good visualization. I teach this in my game AI class and the visualization is key to understanding.

</comment><comment><USER18> Awesome article! The diagrams made it extremely easy for me to recall how A* worked. I now vividly remember graph traversal theory classes an exercises from University time!

I guess the implementation effort greatly varies depending on the programming language and the libraries at one's disposal. However, I believe that even for someone not too versed into data structures, the priority queue should be relatively easy to implement.

</comment><comment><USER19> The visualizations are incredibly key to helping understand. It would have been much harder for me to understand what was going on without it.

Well done!</comment>


Amateur photo of the Sun (in HD) - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/23/the-sun-roils-over-mexico/

<comment><AUTHOR> Just in case anyone missed it, the HD photo is here: [http://www.astrophoto.com.mx/upload/2011/08/22/pwg_high/2011...](http://www.astrophoto.com.mx/upload/2011/08/22/pwg_high/20110822191336-1ad76cf5.jpg)</comment>


The Psychology of Human Misjudgment (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://www.hb.org/the-psychology-of-human-misjudgment-by-charles-t-munger/ <comment><USER2> He bases some of this on a "description of Pavlov's last work in a popular paperback, written by some Rockefeller-financed psychiatrist". This is probably Battle for the Mind [1] by William Sargant [2].

The Wikipedia entry on Sargant says things like "his reliance on dogma rather than clinical evidence have confirmed his reputation as a controversial figure whose work is seldom cited in modern psychiatric texts.", and others "described him as 'autocratic, a danger, a disaster' and spoke about 'the damage he did'".

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mind-Brainwashing- Evangelists-...](https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Mind-Brainwashing-Evangelists- Psychiatrists/dp/1883536065)

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

<comment><USER3> Thanks, now I don't feel bad about not reading this super long piece.</comment></comment>


Neo.mjs Blog Post Summary - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/neomjs/neo/projects/14 <comment><AUTHOR> Just added a new GitHub project for blog posts.

Each ticket is including a friend link to ensure you won't hit the Medium paywall.</comment>


Facebook Study Says Envy Is Rampant On The Social Network - <AUTHOR> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/facebook-study-envy_n_2526549.html <comment><USER2> I have to say, I did see a noticeable improvement in my satisfaction with my life after I quit facebook.</comment>