Kindly Stop Saying the Efficient Market Hypothesis Is Dead - <AUTHOR> https://thedeepdish.org/efficient-market-hypothesis-is-not-dead/ <comment><USER2> This seems like a silly point. Are markets more efficient in the infinitely long run than an individual who tries to identify the "correct" price? Quite probably. Does the current stock market price at any given moment possibly reflect the herd mentality of a bunch of jumped-up plains apes (or the injection of a huge amount of funds by a central bank), rather than representing the future expected earnings of a given asset? Also extremely likely.

The performance of the markets during the lead-up to the pandemic was absurd. It wasn't just the top-line market prices that were wrong: the obvious hedges, like Put options, were all massively mispriced, to the point that even banks started warning about it. This eventually corrected, but the correction itself was extremely painful. Now the Fed is injecting dollars in order to help "correct" the correction, with unknown long-term effects. (I don't know what the EMH has to say about prices under this regime.)

Anyway, "the EMH is wrong" is an absurd simplification of the problem. The real objection here is that asset prices may be right on average, in the long- enough term, but are prone to huge over-confidence bubbles and corrections that can wreak havoc on the actual human beings, and possibly lead to suboptimal economic outcomes when prices are used to direct investment.

<comment><USER3> EMH is a mental-model of equilibrium, and is useful when used that way.

Financial systems have multiple equilibria [1], so EMH "violations" come in two flavors:

1\. Small deviation from equilibrium. This is where Renaissance Technologies hangs out.

2\. Market herd expects the wrong equilibrium. This is where Nassim Taleb hangs out.

On the scale of single years, 2 happens so rarely than you can't get statistically significant measurements. So, we end up with endless philosophical debates about whether EMH is "true".

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond%E2%80%93Dybvig_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond%E2%80%93Dybvig_model)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Markets are not rational, they exhibit crowd psychology and as such are more primitive and irrational than individual behavior. Quite a few professional traders, hedge funds and even retail traders consistently outperform the indexes. They are able to do this because they have recognized the fallacy of EMH and are able to exploit the market's irrationality.

<comment><USER5> > _Quite a few professional traders, hedge funds and even retail traders > consistently outperform the indexes._

In any one year there are a number of them do, but SPIVA has shown that over the course of 5, 10, and 15 years that number gets smaller and smaller:

* [https://us.spindices.com/spiva/#/](https://us.spindices.com/spiva/#/)

Also: just because the market is not 100% efficient, and some folks can find 'weaknesses', does not mean it is not mostly efficient.

* [https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/black-or-white](https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/black-or-white)

Not even Fama, whose is often credited for formulating the EMH, has said that it is 100:

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

<comment><USER6> I don't disagree with the point you're making, but I should point out that one reason some funds don't beat the S&P500 is because of the fees they charge, which are deducted from their performance. In reality, their actual gross performance is better than the S&P. However, the fact that the results are so close to the S&P's performance that the fees alone can push them below it supports your overarching point.

<comment><USER5> Further, in low-performance years, there is more of a headwind that must be overcome to even earn a return (from the investor's POV).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A slightly different, more complete version by the same author can be found on LessWrong. It has some clarifying edits (written in small writing), and there's more discussion in the comments. [https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/utySCY9nJt9xGYGGQ/the-emh- at...](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/utySCY9nJt9xGYGGQ/the-emh-aten-t-dead)

</comment><comment><USER8> For any big market movement you will _always_ be able to find the person who acted on it first. That person will always look like a prescient genius if you just look at that one data point. To show a counterexample to the EMH you would need to exhibit someone who can _consistently_ beat the market at odds better than chance under proper controlled conditions. No single data point can ever do it.

<comment><USER5> > _To show a counterexample to the EMH you would need to exhibit someone who > can consistently beat the market at odds better than chance under proper > controlled conditions._

See perhaps Renaissance's Medallion Fund:

> _The Medallion fund is considered to be one of the most successful hedge > funds ever. It has averaged a 71.8% annual return, before fees, from 1994 > through mid-2014.[32]_

* [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies#Medal...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies#Medallion_Fund)

People speculate that while mathematically half of trades must win and the other must lose (for each side of a buy-sell), that Medallion may perhaps 'win' something like 52% of trades, but their volume is so high that the (e.g.) 2% gives them their profit just like The House only needs a slight edge when it comes to casinos.

<comment><USER8> Figuring out whether a given performance level is statistically significant is incredibly difficult. You have to take into account a myriad factors: how many other funds were there? The more total funds there are, the more likely you are to find outliers. What was the risk-adjusted return, and what were the underlying market conditions? It's trivial to take a consistently rising market and amplify its returns: just apply leverage.

The fact that Medallion had this extraordinary return in a period that included the 2008 crash is remarkable, but even then you would only have had to predict a single black swan in order to avoid being impacted by it. And even _I_ saw that one coming back in the day, and I don't really pay that much attention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article reads like it was written by someone who has a deep interest in finance, but hasn't worked much in the industry. Markets are quite efficient, but there are pockets of risk premia driven by regulatory/intermediary constraints and plain old behavioral bias. Then again, if he knew about them, he presumably wouldn't write about them in an internet blog post.

</comment><comment><USER10> It might interest some people here to know that if the EMH were true, you could use it to break unbreakable cryptography.

However that's not what would happen. If you tried it, your crack would fail, and you would just end up proving experimentally that EMH isn't true.

That would move the discussion to "is it true except if you test it in weird experiments though?" which is not an interesting point of debate:

Obviously there are no market participants with infinite wisdom and processing ability who know all public news and factor it into every stock's price instantly at all times, and are perfect in their analysis.

And have been since the dawn of markets, even before the Internet.

it's totally obvious.

Anyway here is a protocol you can use to demonstrate EMH is false, any time you want:

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.0423](https://arxiv.org/abs/1011.0423)

<comment><USER11> This is a fun paper, and the logic seems sound. But the contrived situation is nothing like real life, so it doesn't seem useful as a model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's a dashboard I made that tracks the performance of the average Robinhood user vs. the S&P 500 (using user holding data): [https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/robinhood](https://www.quiverquant.com/sources/robinhood)

There's an argument to be made that the ability to consistently UNDERPERFORM the market is evidence against the Efficient Market Hypothesis.

<comment><USER9> Trading costs are a thing. In an efficient market I would expect ex-ante negative performance versus the benchmark.

<comment><USER12> True, although the method I used to find the aggregate performance of Robinhood users ignored trading costs.

Obviously this data is incredibly noisy and nowhere near statistically significant, but I like how it implies that betting against Robinhood traders would've been an alpha-generating strategy over the last two years.

<comment><USER9> I agree that the data is quite noisy, and the choice of weighting (by users instead of dollar value traded) may significantly influence results. Then again, after reading r/wallstreetbets, I am not so sure ;).

<comment><USER12> Yeah, unfortunately Robinhood doesn't provide data on # shares held per user.

I've been doing something similar to track discussion on r/WSB here: [https://www.quiverquant.com/wallstreetbets/](https://www.quiverquant.com/wallstreetbets/)

I haven't finished any backtesting yet to see if they live up to their reputation haha.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Efficient Market Theory is dead because it is unfalsifiable.

It is not capable of being proved false, and should be discarded for that reason.

Information asymmetries exist, not everyone with better information have the access to capital or risk profile to alter the market price of an asset.

<comment><USER14> Your first two sentences are very interesting.

> Information asymmetries exist, not everyone with better information have the > access to capital or risk profile to alter the market price of an asset.

This is talked about in the article and seems to just start an argument again and not explain the unfalsifiable statement.

<comment><USER13> Sorry if that weakens the argument to you. It is a separate thought. My point is that "asset pricing" theories are too reductive, and should at least factor in undercapitalized people that do not wish to speculate that can perceive information. Or just abandon reductive asset pricing theories and focus on other things. Promote liquidity and increases in transactions, "efficiency" in that context, not "efficiency" in a "it already is and has been all the time and forever" context.

<comment><USER14> I think it's like the Shinichi Mochizuki mathematical proof.

If they can't play the game are they really part of it?

How do you know if you perceive true information?

I can tell you Magic Leap is a BS company and won't make any actual money. But so can lots of people. So is that 'information', the answer is no. Real information is when it will fail.

<comment><USER13> and that mathematical proof is much more sound than an economist's Efficient Market Theory. QED.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a clarification question (probably for people that have studied or read about the EMH in depth).

Wikipedia's definition is: "The efficient-market hypothesis (EMH) is a hypothesis in financial economics that states that asset prices reflect all available information."

The sentence above doesn't say how quickly the prices incorporate the information. The rest of the Wikipedia article didn't really clarify my core question (next).

Could someone give a summary of how the EMH is or is not framed in terms of steady-state assumptions? In other words, does the core EMH theory concern itself with dynamics? (Random walk theory does discuss dynamics.)

If there is a variation of theories that are all called "EMH", would you please summarize some grouping you find useful?

</comment><comment><USER16> Emh is almost tautologically ridiculous. Markets efficiently price the sums of everyones actions based on their opinions regarding the underlying facts. It doesn't price in some objective thing called "information". If one person takes one bet based on a piece of information and another person makes the opposite bet off of a differ wnt interpretation on the same piece of information then neither of their strongly held opinions altered the market price. If skewed numbers of people take those bets based on which side of the bed they woke up on then the market skews to that side. There isnt some conceptually perfect piece of "information" that is being priced here.

Not everyone has the same information, and not everyone interprets the information the same way. All the market prices is the average of these subjective opinions, and sure it does that efficiently, but that does not mean that that price represents some perfect unbeatable truth.

My bank account would also like to disagree with EMH

</comment><comment><USER17> How does the author explain the Renaissance Medallion Fund?

Also (and I asked this in the last big HN discussion of EMH too), how can EMH co-exist with the existence of 'trading' as a profession? I don't mean day traders, I mean professional traders who work for Goldman Sachs, investments banks, etc. Every asset class in the world has dedicated, professional traders.

If trading is fundamentally unprofitable over a long enough period of time.... why do sophisticated banks employ traders? (Wouldn't they, uh, have figured this out already?) Assuming trading is profitable (for professionals with a massive data advantage, etc.)- doesn't that disprove EMH? I can believe retail trading is always unprofitable, but why do the pros do it?

<comment><USER18> Hedge funds overall do not outperform index funds in the long run [1]. Banks have moved mostly to sell side and their traders earn commission and bid-ask spread. For a while the most profitable shops are market makers who use high- speed trading to leverage tiny arbitage opportunities, profiting exactly from tiny fluctuations from an efficient market.

[1] [http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/04/24/1524542401000/A-comple...](http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/04/24/1524542401000/A-complex- analysis-reaches-same-conclusion-as-simple-one--hedge-funds-suck/z)

<comment><USER17> >Hedge funds overall do not outperform index funds in the long run

But the Medallion Fund does apparently, which is my point. How can they have 70+% returns year after year for decades in a world where EMH is true? Their existence seems to disprove it, no?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think there are two important aspects that make the EMH not a good predictor:

\- The markets move the prices themselves, so the prices are not the "canonical" ones (if there was ever such a thing) but it reflects the idea that the market itself has.

Betting on a certain outcome in a game doesn't change the possible results, "betting on the market" does. So it's less about the "reality" and more about what the market thinks.

The second aspect can be summed up by the phrase "one person is smart, but people are dumb" (with the added component of "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent")

So, the market is probably not efficient but that doesn't mean you can beat it with ease.

</comment><comment><USER20> More interesting than "Is EMH dead?" is our improving understanding of the efficiency of incorporating new information into markets is getting better.

I'll refer you below to Andrew Lo's "Adaptive Market Hypothesis" which:

"is an attempt to reconcile economic theories based on the efficient market hypothesis (which implies that markets are efficient) with behavioral economics, by applying the principles of evolution to financial interactions: competition, adaptation and natural selection."[1]

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

</comment><comment><USER21> The analogy I always use (similar to the joke about the economist not picking up a twenty dollar bill) is that the market is as efficient as an evolved jungle ecosystem. Most of us would consider this system highly efficient, certainly more so than one our government could design, but it doesn't mean an animal shouldn't be able to find food. It just means it requires _energy_ to find it -- or, in the economy, to determine a more accurate future price. There's no free lunch.

</comment><comment><USER22> The efficient market hypothesis has a really questionable name which is a recurrent source of confusion: it's not about markets being efficient (in terms of resources allocation), it's about the inability to efficiently forecast assets price. The former isn't necessary for the later to be true.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is nonsense, ignoring the social/human aspects of it, the "efficient market" hypothesis only works if competition is possible (e.g. no monopoly, minimal capital startup costs), and if P=NP.

</comment><comment><USER24> One thing this blog doesn't address is price elasticity/liquidity.

There is far less friction and chance to get front-run if you are dealing with $100k rather than $100M.

</comment><comment><USER25> It is trivial to outperform the market by insider trading, thus markets are inefficient. The efficient market hypothesis isn't dead, it was never true.

<comment><USER26> I think empirically it's neither trivial nor impossible.

For instance, say you are a CEO and earnings are about to be announced for your company. You know exactly what the earnings are going to be, and what the published expectations are, so you know how much they will beat or fall short. Does that mean you know how the market will react? I think people who have been in that position would tell you no.

There was something in the news about someone who hacked into a database with earnings press releases that gave them access just a little early. And someone did an analysis of how reliably this worked to make money. It wasn't 100%!

<comment><USER25> If you frontrun a merger or a huge earnings miss, there's nearly a 0 percent chance you will lose money, and you can further leverage with options.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> the efficient market hypotheis isn't dead, but markets are efficient only if P == NP [https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284](https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2284)

<comment><USER11> Someone posted a similar (but later) paper above: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23371766](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23371766)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Finally some sense. I am so tired of people complaining about markets being irrational

</comment><comment><USER29> "The Market" is a leaky abstraction for the collective activity of millions of individual humans making concrete decisions at specific points in time. The EMH says something about the model, not about reality, so there will always be a gap.

</comment><comment><USER30> EMH is dead.

</comment><comment><USER31> Money printer goes brrrrrr.

Effecient markets!

</comment><comment><USER32> First off, I don't like titles telling me what to do. You're not my real mom.

Second, this was more incoherent babble than useful. While I am an investing nerd, this article could be about 1/3rd as long. The rest was trash writing and ego.

Third, there _is_ some worthwhile content in that 1/3rd that's good. But it's nothing groundbreaking or new, and detached from the EMH topic. His perspective on Warren Buffet was worthwhile, though, and the idea that once a tactic goes public the collective abosrbes it and the edge is lost is worth pondering over, and the comparison of using a stone-age axe against a fighter jet is meaningful too. There's no real discussion around the lifetime of tools, techniques, and perspectives. That might be the most worthwhile takeaway for me.

Forthly, equating market action to coin tossing is intellectual laziness. I would agree with this on an intraday trading level, but in long term investing that's just not the behavior equities exhibit.

Lastly, my portfolio has beat the S&P500 by significant margin (>3-8x) for 5 years. I'm still waiting to get humbled so i can investing in the S&P500/bonds and call it a day. If history is any indicator, it should be an eventuality. But given the perspective that stone-age axes don't work against fighter jets, I wonder how that could come to pass.</comment>


Covid 19 Worldwide Growth Rates - <AUTHOR> http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/covid19/ <comment><USER2> Isn't it a bit difficult to compare case numbers between countries when the approach to testing is so different? For example, in the UK we are only really testing people with respiratory issues in hospitals. So our number may be some number of thousands, but in reality we probably have 5-10 times that number.

<comment><AUTHOR> From the friendly article FAQ:

 _Q: Different countries are testing at different rates. How can you compare the data?_

 _So long as the fraction of actual cases being detected does not change, this does not affect any inference we can make about the growth rate. 35% growth is still 35% growth, whether we measure 100% of the cases or 50%._</comment></comment>


How a Christmas Story Became an American Tradition - <AUTHOR> http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/11/how-a-christmas-story-became-an-american-tradition <comment><USER2> This used to be my favorite Christmas movie. One year, I fell asleep during one of those 24 hour marathons they have every year on TBS (not sure if they still do this). I forgot to turn the TV off and kept waking up during different parts of the movie.

I haven't been able to watch it since.</comment>


Life in the grey area: Private WOW server under repeat DDOS attack. - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/pages/Arena-Tournamentcom/145440605498360 Arena tournament staff: "As most of you might have noticed, we are currently under a huge Ddos attack and are doing our best to resolve the issue. The attacker is the same guy who threatened us a while ago (Trentddos) but the attacks have increased by size. We are not able to tell yet for how long we will stay offline but we're doing everything in our power to get the server running. We're thankful for everyones support and patience."<p>What sort of measures could you take to prevent this sort of thing? <comment><AUTHOR> From the page:

"As most of you might have noticed, we are currently under a huge Ddos attack and are doing our best to resolve the issue. The attacker is the same guy who threatened us a while ago (Trentddos) but the attacks have increased by size. We are not able to tell yet for how long we will stay offline but we're doing everything in our power to get the server running. We're thankful for everyones support and patience."

What can you do to avoid this sort of thing?</comment>


CES: This router can power your devices wirelessly from 15 feet away (Energous) - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/05/energous-wattup-wireless-charging-demo

<comment><USER2> I would definitely utilize this at home as I am tired of having all the various power cables around my house.</comment>


Riding a Time Capsule to Apartment 8G - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/15/nyregion/manual-elevators-operators.html <comment><USER2> Modern design seems so pathetic in comparison.</comment>


Awful app review trend among Turkish users - <AUTHOR> http://blog.appwared.com/awful-app-review-trend-among-turkish-users-this-is-why-your-app-gets-so-many-one-star-reviews/ <comment><USER2> On iOS, we have indexed 666,355 reviews in Turkey. Out of those, 92,853 are 1 star reviews. 13.93%

On iOS, we have 32,296,341 reviews, with 3,448,351 being 1 star reviews. 10.67% one star reviews.

Let's see if we limit it to reviews in the last 2 months:

16.47% negative in Turkey (65,154 total reviews) 12.05% negative in the US (1,960,283 total reviews)

(source - internal [https://sensortower.com](https://sensortower.com) analytics)

It's a bit harder to separate reviews between countries on Android, but we have 7,862,505 recent reviews indexed in the last 2 months on Android, and 780,997 of them are negative (9.93%). I will try to run a query with language detection, though that might take a bit of time~

<comment><USER3> I'm seeing a similar number for iOS:

        Rating         % All         % Turkish
        1              09.6%         15.2%
        2              03.5%         04.4%
        3              06.5%         07.0%
        4              16.6%         14.5%
        5              63.6%         58.7%

(Source: data from MixRank's iOS intelligence)

There's definitely a bump in 1-star reviews in Turkey.

<comment><USER4> Could be accounted for by apps with poor localization.

<comment><USER5> So these apps have approximately equally good localization for every other language, except Turkish?

<comment><USER6> I get that you were being flippant, but apparently Turkish is unusually hard to localize for: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/whats-wrong-with- tu...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/03/whats-wrong-with-turkey.html)

<comment><USER7> This post is a little like programming pop science: an entertaining read, but greatly overstates some small result. The only Turkish-specific problem he mentions is case folding of ı/i. This is a problem unique to Turkish, there are other problems in case folding, like eszett (ß/ss) in German but these are much less likely to trip you up.

The US date format (m/d/y) is used virtually only in US, most other places use d/m/y or y/m/d. \-- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country#Map](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country#Map)

Re dots for thousands separators -- the world is split about roughly evenly on this, with all of europe (except for Great Britain and Ireland) using commas for decimals dots for thousands separators. -- [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#Hindu.E2.80.93Arab...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark#Hindu.E2.80.93Arabic_numeral_system)

<comment><USER8> "This post is a little like programming pop science" That's Jeff Atwood for you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Maybe it's a Saturday night thing but the discussion for this part mostly has comments that rival the ignorance of the OP, e.g. "The sad fact is that most people are awful", "you could block that country from your app", all based on simplistic anecdotal analysis given in the post.

Before you arrive at such a sweeping conclusion, you should perform at least _a little bit_ of statistical testing, e.g. see diziet's analysis on this page.

Two further comments:

1\. The behavior mentioned in the post does seem to be a real thing, as evidenced by the many entries in the Turkish zeitgeist site eksisozluk: [https://eksisozluk.com/yorumum-gozuksun-diye-1-yildiz-- 41109...](https://eksisozluk.com/yorumum-gozuksun-diye-1-yildiz--4110946?p=1), the first entry under this heading is dated 11/13/2013 so it seems to be a new meme. Also, the entries suggest that the behavior seems to be focused on Google Play rather than the Apple Store.

2\. This shows a significant drawback of Google Play's selection of comments to display. Looking at the selected comments for the same game on the Apple Store ([https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wheres-my- water-2/id63885314...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wheres-my- water-2/id638853147?mt=8)) I don't see this kind of 1 star ratings.

<comment><USER10> You wouldn't see these ratings on the Apple Store unless you are in Turkey (or changed your device's region) because Apple separates app store ratings. US devices only see US ratings. Turkey only sees Turkey ratings.

EDIT: Also, Apple doesn't display ratings like Google does, so there is clearly no reason for them to leave reviews like that.

<comment><USER11> That's clever. It accounts for cultural differences in rating systems.

A 3/5 isn't a good rating in any country I've lived. A 5 is good. There isn't really a rating for "exceptionally amazing". But I'm sure somewhere, a 3/5 means "pretty good" and 5/5 is reserved for exceptionally positive reviews.

<comment><USER12> May be my Norwegian upbringing or that I now live the UK, but when I like an app I often give it 3/5 stars, which to me is "not bad" (which means "good" in the UK). 5/5 would be amazing life changing rating and I don't get that excited by any app. I have give 4/5 to a few apps that is installed on all my devices.

So the problem with world wide rating is that are so different depending on your location and culture (and age).

Although I only install apps that have 4.5 star rating so I am being hypocritical...

Anecdotal tangent: A long time ago when I was in school in Norway, grades was marked on sort of 1-5 rating. (LG=Not very Good, NG=Quite Good, G=Good, MG=Very Good, S=Exceptionally Good. [http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaktersystemer_i_Norge#Grunns...](http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaktersystemer_i_Norge#Grunnskolen)) As I was usually among the best I mostly got a grade in the range of MG ie a 4. The top rating was practically impossible and I only got that on a few occasional tests but never on a full year's grade. MG+ was the more likely top grade to aim for. (They have since changed and expanded the grade system)

When I then moved to the UK in my last years of schooling, grade A seemed to be handy out all over the place. I do remember having to have meetings with the head of the year to be put into the best Maths set even if my average from Norway was not of the top grade and trying to explain that top grade in the two countries was not equivalent.

<comment><USER13> I think the purpose of the rating system motivates how people rate. Since the App Store appears to give importance to mean average data, I am given motivation in that direction:

If I think the app is good, and other people should download it, my rating makes the most difference if I award a score of 5.

If I think the app is OK but not worth downloading, I can most effectively indicate that by scoring it a 1.

If I want people to read my review (as Turkish reviewers have observed), I should perhaps rate it a 1 as well.

So, if I want my reviews to have an observable effect, I should (perhaps) rate everything 1 or 5.

(Or, I could decide what rating I want the app to have, then rate it a 1 or 5 depending on which direction I need to move it)

The motivation initiated by Apple here is bad - by simplifying everything to a single figure average, we lose all the nuance that you are trying to give with your Norwegian-style ratings.

<comment><USER14> > (Or, I could decide what rating I want the app to have, then rate it a 1 or > 5 depending on which direction I need to move it)

You just re-discovered strategic voting. And that's why the rating system should display the median and not the mean. For the median, you can skip step two: just vote what you want.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> If you are going to take user reviews seriously, you have to account for the possibility that a significant portion of the general population _may_ be comprised of idiots.

People misusing the star system is a problem, but the _real_ problem is that we are forced to care when people misuse it.

(To correct _this specific_ problem, I would recommend low-tolerance hellbanning. If a positive review is accompanied by a one-star rating, that user's ratings and comments will never be seen by another user again.)

<comment><USER16> Are developers on the play store allowed to delete reviews? That sounds like something that would be really easily abused (i.e. delete all bad reviews of your bad product).

<comment><USER17> There is no option on the developer console for this afaik. If there is it is not prominent or easily discovered.

However, I saw a small burst of bad reviews on an app I used to work on a few months back - all of those reviews including the developer replies are now 'missing'.

Its possible they merely flagged the reviews and Google got rid of them because they were rude. Possibly the OPs removed them because the developer got in contact to ease their pain somehow...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am Turkish, I live in the US and run a startup. I conducted a small experiment (n=3) among my cousins living in Turkey aged 8-14: They don't understand that 3rd parties make these apps not tied to the device; and they definitely don't understand that the rating (in general) would impact someone making this app financially. Huh.

<comment><USER19> So you say that you asked a bunch of questions to a couple kids and concluded that the whole population of Turkey are idiots? Let me tell you, your cousin's reactions are quite expected, but I doubt yours are.

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

<comment><USER20> Before you get all uppity about the scientific method, I suggest you read [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_to_conclusions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumping_to_conclusions)

<comment><USER19> Even without the context of my comment, this still makes a great read. Thank you. BTW, I have to admit that I have misinterpreted the comment, my apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Turkish users want their reviews to be seen. This sounds narcissistic to us, but for a lot of people being asked for their opinion of a product is a big deal. Rather than condemning the users, we should look for ways to improve the UX of the Google Play Store.

There could be cultural factors at play here as well. When I was growing up in Turkey, every so often there would be a fad that picked obscure artefacts of American culture and turned them into articles of social prestige. Cheesy American soap operas, songs and actors would suddenly and inexplicably become national sensations that everyone had to know. I assume something similar is going on with the Android Play Store reviews. Having your review on the frontpage of an app had become a point of pride, so much so that users are subverting the system to get there.

<comment><USER22> What's interesting is that Google Play will already automatically surface the reviews from anyone in your extended circles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's kind of weird that they want their comment to be at the top, but the only thing they say in their comment is that they want it to be at the top. You'd think if they were looking for exposure, they'd use the exposure to do something other than talking about how they wanted exposure.

<comment><USER24> First.

<comment><USER25> I didn't even know that was _ALLOWED_ on Hacker News! All this time I've been going back to SlashDot when I needed to post that, and I could have been claiming first posts here.

<comment><USER24> I suspect it's not normally allowed or encouraged, but I think it is uniquely relevant and appropriate in this case.

<comment><USER25> I wasn't seriously suggesting otherwise ... It was supposed to be funny (and to subtly make the point that we really don't want that here).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This makes me wonder... are there locales where 1 star might be taken to mean a better review than a 5 star review?

I realize that's not what's being claimed here, though.

There's no intrinsic meaning to how stars correlate to quality is my thinking here, but perhaps only due to familiarity do we think that more stars is better and not worse.

<comment><USER27> Here's a comment which suggests that at least some of them are thinking 1 star is the best:

 _Kubilay Tekin: I hadn 't gave 1 star just because I want my comment gets shown on top, I actually think that the game is aweful aqws.w.wew..ws_

(I've seen this phenomenon before - there are quite a few who associate 1 with _first place_ , hence surveys and such often have the [1 = worst, 10 = best] next to each "rate xxx on a scale of 1 to 10")

<comment><USER28> I don't think that's what that comment suggests. The commenter is acknowledging that some people give one star just to have their comment seen, even though they think it's a good app, but that he personally is giving one star because he thought it was indeed awful.

<comment><USER27> I saw it as that he is giving 1 star because he wants the comment to be seen, but actually thinks it was awful (implying that he wouldn't give 1 if it _wasn 't_ awful). Either way the grammar certainly taxed my parser...

<comment><USER29> You misread that. It says "I hadn't gave 1 star just because I want my comment gets shown on top"

He is saying he hasnt only given 1 start to be at the top, he actually does think the app is terrible

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> [http://nlp.stanford.edu/sentiment/](http://nlp.stanford.edu/sentiment/)

> Good, a very good game! I gave 1 star so that my comment gets seen.

++ very positive

> The game is an example of how a good game should be! Don't bother that I > gave 1 star, it's because I want my comment gets seen.

++ very positive

> Super! I gave 1 star so that my comment is shown first but I actually liked > the game.

0 neutral

> I hadn't gave 1 star just because I want my comment gets shown on top, I > actually think that the game is aweful aqws.w.wew..ws

\- negative

<comment><USER31> Maybe star ratings should be removed in favor of text reviews with "ratings" based exclusively on sentiment analysis. Has machine learning reached a state where that's practical? If not, will anyone hazard a guess on when it will?

<comment><USER14> Just offer both, and weigh them behind the scenes however you feel like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> WTF? Why is this bug report getting spammed with talk about Turkey? The bug is that the system displays one star reviews first, creating broken incentives. Assuming that the code works (i.e., doesn't work) the same way in every country, the country has nothing to do with it. The system needs to be fixed to use a more neutral display order.

</comment><comment><USER33> Is there anyone else who thinks the "5 star" rating is somewhat flawed, or is it just me?

I think, the problem is that the scale is all on the positive side, but people are trying to use it to give negative rating. So naturally they readjust the scale, so that it has both, positive and negative sides, by "shifting" the zero of the scale. Now, where exactly does it go? Will 3 become 0, or is it 2 for some people, or maybe 4?

I know it's way too late in the game, but why can't the rating system be just a simple "good", "bad", "it's ok", or maybe even: :-(, :-|, :-)

<comment><USER15> I am not enamoured with the "5 star" system, but I have to say that I like it more than the standard 5-choice system that explicitly labels the choices as positive or negative: _Strongly Disagree, Disagree, No Opinion, Agree, Strongly Agree_

I _despise_ that sort of system. None of the choices ever seem to be appropriate for what I think or feel.

Star systems avoid inspiring this frustration in me by giving me the freedom to imagine labels that I think fit how I feel or think.

<comment><USER34> >Star systems avoid inspiring this frustration in me by giving me the freedom to imagine labels that I think fit how I feel or think.

And in statistical circles, this is called survey bias (rating bias).

If you think a 4 is "awesome", and another person thinks that it means "pretty good", and this effect is widespread, it will result in a biased survey that is difficult to interpret.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Interesting.

Is it for mixed reviews as in total reviews worldwide and Turkey or just for Turkey. It seems it is just for Turkey.

Maybe they are just more honest and say why they are giving 1 star reviews. Or maybe they are dishonest and really think the game is terrible but in the comment chose to say something else to seem nice? Is there somehow a disproportionate presence of Turkish Android app developers and since they are competing with you they are just messing with author's head.

Looking at the game review in the app store (presumably the US version) most 1 or 2 star reviews seem valid (and don't see a particular trend with names, to mean they are certain ethnicity).

A guess it would be good to browser other apps' reviews from Turkey. So I took a look at Cut The Rope. Very popular game, indeed.

Looking at US reviews, looks good.

Turkish:

[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zeptolab.c...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zeptolab.ctr.ads&hl=tr)

Hmm, well I can't read Turkish. So I opened Google Translate and started translating a few top 1 star review. And yap, same pattern.

===

Mükemmel Çok güzel harika bir oyun gözüksün diye 1

\---

Excellent Very nice people to see a great game as one

===

===

Gerçekten cok guzel bir oyun hem zeka açıcı Gercekten cok güzel

\---

Really a very nice game're really nice and intelligence opener

===

Someone might want to help, but even with Google Translate it looks like they are giving it good reviews as text but 1 star as a score.

The crude and seemingly insensitive way is to just prevent Turkish reviewers from commenting. Or even better hellban them and never account for their score. The would correct this pretty quickly I would imagine.

Now I would really hope someone from Turkey to explain if there is a cultural or social reason for this. It just seems to strange and odd.

<comment><USER36> > The crude and seemingly insensitive way is to just prevent Turkish reviewers > from commenting. Or even better hellban them and never account for their > score.

Maybe don't provide a guaranteed way to appear in the displayed comments? I'd expect this to spread outside of Turkey pretty quickly.

<comment><USER37> This is pretty sad for other Turkish people, who seeks proper reviews and know proper rating mentality. It is like hell for me. I translated an app to Turkish and wanted to check if there is any translation related comments. It blew my mind. There was 1 review in terms of new translation pack. The rest was 1-star reviews. I started to downvote these reviews (thumb down), but I guess no one cares enough to vote up or down useful reviews. There has to be another way. I guess voting anonymously will be the solution. Thanks to Google's Google+ integration, some stupid attention seekers want to show their full name on apps' first pages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This is really odd, particularly considering that Turkey is by far one of the friendliest places I've been in my many travels (well, at least many travels when I was younger).

I question whether they're aware of the grief that their reviews are causing. In any case, it's still pretty inconsiderate to tell someone (numerically) that you think their work sucks, even if you don't really mean any harm.

All in all, probably an extension of the whole "cursing/attacking/belittling someone on the Internet doesn't count" phenomenon.

<comment><USER37> They don't think that they are hurting developers, firms, etc. I saw a comment like this: "Hey dude, don't get me wrong I loved your app, it is really fun thank you; but I am giving 1-star just to be seen".

I guess they don't comprehend stars' purpose. When they are searching apps, they just scroll down to the comments. Stars are not a way to judge the apps. Also, with the Google+ integration, they enjoy their full name is being seen on an app's page. Weird.

<comment><USER14> Turks are friendly in person, and warm and welcoming. But in general, they don't seem to have as much of a general concept of civic duty. Eg they just litter, because there's no visible victim, and they don't see the guy who has to pick up the trash.

(I lived there for a few months.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I hate the iOS review system. People rarely leave a review if the like the app, but as soon as they have something to complain about they will leave a bad review. Also most people if they have an issue will automatically leave a bad review instead of contacting the support email to get it resolved.

What's even more annoying is people that write things like 'Best app ever' and then give it a 3 or 4 star rating instead of 5.

<comment><USER39> > Also most people if they have an issue will automatically leave a bad review > instead of contacting the support email to get it resolved.

because most people are used to working with big products. Even me, a developer, this is the first time I considered that you could in general email support and not get some patronizing useless robot. It makes sense now that I think about it, since so many of the apps are made by small sized development firms or even just lone wolfs, there's a good chance I could get a human, maybe even another dev!

In general, that would never happen with a large and well known product. Faced with that, people take the only outlet they feel with maybe change something.

The best app ever part. Well...

People always exaggerate, _ALWAYS_.

:)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> We had the same problem, but with Russia. Ours being a paid app and our reviews being in the low 1000s, every 1-star rating was hurting us badly, so we removed Russia completely from our distribution. We added it back a month later and things went back to normal, but that's definitely something that we shouldn't need to have done.

<comment><USER34> Was it the same "awesome app but 1 star so I'm on the front page?". Or just widespread 1 star reviews solely from Russia?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Maybe Google should do sentiment analysis on review text and compare with star rating then rank the review to be less visible if the two contradicts too much?

</comment><comment><USER42> If you aren't generating any revenue from Turkey you could block that country from your app.

</comment><comment><USER43> As a Turkish, I think i know little better what is going on here;

It is the high school kids that they think it is cool to mess up with big and serious systems in their stupid way. It is fun for them to mess up rules which I think is the same for most of the teenagers around the world. They try to break things, don't listen teachers, don't go to school.

They think that they should be doing what they want instead of what others want them to do.

The outcome for the turkish teenagers irritating behaviour showed in Google's Play Store. That is all what i can see.

Aren't we all tired of these kids actions around us sometimes? :)

</comment><comment><USER44> People's review habits in general are bizarre. I have read reviews like "I haven't gotten a chance to use the product yet" with a 3 star rating. One wonders what exactly they are reviewing. Or recipe reviews are the weirdest, every one of them say "I change blah blah blah" to the point where its a completely different recipe then they review their recipe, like that's somehow appropriate. I can understand making one tweek to suit your taste but don't change the whole recipe and think thats what you are reviewing.

<comment><USER45> When I FIRST released a paid game on the Android Market, after my first dozen 5-star reviews I was devastated by a 1-star review, the content of which was "I can't review this game in only 15 minutes."

And that user then promptly refunded the game within the (then-new) 15 minute window.

And (surprise!) someone ended up uploading a "cracked" [1] version of my game to warez sites shortly thereafter. Talk about adding insult to injury.

[1] I used a sneaky way to detect "cracks" in my game that involved, in part, letting the hacker _think_ they'd cracked it: The game would query Google to see if they'd paid for it, and if not, it would throw a "Sorry, you don't own this game" dialog up. There were scripts around that would remove the standard Google DRM, though; instead of fighting that, I LET them "hack" it, and afterwards it wouldn't bring up that dialog any more. But then the behavior reverted to being identical to the free demo (first 30 levels free, then you had to buy the real game). It was "hacked" almost a dozen times, and never once did anyone figure out how to get past the second layer of protection.

<comment><USER46> How did you detect that the DRM check was removed?

<comment><USER45> Short answer: I looked at the SHA signature of the .class file (where all the compiled classes' bytecode is stored) and checked it against a known signature stored in an encrypted data file.

And the best part was the encryption on ALL the games' data files was based on a key derived from the binary executable (the .so file), so if anyone were to hack that executable, the game wouldn't run at all. I should have thrown up a screen that let people know that it was a cracked version, and where to get the real thing. And I DEFINITELY should have changed the Flurry code; my "paid game" analytics were completely shot after the cracks were released. Duh.

A serious hack attempt would have broken it, no question; there's no unbreakable DRM, after all, and I wasn't even using serious encryption (I decided it didn't matter: A typical attacker is not going to attack the encryption mathematically, they're going to decompile the binary to get the key AND algorithm, so as long as it can stand up to trivial attacks, it's strong enough -- connecting to a known encryption algorithm might actually make it EASIER for them, since then they'd have known function names and parameters). I just wanted to raise the bar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Mere speculation: Isn't this just a result of the mixing of "Helpfulness" feature and the black-hat marketing / reviews purchasing?

As in now those selling "Reviews" for your app; something like $100 for around fifty 3 to 5 star reviews can justify their price by stating their reviewers have consistently ranked as being "Helpful" and always on the "front page" of any app review? And what we're seeing is the reviewers working for these black-hat intermediaries trying to up their overall review "weight"; whereby I'm assuming google takes into account your previous reviews (and their helpfulness) with how long your review now stays on the front page (much like comments staying on top of a HN thread).

Or it could just be a typical fad akin to wanting the personalized car registration of "A1", being top/first etc.

</comment><comment><USER48> The sad fact is that most people are awful. I fully expect this trend to catch on elsewhere, it just happens to have got started off in Turkey.

</comment><comment><USER49> When I read the title I thought: "well, must be an issue with internationalization (see Turkey test)". When I read the actual article I just thought "w..t..f... This just doesn't make any sense, who came up with this?".

</comment><comment><USER50> They are just exploiting the flawed rating system. If users are encouraged by the system to give bad reviews I don't feel that they could be blamed. Google should think of other way to display review comments.

<comment><USER51> They could perhaps implement meta reviews, which let users rate reviews. Note That:

* perhaps the ratio of misleading ratings isn't necessarily high enough to render the system ineffective (iow, it may be just noise), but in order to know that, it appears to me that the meta review would be necessary.

* it wouldn't stop people from trying to game the system (which lead to the idea that even if meta review was there, its effectiveness would have to be tested, maybe by using... a meta meta review?)

<comment><USER10> Apple has done this for years. "is this comment helpful" and then the reviews can be sorted by most helpful in addition to recent. i'm pretty sure most helpful is the default as well.

<comment><USER51> I guess this wasn't too far fetched an idea. Google engineers must have thought of this before me as well, which means that they must've a good reason to not implement it. I wonder what it could be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Abusing something is like a cultural thing in here. Sorry :(

<comment><USER53> Is pretty funny in a law of unintended consequences kind of a way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I guess people should be able to rate comments. They would fight on comment rating and less on app rating. If the idiots are just a minority, this should fix it.

</comment><comment><USER55> Perhaps you should only be allowed to give an app a 1 star review if you delete it.

Re-installing it should remove your review.

</comment><comment><USER56> There's also a phenomenon in IMDB where Turkish movies get voted exceptionally high on many categories.

<comment><USER57> Turkish users like to manipulate votes and have some high self esteem to be a superior in doing anything. So if some thing is Turkish rooted and be or seems to be better than competitors they have pride. So to have more pride and fulfil their self esteem they try to manipulate every voting system.

In this case, the self esteem is their comment is better to bee seen then anyone else's so why not manipulate the system? It's some kind of hacking culture but in a bad motive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> And does this surprise you, op? I think you have seen ample evidence of so called "troll" comments garner more attention and clicks in ekşisözlük. They are doing this, because they want attention and google provides an easy way to do it. You don't even have to write a provocative content, just click 1 star and you are on the top of the world.

A community, be it a virtual or a real one, has its trolls, e.g. misusers. If you promote such a behavior, albeit unintentionally, increase in repetition of such behavior is very expectable. The thing to do in my humble opinion is rethinking this feedback mechanism and rebuild it in the content quality's favor.

</comment><comment><USER59> this is simply the first shot in our generations new problem - how to gather review globally in a useful and fair manner.

"stars ratings" is simple - and in fact too simple. Rating based on likes of friends is the next (current?) evolution - but that has some terrible drawbacks for fairness and socially beneficial ends, after that? Probably based on actual usage, as most social sciences have given up on self-reporting as a methodology and started using observations.

But it's going to be a hard slog - and personally a slog I would prefer to be done openly and not behind closed commercial doors

</comment><comment><USER60> Do 1 star comments really go to the top or is the problem here that these kids _think_ they do? Isn't it more likely it's just the most recent reviews that are getting shown first?

<comment><USER61> 1-star comments really go to the top...

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Is this strictly limited to Turkish users? I have a feeling that if we were to consider apps in other languages we might find it's just a general problem amongst all users.

<comment><USER63> It could just be that the trend started amongst Turkish users first and the language barrier could be inhibiting its spread to other locales. This article having translated and explained the review ranking behaviour might speed things along.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> This reminds me of the case where an Indian politician's facebook page was found to contain a lot of 'likes' from Turkish users.

[http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/rajasthan-chief- minister-a...](http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/rajasthan-chief-minister- ashok-gehlot-accused-of-buying-facebook-likes-from-istanbul-390210)

The city where he was most liked changed from Jaipur to Istanbul which helped detect this.

</comment><comment><USER65> They are mostly 9-14 years old kids. And yes, they are selfish, spoiled, senseless a bunch stupids. Do not think i am using "a bunch" phrase to de- emphasize this situation. There are 6.5 million 9-14 years old kids live in Turkey and i can guarantee that, half of them can do this shit. So google must do something before developers get more damage from this stupidity.

</comment><comment><USER66> YouTube already realized that the 5-star rating system doesn't work [1]. Based on the histograms I see on the Play Store, it's seems like they should realize it too.

[1] [http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars- domina...](http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2009/09/five-stars-dominate- ratings.html)

</comment><comment><USER67> Another awful app review trend among Turkish users [https://itunes.apple.com/tr/app/cloudsearch-reverse- phone/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/tr/app/cloudsearch-reverse- phone/id586594379) They give 5 star in order to get 3 free credits. (Also this app uses CIA app's database which is free)

</comment><comment><USER68> To be fair, I'm not sure it has ever been a good idea to take advice from random strangers on the Internet.

<comment><USER69> Not sure that still applies as aptly in the emerging world where (nearly) everything is being advertised, explored, researched and ordered online.

Good or bad, the crowd is relying on its emerging "wisdom" more 'n more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> In America either something changes our lives or we want the creator to have their house taken away.

</comment><comment><USER67> Turkish users "crack" reCaptcha [http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/01/comments- back-on-recaptcha-...](http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/01/comments-back-on- recaptcha-was.html)

</comment><comment><USER67> Also the term "yorum" in Turkish means "comment". So it does not completely mean "review". In other words, there is no equivalent translation for the word "review".

<comment><USER37> "inceleme" may cover "review". it is used to be like this in turkish websites:

"Galaxy S3 incelemesi" "Samsung SyncMaster 2333 incelemesi"... etc.

Turkish users are used to the word "inceleme". Yorum/comment is like: ah yes I liked, fuck this sucks. A yorum/comment may not include why do you like it/why does it suck, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I guess Turkish users will get blocked by app developers after looking at this ridiculous attitude. Btw they helped Google to find this bug, good job Turkish users.

<comment><USER72> It is not really a bug, 1 star reviews get an intentional bump in priority which is expected since "THIS APP BROKE MY PHONE, 1 STAR" is more important than "Just another breakout clone, meh. 3 star"

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> This is like : [http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-04-16/](http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2003-04-16/)

</comment><comment><USER74> Interesting. Any idea for another way "helpful comments" can be identified? I mean, presenting bad reviews _is_ helpful in most cases.

</comment><comment><USER75> As an iOS dev, you get a lot of crappy reviews based on really dumb, inane things by users.

People are very quick to give 1-star reviews without hesitation.

</comment><comment><USER76> hi i am from turkey and i can say do not take seriously turkish reviews with 1 star. these are absolutely rubbish. some people in turkey just want other people to read their comments in anyway

i am also an android developer and i do not know why they are doing this shit.

IGNORE THEM.

</comment><comment><USER77> I wonder if it is isolated to Google Play, and if so, if these are actually human accounts?

</comment><comment><USER78> Better than "I would give it 5 stars if it was free" type of comments.

<comment><USER79> "I would rate these jeans 5 stars, but they were delivered a day late so I'm giving them 1 star."

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> That's nobody's business but the Turks.

</comment><comment><USER81> I once did iPhone app development. I'll always remember one app in particular that I shipped. A retro game. We'd see lots of "reviews" in the App Store where the user would leave comments like, "great game! loved it. but I really wished there were more playable levels for the 99 cents I paid. So I could only give it 1 out of 5 stars."

ad nauseum

<comment><USER82> I've seen plenty of reviews along the lines of "This free app does everything it says it does, and does it extremely well. But it doesn't do <unfeasible thing that would matter only in some obscure use case> so until it does, 1 star."

</comment></comment><comment><USER83> Ha ha! It gave me a good laugh :-)

<comment><USER83> oops sorry, I thought it was funny that people can be so eager to have their comments appear but I missed the seriousness

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> This article seems naive. Probably people are being paid to rate apps down.

<comment><USER85> If they're being paid to rate the app down, why does the review itself claim the game is good?

<comment><USER86> Plausible deniability?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> What do you expect from Android users? In general the Google Play store is a far more bizarre and spammy atmosphere...

<comment><USER88> "What do you expect from Android users?"

Sigh. What did i expect from a web designer? /s

<comment><USER87> > Sigh. What did i expect from a web designer? /s

I'm not a web designer...

<comment><USER89> "I design and develop websites at MasterMade or write at Newly Ancient."

From your website.

<comment><USER90> Well, he said 'or'.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Payroll and benefits for international remote employees? - <AUTHOR>

My business is based in Canada and I'm about to hire my first employee, an Australian citizen located in Australia. I've talked to several HR outsourcing firms (TriNet, ADP) and they all say I need to register an entity in Australia and setup payroll and benefits there. My lawyer has advised me to consider treating the employee as a contractor, but consult an Australia lawyer to make sure this conforms to Australian law. How do HN'ers handle payroll and benefits for remote employees? Do you treat them as contractors? <comment><USER2> I am an Australian now living in Canada, but in my Australian business I always "employ" people as a contractor, which simplifies things a lot. You do not have to pay superannuation, although I still pay workplace health and safety, but that's only a few hundred dollars. All the contractor has to do is register an ABN (free and can be done online) and send you monthly invoices.

Also be aware that in Australia people usually pay for their own health insurance if they want private health insurance.

Just be careful to set things up so it looks like your contractor is really a contractor. Even if you have a contract agreement the tax office will declare him to be an employee if that's what he looks like to them (paid like an employee, works full time, you're his only client etc).

<comment><AUTHOR> What steps do you take to make it look like they are a contractor? Also, would you recommend having a lawyer draft the contract agreement, or is adapting a template good enough?

<comment><USER2> Just think to yourself, what would make them look like a freelancer/consultant/contractor. For example, they work from their own location (obviously the case in your situation), have their own pty ltd company, if they have other clients, they do marketing/advertising, they use their own equipment (even if you reimburse them, which is normal for consultants), don't pay benefits or superannuation etc. Obviously not all of these are feasible but the more the better. Most of these things have to be done by the contractor.

I think you will be fine, it certainly seems reasonable to contract with a local consultant rather than hire someone. I am definitely not an expert. Yes I would recommend some advice from a lawyer. I can give you the details of my Australian lawyer if you like, they are used to working with startups.</comment></comment></comment>


AMD Ryzen 7 3800X Glides Past Intel Core I9-9900K in Leaked Geekbench Numbers - <AUTHOR> https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-ryzen-7-3800x-vs-intel-i9-9900k-geekbench,39691.html <comment><USER2> Great reporting; claim the 3800X "glides past" the Intel chip, yet the scores shown in the screenshot in the article show the opposite!</comment>


The Zen Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.zenprogrammer.org/

<comment><USER2> Does anyone feel like a book by a non-zen expert that attempts to teach something as deep and ancient as zen through programming analogies actually does more harm than good? It teaches neither programming nor zen, and may contain a number of cherry-picked principles that are devoid of the context necessary for understanding.

I think it would be awesome of someone wrote book about very specific processes that they were able to come up with as a result of practicing some philosophy, and leave the actual teaching of the philosophy to an expert.

<comment><USER3> This book is containing my own story with Zen. How did it change me personally and how does my daily work life looks like. What have I understood from it. And so on. Actually the book contains the result of my practice. Inside the book you'll find many references to the actual original texts where you can read more about it.

You wrote "may contain" and "it does not". You simply don't know whats inside the book if you haven't read it.

Instead of assuming what the book is about or not, I invite you to just read it. If you are not happy with it I will refund you. Or if you buy it on Leanpub they will refund you according to their 100% happiness guarantee (on Leanpub you have even a bit more time to read the book).

Here is the book on Leanpub: [https://leanpub.com/thezenprogrammer](https://leanpub.com/thezenprogrammer)

Here is the happiness guarantee: [https://leanpub.com/thezenprogrammer#happiness_guarantee](https://leanpub.com/thezenprogrammer#happiness_guarantee)

There is no risk for you. When you have read it I am happy about your email if you liked it or not and if you actually see any harm in it.

<comment><USER2> My comment wasn't purely speculative. That would be unfair. It contains the thoughts that I had after reading your sample.

Here's one excerpt

 _Kôdô Sawaki says: if you need to sleep, sleep. Don't plan your software when you are trying to sleep. Just sleep. If you code, code. Don't daydream—code. If you are so tired that you cannot program, sleep. Even known multitaskers like Stephan Uhrenbacher have decided to work singlethreaded_

Who's Sawaki? Who's Uhrenbacher? This is what I mean by missing context. Now that I think about it, some of the criticism (mine included) may be due to the fact that you picked the final chapter to represent a sample. You pretty much gave away the ending, and we have no clue how you got there.

<comment><USER3> Sawaki is a known Zen Master. He didn't write texts on his own; his books are just quotes collected by his students. The internet is full with information on him.

Stephan Uhrenbacher is linked in the original blog post: [http://www.grobmeier.de/the-10-rules-of-a-zen- programmer-030...](http://www.grobmeier.de/the-10-rules-of-a-zen- programmer-03022012.html)

The "10 rules" post is the beginning, not the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That does look interesting but it might be too philosophical for many hackers. I would instead recommend _Time Management for Sysadmins_ , Tim Lemoncelli, O'Reilly and _Pragmatic Thinking and Learning_ , Andy Hunt, PragProg. Both are interesting and helpful but much more practical, especially TMSA, which I should dust off and re-read.

[http://everythingsysadmin.com/books.html](http://everythingsysadmin.com/books.html)

[http://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and- learni...](http://pragprog.com/book/ahptl/pragmatic-thinking-and-learning)

<comment><USER3> The ZP book is not about time management.

<comment><USER5> For someone who never heard of you, your book or "zen programming" before, there is not enough information either here or on your site to make a purchase decision.

I would respectfully ask a few questions. Who are you? Why are you qualified to write a programming book? Why are you qualified to write a "zen programming" book? How long have you been a programmer? What concrete things will someone who studies the book get out of it?

I read the intro of the site, the description of the book on the site, the testimonials and the Ten Rules of a Zen Programmer and still don't know the answers to these questions other than seeming platitudes.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for your constructive feedback.

I will add a few paragraphs with more information when I find a few minutes.

Please note, if you would buy the book and if you are not happy with it I will fully refund you (see terms). This is also the case when you purchase at Leanpub.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Looks interesting, but it would be great if there's an example chapter or two.

<comment><USER3> Try that: [http://www.zenprogrammer.org/en/the10rulesofazenprogrammer.h...](http://www.zenprogrammer.org/en/the10rulesofazenprogrammer.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Table of contents - [https://leanpub.com/thezenprogrammer](https://leanpub.com/thezenprogrammer) Sample chapter - [http://www.zenprogrammer.org/en/the10rulesofazenprogrammer.h...](http://www.zenprogrammer.org/en/the10rulesofazenprogrammer.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> "This book will teach you that there are more than just emails, phone calls, and urgent issues."

There are more what? Or did you mean to write 'there is more'? In any case, it's a weak statement. Of course there's more, what about just programming?

The only information I get from that introductory paragraph is that the book is about saying no to certain things in a zen way.

<comment><USER3> Thank you.

I will try to improve the section.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> just bought it and now it says: [https://www.evernote.com/shard/s8/sh/aee8a9f9-e438-4b6d-9051...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s8/sh/aee8a9f9-e438-4b6d-9051-ccf272b240c4/ca62024eee2ae8bd4edfb9fb19c77828)

<comment><USER3> Hello, i fixed that. Please try again. Sorry for the issue!

<comment><USER9> cool thanks! works perfectly fine!

<comment><USER3> Great :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I appreciate the sample text, thank you.

In it I found this advice:

'Kôdô Sawaki once said: "You are not important."

Think about it.'

Why should a person consider himself unimportant? What actions would follow from a person who truly does not value himself or herself?

<comment><USER11> Perhaps spontaneous ones?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> um... I am very interested in the book but apart from a vague description I have no idea what it says. A table of contents would be very useful to extrapolate what I can grok from it maybe?

<comment><USER3> You are right, I will include a TOC to the page. Meanwhile, you can see it here: [https://leanpub.com/thezenprogrammer](https://leanpub.com/thezenprogrammer)

<comment><USER13> I've been lurking on HN for 4+ years, don't comment, and have only 3 karma. I'm breaking radio silence to say I've just purchased your book and very much look forward to reading it in full. From what I've skimmed this really meshes well with a direction I have been trending in myself and I just wanted to give you a vote of confidence and congratulations on getting the book out into the wild. I hope you are not too put off by the reactionary backlash here on HN. For a site ostensibly about new tech perspectives, I find the commenting culture of this site often puzzling.

<comment><USER3> Thanks a lot! Actually I was a bit concerned on a few comments here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this book digital only, or can I get an actual printed copy?

<comment><USER3> Currently it is digital only. I am preparing a physical copy via Createspace (Amazon). I am planning to give vouchers for the physical copy to the buyers of the ebook but I haven't figured out if this is supported by Createspace or not. The ebook comes as PDF which you should be able to print on your own at Lulu.com too, if you like.

<comment><USER14> Thanks. Call me old fashioned, but I like to read actual books versus my computer/tablet. I am interested in the book, and will probably buy a copy. It would be nice to be able to get a physical copy in the future :-)

<comment><USER3> I understand you - I own a lot of books myself. Personally I am not sure if I would buy Zen related e-books. However I am preparing the book to work with CreateSpace. If you would like to get notified join the mailing list at zenprogrammer.org or follow @zenprog. Thanks anyway for you comment. It motivates me to push the physical issue :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Sind Probekapitel vorhanden?

<comment><USER16> holly crap - I know kung-fu

<comment><USER17> show me

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> The sample chapter really drives home what I dislike about Zen. It's taking this cute little ego thing and trying to lure it into a trap. Hah! That'll show it. Cut off its tail! Clever!

Rather, I prefer the more direct Advaita Vedanta approach: quickly smother it with napalm.</comment>


Ask HN: I don't like programming anymore. Help on a new career please? - <AUTHOR>

Hi guys,
I've been a programmer for quite some time and just recently, I hit a wall. I seem to not enjoy programming the way I used to.
I'm thinking about what other stuff do I like or interested in.
I remember from my experience that I really like tinkering web servers and I'm very interested in making them perform at their best. I love reading highscalability.com and now I'm wondering, should I make a career change? If so, what should I get into?
If you guys want to know more, ask away!
I'd really appreciate your help guys. Thank you in advance!
P.S. I don't know if this might help but I seem to be very good at Yahoo NBA Fantasy and Magic the gathering :D I'm just throwing it out there maybe it could help. Thanks again. <comment><USER2> I think you should think twice before taking this step. I love programming, but sometimes I feel the same. Sometimes I think maybe I've chosen wrong career and I should really become a taxi driver. But it's all from sameness. Try to change not your career for now but, for example, the project you are working on, or try another programming language (this helps me a lot). At last try to create your own project, even small, but it'll bring you joy back!

</comment><comment><USER3> Think of a few things you would enjoy spending your time on. Now, pick one of those, and make a web site that lets you do whatever that is.

Or:

QA, tech writer, book writer, blogger/consultant/freelancer (where your blog supports and builds your brand and credibility).

<comment><AUTHOR> hi antidoh! thanks for your suggestions. I'm curious about being a QA and consultant. How do I get started?

<comment><USER3> QA: contact a few local contractor agencies. Some specialize in QA. Or contact a few companies directly and say "I wanna do X." You may have to look longer than you're used to if you want a QA position that pays what you're used to.

How to be a consultant or freelancer: dunno. Just some roles that I know some people do, and some of those do it well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Consulting is the best option , let me know how I can reach you .

<comment><AUTHOR> That would be awesome, thank you. Please see my profile for my email. Thanks!</comment></comment>


Training a Recurrent Neural Network to Compose Music - <AUTHOR> https://maraoz.com/2016/02/02/abc-rnn/ <comment><USER2> If you think this is impressive, consider that Mozart himself wrote an algorithm to randomly generator music... and it still sounds like Mozart: [http://www.rationalargumentator.com/index/blog/2015/06/varia...](http://www.rationalargumentator.com/index/blog/2015/06/variations- minuet-mozart/)

<comment><USER3> I always felt Mozart had some kind of a formula that made him so productive in his short life. Now I read he had. For MOZARTish music at least.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Noob question: It intuitively seems to me that by feeding raw text of a structured format (such as the music notation in the article) we're making the algorithm unnecessarily learn the syntax in addition to interesting stuff, which is the high level musical patterns. What kind of results would you expect from running the same experiment, but with an input encoding more specialized to the problem domain? Would the performance benefits be significant?

<comment><USER5> Part of the appeal of ml is that you don't have to care about the underlying processes.

<comment><USER4> We want the model to be better right? I just want to express input data using as little bytes as possible. Do you mean that if we are able to somehow express in 1 byte what used to take 100, that you wouldn't expect it to noticeably improve the model?

<comment><USER6> Not appreciably. Neural Networks' _job_ (in some configurations) is to approximate their input in as few bytes as possible. There's a vague equivalence between machine learning and lossy compression.

<comment><USER7> There's even vague equivalence between statistics and lossy compression.

<comment><USER6> And most modern machine learning is referred to in academia as "statistical learning".

Equivalences all the way down!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> A whole time back I created a program which uses genetic algorithms to generate melodies. I used the generated melodies as inspiration for music composition. The idea was (never implemented though) to add a fitness function based on training a neural network which could be trained by looking at other melodies or user input. More information can be found here: [http://jcraane.blogspot.nl/2009/06/melody-composition- using-...](http://jcraane.blogspot.nl/2009/06/melody-composition-using- genetic.html)

The source code is available here: [https://github.com/jcraane/melodycomposition_genetic](https://github.com/jcraane/melodycomposition_genetic)

Some sample melodies are in de docs/samples folder.

I may cost some time to get it to work again but should not be that hard.

</comment><comment><USER9> Another (hilarious) tool which demonstrates the difference in quality of lightly-trained RNNs and strongly-trained RNNs is RoboRosewater, which generates Magic: the Gathering cards using networks of varying quality/sanity, indicated by the card art: [https://twitter.com/RoboRosewater](https://twitter.com/RoboRosewater)

<comment><USER10> Along those lines, the markov chain dota 2 patch notes: [https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/4fw6gm/how_687_would...](https://www.reddit.com/r/DotA2/comments/4fw6gm/how_687_would_look_like_if_icefrog_was_a_markov/)

The best part is Valve actually implemented one of them: [http://i.imgur.com/Ydim1ui.png](http://i.imgur.com/Ydim1ui.png)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The authors of these music-generators should submit some of the compositions to online music libraries, to song competitions, etc, and see if they get accepted! "A la" what happened, back in the day, with peer-reviewed journals and: [http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/](http://www.elsewhere.org/journal/pomo/)

</comment><comment><USER12> I am a neural network noob and only know the basic feedforward network.

So the training set is just text files containing songs? How does it test if the output is correct or not? If I understand correctly the goal here was just to produce outputs in the correct format. If one wanted to train for quality as well would one need to grade every output the network produces by hand?

<comment><USER13> In the training phase the network learns to predict the next note from the past few beats. As training data it uses a bunch of text formatted midi files. In generative mode, they just feed back the generated notes into the network at each step. The same approach can be used to generate DeepDrumpf[1] or any kind of time series.

[1] [https://twitter.com/deepdrumpf](https://twitter.com/deepdrumpf)

Funny, this is DeepDrumpf bad mouthing Andrej Karpathy, the inventor of this algorithm (char-rnn):

[https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/705558159964803072](https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/705558159964803072)

<comment><USER14> I believe Karpathy Char-RNN is from 2015 (that is at least the year on the 100-line gist and the "unreasonable effectiveness of ..." blog post[0]) but char-level RNN language models dates back to at least 2011 with [1]

So I don't think we should call him the inventor, though he definitely popularised it with his great writing and examples.

[0] [http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn- effectiveness/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/) [1] Sutskever, Ilya, James Martens, and Geoffrey E. Hinton. "Generating text with recurrent neural networks." Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML-11). 2011.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Isn't this the third project like this on HN?

These things generate tunes which sound OK for a few seconds, but after tens of seconds, you realize there's no higher level structure at all. It's just random.

<comment><USER16> Google's Magenta is exploring generation of long-term structure in music. [1] Its demo song is fun [2]

[1] - [https://magenta.tensorflow.org/2016/07/15/lookback-rnn- atten...](https://magenta.tensorflow.org/2016/07/15/lookback-rnn-attention- rnn/)

[2] - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFBQDfPyjoE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qFBQDfPyjoE)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The music came out quite fun sounding. I could almost imagine hearing at least passages within the music in videogames. Perhaps some old-school zelda/jrpg game which would suit the folky quality of the music.

The bass line was generally quite simplistic, I wonder what happens if you codified gradus ad parnassum and taught the RNN counterpoint[0]

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

<comment><USER18> Fux wouldn't apply here because the bass/chord accompaniment shapes are idiomatic, and Fuxian counterpoint wouldn't be.

In fact this kind of toy ML can never produce competent music. The best it can do is produce short workable snatches that sound like cut and paste snippets of the training source - before losing the plot in the next bar or two.

Training an RNN on a huge set of tunes and expecting it to produce examples of equivalent musicality _is a fundamentally unworkable idea._

I'd suggest that anyone who doesn't see why this must be true doesn't understand ML well enough to know when it can and can't be used effectively.

It's worth asking in what other domains are trivial RNNs being misapplied to produce trivially poor models.

It's one thing to make bad music. It's another to - say - run a trading strategy, or make marketing decisions based on oversimplified ML models that produce misleading results because they're not sophisticated enough to recognise all the critical structures in the data set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Is there a better music database to work from for music generation? I'm surprised there isn't a massive db of 19th century sheet music or player piano rolls somewhere.

<comment><USER20> Musescore has a user database that has lots of music (no song count that I could find quickly, but I want to say ~10s-100s of thousands) that ought to be convertible to appropriate formats.

IMSLP (<[http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page>](http://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page>)) has about 110,000 works uploaded. However, these are mostly PDFs (some of them are scans), which would be very hard to extract useful data from.

Such data may include multiple voices, which makes it harder for a neural network to learn a pleasant-sounding song.

<comment><USER15> Try taking in MIDI files. There are lots of those, and they have all the information of a score.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This isn't composition. Mimicry, perhaps.

<comment><USER22> The patterns that RNNs tease out of training data seem to transcend mimicry. An artist may compose a song that sounds just like another song, but it is not simply mimicry, it is influence. It is a learned set of patterns that are composed somewhat randomly. The human mind has this illusion that what it hears is subjectively good, but that intuition is built out of experiences just like the RNN.

<comment><USER23> How can you have an illusion that something is subjectively good?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> So has somebody fed all (i.e.: JS) github code into a neural network yet?

<comment><USER25> Not quite at that scale, but Andrej Karpathy fed the linux source code into an RNN: [http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn- effectiveness/](http://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/)</comment></comment>


How one college went from 10% female computer-science majors to 40% - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/192071/how-one-college-went-from-10-female-computer-science-majors-to-40/

<comment><USER2> "Then they implemented Operation Eliminate the Macho Effect: guys who showed- off in class were taken aside in class and told..."

THIS. THIS IS STUPID. Guess what? I was a good programmer. I showed off, and had amazing project presentations. People either wanted to work with me, knowing that we would do a good job and get good grades, or they didn't want to work with me because they knew that I would require them to work, too. It has nothing to do with gender. I've worked with awesome female (and male) programmers, and I've worked with horrid female (and male) programmers. Gender doesn't matter, skill and determination do.

Quite frankly, if I were at that school, I would probably leave because they sound like they are pandering to the PC police.

I have no problem with having women in tech. I have no problem with women out- numbering men in tech. I do not, however, have ANY respect for an establishment that caters to specific demographics at the cost of program quality, subject rigor, or the demoralization of others.</comment>