Gary Taubes: The Inanity of Overeating  - <AUTHOR> http://www.garytaubes.com/2010/12/inanity-of-overeating/ <comment><USER3> _Since a pound of fat is roughly equal to 3500 calories, this means you accumulate roughly 7000 calories worth of fat every year. Divide that 7000 by 365 and you get the number of calories of fat you stored each day and never burned roughly 19 calories. Let's round up to 20 calories, so we have a nice round number. (In the new book I discuss this issue in a chapter called "The Significance of Twenty Calories a Day.")_

He neglects the metabolism one needs to maintain that fat tissue each and every day. One rough rule of thumb is 11/cal/day/pound to maintain your weight. Being 40 lbs overweight thus takes not just his (apparently trivial) 20 calories per day to gain that weight, but 440 additional calories per day to maintain it. If the weight was truly gained in a linear fashion, that's an average of 220 calories per day to maintain it, above the 20 per day to gain it. This is the real math. This is why weight gain and weight loss correspond to gross caloric intake and expenditure. The dynamic equilibrium of an organism's weight is a feedback mechanism _in which the mass of the organism appears as the magnitude of the gain on the negative feedback term._

Someone who is truly obese, say someone who is 300 lbs who should 180 lbs, for example, is running an ongoing daily calorie surplus of 1320 calories through diet and lifestyle, not the 60 per day that Taubes would suggest. This is not an insignificant disparity, and this guy's work will be truly harmful wherever it is--help us all--taken seriously.

I could maybe take the rest of his ideas more seriously if he were not so obviously wrong right out of the gate.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure how the maintenance expenditure is relevant to his point - <USER2> point is that if you only eat 20 calories/day more than you "should" (the amount that would cause your weight to remain the same) then you will gain the weight. The fact that the baseline changes is an irrelevant detail. Regardless of what the baseline is at any given point, how does the system (meaning the person's body+brain) know when to stop eating?

<comment><USER3> _the point is that if you only eat 20 calories/day more than you "should" (the amount that would cause your weight to remain the same) then you will gain the weight._

The point is that you won't ever gain the 40 lbs if you only eat the 20 cal/day extra.

Imagine you start eating the 20 cal/day extra. Initially, your weight climbs at 1 lb/year. However, by the time you gain that one pound, you have to spend an additional 11 cal/day to maintain that weight, so now you're gaining at a bit less than 1/2 lb/year. By the time you (asymptotically) approach having gained 20/11 ~ 1.9 pounds (which really only happens at infinity, but let's imagine you splurged to put yourself over), then you're at maintenance for your new weight. In order to gain more, you have to increase your uptake again.

As you gain weight, you accumulate metabolic load, so it takes a serious surplus of calories to continue to gain in the long term.

The steady-state condition of obesity requires a _large ongoing surplus_ of calories to maintain.

Plausible fixes are incorporating more fiber in the diet to increase the feeling of satiety, reduce portions generally, cut out high-calorie drinks, and start exercising, even if only moderately but consistently.

Succinctly, the amount you "should" eat is not the amount to maintain your current weight, but the amount you need to maintain a healthy weight.

<comment><USER5> This is all true, but I'm wondering if you are mistaking a strawman for Taubes actual argument. The bit about '20 calories/day' is his attempt to explain the current philosophy, which he feels is fatally flawed, in the way you mention among others. He's setting up this argument merely to tear it down. Despite being the simplified version of the standard wisdom, he agrees with you that it's wrong.

His actual point is at the end: 'Maybe when we get fat it's because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat'. He might be wrong about this, but his point is that the difference between an obese and non- obese person cannot be fully explained by an intake difference of 20 calories per day over a lifetime. There must be something else in play.

<comment><USER6> _...his point is that the difference between an obese and non-obese person cannot be fully explained by an intake difference of 20 calories per day over a lifetime..._

If that's his point, it's wrong. The intake difference between the obese person and the non-obese person is just shy of 1 big mac/day after 40 years (440 cals maintenance + 20 cals excess).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Worth mentioning, maybe, because I was surprised by this factoid when I learned it: Gary Taubes is not one of the 10,487 "nutrition experts" hawking diet books; his best-known book, _Good Calories, Bad Calories_, is a serious pop-sci look at the scientific controversies behind nutrition; prior to writing it, Taubes was already a science writer of no small repute.

Interesting to see him take the "laws of thermodynamics" meme head on.

<comment><USER8> This article is my introduction to this author. After reading it, and being incensed at how thoroughly bad it was, I researched the author's previous work, his background, and the list of accolades he has received. It's distressing to see someone who clearly doesn't know what he's talking about being rewarded as a serious expert. The things he says are either false or nonsensical. He generates controversy. He knows how to sell books. That's about it. Whatever scientific reputation he has is based on tricking people who don't know how to dissect an argument.

<comment><USER9> Was it hard writing this comment while waving your arms so wildly about?

How about some of your own facts/links/corrections showing where he "clearly doesn't know what he's talking about".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It occurs to me that I haven't seen this question addressed anywhere: Is everyone's digestive system, at all times and under all conditions, equally efficient at extracting energy from food? (Rhetorical question.)

To illustrate with an extreme example, lactose is a sugar and carries energy, but some people can digest it (and their bodies will get the full complement of calories from it), and some people can't (it'll get digested by bacteria and they'll get gas and feel unpleasant; I'm pretty sure they don't get calories from it). It is incorrect and stupid to say that an item of food with significant lactose component carries "N calories" without specifying whether the person who eats it can digest lactose. Likewise, with cellulose, I think cows get a lot more energy out of cellulose than humans can.

Also, it seems likely to me that people's digestive systems' performance varies with "outside" conditions in the body. For example, I've heard that being pumped full of adrenaline puts digestion on hold; and subjective experience suggests to me that if you eat a lot of food (over a period of, say, a day), your system will send it through pretty quickly, without digesting it fully.

I suspect there are a lot of other situations in which one's body doesn't get all N calories from an "N-calorie" item of food. I suppose that if that happens, then the remaining part probably will be digested by bacteria, and one may notice symptoms of... oh, hey, there's a name for this, "indigestion". (Though if the amount of left-over energy is really small, then the symptoms are probably too slight to notice. If 10 or 20 calories a day matters, then this may make things unpredictable.)

I suppose one could count the bacteria digesting the food that you didn't as "calories burned", but then that means you may be burning a bunch of calories without doing any physical activity.

Does someone more knowledgeable than me know a) whether these things are really significant and b) whether these researchers take them into account?

<comment><USER11> It is pretty clear that digestion varies dramatically from person to person, and from moment to moment for the same person. You hit upon two major things in your question; what flora are in your gut, and how the rest of your body is.

Anecdotally I've noticed I can change my stomach on purpose by what I eat, and rebalance the flora. For example I used to eat Tums all the time to deal with acid indigestion. Then I did a 3 day fast at the suggestion of my mother in law, and found I was free of indigestion for months after that. Now whenever I find myself getting heartburn more than a couple times I do a fast and it clears up for awhile.

There is increasing evidence the balance of flora also contributes to how you process food, and can contribute to greater development of fat when out of whack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> When people ask me how to lose weight or get in shape, I say a couple of things that are quite controversial, though they won't be in 5-10 years as modern conventional wisdom catches up to the science.

1\. 90% of what you look like is what you eat (not how much, what) rather than, say, how much you workout or your genetics.

2\. Optimize what you eat before you optimize how much you eat. It is more important to eat good clean food rather than eat small portions of still bad food.

3\. Exercise fast, short and incredibly intense.

#1 is something I say to catch them off guard and eliminate excuses (genetics).

#2 is the real issue. The past 25 years of diet information in the US is basically misinformation. We were told that we had to eat less fat and cholesterol and we would be healthy. Science has shown this not to be the case but we are just now catching up to that science.

For instance...this is an ideal diet for nearly everyone: 1\. Eliminate grains, sugars and most fruits (high-glycemic index fruits for sure: think watermelon) 2\. Load up on veggies, eggs (best protein source around) and meat (high fat meat is great...no worries) 3\. No oils other than coconut or olive 4\. Unless you are trying to gain weight, minimal starches (potato/sweet potato etc) 5\. Some nuts...don't go crazy with them. 6\. some fruit, but only of the berry/cherry variety 7\. minimal diary

<http://www.paleonu.com/get-started/> is a great place to start.

#3 is b/c low intensity exercise doesn't really do much for your metabolism...it is a slow calorie burn that lasts as long as you are doing the activity. High intensity workouts boost base metabolism for as long as 36 hours.

I wish I knew this when I was a teenager...feels like lost years battling diet and weight only to seek the information later and realize the errors of modern conventional wisdom. At least I know early enough to correct for my next 50+ years.

<comment><USER13> That website you link is very interesting. For starters, I can see the logic behind cutting legumes if the foundation of the guide is 'eat what prehistoric man ate' because legumes require a lot of cooking, but I'm curious if they are actually detrimental. They are usually accepted as extremely healthy.

 _10\. Most modern fruit is just a candy bar from a tree. Go easy on bags of sugar like apples. Stick with berries._

This is a very, very interesting point. I don't know if he means this, but I realized that modern fruit is often _not the same fruit from 500 years ago_. It's been genetically engineered through artificial selection- apples, for example, used to be small, sour & bitter.

I've never really quite bought the demonization of grains though. We've been eating them for thousands of years, and most of the health problems blamed on grains seem to be recent events. Doesn't help that I dearly love breads.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, grains are a tough one. We have to love grains as they basically helped humans take over the world! I firmly believe that without grains we wouldn't have 6 billion people today.

That being said, I don't think eating grains is optimal for our bodies. Most of what is coming out of science today shows that we still haven't evolved to eat grains and use them very efficiently in our body. We use them, but they cause an inflammatory response and that is obviously suboptimal for overall health and nutrition. We get some nutrition out of them (nothing that we couldn't get from veggies or meat), but it also damages at the same time...catch-22.

I think of it this way: at the zoo, you see the handlers feed tigers raw meat and pandas bamboo because that is what they evolved to eat. What did we evolve to eat? Answer that question and believe you will achieve optimal health. Personally I believe what I wrote earlier is what we evolved to eat and I believe most of the science supports that.

<comment><USER14> _"What did we evolve to eat? Answer that question and believe you will achieve optimal health."_

I hate this sort of blind naturalism. We evolved to be susceptible to polio, tuberculosis, and plague and to live to ~30. Just because it's _natural_ doesn't mean it's optimal -- science and technology can, when judiciously applied, add a lot to the quality (and length) of life.

Additionally (and importantly) evolution is only a factor up until age ~30-35 (child bearing/rearing age). Evolution plays no role in protecting us from most modern afflictions (obesity, alzheimer's, cancer, etc). You can have your "evolutinoarily optimal" paleolithic diet; I'll take my chances with modernity.

<comment><USER15> > _[…] and to live to ~30._

People used to die younger because of injuries, illnesses and poor nutrition, not because the body is only "supposed" to live for 30 years.

> _Additionally (and importantly) evolution is only a factor up until age > ~30-35 (child bearing/rearing age). Evolution plays no role in protecting us > from most modern afflictions (obesity, alzheimer's, cancer, etc)._

That's absolutely not true. It seems likely that older people have played an important role in society throughout, helping take care of children while the more able work, sources of wisdom &c. While evolution hasn't eliminated all diseases of the old age (because it doesn't work actively like that) longer- lived genes have provided some survival advantage.

<comment><USER14> I'm willing to bet that 10,000 years ago you wouldn't have been able to find a homo sapien on this planet that was older than 50. The vast, vast majority of evolutionary pressure occurred well before then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Boy it took him a long time to NOT get to the point... I want my 10 minutes back.

<comment><USER9> Noticed that as well; about half way through he introduces the thermo-dynamics issue and the implied (but useless) truth-ly-ness of fat people eating more than non-fat people, then spends the entire remainder of the article stating, re-stating and re-phrasing that _same point_ again and again and again with different analogies, examples and mock conversations.

It was about 2 paragraphs away from the end (before the last mock conversation) that I realized he was baiting for his book OR doesn't have a conclusion strong enough to share.

I absolutely could be wrong, but I can't stand being lead around by my chin with arm-waving tomfoolery and flashing lights just to find out there is nothing there.

If he had made his compelling point, or at least hinted at it more than the very last comment -- "Maybe when we get fat it's because those physiological, metabolic and genetic factors you mentioned are dysregulating our fat tissue, driving it to accumulate too much fat, and that's why we eat so much and appear" -- I would have been more interested.

I don't know that what I quoted there was even the correct "hook" at his book premise as it starts "when we get fat..." talking about AFTER someone is already fat, when the premise of his book is "why we get fat" which is the before... the cause.

I am interested enough to want to pick his book up, but also annoyed enough to take my sweet time doing it in case it's hollow.

\---- EDIT ----

I was critical above of Gary's blog post so I did some more reading to see if I would be interested in his book and his ultimate point being made.

I found this review on Amazon that completely sold me on it: [http://www.amazon.com/review/R1IGC558QIFYRU/ref=cm_cr_pr_per...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R1IGC558QIFYRU/ref=cm_cr_pr_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0307272702&nodeID=&tag=&linkCode=)

While I haven't read the book yet (downloading on iPad now) and proposition that Gary is making (according to this reviewer) is fascinating to me and jives with the way I feel at times.

Gary talks about how sugars and the insulin response feed your fat and your fat itself takes on a self-sustaining role in your body, not the passive storage-mechanism we understand it to be.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. In stark contrast, I appreciate Michael Pollan's pithiness:

 _"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants."_

It's not that complicated, folks.

<comment><USER16> No offense, but that's complete bullshit, and the sort of tautological reasoning he's mocking. Of course you should eat "not too much" -- eating "too much" is too much!

<comment><USER17> The key word in that quote is "food", though; the "not too much" is an afterthought.

<comment><USER18> It's 7 words and you think the last 5 are not important enough to be criticized?

<comment><USER17> Not if the criticism is a blanket "this is total bullshit".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'll start with one messed up point in this article: _One way to get around this is to assume that we overeat by this trivial amount for a few years on end and then we realize we've put on five or ten pounds...and then we decide to undereat every day for however long it takes to make up for it...But then how do animals do it?_

Easy: most animals have weight which fluctuates significantly depending on food availability. In the wild, many are undernourished. Overeating is a real problem for domesticated animals. <http://www.petobesityprevention.com/pet- obesity-fact-risks/>

But now I'll argue against his real thesis. Based on other articles on this same topic, I get the impression Gary Taubes is an opponent of the "personal irresponsibility" theory of obesity - see this article for instance: [http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/health/28zuger.html?_r=1&#...
But unfortunately, he proposes to replace it with a much higher entropy theory. Rather than having one intuitive factor (personal irresponsibility) which explains several highly correlated outputs (obesity, low income, low education), he wants to propose a more complicated theory which explains only one of these outputs. Occams Razor suggests he is probably wrong, and from what I've seen, he doesn't even try to address this.

<comment><USER19> > Rather than having one intuitive factor (personal irresponsibility) which > explains several highly correlated outputs (obesity, low income, low > education), he wants to propose a more complicated theory which explains > only one of these outputs.

I could go pick a bunch of correlated things and ascribe them all to "magic" or "Zeus" or what-have-you, but stuffing all the entropy into a black box like this shouldn't make it count as a "low-entropy theory".

<comment><USER6> It is low entropy relative to a theory which explains only one of several correlated things.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I read "Good Calories, Bad Calories" last year and just read "Why We Get Fat" yesterday(both available on Kindle!).

GCBC is a good, long read with a lot of insight into the issues with science in the last 100 years. WWGF is much more focused on the current state of the carbohydrate theory.

Both are good, but if you want a quick win, go for WWGF. :)

[I am doing low carbs now, and lost 10kg so far.]

</comment><comment><USER8> This article is inane. Just a sample:

"Twenty calories, after all, is a bite or two of food, ... an absolutely trivial amount of overeating that the body then chooses, for reasons we'll have to discuss at some point, not to expend, ... , so that we don't overshoot by 20 calories a day. ... That's matching intake to expenditure with an accuracy of better than 1 percent."

The author, despite his qualifications, is numerically illiterate. Anyone who has seriously worked with numerical data understands the law of large numbers. If my body works to maintain some caloric level e, then over time the full meals I skip for seemingly no reason, or the second helpings I mysteriously decline, amortized over a scale of months, will balance out my caloric intake with severe accuracy. (Assuming I am predisposed to maintain a specific weight.)

Secondly, stating that weight gain is due to eating more calories than you burn is neither tautological, vacuous, nor inane. It might not be satisfying to the author, but it is a cogent and useful explanation of why people gain weight. Other, worse examples that institutions might give that would give people fewer clues about how to combat weight gain: "you've angered some god," "you're predisposed to be fat," "you're eating the wrong kind of food." The link expressed between consumed calories and stored mass is not logically trivial. Stating that I should eat fewer calories clues me in to track and reduce the calories listed on the side of foods I buy. If you want to get pedantic, a tautological explanation would be you're getting heavier because you're gaining weight.

It isn't worth dissecting the rest of the article. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. He wraps up a lot of obvious points in a lot of science that he doesn't understand.

P.S. - it isn't a mystery to anybody why people get fat

<comment><USER5> _He wraps up a lot of obvious points in a lot of science that he doesn't understand._

That's odd. You would have thought that an undergraduate physics degree (even from a liberal arts institution) and a masters in engineering (OK, that one's from a real school) would have given him at least a _basic_ grasp of the issues. :)

His "20 calories a day" explanation is not the argument he is making. Rather, he's pointing out that it's absurd to think that the sole difference between an obese 70 year and his svelte wife is the one sugar cube per day the fat one added to his morning coffee. Are you arguing that it is indeed this simple, and that all we have to do to have a thin and fit population is to drink black coffee?

p.s. Why the new account?

<comment><USER8> What's more important, the two pieces of paper he received or the fact that his own arguments clearly depict he doesn't understand? He says:

" Does anyone – even Jonah Lehrer or the neuroscientists he consults – think that the brain, perhaps in cohort with the gut, is making decisions about how much we should eat, on how long we stay hungry and when we get full, so that we don't overshoot by 20 calories a day. That's matching intake to expenditure with an accuracy of better than 1 percent. (We consume, on average, about 2700 calories a day, so matching energy in to energy out and not overshooting by 20 calories requires better than one percent accuracy.)"

"...we actually have to be perfect in our matching of intake to expenditure or we're going to get inexorably fatter (or leaner, if we err on the side of going hungry), or at least we have to average perfection over decades."

His argument is that the body is not accurate to within 20 calories a day. He appears unaware of the fact that this kind of regulation, which I agree isn't possible on a day-to-day basis (the brain never says "don't eat that last 1/12 of a candy bar"), is unremarkable when amortized over time. That is where his scientific inexperience shows. "Averaging perfection over decades" happens all the time and is perfectly unremarkable. He is oblivious to this fact.

This is a fatal error. Regardless of how it fits into his larger argument, he gets this basic and fundamental point wrong. When an author can't get facts like these straight, I become suspicious of the rest of his arguments. And indeed, a random sampling shows they are fundamentally broken. I would not trust him to explain any kind of complex science.

<comment><USER5> _When an author can't get facts like these straight, I become suspicious of the rest of his arguments._

I agree that this is a pretty good standard to adhere to, but there are other explanations: perhaps Taubes understands the issues well, but didn't do a great job of translating them to analogies. Or perhaps you (as reader) are not correct in your understanding of his argument. I suspect Taubes would agree with you that given an appropriate long-term feedback method that fine regulation is possible, thus I presume the actual issue is something else.

I'm inclined to trust Taubes because I've enjoyed some of his prior writings. Here's an award winning article of his that was published in Science: <http://www.junkscience.com/news3/taubes.html>. You might enjoy this earlier article as an example of his style applied to a different topic. While it's certainly possible he's completely wrong here, I don't think it's because he lacks any fundamental understanding of science.

As I read it, Taubes' basic critique is that the 'calories equals weight gain' formula is so flawed as to be almost useless. The more I look into it, the more I agree with him. Yes, obviously at the extremes there are physical limits involved, but presuming a purely linear response just seems silly. I cheer him on in his attempts to come up with something better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "That more people are entering than leaving doesn't. It's what logicians call "vacuously" true. It's true, but meaningless. It tells us nothing. And the same is true of overeating as an explanation for why we get fat. If we got fat, we had to overeat. That's always true; it's obvious, and it tells us nothing about why we got fat, or why one person got fat and another didn't."

I was following along with the analogy, but this really bothered me. "If I am fat, then I ate more calories than I burned" isn't vacuously true (because there are people who are fat), it's a tautology.

I don't know anything about nutrition, but seeing an error in the small part of the article I do know something about makes me more skeptical as to it's premise.

EDIT: After a few more minutes thought, I have to mention that since we've all eaten more calories than we've burned (or else we'd be massless), the statement is true for everyone, not just obese people. But that's just me being needlessly pedantic.

<comment><USER22> It's not that you ate more calories than you burned, it's that you absorbed more calories than you burned.

I think it's worth asking why some calories are more likely to be absorbed than others, and why some people are more inclined to absorb more calories than other people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> "We don't know. It's complicated." But then there's the thought bubble with the words "Moral failure" in it:

[http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/physician...](http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/physicians_have_less_respect_for_obese_patients_study_suggests)

</comment><comment><USER24> I take issue with his statement that there are plenty of animals that have abundant food, which don't get fat. I just don't think that's true. Even for the animals that have plenty of food, they still have to go out and forage/hunt. On the other hand, if you just pile up food in front of animals everyday, they will eat it and get fat. Some examples of this are my parents' dogs, and there are no animals but humans and domestics that have infinite food with no work attached.

I think people and animals eat, because that's how we are wired. Any animal gorges itself presented with work-free food. Our body wants as much fuel as it can get at a very basic level.

However, I don't think it comes down to "personal responsibility." I think society is successful at instilling logical discipline in many members, and less successful with others. If you are fat, it's probably because your family didn't raise you to have the tools to make good health decisions and follow through with your thoughts. I also think unsatisfied people tend to over-eat, over-smoke, and over-everything else.

It takes both luck and hard work to be happy and fit.

<comment><USER25> I weight between 135-145 pounds and I'm 6' tall. I'm well past thirty.

I eat as much as I can. The only that stops from eating is stomach pain from overeating.

Some people may get fat from overeating. But it's hard to generalize here.

<comment><USER15> No, it's very easy to generalize: an overwhelming majority of people will get fat from overeating, some quicker than others. I'd think your condition is somewhere in the single-digit percentages.

I've always been fairly lean – 176/70ish (5'9"/155ish in SU) – a "can eat anything" type, but taking an almost 3-month break from cycling while not reducing food consumption has resulted in a gain of about 8kg/17lbs. (Planning to drop to about 68kg by June).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The article is not helpful in any practical way. It simply gives the core thesis that eating too much doesn't make you fat, and that the author knows some secret that he will reveal in his book once you buy it.

Why should I give any more weight to this than any of the thousands of other "buy this diet secret!" books out there?

<comment><USER27> _The article is not helpful in any practical way._

True, but what it does do is explain why the "thermodynamic" explanation, although correct, is not practically useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is a fascinating article that uses logic really well. Of course, he doesn't go into the answers to the question he poses: "Why do people overeat?" I suppose you have to buy the book to figure that out.

<comment><USER7> He definitely has a hypothesis about that (read _Good Calories, Bad Calories_ for more details --- or, Google [ucsf fructose] and watch that video again).

<comment><USER12> +1 for fructose video. Awesome watch.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think the medical establishment would be overjoyed if people on average were putting on only 1 pound per year. The obesity "epidemic" is about 50-100 pounds of extra weight. Bariatric wards are filled with those hundreds of pounds overweight not 20.

</comment><comment><USER30> Not sure that I trust a thin guy's advice on why people get fat.

<comment><USER31> Would you trust a fat guy's diet advice?

<comment><USER32> Funny, people seem to trust Dr. Phil.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What CRM Should I Use? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for a simple CRM that has the following:
1. Bulk email send 2. Good canned responses 3. The ability group leads based on position in funnel 4. Easy to use and setup 5. Something light-weight
Any suggestions? I've tried the big names out there with no luck.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> i got good suggestions from reddit.com/r/crm if you dont find it. gl

</comment><comment><USER3> MailChimp?</comment>


Do programmers still buy printed books? - <AUTHOR> http://antoniocangiano.com/2009/08/15/do-programmers-still-buy-printed-books/ <comment><USER2> Yes.

I buy lots of printed books (and not just for programming). I've probably bought at least a dozen computer books this year alone. I've read several of them cover to cover, substantial portions of several, and used several just for occasional reference. My favorite type of computer books to buy is more theoretical books. Most books to learn a technology are not much better than tutorials online. Reference books don't really beat Google. However, books intended for READING are much better in print. There is no way I would read Code Complete on a computer screen. 800, or however many pages it is, is just way too much not to have paper and ink.

Another point for books, you OWN them. Most digital content, you don't really own. If it has any DRM at all of any kind whatsoever, you don't own it. You're leasing it at best. Furthermore, accidental deletion and disk failure are much more likely than your house burning down or flooding to destroy your books. It's even worse if the content lives on someone else's servers. I don't want the availability of my books to be subject to some company's continued existence. If Honda goes out of business, I still have a car. If O'Reilly goes out of business, I should still have my books. There are other ways this comes up. If my internet access goes out, I should still have my books.

Another point of books, you can resell or gift them. I bought a computer book recently that I didn't find very useful. I think I got it for like $30 used on Amazon. It's still going for about the same price. So basically I can sell it and have paid nothing for it. Try that with a PDF.

Another advantage of books, you can go to a bookstore and browse through them all you want. If you really wanted, you could go to Barnes & Noble, get some coffee, pick up a computer book and read the whole thing there in the store. Sure, some places give previews, but they decide what part of the book the preview comes from and how much you can see. When you're shopping for books, you decide (assuming you're in a store, not on Amazon).

</comment><comment><USER3> For me the whole point of buying programming books is to save time and these days fewer and fewer printed books accomplish that.

Before the web I used to drive 50 miles every other weekend to buy books from Computer Literacy to add to my personal library when I didn't have a need for them because of the time saved having them at hand later. I don't do this anymore, in part because for my needs the web is often sufficient but also because Computer Literacy eventually went out of business and there's no comparable store anymore worth that trip.

These days I'm _thrilled_ whenever I do find a printed programming book likely to save me time compared to searching the web. The last such book I found was Kurt Jung and Aaron Brown's "Beginning Lua Programming". It's full of well- organized time-saving details and an excellent companion to Roberto Ierusalimschy's "Programming in Lua", a book at the same quality level as K&R's "The C Programming Language". Unless the price is an absolute bargin, I won't bother buying a printed book unless it's as good as those.

</comment><comment><USER4> I sold more printed copies than electronic copies (of my Catalyst book).

Personally, I buy ebooks whenever possible. Printed books are fine, but you have to wait for them to arrive. When you buy an ebook, you can start reading immediately.

For technical books, I don't mind being forced to read in front of my computer. I am going to want to play with "real code" while I am reading anyway, so I am probably not going to be too far from my computer. (An exception; I read "Real World Haskell" on two very long flights. There was just a lot to play with when I got home...)

For non-technical books, the Kindle is much nicer than a physical book. Smaller, lighter, cheaper content, and nobody knows what you are reading about.

</comment><comment><USER5> I do! Books are great for learning. You can tell how difficult something is simply by the weight of the book. Books have a linear structure suitable for learning. You always know how far you've got and how much you have left to learn by the number of pages left. You can even feel it with your fingers!

No online tutorial comes close. Just wish they had a CTRL+F.

<comment><USER6> I like that Pragprog gives you the option of buying both the deadtree and pdf versions. That way you CAN have your Ctl-F and something to read on holiday at the same time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Programmers always spent their money on books and computers and they will forever! :)

</comment><comment><USER8> Perhaps the question should be "Do programmers still read printed books?". Because I still regularly buy printed books but a lot do seem to end up on the shelf unread or barely read collecting dust :(</comment>


Freedom Chair – Off-road wheelchair - <AUTHOR> http://www.gogrit.us/ <comment><USER2> The Boston Globe Magazine had a story about patented inventions from Massachusetts [0] which is where I first heard about this project and its non- profit Leveraged Freedom chair. [1]

I'm glad to see it getting more exposure. It seems like a great solution for many.

[0]: [https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2015/08/08/when- comes-p...](https://www.bostonglobe.com/magazine/2015/08/08/when-comes- patents-massachusetts-big-player/3AmNfmSE8xWzzNbUnDzvPK/story.html) [1]: [http://www.gogrit.us/lfc/](http://www.gogrit.us/lfc/)</comment>


Unity's perception tools to generate and analyze synthetic data at scale - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.unity3d.com/2020/06/10/use-unitys-perception-tools-to-generate-and-analyze-synthetic-data-at-scale-to-train-your-ml-models/ <comment><USER2> So here's a question. Why aren't ML pipelines recursive? In the case of 3D models I can imagine the following pipeline. Take some 2D images, pass it through an ML pipeline to generate 3D objects (article mentions photogrammetry and I think this is a good idea for bootstrapping), refine the 3D objects and re-arrange them in novel ways, generate 2D images from those 3D objects, feed the results back into the 2D-to-3D pipeline, rinse and repeat until the ML model is generating interesting and non-random results.

I know this sounds like GANs but every paper I've seen on GANs does not require human input other than during the initial bootstrapping phase. The training loop is completely devoid of further human intervention other than maybe tuning the hyperparameters to avoid divergence.

This article hints at such a pipeline but I don't think they go all the way and put all the pieces together:

> We created a library of 3D assets of selected grocery products using Digital > Content Creation (DCC) tools, scanned labels, and photogrammetry. > Additionally, we created background and occluding assets using real world > imagery mapped onto simple primitives such as cubes, spheres, and cylinders. > All of the grocery products used custom shaders created in the Unity Editor > using Shadergraph, in the Universal Rendering Pipeline.</comment>


Quantum Computing for the Curious - <AUTHOR> https://quantum.country/qcvc/ <comment><USER2> I have a PhD in quantum information/computing and I knew everything in the essay before reading it, but the additional understanding I got from doing the given spaced repetition flashcards significantly improved my understanding of the material. Everyone who is reading this essay, should sign up and give spaced repetition a try.

</comment><comment><USER3> As someone with more of a math than a physics background I really enjoyed this, but I guess I'm surprised by how, for lack of a better word, basic, it seemed? Maybe that serves as a compliment to the author, in the past I have been snowed by all these vocab words when it turns out it's mostly just linear algebra. A lot of what I enjoyed here were the sidebars explaining that concept X was really just rebranded Y, detail Z is not really important for intuition, etc...

A random question along those lines: why represent states as 2d complex vectors instead of quarterions? Aren't they the same thing? As soon as I read that I spent the rest of the article wondering if everything it would make even more sense cast that way.

<comment><USER4> This is the great secret of quantum computing! People assume it must be difficult because their exposure to quantum mechanics has been a hundred incomprehensible pop science articles written by people who have no idea what they're talking about. In fact quantum computing requires only extremely basic knowledge of linear algebra.

<comment><USER5> ok, extremely basic is a bit oversimplifying it. When you start reading quantum algorithms, you will inevitably come across Shor's factorization algorithm, which requires (quantum) phase estimation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_phase_estimation_algor...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_phase_estimation_algorithm) which requires quantum Fourier transform and some good deal of math. This is when you don't go into the physical implementations. If you want to look at that aspect, things may become a bit more complex.

This is not to discourage anyone, but underselling it as requiring elementary linear algebra is not very helpful (the pop-sci articles have already been overselling it as "magical"/"mind-blowing" etc.).

<comment><USER4> There are algorithms which involve advanced mathematics on classical computers, too. You don't have to understand them to understand how classical computers work. I've never bothered to learn the general number field sieve, and similarly I've never bothered to learn Shor's.

I say if you understand gates as unitary matrix multiplication, representing multiple qbits with the tensor product, entanglement, and projective measurement, you basically understand quantum computing. Throw in an algorithm or two to convince yourself of the benefits.

<comment><USER5> True, but: 1\. Any serious quantum computing course/book will have Shor's algorithm in the first few chapters (in fact there are not a lot of quantum algorithms which have clear advantage over classical ones). One can teach quite a bit of useful classical algos (sort, binary search, tree/graph-based) without going into mathematics like FFT or jpeg coding.

2\. Again valid, but IMHO measurements (and PoVMs) can lead to deep rabbit holes, and I found myself digging in much deeper.

Probably I should read easier expositions to see how effectively they teach. (I come from a EE+physics background, so I do gravitate to math-heavy rigorous explanations)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hobby physics nerd here. This thing is mental. I clicked it, saw how long it was, and abandoned. Comments here took me back in and it's going to turn out to be a real gift.

</comment><comment><USER7> Note that this is written by one of the authors of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computation_and_Quan...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Computation_and_Quantum_Information)

</comment><comment><USER8> This is absolutely fantastic. Now I'm wondering if there are resources for doing spaced-repetition for other computer science topics. Has anyone seen anything like this?

</comment><comment><USER9> Good time for a [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition) that remember me of [https://metacpan.org/pod/Quantum::Entanglement](https://metacpan.org/pod/Quantum::Entanglement) (good old perl ~20 years old :)

</comment><comment><USER10> So why does the Hadamard+CNOT acting on two qubits give an entangled state, but a Hadamard acting on a single qubit does not give an entangled state?

<comment><USER9> I think you need 2 qbit to have them entangled

<comment><USER11> Exactly. The point of quantum entanglement is that the state of two (or more) qubits cannot be separated. To entangle a single qubit is meaningless.

For two qubits, the simplest entangled states are the Bell States[0] (generated from a CNOT and Hadamard gate). The article gives an example of one of them.

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

<comment><USER10> What's the difference between an entangled state and a mixed state?

<comment><USER11> Knowledge is a bit rusty (took a module in Uni) but I'll try to answer.

A mixed state is that which is a linear combination of pure states e.g. a|0> \+ b|1>

What determines an entangled state is that qubit values will correlate exactly with each other. |00> \+ |11> would be an example of an entangled state as measuring one qubit determines the value of the other with certainty. If you measure |0> for the first qubit, the second will definitely be |0> and vice versa.

They are also not mutually exclusive as mixed entangled states exist.

<comment><USER10> > A mixed state is that which is a linear combination of pure states e.g. a|0> > \+ b|1>

Here [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit#Mixed_state](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubit#Mixed_state) it says that 'Mixed states can be represented by points inside the Bloch sphere'. However, points ON the sphere correspond to linear combinations of the pure states. How to reconcile this?

<comment><USER11> Like I said, my knowledge is rusty.

I've gotten pure states mixed up with |0>, |1>

I believe what it's saying is that with a mixed state |a|^2 + |b|^2 does not need to equal 1.

So pure states are a|0> \+ b|1> where |a|^2 + |b|^2 = 1

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Very interesting article, I would love to have it in a portable/printable format (e.g. .pdf) can anyone help me out ?

</comment><comment><USER13> This is absolutely wonderful!

</comment><comment><USER14> Very nice article!

</comment><comment><USER15> Everyone should read this. It is an amazing effort in education. Almost too good. I wonder what techniques they used to compose it. Seem like it might have been machine assisted?

<comment><USER16> One of the authors here. While the study schedule is regulated by algorithm, the questions themselves were hand written. We have found it's quite difficult to write good questions, needs lots of revision and thought. Glad you enjoyed!</comment></comment>


Show HN: My side project to help you milk your Dropbox space to the last drop - <AUTHOR> http://crunchcow.com

<comment><USER2> Looks interesting. Mind sharing how exactly my photos will be manipulated?

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice presentation. Any idea when it will be ready?

<comment><AUTHOR> It's ready now, we're rolling it out to new users as we speak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> lol, click the cow..</comment>


Anyone using Lua to deploy web apps? - <AUTHOR>

I would think C/Lua + Libevent is a kick-ass setup for the lightest and fastest web server ever made. I am considering using it for writing lightweight APIs, imagine if you could run many processes of a tiny API web server in the cheapest kind of EC2 slice. <comment><USER2> I have been using Lua for almost 2 years now for web applications. Speed has never been an issue for my particular application (relatively small scale online research) - and I've often just been using old fashioned CGI technology.

My only negative comment about the experience would be that I tend to accumulate some C extensions which take a little effort to deploy when you move servers.

<comment><AUTHOR> If I might ask, what C extensions are you using today?

<comment><USER2> Mersenne Twister (lrandom) from <http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/lua/>.

I have previously also used a network library for SCGI, and some homegrown code which I can't remember.

I should point out that I am planning to move away from Lua for my webapps so that others can maintain them if that is needed. My plan is to use server-side Javascript built on V8 (Google). I still prefer Lua - but Javascript programmers are pretty easy to find.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: A very simple Yahoo Mail expander for Firefox - <AUTHOR> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yahoomailhideadpanel/

<comment><AUTHOR> Any feedback or suggestions are welcome. Just makes reading yahoo mails a bit easier for its non-pro version.</comment>


Hey LinkedIn – Nobody Wants This - <AUTHOR> http://appmagma.com/hey-linkedin-nobody-wants-this/ <comment><USER2> I don't even have to read this article to say that no, Linkedin is not better than this, whatever this is.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, I can't get the article to load, but my reaction was pretty much the same.

<comment><USER4> It's about their "Invite people to LinkedIn" scheme and how they make it very easy to spam everyone you've ever communicated with. Or in the case of addresses like iTunesConnect, everything you've ever communicated with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The CEO of a company I worked for did this by accident: Invited all of his contact. Let me tell you, all the underlings and vendors were so excited to get an invitation from the CEO. His linked in profile exploded. I was tasked with trying to uninvite the 500 or so people that hadn't accepted in the first few hours! I eventually told him it was no big deal. LinkedIn isn't very personal, it's mostly image.

<comment><USER6> That's kind of interesting. Why were they so excited to get his invite and why was he so worried about managing his connections? (Ie uninviting people.) Curious to understand the behavior.

<comment><USER5> All those people apparently felt some sort of personal connection by the act, it was a very strange phenomenon. He had not cleared out his contacts in a decade! He had "reached out" to many past vendors, former colleagues, etc. They all want to "reconnect" and were emailing, messaging, etc. It was literally (in the correct use of the word), taking up a lot of his time with all the influx of emails and calls.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why give them access to your account at all?

I did this with Facebook eons ago and they just kept the data and it haunted me for years. No, I don't want to add people I removed from my address book years ago.

</comment><comment><USER8> LinkedIn is at the very bottom of the list when it comes to stuff like this. If you don't expect the worst from them you've not been paying attention.

</comment><comment><USER9> Everyone does this. By now, I consider it an industry "best practice" and no one should be surprised.

Is it still reprehensible? Sure, but then again, every startup that has ever grown their user base has used some variation of this "growth hack".

<comment><USER10> I wish that I had the ability to downvote people because of comments like this. There is no justification for that kind of behavior -- and calling it a "best practice" speaks volumes about your lack of integrity.

<comment><USER11> I think the quotes around "best practices" served to convey a sense of mocking. The second paragraph is evidence of that.

<comment><USER9> Where's the app that properly conveys snarkiness in text? Thanks Pandler for your clarification.

<comment><USER10> Huh, I didn't read any snarkiness in that... Sorry, then!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Twitter also does this:

[https://www.evernote.com/shard/s74/sh/d88e4751-964e-464b-aef...](https://www.evernote.com/shard/s74/sh/d88e4751-964e-464b-aef6-0f55d9faf74d/c20fdcad6a764285425270602e6c9b36)

</comment><comment><USER13> I have never had a LinkedIn and I just counted 213 LinkedIn messages in my gmail account (yes, I am horrible at deleting emails). Their email spamming has turned me off to ever trying LinkedIn.

Do people actually find LinkedIn useful anyway? Everyone I know has an account, but I have never actually met a person who has found a job through using the site.

<comment><USER14> I actually find it pretty useful. I've used it to cold call people in different companies and functional roles just to pick their brains, people are surprisingly open to it.

Also, it's helpful as a contact database when a former colleague changes their email address/phone number.

The "request an intro" is pretty good to just to see how you're connected. If you know someone in common with a person it tends to lower the barrier of a cold call.

Note: by cold call I don't mean selling, just getting a chance to talk to someone interesting; i.e. you see an interesting role and want to get the real deal about a company

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I find LinkedIn to be super-aggressive on the email marketing front; both with trying to recruit new members through existing members and in trying to keep existing members coming back.

<comment><USER16> FIFY: I find LinkedIn to be super-aggressive on growth hacking.

Maybe their aggressiveness shows that they've reached market saturation?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I remember exactly when I accidentally hit invite button after I successfully linked my gmail account with LinkedIn. After I did this I noticed that the scrollbars were hidden by OS X and later I realized that I spammed every single person that I received email from with my linkedin invitation. I felt so ashamed by myself and even until today I receive messages such as : "you are now connected to Person X", who personally I even don't remember.

Shame for LinkedIn that they do their social linking in such a bad and confusing way. Cheers for the author.

</comment><comment><USER18> Google cache: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yiaEc_C...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:yiaEc_C6iVQJ:appmagma.com/hey- linkedin-nobody-wants-this/)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Whoa thats a lot of traffic. I just beefed up the server! Sorry for the 500 errors!

<comment><USER19> Your server would have handled it fine if your WordPress install had some basic performance tuning.

Read [http://browserdiet.com/](http://browserdiet.com/) or [http://blog.newrelic.com/2013/02/07/web-performance- optimiza...](http://blog.newrelic.com/2013/02/07/web-performance-optimization- automation/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Go to this link to discover if Linkedin ripped all your contacts: [http://www.linkedin.com/people/contacts?sortAction=lastName&...](http://www.linkedin.com/people/contacts?sortAction=lastName&showInvited=true&membersOnly=false)

PS: I saw this link in: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6426733](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6426733)

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit > _its probably my favorite social network_

I pretty much tuned out at this point. I don't believe it is (nor should it be) a _social_ network. I have a couple connections that use LinkedIn like others use Facebook. I don't want my LinkedIn connections telling me they had oatmeal for breakfast. That is what Facebook is for.

</comment><comment><USER21> The moment a service linked Linkedin or Facebook tries to connect to your Google or Yahoo account, there should be a big glaring red pop-up listing the horrors in store ... and how some of the damage is irreversible. It'll haunt you for ages as someone else said in another comment.

</comment><comment><USER22> Cached copy here:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://appmagma.com/hey- linkedin-nobody-wants-this/)

</comment><comment><USER10> This sleazy behavior is exactly why I refuse to use LinkedIn.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's called monetizing.

Eventually all the free services do it.

<comment><USER24> No, it's called being viral. Monetizing is when you get spam from people you're not connected to (a.k.a. InMail)...

<comment><USER10> No, it's called being sleazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Contact scraping is the only thing keeping social media going. I say let it die.</comment>


How I would create a couple of million jobs--for $53B - <AUTHOR> http://launch.is/blog/a-new-new-deal-adult-technical-education-or-the-jarvis-deal.html

<comment><USER2> My most important takeaway from this is that you're starting to publicize the conversation from the entrepreneurial elite.

When the first recession dip happened in the millennium and we were lamenting the manufacturing industry, I was preaching the same thing to my wife and liberal friends, that it's about retraining and that's where our tax dollars should go rather than subsidies and tariffs. Unfortunately, especially with government spending, the devil is in the details and the follow up accounting. Look at all of the money that was pissed away to corrupt contractors in Iraq with nothing to show for it.

From a purely technology industry perspective, the implementation details that need to be solved are with Placement. Every job posting for startups has "Rockstar Developer" in them. The people you're training won't be able to get a sniff from entrepreneurs who need to maximize each dollar spent on a new employee and they are not willing to train people up while building their team. I'd say they could freelance, but that market is drying up as the cost of living in the US has out priced many developers here against Eastern Asia and Eastern Europe. This won't change until people start to realize the true cost of a Repeat-Quality-Check loop that happens with cheap dev.

Finally, you have to solve the no-skin = no-value human penchant for not caring too much about things we get for free.

I think if you combine the arguments above, you can get to a solution where Government takes tax dollars to Subsidize Placement of Individuals who Qualify by paying their own way for Retraining with a Government Qualified Student Loan. Place them within Larger Companies (banks, established Tech Giants like MS) who can absorb their nascent skill set while getting a Subsidy for (like you said) the first X months while the person is employed. To make it work, repurpose some bureaucrats from different areas of the government in order to qualify and follow up (this is an absolute MUST). MS can complain about not getting enough H1-B's to come in from India, and be presented with this counterargument of "why don't you hire the people from our program?"

</comment><comment><USER3> Why not spend 1/10th of the money and instead of paying people to train create online training classes. Thus basically we could train people over and over again for the cost of bandwidth. Didn't we hit the age of the internet?

I am sure we could video the class once, and for the same price or less buy them each a netbook/chromebook cheap get them internet access - and trained up, and could have advanced classes, so that people could get better.

The only issue I see is that although we would have people trained up, that does not create jobs. But its a good first step..

<comment><AUTHOR> We are doing that at Mahalo now, but that requires a really motivated person obviously.

We've identified a spectrum of learning that runs from quick how to videos on one end all the way to the University of Pheonix on the other end.

In between there is very little, but what's there are companies worth 100s of millions to billions:

a) lynda.com ($50m in revenue), b) rosetta stone <http://www.google.com/finance?q=rossetta+stone> c) wiley (makers of 'for dummies') [http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AJW.A&hl=en](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AJW.A&hl=en)

There are a half-dozen milestones I can see... Mahalo has half of them:

1\. individual videos that teach you something you want to know right now.

i.e. how do i make a lightsaber effect in photoshop? <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSSb5l6hHnY>

how can i augment breasts in photoshop <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCAYwqaUoIc>

2\. a course that teaches you broadly about how to learn a program, that's available on Mahalo.com (or maybe a paid iPad app?).

i.e. learn photoshop <http://www.mahalo.com/learn-adobe-photoshop- introduction/>

3\. a course on Mahalo.com (or an iPad app maybe) that teaches you how to solve a specific longer, more complicated task

i.e. how to make a movie poster [http://www.mahalo.com/photoshop-video- tutorial-how-to-make-a...](http://www.mahalo.com/photoshop-video-tutorial-how- to-make-a-movie-poster/)

4\. A course that you attend for one to three days for $99-299 on a topic

we haven't done this and don't have plans for it.

i.e. Master Adobe After Effects, Master SEO, Master Social Media or Master Google Analytics & paid traffic (StumbleUpon, Google Adsense, FAcebook ad network).

5\. A certification/degree that takes four months full-time where you learn 3-5 pieces of software around a specific skill (i.e. publishing, advertising buying/selling, seo/social media, graphic design, html/webdesign, ecommerce). This would be soup to nuts followed by a four month on-site mentorship where the company gets paid $1k a month to take you on.

6\. A college where you go for two to four years for $20k a year that feels more like a job.

I'm not sure if Mahalo will do 4 through six... maybe after we get 1-3 right. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Great article Jason. Interesting thoughts to ponder. Here is my perspective as a web developer.

What you are creating for $53B is not a couple of a million jobs but a couple of million "start-up ready" employees. Frankly these employees are not that valuable and would be out performed by the couple of million already start-up ready and much cheaper to hire college graduates that are going to have an increasingly hard time finding a good job out of college. Also, are there really that many entry level start up jobs that need to be filled? I think that people who currently have the skill set you are describing are already having a hard time finding a job. The "talent drought" is only for highly trained, highly talented, technical people that have years of practice, experience and professional training as well as the in built drive that lead them to get those skills in the first place. Even a fresh out of school completely green CS grad has usually dedicated thousands and thousands of hours mastering their technical skills before and during their academic career.

Anyways, I do think you bring up some really great points and I do think some kind of reform is needed. Using tax dollars for valuable high quality vocational education is a great idea. Figuring out how to structure that vocational education to be efficient and effective is another whole problem to figure out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good feedback.

1\. I think that folks graduating college don't have a lot of tech talent or what employers consider tangible skills.

2\. I think many companies would rather have someone with 10 years on the job and a refreshed/refined skill set.

3\. This is just a back-of-the-envelope thought bomb.... $53b is nothing, but the truth is the government does not deploy capital in an intelligent manner.

4\. Only greed and vision-based entrepreneurs can execute on this plan. So, I'd just give 'education loans' to founders, like we did with Tesla and Fisker to do electric cars.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is a really inspiring article. Jason, I don't know if you're able to comment on this or not, but do you have any kind of vocational education projects brewing?

> Oh wait, venture capitalists think social media is a better investment than > education.

I fully agree that education is a much more socially valuable investment than social media. But it seems the reason VCs go for social media kinds of things is because those are more likely to be profitable.

Any thoughts on how to change that?

<comment><AUTHOR> VCs will flock to education when someone demonstrates it can generate tens of millions or 100s of millions a year in revenue with a solid margin.

Rosetta Stone and Lynda are very solid companies that are worth $250-500M right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> very naive assumptions about what it costs and what it takes to train the unemployed (which isn't the problem to begin with, but that is a separate issue)

put simply, if it only took 3 months and $4k to train people to be ready for startup tech jobs, then everybody would already be doing it

<comment><AUTHOR> CORRECTION: My cost is $20,000 in the piece. Please re-read the piece. In it I state:

\-- four months of f/t training with a $200k teacher. \-- 20 students per for months, so 80 students a year / $200k \-- i added 20% for admin so it's $240k / 80 students \-- add $1-2k per student for space \-- four months onsite at $1k a month = 4k per student

that's around $10k per person

i say later in the piece double it.... so $20k a student.

now, not every student is ready for this type of training. but where does a boot camp like this exist?</comment></comment>


U.S. To Probe Apple Over Updates That Slow Older iPhones - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-01-30/u-s-said-to-probe-apple-over-updates-that-slow-older-iphones-jd1yahj7 <comment><USER2> It bothers me a little the way people are assuming active malice where passive indifference and normal progressions of technology and features is sufficient to cause what we are seeing.

Apple could be inserting code to slow down phones in a very controlled and deliberate effort:

      if (version <= iPhone7) {
        wait_ms(100);
      }

This is what I think of when someone says Apple is deliberately slowing down phones but I don't find this credible.

For this specific case Apple's explanation, they started throttling down CPUs based on battery age to prevent unexpected phone shutdowns make sense. I do have issue with how this was initially messaged (a.k.a. it wasn't) but I understand why, consumer tech news tends to be very low information. It doesn't make sense for Apple to try to explain to users the details of every tweak to power management settings, and if they did it would either be lost on most consumers or be transformed in to negative headlines about how updating your phone makes it slower, in large part because the headline "Will the New iOS Update Slow Down your iPhone?" gets more clicks than "Apple makes Incremental Improvements to Power Management of iPhones as Part of Long-Term Strategy". So I understand the strategy of saying nothing.

Furthermore I expect most of the actual (not perceived) slow down is from dozens of conversations like happening:

Eng: New feature FooBar is awesome we should include it in the next iOS release. QA: FooBar isn't passing latency tests on our latest iPhone so you can't include it. Eng: Darn :(

<2 years later>

Eng: I still think Foobar is awesome, and look it very snappy on my current phone. QA: It works on our latests phones too, and users like it. Okay it is in! Eng: Yay.

This is fundamental to how software has been developed forever. We make faster hardware to be able to run more complex taxing software and than means older hardware will be slower in comparison.

<comment><USER3> > For this specific case Apple's explanation, they started throttling down > CPUs based on battery age to prevent unexpected phone shutdowns make sense.

At best it's a complete botch on Apple's part. I got that update and my phone was noticeably slower, right off the charger at 100%. My typical usage pattern has me plugging in my phone at night with usually more than 50% and rarely around 40%. I'm _never_ in danger of unexpected shutdown.

The way things _used to_ work, I'd drain an iOS device and somewhere around 20% I'd get a popup to switch to power saving mode, with a choice to do it or not. This is quite reasonable, usable, and the device remains fast until you're in the danger zone. Wanna tweak it? Move from 20% to 25%. Done. Worried that people won't switch to power saving mode and then have a shutdown? Make the switch mandatory at 20-25% or whatever.

But slowing down older phones all the time... it's hard not to be suspicious of motives.

<comment><USER4> The issue is that the peak power consumption could exceed the maximum power that the battery could deliver, not that the batteries were running out of charge. By throttling power consumption you can prevent unexpected shutdowns at the expense of maximum performance. This is especially problematic in colder climates where phones were shutting down because the cold battery couldn't deliver enough juice, regardless of its charge level.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't this mean that they made an error while designing the hardware, because required power output could not be sustained over a normal battery lifespan?

But the decision process probably favoured shipping and trying to patch around it in software because form always wins over function.

Unsurprised by the lawsuits, sounds like a massive engineering fuckup to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I am happy to see this issue getting so much attention outside of tech circles. Apple has mostly gotten a pass for their anti-consumer behavior recently and I hope the negative publicity from this forces them to improve things.

<comment><USER7> It's ironic that Apple, which provides regular software updates, is being scrutinized while it appears Google and other Android vendors -- whose track record on updates is very spotty -- get a free pass.

To avoid a case of 'no good deed goes unpunished', I do hope Samsung, Google and co get some attention over lack of updates for older phones/OSes too. Their approach of not updating perfectly good phones just leads to greater e-waste, not to mention wasting consumer dollars.

<comment><USER8> No updates might actually be better than forced (practically? I don't use iOS) updates that make your device less desirable to you, and can't be undone.

It's more fair and conceivable that Apple should be forced to meet certain standards for updates they choose to release, than for any manufacturer to be forced to make updates for some arbitrary/indefinite period of time.

<comment><USER9> > No updates might actually be better than forced (practically? I don't use > iOS) updates that make your device less desirable to you, and can't be > undone

No real people hold this opinion. You don't hold this opinion.

You're saying that phone OS updates in general (whether from Google or Apple) are so low quality that its better NOT to get them on older phones?

<comment><USER10> Lots of real people hold that position. Just go to any Android-related forum, lots of owners of older tablets/phones recommend not upgrading past version X (usually for performance reasons.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> As with every Apple "scandal" it seems the company is a Rorschach test writ large.

If you're inclined to think the worst of them, well, obviously this reinforces the idea that they're greedy, anti-consumer schmucks who deserve to be taken down a notch.

</comment><comment><USER12> _Apple is delaying some key iPhone and Mac software features planned for release this year to focus on quality improvements, Bloomberg News reported earlier Tuesday._

In my book, that's the best news to come out of Apple in years.

</comment><comment><USER13> I had an iPhone 6 Plus (from 2014) that _dramatically slowed down_ after an iOS update that was released around 2 years ago (some point after the iPhone 7 was out).

This is a phone that costs with sales taxes, over $1000. At one point, it was _so slow_ that I felt like throwing it on the wall, and breaking it into a thousand small pieces. (There even was a lag between me typing on the on- screen keyboard and those characters appearing.) I replaced the battery (about a year ago), and the speed improved a bit, but not completely.

I _had to get a new phone_ because it was (still was) simply just too slow. Honestly, there needs to be some sort of class-action lawsuit and compensation for iPhone owners who have literally been swindled by this.

<comment><USER14> >I had to get a new phone because it was slow to the point of being unusable.

What new phone did you end up getting? I hope it wasn't another iPhone.

<comment><USER13> I got a used Nexus 6 (in excellent condition) from Glyde for $185 which worked decently well. It was faster, but not super-snappy; and the battery life wasn't great.

But I purchased the iPhone X with AppleCare+ about a month ago. It was a huge purchase. The phone was $1,149, AppleCare+ was $199, and NYC sales tax was close to $120. In total, I spent $1,468.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I think this wasn't really news for most people, it's been taken as granted among my friends that you DON'T update an older iPhone in order to keep it in good shape. If this news had been released an year ago I'd have thought it is just capitalism 101, maximize profits. But there are software failures among all latest Apple platforms, OSX High Sierra is terrible on my 2yo MacBook Pro, I can't think that is also intended for profit maximization. Looking forward to the conclusion.</comment>


Court Rules Use of GPS to Track Individuals Not Privacy Invasion - <AUTHOR> http://www.christianpost.com/news/court-rules-use-of-gps-to-track-cheating-spouse-not-privacy-invasion-52087/

<comment><AUTHOR> The article title on ChristianPost.com emphasizes 'Cheating Spouse' but the judges ruled based on the following:

"Appellate Judges Joseph Lisa, Jack Sabatino and Carmen Alvarez said Villanova had no right to "expect privacy" because the GPS tracked his movements while he was driving on public streets."

With no mention of the relation of the tracker to the tracked.</comment>


How to tell when a robot has written you a letter - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/message/how-to-tell-when-a-robot-has-written-you-a-letter-701562705d59 <comment><USER2> _If you need to send out 200 personalized letters to sales leads but haven't got the time to handwrite them yourself — or if your handwriting is, like mine, grotesque — then Maillift will generate them for you, using teams of genuinely carbon-based people._

That's horrible! I don't mind getting a printed letter but if I got a handwritten letter that I later found out was faked I would never, ever do business with that person again. Doing this means the very first step in an attempt to form a business relationship is an act of deception.

This is of course a classic submarine story: [http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html)

Every time I feel like I have come to terms with marketing people as economic actors they manage to plumb some new nadir.

<comment><USER3> "Marketing people" is one of the most egregious generalization errors on HN.

It's certainly in vogue to hate on marketers but it is not an identity, marketer is a hat that people wear. Just stop.

<comment><USER4> Hating on "marketing people" isn't just an HN thing, I think. I'm fairly sure most people hate marketers, particularly because it's their job to try and part you from your money. In fact, on HN we are probably more lenient because _we_ are some of the people that are interested in separating people from their cash.

<comment><USER5> I don't care that people are trying to part me from my money. Often I'm trying to get rid of it. {EDIT: whenever you buy anything you're trying to get rid of that bit of money. This is true for poor people as well.}

The hate for (some) marketers comes from the fact that some of them are fucking scum with bizarre feelings of entitlement.

"When those other companies do it then yes I guess it is spam but trust us you really want to read our unsolicited email".

<comment><USER6> > I don't care that people are trying to part me from my money. Often I'm > trying to get rid of it.

You can give it to me.

But seriously, what a wonderful "problem" to have.

<comment><USER5> You want to buy a tv. You set aside an amount of money to buy that tv. From that point you're trying to get rid of that bit of money in return for a TV.

<comment><USER7> I don't think that's an accurate description. If you got to the store and they told you that, I dunno, you're the millionth customer and your TV is free, I doubt you'd feel like you failed to get rid of the money. Because you weren't trying to get rid of it — you were giving it up as a concession to get something else you want more.

<comment><USER8> I think that's a good point, but for many people going shopping they are more or less trying to spend money. They have a minimum budget and will just buy more stuff or come back the next day if what they want is on sale or something. Suppose, you got everyone on your list a nice Christmas gift for 20$ total, would you really stop shopping at that point?

<comment><USER7> If there weren't anything else I wanted, yeah, I would. I don't know a lot of people who buy things they don't want just to get rid of money. Maybe the obscenely wealthy or very compulsive people, but most people I know only part with their money in exchange for things they want, and otherwise are glad to keep it until they find something they do want. (They may not be fastidious about _how much_ of their money they're parting with compared to how much they want the things, but it doesn't seem like they part with money just to be rid of it.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, you can't.

You can buy a wacom tablet with tilt sensors and make the robot replicate the same stroke. You could add randomness to it too.

To apply different amount of force with the robot you use a spring and you control the force with the distance to the paper, it is very simple to do.

We did exactly that with ABB robots in the University a long time ago.

We used wacom drivers for linux and the wacoms were over 200 dollars or so.

A robot that uses only 3 axis is not "five figures", it is basically a plotter and thanks to reprap you could make your own for over 300 dollars.

Those are probably the ones used by this people, but you can use a robot with more degree axis and you won't be able to differentiate it.

<comment><USER10> Yeah, fully replicating human hand writing with varying force and slight randomization of letters sounds fairly easy to do. Sounds like a project an intern can handle.

<comment><USER11> [https://xkcd.com/793/](https://xkcd.com/793/) Just model it as a <simple object>, and then add some secondary terms to account for <complications I just thought of>. Easy, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Judging from the Robot letter in the article, the easiest way to spot a robot- penned letter would be that specific words are all the same. Look at the word 'the' in the picture, or even the 'th' in 'this'. They're all identical.

The robot seems to be working from just a small pool of characters.

Some sort of randomisation algorithm would work well here, varying the size, weight and slant or jitter of each letter would at least make it appear more random, and harder to spot.

Having said that, if you are someone who works on this sort of invention, please take a long, hard look at what you're doing with your life and consider just how this invention is contributing to the advancement of mankind.

<comment><USER13> > Having said that, if you are someone who works on this sort of invention, > please take a long, hard look at what you're doing with your life and > consider just how this invention is contributing to the advancement of > mankind.

This is a silly point that gets repeated far too often. You can make that statement to almost every developer and designer here.

Some people are quite satisfied advancing their own lives and that of those who are close to them.

<comment><USER14> >Some people are quite satisfied advancing their own lives and that of those who are close to them.

That is quite true, and that is the problem. It is an inherently different philosophy, whether one's work should advance humanity as a whole, the local subset of humanity, or the local subset of humanity at the expense of the whole.

<comment><USER15> They could always be using the money they're making from selling handwriting- robots to fund homeless shelters and college scholarships.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is so pointless. People have positive associations with handwritten letters because of the _content_ that goes with it. If marketeers start using handwritten letters they will just ruin that association.

<comment><USER17> But in the few years before the association is ruined, those marketers that successfully fool people into reading their junk mail will make money.

<comment><USER18> Or just piss off a lot of people for wasting their time.

Everybody assumes if i see your advert I'm going to buy your product regardless how i run into it that's just plain not true.

It may actually have the opposite effect I'll remember it for wasting my time and avoid that annoying company that is spending way too much on advertizing instead of doing something useful with it.

<comment><USER19> This is not how advertisements work. You're not "persuaded" by a single ad. Rather you are _primed_ into believing it. A few days (or even hours) after you've seen an ad, you forget the source, but the content remains in your memory. The next time you see similar content, it will be more likely to stick. This goes on a few iterations, and pretty soon, out of a given population, the average individual is more likely to behave as suggested by the advertisement. What you thing _during_ the advertisement is only secondary.

<comment><USER16> I know that theory, but I suspect it doesn't apply to these faux personal messages. For example you might get a coupon from some company because of your birthday, and the goal is clearly to get you to use that coupon within, say, two weeks. The handwriting is thus intended as a nudge towards immediate action as opposed to mass media advertisements which prime you for brand recognition.

<comment><USER19> Well you are more likely to read a seemingly handwritten letter then a printed one. That alone will expose a greater proportion to the content, where they'll be primed to certain keywords more likely to be picked up at a later through a mass broadcasted medium. And by that time, perhaps they'll relate that keyword to some personalized source, hence, a greater effect. You know, just like coupons relate a sense of _favor_ to keywords/logos and therefor have a greater effect on persuasive power of a given proportion of the population.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a kid, when I used to write on white paper, my lines used to slope and I used to throw them in the trash and try again. Over time, underneath the white sheet of paper, I started placing another paper that has lines and a margin, so I can see through the white paper and know where exactly I should write. The result was perfectly straight lines and a perfect margin.

I'm not a robot.

<comment><USER21> > I'm not a robot.

How do you know?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Computers can imitate human handwriting styles as well:

[http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.cgi](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.cgi)

Although a simple way would be to just have a human write the original and have a robot copy it.

</comment><comment><USER23> Shouldn't marketers try the exact opposite approach?

In this paper about "Nigerian" mail fraud [http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf](http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/167719/whyfromnigeria.pdf)

researchers argue that it's very efficient for attackers to appear fraudulent, because this helps select the most gullible victims (true positives) while weeding out "false positives": people who respond at first, but are not scammed in the end.

From the abstract:

> _" Far-fetched tales of West African riches strike most as comical. Our > analysis suggests that is an advantage to the attacker, not a disadvantage. > Since his attack has a low density of victims the Nigerian scammer has an > over-riding need to reduce false positives. By sending an email that repels > all but the most gullible the scammer gets the most promising marks to self- > select, and tilts the true to false positive ratio in his favor."_

Shouldn't marketers do the same? Isn't it more efficient to eliminate non- targets as early as possible, instead of dragging into the process people who will ultimately relent. If so, it would seem preferable to send junk mail that is very explicitly junky.

<comment><USER7> It's unlikely that mortgage companies are deluged with bad leads because people thought the handwriting was legit. Weeding out false positives is only an issue if you have a false positive problem.

<comment><USER23> Why do you need handwriting if not to make people open the mail, who would have otherwise thrown it away?

And if they'd have thrown it away, how likely is it they'll change their mind after having been tricked into opening it because it appeared to have been sent by a human?

The point of junk mail is not to be read, it's to generate valuable/actionable leads; I don't see how handwriting helps -- maybe it does, but we would need to see ultimate conversion rates (not just rates of initial inquiries for example).

<comment><USER7> The point is to get people to open the letter, yes. Having people open the letter who won't actually respond has _zero cost_ to the advertiser. The letter itself is a sunk cost, so trying to push people away from opening it is not beneficial. By trying to entice them to read, in the _worst case_ , they just throw away your letter a little bit later. More people opening the letter is not a negative like being deluged with thousands of false leads would be for the Nigerian scammer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It was an interesting advertisement for Mailift. I find it interesting to see the lengths that junk mail goes to in order to get read. At least at my house opened or not the conversion rate is zero. But clearly that isn't the case elsewhere.

Other than the company is getting better at mimicing humans though I didn't get a whole lot out of it.

</comment><comment><USER25> When a volunteer signs up at Social Coder I send them a welcome message.

Here's my confession: I will probably have sent that exact same message to someone else in the past.

At the moment I personally click on the "new message" button, fill out the name, paste in the message, double-check I'm sending it from a socialcoder email address, and then I send it.

This "welcome" process would be trivial to automate and yet I hesitate to do so.

Robots (and scripts) also have a way of blundering into situations that humans would avoid but this isn't why I'm reluctant to automate.

When it comes down to it I don't want to take the human (me) out of the loop. It would feel like I'm duping the recipient who might naturally expect a human connection rather than a recorded message.

If the volume was very much higher I might - apologetically - automate the welcome message. It might not make any difference to the volunteers signing up, but it would make a difference to _me_.

</comment><comment><USER26> "The Dots on The 'i's" and "The Rounded Right Margin" can both be fixed by having a human generate the strokes for the original form letter, like an Autopen with RAM. Write once, then make 30,000 copies of your exact handwriting with your handwriting robot.

</comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of the small company the protagonist works for in "Her".

<comment><USER28> To expand on this, the protagonist writes personal letters for other people, not because of penmanship but because of wordsmanship.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I recently had a horrible experience getting a home mortgage, and when invited to leave feedback I did so - politely, but sparing no feelings.

In response, I received a form-letter generic apology with a stamped signature. The numeric code at the very bottom of the letter (and the fact that it didn't address any specific issue I'd raised) gave it away, though I had to squint to determine that the signature wasn't legit.

I don't know which bothers me more: the fact that they didn't actually care enough to write a genuine response, or that the get enough disgruntled customers that they have a standard apology letter ready to go.

</comment><comment><USER30> Fascinating - I had no idea such a machine existed. Here is a video of one in action - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49ncf60zN8#t=16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k49ncf60zN8#t=16)

<comment><USER31> It's not exactly the same, but pen-wielding robots existed for a long time(earliest examples are almost 200 years old!) - US presidents have been using them for a long time to sign official documents:

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

<comment><USER30> Now you say it, reminds me of the 'Automaton' featured in Hugo.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> One of the things that readily annoys me is the "Important Information About your Current Account" letters from a credit card company that are just purchase checks inside. I do tend to open them, just in case; but have never actually used one. I don't think there is necessarily any trickery going on here, but it certainly trains people to ignore mail from them.

The mortgage companies are worse, in that they plaster the name of your current (or former) lenders on them; even though they have no actual association. These are usually easy to differentiate from real mail though.

</comment><comment><USER33> Similar machines have been in use for a long time to sign letters [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autopen) : US presidents (and LDS presidents) have long been fond of them. Presumably extending their use to whole handwritten letters is newer.

Then there's something even older: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laJX0txJc6M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=laJX0txJc6M)

</comment><comment><USER34> I think neural networks (RNNs to be specific) have the potential to do this - coupled with these handwriting bots it would be pretty hard to tell which is which. See the research of Alex Graves [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.html](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~graves/handwriting.html)

This type of research is also pretty amazing for speech synthesis.

</comment><comment><USER35> This is news? The technology is 249 years old ... :)

[http://www.chonday.com/Videos/the-writer- automaton](http://www.chonday.com/Videos/the-writer-automaton)

</comment><comment><USER36> Realtors have been using these lately. Had to let my old house go back to the bank in a deed-in-lieu earlier this year, but within days of the MLS listing expiring with our realtor, we started getting mail forwarded to our new house that looked handwritten.

All of them were offers from realtors wanting to re-list our house and try to sell it, and it wasn't until I got two identical letters, in identical handwriting, from two separate realtors, that I realized they were computer- generated.

</comment><comment><USER23> What about stamps though? Real letters from real people have stamps that are glued on in an odd position; junk mail (or any automated mail) has the postage directly printed on the envelope.

It's certainly possible to automate the sticking of stamps, but won't all those operations needed to "look real" increase the cost of junk mail in unsustainable proportions? Which is the point of course, from the receiver/victim point of view...

</comment><comment><USER37> This machine seems a standard automation for pre-email era. Most of the e-mails sent by me now and in the past years at my work in HR, have been automated by me while retaining a good amount of "personalization" for most of the non-priority e-mail replies which helped me highly for saving time for my start-ups. You will be surprised at the amount of "personalized looking" e-mails received that are actually automated.

</comment><comment><USER38> The best way to tell is to check if the postage says "Pre-sorted Mail" or if they actually spent money on first-class postage to send it. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER39> If the amount of energy and money spent on this level of sophistication can be devoted to actual customer service, imagine their retention. After all, it's the retention that keeps your business going. If your customers will spread the word about you too, that's far more convincing than "convincing looking" handwriting.

</comment><comment><USER40> Well, at least that's one marketing battle I've already won.

I don't read ground mail anymore.

</comment><comment><USER41> Now, that is progress. Manipulating a corporate droid into closing a deal by sending them a hand-written / hand-botted / whatever letter is serious kung fu.

</comment><comment><USER42> I think I'll just rip open the letter rather than analyzing the writing. Too many details to look at.

<comment><USER30> All my letters are either from a robot or my Nan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Left handed with horrible penmanship skills -- this is wonderful!

</comment><comment><USER44> Is there a Makerbot equivalent for these machines?</comment>