New iPhone 5 video surfaces, gets turned on. - <AUTHOR> http://mobilesyrup.com/2012/09/03/new-iphone-5-video-surfaces-gets-turned-on/

<comment><USER2> I like the design, color and texture on the back. Also I think the centered front-facing camera is elegant. However my excitement over new iPhone releases has been steadily declining.

The iPhone 3G was my first device. The difference between that and my crappy flip-phone was enormous. I basically ignored the 3GS because my 3G was fast enough. My anticipation for new iPhone models peaked with the release of the iPhone 4. The retina display and increased speed over the 3G was quite nice. But it wasn't the same as going from cheap phone to 3G.

I'm currently using a 4S. Honestly I can't tell the difference between this device and my 4 except for the home button that actually works every time it's pressed. I've never used siri for anything other than novelty questions. And the count of those is about ten in six months.

<comment><USER3> My iPhone 4 runs noticeably more sluggishly than my 4S on the latest versions of iOS. I think you'd be pretty annoyed moving from the 4S to the 4.

I think the nicest things about the next iPhone will be the larger screen and LTE. I'll probably be sticking with the Galaxy Nexus for personal use though.

<comment><USER2> I think you're right that actually moving back to the 4 would seem sluggish at first. What I find interesting is how the small delta between the 4 and 4S doesn't make me question moving back too much. The larger delta between the 3G and 4S makes it really clear there's no way I'd move back to the 3G. So the deltas (for me at least) are shrinking with each release.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is certainty fake (in my expert opinion). At least the turn on bit of it. Otherwise seems a dummy shell/mockup.

<comment><USER5> I almost downvoted this until I read who you were. I upvoted it instead :) What signs make you think it is fake?

<comment><USER4> There generally isn't one thing, but more a gestalt. But relatively easy to fake, the nonchalant - oh it works too - just tagged on at end, coming from just a guy on youtube. It also shows nothing specific. (others noted that iOS doesn't even require the connect to iTunes anymore) We see a lot of these fakes before every Apple event.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolith_(Space_Odyssey)>

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm trying to figure out when I fell out of love with SmartPhones. They were really exciting back in 2007-2009 when things were progressing so quickly but now almost any of them are 'good enough' and basically do all the same things more or less the same way. The hype around these products doesn't quite match their actual important anymore in my opinion.

<comment><USER8> They are over-hyped for sure, but I am curious about your take on computers, and their upgrade cycles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Only available in 360p? Has to be fake to cover up the dodgy video editing when the phone is turned on.

</comment><comment><USER10> Smartphones have become a commodity in the developed world. Do we really need constant updates about the latest leaks and rumors?

<comment><USER11> > _Smartphones have become a commodity in the developed world._

Whereas startups are rare?

<comment><USER12> Not rare, but not interchangeable. Commodity suggests that there isn't much qualitative differentiation across a market, which is more or less true at this point.

The difference between phone rumors discussed here are pixels, megapixels, centimeters maybe.

The differences between start-ups discussed here are the sun and the moon!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm surprised nobody pointed out the three UX changes that appear to be the least Apple-like:

1) The white notification light located off-center on the home button looks like the biggest design flaw demonstrated in this video.

2) The phone's dimensions are no longer visually pleasing (same width, much longer.)

3) The centered camera is easily covered with fingers while typing or playing a game in landscape mode.

I agree with comments that the video is poor resolution, the build quality is pretty poor, and the phone boot-up sequence could have easily been added in post-production.

<comment><USER14> Regardless of it being fake (the bootup likely is), the rest of it will almost certainly be present. There's also no notification light, you're seeing a reflection.

What's it matter if the front camera is hidden while not being used? Though I imagine it's less likely to be hidden when in the center than when on the bottom left (if used in landscape).

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I call fake. There's something weird about the perspective of the Apple logo and "Connect to iTunes" screens.

<comment> martin-adams The weird thing I thought is that Apple made a big push to allow you to set up a device without iTunes. When I got my 4S, I walked out the store with it working.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Well it doesn't look like they're doing a great job at the whole increased secrecy thing...

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm glad they made the back all black. Hopefully I like the new screen size. That is the only thing I am worried about.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if the device will start showing up in the logs of mobile sites?

<comment><USER19> It already is. Not sure if it's the one in the video tho

<http://www.marco.org/2012/08/30/ipad-mini-internals>

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How can he charge it without a dock connector cable?

<comment><USER2> Perhaps it was charged when he got it. He's probably not turning it on too frequently since the only feature is showing the "connect to iTunes" prompt.

<comment><USER21> iOS doesn't have connect to iTunes any more.

<comment><USER2> If this is the case then why didn't his phone go to the homescreen after turning on?

<comment><USER4> Because its fake

<comment><USER22> I can see that it could be fake but why would someone go through the effort of building a fake prototype three weeks before the official release? It would cost him a good amount of time and money and with no ads on his video, he gains would be even less. Couldn't it be he actually received one of the Apple designer's rejected prototype?

<comment><USER4> The physical object is real (but non functional), and relatively cheaply obtained apparently.[1] The fake part is placing the image on the screen making it look like it works.

Why? People love posting fake apple stuff to fool people.

1\. [http://micgadget.com/29451/fully-assembled- iphone-5-mockups-...](http://micgadget.com/29451/fully-assembled- iphone-5-mockups-are-everywhere-in-china-prices-start-at-5/)

<comment><USER22> Wow, din't know there was a market that sells these kinds of mockups. Thought the guy built it using a 3d printer or some. Thank you for the link. It does look awfully similar to the Mockup #01 from that page.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Apple is really slipping in terms of leaks prior to their major product releases. We have had major leaks before but this is getting ridiculous.

<comment><USER24> Assuming, of course, that Apple isn't just deliberately leaking a bunch of bullshit to mask the inevitable real ones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> A micro SD card? This is either fake or Apple is changing their philosophy quite a bit. If they thought people deserve SD cards, they could have integrated them a long time ago.

I would appreciate an SD card but I doubt Apple wants to give up the incentive to buy the most expensive version with the largest memory.

<comment><USER26> He said mini SIM, not micro SD.

<comment><USER25> Thanks for correcting me!</comment></comment></comment>


An introduction to Cascalog (slides) - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/nathanmarz/cascalog

<comment><USER2> slideshare, please take a cue from scribd and ditch the flash

<comment><USER3> Looks pretty nice in the new viewer: [http://www.scribd.com/documents/31059967/An-introduction- to-...](http://www.scribd.com/documents/31059967/An-introduction-to-Cascalog)

aside: Born and raised in Tucson - kudos for starting-up there!</comment></comment>


GitHub bi-colour timeline graphs are back. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ab9

<comment><AUTHOR> ... But appears not to have rolled out for most people (presumably the old setup stuck until the render cache clears).

By way of explanation:

      <canvas data-color-all="#e0e0e0" data-color-owner="#4183C4"
      data-source="/ab9/simple_authentication_starter/graphs/owner_participation">
      </canvas>

Each timeline is drawn in a <canvas> element. Each element uses the data-src to grab a JSON blob with "all" and "owner" keys, and uses the _color-owner_ and _color-all_ attributes to figure out which colours to use when drawing them. Kinda neat.

Not a peep from GitHub about this officially, unfortunately, regarding both it going away or coming back.</comment>


Solar Roadways Prove Expensive and Inefficient - <AUTHOR> https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/solar-roadways-are-expensive-and-inefficient <comment><USER2> (2018)

This was a nonsensical idea from the start.</comment>


The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ <comment><USER2> Good article, but ugh, please leave Shakespeare alone if (as you freely admit) you don't know anything about Shakespeare. Just because the real thing sounds strange to you doesn't mean that your "samples" are anything but nonsense.

 _edit_ To (preemptively) stress that I am not trolling: I find the topic and the writeup interesting and useful, and I appreciate the work that people do to share their experiences. But this is not a good example of the RNN working; it's a good example of the RNN _not_ working, and should either be omitted or presented at least neutrally, instead of glibly saying

> I can barely recognize these samples from actual Shakespeare :)

<comment><USER3> It works about as well/poorly as the other examples (Paul Graham, Wikipedia, math in LaTex). The samples from all of the examples are nonsense. What's interesting is that they, mostly, follow the _form_ of the original.

<comment><USER2> Fair enough. My objection was that the OP implies this is a passable substitute, but okay, in the larger context it's clearly a joke.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9584325](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9584325) (458 days ago, 211 comments)

</comment><comment><USER5> Really interesting article (missed the previous post)!

How far is this from being implementable for a practical application such as e.g. a "spellchecker and improvement ideas" for coding? E.g. train with "good" code from open source projects, have it running and highlighting areas with potential errors/improvement potential while you code (not counting trivial errors caught by e.g. lint tools).</comment>


Heart surgeons refuse difficult operations to avoid poor mortality ratings - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/06/03/one-in-three-heart-surgeons-refuse-difficult-operations-to-avoid/ <comment><USER3> It's Goodhart's Law in action, this time with deadly consequences:

"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."[a]

[a] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law)

<comment><USER4> Low mortality is a good damned measure.

I don't want to be operated on some yahoo surgeon who unconditionally operates regardless of risk and has a high mortality track record as a result.

<comment><USER5> Then maybe mortality rate should be attributed to doctors not operating as well. Low mortality is a good metric on patients, not doctors.

But on the other hand, I don't want to be treated by a doctor who cares more about his sellable stats than saving lives.

<comment><USER6> Maybe it's a good metric for hospitals. There are other pressures discouraging hospitals from rejecting patients altogether, or such is my impression, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The advent of public reporting of outcomes after intervention for myocardial infarction (heart attack) led to an _increase in mortality_ in Massachusetts and New York.[1]

1 = [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4368858/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4368858/)

<comment><USER8> A better way to make this claim would be to plot the mortality rates for the states over time and show that the rates in those places requiring reporting begin to diverge as the new policy is implemented.

<comment><USER7> They effectively did that: they compared public reporting states with other geographically adjacent states.

<comment><USER8> There's nothing like Boston or NYC in the control states. If the effect is as big as they seem to think--a 21% increase in mortality--that should be visible on a plot of deaths over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It was not heart surgery, but after being diagnosed with lung cancer, my mother had one of her lungs removed by a surgeon who assured us he'd be able to get all the cancer. She had a miserable, painful recovery that I would not wish on anybody. Within a week or two of her recovering to the point where she could walk short distances, the cancer was found in her other lung and went on to kill her within a few more months. She may have gained several months of life from this operation, but it was a painful few months without dignity.

It was 20 years ago, so my memory is fuzzy, but I don't remember ever being presented with anything but certainty from the surgeon that he could cure her. I think that patients and surgeons need to have a better idea of the realistic chance of success from a major surgery in order to make an informed decision. Perhaps if surgeons at least have to worry about their own numbers, they might hesitate before attempting cases like my mother's.

<comment><USER10> Sadly, it seems that your mother would not have had a better outcome with or without the surgery - if the doctor had said "I'm 75% sure that the cancer is contained in the one lung, so removing the lung will remove the cancer", would that have changed the decision to have the surgery? What it was was 50%? What is the threshold where someone with a fatal illness will accept the risk for a possible cure?

<comment><USER11> Perhaps the patient should have the right to decide what that threshold is for themselves rather than having the information hidden from them.

<comment><USER12> What information? Apparently the doctor told them he could do it. If he really believed in himself, then he told the patient everything she needed to know. Remember, the other option is "go die". So assigning a percentage chance on the successful outcome of a surgery is utterly meaningless when the alternative is a 100% "go die".

<comment><USER13> respectfully, this isn't the way to conceptualize any medical therapy. it's never "this will save you" or "go die", it's always "you will eventually die, this might forestall it, we're never sure, and there's a big list of potential drawbacks."

a person who can be helped by a medical intervention will die no matter what, but if they get an organ transplant or a pacemaker or continuous dialysis or a cancer removed, they may live a little bit longer, as far as scientists observe, although sometimes with significant difficulties. immunosuppression and chemotherapy both deactivate certain organ systems.

no one can see the future. cancer treatments seem to help some people and be useless for others, and it might all come down to something like, "uh cancer stem cell #13491340 was not destroyed, and there was metastasis." the idea with tumor excision is usually to prevent there from being so many potentially-metastatic stems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ultimately, we need to compare apples to apples by building rating systems that account for the difficulty of treating patients with various, ailments at various ages, with various complications.

Think of it in terms of competitive diving, gymnastics, or snowboarding: Your scores depend upon the difficulty of the moves you attempted combined with your performance of those specific moves. The more difficult the move, the more you're compensated for even attempting it when it comes to scoring.

The trick then is to prevent physicians from gaming the system by exaggerating the difficulty of the patients they're dealing with. You'd need to use as many objective metrics as possible and possibly some system of having different physicians assess ratings than the ones performing the procedures - maybe in some kind of double-blind fashion to prevent any kind of coordination strategy.

<comment><USER12> > some system of having different physicians assess ratings than the ones > performing the procedures - maybe in some kind of double-blind fashion to > prevent any kind of coordination strategy.

That would simply result in an unwritten rule where everyone gives everyone else good ratings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This topic was discussed in the last EconTalk [1] podcast featuring the author of a recent book "The Tyranny of Metrics" [2]. I think one of the author's interest insights is the distinction between metrics for diagnostics and those for incentives.

1\. [http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/04/_what_is_the_ap.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/04/_what_is_the_ap.html)

2\. [https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Metrics-Jerry-Z-Muller- ebook/...](https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Metrics-Jerry-Z-Muller- ebook/dp/B076ZWW2MN)

<comment><USER16> It's what I hate about the legal system. Prosecutors don't care about justice, they care about a record of putting thevmost people away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> In Australia, we have a neurosurgeon Charlie Teo that is well known for operating on "inoperable" brain tumours. While he has a lot of respect in the general community, to many of his surgical peers he is seen as a reckless maverick. I would think his stats on average are bad, but because he will tackle outliers he has won the support of the people that matter - <USER2> patients.

</comment><comment><USER18> 66% of 115 specialists polled did not refuse a difficult operation.

33% thought about how it would impact their statistics, or put more generously, thought hard about the probability of the patient surviving presumably quite serious surgery.

Yes mortality is a blunt statistic for a surgeon, but perhaps giving people pause for thought about the odds of success is no bad thing.

Contra point: would you rather not know how many cases your surgeon has done that year, and the issues they have had?

<comment><USER19> A large portion of the people undergoing heart surgeries still face a high risk of death if they don't have the surgery (with the surgery bringing the chance of a longer, more comfortable life).

Here's why your hot take isn't the best take:

"About 30 percent of them said they had turned patients down for surgery even when they knew full well that surgery was in their best interest."

<comment><USER20> Here's the converse of that, though: why do we think it's okay to expect a team of doctors and nurses to be okay with almost assuredly killing someone during surgery? They're not robots, "it's their job" is not an acceptable answer.

Even if the surgery is in a patient's best interest, if the odds of killing them are all but guaranteed then it's most definitely not a matter of looking at the patient and rationalising it with "they will die otherwise anyway". It's not just about the patient.

People who make this argument seem to forget that there's also an entire team of medical professionals that your rationalisation says should be okay with going into a surgery knowing they are almost guaranteed to kill this patient. They have the stats, the stats say "this person will die under the knife", many more lives are affected in this decision than just the patient.

So expecting them to just do the surgery instead of going "No. This will kill the patient, I don't want that on me and my team" is very far from an okay attitude towards fellow human beings, and leads to terrible medical practices.

<comment><USER19> I don't see where the article says "the odds of killing them are all but guaranteed", so I don't really appreciate you stuffing that meaning into my comment. I highly doubt that surgeries at that level of risk are actually in the medical interests of the patient (the standard I used).

Are you speaking from further knowledge of the the statistics of the cases where surgery is refused? If so, why not drop that instead of the lecture?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sports athletes do this. For example players won't attempt end of the quarter half court shots since that will lower their percentages, or QBs taking sacks to not lower their QB ratings. What they do in sports is keep advanced stats. Instead of just giving a pure mortality rating have mortality rating, by surgery type.

<comment><USER22> Maybe in other sports this happens, but I seriously doubt QB's engage in that. First of all, taking a sack is not pleasant. In the extreme it can take you out of the game, or land you on the IR (injured reserve). Drew Bledsoe was replaced by Tom Brady after such a sack, and was never the star he had been before. Second, the number of sacks a QB takes is a statistic in itself. Third, the top stats for a QB are in this order: touchdowns, interceptions, passing yards, and completion percentage. If a QB takes a sack to avoid an interception, I'm 100% happy with that. If he takes a sack so that his completion percentage is higher by 0.01%, I would not be, but then the completion percentage is reported at the 0.1% level of precision. There is simply too much physical pain in taking a sack for a QB to trade that for an imperceptible gain in a pretty unimportant stat.

<comment><USER23> some QBs like aaron rodgers will take a sack instead of throwing the ball away.

rodgers had a 50 sack season twice in his career and has a sack career of 6.96. this is reflected on his interception rate (which is the best in the nfl). he just prefers to take a sack to attempt a pass that could be intercepted -- and everybody looks at those int/td numbers and don't look a lot at sack numbers (because sacks are usually not the qb fault).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Shameless plug - I wrote an essay recently on how any metric becomes a vanity metric [http://dimitarsimeonov.com/2018/03/22/the-vanity-metric- para...](http://dimitarsimeonov.com/2018/03/22/the-vanity-metric-paradox)

Some excerpts:

\- having clear, well defined metrics is the single largest driver of progress within a company

\- _Any metric sufficiently optimized becomes a vanity metric_

\- Building products is not science. What makes a good product is usually dependent on so many factors that are subject to change and evolve.

\- Over time, a product no longer stands to die if these metrics degrade.

\- According to EdwardTufte - people and institutions cannot keep their own score

Hope someone finds it useful!

</comment><comment><USER25> Econtalk had a good interview this month on this general phenomenon discussing the book "The Tyranny of Metrics"

[http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/04/jerry_muller_on.htm...](http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/04/jerry_muller_on.html)

</comment><comment><USER26> Why don't we keep track of refusals as well?

<comment><USER27> Not a bad idea, per se, but then which is better - the doctor with 0% refusals and 20% deaths, or the one with 20% refusals and 10% deaths?

<comment><USER28> Include the outcomes of the refused cases.

Note that this also works to _improve_ stats on docs who choose hard cases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The incorrect assumption your readers are making is that heart surgery is a good thing in all cases. America is the leader in futile medical procedures: it may well be a good thing to have fewer risky procedures on patients who were more likely to be harmed. "primum no nocere" may be advanced!

</comment><comment><USER30> On a related vein, do surgical procedures involve any type of quality control, where the work is independently audited? If so I wasn't aware. Quality control is such an important cogwheel of processes in many other industries, yet I don't hear much talk of it in relation to medical profession.

<comment><USER8> In the US, if the surgery is in hospital:

\- Well-regarded hospitals will vet surgeons before granting privileges.

\- Average hospitals give out privileges fairly easily if there are no actions against a person's license.

\- There is a "collegial" review of big screw-ups that carry major reputational risk.

\- As with any fee-for-service firm, "rainmakers" are highly sought after and get away with more.

\- Privileges are difficult to take away once granted. (Have stronger legal protections than academic tenure in some states.)

If the surgery is in an ambulatory surgery center or doctor's office:

Basically anything goes. Ice-pick lobotomies, tonsillectomy mills, boob job factories in strip malls....all have happened in recent US history. About as well-regulated as traveling carnivals.

<comment><USER30> I was thinking something more akin to routine inspection program carried out by independent personnnel applicable to all procedures, not just the reviews that are necessitated due to screw ups.

<comment><USER8> As far as a performance evaluation that directly scores a surgeon's judgment and whether the procedures s/he is performing are actually beneficial...in the absence of a big screw-up or complaint, I don't believe there is any forum to do that after training is complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> it's been said a few times on /r/medicine, surgeons have their lawyer in mind when operating, they're skilled, but they first avoid anything that could damage their own life irreversably. Of course to an extent this goal aligns with the patient, but not always, and a bit sad on the ideal side.

<comment><USER32> Can someone really sue their surgeon in the US?

<comment><USER33> Absolutely. You can sue for pretty much anything. Winning is another story, but doctor's don't generally make sympathetic defendants. Juries know they have money and that they pay huge insurance fees to cover these cases. Of course, after losing a big case where the insurance company pays out millions of dollars, they likely become uninsurable and unemployable. But hey, the money is good until you hit the anti-lottery.

My father was an anesthesiologist (who retired in good standing), and I remember him telling me a case he read about a Caesarean section. The surgeon was using an electrocautery pen to sear closed the ends of blood vessels. The surgeon set down the pen on the surgical cart, lifted the baby out, set the baby on the cart, and the baby's heel touched the pen. Now the baby has a small scar on the bottom of his/her heel for life. The parents sued the surgeon, the cart nurse overseeing the cart, and the anesthesiologist was close to the surgical cart. All 3 defendants settled out of court, since babies almost always win jury cases against rich doctors, regardless of merit.

The litigant's lawyer would almost certainly bring up a below median survival rate as evidence of a pattern of gross incompetence.

Also, of course, in the U.S., I believe only governments are immune to lawsuits (sovereign immunity) without their consent. The courts have consistently ruled that many rights, including the right to sue, cannot be legally waived by contract. In a similar way, if you sell yourself into slavery by entering into a contract that waives your right against unlawful detention, that contract cannot be legally enforced.

My grandfather was an anesthesiologist. My dad was an anesthesiologist (and did well enough on the MCAT to go to med school after 3 years of undergrad... practiced medicine without an undergrad degree... med school is too competitive today to do such a thing). I was a good student: I graduated from MIT. However, my brother and I saw all of the BS and stress (anesthesiologists have a high suicide rate) and constantly rotating sleep/work shifts and both went into engineering.

<comment><USER34> If he really had a pattern of gross incompetence, wouldn't there have been some other process to stop him doing that? Are courts really that incompetent themselves that they can't understand such simple statistical errors as using survival rate to measure competence?

<comment><USER33> It's not about gross incompetence; it's about a jury's perception of incompetence, colored by their perception of the doctor and their perception of the grieving family members. If it comes to a jury trial, the court relies on the jury to make legally factual findings, so the courts end up relying upon the statistical abilities of the median juror, colored by the aforementioned biases.

There are medical boards to remove incompetent doctors, but those influence jury trials primarily through submissions of findings as evidence for consideration by juries. A good lawyer will portray medical boards as a bunch of doctors biased against passing judgement on fellow doctors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Easily solvable. Have a person whos jobs it is to rank how likely a person is to live. He gets paid based on how accurate he is.

Doctors would then be ranked as an offset from this previous mortality prediction.

<comment><USER36> This incentivizes the doctor to maximize the _appearance_ of risk in the medical record.

<comment><USER37> The one doing the estimate should obviously not be the same doctor doing the surgery.

<comment><USER36> The one doing the estimate will do so based off the records generated by the doctor doing the surgery.

<comment><USER28> Not for referrals.

<comment><USER36> The only way to get reasonably accurate results with this is to have two surgeons do completely separate diagnostics in a double-blind where neither they nor the patient knows which one is going to be performing the surgery. That seems unworkable at scale.

<comment><USER28> Surgeons don't do diagnostics, as a general rule.

Internists, paths, triage, GP, trauma do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This exact topic was discussed in the 1968 novel Case of Need by Jeffrey Hudson. It was his first book, written while a medical student at Harvard. The novel raised a stir as it was critical of Harvard faculty and in some ways the practice of medicine in general. The book eventually won an Edgar Award.

Some may know Jeffrey Hudson better by his given name, Michael Crichton.

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

</comment><comment><USER39> You cannot compare crude outcomes. You have to adjust for so called "case- mix". For mortality after cardiac surgery, the risk can be calculated using the EuroSCORE II. [http://www.euroscore.org/calc.html](http://www.euroscore.org/calc.html) And even then, often the numbers for individual surgeons are too small to draw conclusions.

</comment><comment><USER40> That means there's an opportunity / gap in the market.

Demand for risky operations by motivated buyers, should lead to some doctors taking on the role / label of risk-takers / explorers.

Since they can get the customers other, risk averse doctors are turning away, and pull in rare-treatment seekers on their own.

</comment><comment><USER41> The only way this changes is removing the choice from the surgeon doing the cutting.

Sounds a bit dramatic but if they think action is genuinely inappropriate, they should make the case to their colleagues, or a Multi Disciplinary Team, and let them have the final say. Together they should be able to enforce the Royal College and NICE guidelines for operating and the CQC —the main monitoring body— should be able to work out (both from data and on-the-ground inspectors) whether hospitals are doing as they should.

I realise that's pretty UK specific but the ACS should be able to achieve something similar.

</comment><comment><USER42> Relatedly, I've met many people who had a surgery where they used to live and, after moving, other surgeons won't touch them. They have to travel back to where they used to live to get care. Seems really unethical.

</comment><comment><USER43> Reminds me of why some devs will not touch critical pieces of code because the next time a bug comes in that module, git log shows they were last editors and will be asked to take a look (even if the bug is unrelated to them)

</comment><comment><USER44> We chose to have our daughter delivered at a hospital that is renowned for its neonatal ICU. It's obviously a great place to give birth, but if you look on paper, their c-section and other intervention rates are above average. Which makes sense when you understand that they are equipped to handle the highest risk pregnancies.

A similar phenomenon occurs in education. I taught high school in Baltimore, where the vast majority of my students were high risk. Baltimore has a few renowned high schools, but by and large, they serve the easiest students.

</comment><comment><USER45> There was a counterintuitive study of obstetricians that I cannot find right now that showed that in one state over many (10?) years the ones who did the most C-sections were the best doctors - because when researchers looked at the underlying data the realized these doctors treated the patients who had the worst predicted outcomes and beat the national odds - I think they theorized that these doctors had the best ability to choose the optimal method of birth and were not afraid to choose c-section when it was necessary.

<comment><USER28> There's a very strong relationship between experience (number of procs performed) and outcomes. High-volume is almost always beetter.

This may of course favour unnecessary ops...)

<comment><USER45> Yes, I think this was particularly against the grain because mothers are commonly told to look for a doctor/practice who does not resort to a C-section right away, and judge this by the number of C-sections a doctor/practice performs.

<comment><USER28> Hospital rather than doc rates are far more useful here.

Look to c-sec vs. vag deliveries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> This is the classic problem where people use averages as a metric, but ignore the fact that variations are not distributed evenly.

I remember looking at the economics of a clinic for our product. Someone said "let's just give them a 5% discount as on average they will break-even.

That works if you look at on average how much they make, but ignore the fact that every clinic has a different mix of insurance companies and *their own economics are all different."

</comment><comment><USER47> My mother went two years with a horrible stomach condition and couldn't get anyone to treat it until she wound up in the hospital and they were legally required to treat it. It was for exactly that reason: risky surgery looks bad, even if it's necessary. When there aren't a lot of doctors who can perform the surgery in question to begin with, say only two in your state, then you might just die.

</comment><comment><USER48> This isn't surprising because humans will do what they're incentivized to do (speaking mainly in a professional setting here).

Might be effective to add a measure to the transparency that shows something to the effect of, "likelihood to perform life-saving and risky procedures." Therefore a high win-loss with a lower risk threshold would be weighted lower than a so-so win-loss with a higher risk threshold.

</comment><comment><USER34> 1/3 of heart surgeons violate medical ethics. That shows how flimsy and easily corrupted doctors are. That they don't really care about doing what's best for their patients' health as soon as an incentive makes that inconvenient. I hope some more data will reveal who has statistical anomalies in who they're turning away so the frauds can be identified.

</comment><comment><USER49> Fertility clinics are subject to the same pressures. They need to keep their success rates up so they avoid cases with poor prognoses.

</comment><comment><USER50> We bundle up too many conflicting jobs into the role of the doctor. Rating the difficulty and status of an incoming patient should be completely separate from the job of treating them, and all judgments about doctor effectiveness should be judged relative to those assessments.

(Credit: alerted to this misincentive by Yudkowsky's recent book _Inadequate Equilibria_.)

</comment><comment><USER51> Would it be possible to determine a "risk" factor and count that in the mortality ratings, or is this too simple?

<comment><USER52> There is probably already _some_ adjustment for risk - anyone can see that a smoker in his 60s will have higher mortality than a non-smoker in his 30s.

The problem might be that the statistician doing the risk adjustment doesn't have 'skin in the game', so his/her assessment of risk is worse than the surgeon's. (Although if that were the case I would expect the statistician to be just as likely to overestimate the risk than underestimate it, yet I never hear about surgeons _favouring_ the difficult cases because they think they can improve on the expected mortality rate in such cases).

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> There might be several decent ways to improve (at least as a next step) to avoid this particular way to game the KPIs: \- use an assessed upfront difficulty (if available in measurable form) to adjust for the outcome rating \- add additional KPI for % of refused operations (perhaps again adjusted for difficulty)

</comment><comment><USER54> What would you prefer?

A surgeon who expects a poor outcome of your surgery:

a)decides to not operate on you? b)decides to operate on you nonetheless?

I am in camp a

<comment><USER12> I'm definitely in camp B. 90% chance of dying on the table beats a 100% chance of dying without the surgery, every single time.

<comment><USER55> Quality of life matters in most of these marginal cases. If they are going to give you the Konno procedure (scrape extra tissue out of a thickened ventricle), there's tons of things that can go wrong OTHER than death. Death is assured, either way, for everyone.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Metrics do drive behavior. Like, in the IT space, percentage of successful change requests. Encouraged you to power though even if things look bad. Because aborting is a 100% chance of a ding to the metric, while taking the risk is something less.

The stakes are lower, of course, but the idea is similar.

</comment><comment><USER57> Alternatively, you have a good idea of what your mortality rate will be if a surgeon picks you for a case.

</comment><comment><USER58> I firmly believe that this is why my mother-in-law died. She needed surgery to fix a hernia that basically left her unable to eat at all. Is she did not have the surgery she was going to die. The surgeon stopped the surgery because the 'risk' was too high.

48 hours later she was dead.

<comment><USER59> You don't die in 48h from not eating. So many elements missing there, this is such a terrible depiction. I hope anyone passing by will have a bit of critical thinking.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> They need to add a difficulty correlated metric to the statistics. Maybe BMI and age? I am sure IVF clinics wouldn't offer the procedure to anyone over 35 if the rather detailed statistics they are required to report didn't also include the patient's age.

<comment><USER61> I imagine it's extremely difficult to come up with a metric that captures everything about the case. BMI, age, tumor type, tumor shape, history of kidney disease, diabetes, where do you stop?

<comment><USER52> You don't need a metric which captures everything about the case - you just need a statistical model whose risk assessment is at least as accurate as the surgeon's assessment. This is not as difficult as it sounds - in Chapter 21 of _Thinking Fast and Slow_ , Kahneman makes a strong case that simple algorithms are very often better than expert clinical judgement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Can there be positive self selection and specialization of the surgeons? Those who don't believe they can probably operate successfully don't do that at all and the others get more insensitive.

</comment><comment><USER63> If you're a patient, wouldn't this still mean starting with the lowest- mortality surgeon? If they take your case, you're least likely to die. If not, you have a better appraisal of your odds.

<comment><USER64> I'm not so sure. That might mean going with a surgeon where you are at the top end of their "risk profile", rather than a more skilled surgeon who has higher mortality rates due to routinely taking more difficult cases. I'm not sure you can generalise the mortality rate of all patients to your specific chance of death (a more skilled surgeon would likely be better for you, c.p.).

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> One possibility is to offer the surgeons more money for difficult surgeries, and more money for a successful outcome, to balance out the reputational risk to the surgeon.

<comment><USER66> How do you estimate the difficulty in a way that does not involve wrong incentives on the part of the surgeon or whoever is doing the estimation when money is involved?

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> A colleague of mine was interviewed by a new hospital heart program. He was asked what his mortality rate was. He replied, what do you want it to be?

</comment><comment><USER68> Check out the comments over on /r/medicine and you will likely be horrified. It is career over everything. There was even a thread this week about how you should NEVER correct someone above you (med students should never correct a resident and a resident should never correct an attending).

That mentality is terrible for everyone and every thing, except the physicians' careers.

I don't know if we need to select for better people when admitting them to medical school or if the culture is just completely fucked.

<comment><USER69> If you think about what it takes to get into med school then it seems pretty natural that you're going to get hyper competitive surgeons in the end. It starts before med school. You get assigned 10 unobtainable books that only the library has. Finals week comes around, all the books are missing even though they have to stay in the library. Turns out your classmates hid them inside the library so they could have a competitive advantage and get a higher grade on the curve.

You already devoted probably half your life to becoming a surgeon, why would you screw it up and lose so much ground so easily?

<comment><USER7> What decade are you describing? In my medical school, all of the required material aside from our anatomy textbook was given to us as a PDF or a printout.

<comment><USER69> This was within the last 7 years. I don't doubt each school is different. This was at UW in Seattle.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> To be fair, you wouldn't want heart surgeons to shrug and take on operations they didn't feel ready for, either.

</comment><comment><USER71> Can we get a (2016) on the thread title?

</comment><comment><USER72> The subjective is always where there is value.

I wish there were surgeons that would accept these challenges and colleagues would objectively assign a degree of difficulty score.

And a site that aggregated such scores. I really don't care how "friendly" a doctor is - did the get the diagnosis right? Did they improve longevity? Did they improve quality of life?

Not easy to score but what everyone wants to know.

<comment><USER73> Does the NHS provide enough free market choice that anybody could take advantage of a score even if they wanted to?

<comment><USER74> You can choose where to get treatment and who treats you; the main issue is whether you get the timeline you'd prefer. Generally, patients will choose a clinical center (to the extent that some hospitals have stopped offering specific treatments, because their stats were never good enough - e.g you need to do a certain number of children's heart ops per year to be good enough to get good stats). If you have the option to go private, either through your insurance or the NHS, then obviously there's another layer of choice.

Most of the private surgeons are also NHS, anyway.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Should "NHS" be added to the title? This seems to only apply to British heart surgeons.

</comment><comment><USER76> I recommend listening to the new EconTalk episode about the tyranny of metrics

</comment><comment><USER11> You would think that they could adjust these figures by patient age and condition.

</comment><comment><USER77> Sounds a lot like police work in Japan (they love their stats).

</comment><comment><USER78> Goodhart's Law again!

</comment><comment><USER79> Some doctors probably refuse patients that left bad reviews at competing offices...

<comment><USER80> "I don't appreciate the service they provide and they're terrible people !!!"

"Okay, we won't serve you if you're just going to trash us."

"EVIL HOW DARE YOU!"

<comment><USER79> I meant if you left a bad review somewhere else...

Of course someone should not go back where they don't like to go....

<comment><USER81> That only works if you have more than one choice available.

<comment><USER79> The shitty US health/dental insurance system make it hard, but I still would be surprised if most people don't have a choice of more then one doctor...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> It's sad to hear this when it's totally unnecessary.

Hear disease has been a solved problem for decades. Just compare the rates of disease for vegans with the general population.

<comment><USER83> > Just compare the rates of disease for vegans with the general population.

"Disease" is such a broad category that it's sort of meaningless here.

Maybe veganism is healthier than an animal diet, but the degree of its impact can only be stated only after removing the many other environmental factors that might be contributing to lower disease rates among vegans, including income and location.

<comment><USER82> Yes, lot's of things are always involved. Including air quality etc as I think I saw on HN just the other day.

I find it interesting though that the right type of vegan diet will basically make you hypertension and heart attack proof and that it may also reverse heard disease (the only diet to do so). Especially when you look at mortality and costs of healthcare this really need to be more generally recognized.

<comment><USER83> > I find it interesting though that the right type of vegan diet will > basically make you hypertension and heart attack proof

A diet making someone heart-attack-proof is a pretty strong claim. Have a citation?

I think the only thing one can say with near-certainty about a well balanced vegan diet is that it has much lower environmental externalities (i.e carbon footprint, water usage) than a meat-based diet, while being no worse for you than any other comparably healthy diet.

That alone is a great reason to be a vegan, without having to rely on possibly hyperbolic claims of health benefits.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why I wrote The Geek Atlas - <AUTHOR> http://www.jgc.org/blog/2009/05/why-i-wrote-geek-atlas.html <comment><USER2> I want a copy, and I want a copy _now_.

<comment><USER3> The book will be available on June 3.</comment></comment>


Show HN: An Efficient Way to Browse Hacker News - <AUTHOR> http://xinglab.com/hackercut-is-released/

<comment><USER2> Almost all new cool extensions are now created only for Chrome. The last similar thing I saw was: [https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/hn- special](https://github.com/gabrielecirulli/hn-special) This makes me seriously question why I'm sticking with my Firefox nightly.

Will there be a Firefox port? or are you using some Chrome specific APIs?

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't know if this is the experience other people are having, but it's super buggy for me. When I view comment threads (like, this page for example), the layout of the page gets hijacked and looks really weird. Also, when typing out a new reply comment, trying to type certain letters would register as command shortcuts instead of simply entering text.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for reporting the bugs, I'll fix them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This looks like a fantastic tool. Unfortunately I use firefox. That being said, I use similar extensions for other sites including RES for reddit. I will definitely use it if/when there is a firefox extension.

User configurable "hotkeys" would be cool as well so that the user could configure specific keys for navigation.

</comment><comment><USER5> I dig it! Perhaps update this by adding a shortcut for the new "Show HN" nav link?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the suggestion, I've opened an issue on GitHub for it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would love to have vim mode.

<comment><USER3> totally agree: vim mode is a must.</comment></comment>


Facebook invests $5.7B in India's Reliance Jio - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/04/21/facebook-reliance-jio/ <comment><USER2> Jio is EVERYWHERE in India. This is a really smart move for their India play.</comment>


Google and Red Hat announce cloud-based scalable file servers - <AUTHOR> http://googlecloudplatform.blogspot.com/2016/02/Google-and-Red-Hat-announce-cloud-based-scalable-file-servers.html <comment><USER3> Heyas,

Ex-GlusterFS person here (used to work at Red Hat on the project side, leaving mid last year).

"Small file access", and "lots of files in a directory" have been a pain point with GlusterFS for ages. The 3.7.0 release had some important improvements in it, specificially designed to help fix that:

[https://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Fe...](https://www.gluster.org/community/documentation/index.php/Features/Feature_Smallfile_Perf)

The latest Gluster release is 3.7.8 (the same series as 3.7.0), and is worth looking at if you're needing a good distributed file system. If you have something like 1Mill files in a single directory though... hrmmm... NFS or other technologies might still be a better idea. ;)

<comment><USER4> What makes having a lot of files in a directory a hard problem?

<comment><USER5> Hi. I'm one of the GlusterFS developers. Hi, Justin. ;)

The basic answer to your question is that _networks are slow_ compared to local storage. In order to get decent performance, you must either avoid network round trips or amortize their cost over many operations. We - not just GlusterFS but distributed filesystems in general - can do this pretty well for some operations. We can batch, buffer, cache, etc. This works great for plain old reads and writes to large files (for example). It doesn't work so well for operations that have to touch many small files. For those, in order to ensure the required level of consistency/currency, we have two choices.

(1) Send a request per file to get current metadata.

(2) Cache metadata, and participate in some sort of consistency protocol to make sure we don't serve stale cached information.

Both approaches have workloads where they perform better and workloads where they perform worse. In addition, the second approach adds _a lot_ of complexity, especially in a system where failures are common and a loosely coordinated set of servers must respond (systems with a single master server have an easier time here but are less resilient). The inherent difficulty of this approach is why e.g. CephFS has taken so long to mature.

GlusterFS took the first route instead. It does mean that "ZOT" (Zillions Of Tiny files) workloads will perform poorly. I won't deny that. On the other hand, it's easier to test or prove correct, and the time not spent on solving the hard version of that problem - often for little eventual benefit - <USER2> instead be spent on other kinds of improvements. Some people are happy with that. Some are not. Some spread FUD. Some try to implement the practical equivalent of a distributed filesystem on top of some alternative (e.g. object stores) with their own even more serious limitations, and experience even more pain as a result. Some are initially unhappy with these tradeoffs, but work with us and learn to work more effectively with these limitations to enjoy other benefits. That's life in the big city.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for clearing that up, that's awesome. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I worked with a GlusterFS deployment in production about 2 years ago, and it was such a nightmare that I both feel compelled to write about it and never touch anything made by that team ever again.

It was the whole shebang: Kernel panics, inconsistent views, data loss, very slow performance, split-brain problems all the time. Our set up IIRC was very simple: two bricks in a replicated volume. It worked so poorly that we had to take it out of production. Some of our experience can be explained by GlusterFS performing poorly under network partitions, but nothing could justify kernel panics. It blew my mind that Redhat acquired that company and product.

Edit: I hope there's been a big improvement to the reliability and performance of GlusterFS. Can anyone with more recent experience running it in production comment?

<comment><USER7> I'm not a GlusterFS expert, and haven't used it before, but you should know that most consensus algorithms (Paxos, Raft, etc) only function reliably with an odd number of nodes. I have to wonder if your problems were mostly self- inflicted from having 2 nodes. Of course, any network partition in a 2-node cluster has a huge potential for data corruption, as each node now thinks it is the master (split-brain).

In a 3-node cluster, any system with a decent consensus algorithm (to be clear, I'm not sure if GlusterFS has one) would know that during a partition the cluster can only continue to operate if at least 2 nodes can communicate with each other to elect a new master.

<comment><USER8> But then in a split with a 3-node cluster, there is now a 2-node cluster in charge, and what happens if another partition happens?

<comment><USER7> Typically, clusters without a majority (2 out of 3, 3 out of 5, 4 out of 7, etc) of nodes present will shut themselves down to prevent data corruption.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Last time I tried GlusterFS was in 2012. The way it worked was very impressive back then and I would have loved to actually put it into production.

Unfortunately, I hit a roadblock in relation to enumeration of huge directories: Even with just 5K files in a directory, performance started to drop really badly to the point where enumerating a directory containing 10K files would take longer than 5 minutes.

Yes. You're not supposed to store many files in a directory, but this was about giving third parties FTP upload access for product pictures and I can't possibly ask them to follow any schema for file and folder naming. These people want a directory to put stuff to with their GUI FTP client and they want their client to be able to not upload files if the target already exists. So having all files in one directory was a huge improvement UX-wise.

So in the end, I had to move to nfs on top of drbd to provide shared backend storage. Enumerating 20K files over NFS still isn't fast but completes within 2 seconds instead of more than 5 minutes.

Of course, now that we're talking about GlusterFS, I wonder whether this has been fixed since?

<comment><USER10> Couldn't your FTP server have handled this in a clever way? For example, sort in directories by first letter, then by first two letters. While still providing a virtual flat view to the FTP client user. It'd be a simple mapping away.

<comment><USER9> You assume I wanted to write an FTP server.

I don't. I am using stock vsftp with a PAM module that allows authentication against our web application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm not sure what is announced here. Gluster FS is for few years already (version 3.6 now), while the article doesn't mention that there is started any managed service based on it. It is more like reminder that you can set up distributed file system on your cloud servers using Gluster. Not even any step-by-step tutorial how to do that.

<comment><USER12> > Google Cloud Platform and Red Hat are proud to announce the availability of > Red Hat Gluster Storage on Google Compute Engine.

Gluster is available not announcing that this is a new technology.

<comment><USER11> How this availability will be implemented then? I can install it now, so it is already available for me. Will they provide a service like Amazon Elastic File System? Or there will be some pre-configured images?

<comment><USER13> On AWS you get pre-configured AMIs, I suppose it's similar.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Basically, GlusterFS is trying to solve a hard problem: make distributed/remote filesystem to feel like a local filesystem for applications built on top of it. For the client, you can choose from NFS, SMB or its homemake fuse client, which makes the remote system accessible as if everything is on local file system. I used to build similar systems in house and find it extremely painful to design and maintain, we did lots of custom hacks to make our system to suit our need. GlusterFS, as a general solution, won't have that much flexibility and may or may not suit your custom needs.

Overall, I feel AWS S3 is a better (or at least simpler) approach. Just acknowledge that files are not locally stored and use them as is. AWS is experimenting EFS as well, which we found not as desirable as well.

Edit: I am not saying that you cannot make GlusterFS or EFS perform great. My appoint it that it's hard to do so, and might not worth the effort to develop such a system given that S3 can serve most needs of distributed file storage.

<comment><USER15> aren't you comparing apples to oranges? S3 is an object store (and non POSIX.. Also only eventually consistent).. GlusterFS is neither of those. They simply solve different problem spaces

<comment><USER16> Parent is saying that it might be simpler for many applications to forgo the need for a file system abstraction and just use S3's more limited API directly. That way, you don't get bit by thorny edge cases like "ls" of 10K files taking orders of magnitude more time than you'd expect give you're used to the speed of a local disk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Red Hat announcement: [http://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat- unveil...](http://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-unveils- flexible-and-portable-cloud-storage-red-hat-gluster-storage-google-cloud- platform)

</comment><comment><USER18> I needed a shared volume across multiple EC2 instances in a VPC. My use case is that multiple "ingress" boxes write files to the shared volume, and then a single "worker" box processes those files. This is a somewhat unusual use case in that it means one box is responsible for 99% of IO heavy operations, and the other boxes are responsible only for writing to the volume, with no latency requirements.

My solution was to mount an EBS on the "worker box," along with an NFS server. Each "ingress box" runs an NFS client that connects to the server via its internal VPC IP address, and mounts the NFS volume to a local directory. It works wonderfully. In three months of running this setup, I've had no downtime or issues, not even minor ones. Granted I don't need any kind of extreme I/O performance, so I haven't measured it, but this system took less than an hour to setup and fit my needs perfectly.

<comment><USER19> Amazon now has an NFS service (in preview release) called EFS: [https://aws.amazon.com/efs/](https://aws.amazon.com/efs/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Gluster is not for the faint of heart, but as far as distributed filesystems go it's probably the easiest to set up and deal with.

We've been using it in production for a few years now and having a single namespace that can basically grow ad infinitum has been pretty neat.

If you want a trouble free Gluster experience stay away from MANY small files and replicated volumes.

</comment><comment><USER21> It's a bit light for a press release. Considering RedHat is officially promoting AWS on their website, providing more information to let people know whether the offering on Google Cloud will be better or similar would have been better.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, it seems to be missing the "click here for next steps / further information" bit, which is less than optimal. :(

<comment><USER22> Disclaimer: I work on GCP Yup, we goofed. Here's the next step bits: [https://cloud.google.com/solutions/filers-on-compute- engine](https://cloud.google.com/solutions/filers-on-compute-engine)

<comment><USER3> Ugh. So it's literally still RH Gluster, needing manual setup.

Also, there's a sentence on the end of the GlusterFS section there saying:

"If you want to deploy a Red Hat Gluster Storage cluster on Compute Engine, see this white paper for instructions on how to provision a multi-node cluster that includes cross-zone and cross-region replication:"

Apart from the typo (pedant alert!), the URL on "white paper" goes to a non- public document only Red Hat subscribers have access to. That should probably be that fixed, so non-Red-Hat-subscribers can read the doc and know what they'll need to do up front.

If people need to subscribe to RH in order to get that info... just to know what they need to do... that's probably going to hinder adoption. Potentially by a lot. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Before reading the article, I was going to ask if it solves the "high read access of many small files" I/O problem, but alas, it's on GlusterFS, so only insomuch as Gluster has been making improvements these last few minor releases.

Is anyone here running a GlusterFS setup with high read/write volume on small files successfully? If so, what's your secret?

</comment><comment><USER24> If you are looking for a POSIX compatible file system for GCE or EC2, we think our ObjectiveFS[1] is the easiest way to get started and use. It is a log structured filesystem using GCS or S3 for backend storage and with a ZFS like interface to manage your filesystems.

[1] [https://objectivefs.com](https://objectivefs.com)

</comment><comment><USER25> Glad to see Gluster is still making waves. I was an early customer. It's impressive when a brand survives acquisition much less a transition into a new type of offering like this. Kudos to everyone who helped make Gluster special!

</comment><comment><USER26> I wonder why they even did this. They already have a state of the art distributed filesystem (Colossus) which doesn't have any scalability problems at all, since they use it for everything.

[http://www.highlyscalablesystems.com/3202/colossus- successor...](http://www.highlyscalablesystems.com/3202/colossus-successor-to- google-file-system-gfs/)

<comment><USER27> Can you mount Colossus? Does it have POSIX semantics?

<comment><USER26> I'm sure this could be retrofitted even if it does not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> you can see why google is such a good marketing company. None of the links in the article is not to their own products.

So, here is the link to the star of the show: [https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/storage/gluster](https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/storage/gluster)

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm wondering if there exist better (simpler) solutions than GlusterFS for the case where files are strictly write-once.

</comment><comment><USER30> GlusterFS is basically synonymous with pain. Use at your own peril.

</comment><comment><USER31> nice

</comment><comment><USER32> pricing?

<comment><USER22> Disclaimer: I work on GCP. GlusterFS works best on RHEL, and consumes normal GCP resources like GCE and PD-SSD storage. To host a rocking fast, best practices, HA, 3TB all-SSD filer, it'd be less than $900 on GCP: [https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=e76e9a5a-bf...](https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=e76e9a5a-bf21-4ccd-9cab-5590c77394db)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I see that the GlusterFS FAQ says it is fully POSIX compliant. That's a pretty good trick. Ten years ago or so I had a suite of compliance tests I would use to embarrass salesmen from iBrix and Panasas. The only actually POSIX- compliant distributed filesystem I could find in those days was Lustre (unrelated to Gluster, despite the naming). Lustre works well but it almost impossible to install and operate.

<comment><USER34> In HPC/HTC, Lustre is very common, especially in DOE labs. I've never tried to install it, but I don't think my colleagues who have are some kind of special genius.

<comment><USER30> Most HPC labs run distributions that go to quite a lot of pain to ensure Lustre works well.

The issue with Lustre is that it usually requires kernel patches if you are not running the aforementioned distributions that are designed for HPC. Specifically the Lustre OSD used a modified version of ext2 among other issues.

That could be getting better now with the new ZFS based OSD though I wouldn't put money on it being "easy" to install.

Lustre also doesn't provide any means of replication. If you want to achieve HA with Lustre you need to make each OSD individually HA. This can be done with multi-pathed SAS arrays and a ton of scripting but it's still not exactly a walk in the park.

Hopefully one day we will see a real high performance distributed filesystem that also bundles replication, tiering and some semblance of POSIX compatiblity. I doubt Ceph is going to be it so we are probably still 5-10 years from a solution to the problem.

<comment><USER34> Well most HPC installation I know are just running RHEL6/7 (except for NERSC which is using Cray linux based on SUSE still I think?) which I wouldn't peg as particularly exotic. The HA thing is know, typically Lustre is just a piece of the file system, along with local disks and GPFS (and now towards Ceph), and HPSS/tape (which can be a tier of GPFS).

I'm not so sure the hope for "one filesystem to rule them all" will ever really work out, but Ceph is the best positioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> File storage in 2016? Why not just use S3? If file storage even a problem anymore?

<comment><USER36> Anytime you use the word "just", you're sweeping a huge number of assumptions under the rug.

For example, what if you have to run code that depends on a POSIX interface? That "just" becomes a massive rewrite project.</comment></comment>


Tesla, the Triple-WTF Chart of the Year - <AUTHOR> https://wolfstreet.com/2020/08/31/tesla-the-triple-wtf-chart-of-the-year-just-put-your-brain-on-tesla-autopilot-and-believe-in-it/ <comment><AUTHOR> I think this puts the recent growth into perspective:

> _In the second quarter, Tesla's total revenues were $6 billion, down by 5.8% > from Q2 last year. Today, its value rose by $8 billion per hour. Over the > past four quarters, Tesla's total revenues were $26 billion. Today, its > value rose by $64 billion._

<comment><USER2> A hypergrowth company thats not growing</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Most ergonomic setup (chair and computer)? - <AUTHOR> What is your preferred chair at home/office? PLease share photo if possible or details that others can find helpful. The purpose of this ASK HN is to get a nice chair to avoid back pain and wrist problems. <comment><AUTHOR> Here is various photos from Google Search? Which one do you guys prefer?: [https://www.google.com/search?q=ergonomic+chair+and+computer...](https://www.google.com/search?q=ergonomic+chair+and+computer&qscrl=1&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=2EIiU4nZDsqU2QWMzoDgBg&ved=0CAkQ_AUoAQ&biw=1560&bih=979)</comment>


Indian version of SOPA type lockdown? - <AUTHOR> http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/we-can-block-websites-delhi-high-court-warns-facebook-and-google-166383

<comment><USER2> This appeared in a newspaper as well, it was ultimately dismissed as political figures trying to cover up articles that portrayed them in a bad light, nothing to worry about as the government has no intention of doing anything like what China has done.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Its interesting to see though how governments are trying their best to suppress the Internet: the vehicle of transparent information.

Of course Internet is the inevitable. So the old guards would fight to stop it... but for how long?</comment>


Ask HN: I think I hate programming, but love technology. What should I do? - <AUTHOR> I currently have a job programming and I'm starting to realize that I just have no interest in it. Does anyone here have experience transitioning from programming to something new? <comment><USER2> Consider some of these:

customer service, project management, marketing, social media, product testing, content creation

I transitioned from Web developer tasks gradually to more content and people tasks over the years.</comment>


Kill the password - Italian style - <AUTHOR> http://beta.neoeyed.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hello, We are aiming to create a solution that will make you access websites easier, faster and safer and we would like to have some feedback from you.

Today registering to a website is something that you do very often and each time you should use a different and complex password to select access credentials. Most people use always the same combination or very simple password, unfortunately the number of hacking attacks are increasing and has become very easy for someone stealing your information and all of your data, moreover, recent attacks are revealing that even complex password are become more and more simple to hack leaving the users no chance to protect in the near future. Moreover, today a person is supposed to deal with at least 100 passwords in his life, how much time is spent to secure and type them? The problem is that until we don't replace the username/password mechanism, users will be more and more careless adopting unsafe methods to generate, store or remind their credentials.

Do you feel this problem is actual? Do you think that websites will become more secure in the future even adopting username/password mechanisms? Do you feel safe enough with your password? Do you think you're becomeing careless? Do you feel like losing time on login, typing, remembering, storing password? How many password do you have? Do you use the same for all the logins? How much time you dedicate to typing username/password? Do you use other password reminder tool/filler? What do you think they lack?

Our product is currently in beta and we are testing the user to improve our interface to deliver you the best solution you can. Do you think you'd be interested in test the soution?

Thank you very much for your time.</comment>


Google Announces Venture Group - <AUTHOR> http://www.siliconangle.com/ver2/?p=3668 Google announces venture group. My Angle: I am curious to see how Google structures their fund. How entrepreneur friendly will they be? Will they be a strategic investor (translation: driven by internal priorities) verses financial profit motive? <comment><USER2> Seems to me their 'innovation' machine stopped working long time ago. It was expected though, after all those acquisitions. In reality, I haven't seen anything 'new', but just 'better'. This could be their way to go through the downturn..

As for us, we've applied at YC, but when I weigh it out, it's not the money that we really need, but guidance. Real costs of doing a startup, in the beginning, cant be a lot more than 100€ per month. If they are, you are simply not an entrepreneur...</comment>


Young people don't want construction jobs - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/young-people-dont-want-construction-jobs-thats-a-problem-for-the-housing-market-1533029401 <comment><USER2> Wow, the entire article doesn't mention once what the average wage for entry- level construction workers is. That's probably a huge part of the puzzle -- to omit that seems almost intentionally misleading, or at least bad journalism.

Also, construction is a job that's notoriously hard on your body. You can't count on being able to do it into your 60s like office work, and one bad accident can end your career in construction (or just flat out end you). And the work itself is hard. Pay needs to be higher than other jobs to compensate for this. I know I'd rather be, say, a Starbucks barista than a construction worker, even if the latter paid a little bit more.

<comment><USER3> Seems like $14.07.

[https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Construction_Labore...](https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Construction_Laborer/Hourly_Rate/42fc8d3e/Entry- Level)

Even "Construction Worker" doesn't bring it up much ($14.75), which means there's nothing in that career directly.

[https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Construction_Worker...](https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Construction_Worker/Hourly_Rate)

The next step in that career is to be a manager or foreman. The Foreman only gets $22.36. ($38k/yr)

[https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Construction_Forema...](https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Construction_Foreman/Hourly_Rate)

What does a college grad make? $50k/yr.

[http://time.com/money/collection-post/3829776/heres-what- the...](http://time.com/money/collection-post/3829776/heres-what-the-average- grad-makes-right-out-of-college/)

Carpenter, handyman and general contractor do better than construction.

[https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Industry=Home_Renovatio...](https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Industry=Home_Renovation/Hourly_Rate)

So yeah, I'm not surprised that people aren't excited about a career in construction.

<comment><USER4> Depends on the market you're in and what you can do.

> A crane operator in New York City earns $82.15 an hour in base pay and > benefits, according to the Engineer News-Record, a trade publication. That's > well's above the $66 an hour he would earn in Chicago or the $39 an hour in > Washington, D.C.

> But the real reason New York crane operators and other operating engineers > earn such big salaries is overtime and benefits. A relief crane operator > working 56 hours of overtime per week for 52 weeks will earn $332,667 in > overtime and $159,053 in overtime benefits at the World Trade Center. As a > worker's salaries go up, so do the amounts employers must kick in for > annuities and pensions.

[https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303936704576399...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702303936704576399563008284024)

<comment><USER5> Thats unions, but such thing also reduces the amount of housing and construction you can make.

<comment><USER6> If it can't be built with labor compensated by living wages, it probably doesn't need to be built all that bad...

<comment><USER5> Say the homeless and the 30 year-olds living with their parents and the unemployed or workers earning less than unionized workers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What's the endgame for construction workers? Everyone can't move into management. Many people's bodies can't handle that kind of manual labor for 40 years, and even if they could construction jobs tend to be insecure.

If you want people to make those trade offs you have to pay more.

This kind of rhetoric from companies drives me nuts. They push to remove regulations, but when the free market says they have to pay more for labor, suddenly it's not the free market driving up wages, it's a worker shortage. Now we need the government to step in and fix it. You see it most obviously with tech companies pushing for STEM in public schools and the push for more H-1Bs.

<comment><USER8> The end game used to be wealthy retirement because it paid extremely well. And on a side note people's bodies _can_ and do handle that kind of manual labour for 40+ years. Not all of course, some get hurt, some are not cut out for it, but go to any manual work site and you will see older people in their 50's and 60's still in excellent physical shape doing it and younger people doing the really hard shitty jobs since time immemorial.

<comment><USER7> >older people in their 50's and 60's

I edited "most people" to "many people" because I really don't have the numbers.

From anecdotal experience from friends and family, I'd think most people won't make it through 40 years of hard manual labor without injury. For every 60 year old you see on a job site, we don't know how many of their peers have stopped working construction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'd love to work construction. But every time I've mentioned it to my family they tell me about how it will destroy my knees and back, I'll lose fingers, get hearing damage, head injuries, and the pay is crap compared to the risk.

If there was decent workplace safety (my hometown is infamous for it's poor safety standards), and a good pension program where you're expected to want to quit and do something else after 10 years or so, before your body is ruined, then I'd be all about it.

<comment><USER10> This is a big reason why unions were created in the first place. Create safer working conditions, and make it possible for people who wear their bodies out can retire.

<comment><USER11> But what if I want to retire with a healthy body not a crippled one?

<comment><USER12> Then you choose not to perform manual labor. In an ideal situation, the market will pay people a premium for choosing to sacrifice their bodies, assuming everyone is competing on a level playing field and you don't have a huge supply of undereducated workers from another country who have no other options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Many of these news stories about labour shortages could alternatively be summarized as "Company expects perpetual huge profits and people to continue to work for next to nothing"

</comment><comment><USER13> These types of jobs eventually burn out your body.

You used to be able to buy a house and grow a family on these wages, and eventually retire. With that no longer being the case, why would anyone with choice choose this option?

<comment><USER14> My dad did these jobs his whole life. He's in still in better shape than I've ever been and has a union pension better than anything any company has ever offered me.

So.

<comment><USER15> That's the point. You couldn't get the same deal as he got, because the industry has changed to be more worker-hostile since your father started.

No company in your industry has ever offered you anything like his union pension, because no companies in any industry (excepting maybe railroads?) offer anything like his union pension. They all stopped doing it some time between him and you.

The young people of today can't go back in time to when your dad was the same age. They have to take the jobs that are offered now. And the companies of now have worked very hard to bust the union influence of the past, so that they can offer crap pay and crap benefits, and shovel most of the risks of working the job onto the worker.

Young people are taking one look at that, and deciding to not even take one step down that career path. All this tells me is that young people are not as stupid as companies assumed them to be. The companies offering jobs that don't balance remuneration with worker risk then have to rely on workers with lower expectations, which is to say immigrants from countries with lower quality-of- life norms. They don't look at the work by judging the job in relation to other jobs in the US, but by comparing it to a similar job in their country of origin, and finding that it is X% better. Then the political scene changes, those workers start to dry up, and the companies are screwed--or, more accurately, hoist on their own petards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've been wondering about the long term sustainability of the rise of service jobs in the developed world. If you can work in finance, law, medicine, or tech that's great. Those are all high skill, high paying jobs. Unfortunately, most people aren't cut out for them, largely due to genetic and environmental factors that they have no control over. So what is the rest of the workforce supposed to do? Work in restaurants and other low-skill, low-paying service jobs?

That doesn't seem sustainable long term. I worry that by losing goods- producing jobs like manufacturing and construction we are creating a long-term problem where people who can't produce high value services end up living an impoverished life. To some extent you could address this problem by making immigration easier which would help create more low-labor cost, goods- producing jobs, which would in-turn lead to more low-skill service jobs.

</comment><comment><USER6> > generally well-paid [1]

Three seconds on google suggests that they make <40k in my area, typically. That's definitely _not_ well paid, especially for a job that's fickle and physically demanding. Hell, that's barely above minimum wage (I'm in a $15/hr area, minimum wage is $32k) - I can get an office job tomorrow paying close to the same with basically no effort.

As usual, whenever someone blames labor for labor shortages, just look at the wages. If you pay less than a waiter earns with tips while demanding more out of your workers, don't expect people to be lining up at the door. Same goes for farm labor. Same goes for teachers. Same goes for truckers. And so on.

[1] - taken from the Non-WSJ alternative in the comments below

<comment><USER2> Good point about the employment being fickle. Construction workers get screwed in pretty much every recession, the previous one being particularly bad. The only negative that happened to me in 2008 was we didn't get an annual bonus. The average construction worker saw much reduced hours over a period spanning years, or lost their job entirely. There was a huge outflow from the construction sector during that recession, disproportionately large compared to almost every other employment sector.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Non-WSJ Alternative (seems to be an affiliated summary): [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/young-people-are- shunning-...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/young-people-are-shunning- construction-jobsand-its-hurting-the-housing-market-2018-07-31)

</comment><comment> crooked-v So pay them more.

<comment><USER5> There isnt a market for that: increased wages would increase house prices and the developer estimates he cant sell the house.

If land were cheaper you would see rising wages.

<comment><USER2> If there isn't a market for it then there isn't a shortage of labor -- the correct equilibrium point has been found. And yet, they're claiming a shortage. They want to eat their cake and have it too.

<comment><AUTHOR> And this is how you cause an economy to collapse, by raising inflation.

The market doesn't know what's good for it. It's only interest is the immediate short term.

<comment><USER18> Inflation provides an incentive to not hoard cash. As long as it's under control, it's not a bad thing.

<comment><USER5> If I tell you im burning your wallet at the end of the day, will your spending be better or worse?

We can test this :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I love all these "Young people don't want $job_type any more". And then go on to talk about how the jobs don't pay enough, or aren't attracting talent because it's not interesting.

Over the past couple of decades the percentage of young people getting degrees has swelled, we've been encouraging everyone to get a degree. Did we expect people to remain in low paying jobs when they can do something else? Those student loans payments aren't making themselves.

<comment><USER20> Why don't young people want to take difficult and dangerous jobs for 1.5x minimum wage? I can't figure it out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The funny thing is, growing up, construction is awe-inspiring.

In my last position, I worked across the street from where they were putting up two buildings. We'd gawk over how brave they must be to be up that high on the rafters.

<comment><USER2> Same. I always love looking at buildings in various stages of construction. I designed and built a shed from scratch five years ago and it was highly enjoyable (and of course a lot of hard work). Just the amount of research to figure out how to do everything properly really satisfies that "geeking out on a new hobby" urge.

I think people underestimate how bad the whole "being outside during all four seasons" aspect of these jobs is, though. Most other jobs are indoors, whether they're highly skilled (e.g. SWE) or not (e.g. fry cook).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This seems to me primarily about the wages versus cost of living in the places where construction demand is high. I would also point to this as a death spiral for a housing bubble.

The article mentions labor commuting from Sacramento to SF where the wages are higher, thus driving up prices in Sacramento due to lack of supply. That kind of domino effect eventually makes it so SF can't get labor because the labor has shifted to live 90' outside of Sacramento and commute there instead. At some point wages do have to go up, driving up costs further in a vicious cycle.

I don't know when but I believe another broad housing market collapse is coming.

</comment><comment><USER23> The market will decide!

</comment><comment><USER24> Drywall rotting on the trucks, for lack of people to hang it.

</comment><comment><USER25> Why would they? You've spent the last 30 years telling them not to do those jobs, devaluing them with globalization and de-unionizing them to make sure those jobs don't create any kind of sustainable lifestyle for the people that do them. Someone on HN a while back gave some good advice: whenever you see "people won't do X job", append in your mind the qualifier "for Y underpaid salary/benefits package".

<comment><USER26> On point. You want people just give then good salaryies, benefits, and career growth.

<comment><USER27> I know a few people in construction, they started working for someone by fixing doors, do painting etc. until they learned enough to find their own clients. It's easier than you think to find a friend who needs something to get fixed and get more clients from there by doing local advertising or even door to door knocking to check if people need some fixes. These people I know now hire their own workers (and still work themselves too) and make more than many college graduates I know.

Not saying anyone who gets into construction makes millions but there definitely is a path for growth and good pay is possible. It is however not a glamorous job, you need to get your hand dirty and work with some unhealthy products you need to protect yourself from (as much as you can at least...). It's a tough job but it does pay well. I personally wouldn't do it because of the physical aspect but financially it is definitely interesting.

<comment><USER28> > It's easier than you think to find a friend who needs something to get fixed > and get more clients from there by doing local advertising or even door to > door knocking to check if people need some fixes.

And... treat it like a business. Show up on time. Answer your phone/text/emails. If you need to cancel, give notice.

I'm continually flummoxed at how generally bad service industries are in many areas. We had one guy cutting our lawn. BEST EVER. Younger kid - showed up on time, notified ahead when he was coming, would notify if he couldn't make it re: weather delays, then would give us updated time/date. Even more "professional" than professional services we've used. We had one good year, then "I'm going to college, and can't do this any more". He could probably earn more expanding out his operation than he will from whatever college degree he will get. :(

<comment><USER12> At what cost might he earn more money? He loses socioeconomic status by being a landscaper, so his value in the dating market drops. He sacrifices health by being out in the sun all the time, inhaling fuel, increased risk of injury from driving around everywhere. Maybe he can have his own business someday, and have others do the work, but is he wise to play those odds if he also has a decent chance at becoming a doctor/lawyer/engineer/trader/banker?

<comment><USER28> Nothing saying he couldn't hire more people now. There's (imo) an unmet need for quality service providers. Maybe it's just local to my area, and everyone else is doing great(?)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Young people already can't afford houses so it seems like a self regulating problem.

</comment><comment><USER30> All they have to do is offer 300k a year and unlimited PTO. Ez.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why not bring labor on demand from South Asia or Africa.

</comment><comment><USER32> 3D printing construction tech should be a great way to offset this. Also great for space explorations.

<comment><USER33> Scaling 3D printers to the size and cost require for usefulness is an interesting idea. Otherwise, you're talking about a Lego house.

<comment><USER34> 16 House 3D Printers Available in 2018

[https://www.aniwaa.com/house-3d-printer- construction/](https://www.aniwaa.com/house-3d-printer-construction/)</comment></comment></comment>


CS50 Fair - <AUTHOR> https://live.cs50.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is a live stream of Harvard / Yale computer science students final projects. Begins in 30 minutes. Previous years are at: [https://fair.cs50.net/](https://fair.cs50.net/)</comment>


Which comes first, the product or the marketing? - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/02/which-comes-first-the-product-or-the-marketing.html <comment><USER2> I think that Seth is trying to say that there are important parts of marketing, such as market research, needs analysis, product definition, etc etc that he thinks should be done before the development of a product. It would have been nice if he had said so explicitly in his blog - he has a lot of readers that aren't trained in marketing.

Personally I'm dubious - Apple certainly never does marketing before product development. Even just looking at what happens in the company where I work, I notice that the innovations that really open up new markets and new revenue for us always come from the developpers. The marketing group just aren't aware enough of the technical limitations and opportunities that are out there - they either push for products that just can't be done with current tech, or they simply follow what their competitors are doing.

Of course, in a company that does marketing properly, which to my mind means including experienced engineers in the team, you could probably get some pretty good results - it's just that I've never worked in a company that does that.

<comment><USER3> Apple is an interesting example and I can see why you think that, but I think Apple does do marketing before they make the product. I don't have an inside source at Apple, but I am sure they are taking feedback from current products as well as researching competition when they are deciding what to make next.

I think they are constantly trying to listen to their customers, and then wow. Sometimes they even try and show customers what they really want even when they haven't asked for it. That is why I think they are successful. They do their research to find out the real problem and not just the symptom of the problem.

Some might not call that marketing but I do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Making something that isn't binary into a binary discussion is a great way to start controversy but it isn't very productive.

The truth is: Products Evolve, and marketing (which is a product in and of itself) evolves right along.

Marketing is nowadays seen as 'ramming stuff people don't need down their throat', whereas it used to mean to build a lasting relationship with your current and future customers.

Spending money on marketing a product that nobody needs or wants to me is wasted effort, but that's probably an idealistic point of view.

Still, it seems to me that marketing good products is an evolutionary process, where both the marketing and the product continue to evolve in lockstep.

Case in point: Sony Walkman -> product came first, then the marketing, subsequently we entered the digital age and now everybody and their brother is buying Ipods and other digital mp3 players.

There is an unbroken chain between the product development for the walkman (portable personal audio), initially tailoired to a single individuals needs all the way to the current generation of flash based personal audio products.

That same chain exists between the marketing efforts that have gone into all personal audio products.

</comment><comment><USER5> Seth, the marketer says: "If someone comes to you with a 'great' product that just needs some marketing, the game is probably already over."

The hacker says: "If someone comes to you with a 'great' marketing plan that just needs a product, the game is probably already over."

Can we stop taking entire disciplines for granted, and acknowledge the fact that all ventures need to focus on both these aspects? (to varying degrees, of course)

<comment><USER6> There's an element of truth to what Seth said. Sometimes a great product is too early -- it won't be able to achieve product/market fit until years later. But the untruth in what Seth said is that sometimes you can't understand the market for a product until you put the product out there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There hasn't been a Godin on the front page for a while, and even though this isn't the greatest thing he's written, this is the kind of post I could read every week or two from him. Thanks bdfh42, and thanks to everyone who has passed on the last several dozen posts from SG.

</comment><comment><USER8> _As Jon points out, the Prius was developed after the marketing thinking was done. Jones Soda, too. In fact, just about every successful product or service is the result of smart marketing thinking first, followed by a great product that makes the marketing story come true._

Ok, so yeah, lets call a spade a spade, he's talking about positioning.

Actively marketing your product is fine, but you still actually need to have a product or you may position yourself out of the market as Vaporware.

Exhibit A) Duke Nukem Forever.

I rest my case.

</comment><comment><USER9> You can't analyse a market that doesn't exist yet.

</comment><comment><USER10> To "Which comes first, the product or the marketing?"

I answer: Yes.

</comment><comment><USER11> I suppose if there is no market it does not matter how great the product is. Take the laser disc. It was pretty cool, but it just never really penetrated the market. So maybe one does not have to "begin marketing" before developing, but one at least needs to research the market enough to make sure there is a market for the product being developed.</comment>