Book review: Bad Pharma - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2014/07/08/book-review-bad-pharma/ <comment><USER2> Having read the book, this review I would say is very misrepresentative.

The actual book is very good and a definite read.

But this article seems to have spun it into a conspiracy theory.

This is the opposite of why I liked the book in the first place, it explains how bad(For consumers) things happen due to systems not conspiracies. Also how things are not bad, just could be much better. Many examples are how mistakes are made but then found and how people are working to stoping them happening again.

"With all of the trillions of dollars spent on drug development and drugs themselves, have you ever wondered why people don't seem to feel better than they did back in the 1970s?"

The book for instance would NOT agree with this statement. Seriously would you want to have 70's medicine or 2014 medicine? This is crazy.

<comment><USER3> People could actually _afford_ 1970s medicine, so it's rather a moot point, no?

<comment><USER4> People in my country, and almost every Western nation in the world can afford medicine.

The problem you speak of is unique to the USA's backwards healthcare system that costs more for worse healthcare.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That's a review? There's almost no criticism, or even considered discussion, of the book _at all_. He's just copied and pasted sections that he thinks are important or interesting, and called it a day.

Not that there's anything wrong with quoting sections of a work that you think are worthy of spreading to a wider audience (assuming proper attribution), but IMNSHO it's a bit disingenuous to call QFTing a "review".

(FWIW, I thought the book was both excellent and terrifying, and that you should read it. That's also not a review, just an opinion. :-p )

Edit: downvotes? Am I really being unfair? Can you explain what it is you think the author of the review has added here?

<comment><AUTHOR> Greenspun did a good job of characterizing (even summarizing) the information that you can find in the book. I learned new things from reading his review. Since I didn't read the book, this was more valuable to me than a "discussion".

<comment><USER6> How do you know he did a good job if you didn't read the book?

<comment><USER4> You know better than to bring logic to HN. Someone is having a rant; don't cloud the issue with facts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the kind of content we want on the front page of HN? A "review" that is nothing more than content copied out of the book with a few paragraphs introducing each copied section, for a book that has been out for almost a year and a half?

If you want to read some real reviews of Bad Pharma a quick search will find you these:

[http://davidhealy.org/not-so-bad-pharma/](http://davidhealy.org/not-so-bad- pharma/)

[http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/17/bad-pharma- ben-...](http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/oct/17/bad-pharma-ben-goldacre- review)

[http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/bad-pharma-a- manifesto-t...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/bad-pharma-a-manifesto-to- fix-the-pharmaceutical-industry/)

Goldacre's blog, Bad Science, also talks a lot about the book and the topic: [http://www.badscience.net/category/big- pharma/](http://www.badscience.net/category/big-pharma/)

</comment><comment><USER8> a bit of a weird review. mixes trial design, which is international, with inherent US issues like the ok to advertise prescription drugs.

i postulate that pharma is actually working, better than a lot of other industries. pharma has a working patent system that balances the need for profit and expiration dates (see the recent patent cliff that wreaked havoc, in a good way, on the entire industry). it has to scientifically prove that their products actually work and don't kill people in obvious ways.

you think trials are easy? look at how many products fail in phase 2 and 3 studies. you think the industry _likes_ pissing away all that money? you have the FDA, but then also the various EU country hurdles - where they might approve your product, but not cover it due to insignificant benefits over older products.

HIV is under control, Hep C is cured. Certain cancer survival rates are way better than 25 years ago. Your chances of survival into old age are going up all the time. You can bone your wife at 70, any time you want.

While big bad pharma attempts to cure cancer, for massive profits, other industries create sugar drinks and chat apps. BioTechs are the ultimate start ups, try creating a complex molecule/protein and prove it does something significant. I'll take Genentech over Facebook, anytime.

<comment><USER9> "you think X is easy?" is a pointless statement. Everything is easy or difficult to different extents to different people. Also, the difficulty of solving a problem is not the primary criterion for choosing whether to attempt or expect to solve the problem. More importantly, there are no excuses for unethical behavior and fraudulent research.

I haven't read the book but I have read a lot of Ben Goldacre's articles ([http://www.badscience.net/](http://www.badscience.net/)). His arguments are typically about how quacks, kooks, and pharmas practice 'bad' and fraudulent 'science' and are dishonest in presenting the results of their 'research'.

A vast majority of the population is inept at understanding the kind of statistical language in which drug companies misrepresent results. In addition to innate human propensity for logical fallacies (e.g. Type 1 thinking- Kahneman, Tversky, etc.), our perception is tainted by the personal dimensions of issues related to health and suffering.

Ben Goldacre is a darn good science 'popularizer' and does a great job of explaining these things to a general audience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> On the issue of efficiency of Prozac or similar drugs, sometimes the explanation is that they simply work and you know it if you have taken them. I found the effects of SSRIs very noticeable, and every doctor prescribing them knows of patients who suddenly were able to leave the bed, or deeply depressive patients switching into a manic episode. The latter might not sound like an improvement, but for the patients, quality of life improves immensely. This can explain why doctors and regulators look favourably on drugs with a long history of clinical use.

I'd also criticize the conclusion that there's nothing better than Aspirin on the market. Which hasn't been known since ancient times by the way. The original salicylic acid was much worse on the stomach. Both Ibuprofene and Diclofenac have better analgesic properties, again very noticeable, and metamizole has different properties, again much more useful than asparin. There's really nothing to argue with that, except some hand-waving "placebo" talk, which often isn't so scientific either.

I'm more familiar with the veterinary side of things, and there the situation is that there are both independant trials, and a sort of "grapevine" where veterinarians compare notes on different drugs.

You can't really argue with anesthesia drugs. Either they work or they don't. Either they have a high incidence of accidents in a particular species, or they don't. Antibiotics much the same, especially when performing individual lab tests. Sure there is a lot of hyperbole or bad advertising, but it's not just "bad pharma".

<comment><USER11> > On the issue of efficiency of Prozac or similar drugs, sometimes the > explanation is that they simply work and you know it if you have taken them.

This is what people who take homeopathy say. It's what doctors and patients said about knee arthroscopy for rheumatoid arthritus until they did a trial involving sham operations.

When Prozac was introduced in the UK we were told that it made people "better than well", and that everyone should have it and that the UK prescription laws were seriously flawed because this drug was restricted to people who had a diagnosed illness and was not available to everyone.

It's that kind of behaviour which is sleazy. The deliberate hyping of medications.

The brutal cynicism of using dying cancer patients to campaign for your ineffective very expensive cancer medication is really disgusting.

I'm not sure whether you're critiquing the book or what you've read in the review.

<comment><USER10> Pain medication does work for quite a large number of conditions. Much of this has been demonstrated against a placebo or different treatments. If you give these drugs to animals in pain, they cease showing pain behavior.

Just defining all effects of pain medication as placebo just isn't scientific at all. Placebos often don't work reliably and repeatable either...

<comment><USER11> You still haven't said whether you are responding to the book or this review of the book. This review is, as several people have said, lousy. It's pointless for us to discuss this review because I disagree with the review. I do agree with a lot of the book.

When Goldacre talks about placebo he tends to talk about the pricing differences between differently packaged but identical medication. Thus, a brand name paracetamol is the same as an own-brand paracetamol and they're the same as a budget paracetamol. Yet one can be five or six times more expensive than the other. (Personally I don't see this as particularly bad behaviour.) I agree that he tends to place too much emphasis on placebo, but then I haven't read the studies. There are strong psychological aspects to pain; pain in cancer patients can be helped with cognitive behaviour therapy; some people (40% in one (not very good) report) with long term pain reported relief when they took a placebo.

But also look at coproxamol. This is an old med. we used to think that mixing meds meant you could use smaller quanties of active ingredients. Coproxamol is a sub-therapeutic dose of paracetamol and a dangerous toxic opiod (opiate?) dextropropoxyphene. (Paracetamol in acute overdose is very dangerous so for the dextropropoxyphene to be the more worrying ingredient tells us something). We've known since at least the 1980s that this med is not particularly effective and is very risky, yet it has only just been withdrawn from general use in the UK. We knew that it was less effective than paracetamol alone (because you'd take that at an effective dose) but that it was far more dangerous and that evidence got stronger through the 1990s and 2000s. (An overdose of paracetamol is treatable if caught in time, although paracetamol overdose does kill many people each year. An overdose of coproxamol is usually fatal before help arrives. For a time coproxamol was the leading medication in fatal overdoses.) Removal of this med was fiercely fought for years by pharmaceutical companies and by patient advocacy groups (sometimes funded by those same companies).

That is sleazy behaviour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Personally I see an intersect with many of the issues in pharmaceuticals and software patents. My particular interest is in so-called 'Low Dose Naltrexone' which I take for Crohn's Disease. The current system seems to neglect drugs which have multiple uses, particularly when said drug has gone out of patent, i.e. is cheap, as there is less of an incentive to do these hugely expensive trials in comparison to doing them for a newly patented, more profitable drug. This is not a 'big pharma' conspiracy, it's captialism + patents that is a big issue here and, as someone earlier said, it'd be a lot easier to address if it were just a conspiracy. As Goldacre shows, it's a flawed system that needs to be reformed to focus on patient health as much as, if not more than profits.

</comment><comment><USER13> I found this to be a much more objective review of the book: [http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/bad-pharma-a- manifesto-t...](http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/bad-pharma-a-manifesto-to- fix-the-pharmaceutical-industry/)

</comment><comment><USER14> "We're nearly 30 years into Prozac Nation. The pills are cheap and published research shows that they work well. Is everyone cheerful?"

What a dumb argument, this makes me not want to read this book.

</comment><comment><USER15> check [http://www.alltrials.net/](http://www.alltrials.net/) campaign

 _" About AllTrials:

The AllTrials campaign was launched in January 2013 and calls for all past and present clinical trials to be registered and their results reported. It is an initiative of Bad Science, BMJ, Centre for Evidence-based Medicine, Cochrane Collaboration, James Lind Initiative, PLOS and Sense About Science and is being led in the US by Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine and the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice. Since then, the AllTrials petition has been signed by 79138 people and 489 organisations."_

\---

What you can do today:

[http://www.alltrials.net/get- involved/individuals/](http://www.alltrials.net/get-involved/individuals/)

\---

All Trials News:

[http://www.alltrials.net/news/](http://www.alltrials.net/news/)

\---

TEDMED 2012:"Ben Goldacre: What doctors don't know about the drugs they prescribe" ( video 13:29 )

[https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_kn...](https://www.ted.com/talks/ben_goldacre_what_doctors_don_t_know_about_the_drugs_they_prescribe)

 _" When a new drug gets tested, the results of the trials should be published for the rest of the medical world — except much of the time, negative or inconclusive findings go unreported, leaving doctors and researchers in the dark. In this impassioned talk, Ben Goldacre explains why these unreported instances of negative data are especially misleading and dangerous."_

 _"

...

Now you might say, well, that's an extremely unusual example, and I wouldn't want to be guilty of the same kind of cherry-picking and selective referencing that I'm accusing other people of. But it turns out that this phenomenon of publication bias has actually been very, very well studied. So here is one example of how you approach it. The classic model is, you get a bunch of studies where you know that they've been conducted and completed, and then you go and see if they've been published anywhere in the academic literature. So this took all of the trials that had ever been conducted on antidepressants that were approved over a 15-year period by the FDA. They took all of the trials which were submitted to the FDA as part of the approval package. So that's not all of the trials that were ever conducted on these drugs, because we can never know if we have those, but it is the ones that were conducted in order to get the marketing authorization. And then they went to see if these trials had been published in the peer-reviewed academic literature. And this is what they found. It was pretty much a 50-50 split. Half of these trials were positive, half of them were negative, in reality. But when they went to look for these trials in the peer-reviewed academic literature, what they found was a very different picture. Only three of the negative trials were published, but all but one of the positive trials were published. Now if we just flick back and forth between those two, you can see what a staggering difference there was between reality and what doctors, patients, commissioners of health services, and academics were able to see in the peer-reviewed academic literature. We were misled, and this is a systematic flaw in the core of medicine.

8:18

In fact, there have been so many studies conducted on publication bias now, over a hundred, that they've been collected in a systematic review, published in 2010, that took every single study on publication bias that they could find. Publication bias affects every field of medicine. About half of all trials, on average, go missing in action, and we know that positive findings are around twice as likely to be published as negative findings.

8:45

This is a cancer at the core of evidence-based medicine. If I flipped a coin 100 times but then withheld the results from you from half of those tosses, I could make it look as if I had a coin that always came up heads. But that wouldn't mean that I had a two-headed coin. That would mean that I was a chancer and you were an idiot for letting me get away with it. (Laughter) But this is exactly what we blindly tolerate in the whole of evidence-based medicine. And to me, this is research misconduct. If I conducted one study and I withheld half of the data points from that one study, you would rightly accuse me, essentially, of research fraud. And yet, for some reason, if somebody conducts 10 studies but only publishes the five that give the result that they want, we don't consider that to be research misconduct. And when that responsibility is diffused between a whole network of researchers, academics, industry sponsors, journal editors, for some reason we find it more acceptable, but the effect on patients is damning.

...

"_</comment>


Unclassified Cookies That Live for 60 Years Are Simply Not OK. - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/WhoTracks_me/status/1098627080177287168 <comment><USER2> It feels like lots of cookies are limited by the device life cycle rather than their expiration date. Get a new phone, get a new cookie.

The difference between a one-year-cookie and a sixty-year-cookie is probably small. If you're not going to visit a site again within one year (and get a new lease on that cookie), you're likely not going to visit the site in the next sixty years (because either it or you no longer exist, you're no longer in the audience of that site etc).</comment>


Axis Mundi – A secure, resilient, distributed and open communication platform - <AUTHOR> https://six-pack.github.io/Axis-Mundi/

<comment><USER2> This has been the inevitable end-state of TOR-based black markets for a while now. Neat to see someone has actually tackled it.

<comment><USER3> What part of this is tackling something that Silkroad and its friends haven't?

<comment><USER4> It's distributed, so you can't take it down without deleting every copy of the source code.

A few other versions of this exist:

[http://slur.io/](http://slur.io/)

[https://wiki.unsystem.net/en/index.php/Main_Page](https://wiki.unsystem.net/en/index.php/Main_Page)

(I think unsystem is trying to tackle the distributed DNM problem at least but I could be mistaken)

<comment><USER5> Does slur exist? Their GitHub repo is just a license and near-empty readme.

<comment><USER4> I guess it's vaporware at this point, good to know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Did anyone notice the tabs in the screenshot? Weird.

<comment><USER7> He's roleplaying as the alien from [Google's real fast] American Dad. [0]

Having questionable tabs open during screenshots is a gag. Seeing as he is an alien, he has alien porn open.

It's a bit of humor - unfortunately it hurts my ability to take this project seriously.

[0] [https://github.com/six-pack](https://github.com/six-pack)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> where are the webpages stored? are pieces of it distributed through all the nodes or do each node have it's own copy? I'm trying see if there's any potential vulnerabilities here.</comment>


Strong Passwords - <AUTHOR> https://strongpassword.us/ <comment><USER2> Having worked in IT, this is the kind of "guide" that I hate. It's theoretically correct, but wildly impractical and therefore not useful at all.

Do not let perfect be the enemy of good. Right now, people's password hygiene is not even "good".

Some specific criticisms:

> At a bare minimum you should be using a unique 32 character random > alphanumeric on every website or service that you use.

Sometimes you have to type in a password, even if you use a password manager. Maybe you are using a public computer. 32 character passwords are laughable. NIST recommends 80 bits, that's ~14 characters. Entirely sufficient.

> Do not use online password services

If it means you're using different, reasonably strong passwords for all your accounts instead of just one password shared with everything, then PLEASE DO use an online password service. You will be vastly more secure.

Getting "normal" people to use good passwords means their password manager has to be super easy to use. LastPass is fine. 1Password is fine. Hell, even writing your passwords down in a book is fine, as long as you look after the book.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think encouraging longer passwords is a good idea. Even if 14 characters is suitable today in 2016, as computers get faster it will soon not be adequate.

By encouraging different password habits, people will be better prepared for the future.

I have to question your expertise on this matter since you suggest writing passwords down in a book, as well as using online password databases, both are terrible ideas.

<comment><USER2> Passwords significantly longer than 14 characters will never really be practical. Users hate typing them in. Password managers will never be ubiquitous. This is why the "pass phrase" has never really caught on and replaced the "password".

But I don't believe this is really a problem. As computers get faster, hashing can get slower. There is no upper limit on hash complexity.

Edit: This is your guide, isn't it? It would be ethical for you to disclose that, given that it has an advert for your business at the bottom.

<comment><AUTHOR> And we'll never need more than 64kb of RAM too.

It was not many years ago when strong 8 character passwords were completely suitable. So respectfully I think your statements are false.

One of the reasons the guide recommends Keepass is that it eliminates the need to type in passwords completely. Even in the rare case of poorly designed apps that block pasting, the auto-type capability works around that.

<comment><USER3> A fully random 8 character password, using uppercase, lowercase, and digits, should still be OK today if hashed with bcrypt (or similar or stronger scheme).

I searched around and found someone posted some hashcat-ocl benchmarks done with a Titan X about a year ago, and it could do 14440 bcrypt hashes per second. So let's calculate how many "Titan X * days" are required to brute- force such a completely random password using that character set:

        >>> (26 + 26 + 10) ** 8 / 14440 / 3600 / 24
        175005

If you assume the best GPU today is twice as fast, and that someone has 8 of them in a rig, that's still 10 thousand days to search all possibilities, which means 5 thousand days on average until the hash collision is found.

For a typical user account, 5 thousand days of crunching by 8 of the most powerful GPUs on the market, is pretty good.

I personally go for 9 or 10 character passwords that include some symbols too, but are a bit less random ;)

Anyway, the biggest factor is to use a unique password for every account, because you can't guarantee that none of the websites you use didn't totally fuck up and accidentally put the original password somewhere, nor can you guarantee that they won't be hacked to the extent that the passwords are intercepted during sign-in.

<comment><USER4> > A fully random 8 character password

If you were given a list a human generated passwords and computer generated passwords, you could spot the difference immediately. Passwords are not random, and crackers take this into account. Most passwords are letters with a stray symbol here and there. More advanced password crackers take a dictionary of base words and use Markov chains of passwords to try.

This greatly reduces the search space and the eon-long searches start looking more in reach.

<comment><USER3> That's true - human chosen passwords are vulnerable to more clever non-brute- force attacks. This effect is rather different than the interplay between computer power and hashing schemes though. (Thus my strong qualifications about fully-random :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you are like me and you like the idea of password managers but don't trust them because they're giant targets for cyber criminals and intelligence agencies have at my trusty ruby script:

        puts ((rand * 1_000_000_000).to_i.to_s + \
          ("a".."z").to_a.sample(10).join + \
          ("A".."Z").to_a.sample(10).join + "_")

Some benefits: If you need to enter in a password on your phone the numbers / capitals are all in a row, so you're not constantly shift-on / shift-off-ing. There is multi-case alphanumeric with a symbol, so it passes most website checks. If the website is something dumb and they don't allow special characters your underscore is right at the end so you can just delete it, and since it is an underscore it's a special character usually allowed (unlike % for example) because they're not weirdly encoded, even in URLs.

You can save your passwords in a gpg'd text file if you want, though it usually doesn't matter that much. Just store them in chrome and use two- factor. If you get logged out just password reset to your email.

<comment><USER6> What do you do when you're traveling and don't have a laptop handy, but need to log in to Gmail on a public computer to email your family? Or just if you're traveling and have a phone (but not a laptop), and need to access your banking account?

<comment><USER5> Gmail is the only password that you need to memorize. As for banking, not being able to log in without my laptop hasn't been an issue, but I can always _call_ my bank with the weak phone password (but which includes voice detection software) and once authenticated have them do most types of things.

You're right though, it isn't perfect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One of the more persistent annoyances of the modern web for the tech-savvy is the experience of putting a long, randomly generated password into a site and getting an "invalid characters" error.

<comment><USER8> Or sites that don't let you paste in, and ask you to confirm it.

<comment><USER9> Or sites with a maximum length of something like 10 characters

<comment><USER10> Or sites that don't tell you the max number of allowed characters and then quietly truncate the password for you. Then you have to guess how many characters they chopped off and try logging in until you get it right.

<comment><USER11> This! This is the most infuriating... and the salt in the wound is that some of the offenders are career/employment sites for firms that should have enough tech savvy employees to code a form that does client-side verification and clearly indicate password criteria to the user.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I haven't lookek at keepass in a long time, and a quick glance at the website didn't help. The author of TFA says that keepass handles synchronization for you. Is that true? Because it didn't do that in the past.

Also, can keepass generate secure passwords for you? That's something I love about lastpass.

UPDATE: also, how easy is it to use on an Android?

<comment><USER13> Keepass can generate secure passwords yes, with customizable rules. I think synchronization on Keepass's side is possible, but to me the fact that your password database doesn't talk to "the cloud" is a major selling point. I even use the alternate version of Keepass2Android that doesn't have internet permissions as an extra precaution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> > At a bare minimum you should be using a unique 32 character random > alphanumeric on every website or service that you use.

That is a non-starter....

<comment><USER15> Why would anyone use more than 128 bits of entropy in a password/passphrase? (24 characters alphanumeric with upper and lower case.) The answer: "I don't have to out-run the bear. I just have to out-run you!"

<comment><USER16> And then protect it with a 128 bit AES key...

<comment><USER15> But when a website you're using is hacked, it's probably not your password database that's being attacked. It's probably that site's password hashing that's being attacked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The only complicated part of this method is securing the key, and the key is definitely required or you may as well just save it as plain text.

You sync your DB across multiple cloud services, and to decrypt you use a weak master pass and strong key.

I've been struggling with how to move that key around.

.1) Put it on a USB drive or hide it in your filesystem.

This is cumbersome and losing the drive could be disastrous. It's also trivial to scan a filesystem for key-like files.

.2) Use an authentication dongle.

This one is better but requires third party hardware in most cases, and is slightly expensive.

.3) Bluetooth/NFC to your device.

This can be intercepted at extended ranges as proven at defcon etc. Though is admittedly the most convenient method. The data can be signed, but I haven't seen anything out there that implements this well just yet.

.4) Timed one time passwords, PushBullet etc.

This feels like a bonus feature.

I'm not sure how to go about this. You lose or leak the key then you're screwed.

Is there a wristwatch or phone app with signed credential sharing based on wearer input, compatible to a standard?

</comment><comment><USER18> Just use diceware. Simple and effective.

[http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html](http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html)

<comment><USER19> Diceware is great for passphrases.

Passphrases are not passwords and I think they shouldn't be recommended for use as passwords.

Passphrases are fantastic for encryption keys, where trying to otherwise memorise a suitable amount of entropy to match the required strength would be almost impossible.

But passwords don't need to be 256 bit. If you're using a password manager it doesn't hurt to keep passwords as strong as each service will allow, but Diceware isn't the right tool for the job for passwords, because while it's great for memorizing one or two high entropy phrases, there's no way someone could be expected to memorize the dozens of passwords they use on a daily basis.

At which point you're back to bad solutions such as writing it down, using the same phrase everywhere or cheating on the lengths.

The only sane way to manage dozens of services in a way that doesn't bleed risk from one service compromise to the next is password managers.

At which point a 16-20 character password of random characters is more suitable than a passphase. It's harder to memorize if anyone happens to see it due to a miss-paste or whatever, it's easier to type in if you need to and it's less likely to suffer from "silent truncation" effects.

So use a password manager, use a diceware phrase to secure the master password (encryption) there, but allow the password managers to generate passwords which are short and random.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> For passwords I need to be able to remember (not many) or share (initial passwords for user accounts) I use a passphrase generator. Everything else is random 24-character Keepass.

Plugging my super simple passphrase generator built upon the EFF wordlist: [https://spg.brashear.me](https://spg.brashear.me)

</comment><comment><USER21> What about 8-character passwords with letters, numbers, and symbols? What if it includes non-ASCII characters?

</comment><comment><USER22> Any 'password manager' is a priority target. Just use longish pass phrase and don't walk around with a target on your back.</comment>


Why you don't overturn the Big Bang via a media interview - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/08/why-you-dont-overturn-the-big-bang-via-a-media-interview/ <comment><USER2> The article closes by asking press officers and reporters to be a little more critical of the material they pass on. Unfortunately, that is extremely unlikely to happen. There is too much information to be critical of and incentives are not aligned to make that happen. If the press passes on a breathless press release that turns out to be false, they just point the finger at somebody else, but in the meantime, they've driven traffic to whatever organization they're working for.

Ultimately, the scientist should be held accountable for this in his community. Similar to the massive black eyes Fleischmann and Pons got for cold fusion[1], Quach should be dragged across the carpet for this.

1\. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_fusion> (my poor alma matter :)

<comment><USER3> "If the press passes on a breathless press release that turns out to be false, they just point the finger at somebody else, but in the meantime, they've driven traffic to whatever organization they're working for."

I think this is overwhelmingly the toughest problem to solve here for any mainstream rag. Take the Sydney newspaper mentioned in the article for example. If their competitors publish the more dramatic version of the story replete with the sensationalist headline while the Sydney Morning Herald in an attempt to maintain some semblance of journalistic integrity don't, guess which papers the public are going to buy. It's obvious where the incentive lies.

Unfortunately the reality is the public isn't going to change as it is in human nature to pay attention to the more "surprising" news (Tiger! in caveman days). So if the public isn't going to change and the market rewards yellow journalism what's left? Regulation? I don't know.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the PR:

      > "Thousands of years later, Albert Einstein assumed that space and time were continuous and flowed smoothly, but we now believe that this assumption may not be valid at very small scales," Quach said.

My only source of knowledge is having read a pop-physics book or two, but I thought it was well-accepted that at "small scales", the universe is very non- continuous and chaotic?

And, reading the PR, it doesn't seem to be that breathless nor does it say it's overturning the Big Bang. It read more like "hey there might be another thing that happened during the Big Bang and that might make 'cracks' that we might be able to see".

<comment><USER3> "but I thought it was well-accepted that at "small scales", the universe is very non-continuous and chaotic?"

It is and the funny thing is this guy has a funny definition of "now" considering Max Planck discovered light travels in discrete quanta. In 1900. Around the time of Einstein submitting his first paper and _before_ his paper on Special Relativity. I would imagine whoever signed off on the PR copy is aware of this as well as other inconsistencies. Makes you wonder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Jorge Cham nailed this phenomenon:

<http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1174>

</comment><comment><USER6> "A number of theories have been proposed over the years to explain why there are four dimensions (three space, one time) instead of some other number..."

Time is not a dimension. It is a property of space, hence "spacetime".

[http://m.phys.org/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime- dimensio...](http://m.phys.org/news/2011-04-scientists-spacetime- dimension.html)

<comment><USER7> Time is very much a dimension: spacetime is well described as a 3+1 dimensional manifold.

Reading your link, I have no idea what those researchers are talking about (nor did it inspire me to look at their actual article). The "1 time + 3 space dimensions" structure of the universe is exceedingly well established experimentally by the essentially perfect verifications of the predictions of relativity that we use every day (in GPS, for instance). It's possible (though unlikely, from what I've seen here) that they have some deep new insight into the nature of time, sure. But _any_ successful theory of time will have to be almost indistinguishable from standard 3+1 dimensional spacetime under "ordinary" conditions, or else it will contradict a huge body of experimental evidence. So even if what these folks are saying somehow makes sense, saying "time is not a dimension" would still be wrong in many important ways.</comment></comment>


When Picking Apples on a Farm with 5,000 Rules, Watch Out for the Ladders - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/business/picking-apples-on-a-farm-with-5000-rules-watch-out-for-the-ladders.html <comment><USER2> I like how "vehicle registrations, insurance documents and time sheets" is painted as an onerous and undue burden of proof for the farm.

How dare they require legally registered vehicles and insurance at a business. And they'll fine you if you have rats in the food prep areas!

A lot of these super specific rules also seem to be a product of the regulatory culture in the US where you don't regulate things until someone has fucked up really bad. Then you get these super specific rules that cover that one case, but nothing else because people will scream about "unfair over- regulation".

<comment><USER3> Unless NY is exceptional, vehicle registration _isn 't even required_ for farming vehicles that don't leave the farm or other private property and only cross public roads at right angles.

<comment><USER4> >Only cross public roads at right angles.

What if the public road is differentiable nowhere?

<comment><USER5> Then you can only cross at extrema.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"All I'm trying to do is grow so that my grandchild can pick an apple off a tree and take a bite out of it and be O.K. That's where I want to be."_

Well, congratulations. Your competitors are trying to grow as many saleable apples as possible, as cheaply as possible, grandchildren be damned. Most of those regulations come over someone's dead body.

<comment><USER7> It's almost as is if things just tend towards crappiness as "fitness" outcompetes "goodness" [0].

[0] [http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on- moloch/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/)

<comment><USER8> Life is just another thermodynamic process following a gradient, and all things tend to entropy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Audit" (sorry I can't think of a better word) compliance for visits by government agencies (regulators, what have you) are STILL in 2017 a great place to start a software business. The first product I made and sold on the side was for small trucking companies to do safety compliance in a specific niche. It was such a crappy app built on MS Access but it helped my customers sail through DOT audits. The DOT auditors had seen nothing like it. Customers loved it. A friend went on to turn the product into a sizable business.

Small businesses face more regulation each year. This isn't a value judgement about regulation, just take a look at the Federal Register. It's just a fact of life. Agencies and congress are hard at work adding to the CFR.

This is perfect work for the solo developer who wants to own a little niche.

Steps to get started.

1\. Befriend small business owner or compliance person in small-medium sized business.

2\. Ask how much time they spend on compliance, and how much it costs when they fuck up. Establish a unit cost.

3\. Sketch up a paper prototype and iterate with the initial customer.

4\. Build basic demo, show to your first customer's colleagues. Get feedback.

5\. Get group of potential customers to commit to buying at a specific price (discounted for them taking a chance on you) and to write you a check up front. Promise a delivery date of what you've agreed to deliver. (You can promise full refund if necessary but get a check to get through sales objections).

6\. Hold checks. Don't cash.

7\. Build the damn thing

8\. Deliver

9\. Fix initial complaints because you're a bozo not a wizard harry.

10\. Sell to other people in your niche.

</comment><comment><USER10> Tech people have been spoiled for so long they have forgotten what regulation in business is even like. Start a multi billion dollar tech company? You'll deal with some regulation when selling into certain industries, or if you decide to roll your own credit card processing, but overall it's minimal, unless your tech is specifically to streamline a regulated industry.

Try to start a restaurant, raise cattle, farm food, or any other business that non-tech people can understand? I hope you have a lot of capital for regulatory compliance staff and government pleasing!

<comment><USER8> Once you kill a few people with your tech, they'll demand the same regulations. It's just that much consumer tech is crap that frankly couldn't do the intended job, never mind hurt someone. You can compromise then identities of millions of people, but it's just a PR thing for now.

Try that same hacker ethos with an automated vehicle, or a medical device though. In time, as tech starts to live up to its promise, you'll find your red tape. Sure, there are some bad regulations, but a lot are the result of someone dying or nearly dying. When the equivalent of a countrywide E. Coli outbreak is a techie problem, the rest will rapidly follow.

<comment><USER11> See, for example, IEC 62304 and the EU and US regulations that require compliance with it.

That standard is generally considered to have arisen out of the deaths caused by the Therac-25 device and its faulty software and design.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The quotes from the FDA, et al in the article are all about how they just want to help and are wanting to work with farmers, etc etc. But when did the regulators show up? Friday, the start of the weekend, during a apple orchard's peak season.

Not Tuesday morning in August to discuss worker safety for peak harvesting. Not Wednesday afternoon in November to review incidents. Peak season, start of the weekend.

<comment><USER6> I don't know. Showing up when they're not doing anything doesn't sound like a good way to check that they are following proper procedures when they're actually working.

And assuming their workers are working normal hours, Friday would be the least intrusive.

<comment><USER12> A lot of apple orchards, this one included, are very busy on the weekends because people come out to visit them. As stated in the article:

> "The farm sells homemade apple pies, fresh cider and warm doughnuts. > Schoolchildren arrive by the bus load to learn about growing apples. And as > customers pick fruit from trees, workers fill bins with apples, destined for > the farm's shop and grocery stores."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My father did environmental, health, and safety compliance for a manufacturing operation for 21 years. Simple guidelines would work fine for a lot of things if you could trust that the rules were just to advise thoughtful and non- malicious people. But there's always somebody too stupid or amoral to infer that "don't let this stuff get in workers' eyes" also implies "don't let workers apply this stuff without protective eyewear," so every detail has to be explicit. Sometimes the people trying to get away with something are in the executive suite; sometimes they're just forklift operators. For most rules in the rulebook, you can bet that somebody once did the dumb thing the book is now explicitly telling you not to do. That's usually why it got added as a rule.

I'm sure it is a burden to have such large accumulations of rules, particularly if 4 out of 5 are just telling you to do things that any reasonably careful person would already be doing. I don't see how to reduce that burden while also not introducing exploitable loopholes for bad actors.

</comment><comment><USER14> The trick with inspectors is to feed them- they have to report something, so their bosses know they did there job- so you have to leave a easy to find - not to expensive flaw. After that one is found and fixed, you get the cross in the checkbox and the caravan moves on.

Also - all in all it sounds a lot like farming in europe.

<comment><USER15> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_triviality)

And one of my favorite stories:

This started as a piece of corporate lore at Interplay Entertainment. It was well known that producers (a game industry position roughly equivalent to project manager) had to make a change to everything that was done. The assumption was that subconsciously they felt that if they didn't, they weren't adding value.

The artist working on the queen animations for Battle Chess was aware of this tendency, and came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He animated this duck through all of the queen's animations, had it flapping around the corners. He also took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the "actual" animation.

Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. The producer sat down and watched all of the animations. When they were done, he turned to the artist and said, "That looks great. Just one thing: get rid of the duck."

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > when they asked to have 22 types of records available.

Meh. I am sending my kid to pre-school, and the amount of paperwork we need to submit is around that amount - waivers of responsibility, medical history, acknowledgement of procedures, etc., etc., etc.

There's an expression - "well, that's just the cost of doing business."

Paperwork is just "the cost of life."

</comment><comment><USER17> > "I'm not necessarily in favor of rolling back a lot of federal regulations," > said Ms. Ten Eyck, a Democrat who serves on her local town board. "I'm in > favor of applying them intelligently."

So the apple farmer makes sense, why not do that?

<comment><USER18> >why not do that?

Because "applying intelligently" obviously means "applying them selectively at the discretion of whoever's doing the enforcing".

<comment><USER17> > Mr. Ten Eyck says the requirement was "ridiculous" in practice — the > equivalent of finding an earring in the orchard — so Indian Farms came up > with an alternative to scouring the orchard every morning. "We have trained > the guys only to grab the rails of the ladder," he said.

My interpretation is getting to the same result more efficiently, not selectively applying based on that quote.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What's almost worse is that if you want to say start an apple orchard, good luck trying to figure out what the applicable rules and regulations even are!

<comment><USER20> Can't you just hire a lawyer who specializes in this stuff to collate it for you?

It would be nice if an average person could do it themselves, but I don't know that it's reasonable to expect that they should, any more than we should expect an average person to be able to design a building rather than hiring a professional.

<comment><USER19> Of course you can, what's it going to cost? $20K? $50k? This creates a pretty significant barrier to entry! and that is just to learn what the rules are, let alone comply with them!

The end result is keeping small operations out of the market and protecting larger commercial operations that have the scale to deal with the regulatory burden.

<comment><USER20> How much does an apple farm cost? There are a lot of costs associated with a business like this. I need a lot more than a (relatively low) number to believe that this is unfair or unjustified.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple TV+ subscribers get CBS All Access and SHOWTIME bundle at a great value - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/08/apple-tv-plus-subscribers-get-cbs-all-access-and-showtime-bundle-at-a-great-value/ <comment><USER2> I wonder if this might affect anti-competitive investigations and Epic's lawsuit. It seems very likely that a big part of this "discount" is provided by Apple not taking their cut of the subscription fee.

<comment><USER3> And Apple offered Amazon a 15% fee to Amazon for bringing its Prime Video app on the Apple TV set-top box.</comment></comment>


Choose an open source license - <AUTHOR> http://choosealicense.com/ <comment><USER2> This page is an excellent resource. I do wish the Eclipse license was up here as well w/its various pros/cons expounded.

<comment><USER3> It's at [http://choosealicense.com/licenses/epl-1.0/](http://choosealicense.com/licenses/epl-1.0/) and in table of all licenses currently cataloged in the repo at [http://choosealicense.com/appendix/](http://choosealicense.com/appendix/) though without expounding.

It doesn't add much to range highlighted on the home page and [http://choosealicense.com/licenses/](http://choosealicense.com/licenses/) and it isn't compatible with some of the licenses that are listed; highlighting the Eclipse license would only add noise for the new user. If you already know you want to use Eclipse by all means, but then you don't need the site. :)</comment></comment>


Royalty Free No Copyright Music for All Your Projects - <AUTHOR> https://www.wowa.me <comment><AUTHOR> Hi, humbly said: I am the maker of this project - wowa.me (beta) I'm working on it beside my job and three children - towards a dream I had 3 years ago.

I am aware that "Unsplash for music" is a very high goal and I am far not a good coder. Nevertheless, I believe in being able to get closer to this aim TOGETHER.

That's why I'm looking intensivly for qualified feedback like: \- what are main issues to solve? \- what are basic features to provide? \- is "staying ad-free" a must? \- do you think a kickstarter crowdfunding campaign would be appropriated? Etc.

Warm regards and a big Thank You from Germany.

Wlad

<comment><USER3> Nice!!

How do you compare to [https://incompetech.com/music/](https://incompetech.com/music/) or rather, how do you plan to distinguish yourself from the existing grandmaster of royalty free music?

<comment><AUTHOR> Kevin MacLeod is awesome and an inspiration. I think incompetech is only MacLeod music or? I would love see all different artists - "unsplash for music" simply :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> May I suggest 2 improvements: 1\. a volume slider 2\. I think in 99% of use cases it would be better if one track stops playing once you start another one

Interesting project, I directly put it in my list of cc0 content which I can use for my tiny side project games

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi thanks! 1.Not sure about a volume slider - always saw this as avoidable for simplicity and UX. 2\. You absolutely right. Its a must. Was to complicated so far... we'll see

<comment><USER5> I used to be with you on the volume slider being redundant, but at least a few times lately, the more video editing I do, the more I find that I am constantly having multiple windows open, often playing things simultaneously, and wanting one thing to be significantly less loud than another.

Edit: also, the tracks that I've listened to are great! I'll definitely be looking here for a future project. Thanks for doing this, and I wish you success in keeping it going and making it profitable!

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome. Love all those honest feedback. Also to you success with your projects.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> white-moss Quote from the license text : > This license does not include the right to compile music from WOWA to replicate a similar or competing service.

I think this clause coflicts with CC0, or prevent bundling into FLOSS (e.g. GPLed one). Am I wrong? For example, Pixabay's image, which has such a clause in the license, was recently banned using with WordPress theme (because WordPress is GPLv3). I am getting very nervous about such a clause, but I know CC0 is weak for trolls... Annoying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hm, Do you think its not CC0? Unsplash has same words: [https://unsplash.com/license](https://unsplash.com/license)

I added this one to make it even clearer: "So you can be safe and sure: You can make commercial projects by using all music on WOWA, you just can't sell the music as it is or create another "WOWA" with this music."

Thanks

<comment><USER6> The issue is you're claiming three incompatible things

\- 'no copyright'

\- 'CC0'

\- 'you just can't sell the music as it is'

It is not possible that all of these things are true at the same time.

For example by claiming CC0 you have waived 'all of [your] rights to the work worldwide under copyright law', but then you try to assert the right to tell me not to sell them? How do you think this works?

<comment><USER7> Still, the act of compiling them can be protected no? It might even be copyrightable as a collection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is great, high quality stuff. Added to my list of free resources.

One nice to have feature would be to stop the currently playing track when I click on play.

Worth submitting it here:

[https://github.com/neutraltone/awesome-stock- resources](https://github.com/neutraltone/awesome-stock-resources)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. Thank you!

How to add it to this github?

<comment><USER8> Just make a pull request.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thnx

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> [https://jamendo.com/](https://jamendo.com/) competitor?

<comment><USER10> Not free for commercial projects.

<comment><USER3> Jamendo? Just filter by license, you can use commercially what is not -NC.

<comment><USER10> Aah, ok, they must have changed that it's been many years since I was last there - due to the licensing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Very cool project. Worth noting that it's not just a webpage that compiles a bunch of CC-0 tracks, but the OP/author himself is the composer/producer of many of the tracks, so kudos to him for sharing his music for free.

There's not a ton of tracks now, but it might be useful to add a genre label and bpm, alongside the track names, to make it easier for people to narrow in on what they're interested in.

<comment><AUTHOR> you are kind - thanks a lot! great Ideas - will come definitely.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi HN Community, I want to thank everybody participating in this discussion about "Unsplash for Music" (beta) :-) This is my first experience on HN and I have to say it was fascinating and enlightning. Thanks for all the qualified feedback, corrections and kind words.

To give appropriate thanks to you all, I decided to provide a new exclusive free short track which I posted privatly. You can find it here: [https://www.wowa.me/private/182444650937/tumblr_pm6riikWf31u...](https://www.wowa.me/private/182444650937/tumblr_pm6riikWf31ufzzxk)

For me - I'm gonna roll up my sleeves now and implement some of the feedback on the website with the help of some of you contacted me and offered their support.

All the best.

T H A N K Y O U !!!

</comment><comment><USER12> I'm excited! It's not the first time I see a project like this, so I hope you gain a lot of traction.

One thing that I immediately thought about: I'm preparing to ramp up a (non- tech) YouTube channel and I'm a bit worried somebody will claim ownership of any do-whatever-you-want free music I would use to de-monetize or copyright- strike my channel. I know big sites like Epidemic, AudioJungle or Audioblocks have some sort of legal structure in place to protect their commercial clients. Any thoughts on that?

EDIT: I can't grammar.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are absolutely right. I found many Projects and YouTube Channels in the past which were claiming "no copyright" music but have either many different crediting rules in small print or have claimed ownership via YouTube or Soundcloud.

As a Music Artist I found out early, that Music-Copyright is not trivial - just because someone says a song is copyright-free and submit it, it really is - still someone else can claim ownership rights on parts of the song etc.

I realized that I can't easily get some songs from the internet and put them online. I decided to give my own music away for free as I can assure the rights and I only used license free material in the music. In the hope others will follow.

To answer your question: All submitted songs to wowa.me will be checked and reviewed one at a time on quality and ownership. I use tools to ensure this song is not already registered etc. Furthermore every submitter has to accept terms of submission.

But you got me on two important things: 1\. Submitting System needs to validate email-realness via double-opt-in or so.

2\. How multiple commercial usage can work? Example: artist uses the free beat/soundtrack and publish this new song (with vocals) to all platforms (spotify, itunes and youtube network) Question: Will YouTube copyright mechanism take effect if another artist uses same free beat with other vocals?

thanks

<comment><USER13> Do you also need to upload your songs on YouTube to prevent someone else from doing that and copyright striking every video that uses them?

<comment><AUTHOR> I will uplaod the music to youtube later but I will not add them to "youtube network id's" as this would prevent also you / the user from using the music in your videos.

So I think we will concentrate on unique soundtrack music which is not suitable for putting vocals on top but everyone can use them in videos, apps & co. of course remix and them etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Great idea! How do you plan to "scale" it? Will you personally review every song that is submitted? And I guess related (though probably a "worry about it later" problem too) but how will you verify that some troll isn't just posting other people's work as their own?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! For now I use a mix of personal review and copyright mechanisms from soundcloud. Personal check is important to ensure quality.

Scaling will be supported by AI and more personell in future I assume. Thankyou

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> See also: [http://opengameart.org](http://opengameart.org)

</comment><comment><USER16> Firefox logs a lot of messages like

> The resource at "[https://assets.tumblr.com/client/prod/standalone/audio- > ifram...](https://assets.tumblr.com/client/prod/standalone/audio- > iframe/index.build.js?_v=4de6a1c533df396453738ed3b26ea516") was blocked > because content blocking is enabled.[Learn More]

> The resource at > "[https://assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/tumblelog.js?_v=633...](https://assets.tumblr.com/assets/scripts/tumblelog.js?_v=63342563b8d3e03a2d8d50dddd99c7f9") > was blocked because content blocking is enabled.[Learn More]

Basically all is left is a white page with some unstyled text and DOWNLOAD links, which let me download MP3 files.

Of course I could click in the address bar and disable content blocking for this site, but that's an all or nothing switch and I'm not sure I want tumblelog.js I didn't inspect it but its name doesn't inspire trust.

</comment><comment><USER17> Congrats on the launch!

Not sure if this is the HN effect but i'm unable to play anything unfortunately - I can click play on multiple songs at a time with lots of crosses appearing ( presumably to stop playing - i'm not sure? ) but with no sound actually playing

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot! Hmm, Could you please tell which browser and device you are using so I can double check?

Thanks

<comment><USER17> Sorry for the late reply i was on chrome but just had another try and it works now! Although I do still find when I click play multiple times everything plays over each other - so I would prevent that if you're looking for something to fix :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great. Yes will definitely do that. Thanks a lot.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The site definitely needs to be redesigned to actually work if someone has noscript running, because it can't possibly look like this by design, and I'm not "allowing all" just to see what it's really supposed to look like.

</comment><comment><USER19> you have been asked about scalability, and you have not answered. I do not know if it really is a serious project, or a project with which you wish to self-promote.

In as much as, take care of your https, you expire next month.

And the numerous cookies that are implanted, including those of a counter that you have hidden somewhere, those of tumblr, those of doubleclick, yahoo ..

Adblock blocks an item Which apparently is also hidden somewhere. Because when I deactivate it, I can not reach what it is.

This is a tumblr? Turned? Too much for a site with 19 songs.

Likewise, it is appreciated as something that is free. I'm sorry for my English. Good luck with the project.

<comment><AUTHOR> hi. I'm not sure if I understood everything but I will try to answer: Regarding scalability: I think in the far future scaling will be possible through implementing AI, optimized and automated processes and a bigger team working together on that project. But honestly I am much more focused on quality than quantity for now and things like "understanding all legal aspects" etc. But of course in future I will work on having more different artists from different genres on the platform with growth capacity. \-- Regarding "self-promotion": As I stated in other reply, I just started giving my own music for free as I realized that this is the only way to start assuring copyright restrictions. It should not be about me primarly. I also consider changing the Domain-URL from ".me" to a ".com" to support this. \-- Regarding all technical issues you mention - wow really helpful thoughts but I am not a pro by far. None you mentioned is in any way with bad intention - <USER2> opposite, I tried eliminate all unnecessary stuff from a tumblr template to get a clean website. If you have concrete improvement ideas please contact me directly via mail - really appreciate your thoughts!

For now I'm already starting to work with some of you who offered to support the project technically and to build it on a more scalable solution. stay tuned (newsletter) Thankyou!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Really interesting I was going to have a go at producing some theme music / cues for actual play podcast I am in using live and this is a fab looking source.

</comment><comment><USER21> I had to double-take at the domain since I have owned the wowana.me domain for five years now

</comment><comment><USER22> A lot of that music is really really good. Want to contribute but man, they set the bar high!

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi - cool thanks! What do you exactly mean by this?

<comment><USER22> I mean I'd be a little embarrassed to submit my own. These samples are sick. They are every bid as good as pro sample packs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Needs more Kevin Macleod!

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be great :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Awesome initiative, I'd love to see some classical music!

<comment><AUTHOR> Haha - thanks, I will see - thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Great idea, love Unsplash and use it all the time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is a great reference, are there others?

</comment><comment><USER27> Timeout HN Hug of death ;)

</comment><comment><USER28> is there a similar site for sound effects?

</comment><comment><USER29> Nice _kiss_</comment>


Ask HN: When you have production issues, what chat application do you use? - <AUTHOR>

Want to know what fellow HN'ers use -
1.) When you have a production issue going on ( and if you ever do production support), what chat application do you use ?
2.) Do you wish there was a better application than the one you already use ?
3.) If you do, does it have capability to put attachments, etc. inside it and store the timeline for post mortem ?
<p>I've not found one, which is stable, can be used internally(security concerns) and has the above. I'll start building one if I don't find one. One last check before I dive in.
Please let me know if you have any inputs. <comment><USER2> 1) Usually use Skype.

2) Yes -- chat-wise Skype is absolutely fine though

3) I would love the ability to have longer term centralized storage of the chats with a decent search engine and the ability to have scripts post stuff as well.

As far as I can tell the best alternative is setting up an IRC service: it'll run within your corporate environment if you must, easy to integrate deployment scripts into (&c) and there is a lot of archiving/search apps already.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks ojilles. I like the idea of IRC, never came to my mind !

<comment><USER2> Check out this slidedeck from Flickr, see slide 108 and further:

[http://www.slideshare.net/jallspaw/operational-efficiency- ha...](http://www.slideshare.net/jallspaw/operational-efficiency-hacks- web20-expo2009)

<comment><AUTHOR> No access from office, have stored for reading later. I also found some great XMPP/jabber bases services I'm going to explore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Have you seen Holla? (<http://github.com/maccman/holla> or <http://getholla.com>)

I haven't used it, but seems like a open source competitor to Campfire (which is awesome).

Good write up on GigaOM [http://gigaom.com/collaboration/holla-an-open-source- group-c...](http://gigaom.com/collaboration/holla-an-open-source-group-chat- app/)

<comment><AUTHOR> That seems great ! Thanks bgraves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> see campfire - <http://campfirenow.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like a good tool, but again, it can't be installed inside the network..</comment></comment>


Making a Case for Using Shortcuts - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@timonbimon/making-a-case-for-using-shortcuts-fa89012cf64f <comment><USER2> Great article man! At 7 years old, we were trained to touch type. Our keyboards were covered and we had to do some typing tests. So learning shortcuts naturally complement what we learned.</comment>


Fake Amazon Tech Book Reviews Are Hurting My Book - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2015/03/fake-amazon-book-reviews-are-hurting-my-book.html <comment><USER2> Anything with less than a real critical mass of reviews (less than hundreds) is way too easy to entirely game on Amazon. I wrote a book quite a few years ago on a niche tech topic. To be entirely honest, very few people read it. The positive reviews of the book were almost all from people I knew personally. Then the 1-star reviews started coming in. Each 1-star review had no actual content in the review. It was clear that the writers of these BS reviews hadn't read the book at all, since they didn't mention anything specific whatsoever. However, each of the 1-star reviews DID manage to mention a competing book that was "better". And all the bad reviews mentioned the same exact competing book. It was ridiculously obvious that someone was bashing my book to push a competing book instead, without any actual substance. At first I cared, and asked Amazon to remove the reviews, which they did. Then more BS reviews came back, I had them removed, they came back again, and eventually I just got tired and stopped caring.

<comment><USER3> That's awful. Has no one automated the process of checking for bogus reviews and reporting them?

<comment><USER4> How do you tell a bogus review from a real one, except by having it actually read by a human? This would be pretty expensive.

<comment><USER5> The good news is that you don't need to read all the books, because many bogus reviews tend to be written by the same "customers". Simply seeing a correlation of bad books getting good reviews, would result in those "customers" losing their ranking power from their reviews.

What's bad (really bad) here, is that not only are the books that are being ranked highly absolute crap, but they are crap _in different categories_. I.E. A "book" on swift, that was apparently "written", in a few hours, shoved onto Amazon, falsely ranked up - now ranks ahead of a 700 page opus on Perl, _in the Perl category._

That's a total fail on Amazon's part, and really, really disappointing.

<comment><USER6> I don't find it at all surprising, however. Amazon can't even manage a half- decent search across the products they carry. I have this feeling that somewhere in Amazon, it has been decreed that the search and the rankings and everything else must be filtered through the same system that generates recommendations. You search for "4TB hard drive" and the 8th search result is a 3TB drive. Their site skips over much more relevant items apparently because the items are more strongly 'related' in terms of purchase history or browsing history or something. I expect exactly that kind of system is what is being gamed in these circumstances.

When it comes to reviews, the correct answer is that every user should have their tastes profiled and compared against the tastes of other users, with only users whose tastes in other areas counting strongly. I could easily imagine that this sort of thing might be difficult for Amazon to implement, though, depending on their infrastructure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> If you have a few minutes to report the issues with the Perl category to Amazon, they accept "catalog feedback" through their 24/7 live chat system.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact- us](https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/contact-us)

#1: Ignore this section, skip to #2.

#2: From the dropdowns, select: "More order issues", "Give Amazon feedback", "Other feedback topic". In the text box, enter "Catalog feedback".

#3: Click "Chat".

It took me around five minutes to explain that several of the books in the top 100 were incorrectly listed in the Perl category, and they happily accepted the feedback.

Including a direct link to the Perl category helps them tremendously:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/6134005011](http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/books/6134005011)

And I also included a link to the post above.

Edit: Tell them specifically which books, in which top 100 position, are in the wrong category, so that they know which ones aren't Perl.

</comment><comment><USER8> I wish Amazon had a "This looks fake" button above each review. I would click it multiple times per week.

Most fake reviews are easy to spot. The simple test:

Could this review have been written about any other book in this category without changing a word?

I see fake reviews all the time for Kindle books written by indie authors. A mark of quality in a book is when there appear to be no 5 star fake reviews, but several written by real people, even if there are only 3 or 4 reviews.

Some fake reviews are harder to spot, though. For example, I suspect this account, which has been around for many years, is more than one person (perhaps a PR firm) hand writing unique reviews for each one:

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833](http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A130YN8T37O833)

All reviews are either 1 star or 5 star. There is content specific information but all stuff you can get from tech specs or descriptions - no sense the person actually used the product except generic intro paragraphs.

I think there is also fake voting on really good reviews. The review that I felt was the best review I ever wrote was downvoted more than any other review I've written. I don't really know if the downvoting was fake - maybe it wasn't helpful because I delved into too much technical detail:

[http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8](http://www.amazon.com/review/R14QK0B7HRE5L8)

However, most of the glowingly favorable reviews for this book have unanimous thumbs up, and the first 3 are written by "A Customer" which I'm guessing means the account of the reviewer has been terminated.

<comment><USER9> Crowdsourcing the spam identification would be a great move.

Unfortunately it would also reveal to customers that there are fake reviews, causing them to lose confidence in and lessen the value of reviews. They may then read reviews and subconsciously be evaluating if the comment is fake, not if the product is a good buy.

If you hid the "Irrelevant Review" button under a dropdown it might work better, since it wouldn't be there as a constant reminder.

<comment><USER10> They do this - Was this comment helpful? Click no and you can report it along with a brief message. It's either ineffective or doesn't do anything at all, can't tell.

<comment><USER8> "not helpful" and "looks fake" are not the same. A review can be not helpful for many reasons, including:

* one or more incorrect facts

* goes on and on about one minor point while ignoring major stuff

* too brief

* reveals spoiler without a warning

Etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Web cache version, since the site is down for me: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.p...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:blogs.perl.org/users/ovid/2015/03/fake- amazon-book-reviews-are-hurting-my-book.html)

While not really related, I seem to run across a lot of books on Amazon that have a high number of 5 star reviews that, upon reading, are just bad. Seems to happen a lot with books by independent sci-fi authors with Kindle-only books...

Of course, "bad" is just my opinion.

<comment><USER12> Do you leave your own review on those books to counteract the unearned rating?

<comment><USER11> Usually yes, but always. I wish Amazon let you just give a star rating, instead of requiring you to add a real comment.

<comment><USER13> I'd prefer it the other way around, actually. Forget the rating, maybe just give a thumbs-up/thumbs-down, and require at least a couple of sentences' worth of review.

It's fairly easy to ignore a bogus review when you look at it, but the star system makes it too easy to take them at face value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In light of that recent article about computer-generated prose being in many cases indistinguishable from human-written, I'd say those fake reviews are likely written by a computer. Notice that they're mostly of the form "I didn't think I'd be interested in [TOPIC] but [TITLE] was really interesting and really helped me learn about [TOPIC]."

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an interesting thought. I'm pretty sure I could write up a nice grammar to chunk out "interesting" reviews of books. Instead of whining about my book getting buried by fake reviews, maybe I should chuck it and cache in on said reviews!

<comment><USER15> There should be very obvious ways to identify "review bots" \- especially given that reviews are tied to an amazon accounts purchase and browsing history.

That they don't have an efficient algorithm for this sounds more like they don't really care and never bothered with it.

<comment><USER16> I'd say it's more likely that this is a complex problem, and will take a bit of time and computing power to work through...

Amazon has hundreds of thousands of products with tens of millions of reviews... correlating that with log history for each review will take a lot of time... not just to run, but to write any automated process, and work through resolving it.

It seems to me that Amazon seems to be pretty responsive when bot reviews are pointed out, and that may be, or at least have been a more effective strategy... But looking at an article a few days ago regarding twitter bot nets, and even seeing them try to draw me in... it's a very large problem all around.

Bad people will do bad things... as will misguided people. The bigger issue is the false positives... we've all read the horror stories of when a legitimate domain gets screwed by (insert popular domain registrar here) because of incorrect reportiong/reaction... or when a business' google apps is offline, and nobody can be reached at google... it happens.

In the case mentioned in TFA... it's probably prudent to ban the publisher in question. In others, the case may well be different.

<comment><USER15> > I'd say it's more likely that this is a complex problem, and will take a bit > of time and computing power to work through...

It is a complex problem - but amazon has a serious advantage over other sites that have to deal with such issues (i.e. Twitter) - in that they have significantly more information on each user. I don't think Amazon is short on computing power either.

Taking into account order and browsing history, product review trends, linguistic similarities in review posts etc. They should be able to get _very_ low error rates in identification.

Further unlike something like twitter feeds, it's quite possibly to silently de-prioritize abusive reviewers and associated products. Really, I'm quite surprised at how bad of a job they are doing - most of these cases are so blatant and obvious they should not require an author and a live representative to resolve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm also surprised that Amazon has such a poor handle on their product reviews. _Obviously fake_ reviews absolutely litter the site. Speaking as only a consumer, it makes the process of purchasing much more cumbersome than it ought to be.

It's not reasonable to expect Amazon (or anyone, really) to detect fraudulent behavior with perfect accuracy. I have to agree with the OP, though, in that they should be able to do a lot better. Many fake reviews are _blatantly_ fake, and could easily be flagged by a relatively naive set of heuristics.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Many fake reviews are blatantly fake, and could easily be flagged by a > relatively naive set of heuristics.

Yes, that's true, but I think this is a question of scale. Amazon is the world's largest e-commerce site (well, I think they're #2 after Alibaba now) and I've worked on some of the world's largest sites. Even "trivial" solutions become much harder at that scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't think this is unique to Amazon.

I've gotten this on the iTunes app store quite a bit. Low ratings from people who don't review any other products (or if they do, it looks super spammy).

On top of that, the bad reviews tend to come in bunches (multiple in a day), are void of any actual useful feedback or complaints and are just vague & angry (sucks, ripoff, etc).

I've had decent luck with having Apple remove any that are WAY off topic, but it still sucks.

Google Play allows you to reply to reviews (which helps quite a bit as far as either helping the customer or correcting a misconception). I'm not sure what Amazon can change on that front.

<comment><USER19> Of course in this case, he isn't getting bad reviews on his book. False good reviews on other books are pushing those "books" ahead of him.

Any type of system to respond would be useless for this particular problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Upvoted for visibility. A bit related : another recent article on fake Amazon reviews [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9136614) .

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> OP here.

I really can't say as much as I would like (there's stuff I can't share), but my publisher had a face-to-face with an Amazon rep and internal action was taken. Amazon's investigation is apparently over. The internal position seems to be "we're making money, there are words on pages, so there's no problem here." Amazon's investigation was short and sweet. Some bogus reviewers were removed, but Felicity — one of the worst offenders ([http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NT2YXTUES4RW/ref=cm_c...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1NT2YXTUES4RW/ref=cm_cr_pr_pdp)) — is still there, despite the obvious fact that these are fake reviews. Many other obviously fake reviews remain. In fact, a new fake book with fake reviewers showed up. I genuinely do not know if this response is because of a careless employee or if Amazon discourages employees from shutting down profit streams.

</comment><comment><USER21> Much like search engines combat black hat SEO, amazon and reviews systems can do the same.

It would not be to hard too for amazon. Use reviews that are a 'Verified Purchase' and highly 'helpful' reviews as a training/test set. Then machine learn a weighting to every review based on the (product, reviewer, other reviews, etc features...)

The outcome could actually hinder tactics like this for products that game the system much like how link farms hurt sites they were propping up when Google figured out how to stop sites from gaming a search engine.

<comment><USER16> In this case, the positive fake reviews are for verified purchases of ebooks that are relatively cheap... I'd suggest reviews from accounts more than 2 years old, with over 5 reviews, and more than $500 spent would probably be a better baseline for training.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I wonder if any NLP approaches could yield an improvement on this? I immediately think of doing some NER on the review (looking for the title, authors, chapters, even specific topics) and if none of the above are mentioned, or at least not mentioned "enough", then it can be flagged for review as potential spam. Likewise, if you did sentiment analysis on a 5 star review, but the sentiment was either neutral or negative, it's likely not a very useful review.

I'm sure there's a lot that could be done with this, but some run of the mill NLP seems like it could at least help. I'm not sure the plausibility of this at a large scale, but it seems like an interesting problem nonetheless.

<comment><USER23> I would say just include a code inside the box that you can type in to validate your review as an actual purchaser. Then Amazon could heavily weight these reviews, at least for products known to be prone to scam reviews.

<comment><USER24> They already have a system for this: "Amazon Verified Purchase" will appear below the title of a review from someone who bought the book. Of course, they had to have purchased it from Amazon. They could default to only showing verified reviews by default or weighting verified reviews higher than unverified ones. It's too easy to create accounts and reviews to keep letting this just slide.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> How about writing high-quality responses to the bad reviews? I have seen this done by some authors and it usually stops the meaningless reviews, since each additional spam review only creates a new opportunity for the author to present their marketing perspective via comment.

If this were a novel, economically hostile and unsubstantiated feedback would be considered economic warfare.

<comment><USER26> This is a romantic idea, but the obvious problem is that bad computer generated reviews are cheap and easy to produce, so there are naturally too many of them for the author to reply to individually.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Amazon will delete spam reviews if they are reported. Reviewers and reviews get meta-reviewed, and poorly meta-reviewed reviews won't appear in the featured reviews for your book.

BUT that means you still need a critical mass of genuine reviewers who give your book positive reviews, and for technical books, sometimes that's hard to come by. One way to do this is to get lots of people reviewing your manuscript pre-publication. That has lots of other obvious benefits, too.

Reply to reviews, especially if a reader had difficulty with a code example and you can help them.

</comment><comment><USER28> I used to love reading tech books. Now I am writing a book of my own, and there are SO many incentives to churn out a low-quality book.

As an author, you make very little: maybe 5% of the cover price. So money is not an incentive. You are either writing because a. it looks good on your resume, or b. you really care about this topic and feel like this book should already exist.

Books are sold based on number of pages, not quality of content. The publishers know that if your book has 100 more pages, they can tack on another $5 - $10 to the price. So there's heavy incentive to produce a lot of content.

Readers don't want to buy multiple books: they want the one book that will cover all of their needs. So they will buy mostly based on the table of contents.

So if you want to optimize for your own monetary gain, the best book you can write is one that is big, and has an impressive table of contents, but took very little time to write. So we end up with books that have a very poor signal to noise ratio. For example: my book has code samples in Python. A couple of readers have asked me to write an appendix that shows them how to set up Python on their computer, play with the REPL, etc. I think this is totally useless. They can google and get up-to-date information, and the appendix will be out of date soon. But it is very easy for me to write and would pages to the book.

So as an author, the best job you can do is pump out a bunch of fluff and then pay for reviews on amazon. It is really frustrating to see, but that's how the incentives are set up here.

<comment><USER29> You make significantly more than 5% of the cover price if you self-publish.

There isn't much reason to use a publisher, unless its a reputable one who fronts you an advance and knows how to market your book for increased sales.

<comment><USER28> Again, it depends on why you are writing the book. I have heard that you make $10k on avg if you use a publisher, vs $50k avg if you self-publish. If you are doing it for the money, self-publishing might be the way to go.

I'm using a publisher because:

\- They have the resources to market the book. The book's not done yet and I've already sold ~2000 advance copies. I'm trying to reach as many people with this book as possible, and it would have taken me a lot longer to sell 2k copies on my own.

\- I'm trying to learn how to write a tech book. My editor is the rare breed that cares about making a good book, and has 20 years of teaching + writing experience. I have learned a lot from him.

<comment><AUTHOR> 2000 advance copies? Holy shit! I have the wrong publisher!

(To be fair, they were awesome with me and I had a blast, but damn, 2000 advance copies?)

What's the topic of the book?

<comment><USER28> Here's my book: manning.com/bhargava/

It is one of their better selling MEAPs :) I have also put a lot of work into it. I don't think 2k is typical.

<comment><USER30> I had a look at the sample chapter and I like the way that you're explaining concepts with sketches.

I've already learned all the material listed in the table of contents, so I might not get much from reading it, but I wish I had seen that book 15 years ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Sometimes review abuse is more subtle than the example in the article given.

I found a recently published technical book on Amazon, which had a couple dozen five star reviews. I read a few of them, and it seemed great. The author's biography said he worked at X, a very well-known software company. I bought a paperback copy, read it, and was disappointed. The book wasn't terrible, but it wasn't written very well, and did not contain the technical depth that it appeared it would on the reviews. The book turned out to be self-published, and the technical editor was the author's boss at X. The other editors were the author's family members.

I went back and looked at the reviews, and found that many of the five-star reviewers worked at X, or if I couldn't figure out their employer, they happened to be located in the same metro area as X's headquarters. One of the Amazon reviewers is even mentioned in the acknowledgements of the book.

I think all the reviewers had good intentions to help their friend and colleague, but I think it's still misleading, as you cannot expect a someone to give an impartial public review on their colleague's work.

All in all, the book was not total junk, but perhaps should have been a 3/5 star book instead of 5/5.

<comment><USER32> This is curious, because my g/f (who read the book and liked it) posted a good review of a novel I wrote and her review was removed because Amazon figured out she knew me. I have no idea how they did this: we don't live together and I'm not sure I've ever bought her anything off Amazon, certainly not at her present address.

So I have the impression that Amazon is pretty good at weeding out good reviews from people you know, while still being complete rubbish at policing obvious spam reviews, and doing a terrible job of suppressing reviews from obvious trolls (my book has a two-star review from a guy who also gave "A Tale of Two Cities" a two star review, but you wouldn't know that unless you looked at their review history, and who can be bothered to do that?

As both an author and book-buyer, Amazon's review system is a complete loss. Every single book I look at has both good and bad reviews with almost no way to tell if they are based on standards at all relevant to my taste. Any review that doesn't say something along the lines of "My taste runs to X and this was a great example of X" or "My taste runs to Y and while this was kinda-Y-like it failed in these respects" may as well not exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> When I search for "perl" on amazon, I don't see any of the spam books now, so it looks like the issue is clearing up. Whether that's due to attention from Amazon or the public, I don't know.

</comment><comment><USER34> Those reviews certainly seem pretty sketchy, and this sort of issue is definitely not unique to books.

What would be Amazon's best possible approach to dealing with this? Does there exist software good enough at distinguishing potentially fake reviews from real ones?

<comment><USER35> they should give more weight to the "verified purchase" reviews, I might even go as far as to say disallow reviews unless you actually bought the product, it would stop a lot of this, and the stupid review bandwagon that people seem to jump on

<comment><USER36> This. This more than anything. Amazon is now in a position not to need reviews from people that currently own that book. Or better still, there is a point where there is a verified purchases threshold that triggers the hiding of unverified votes.

Yes it still means a person can buy the book, then give it a bad review, then return it, however the effort to do this would be higher AND there would be a purchase pattern that begins to show itself.

<comment> vhost- You can easily detect that. If a person buys a lot of books and make a lot of 5 star or 1 star reviews, then returns them, that's clearly abuse and you ban them.

<comment><USER37> Or just wait until they have a lot of books and then reject every return. Their purchase history would tell a compelling story for the credit card bank.

<comment><USER38> Amazon will in fact ban you if you have too many returns, or so I understand.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The problem isn't unique to Amazon. The same thing happens on the App stores. It really does seem like it's high time something were done about it.

</comment><comment><USER40> So, here's the thing about Amazon rankings. They're not a meritocracy, and you might think that good reviews help you and bad reviews hurt you. They do/can! But it's closer to SEO than that. Amazon ranks things by what sells, and yes, higher-ranked things sell better, but it's more complicated than just that. Not everybody finds Perl books by looking in the Perl category. I'm looking at the third book you highlighted, about PHP. Its sales rank is 38,xxx and yours is 2xx,xxx (btw, and you may know this - the sales required to move up rankings increase exponentially, so this difference in ranking translates to quite a few sales per day). As long as Amazon believes it's about Perl, even if only tangentially so, it will rank higher in Perl than you because it's selling better. It's in their interest to market what sells better for them.

I learned this from fiction, but it applies to nonfiction too. First of all, books are categorized by what you put in the keywords section in KDP, if they're self-published, or by whatever your publisher put in there if you're not. Let's say you write a book about Perl and cooking. It may outsell pure Perl books because more people like cooking than Perl. It might be a great cooking book but a poor Perl book - or maybe you're lying about the Perl thing, and it's just a cookbook. But it'll top the Perl category as long as Amazon believes you that it's about Perl, and among the Perl books, it will have the highest sales rank.

Unfortunately, what I bet is happening is that this book is legitimately somewhat about Perl, and the author tagged it as such in the keywords. But its sales aren't coming from winning the Perl category alone; they're coming from that and PHP and beginning programming and generally from being ranked in multiple categories.

Your best bet to get your category back is to try to convince Amazon it's not about Perl at all. Good luck - I didn't look close enough to see if that's a reasonable claim or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> The books aren't about Perl; they're gaming the Amazon system. That being said, it was interesting when you commented about sales rank. Yeah, they sell more than I do, but you can frequently buy the for $0.99, when my sells for a real price. That might make them break even, but since they're (I'm assuming) self-published, they're probably making far more money overall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Steps to reproduce:

1) Visit Fiverr [1]

2) Repeat

Sadly, I don't see very many ways to overcome these kinds of review factories. Maybe Amazon should start doing sting operations on these services.

[1] [https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?acmpl=1&utf8=%E2%9C%93&qu...](https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?acmpl=1&utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=amazon+reviews&search_in=category&category=5&sub_category=111&page=1&layout=auto)

</comment><comment><USER42> I was recently on Amazon looking to purchase an item. Apparently not a lot people buy this item online, so there was very few number of reviews.

I got curious if the people reviewing these items are genuine buyers or otherwise, so I click through to one guy's profile (verified purchase). Turns out he posted hundreds of one liner reviews for a plethora of esoteric products(all verified purchase) all on Jan 12, 2015.

They are out there.

</comment><comment><USER43> There's no point in playing whack-a-mole with the hired reviewers, they should be punishing the book publishers who are paying for this.

</comment><comment><USER44> >why are three books in front of me in the Perl category about Swift, HTML, and PHP?

This is a big problem for more than just niche books. When I tried to find a new fiction book by browsing categories I found the same books listed in every major category, i.e. it's difficult to believe the same book ought to be listed in Sci fi, horror, self help, history, and current events.

</comment><comment><USER45> Perhaps Amazon should have two categories of reviews, one category has only reviews by verified purchasers, people who have bought the book from Amazon, and the second is all the rest. If there's a huge discrepancy between the verified reviews and non-verified, then it's obvious that something fishy is up.

</comment><comment><USER46> _" why are three books in front of me in the Perl category about Swift, HTML, and PHP?>"_

The other thing I notice is the titles are Kindle. Why are dead-tree products, arguably a more liberal format, mixed with a e-book products that are proprietary and closed?

</comment><comment><USER47> > Come on, Amazon, you can do a better job!

I'm not sure they can. There are things Amazon seems able to do well, but this certainly has never been one of them. And I don't know that anyone else at half Amazon's scale or larger has done much better.

</comment><comment><USER48> "...I was intrigue and more interested in playing minecraft knowing different tips and tricks that can help me to win the game. "

Lol. _chuckle_

</comment><comment><USER49> If amazon made it policy to remove any negative comments that steer readers to competing products I think, on the balance it would help.

</comment><comment><USER50> You can use my site (posted on hacker news back in January): www.fakespot.com

It basically analyzes reviews to detect if they are fake or not.

</comment><comment><USER51> It's happening on MANY products and ruining Amazon credibility.It has become open and notorious!!!

</comment><comment><USER52> Off topic a bit, but is there a review/rating system that isn't gamable (sp?) like this?</comment>