Mapping the World - <AUTHOR> http://nerds.airbnb.com/mapping-world/

<comment><USER2> Looks nice, but I am disappointed they choose Google Maps over OpenStreetMap for this :)

<comment><USER3> As far as I can tell, they're only using Google Maps for the display layer, the actual polygons are entirely theirs.

<comment><USER4> If you draw polygons based on what you see on Google Maps (or any other copyrighted map), your polygons might be found to be a derived work of the original Google Map.

Otherwise, you could just trace all the roads on Google Maps to make your own $BLAH Maps, that's obviously not legal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm surprised they didn't even mention openstreetmap. I know airbnb is a for profit company but most likely neighborhoods and oceans are already mapped. (Europe is particularly well mapped)

<comment><USER3> OSM's convoluted licensing might expose them to the "risk" of having to contribute back their contributions though, plus (if they try to keep in sync) run the risk of others' changes running roughshod over their finely tuned model. This way they retain full control.

<comment><USER6> It doesn't seem that they will have to contribute them back, just possibly, use the same license (which is possibly equivalent/just as bad):

 _> You are free to copy, distribute, transmit and adapt our data, as long as you credit OpenStreetMap and its contributors. If you alter or build upon our data, you may distribute the result only under the same licence. The full legal code explains your rights and responsibilities._

[http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright](http://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright)

Although IANAL, and it's not clear to me if rendering an independent set of data on top of the unchanged OSM data layer (i.e. effectively render two maps, on with some transparent sections) counts as building on top of the OSM database. So maybe they wouldn't even need to use the ODbL for their own data.

<comment><USER4> _it 's not clear to me if rendering an independent set of data on top of the unchanged OSM data layer (i.e. effectively render two maps, on with some transparent sections) counts as building on top of the OSM database_

If you render _OSM data_ with a unique map style, and produce an image, then you have made a "Produced Work" and you only have to attribute OSM, and nothing else. You can make it so people can't copy it if you'd like.

If you make a new database by combing OSM with something else, that new DB is ODbL.

Just showing something on top of OSM doesn't mean it's derived from OSM.

[http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ](http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Legal_FAQ)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Love it. I hope they're able to publish the data. If only parts of it are generated using Google Maps data (see the 'create' feature in the screenshots) then they wouldn't because it's derived work.

Here is Flickr equivalent [http://code.flickr.net/2008/10/30/the-shape-of- alpha/](http://code.flickr.net/2008/10/30/the-shape-of-alpha/) (downloadable). Foursquare also does similar work.

[edit: sorry, I thought Airbnb was analyzing listing data to find the extends of neighborhoods. They don't seem to do that.]

<comment><USER8> Zillow provides free neighborhood creative-commons boundaries btw: [http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/neighborhood- boundaries.htm](http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/neighborhood-boundaries.htm)

<comment><USER9> Has this data made its way into OSM yet?

<comment><USER4> It looks like it's distributed under a CC-BY-SA licence. OSM actually changed from CC-BY-SA licence to ODbL because it didn't look like that CC licence is suitable for geo databases like OSM ( read more: [http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/We_Are_Changing_Th...](http://www.osmfoundation.org/wiki/License/We_Are_Changing_The_License) ).

It would have to be relicenced (which I presume would not be a problem since ODbL is spiritually very similar to CC-BY-SA). But as maxerikson mentions it's not clear that it should be in OSM

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nothing particularly special, every travel startup has some internal DB/toolset to (re)create proper geoschema.

Front-end tooling is pretty nice, though; I believe content editors' productivity using AT-AT is much higher than using some of the tools I've written :)

</comment><comment><USER11> >When you're exploring new places to experience, Airbnb Neighborhoods combines local editorial content with the handy, need-to-know information alongside professional photos to explore a place without having to leave your chair.

I see a conflict here. How can you explore a place without leaving your chair? (pun-intended)

</comment><comment><USER12> How about before all this NLP mumbo jumbo they do something useful like simply let users sort by price, like every other hotel site. Or, you know, fix the rampant bugs.</comment>


The Guardian's Summary of Julian Assange's Interview Was Completely False - <AUTHOR> https://theintercept.com/2016/12/29/the-guardians-summary-of-julian-assanges-interview-went-viral-and-was-completely-false/ <comment><USER2> Thanks for posting this, it confirms indirectly how the "fake news" issue is not limited to social media or bloggers or whatever, but it includes also the professionals. I am surprised that The Guardian did not do something more incisive than publishing the IMHO "lame" and "partial" retraction.

<comment><USER3> Jacob's should have whatever the journalist equivalent of being hung, drawn and quartered. Public full apology, him fired, investigation launched into how the fuck it got as far as it did, when a cursory fact check would have immediately destroyed his credibility.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unbelievable how far the mainstream media has fallen. Wapo's false russian hacking grids and now this.

Im glad, we have the intercept to call out these institutions who want decide what is fake news when they are pumping it out themselves.

</comment><comment><USER5> this whole devolution of journalism at least has made me realize that i can't in any way pretend to have an informed opinion about whats going on outside my daily life

it was a comforting illusion while it lasted. what do we have left? a groundless postmodern solipsism?

i used to be quite comfortable thinking that assange and wikileaks had a complicated moral position that could be both praised and damned simultaneously. now, i don't even have that.

</comment><comment><USER6> I'm not a fan of Greenwald's style, and didn't enjoy his articles praising Jeremy Corbyn but once again he showed the importance of a balanced media. Where do we go for real news?

<comment><USER7> Unfortunately you can't. However, when was the last time you were genuinely affected by breaking "news" that you read or watched on television? I've learned that if I read 3-day old news, a lot of junk tends to be weeded out. But then again, will so much partisan in news it's all become entertainment and ad revenue more than research and facts.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Trackr.sh – A Minimalistic Bookmarking Service - <AUTHOR> https://trackr.sh/ <comment><AUTHOR> The goal of trackr.sh is to allow you to bookmark interesting information, allow you to quickly find that information at a later time, and just stay out of your face in all other cases.

We feature archiving so you never loose that interesting piece of content you bookmarked and have integrations with Twitter and Reddit.

I would love to get your feedback on this and we are very open to feature requests so we can make trackr.sh a better product!

</comment><comment><USER2> Signed up, waiting for activation email.

Question: Why build this? there are a hundreds of tools, how do you plan to be different?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for signing up!

Why build it? Because I think we can do a better job and provide a different experience (hopefully better) than competing services. Just because similar services exist is no reason not to build something. Otherwise there would be very little to do in this world :-)

<comment><USER3> How do you plan to be different/better than pinboard.in, for example?

<comment><AUTHOR> One thing I want to get right is reliable archiving of bookmarks [0], a modern minimalistic UX with first class mobile support and we include an RSS reader that integrates seamlessly into the bookmarking functionality.

I'm still working out the details but I want to make trackr a first stop for managing your content: bookmarks and feeds.

[0] If I can believe other users this is something that pinboard has actually gotten worse at lately.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is iMessage spoofing like this possible? - <AUTHOR> I saw this on twitter: https://twitter.com/chloe_lamyia/status/1194453574010454017?s=12<p>The tweet indicates that iMessages were spoofed to appear to come from a known contact, and attempted to lure someone outside of their home. To what extent is this possible? <comment><USER2> The person's icloud account was hacked. Pretty simple explanation.</comment>


Facebook co-founder says the 1 percent should give cash to working people - <AUTHOR> https://www.recode.net/2018/3/14/17117892/chris-hughes-fair-shot-book-guaranteed-income-one-percent-money-ubi-kara-swisher-decode-podcast <comment><USER2> No, they should be left free to do what they want. Because that's the principle by which people such as Elon Musk have the resources necessary to revolutionize transportation, internet service (they are working on geosynchronous satellites that promise to provide fast, affordable internet access), space travel, etc.

Do I really need to explain how the introduction of things such as the Hyperloop, electric cars, a global wireless internet service, backing up humanity on Mars provides a benefit to everyone, including "working people?"

How about the overview effect? By making it much cheaper to access space with BFR, more people will experience this. And that might reduce the level of support for war and other calamitous behavior: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_effect)

And yes, I know people will tell you that all of the above is only affordable by wealthy people. But that's not how technology works. Early adopters (rich tech people) pay lots, offsetting R&D costs, and each successive wave of the technology is cheaper, faster, better. For example, the original iPhone was expensive. But lots of people have iPhones today, each of which is far more capable than the original model.</comment>


Xerox Alto Restoration Part 5 [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wr7vDZpniNI&feature=youtu.be <comment><USER2> Logic analyzers connected to pins on a CPU. You don't see that much any more. The connections they're looking at are inside the chip today. Of course, now we often have JTAG access to the innards.

<comment><AUTHOR> Let me emphasize that there's no CPU chip in the Alto - the CPU is made up of dozens of TTL chips on three different boards. We're tracing the individual microcode instructions that the Alto is running. As Animats points out, this would be deep inside a modern chip.

<comment><USER3> There's a brilliant talk, given in 2009 at HOPE09, NYC titled "Indistinguishable From Magic: Manufacturing Modern Computer Chips".

At roughly 36 minutes, there's a cross-section of a (in 2009) modern chip. The topmost layer is the shiny rainbowy topmost metal-layer you see on typical (from the top) die photographs. The very, very small comb-looking bottommost- layer is the individual transistors, and structures there are of the size that give a "xxx nm" process its name.

[https://youtu.be/NGFhc8R_uO4?t=36m8s](https://youtu.be/NGFhc8R_uO4?t=36m8s)

I very much recommend everyone to watch this video, to get a sense for the complexity that goes into producing a modern CPU.

To come back to the thread I'm answering here: The logic analyzer on the Alto (probing microcode) connected to interconnects of individual gates probably would be connected to signals somewhere in the lower middle of the stack in a modern CPU, I guess.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What I'm personally afraid of is that, due to the bad power supply which was repaired in restoration part 1, the wrong voltage was applied to one of the power pins of several boards full of DRAM chips, and this may have fried the entire lot of them.

If the Alto2 has 128KiW of dram, and the drams used are old tms4108 chips(I'm not actually sure about this, they may be even older), and there are 18 or 19 bits of ram per word (16 bits plus 3 parity/ECC? Again, not sure.), then there could be as many as 304 chips to replace (or at the very least, to pull and test each one and replace the bad ones).

Fortunately, if they used triple-voltage (5v, 12v, -5v) 4108 or 4116 drams, you can replace those chips with the 5v-only 4164 chip by bending 2 pins upward on the 4164 and soldering a wire to another pin. This isn't "period accurate" but should work to replace a few bad chips until working ICs can be found.

See [http://picmania.garcia- cuervo.net/recursos/redpicdatasheets/...](http://picmania.garcia- cuervo.net/recursos/redpicdatasheets/memorias_ram/4116_to_4164.htm)

LN

<comment><AUTHOR> We tested and repaired the power supplies _before_ powering up the circuit boards, to make sure we didn't fry anything.

Each of the four boards has 80 memory chips. These are 4116 DRAM chips, each holding 16 kilobits. Each board holds 128K 10-bit-wide "chunks". Data is stored as 32 bits + 8 bits (actually 7) of Hamming error correction and parity.

<comment><USER4> The issue is not when _you_ powered up the machine and the ram boards, its more whoever powered them up _before you got the machine_.

That power supply may have failed decades ago. Was the machine known working when it was last powered up?

Is there any way you could build a rig to test each 4116 chip, or a rig you could plug each board into which would supply proper voltages (in the correct bring-up and bring-down order, because 4116 drams are weird like that) for the dram, and do a pattern test on the entire board all at once?

Personally I don't like 4116 drams at all because they're very unreliable. (4164s are far superior in this regard.) See the PARC notes on bitsavers re: the notetaker project, the notetaker test systems were frequently out of commission due to failed 4116 dram chips, or running with one or more chips dead and the ECC constantly correcting the errors.

LN

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Where's the text writeup? The previous 4 parts had one.

<comment><AUTHOR> As with the previous parts, the text writeup will be a few days after the video. I'm not as fast at writing as Marc is with video editing :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Very cool.

</comment><comment><USER7> [The [http://youtu.be](http://youtu.be) submissions are autokilled. Remember to submit the [http://youtube.com](http://youtube.com) variant next time.]

<comment><USER8> Was the shortener used for spam submissions at some point?</comment></comment>


Use U+200B to evade Twitter's DM malware flagging - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/jed/7345401

<comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr: URLs with all periods prepended by a zero-width space evade Twitter DM malware detection, but are still recognized (and clickable) by Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Twitter's own client.

        javascript:prompt(0,location.href.replace(/\./g,"\u200b."))._</comment>


Being "almost ready" means you're not - <AUTHOR> http://behindthescenes.midtownrow.com/being-almost-ready-means-youre-not

<comment><USER2> More reasons why it is important to do a "soft launch" first. If PR is the reason, then I can think ways of easily spinning that most popular being "We are in Beta this week and our official launch is next week".

</comment><comment><USER3> I almost agree.</comment>


High School Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Formal Schooling - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9M4tdMsg3ts

<comment><AUTHOR> Text of the speech: [http://americaviaerica.blogspot.com/2010/07/coxsackie- athens...](http://americaviaerica.blogspot.com/2010/07/coxsackie-athens- valedictorian-speech.html)</comment>


Should I attempt to gain app development skills in 6 months? - <AUTHOR>

I am in the early stages of developing (what I envisage to be) a multi-sided platform startup. At this stage I envisage it being based on a phone app. I think that the app would need:
 - user profile functionality like linkedin
 - geo-location functionality like tinder
 - bidding and payment functionality, perhaps like ebay
My question is, given my background, is it worth trying to gain app development skills over the next 6 months sufficient to do early minimum viable product iterations (I could probably spend 10-20 hours per month)? Or should I try to partner with a real developer (would be in Berlin). I have an idea that I would like to show some proof of traction to a potential partner to try to attract high quality candidates.
My background: relatively minimal formal training in programming (a couple of courses at university). Quantitative analysis programming (MATLAB) during physics/maths undergraduate studies (5 years). 2.5 years C++/Python programming running LHC simulations. A further 1.5 years Python programming modelling supply chains in my present job. I would consider myself to be fairly confident in developing object oriented programmes in Python (C++ experience was >5 years ago now, but could probably pick it back up).  I am fairly confident of ability to hack solutions by google-searching.
If you think it is worth giving it a go, what courses and languages would you recommend, given my objective (sufficient to do early minimum viable product iterations. i.e. I guess that the product wouldn't have to be super-efficient or super polished).
I am also a bit uncertain about what backend development I would need for such early iterations so any advice/reading on that would also be appreciated.
Thankful for any advice. Apologies if I have left out any important information. <comment><USER2> Marketplaces are incredibly difficult to pull off successfully. What I recommend is to find a way to add value to one side of the equation (most likely for the sellers), and build up a sufficiently compelling argument for them that you can become profitable simply as a SaaS business for them. And then, when you have traction on that side of the equation, add your consumer biz.

And it's always useful to know how to write code.</comment>


Why Murdoch's overpriced WSJ iPad subscription may be a stroke of genius - <AUTHOR> http://monetizethis.info/post/520055554/counterintuitive-why-murdochs-over-priced-wall-street

<comment><USER2> Interesting theory, though I disagree that WSJ will be able to increase revenue with a premium CPM as they'll have less eyeballs, so it probably all events out in the end.

I suspect the author is correct that WSJ figured, they may as well see what happens with a high price point, as it is easier to lower your price later than it is to raise it, and they likely benefit strongly by having a large amount of the user base NOT subscribe via the Apple environment, but rather use Apple as a sales channel at a premium while providing a web subscription server the broader market.

</comment><comment><USER3> It would be helpful to know how much the iPad subscription costs in relation to the print ($120/yr)* and web ($103/yr)* subscriptions. I don't have or plan on installing iTunes so looking at the AppStore is not exactly feasible. I read $3.99/wk ($207.78/yr) from some other article found on Google for the iPad subscription.

* Prices probably vary greatly.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some good first credit card options for someone new in US? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Secured card from a credit union, wait 6 months, get an Amex charge card (any color), wait 6 months, move on to other cards.</comment>


Rising Above I.Q. - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/opinion/07kristof.html

<comment><USER3> This article is both is both fallacious and intellectualy dishonest.

 _Richard Nisbett cites each of these groups in his superb recent book, "Intelligence and How to Get It." Dr. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, argues that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics._

Nisbett actually writes, "The evidence of the adoption studies indicate that postnatal environmental factors - biological and social ones combined - probably outweigh the genetic ones" (p. 79). On another page, "The environmentalist camp estimates heritability to be .50 or less... And I agree with these scientists - in fact I suspect heritability may be even lower than .5" (p 21)

In both quotes Nisbetts uses couched language to suggest that heritability may be lower than .50. Kristof then morphs this this into, "owes little or nothing to genetics." That's a lot different than what Nisbett said.

And of course, Nisbett is a member of the environmentalist camp. Kristof fails to acknowledge that many others who have studied the evidence strongly disagree with Nisbett's conclusions.

 _"I think the evidence is very good that there is no genetic contribution to the black-white difference on I.Q.," he said,_

I read Nisbett's case. Personally I found it much less convincing than articles that have suggested some genetic contribution: ( <http://www.slate.com/id/2178122/entry/2178123/> , <http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2007/02/race-iq-and-ses.php> , and <http://members.cox.net/bvv/h2b.html> )

 _As for Jews, some not-very-rigorous studies have found modestly above- average I.Q. for Ashkenazi Jews, though not for Sephardic Jews._

Again, this also supports the case for genetics. Harpending and Cochran argue that the selection for Ashkenazi intelligence occurred from 1000 AD to 1800 AD, long after they separated from the Sephardic Jews. Read the book "The Ten Thousand Year Explosion" to learn more: [http://www.amazon.com/000-Year- Explosion-Civilization-Accele...](http://www.amazon.com/000-Year-Explosion- Civilization-Accelerated/dp/0465002218)

 _One large study followed a group of Chinese-Americans who initially did slightly worse on the verbal portion of I.Q. tests than other Americans and the same on math portions. But beginning in grade school, the Chinese outperformed their peers, apparently because they worked harder._

Cross group studies that use early-childhood comparisons can mislead, because different rates of development can alter IQ measurements. For instance, if group A on average will have a lower adult IQ, but a faster rate of childhood development, the children of group A may have an equal or higher IQ than average at a young age.

It's also noticeable that in twin studies environmental differences matter much more at an early age, and then gradually disappear over time: "Another way to demonstrate the vanishing nature of the shared environment is to look at non-twin siblings. When reared together, their IQ correlation is 0.49 in adulthood. When reared apart, their IQs correlate at 0.24 as children, but this rises to 0.49 in adulthood. Unrelated children, reared together (adopted) correlate at 0.25 in childhood and 0.01 in adulthood." <http://members.cox.net/bvv/h2b.html>

_It's that the most decisive weapons in the war on poverty aren't transfer payments but education, education, education._

Since 1930 government spending on education has risen from 1.5% of GDP to 6% of GDP. That equates to an extra $6,000 per household spent on education. Today 40% of Americans are either in school or working for the education industry. Yet despite this incredible increase in education, measurements of both vocabulary and numeracy have been flat ( <http://www.miller- mccune.com/article/349> ).

So even if IQ could be improved through the environment, the policy implication that we should spend more on education does not follow.

What evidence does Kristoff present that spending more on education will make a difference? What dramatic change does he propose to actually make education work as advertised?

 _One study found that a child of professionals (disproportionately white) has heard about 30 million words spoken by age 3; a black child raised on welfare has heard only 10 million words, leaving that child at a disadvantage in school._

I hear this study cited more and more. The education establishment needs a new explanation to help account for the continued failure of education spending. Why hasn't spending $800 billion a year on education made a whit of difference in vocab? Well, because we forgot the tots! Perhaps if we increase spending to $1 trillion a year so that we can give toddlers 8 hours a day of vocab immersion, the dream of true equality - as envisioned by authors like Aldous Huxley - will finally be achieved.

 _The next step is intensive early childhood programs, followed by improved elementary and high schools, and programs to defray college costs._

I jested in the previous paragraph, but there is a real tragedy here. Six thousand dollars per family is no joke. If differences in achievement stem mostly from genetics, than education spending is really a transfer of wealth from hard working carpenters, machinists, engineers, etc to high IQ teachers and administrators. Thus increasing schooling even more will not wipe out the academic achievement gap, but it will widen the income gap between college grads and the laboring class. After the gap widens more, people like Kristof will then use this as evidence that we are not spending enough on education. This cycle has been in place for 80 years, and it is rotten to the core.

</comment><comment><USER4> The way to rise above IQ is to stop thinking about oneself and stop being so competitive. This parochial attitude leads to depression and failure.

The truest, most promising motivation for mastering a field or a craft lies in the _beauty of the craft itself_. Beauty is the greatest stimulus for creativity and imagination. It makes all things gentle and easy. Technical competence follows as the night the day.

<comment><USER5> Interestingly, my impression is that this is exactly the strategy that Asian- Americans _don't_ use.

While I completely agree on your argument, I don't see many people driven by the beauty fo the craft itself. My guess is that competition and shortcuts are simply much more effective in quickly reaching success.

The sad fact might be that it is perfectly possible to master a field or craft without a passion for the subject. Simply because passion is not competitively passable.

<comment><USER6> I don't mean to pick on you personally, but the fact that you responded to that rather profound comment with a borderline racial slur is indicative of what's wrong with this thread and this entire class of conversation and article. It makes me want to walk on the other side of the street.

Edit: I guess I should be more careful in putting this. I like frankness and don't believe in imposing ideological rules on discourse. But I also observe that discussions around this stuff tend to be of low quality. Your comment struck me as a nice example because the first sentence seemed nasty and jarring and the rest of the comment was just fine.

<comment><USER5> With "Asian-American" I meant international students temporarily studying abroad, NOT Americans of Asian descent. I see no racism when referring to the first group, since the Chinese education system (I'm only familiar with the Chinese and Thai education system) is too a much larger extent composed around pure memorization of either language or math.

I'm very sorry if what I posted came out as racial slur. It was not my intention, since I certainly do not identify myself even remotely with that kind of arguments.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Did anyone notice the tricky wording when he talked about race?

"Asian-Americans are renowned...for ruining grade curves in schools across the land...

As for Jews...a quarter of Jewish adults in the United States have earned a graduate degree, compared with 6 percent of the population as a whole.

West Indian blacks,...are one-third more likely to graduate from college than _African-Americans_ as a whole..."

So Asians and Jews outperform all Americans, while West Indian Blacks only outperform American Blacks (but presumably not Americans in aggregate [1])? This hardly seems like evidence against racial differences in intelligence/achievement.

(Note: I don't have a strong opinion on racial IQ differences, just pointing out the tricky wording in the article. Unfortunately, the science on that topic tends to be written mostly by activists on both sides, and is fairly untrustworthy.)

[1] I assume that if West Indian blacks outperformed Americans, Kristoff would have mentioned it (as he did with Asians and Jews).

<comment><USER8> _So Asians and Jews outperform all Americans, while West Indian Blacks only outperform American Blacks (but presumably not Americans in aggregate)? This hardly seems like evidence against racial differences in intelligence/achievement._

He doesn't say there aren't racial differences in intelligence. He is saying that irrespective of any actual differences in intelligence, some groups do better than others purely due to cultural norms.

It's along the lines of genius being "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". The point put forward is that any natural variations in the inspiration part are dwarfed by sufficient application of the perspiration part.

<comment><USER7> He does try to imply (without actually stating) that there are small/no racial differences in intelligence. He first debunks a straw man ("success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect") and then quotes someone claiming that intelligence is malleable and non-genetic.

But lets ignore that. Going from his examples, cultural norms can help some blacks outperform other blacks. But it doesn't actually allow blacks to outperform whites. If his examples are representative, the natural variations of the "inspiration" part are actually similar in size to the "perspiration" part of the equation.

<comment><USER8> _Going from his examples, cultural norms can help some blacks outperform other blacks. But it doesn't actually allow blacks to outperform whites. If his examples are representative, the natural variations of the "inspiration" part are actually similar in size to the "perspiration" part of the equation._

Actually it is not possible to prove or disprove that from the data presented (which is not data at all), but one can envisage data that is consistent with his position. For the sake of argument, say Asian-American kids study 20 hours a week, Caucasian kids study 10 hours a week, West Indian origin black kids study 5 hours a week, and African American kids study 3 hours a week. Then both his statements would be correct - performance is related to study hours, not innate talent, and West Indian kids would outperform other black kids but not white kids.

[Of course we are grossly oversiplifying, the suggestion is that wider cultural norms such like intactness of families are the contributor, not just study hours].

I don't know whether he is right or not, but it's not possible to decide he is wrong by the fact that are included just in that article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> _These three groups may help debunk the myth of success as a simple product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories._

I must have missed something. Couldn't he just as easily have said "These three groups may help confirm the fact that success is a product of intrinsic intellect, for they represent three different races and histories, with different average levels of intellect, which strongly correlate with their outcomes."

<comment><USER10> Yeah, I took this article as a great case study on how different people can look at the exact same data and draw totally opposite conclusions. Almost exactly the same example is used in The Bell Curve to argue that intelligence is innate, because Ashkenazi Jews and Asian-Americans tend to have higher IQs than whites, while West Indians tend to have higher IQs than Africans.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> After reading that column, read "Logical Fallacies used to dismiss the evidence on intelligence testing" by Linda S. Gottfredson. It's available here: [http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009fallacies....](http://www.udel.edu/educ/gottfredson/reprints/2009fallacies.pdf)

Now, go back and re-read the New York Times piece.

How many fallacies did you notice?

<comment><USER12> The point of the article isn't that IQ differences don't exist. Only that on average how hard you work is much more important than how smart you are in achieving success. At least in the measures used in the article - <USER2> degrees and income.

From the article:

"In any case, he says, the evidence is overwhelming that what is distinctive about these three groups is not innate advantage but rather a tendency to get the most out of the firepower they have."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> " _Richard Nisbett cites each of these groups in his superb recent book, "Intelligence and How to Get It." Dr. Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, argues that what we think of as intelligence is quite malleable and owes little or nothing to genetics._ "

Stephen Pinker argued very persuasively in _The Blank Slate_ that this is not the case. Brains are malleable to some degree, but genetics are still very important. One of the more convincing pieces of evidence is the similarities in the abilities of twins raised in separate families. He recounted case studies in which identical twins who had never even met each other both had the same proffession, favorite hobby and even shared odd habits, such as wearing a rubber band around their wrists

More bluntly, if intelligence "owes little or nothing to genetics", why is it that children acquire an understand of the language spoken in their home while house pets do not?

As Chomsky's discovery of universal grammar implies, humans already have a great deal of what we need for language processing built into our brains from birth.

<comment><USER14> Psychologists love twin studies, but they're mostly worthless. The unstated assumption is always "A twin study holds genetics constant while randomizing the environment".

Of course the families of two identical twins are far from independent variables. They're both made of the kinds of people who would adopt a child in the same city at the same point in time. You haven't managed to separate the variables at all!

<comment><USER7> You can measure that effect quite easily just by comparing to a control group of random pairs of adoptees (from the same orphanage/etc as the twins).

Any environmental correlations between twins should also be present between random adoptee pairs.

<comment><USER14> Why? The twins who were adopted were of the exact same race, gender, age, and appearance at the moment of adoption. People aren't just given a random child when they adopt, they choose. So you still haven't untangled selection effects entirely.

<comment><USER7> The only one of those factors that can't be controlled for very easily is appearance at the moment of adoption.

       def random_twin_like_pair(children):
            x = random(children)
            y = random([c for c in children if (c.race, c.age, c.gender) == (x.race, x.age, x.gender)])
            return (x,y)

<comment><USER14> At which point you're down to n of 1-2 per group, because separated-at-birth twin studies commonly contain no more then 30-40 pairs of twins, and your study is fatally flawed.

I'm not saying twin studies _couldn't_ be done well, I'm saying in practice most real twin studies are not large enough or well designed enough to actually control for those outcomes. There just aren't enough identical twins separated at birth to allow it to be done well.

(That's not to mention further issues like womb environment, which further muddy the issue and are very important)

Here's a summary of what's wrong with twin studies in general: <http://drbeetle.homestead.com/twins.html>

<comment><USER7> You don't need to restrict to demographic cross sections. You can take a set of 30-40 twins (of all demographics) and compare them to a set of N>40 randomly selected twin-like pairs (of all demographics). As long as your twins and twin-like pairs have the same demographic mix, you have an adequate sample.

This sample will average out demographic variation, but the twin-induced correlations are controlled for.

Womb environment can be controlled for by comparing identical to fraternal twins.

It may be the case that most twin studies are performed badly. I'm just pointing out that most of the issues you raise are not a real problem for anyone who understands basic statistics (admittedly, this may exclude most psychologists).

<comment><USER14> Yes, I generally agree that it would be _theoretically possible_ to do a separated at birth identical twin study. In practice, the requirements are so stringent that they've never (to my knowledge) been met.

The setup you describe could indeed separate genetic/genetic+environment feedback component from the purely environmental component. Albeit with caveats:

\- Identical twins given up for adoption and then separated at birth are probably not drawn at random from the population.

\- You can't draw any conclusions at all about which genetic variance is causing the issue, unless you restrict the demographic cross sections. So it can't possibly give you evidence that one race has a higher average IQ, for example.

\- The conclusions you draw may be much more about environmental feedback than genetics - maybe with a different environment, the differences will go away. For example, maybe you've found genes that code for susceptibility to iodine deficiency, and your society hasn't discovered iodized salt yet. In that case it's hard to say that you've determined the degree to which intelligence is "genetic" except in the most general sense.

In practice, locating identical twins separated at birth is _hard_. Finding a representative sample of them across demographic mix is harder. Doing it again for fraternal twins to control for womb environment makes it yet more work. I'm not sure how you control for the fact that the identical twins who are given up and then separated at birth are probably a different population from random adoptees, but I don't doubt with sufficient cleverness it could be done. The problem is that real twin studies almost always fail to control all these factors, and failing to control even one factor dooms your entire experiment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Mainstream commentary on the IQ debate is worthless. The vast majority are too innumerate to understand statistical concepts used in gathering the data in the first place.

<comment><USER16> And those who believe they are "above" the vast majority are too arrogant to discuss the issue rationally. Simply, if you believe that IQ measures intelligence, you lose 80 IQ points.

<comment><USER3> _Simply, if you believe that IQ measures intelligence, you lose 80 IQ points._

Your comment is a self-negating insult. If IQ does not measure intelligence, than saying "you lose 80 points" is not derisive.

<comment><USER17> Or, it's an especially clever insult, since it'll only matter to those he insults.

<comment><USER16> I thought it was clever and funny, but that doesn't justify it. Clearly I offended people here and for that I apologize.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> So, why do people care so much about IQ in the first place? If it determines your success, then it doesn't matter what you do, you might as well learn what you are passionate about. If it doesn't, then you should learn what you are passionate about since that'll raise your IQ...

The real issue is that people think success is a determiner of human worth. So, if people are inherently less capable of being successful than others, they think they are inherently less of a human. The IQ debate is really a debate about what determines human worth.

<comment><USER3> Politics. The political left is the faction of academia. As institutions, the universities and the teachers unions wish to reallocate money to education spending [1]. To do so, they must simultaneously get people to believe two things: 1) that scholastic achievement is extremely important and 2) that everyone can achieve any scholastic goal. Conversely, those on the right wish to debunk #2 so that politicians will stop reallocating money to academia, and instead allocate it to their favored causes.

Scholastic achievement is closely related to tested IQ. The SAT is a not-so- thinly veiled IQ test. Every American is taught by the educational establishment that both scholastic achievement and the SAT are very important to our future. For the first twenty-two years of our life, we get graded continuously on scholastics, but rarely on character. In all, we are raised to be obsessed about IQ, and we are caught in the midst of a political battle where trillions of dollars are at stake.

[1] Note - I do not impute cynical intent to the actual individuals comprising the educational institutions. Institutions promote themselves via selection effects. True believers who believe what's good for Harvard is good for the country will fill the ranks of Harvard and enter leadership positions. Cynics will find jobs elsewhere. Thus an institution will fill with people who sincerely believe in promoting the institution, whether or not the institution actually is doing any good. Thus the actions of an institution as a whole can be self-serving at the harm of the whole, while the individuals comprising it are sincere. Other institutions besides academia have the same effect, see for instance, the 16th Century Catholic Church.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Reminds me of the rice paddy chapter in the Outliers, and to me they are equally not very scientific.</comment>


Bill Joy - "EMACS costs hundreds of dollars?" Did I miss something? - <AUTHOR> http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~kirkenda/joy84.html <comment><USER3> Pretty sure he speaks of Unipress Emacs. A little history:

Richard M. Stallman wrote the original Editor MACroS for the TECO editor.

James A. Gosling implemented Emacs in C as a stand-alone editor, sometimes called "Gosmacs", and distributed it freely with no copyright notice. Gosmacs had an extention language called Mocklisp, which wasn't really a Lisp (it had no lists) but appeared similar.

RMS used Gosmacs to get started on GNU Emacs, which featured a "real" Lisp (close to Maclisp).

JAG sold the rights to Gosmacs to Unipress, who renamed it Unipress Emacs, sold it commercially, and stopped distribution of gosmacs and derivatives (like GNU Emacs).

Presumably it was around this time the interview with Bill Joy occurred.

RMS rewrote the part of GNU Emacs that was derived Gosmacs, mostly the display code. One could guess that this experience is part of why the GNU project insists on signed copyright assignment or release forms for key utilities.

<comment><USER4> The dates match. The interview is from 1984, which was after the formerly free-beer Gosmacs had gone commercial ("hundreds of dollars... did I miss something?" --- yes, Gosling's deal), but before the first public release of GNU Emacs in 1985, per jwz's timeline here:

<http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> In the early days, the FSF sold magtapes with GNU software on them - <USER2> charge wasn't for the IP, it was for the material and labor required to copy the tape(s).

See [http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/16/gnu_bulletin_28.h...](http://web.cecs.pdx.edu/~trent/gnu/bull/16/gnu_bulletin_28.html) for a sample FSF order form from June 1993.

<comment><USER6> This is from 1984. He's talking about Unipress Emacs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> There are some awesome snippets in there that really helps put in perspective how nice we have it today to build/distribute/use software.

"Page fault, and the computer makes a phone call. Direct broadcast or audio disk - that's the technology to do that. It's half a gigabyte - and you get 100 kilobyte data rate or a megabyte or something. I don't remember. You can then carry around with you all the software you need. You can get random data through some communications link. It is very like Dick Tracy."

<comment><USER8> Another bit that leapt out for me is his discussion of displays. He's talking about flatscreen color displays, about 15-20 years before they really become commonplace.

My favorite is the end, where he talks about how belief and momentum influence the investment into different technologies. Makes you wonder what technologies have been "coming soon" for the last decade, but are just waiting for someone to come in and spend the required amount to pull them off.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "And then the source code got scrunched and I didn't have a complete listing."

"If that scrunch had not happened, vi would have multiple windows, and I might have put in some programmability - but I don't know."

"I actually used [be] to edit itself and scrunched the source code - sort of old home day, because we used to do that all the time."

What does Bill mean by the word "scrunch" here? Is this some jargon lost to the ages?

<comment><USER10> From context, I'd guess that "scrunched" means trashed/junked/lost/broken. As in, "And then the source code got trashed and I didn't have a complete listing."

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> There was also a commercial version, Unipress EMACS.

<comment><USER12> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gosling_Emacs>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> unipress emacs : 395$ / 1983Q2

<http://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html>

</comment><comment><USER14> [1984]</comment>


My travels in white America – a land of anxiety, division and pockets of pain - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/nov/06/my-travels-in-white-america-a-land-of-anxiety-division-and-pockets-of-pain <comment><USER2> From the article: "Increasingly, for many white Americans, their racial privilege resides not in positive benefits of work and security but in the sole fact that it could be worse – they could be black or Latino. In other words, their whiteness is all they have left."

<comment><USER3> I've never been a believer in "racial privilege", however I think having the economic rug torn out from under white America has been instrumental in the meteoric rise of white advocacy and identity groups in the past few years.

Middle-class America has been the big loser in the push for freer, more liberal trade since the end of the Cold War. This is exemplified in the so- called "elephant curve", a measure of income distribution that strikingly illustrates the stagnation of the (predominately white) middle class since the era of globalisation: [https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/hottest-chart- economics...](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/hottest-chart-economics- means)

Lower percentiles, which have been historically "browner", are seeing tremendous gains thanks to a freer global market. This is the wonder of capitalism and how it has begun to level a playing field which was rigged, particularly in the pre-1964 American South. This newfound power "correction" may create the illusion that public policy favours ethnic minorities over a white majority, because the demographic which has not seen progress since 1991 or so is predominately white.

Therefore, progress is seen not as a function of merit, but as a function of what demographic curries the most special favours from government regardless of merit. Therefore, the rallying cry of the alt-right is for whites to vote in aggressive defence of white rights exclusively, and with callous disregard for the concerns of any other demographic. Because if _they_ are seemingly doing it, and seemingly winning, you must be a sucker for not doing it yourself.

All the while the notion of "equal before the law", a inscription carved within stone on the front of the Supreme Court, disappears in the wind of tribal identity and the elevation of the lowest X over the most qualified Y.

<comment><USER4> > the demographic which has not seen progress since 1991 or so is > predominately white

I think "demographic" is the key - how much deviation is in that group?

Does a poor white care that "on average" his demographic is doing well, because of all the rich whites? Who decides how to carve up society?</comment></comment></comment>


We Wasted $50K on Google Ads So You Don't Have To (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiehackers.com/article/we-wasted-50k-on-google-ads-so-you-dont-have-to-355a425b27 <comment><USER3> Left a comment on the IndieHackers page. Keeping a copy here for those who aren't reading the comments section. I have noticed this a lot in various websites I have helped in ad campaigns. Their biggest problem is their landing page. Just like this article uses lots of jargons to explain simple concepts, their landing page reflects the same. For those of you wanting to know more about landing page optimization just watch Isaac Rudansky's excellent videos on Udemy. One of the most important rules is the 5 second test. Show your landing page to your colleagues/friends/family depending on your target audience. If they can't understand what your business proposition is in 5 seconds you have failed landing page optimization. As simple as that.

The comment I posted on the IndieHackers page:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>

The landing page is too complex. Like what does "Full stack adaptive delivery" even mean? I am sure 90% of your paid visitors are just bouncing because that landing page tagline is alien to them. Dumb it down. Make it simple.

Surprisingly, the description in the Indiehackers page makes so much more sense than the one you put up: "File-system-as-a-service that does uploads, storage, and media processing for Web and mobile apps, so you can ship products faster and scale them painlessly"

If you told me that the first time I would have understood your value proposition. Don't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except for what is popular. There are too many jargons already. Don't complicate it further.

Instead of "Full stack adaptive delivery" just try: "File-system-as-service". Instead of "Serve ultimate UX with better images on any website. One script to rule them all." just have: "Ship products faster with better images on any website". That's it. You will get 50+% higher conversion rates with just this one change.

<comment><USER4> > _Don 't get too fancy with your taglines. People don't have time to > understand what you are saying. People don't like fancy terminologies except > for what is popular._

It's worse than that. And it's my pet peeve about many startup landing pages these days. It's not like people don't have time to understand - _there 's nothing there to understand_! "Full stack adaptive delivery" is a near- meaningless phrase. It can be construed to mean just about anything. It would fit just as well on a logistics company page, or on a sticker on the side of an ICBM.

I wish people would just say what they actually do.

<comment><USER5> I do recruiting consulting and it blows my mind how every time I ask a startup how they differentiate from other startups and what specific advantages they want me to discuss, they give me a bunch of meaningless phrases. Its like founders are being taught a different language that they think provides value but makes no fucking sense.

<comment><USER4> I'd love to know where they learn that.

In my university years, I used to invent such ridiculously overblown phrases for simple things I did, as a form of mockery of corporate culture and my general pastime. But at some point I did realize that these phrases are _hashing functions_ \- like the ones you use in a hash table to put objects into buckets. So for a particular thing I do, say "adding colors to terminal applications", I could invent a bunch of nonsense phrases - "enriching the user experience of advanced software", or "delivering visual artistry to professional digital media" or whatnot. It was fun going in this direction, and we'd have a good laugh - but a person seeing just the output could never arrive at my original input, "adding colors to CLI apps". It was one of infinitely many things I could hash under the same phrase, and they could never know which one I did.

So in my eyes, if you're trying to explain something to someone, then using these phrases is essentially equivalent to taking MD5 of what you wanted to say and pasting that hash.

<comment><USER6> "We find null and empty values in your tables and Excel files and prompt your users to fix them" sounds like a 10 dollar idea. How are you going to get employees and investors to really jump on board with that.

"We revolutionize Enterprise Data Quality with next generation AI in the cloud" sounds better to employees, investors, and in some cases buyers

<comment><USER7> So you're saying that there's a lot of con artists out there? No surprise really lol.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Op had some good tactics but an ass backwards strategy. Should have let the agency do the thing they where paid to do.

> Lesson #1: Test and trim keywords sets before hiring an agency to scale > things

This isn't how agencies work. You did the keyword research and testing yourself and then paid some one else to do it again.

I work in an agency, I won't work with you if you do this, because you will get the same results and blame me.

> Lesson #2: Focus on page quality and CTR when doing paid tests

Nope don't do this. When testing ads you should focus on the ads you are testing.

Make as many as you can, test, review and reduce to the winning ads then repeat. When you have found the ads with good CTR it's time to start working on page quality (making your page relevant to the ad).

> Lesson #3: Stick to keywords that you have landing pages and content for

Again no don't do this, write ads to test your keywords build pages for the ads that work, not the other way around this isn't SEO.

> Lesson #4: Don't assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid

Different ads target customers at different stages of the buying journey, ads don't dump to the top of your funnel they dump to landing pages designed to convert that demographic.

> Lesson #5: Analytics will save (some of) your bacon > Lesson #6: Revisit > your awareness ladder often to validate and update it

Winner winner chicken dinner, some good advice.

<comment><USER9> _> Lesson #1: Test and trim keywords sets before hiring an agency to scale things

This isn't how agencies work. You did the keyword research and testing yourself and then paid some one else to do it again._

Unless I misunderstand you, you misunderstood them. They are saying that they _didn 't_ test and trim first and paid a lot of money to the agency that they didn't need to. They _should_ have started with a smaller set.

 _> Lesson #4: Don't assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid

Different ads target customers at different stages of the buying journey, ads don't dump to the top of your funnel they dump to landing pages designed to convert that demographic._

So do organic searches. The initial Google hypothesis was that if someone was searching they would be interested in buying, and showing them an ad right then would be optimal because they are interested in buying (or else they wouldn't click it).

The idea that conversion is better with organic than ad does indeed seem to falsify that hypothesis. But maybe not. There could be click-fraud involved, too, which can dramatically drop the conversion rate.

<comment><USER8> The first point I was being too hard on them.

The agency will add 20% on the spend because they can get better results than the client doing keyword research, writing ads and testing them.

The client did the hard work for the agency basically made the campaign themselves and then paid the agency 20% to set it live.

They should have done it the other way around get the agency to setup the campaign and then "scale" it themselves and they would have been able to an extra 20% ad spend for nothing.

The second point you are right again. I mean more that the funnel should start at the point of contact with the end user (the ad) and the landing page should be built for that ad, they seem to have tried to do it the other way around.

They obviously know what they are doing as far as tactics, it looks like they learned it from SEO, but I think they have tried to apply an SEO strategy of content first to their ad campaign and it didn't work.

You can't change advertising channels so you need to change your content to fit the channel not the other way around.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is such impressive blather that I'm now convinced I know nothing at all about modern sales and marketing.

It may as well have been written by an ancient alien civilization for all I understood.

Probably we'll hear something very like this when SETI receives a signal from another star system.

<comment><USER10> >>> Thanks to developers' trust in our core infrastructure and their recommendations, we're fortunate to have a constant and growing inbound flow of leads and net negative churn, meaning the value of usage-driven upgrades outweighs the loss in revenue from subscription cancellations.

I'm glad they clarified what "net negative churn" means, that really cleared things up.

<comment><USER11> They are getting more new customers (edit: others have pointed out it also includes increased revenue from existing customers), thanks primarily to personal recommendations (word of mouth), than they are losing customers.

<comment><USER10> You sir, should have written the article.

<comment><USER12> Except that this rewritten version is not correct!

They aren't necessarily getting more new customers than old customers cancelling, but the combination of revenue from new customers and added revenue from upgrades from existing customers is more than the revenue lost from customers who cancel.

Which, btw, is exactly what they say, using standard industry terms, and it's not ambiguous. It just wasn't written for you, that's all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > CTR is the most important component of Quality Score

this is because that's how google gets paid.

you can create a great ad that's not terribly relevant to a specific audience, get good ctr but poor conversion.

some tips:

make sure to watch your search query reports and continuously refine your [hopefully shared] carefully-applied negative keywords lists.

avoid broad match like the plague. we use mostly phrase and modified broad with good negative phrase lists that have been continously honed over many months.

don't hyper-segment keyword or ad variations, it'll become a nightmare to manage with little-to-no benefit.

also, whether paid ads are worth it is highly dependent on your market, competitors, and your typical conversion value.

because our typical orders exceed $500, we see double-digit factor returns on ad spend even though we're an established, well-known mfg name in our market.

and yes, be ready to waste some money when dialing things in - $50k in a month of pure waste is quite a lot but that same amount "wasted" on tweaking over the course of 6mo-1yr is not out of the ballpark, assuming it yields progressively increasing ROI.

YMMV

<comment><USER14> While Google may be paid per click, the value of that click (how much companies are willing to pay), is directly dependent on their conversion rates. So Google is incentivized to get you the most converting clicks as possible.

<comment><USER13> i think it's safe to say that the incentives are not _exactly_ aligned.

if i was google, i would make sure that the ctr was as high as possible while the conversion rate was just enough to be worth it.

there are a lot of fine-grained controls missing from the adwords backend which waste money. for example, you cannot segment iphones from android, or forcibly exclude ie11 because you have chosen not to support it any more and the site falls apart on it. you cannot prevent ads from showing to visitors who've already come and bounced. they keep expanding how much "modified broad" sucks in by making the matching looser - with little notice. and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

lots of things that can easily save _you_ money do not exist in their backend. imo these are not oversights but are left out intentionally.

<comment><USER13> ok, i guess there is a way to target to specific mobile devices:

[https://support.google.com/google- ads/answer/7101715?hl=en](https://support.google.com/google- ads/answer/7101715?hl=en)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Interesting...

> "...a customer acquisition cost way above one-third of customer lifetime > value"

Is this really so terrible? As I understand it a lot of mobile games pay more for acquisition than they'll make from the user in e.g. IAP's to scale up their player base and climb the charts. What is a normal CPA vs LTV in the SaaS space?

Also, if you pay less to acquire these customers than you will make from them over time, you haven't quite _wasted_ 50k have you?

<comment><USER16> Climbing the charts with a mobile game has the potential for activating a virtuous cycle with eCPMs for advertising as a parallel benefit to player acquisition. The acquisition and eCPMs can feed the cycle and self-sustain for a while. That's how the Voodoo and Ketchapp's of the world create their arbitrage markets that keep their throwaway hyper casual games dominant in the top of the charts. They've effectively gamed and broken the charts that way, reaping enormous benefits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> "Lesson #3: Stick to keywords that you have landing pages and content for"

This sounds self-evident but we all know sales people who sell a fiction and then engineering has to scramble to (try to) turn it into reality.

<comment><USER18> A product could already have the engineering bits in place but without a landing page calling out that very feature or usecase, sending traffic to a mismatched page is a diservice.

People click an ad to learn more, if they are presented with a specific use- case but land on a generic marketing page they will click the back button.

<comment><USER19> And yet the company is paying for all those pointless clicks. Hopefully they'll consider "misleading ads" as a possible reason for a low conversion rate.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> There is a winter coming for the online ad model when more people realize, as this author has, that most online ad spend was probably a total waste.

That combined with the increasing crackdown by the consumer on blocking data tracking raises serious questions on the long term viability of the business models of some big players in the industry.

<comment><USER21> I'm in adtech and godddamn, I can't wait for the industry to wean itself off user tracking, shaking and crying like a heroin addict.

For years myself and other engineers have been warning the product owners that third party user tracking's life span is very much finite - Firefox was going to block 3rd party cookies by default several years back, but walked it back because Google weren't ready for that and threatened to withdraw the money Mozilla makes from them, but it was the sign of the end times.

Now that Google can identify you with reasonable probability without using cookies, they won't hold Firefox back, they don't need to, and it suits them to roll out the third party blocking in Chromium, alongside browser cache partitioning to avoid the classic circumventions - ETags, steganographed PNGs etc. as first implemented by Safari. UA strings, often used in fingerprinting, are also not long for this world.

And of course, now that Google has a solution that doesn't require cookies or fingerprinting, Chrome is all about that privacy lol - the fact that it hurts Google's competitors is merely happy circumstance.

The amount of panic in adtech companies now is hilarious because they chose to mimic an ostrich until the browsers left them no choice - but they're still flailing around and demanding devs try to find alternatives to 3rd party cookies.

The cookie based user tracking paradigm is dead, but there's a shit ton of people, especially in DSPs and DMPs whose salary relies on them not believing that.

<comment><USER22> I understand how ETag works foe tracking, but can you point me in the direction to learn more about steganographed PNGs?

<comment><USER21> Evercookie's a great resource for dubious techniques to track people - look at the HTML canvas example for how it's done with a PNG: [https://github.com/samyk/evercookie/blob/6d44cb8ad1eda23c9a5...](https://github.com/samyk/evercookie/blob/6d44cb8ad1eda23c9a53f89dd5410b42cd29451a/js/evercookie.js#L679)

Luckily, the partitioning of browser caches on a per domain basis as pioneered by Safari has now made its way to Firefox (I think it's been released) and I presume will eventually be turned on by default in Chromium: [https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5730772021411840](https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5730772021411840)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What more companies should look into is YouTube advertising. You have many youtubers including myself who get paid from multi-billion dollar companies every month to deliver their message to a highly targeted niche market. It's a better alternative to Ad Sense and you'll get quadruple the impressions for a similar price. The landing page is what it is though, if it doesn't capture the customers attention, that's the fault of the company paying to advertise.

</comment><comment><USER24> > Lesson #4: Don't assume organic conversion rate will hold true for paid

Explained in more detail here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21469677](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21469677)

Prepare to be disappointed by paid traffic conversion going in. Paid traffic isn't there to convert, like you hope since it costs you money. It is primarily there for brand awareness which only works if your branding is visible.

</comment><comment><USER17> "Do not wait for leads to become paid users to decide on the quality of paid ads campaigns: focus on quick metrics and tailor experiments to one step of your funnel at a time."

This sounds very familiar... in fact it sounds a lot like "Respond to change instead of following a rigid plan" from the agile manifesto.

</comment><comment><USER25> "Full stack adaptive delivery" \- wut ?

Wouldn't surprise me if bounce rates are high. Took quite a bit of reading to figure out what industries and use cases are

</comment><comment><USER26> This headline is a little sensational.

When I ran a brick and mortar business where we took bookings, Google Ads were imperative to us getting new business. So were Facebook Ads. When they weren't running for some reason, or weren't optimized, we could feel it in the pocket book. AND, it wasn't too expensive. I was able to pay around $300 per month and get a lot of business.

Anyway, every business is different, and I think local business owners need to consider whether Google Ads are good for them based on their own unique situation.

</comment><comment><USER27> As a former Google Ads freelancer I very much enjoyed reading this.

You seem to have learned your lessons like you said and I actually picked up some interesting things from here. I'll be saving those Google docs!

I think the biggest lesson by far to be learned from this is that working with SEM agencies can be a complete clusterf*ck. Most of the time I'd recommend working with a freelancer who has a strong and verifiable background (most can be found in online communities).

Like you said the strategy these guys usually use is to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks. In some, if not most cases they'll have scripts or software running to automate their campaigns without a human going into the account very frequently to weed out bad search terms.

While I 100% agree with most of your conclusions and the conclusions of the people on here commenting on your landing page wording, I do have one question: did you have a good, hard look at the search terms before deciding a keyword had to be removed?

O and yes, quality score is important. However I've seen and ran campaigns with a <5/10 quality score but with incredible CPC's. Don't get too hung up on QS - if it works it works, don't question it.

</comment><comment><USER28> Lots of great lessons. For those wanting more, I wrote a blog post a while back about our own lessons learned with Google Ads:

[https://www.getleadup.com/post/the-startup-founders-guide- to...](https://www.getleadup.com/post/the-startup-founders-guide-to-setting- up-google-ads)

</comment><comment><USER29> Excerpt:

"o Narrow down your extended keyword set and focus on the keyword groups you have polished content and landing pages for, especially when you have a complex product.

o Use an awareness ladder to inform keyword segmentation by purchase stage but revisit it often to validate and adjust.

o Do not use the same landing pages for different steps of your awareness ladder.

o Do not wait for leads to become paid users to decide on the quality of paid ads campaigns: focus on quick metrics and tailor experiments to one step of your funnel at a time.

o Take a test-and-learn approach with small budgets to quickly fine-tune campaigns, focusing on page quality and clickthrough rates.

o Run tests to optimize page content, which will reduce your cost per click.

o Once you find your winner, you're ready to go all-in. Now's the time to pass it off to an agency to scale things up, if you are contracting out campaign management."

</comment><comment><USER30> Thank you very much for sharing your experience with HN. From my own point of view (as the CEO of a performance marketing agency working with Google Ads & clients budgets daily) I have to add, that this are learnings your agency should have protected you from.

</comment><comment><USER31> Agree with the first comment. Landing pages should be customized to the specific point in the customer journey. If you're targeting a clueless user you should keep it simple and educate all the way to conversion.

</comment><comment><USER32> I know this advertising campaign isn't perfect, but I have to wonder if Google isn't digging too deep. They've let advertising dominate their search pages so their page becomes less valuable to the user and advertisers get less value per dollar paid. Where the original concept was to put only a few relevant advertisements up which users would actually be interested in, now they pile on advertisements thick and deep and I rarely find them valuable. At some point this has to affect the ROI for advertisers.

</comment><comment><USER33> Just want to say I'm grateful you took the time to share this lesson - <USER2> were some insights there I'll be thinking about ways to action on our side of things. Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER34> I see this sort of complaint kind of a lot unfortunately and mostly from engineers who think marketing should work like engineering. $1 in should equal $X out. Unfortunately it usually isn't that linear and the whole, when everything is working, tends to be more than the sum of the parts. You get the disproportionate outcomes when all the pieces fit together and not in a linear fashion. Marketing, like startup growth in general is on a hockey stick pattern.

</comment><comment><USER35> previously, on HN [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18904625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18904625)

</comment><comment><USER36> Like others have mentioned, I don't know what the product is from the website. Wth is an acceleration node and why should I care if there's 240k of them?

While I'm being cynical, Indiehackers could stand to not load their css in js, at least for the global stylesheet. Surprisingly the content actually renders, but the header svg and so on breaks quite badly.

</comment><comment><USER37> > _Take a test-and-learn approach with small budgets to quickly fine-tune > campaigns, focusing on page quality and clickthrough rates._

A good reminder that you can apply The Lean Startup methodology (Build > Measure > Learn) to projects of all sizes from forming a new company to running an ad campaign. Ship early, test often, rinse and repeat.

</comment><comment><USER38> Lesson #1: Have a solid product or service which really solves problems many people have.

Lesson #2: Don't try to boost sales just via marketing. Great product sells itself through word of mouth.

</comment><comment><USER39> Another story blaming Google ads, plenty of methods to measure why people exit a page including 3rd party tools to even survey the user "why you leaving?" to get some feedback.

</comment><comment><USER40> With a solid post mortem like that, its not entirely lost. But with Adwords we're doing it to ourselves, drives bids up to a level where profitability becomes very difficult.

</comment><comment><USER41> Good that you decided not to "wallow in buyers' remorse" and spread the story + your brand.

A perfect case of finding opportunity amid crisis.

</comment><comment><USER42> I wasted 10 seconds reading the beginning of this so I don't have to read the rest of it.

</comment><comment><USER43> If my making a living depended on doing stuff like this, I'd find another way to make a living.

</comment><comment><USER44> My content blocker wouldn't let me see this site... did I miss anything important?

<comment><USER45> People who didn't know how to do ads spent $50k on them and complain that they lost $50k.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Nothing new, for an experienced marketer this is ABC.

<comment><USER47> Sharing the lessons learned is good for everyone else, though.

<comment><USER48> As someone totally new to throwing cash at google in exchange for eyeballs, I have picked up so much useful knowledge from this article and the comments on IH and HN</comment></comment></comment>


Secrez: A secrets manager in time of cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sullof/secrez-a-secrets-manager-in-time-of-cryptocurrencies-b15120c5aa14 <comment><USER2> Hello, this is Francesco, the author of Secrez. Just in case you have any question.</comment>


A survival guide for Unix beginners - <AUTHOR> http://matt.might.net/articles/basic-unix/ <comment><USER2> The guide doesn't quite achieve what it sets out to, i.e. showing a GUI user some concrete examples where the command line gives you more power. Instead the reader is presented with lists of fancy ways to access a shell (you realistically expect a Unix beginner to rent a linode.com server?!) and with semi-comprehensive listings of the root file system (as if e.g. "/opt, package-manager installed files" is some place where a beginner might profitably venture).

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I don't think the language is right for newbies:

"What is computing with Unix?

Unix is a family of operating systems and environments that exploits the power of linguistic abstraction and composition to orchestrate tasks."

That isn't a question a newbie would ask or an answer they'd understand. Instead, I think the following would have been (less accurate but) much more helpful:

"What is Unix?

Unix is just an operating system, like Microsoft Windows or Mac OS."

Know your audience!

<comment><USER4> His audience are CS students: _As a professor, I worry that the upcoming generation of programmers is missing out on the Unix experience, and with it, the power it grants._

Your answer is too simple for them.

<comment><USER5> I think you overestimate CS students.

<comment><USER6> I don't think so either, but I _do_ think that leaving it just at "Unix is an operating system" is likely to generate a good more confusion along the lines of _"wait, I just have linux, where can I get unix?"_ , _"what do you mean linux is unix-like?"_ , and of course _"I thought I could use OSX for this"_.

It should be strongly mentioned that "unix" best describes a class of operating systems including "proper" unix systems like OSX and the "unix-like" systems like linux.

It's also important to divorce the students from that layman perspective of "operating systems are all that graphical shit I see on my screen". In fact, I think that might be the most important part.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This guide would probably hurt someone more than help them. It might work as a cursory overview, but even then -- my head would spin if this was my first guide to *nix.

</comment><comment><USER8> It takes for granted that people understand, for instance, what's a filesystem and how it is basically organized. I don't think it'd be very useful for a beginner.

</comment><comment><USER9> why is such a bad tutorial on the frontpage?</comment>


Behind the Scenes Personal Data Sharing to Third Parties by Mobile Apps - <AUTHOR> http://jots.pub/a/2015103001/ <comment><AUTHOR> The original long title has been truncated here - it was:

      Who Knows What About Me?
      A Survey of Behind the Scenes Personal Data Sharing
      to Third Parties by Mobile Apps

From the survey summary:

[researchers] tested 110 popular, free Android and iOS apps to look for apps that shared personal, behavioral, and location data with third parties

...

[researchers] show that a significant proportion of apps share data from user inputs such as personal information or search terms with third parties without Android or iOS requiring a notification to the user</comment>


Google's Secret Hiring Tool - <AUTHOR> http://google.com/foobar <comment><USER2> Is accessing foobar.google.com a puzzle in its own right?

Or is it strictly invite only?

<comment><USER3> usually invites are given based on your searches. Here's a previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588080](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8588080)</comment></comment>


My theory of comedy inspired by ANNs - <AUTHOR> http://orangemind.io/post/comedy-theory <comment><AUTHOR> For the past several months I have been trying to understand how comedy works, to figure out a step-by-step process for coming up with jokes, and I think I'm onto something.

This is my first attempt to express the ideas I have about it. I'm not a neuroscientist, and my theory can be totally incomplete and mistaken, but I think it has some useful epiphanies that explain a lot of things.

I am still working on it and trying to figure it out, and now I'm looking for some feedback/ideas, I really want to talk to some smart people about the subject.

Please let me know what you think. Any criticism/questions that you have, anything that is unclear or can be better explained, any thoughts/ideas would be very valuable to me!

</comment><comment><USER2> No citation at all to: [http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html](http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html) ?</comment>


Why is a Facebook beer worth more than your news story? - <AUTHOR> http://editor.blogspot.com/2010/02/why-is-facebook-beer-worth-more-than.html

<comment><USER2> "When somebody creates a social ecology around news..."

Aren't forums and places like HN or Reddit communities built around news?</comment>


Two tactics effectively limit the spread of science denialism - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/debunking-science-denialism-does-work-but-not-perfectly/ <comment><USER2> Consider Einstein.

At the time his theories were made public, he was some German guy, and it was around WWI, so there was not much interest in hearing from him. There was a lot of hate towards Germans. But, since the theory was interesting, and they did a test which showed his theory could predict physical phenomena, it became accepted and so did he.

This is science.

It's not science if it is not falsifiable.</comment>


Gaps in basic knowledge of deep sea life - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-08-gaps-basic-knowledge-deep-sea.html <comment><USER2> This post is largely pointless, I just felt great pride seeing that the photos accompanying this story were likely taken using equipment I helped design, test and commission.

(Not the photo kit, but the equipment which got the camera to the right spot. :)

I'll go for a celebratory cup of coffee now.

<comment><USER3> Sadly, all ocean studies are underfunded due to a general lack of public interest. "You don't see - you don't care", and pictures like these are the first steps to draw people's attention. Thank you!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't see any CSS or images in this post. Maybe uBlock went nuts on this.

<comment><USER5> Temporarily disabling uBlock for one page takes two clicks, is it the fear of getting a virus (or other nefarious effects from ads, besides simply being annoying) that prompted you to write a comment instead?

<comment><USER6> It's not even 10AM; please dial it back a bit.

<comment><USER7> It's always flame-o-clock somewhere.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Restricting pathname resolution with AT_NO_JUMPS - <AUTHOR> https://lwn.net/Articles/723057/ <comment><USER2> This is very similar to an idea introduced in FreeBSD's Capsicum sandboxing framework[1] some time ago. Google's David Drysdale proposed a patch in 2014 to add this to Linux but it didn't go anywhere; I'm hopeful that this time Linux will add this support.

[1] [http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/papers/20...](http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/papers/2010usenix- security-capsicum-website.pdf) [2] [https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/11/4/218](https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/11/4/218)</comment>


May reason trump the Trump in all of us - <AUTHOR> http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2931 <comment><USER2> Bad title for a great post. This is especially good:

 _It sort of flabbergasts me when social-justice activists don't understand that, if we condemn not only Trump, not only his supporters, but even vociferous Trump opponents who associate with Trump supporters (!), all we'll do is to feed the narrative that got Trumpism as far as it has—namely, that of a smug, bubble-encased, virtue-signalling leftist elite subject to runaway political correctness spirals._

<comment><USER3> I had hoped the rise of Trump would kill the 'political correctness' nonsense the right-wing pushes once and for all.

It's a conspiracy theory just as much as 'climate change is a Chinese hoax', 'globalist bankers are plotting to destroy the US economy's, 'Mexico is intentionally sending its rapists' or 'the war on Christmas'.

Notably, PC-attackers focus on colleges and young people, which is the segment that overwhelmingly reject Trumpism (coming fourth in several polls). No wonder they're scared, the GOP is dead to young people.

Instead it seems like we just have to wait for the victims of this hoax to die off and the people who have been running the media campaign dedicated to scaring them to retire before sanity returns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My fear is not that either Trump or Clinton will win, or that either person's triumph will unleash purges or counter-purges.

What I fear is that four or eight years later, the problems that made Trump (and to a lesser extent Bernie Sanders) gain so much traction with the electorate will remain, or perhaps worsen.

People might not care about experience or character by then. They'll drink the sand anyway.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thiel seems pretty dangerous on his own, regardless of Trump support. A really smart billionaire who seems to have taken against the idea of democracy sounds like a comic book villain.</comment>


Run any Game – Game-defined playground. One experience on all your devices - <AUTHOR> http://runanygame.com/ <comment><USER2> Oh. Very nice!

I will definitely use it!

<comment><AUTHOR> It is still beta. Request beta access and we will invite you to test it.</comment></comment>