Comprehend (YC W11) Raises $8.4M Led by Sequoia to Lower Clinical Trial Costs - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/07/11/comprehend-raises-8-4m-led-by-sequoia-to-lower-costs-of-clinical-trials/ <comment><USER2> Rick from Comprehend here, we're also hiring. Definitely reach out if you're interested in transforming the medical industry! [http://www.comprehend.com/careers](http://www.comprehend.com/careers)

<comment><USER3> Don't most Life Sciences companies already do this internally? I mean, I only have anecdotal evidence, but I worked on and released a couple versions of something for Abbott Labs that sounds eerily similar to what the press release mentions you doing (actually, went a lot further into budget forecasting (including updating and alerting for deviations based on incoming data automatically) and automatic payment calculation and authorization in addition to collaboration, data input, time keeping, and dashboarding for analysts/executives.

In any event, good luck to you. From what I've seen from the inside, newer tech stacks can deal some serious disruption in a very short time frame.

<comment><USER2> Most companies do _something_ internally, but it's typically slow, expensive, out-of-date, breaks frequently, and is prone to errors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Finally, channeling 21st century software technology to something useful. One of the most important industries in the world - healthcare - is sadly broken and advances significantly slower than other technological domains. I wish more investments went that way, for our own good...

<comment><USER5> Healthcare and education are the biggest laggards in technology yet data is super important to their effectiveness. The regulatory minefield (and traditionalist culture) within these industries can only hold back modern technology adoption for so long. Fortunately they seem to be becoming more open to it these days.

<comment><USER6> > The regulatory minefield

Ha! The FDA review board for a drug is allowed to own and trade pharmaceutical stocks, receive cash incentives and guarantees of future employment from companies under review, and generally relies on the summary findings of the company to make their decisions.

It is as much of a minefield as the FCC is to the Family Research Council, or congress is to big oil.

<comment><USER7> I took it that they were speaking to people trying to get in on the action and not the incumbents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To really lower clinical trial costs, one of the biggest line item that can have an impact on the bottom line is patient recruitment. According to stats[1], 80% of trials are delayed due to patient recruitment issues and causes several billions of dollars to industry. Furthermore, different locations, countries have different accural rates and proper planning is required to select the right sites.

IMO, providing a dashboard of trial stats to pharma is helpful but it would not really cut down the majority of costs.

1\. [http://www.ciscrp.org/professional/facts_pat.html](http://www.ciscrp.org/professional/facts_pat.html)

<comment><USER9> There are a lot of companies doing this already - Qunitiles, Blue Chip, Acurian, etc. Anything that can streamline the process is potentially beneficial

<comment><USER2> There are a lot of companies doing this, but it's still a huge problem and I agree w/ chintan that there is a lot of opportunity for innovation.

<comment><USER10> Hi,

I used to work for a BigPharma designing their in-house clinical trial tracking software. The problem is not so much the platform, but system integration. We had a nice system with d3.js charts plotting Pk trials after results. A scheduling system with nice Ajax calendar component to schedule daily animal dosing. A in-life component that linked up with RFID scanners to track patient vitals/conditions. A nice drag-and-drop web GUI for setting up samples for mass spec analysis. All under a phase-by-phase, wizard step-by- step platform, from study design all the way to compliance reporting. Designing the system from the ground up wasn't difficult, system integration wasn't. We even had gadgetized all of the components so that PIs/lab associates could customize their daily dashboard.

Research groups are across the globe and use different stat packages. No one is willing to give up years of work in Excel spreadsheets, Phoenix, STATA whatever. So have to build tons of import/export tools to accommodate all of the tools.

Different research groups wanted different things. We had stakeholders, e.g., PIs from different research groups come in during all of the design/review meetings. One team wanted their scheduling calendar on 'MS Project' linear style layout, another team wanted it to be on the Outlook style. We ended up building both.

Different research groups had different hardware spec's as well. Throughout the pipeline, we had a nice tool that set up samples to be analyzed for mass spec analysis. Integrating with various hardware formats and different layout's, well-templates with existing in-house assay library database/web- services took a long time.

tl,dr; BigPharma has tons of proprietary assay, compounds database/web- service, third-party statistical packages and mass spec hardware spec's that a external vendor needs to integrate with; good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how you deal with security concerns. I think since the result of clinical trials can have such a large impact on a pharma co's share price, there have been a number of cases where insiders with access to trial results have given information to financial trading firms who then proceed to exploit the information in the market.

how do you assure your customers that the information put in your system won't leak?

<comment><USER2> We actually spend a lot of time thinking and dealing with security concerns, both from a software development perspective and from a devops perspective. You're correct that the data is very valuable, so a large percentage of our architecture and design decisions are dictated by security and privacy concerns.

This actually becomes even more complicated when you think about maintaining blinding, aggregate-only blinding, and some of the other features we need to support.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> " _"We are very interested in vertical software as a service," he said. "There's about a trillion dollars of enterprise software, if you're looking at market capitalization out there today. Some of that will transition to [specialized] enterprise software…and create multi-billion dollar companies."_ "

Interesting point. Two points converging really. Enterprise SAAS & Vertical SAAS. There is still lots of room here. Customers willing to pay. Anyone that's trying to come up with "synthetic" startup ideas might start here. More difficult to comprehend verticals are probably least served.

Basecamp for X, where X is some business type that not many people understand.

</comment><comment><USER13> Isn't most of the cost in clinical trials in manufacturing the drugs, finding and paying investigators, paying for legal services, recruitment of patients, getting informed consent, etc? Does Comprehend help with that stuff?

</comment><comment><USER14> I am surprised that Medidata solutions( mdsol.com ) hasn't been brought up. They do something very similar with very forward looking products/apps that are already being adopted by big pharma.

<comment><USER2> Medidata is a data collection system, and Comprehend works out of the box with them. If you're one of their customers you can start looking at your data in Comprehend simply by providing us with your API credentials.

The problem is, many companies use Medidata, Oracle, MERGE, and other vendors. Inside of a single study, let alone across several. That's where Comprehend comes in. We simply help customers get the actionable insights they need, and then help them take those actions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this just another CTMS? Similar to OpenClinica etc?

<comment><USER2> No, we actually work on top of CTMS or EDC systems. Basically, there are just so many of these types of systems, that without Comprehend companies have no way to answer questions across them. The abundance of these systems, which you allude to, is a big part of the problem that we solve.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Congrats guys! This is amazing stuff!!

</comment><comment><USER17> Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER18> Congrats Rick and Jud!

</comment><comment><USER19> Congrats guys!</comment>


Learn from your attackers – SSH HoneyPot - <AUTHOR> https://www.robertputt.co.uk/learn-from-your-attackers-ssh-honeypot.html <comment><USER2> Aside: I used to run a small ISP, a 200-300 dedicated+virtual machines. We set up our router to alert us if outbound SSH connections from a host went above a certain threshold, which was a super reliable way of detecting if a host was compromised. I think we had a near 100% success rate, because once a host is compromised they use it to start trying to compromise other hosts.

But, we also had every customer on a VLAN, limited to only being able to send traffic from their IPs, and also blocking incoming and outgoing bogon traffic.

Years ago I attended a presentation by Evi Nemeth (RIP) related to CAIDA and one thing they found in auditing "backbone" traffic was that some huge percentage of it was bogon traffic (I don't recall the exact number, but lets say 10% +/\- 6%). Nobody wanted to filter that traffic because the pipes were less expensive than the routers to handle filtering packets at high pps rates.

<comment><USER3> You'll never really know your success rate though. You could have had machines compromised for years with small amounts of traffic.

<comment><USER4> I guess he doesn't mean that he detected all infected machines but that near 100% of machines which triggered the alarm were indeed infected.

<comment><USER5> That's a bad metric though. You could miss a lot of infected hosts.

<comment><USER6> That is the single most important metric when you want to create an alert.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been using something similar for a while now. I use pam_jail on freebsd to drop the ankle biters using common ssh login attempts like test, ubuntu, oracle etc into a FreeBSD jail where I watch what the do and get a copy of all their tools. I rate limit the outgoing traffic from that jail to something painfully slow to prevent them from causing any major issues. But being able to fire up 'watch' on freebsd and snoop the tty they are on in the jail is awesome for forensics.

It's secure, they can't break out of the jail.

It's rate limited to prevent them causing much damage to anyone.

It's easy to observe every thing they type and do in the jail from the host.

<comment><USER8> What have you seen them do?

<comment><USER9> Might have changed by now, but what they used to do was usually:

* Download a large file (e.g. XP SP3) from Microsofts servers to test bandwidth * Download IP scanners and trying to run them (in order to find new hosts to attack) * Download botnet code that connects to some C2 server

Tools they download were often downloaded as source, which they then tried to compile in order to run it.

Searching for e.g. 'youtube kippo' will get you videos of honeypot sessions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I just harden my sshd config based on [https://github.com/arthepsy/ssh- audit](https://github.com/arthepsy/ssh-audit) and ALL bots will fail since they do not support the more current config os key-exchange, host-key, encryption and message authentication code algorithms.

To make it even more interesting: one can actually see which bot is trying by the way they fail to handshake.

I like a litte noice on my ports so leave ssh on its default port, accept authentication only with a certificate and be done. Works like a charm. And yes it makes my sshd stand out like a sour thumb since 99.9% (guestimation) of you folks don't tighten up your ssh configs :)

</comment><comment><USER11> If one were to run a honeypot like this and take every IP which connects and attempts a login and immediately ban it from your network, then if more than 1% of the IP range they are in has been banned, ban the entire range... what would the expected outcome be for a typical residential user?

<comment><USER12> in my first years I've setup a ssh server behind a nat'd network and installed fail2ban. the outcome was that nobody could access the ssh server... probably the same thing would happen, on ssh I've seen so many login attemts even on the smallest VPS I've ever gotten, it's just ridicoulus and important to use non password authentication with ssh (i.e. rsa keys probably 4096b).

<comment><USER13> EDIT:

I'm withdrawing the question per the accepted answer below.

-

original comment:

>it's just ridiculous and important to use non password authentication with ssh

Does this follow from the assumption (that you did not state) "since I won't bother to create a high-entropy password"?

Granted its a fairly safe assumption if you're not trying too hard but SSH supports passwords of arbitrary length so I'm curious if there's any other reason, besides not taking the time to create a high-entropy password.

\-----

Accepted answer below (esp "Because your users cannot be trusted. I run servers which coworkers, all developers, get access to.")

<comment><USER14> Because your users cannot be trusted. I run servers which coworkers, all developers, get access to. It's either ssh keys or 2 factor authentication because most don't give a fuck about security and will insist using garbage passwords if not prevented from doing so (and then they will complain), even though the use of a password manager is mandatory.

<comment><USER15> > _... will insist using garbage passwords if not prevented from doing so ..._

      /etc/security/pwquality.conf

is how I prevent co-workers from doing so (on RHEL and derivatives).

<comment><USER14> Good to know. We do our user provisioning through an internal portal which enforces everything. The ssh servers als gets configured to disable password login so the only thing passwords are used for is sudo. All web stuff is behind a SSO gateway with password+2fa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Reminds me of this Fishing for Hackers post [https://sysdig.com/blog/fishing- for-hackers/](https://sysdig.com/blog/fishing-for-hackers/)

</comment><comment><USER17> Great post. Honeypots behind the firewall are also a great way to pick up lateral movement and privilege escalation.

There's a ton of useful open-source tooling one can play with in the space. Here's a list:

\- [https://www.smokescreen.io/practical-honeypots-a-list-of- ope...](https://www.smokescreen.io/practical-honeypots-a-list-of-open-source- deception-tools-that-detect-threats-for-free/)

Most of the projects are also small enough that you can easily contribute back to them especially in terms of reducing the ability to fingerprint the honeypots.

Somewhat timely, The Grugq just wrote up a nice article on Counterintelligence for Cyber Defence:

\- [https://medium.com/@thegrugq/counterintelligence-for- cyber-d...](https://medium.com/@thegrugq/counterintelligence-for-cyber- defence-97d33503064d)

</comment><comment><USER18> Question: I've had an SSH server open to the world for months on a nonstandard port. I've _never_ gotten any attacks logged on fail2ban, to the point where I suspect fail2ban is either not logging the attacks or not operating correctly... even though it logs every login I'm aware of just fine, so it really seems like there really haven't been any attacks. I find this so unlikely. Is this normal? Does no one scan high ports ever? Are there any more plausible explanations?

<comment><USER19> Is this server running a recent version of Ubuntu and using systemd? Also, have you verified that fail2ban actually blocks you by intentionally making bad login attempts to trigger a ban? I do this with every new machine and never assume it works until I can trigger it on demand. (test using a VPN or set a very short bantime so you don't lock yourself out)

I ask because systemd may not be writing the failed login attempts to the log file fail2ban monitors, which means fail2ban may not be responding to attacks. I don't recall exactly how I resolved this, but I think I had to set "backend = systemd" in my jail.local under the [DEFAULT] section header.

<comment><USER18> Oh wow, thanks a ton for mentioning this. It's Ubuntu indeed but I seem to have sysvinit rather than systemd from what I can tell. I have no idea how to actually test it in a way that ensures I will trigger it though (since I don't really have other setups that I can test the same method on and ensure I'm doing it correctly). What do I have to do to trigger it? Just fail a bunch of SSH logins in a row? (I have ssh, dropbear, pam-generic, and ssh-ddos enabled.)

<comment><USER19> > What do I have to do to trigger it? Just fail a bunch of SSH logins in a > row?

Yes, that's what I do. If you have SSH login via password disabled (you should) then just temporarily move your private key(s) out of your ~/.ssh directory and try logging in a few times. "ssh user@machine && ssh user@machine && ssh user@machine" will do it if you have a ban set for three failed attempts. If it's working, your target machine should no longer respond at all, and connections will time out. If it's a web server the site should be unreachable with your web browser until after the bantime passes.

<comment><USER18> Ack, I figured it out. The ban does get triggered, but it doesn't succeed because iptables doesn't work on my system -- some module isn't properly compiled for the kernel. Thanks for helping me figure this out!

<comment><USER19> No problem, and this is a good reminder to test critical systems periodically. Same goes for backups! Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Over a decade ago, I set up a tarpit [1] (I worked at a small web hosting company) on an unused machine to catch network scans. I had the idea of using the information gleaned from that to block IP addresses at the router level, but never did get around to it.

[1] [http://boston.conman.org/2006/01/07.1](http://boston.conman.org/2006/01/07.1)

</comment><comment><USER21> I almost closed the page on mobile because I thought it's empty or broken...

<comment><USER22> It's not any less broken on desktops.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> [https://xkcd.com/350/](https://xkcd.com/350/)

<comment><USER23> Previous discussion [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11040512](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11040512)</comment></comment>


Google, please don't kill the blogs - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2018/01/an-open-note-to-google.html <comment><USER2> You claim people never asked promotions to be moved into a separate folder. As a user of Gmail, this is one of my favorite features. I'd first like to address real emails, like for instance from my mom, and then, if time permits, look at promotions. It's EXACTLY how things should be

<comment><USER3> It's also controlled by users. You can configure which categories you have and shuffle your mail around as you like-- I file blog posts under "Forums".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I never liked that gmail "feature" and disabled it as soon as it came out. It's stupid and takes away my control of my email. If I want some emails to end up in a specific folder/tag, or be marked as read, or even not show up in my inbox, I create a filter. I'm old enough to organize my email myself, thank you very much.

</comment><comment><USER5> I had created so many custom tags and nests of tags and rules before their folder system came along that I never got the Google folder system, even to this day. For which I am insanely thankful. Apparently they figured I was already handling it and left me alone.

</comment><comment><USER6> I can't imagine any blog being important enough to put e-mail in my main inbox.

</comment><comment><USER7> RSS is the system he wants. There's no need to spam emails everyday, just provide an RSS feed and people can subscribe.

And yet there is no RSS link anywhere, not even under the RSS feeds heading in the sidebar.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why can't you just ask the reader to add the "From:" email address used in blog emails to their Contacts at the time they sign up for emails? Don't emails with recognized "From" addresses end up in Primary by default?</comment>


Interactive NYT Census Map - <AUTHOR> http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer?hp?hp

<comment><USER2> Nicely done. Too bad it's in Flash, I would have loved to check out the WMS service behind it.</comment>


Huawei denies involvement in buggy Linux kernel patch proposal - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/huawei-denies-involvement-in-buggy-linux-kernel-patch-proposal/ <comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

Trivially exploitable vulnerability found in HKSP

On Sunday, the HKSP submission sparked interest in the Linux community as could signal Huawei's wish to possibly contribute to the official kernel. Due to this, the patch came under immediate scrutiny, including from the developers of Grsecurity, a project that provides its own set of security- hardening patches for the Linux kernel.

In a blog post published on the same day, the Grsecurity team said that it discovered that the HKSP patch was introducing a "trivially exploitable" vulnerability in the kernel code -- if the patch was to be approved.</comment>


DRM for news? Inside the AP's plan to "wrap" its content - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/07/drm-for-news-inside-the-aps-plan-to-wrap-its-content.ars <comment><USER2> The plan is that they have no plan. The plan is to make a bunch of aging executives look foolish after buying the snake oil off the back of some consultant's cart of tricks. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the web, its culture, and its infrastructure, and is utterly doomed to fail.

</comment><comment><USER3> They'll kill themselves. After a week or two they'll recant, a lot of $ poorer and some experience richer.

This is actually quite comparable to Ted Nelsons' project Xanadu (or at least parts of it).

<comment><USER4> Do you think that Xanadu could reasonably solve this problem?

<comment><USER3> Xanadu was ahead of its time in many ways, but the reason why the web took off the way it did I think has to do with the free and open nature of it.

The basic idea behind xanadu was that information could be re-cited as often as you wanted but the originator would get a slice of the cake.

The web is the opposite, it's a total free-for-all with the spammers and the parasites being on the same level as the originators of the content. Nelson saw it differently.

Early attempts at something like the web in Europe (minitel in France and videotext in the netherlands and germany) tried to charge 'by the page' for the content, but this seriously limited the amount of information available. Information providers could set a price on their information and the 'links' would display the price prior to activation. Billing was done through the telco.

If every web link came with a price attached I think it would have never gotten off the ground the way it did. Still, there are some good elements in that philosophy and I'm sure that in the long run 'for pay' links and some kind of citation mechanism will find their way back in to the web, simply because they are useful and because there is much demand for it (from the content providers side).

One potential way to realize this today is by setting up a gateway that deals with pay-per-view content where information providers could host their data and a plug-in based viewer (flash or something like it) that unlocks the content if the client has enough credits and confirms they want to see it.

I hope all of this makes sense :)

<comment><USER4> Makes lots of sense.

So does it seem that Xanadu would solve what AP is trying to do?

<comment><USER3> It would have, but as far as I'm concerned Xanadu, as visionary as it was turned out to be an evolutionary dead end.

This is not to be disrespectful to Ted Nelson, it's just that the good bits are going to be recylced even if the grand vision won't be.

Some elements from Xanadu would solve the problems the AP is trying to address but I highly doubt that it would be commercially feasible without some kind of collusion between all the news providers. After all, as long as one of them stays free that one will end up with all the customers in their basket.

It's a free market, and the market deals harshly with those that try to sell lemons while the neighbours find a way to give them away and still make a profit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am pleased to see another organization adopting a 'standard' microformat, in this case, hNews.

Microformats are the bridge by which we're going to get to the truly Semantic Web.

<comment><USER6> Yes, this is less absurd than I thought it was going to be; it's basically a polite watermark. My guess is that they'll ignore micro-users like mini- bloggers but throw the book at any volume sites that strip the 'DRM' and recycle the content without attribution.

I think rumors of AP's suicide/death are rather overblown, and they're just looking for a way to share without giving away the farm. Of course, they might have done better to use something like a creative commons license and choose terms that would encapsulate their legitimate commercial interest. On the other hand there's no ML standard for CC licensing that I know of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Alternate title: "How to spend a lot of money solving a non-problem."

<comment><USER8> More Like "How to spend a lot of money not solving a non-problem."

<comment><USER7> Agreed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "[C]ontent providers have the right to decide what happens to their content and on what terms".

\-- Gavin O'Reilly, Chairman, Automated Content Access Protocol

If you don't want people using the content you created, you shouldn't be in the content creation business.

<comment><USER10> I've heard this statement before in many different incarnations some with intonations of piracy, some without. However they all fail to see the basis of where the other party is coming from. They want to be adequately rewarded for you using their content. However adequately differs very much from person to person, you may think that a news story costs a quarter to read, I may think it costs 15 cents, the CEO of AP may think it costs a buck fifty, and the 13 year old down the street thinks AP should pay him to read the news story.

The problem that news companies suffer that makes this a significantly different problem for them rather than a company like the RIAA is that journalists get paid by the company as a primary source of income, journalists have to get sent places which costs the company money, and the company's primary source of revenue is the output of the journalists. For a second lets forget print media ever existed, in the current state of the web where media such as this is demanded by users to be free this is a failing business because of extravagant costs, and almost no profits. Why print media is a failing is because less people buy print and more people read it online.

There are players who beat the market by having a niche audience, low costs, and a high price, ie the Economist. Unlike the NY Times or AP they didn't have to send several photographers and journalists to China several times for pre, during, and post Olympics. While I don't necessarily agree with this business model, an exchange of cash has to exist somewhere, finding where such an exchange is most acceptable is a another story.

<comment><USER9> Market value comes from scarcity. When you need a million dollar press to print a newspaper, you can charge for it because the capital cost is a big barrier to the entry of competitors.

When the cost of printing collapses (to use the expression from Clay Shirky), the barrier to entry disappears, and the value derived from scarcity disappears with it.

AP's scheme amounts to a technical and/or legal attempt to reimpose an artificial scarcity so it can once again sell at a premium.

Their scheme is doomed.

<comment><USER10> I disagree, I still believe that the revenue streams are incompatible (due to culture, web users don't want to pay) or insufficient (such as ads) for a news agency to operate. What needs to happen is for someone to suggest a web culture compatible revenue stream that is sufficient to quench the financial need of a news agencies operations. This is lame attempt to do so, i.e. an iTunes for news segments. But at the end of the things the main problem is that users still don't want to pay for these things.

<comment><USER9> _the main problem is that users still don't want to pay for these things_

That's only a problem if your business model depends on users paying for these things - i.e. if your business model depends on scarcity that doesn't exist.

If they would only stop being precious for a minute, the newsmedia would recognize that they're already familiar with the idea of making money from sources other than the actual content consumers. After all, it was newspapers that popularized the revenue-from-advertising model in the first place, a model that allowed them to deliver newspapers very cheaply (sometimes freely) to their readers.

The smartest thing AP and other newsmedia can do is abandon their micropayment pipe dreams and start getting creative about new ways to leverage their assets for revenue.

<comment><USER10> The problem is that they have tried that. It doesn't work because web advertising is significantly cheaper than print advertising is, especially because you cannot guarantee that someone has seen the advert on the web. Which is why they're currently losing money. A full page ad in the NY times on the cover is 75,000$ or 100,000$ depending on the day, one could only dream of making that kind of money on web adverts.

[http://www.nypost.com/seven/01062009/business/front_page_new...](http://www.nypost.com/seven/01062009/business/front_page_news_147349.htm)

<comment><USER9> The trick is to get creative about finding new sources of value in their assets. Maybe the answer isn't merely more advertising, but finding new revenue streams in addition to straight ad sales. Given that people flat-out won't pay for online news. the newsmedia have no other choice.

<comment><USER10> At this point you'd have to suggest a solution, because I cannot get what you're hinting at. If you can't my point original point is evident: the news agencies are stuck between a rock and a hard place.

<comment><USER9> I'm not actually hinting at anything. I simply don't know what the solution will look like. What I do know is that micropayments from readers do not work and will not work.

That means either:

1) the corporate newsmedia will come up with some new revenue stream by discovering or developing some new source of value from their assets, or

2) they will fail.

Look at Google. They started out as a _search company_. With no real idea how to generate revenue, they came up with a way to aggregate hyperlinks across websites to produce surprisingly helpful page results for keyword searches.

It was the gargantuan data set they managed to accumulate over the course of indexing the internet and generating search results that finally gave them the revenue stream they needed.

Google is now an _advertising company_. They generate revenue by selling contextual advertising embedded in web pages (they get website owners to agree to this advertising by sharing some of their revenue).

That's a profoundly creative way of leveraging assets to generate revenue by providing a scarce, valuable service: _scarce_ because only Google has the infrastructure, data, analytical expertise and market reach to provide it; and _valuable_ because advertisers gain more revenue from increased sales than it costs them to buy Google ads.

The newsmedia, until now, have been mainly in the _advertising business_ , in which the exercise of gathering, reporting and distributing the news served as a mechanism for attracting advertising revenue (in much the same way that indexing the internet and providing search results is Google's mechanism for attracting advertising revenue).

 _The media were never particularly in the business of selling the news to their readers_. Their customers were advertisers, not readers; and what they sold was not news but the eyeballs of their readers.

That business model is now dying. Some media firms - either existing firms that can change their stripes or some new firm that discovers and exploits an opportunity - will find a new business model in which they sell something scarce and valuable to someone willing to pay for it.

Again, those media firms that fail to do this will fail.

If you've got an hour or so, there's a really entertaining lecture by Cory Doctorow on the HN front page right now:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=734138>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm stuck on the last bit of their target case:

 _What I'm talking about, and what has really riled up our internal copyright folks, are the bloggers who take, just paste an entire 800 word story into their blog. They don't even comment on it. And it happens way more than most people realize._

If people don't realize this is happening, how can it be a problem? If a blog without readers violates copyright, does it hurt the AP?

<comment><USER6> I realize it's happening. I think what he means is that most people don't think about it much.

However, if you've used Google News for a long time after a while you notice that there's a lot of no-original-content websites masquerading as news outlets, not unlike the domain squatters with 'search result' pages for high- ranking searches. In my opinion it's a kind of black-hat SEO.

Try looking at a news story in GN and you'll see that the top story has maybe '5000 similar stories'. The first page or two will be related or fully rewritten stories, but if you go past the first 100 results you'll see a lot of junk websites that just host the top 20 news stories and monetize them with adwords. They may only make $10 a day that way, but it's diluting AP's brand a bit in the process.

<comment><USER11> That's a great point. I don't use Google News, but I can definitely see brand dilution happening in that manner.</comment></comment></comment>


Generating random points inside a sphere - <AUTHOR> https://karthikkaranth.me/blog/generating-random-points-in-a-sphere/ <comment><USER2> A note about the rejection method: in high dimensions, this becomes very expensive. This is because the volume of a ball inscribed in a unit cube goes to zero (very quickly) as the dimension goes to infinity, so you start rejecting points with high probability.

<comment><USER3> I think that might be premature optimization to worry about finding random points in an n-dimensional hypersphere where n is a huge number.

<comment><USER4> No, n does not need to be huge, n=8 is high enough.

<comment><USER5> In this context 8 is a huge number.

<comment><USER6> Not at all. There are plenty of circumstances in all kinds of numerics where one would want points on the sphere in high dimensions.

It's not just a geometric object that has limited practical value for d>3\. It is the set of points where the norm is unity, which is a pretty fundamental concept in all sorts of places.

<comment><USER5> Not as part of a graphic's library. You might want to do 4d or 5d. But past that is very unlikely.

In terms of actually solving to proble you just want a vector random distance and a function that to map random distance to actual distance. But if you never deal in 6+ dimensions that's a waste of time.

<comment><USER4> Who said anything about graphics?

<comment><USER5> > While working through Peter Shirley's Ray Tracing in One Weekend > ([http://in1weekend.blogspot.com/2016/01/ray-tracing-in-one- > we...](http://in1weekend.blogspot.com/2016/01/ray-tracing-in-one- > weekend.html))

Which is where that method was used.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The graphics are nice, but this article really could have used some complexity analysis and some probability theory.

The author neither discusses the asymptomatic complexity of the algorithms, nor the run-time of his implementation (which is more pertinent here), nor gives any proofs of why some of the algorithms sample uniformly from the unit ball and why some of them don't.

Also, it would have been really nice to generalize this problem to n dimensions. I assume that there is some small value of n where naive rejection sampling is worse in practice than one of the more sophisticated methods.

<comment><USER8> Does he need to? All algorithms given except the first appear to be O(N), and their performance is going to depend almost entirely on how fast the local implementations of trig operations involved are.

<comment><USER9> Isn't the first method still O(N)? You will reject a constant percentage of points on average (the author says 48%), but constants fall out of big-O.

<comment><USER8> That's true if you assume a while pending on rand() is constant, but that wasn't covered in my CS 101 on complexity analysis...

<comment><USER10> Average-case constant. Worst case? Never halts.

Generating a single point doesn't depend at all on our choice of _n_ (the number of points generated). But yeah, complexity analysis of stochastic algorithms is fairly advanced stuff.

<comment><USER11> It never halts under the condition of infinitely small probability. So it never never halts.

<comment><USER12> Measure 0 and "never" are subtly different. There do exist sets of random draws for which the algorithm never halts. The probability of getting such a draw is zero, but they exist.

It's like picking a random number uniformly between 0 and 1 (in theory, not on a discrete computer). Getting 2 is impossible, never happens. Getting say 1.5 has probability 0, but it is possible.

<comment><USER10> (Getting 0.5 I think you mean :)

<comment><USER12> Right, thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> "about 48% of the points chosen are discarded. This may not be a huge problem if the number of points that need to be generated is small"

... or if the number of points isn't small -- it's only 2x the cost of the simple linear case without a loss of uniformity or adding any costly trig functions. That's still pretty good!

<comment><USER14> 2x the compute resources is still horrible for our environment, which isn't pretty good to me. Computer Scientists/Software Engineers need to get it into their head that wasting compute resources is directly increasing our footprint on this planet. We need to simplify the web not because of bandwidth use, but because all that compute resource moving around useless ads and scripts is largely a waste. We need to stop using block-chain for everything where a centralized ledger would suffice because block-chain is literally wasting resources in those problems for no reason. We need to start _thinking_ about our software's impact on the environment due to wasted compute cycles for things that are unnecessary or which could be improved by reducing the cycles needed and stop doing that lazy or fancy stuff.

<comment><USER8> If you read the comments, you'll see that the "wasteful" method is actually the cheapest computationally.

<comment><USER14> I'm responding to the general lack of concern by the commenter above and most engineers I know. You and this other guy commenting are missing the point, I'm not talking specifically about this algorithm, but about engineers in general who don't care about wasted cycles.

<comment><USER15> Yes but that's the entire point of these comments, wasting cycles is a great optimization but unless the goal is purely intellectual exercise, you lose more time with expensive trig functions. The real world favors the naive approach, in this context + case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Correct uniform sampling in things like this comes up a lot in Monte Carlo radiation transport problems and is covered very well in your basic first year graduate Monte Carlo class in a good nuclear engineering program. If you want to go deeper, check out the literature around that.

<comment><USER17> > in your basic first year graduate Monte Carlo class

How many years of graduate classes are there on Monte Carlo methods for there to be a 'first year' one?!

<comment><USER18> I think he/she means the Monte Carlo class you take in your first year of nuclear grad courses.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, generally there's a lot of coursework like this in the first year. Then if you specialize in it you're going to take like 2-3 advanced classes plus relevant math and computer science stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> That (last method) is a lot of sines and cosines, cube root and an acos... I bet for 3D the rejection method is not that much slower, in wall clock time.

OK so I coded up the first one and the last one in C and compiled on my mac using whatever gcc links to. I found 1e7 points in the sphere:

first routine: 0.521s

last routine: 0.850s

[edit]: C code here: [https://pastebin.com/zH0BehSM](https://pastebin.com/zH0BehSM)

<comment><USER20> Note that his last way does cos(acos(cosϕ))) after generating cosϕ uniformly. Which is a waste, you can just set sinϕ = sqrt(1-cosϕ^2).

After fixing that, this way is faster for me. Some trig, but no branches.

Edit: [https://pastebin.com/UExZ5Siw](https://pastebin.com/UExZ5Siw)

<comment><USER21> But you used Julia. I'm almost certain that if you applied your optimization to the C code you'd find that it makes no difference because `gcc -O2` already made it.

<comment><USER22> Gcc collapses acos(cos(x)) to x on -O2? Surely not since this isn't even accurate for x outside of -pi to pi. That's ignoring floating point errors that make those two different which I thought was a different optimization flag, though I'm not sure about that.

<comment><USER20> Well, here it's cos(acos(x)) and sin(acos(x)), which are easier. But still that's pretty smart, I did not know this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This problem is equivalent to generating random orientations, which can be easily done generating random unit quaternions (see, for example, [1]). Each quaternion found will correspond to a point in the surface of a 4D sphere, which can be mapped to a point inside a 3D sphere.

[1] [http://mathproofs.blogspot.com/2005/05/uniformly- distributed...](http://mathproofs.blogspot.com/2005/05/uniformly-distributed- random-unit.html)

<comment><USER24> If you take the stereographic projection of a uniform random unit quaternion onto 3-space, then to get a uniform distribution in the ball you need to apply a non-linear scaling function to the radius.

I'm not sure this really makes much sense as a way to generate random points in the ball (especially if you care about the details of rounding etc.), but maybe fun for someone to implement. I would expect the rejection method to be noticeably faster.

* * *

Another cute thing you could do is generate 3 normally distributed random numbers (giving a normally distributed random point in a 3-space), and then apply the appropriate non-linear scaling to the radius.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Interestingly, it seems to be all about bending some distribution and then unbending it again. Orthogonal dimensions are independent, so choosing three random numbers generates uniform in-cube distribution. But once you bend it via polar coordinates or vectors, you "wrap" many points of polar/vector abstract space to near the cartesian origin. And then you have to bend back, to make it uniform again. That raises interesting question on whether it relates to topology problems. Since generating N randoms is a fastest primitive operation, is there a quick and uniform translation from a cube to the sphere, such that all points are still uniform? Can we apply space-filling curve magic here (like Hilbert's)? I feel like there is much more geometry power under that, but sadly I'm just a guy with no math bg.

<comment><USER26> It's an interesting idea, but I think it would prove to be equivalent.

As another commenter pointed out, the efficiency of this operation really only matters in higher dimensions.

I bet a generative model would work, though it's tricky enough for me not to be able to think it through on the spot. Something like:

1\. Pick a subset of points thus far generated at random.

2\. From this subset, pick the point with the furthest distance from the origin.

3\. Form a new unit sphere where r is 1-d of the picked point (ie, make a new sphere that is a subset of the parent sphere with a single touching point of the parent sphere).

4\. Generate a new point in this subsphere using the normalized vector method.

Not exactly the above, but something like it. The downside of the above approach is that I think it will create a distribution of points that may be unnaturally uniform. It would be interesting to define a set of equations that could benchmark different approaches for how well they compare to the in-cube strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> The main issue with the second method, which isn't discussed at all, is that it's more likely to pick a direction towards the corners of the unit cube. You can even see that bias in the point cloud.

The problem with choosing d uniformly is also better explained by pointing out that shells of larger radius have larger surface, thus they'll be underrepresented.

</comment><comment><USER28> Interestingly, the method in which you determine your "random point" can greatly affect the end result, so swapping out the methods (e.g. "generate three coordinates and discard" method for the "generate a direction and a length" method) may produce wildly different results.

An interesting illustration of this is Bertrand's Paradox, which asks the question: "if you draw a random chord inside a circle, what is the probability that its length is greater than sqrt(3)?". The correct answer is 1/2\. The correct answer is also 1/3\. Oh, and the correct answer is also 1/4\. It depends on three equally valid (and uniformly distributed) ways of defining your random chord.

See: [http://web.mit.edu/tee/www/bertrand/](http://web.mit.edu/tee/www/bertrand/)

<comment><USER20> Paradox seems like a strong word for this. "Draw a random chord" is almost a pun, draw from what distribution? Until you tell me, there really is no one answer.

<comment><USER28> > "Draw a random chord" is almost a pun

No more so than 'pick a random point in a circle'. Note in all cases we're talking the uniform distribution. The question of using Cartesian coordinates, parametric coordinates, etc. is what causes the differences.

<comment><USER20> I'm complaining that there isn't one uniform distribution. For example uniform in x on [1, 2] is different to uniform in 1/x on the same interval, and which one you draw from may matter. You have to be told. In fact every (one- variable) distribution is uniform in something!

"pick a random point inside a circle" comes with an implicit "uniformly according to the ordinary euclidean metric on the paper". I guess it's a judgement call that this is obvious enough, but "a random chord" is clearly not... otherwise we wouldn't be here!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> When the author mentions "normally distributed numbers" it sounds like he is sampling a normal (Gaussian) distribution. In fact, he is sampling from a uniform distribution.

<comment><USER30> I think he _does_ mean sampling from a gaussian. You can tell because the example calls randn().

The gaussian distribution is invariant under rotations in 3d (and more generally invariant under any orthogonal transformation in any dimension), so if one takes a random vector X whose components are independent N(0,1) random variables and compute X/|X| (where |X| is the usual euclidean norm of X) the result is guaranteed to be uniform on the unit sphere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, I've used randn() wherever a normally distributed random number is needed. This is computed using the Box-Muller method.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For people who like the simplicity of the rejection algorithm, it might be worth checking out Ziggurat sampling which is based on a similar idea, but shapes the sampling region to reduce rejections: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat_algorithm](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ziggurat_algorithm)

<comment><USER7> To add to that comment, importance sampling is also an attempt to reduce the number of rejections and could be interesting here.

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

<comment><USER32> Importance sampling works when you're interested in some linear function[al] of the distribution; not for _actual_ sampling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Pleasantly surprised by the effect when scrolling over the sphere

<comment><USER34> I couldn't see any spheres at all so I was confused by your comment, which led me to realize WebGL wasn't working, which in turn reminded me I had disabled hardware acceleration in Chrome long ago because of some bug which made browsing unbearably slow. I've now re-enabled it and it seems the bug has since been fixed. So, thank you!

<comment><USER35> It's the forced graphics card switching that causes system crash in every 20th case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Related: selecting points on the surface of a sphere [https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/random- points/](https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/random-points/)

Poisson disc sampling can be quite useful.

<comment><USER37> I guess what it would look like in 3D :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> For the second example, sampling the radius uniformly leads to an error with a higher point density in the centre of sphere. The radius, r, has a weight proportional to r^2 or the surface area. So, one can take a uniform random sample, s between 0 and R^2, and take the square root of s. That will give higher probability density around larger radius. Then, the second picture should look like the first one.

<comment><USER39> Seems like you stopped reading after the second example.

<comment><USER38> Yes, didnt look at the details of the next methods. He adjusts for this in the next examples by taking the cube root of the uniform sample(not square root as in my post), which is the correct adjusting factor, as a small shell will have weight in proportion to difference between cubic powers, which is proportional to r^2.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Similar problem which ends up not being quite as simple in the general case as you might think: sampling from a unit simplex: [http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nasmith/papers/smith+tromble.tr04.pdf](http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~nasmith/papers/smith+tromble.tr04.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER41> I think the section "Using normally distributed random numbers" deserves an additional explanation. The code may look simple, but like most of the other methods mentioned on the page, generating normally (Gaussian) distributed random numbers still requires the use of rejection sampling and sine/cosine functions. See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box%E2%80%93Muller_transform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box%E2%80%93Muller_transform)

<comment><USER42> I implemented Marsaglia's Box Muller method in a library (^) and it seems quite quick. It doesn't involve trig functions, just a sqrt, a log, and an average of about two rands per normal outputted.

It seems to work out around the same speed as a trig function - in javascript.

For some purposes just averaging a few rands could be used to get a good enough approximation of a normal.

I wonder if a short Taylor series could be mined that could quite accurately map equal to gaussian distribution.

[^][http://strainer.github.io/Fdrandom.js/](http://strainer.github.io/Fdrandom.js/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> I thought this was kinda fun, and I was trying to figure out why you couldn't just take a random x and use it to find a y that preserves x²+y²=r² (ie by setting y to a random number between 0 and ±√(r²-x²)). In the end I figured out that you need to generate x the same way, but if you have, say: n=rand(r), x=rand(±√(r²-n²)), y=rand(±√(r²-x²)) it seems to work.

Here's a version I extended to three dimensions, designed to be run in the JS console of the original article (it'll show up underneath the first sphere):

        new SphereSimulation(document.getElementById("spheres1"), () => {
          const rand = Math.random
          const root = (x) => rand() < 0.5 ? Math.sqrt(x) : -Math.sqrt(x)
          const invdist = (a=0, b=0) => root(RADIUS*RADIUS - a*a - b*b)

          const x1 = rand() * invdist()

          const x2 = rand() * invdist(x1)
          const y2 = rand() * invdist(x2)

          const x3 = rand() * invdist(x2, y2)
          const y3 = rand() * invdist(x3, y2)
          const z3 = rand() * invdist(x3, y3)

          return new THREE.Vector3(x3, y3, z3)
        })

It looks okay to me - am I missing something? Is this a reasonable approach?

<comment><USER44> Your missing the requirement that the random sample be uniform in the sphere. That is, if the sphere is cut into any number of pieces of equal volume, the sample is equally likely to appear in any piece.

Your approach samples uniformly from the radius, so you're going to end up with far too many samples close to the center.

<comment><USER43> Interesting... thanks for the pointer. I did some testing and the points definitely do seem to cluster along the axis... just increasing the number of iterations of √(r²-n²) seemed to improve it though. At 5, I can't tell the difference anymore:

[https://codepen.io/anon/pen/xJJOEq](https://codepen.io/anon/pen/xJJOEq)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> So what ends up being the general purpose method for uniformly distributed random numbers in some arbitrary shape? (other than the rejection method of course)

If arbitrary shapes always requires the rejection method, what are some "classes" that have easier algorithms (the sphere is obviously included here)

<comment><USER46> Not my area of expertise, but based on what I've read, you general try to get as close as possible through pure mappings, and then use rejection sampling to throw out the samples that don't fall under the desired distribution. This can work even if the distribution is dynamically changing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is also very important in many global illumination techniques which requires sampling the hemisphere around a point. As case in point a simple Monte Carlo path tracer uses this to sample random directions, see e.g. [0]. In addition to this there are many 'tricks' one can use to reduce the variance/noise using a differently weighted sampling (to help the converge of MC). A nice technique to get a cosine-weighted hemisphere sampling is to generate a random point on the unit disc and then project them onto the (hemi)sphere. Seems somewhat relevant here.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing#Algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_tracing#Algorithm)

</comment><comment><USER48> The method I immediately think of is just based on the relation.

Sqrt(x^2 + y^2 +z^2) <= 1 reduces to x^2 + y^2 +z^2 <= 1

Generate the random value for x^2, any random value <= 1

Now we have y^2 +z^2 <= 1-x^2

Generate a random value for y^2, any random value <= 1-x^2

Finally generate a random value for z^2, any random value <= 1-x^2-y^2

Take the square roots of each number we generated to get the final coordinates.

But wait! Theres another step..the most important one! There are 6 orderings of (x,y,z) We must choose a random one because otherwise x will be biased towards higher values compared to y and z.

So I kind of lied. All we needed was 3 random values via the subtraction methods above. Then we need to randomly choose their ordering as (#,#,#)

This seems like the easiest most trivial solution that would be uniformly distributed.

Let me know if I am wrong.

<comment><USER49> >Let me know if I am wrong.

You're wrong on multiple levels.

1\. Generating random values for x^2, y^2, z^2 and taking their square root will only give you values in the x,y,z > 0 octant.

(But let's say you "fix" this by randomly multiplying them with -1.)

2\. Taking the square root of a uniformly distributed random variable is no longer uniformly distributed.

3\. Randomly reordering the coordinates won't fix your bias.

Here's a demonstration in 2D: [https://jsfiddle.net/tz85wnxy/59/](https://jsfiddle.net/tz85wnxy/59/)

Uncomment line 17, 18, 20 to see how it's still not uniform even if you randomly multiply the coordinates by -1 and reorder them.

<comment><USER48> Works fine as long as you generate x,y,z randomly and not their squares.

Same process but minor tweak.

[https://jsfiddle.net/w8zLvsy2/](https://jsfiddle.net/w8zLvsy2/)

<comment><USER50> This approach is still incorrect, and the bias toward the set of 4 points S = {(1,0),(-1,0),(0,1),(0,-1)} can be seen in the diagram. There is no way to break out of this bias by flipping or reordering coordinates because those two operations preserve the symmetries of S:

\- if you flip the x-coord of a point near S, e.g. (-.9,0), you still get a point near S, e.g. (.9,0)

\- if you swap the x-coord and y-coord of a point near S you still get a point near S.

\- etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> [http://blog.geomblog.org/2013/01/a-sampling-gem-sampling- fro...](http://blog.geomblog.org/2013/01/a-sampling-gem-sampling-from-ellp- balls.html)

</comment><comment><USER52> So which algorithm ended up being fastest?

<comment><USER53> To my untrained eye, it looks like the first naive algorithm would be fastest. Two of them require trig functions while the other relies on sqrt and cube root, all of which are expensive functions when compared to the first approach.

So I'd wager that the 50% reject rate would still be _cheaper_ at scale than evaluating trigonometric functions.

<comment><USER54> A quick test with C++'s <random> library agrees. For n = 100,000,000 points, the rejection method beat out the improved spherical by 7.8%. Using the normal distribution was even slower.

      XYZ: 16.418057 seconds
      Gauss: 23.415560 seconds
      Spherical: 17.705553 seconds

<comment><USER55> Youll get a different result if random number generation is made more expensive, e.g. if you need to use a hardware RNG instead of a PRNG.

<comment><USER56> But why would you do that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Section 3 of this paper explains this topic pretty well in N-dimensions:

[http://jmlr.org/papers/volume17/blaser16a/blaser16a.pdf](http://jmlr.org/papers/volume17/blaser16a/blaser16a.pdf)

To get a random point _within_ the sphere (rather than on the surface of the sphere, as described in the paper) you also need to pick a random distance from the origin to randomly scale the point on the surface.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is similar to the method used for generating random numbers using Box- Muller transform.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box%E2%80%93Muller_transform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box%E2%80%93Muller_transform)

</comment><comment><USER58> Maybe a mathematician can correct me. But could you not also model 3D vertices of uniform density into a 1D space and then uniformly sample the 1D space. Of course this may have issues with highly dense objects or very large ones.

<comment><USER59> I don't get what you mean by 1D spaces but you could triangulate into tetrahedra and sample those[1] (taking their volume into account). You will write a lot of code and still have the triangulation approximation error. For high dimensional spheres you can possibly subdivide the space in hyper cubes and do the in/out approach inside each cube that contains a part of the sphere to get a better hit miss ratio.

[1] [http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/jgt/tetra.htm](http://vcg.isti.cnr.it/jgt/tetra.htm)

<comment><USER58> Yes, I was thinking you could triangulate the sphere at discreet shells. I have done 2D symmetric polygons where you needed to uniquely index into a 1D array of vertex values. Ie, based on the magnitude you can estimate which shell. By knowing the shell, you know the number of vertices for the shell, by knowing both you can map it to a specific vertex, as you can define a priori the absolute traversal order.

I have no idea if the 2D case extends to higher dimensions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I find it unclear whether the author is aiming for Uniform, or just "looks pretty uniform".

</comment><comment><USER49> Notice how the rejection method becomes useless for higher dimensions.

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

<comment><USER61> While that's interesting, I'm having a complete lack of imagination fail on why one would be trying to solve this problem for higher dimensions, other than academic pursuits. Could you give a practical example?

<comment><USER49> "Sampling from the uniform distribution on the N-dimensional Euclidean ball (the N-ball) and its surface (the N-sphere) is a tool useful in many diverse research fields, for instance Monte Carlo integration in physics, generating random directions for MCMC sampling on bounded regions, generating random correlation matrices, Monte Carlo analysis of random packing on the sphere, generating random rotations in cryptography as well as various simulation studies in statistics"

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047259X1...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047259X10001211)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I don't agree with the way he normalizes the radius in the last 2 methods. I think it should be a square root, not a cubic one. This is because the volume diferential r^2•sin(phi)•d_phi•d_theta•dr is proportional to the square of r. This mistake is also made in a source he cites: [https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/87230/picking- rando...](https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/87230/picking-random- points-in-the-volume-of-sphere-with-uniform-probability/2872878) and I tried to point it out there as well.

<comment><USER20> That's the correct volume element, but not what you want.

The volume inside radius r grows as r^3. It's the inverse of this _cumulative_ density function which maps uniform-in-r numbers to uniform-in-volume ones.</comment></comment>


Couple hosting Tor exit node raided by cops investigating child abuse - <AUTHOR> https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2016/04/07/couple-hosting-tor-exit-node-raided-by-cops-investigating-child-abuse/ <comment><USER2> SPD. What a bunch of Barney Fifes.

</comment><comment><USER3> lol tor... why even bother, you'll be lumped in with all the pedos and terrible people of the world...

<comment><USER4> A form of martyrism - making a sacrifice for a cause.

You can argue if the cause of anonymity is a greater good (I think it is), but there are always those who are willing to give something up to support it.

<comment><USER5> I think it would be interesting to think about ways in which the core important benefits or anonymity could be achieved through a non-anonymous society. Anonymity is becoming fetishized in certain subgroups of western culture, but I don't think anonymity is the real goal, but what it allows. This is important, because while it may not be possible to salvage anonymity in some or all locales in the future, that doesn't _necessarily_ mean we can't salvage some of its benefits, such as protection from authority. Not that I know how we would accomplish this, but like I said, I think it would be interesting to think about.

<comment><USER6> _Maybe_ perfect equality could be a substitite for anonymity, but as long as there are any power balances in the world, good people with minority views (say, political activists in oppressive regimes) will need to hide from powerful majorities.

I think a better question is how to cure the societal and individual ills that lead to the abuses of anonymity that cause people to oppose it.

<comment><USER5> > I think a better question is how to cure the societal and individual ills > that lead to the abuses of anonymity that cause people to oppose it.

And that as well _might_ only be solved by perfect equality. Actually, looking at it this way, where each spectrum has a range of positive and negative consequences, but the constrained side of the spectrum is self perpetuation and not self correcting, reminds me of freedom of speech itself, where we just accept the alternative is accepted (in some parts of the world at least) as the de-facto standard because of this.

Maybe the way to frame anonymity is that anonymity _is_ freedom of speech, and there isn't truly freedom of speech without it, so we should just accept the ills that come with it. This is probably a known and accepted strategy and I'm just slow on the uptake. :/

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is the second case in a week involving the Seattle PD raiding an exit node operator.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11431128](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11431128)

<comment><USER8> And coincidentally, the person has the same name!

<comment><USER7> Opps.</comment></comment></comment>


Addicted to Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://dpearson.me/blog/posts/Addicted+to+Twitter.html

<comment><USER2> Slot machines, FarmVille, Twitter feeds, I think they all work the same: push a button, you might get a reward. I'll leave it to the armchair psychologists (or even real ones) to put a label on it, but that's the commonality I see in my own behavior. Or maybe it's just the constant influx of stimulation, I don't know.

What I do know is learning to sit and do nothing is valuable. When data- connected phones came out, I thought it a boon because never again would I need simply stand in line. I could check email, surf the web, fill that time with something of "value". Then I realized that, for me, checking a Twitter feed isn't of any more value than just standing there aware of what's going on around me.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've noticed the same pattern as my access to technology has expanded. Initially, I was completely unconcerned with my online presence, but, as the years wore on, it became less of a relief to be away from everything and more of an impatience to get back and check Twitter, email, news, etc. Unfortunately, I'm not sure that there's a way to go back, either for myself or for society as a whole.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You say that you quit in the past and still find yourself in this situation. It's time to quit for good. Delete your account and never look back. Don't worry if your are missing out something, eventually this feeling to check everything will fade. I delieted my facebook and twitter account about 2 months ago. It was taking up too much of my time and I'm glad I did. I still use Google+ but I feel like it doesn't take as much time from me as the other networks, I don't even check it every day.

<comment><AUTHOR> The ideal for me would be to maintain the accounts, but use them less. I'm worried that being completely without any social networking presence could hurt me down the road with companies being reluctant to hire someone who seems like they might have something to hide. In my opinion, at least, this attitude is ridiculous, but I've already had people look at me strangely about it.

</comment></comment><comment> k-mcgrady I took breaks from Twitter a few times but always quickly got back to my previous unhealthy usage. The way I finally stopped was to delete my account. Simple. I eventually created a new one when I wanted to go back but abandoned that after realising I had zero followers and building back to the previous level would take too long.</comment>


Amazon in talks to buy Future Retail stake - <AUTHOR> https://factordaily.com/amazon-future-group/ <comment><USER2> yeah no doubt amazon is becoming largest marketplace around the world</comment>


Sony Launches Worlds Fastest Personal Internet in Japan - <AUTHOR> http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/123304-Sony-Launches-Worlds-Fastest-Personal-Internet-in-Japan

<comment><USER2> The fastest internet in the US is Google Fiber 1 gbs. Not 150mbs.</comment>


Why I love the web. - <AUTHOR> http://blog.webdistortion.com/2010/05/09/why-i-love-the-web/

<comment><USER2> Cross-comment: Another thing that makes the web great is opportunity. With the low cost of ownership the web provides me the opportunity to operate a legitimate business that gives me a chance at financial independence and success. No other medium has seen so many entrepreneurs that wouldn't normally think they could start a business become actual success stories.</comment>


Staples, Office Depot in Advanced Talks to Merge - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/staples-office-depot-in-advanced-talks-to-merge-1422937999

<comment><USER2> Wait, these are separate companies?</comment>


Recruiting a Co-Founder For Your Startup - <AUTHOR> http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2007/07/10/recruiting-a-co-founder-for-your-startup/

<comment><USER2> Very nice post, keep 'em coming.

I think your list is basically a description of the things people who are good at sales do. I'm not sure it can actually help the Wozniaks of the world be more like Jobs.

One of my brothers was raised in a different part of the country by my father's first wife. My other brother was raised by my father. My brothers and father have something very obvious in common to anyone who meets them. They can effortlessly and genuinely connect with strangers and make them feel at total ease. They've all worked in sales at some point and were remarkably good at it. I'm fairly certain the main trait they share is their deep empathetic dispositions.

This had lead me to believe there's a huge genetic component in being great at sales. I'm pretty skeptical it can be taught effectively, anymore than you can teach someone to be a funny person.

BTW, I think Freakonomics is a great book about incentives and a definite must-read for any startup founder.

</comment><comment><USER3> This guy seems a bit confused about his own interpersonal skills. An earlier quote:

"If you're the type of person who is insecure with hiring someone you don't know or based only on their portfolio, I'm not the right person for you."

Now:

"Meet 3x in person [...] to present your case"

</comment><comment><USER4> Should it be a surprise that a salesperson writes a post extolling salespeople?

</comment><comment><USER5> I think the selling idea is good, but first you have to meet the right people. I'd argue that that is the hardest part.

Step one, network, then don't be afraid to be too picky about who you approach to join you.

</comment><comment><USER6> Great post.</comment>


Amazon paid no US income taxes for 2017 - <AUTHOR> https://www.sfgate.com/business/tech/article/Amazon-paid-no-US-income-taxes-for-2017-12713961.php <comment><USER2> Let's say Amazon is about to make $1B in profits. Instead, they go on a hiring spree, and quickly pay out $1B in salary. Ha ha, they say, we have a profit of $0, so we don't get taxed!

But that's good. The employees all made lots of money (and will be taxed on it, often at a higher rate than the corporation would have paid!)

So run the same scenario again, but this time say "stock options" instead of salary.

<comment><USER3> If they spend it on their HQ2, let say it is $2B, do they wipe of the $1 Profits this year, ( Paid no tax ), and Net Operating Loss of $1B, which get deducted next year. Assuming they make the same $1B profits next year, that is No Tax again right?

One of the problem I see is that many companies buy Asset like property asset to avoid taxes.

<comment><USER4> Theres an important distinction in deferring taxes versus avoiding taxes. Every time they buy a peice of property there's taxes on the sale. Every year there's property taxes (very high in WA), then finally there's a sale and guess what?

<comment><USER3> Sorry it was a hypothetical question, didnt know there is property tax in US.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I haven't looked into Amazon's finances extensively, but I bet this is at least partly due to Net Operating Loss. In US tax law net operating loss means that you can deduct losses for prior years from this year's earnings. The funny thing about this is that by losing money you actually add an asset to your balance sheet (deferred tax assets). Since Amazon has lost a lot of money in the past that probably helped with their 2017 taxes. Another interesting thing about this is with the new tax law cutting the corporate tax rate to 21%, many companies had to take a charge against earnings in order to write down the value of the deferred tax assets. If you lost $1M last year, you had $350,000 in deferred tax assets that got written down to $210,000 meaning your company technically lost $140,000, even though you got a tax cut. Accounting is truly amazing.

</comment><comment><USER6> I wonder if journalists will ever tire of writing disingenuous articles like this.

The uninitiated in business will understand this as another company contributing nothing to the tax base, but they're intentionally leaving out the other side of the equation.

The money deducted from employees exercising option grants doesn't go into a black hole. It simply shifts the tax burden to the employee.

The real story is money never escapes the tax man. The burden may shift, but Amazon is creating wealth and the recipients of that wealth are paying taxes.

<comment><USER7> If you're saying that the real headline should be "Amazon shifts 100% of its tax burden to its employees," then I think you'd still have a story that would make some readers angry.

<comment><USER8> This isn't exactly new, though. Incidence of corporate taxes - not just Amazon - is already well-understood to primarily fall on labor.

[https://www.kansascityfed.org/Publicat/RegionalRWP/RRWP07-01...](https://www.kansascityfed.org/Publicat/RegionalRWP/RRWP07-01.pdf)

[https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/tax- anal...](https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/tax-policy/tax- analysis/Documents/WP-101.pdf)

<comment><USER9> I want to believe in this hypothesis, because the case for land taxes has long been rejected due to the perception that they unfairly penalise 'mom and pop'. If corporate taxes do end up simply being a tax on labour, then taxes that don't have the same potential for manipulation can be put in their place.

However, two PDFs alone isn't sufficient proof for me. Has a broad meta-study of both sides of the argument been done?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Vessyl – The cup that knows what you're drinking. - <AUTHOR> http://www.myvessyl.com/?referral_token=BdNapxmGkjXQxHqlkBzPZg

<comment><USER2> This may be the most baffling thing I've ever seen. Why? Imagine if they put this kind of effort into solving, I don't know, virtually any other problem in the universe.</comment>


Going underground: the Moscow metro - <AUTHOR> https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/going-underground-the-moscow-metro <comment><USER2> Ride it everyday, and all the Soviet nostalgia aesthetic is making me sick. Here are some actually interesting stations:

\- Vorobyovy Gory (the longest station, situated on a bridge over Moscow River)

\- Dostoyevskaya (decorated with scenes from Dostoyevsky's novels which tend to be rather... dark)

\- Timiryazevskaya (the only deep single-vault station in Moscow, looks cool)

\- the entire monorail line (just weird)

\- Vystavochnaya (the station under business district Moskva-City, it's just huge)

\- Arbatskaya, light blue line (one of the smallest, and possibly the most useless station, very quirky)

Some of the recently built stations (yellow line Ramenki extension, light green line north of Maryina Roscha, dark blue line north of Strogino) have pretty interesting designs, if you don't mind travelling to the outskirts of Moscow.

<comment><USER3> I mean, it's only appealing to those of us not living under an oppressive regime. If I were in Stalinist Russia I would have been in no mood to appreciate that style.

<comment><USER4> If you lived through Russia in the unmitigated disaster that was the 90s, you might be nostalgic for the good old days.

America currently incarcerates almost as many people (Depending on how you count, more) as the Khrushchev era did, yet that's clearly not the biggest factor in how people evaluate their quality of life.

Most of all, people want food, shelter, and security - and communism largely provided that. Poorly, but better then the collapse that followed.

<comment><USER5> Well, it was an inevitable ending to communist experiment, I would say baked in from the beginning.

The real tragedy that the whole communism thing even happened.

Some people also want dignity. That thing was in short supply back then and is getting thin today.

<comment><USER4> The real tragedy was the system prior to communism, during communism, and after communism.

Tsarist Russia was highly, and poorly centrally planned, and incredibly backwards. It ended _serfdom_ in 1861, for Pete's sakes. The first world war demonstrated exactly how broken that system was.

Market reforms, on the other hand, inflicted immense amounts of suffering on the population, particularly segments of the population that were unable to work. (But, as with every economic system, market advocates only want to take credit for successes.)

Falling from its position as a super-power to a back-water second-world state was also a huge blow to national dignity. In case you're wondering why Russians are largely supportive of Putin's aggression, its because they see him as restoring said national dignity. It's the story of Trump's deplorables writ large.

<comment><USER6> >Market reforms, on the other hand, inflicted immense amounts of suffering on the population, particularly segments of the population that were unable to work.

That's like saying impact inflicts enormous amounts of suffering for people who are falling through the air. The market reforms were painful because there was no other option after the mess that communism made.

<comment><USER5> Well, I think we _could_ go without hyperinflation and voucher privatization.

It would still be pretty bad, sure. Most of Soviet enterprises will go belly up either way. Even in the USA the rust belt suffered during that time. And Russia was basically one big rust belt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Some interesting facts about the Moscow's M.

The Metro could have appeared as early as 1875 in Moscow, but the Russian Orthodox Church blocked it by claiming that "a man, created in the image of God, cannot humiliate himself by descending into the underworld."

In the October of 1941, during 2nd world war, the soviet government was preparing complete liquidation of the Metro. It was supposed to be flooded but the government order was soon abolished.

The total combined length of the M is 300km or 186 miles.

Source: [https://www.buzzfeed.com/victorstepanov/mscw- metro](https://www.buzzfeed.com/victorstepanov/mscw-metro)

<comment><USER8> The story about Church protest has no proof. At least I tried to find it and found nothing worthy

<comment><USER7> According to this source [1] the quote was supposedly from a bishop's letter to the Patriarch of Moscow at the time.

> Церковники распускали разные, порою до глупости нелепые слухи. Один из > архиереев писал московскому митрополиту: «Возможно ли допустить сию > греховную мечту? Не унизит ли себя человек, созданный по образу и подобию > божию разумным созданием, спустившись в преисподнюю? А что там есть, то > ведает один бог, и грешному человеку ведать не надлежит». И подобная > нелепость воспринималась всерьез.

Seems like it was one of many letters, but not the sole factor that forced Duma to scrap the project.

[1] [http://www.metro.ru/library/metropoliteny/147/](http://www.metro.ru/library/metropoliteny/147/)

<comment><USER9> Considering the presence of famously well known cave monasteries within the Russian Empire's borders dating back for 800 or so years even already at that time, with many famed ascetics, elders, and saints, I would hope that the letter yielded a sharp rebuke from the patriarch on that particular point..

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev_Pechersk_Lavra#Caves](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev_Pechersk_Lavra#Caves)

Not to mention the well known knowledge of Roman Christian persecution and the related subterranean activities required to survive at that time..

But since the quote is out of context and has no reference to an actual response, who is to say...

All the better to make the church seem backwards though..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I tagged along on one of my wife's business trips to Moscow about a decade ago. I spent a week mostly on my own exploring the city, and consequently much time on the metro (and more time lost). It certainly helped my ability to read Cyrillic but I would not call it a relaxing trip.

The metro stations really are breathtaking: emerging into a gilded, be- chandeliered hall after a near 5 minute escalator ride isn't something I'll forget.

</comment><comment><USER11> Unfortunately, they're not all as beautiful as the ones pictured here. The one I grew up next to is pretty drab: [https://flic.kr/p/C6QcXj](https://flic.kr/p/C6QcXj)

Although right outside is a pretty awesome statue of Gagarin: [https://flic.kr/p/dLU1xg](https://flic.kr/p/dLU1xg)

<comment><USER12> Fun fact: This statue is pure titanium.

<comment><USER9> Hmm.. Wondering if this is some sort of post-Stalin reference..

<comment><USER13> People did not care much about Stalin in 70s-80s. It is symbolic in this case (space ships in Russia are made from Titanium). Another space-related monument in Moscow (the Conquerers of Space) is also Titanium. Also, from what I've heard, steel technology in the USSR was not that great and it might be just too expensive to build these from steel.

<comment><USER4> In that time period, the USSR produced most of the world's Titanium - a metal critical for defense and aerospace industries. This was the equivalent of, say, South Africa commissioning a statue covered with diamonds.

<comment><USER13> Yes, the main reason for lacking in steel technology probably was the abundance of Titanium.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I always thought that the most amusing part of Moscow Metro is people one can meet there. Just one example : [https://twitter.com/maxsparber/status/858330495788220416](https://twitter.com/maxsparber/status/858330495788220416)

<comment><USER15> Yeah... Just an another example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpr8pvSgqI8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xpr8pvSgqI8)

<comment><USER14> Owls are the coolest creatures in the known Universe!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> [https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/05/scenes-from-the- mo...](https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/05/scenes-from-the-moscow- metro/528660/)

A larger set of photos, partially the same, suggested to me by Zen.</comment>


13-inch MacBook Pro (non Touch Bar) Battery Replacement Program - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/ca/support/13inch-macbookpro-battery-replacement/ <comment><USER2> The keyboards on this new range of Apple laptops are a single unit with the logic board, very costly (to replace). They're extremely fragile and essentially booby trapped so that if you try to replace keys yourself, you may end up breaking the keyboard and thus the logic board as particular keys such as the spacebar are replaced differently. From a usability standpoint, the keys are so shallow that the tips of your fingers hurt after extended usage as if you've been pressing them into cement.

<comment><USER3> My wife has been complaining about the keyboard on her new Macbook Pro, within months of getting it. It seems the keys are sticking, but we're not sure if its a defect or if crumbs got underneath. It has never happened on our previous-model MacBooks Pros/Airs. Either way, this design is unfortunate for the consumer.

<comment><USER2> It's a defect or multiple defects. I have 2016 MB and a mid-2017 touch bar MBP. So many keys have became unresponsive that I backspace most of the letters I type; A torture that you can't let your frustration out on by typing heavily, lest your fingers bear the brunt (Newton's third law + shallow keys). My shiny new MBP began having these issues after about 2 months.

2nd gripe: I made the most unfortunate mistake of attempting to install Windows 10 through bootcamp. short story: _windows f-d up during reboot_ , leaving me with a non-booting mac parition that I don't want to erase.

I thought I could repair it with Ubuntu, _but_...

Most aggrivatingly, there are no linux drivers for the keyboard on the MBP (due to the touch bar being a single unit with the keyboard) and you need more than one USB-C to USB converter if you want to both plug in a linux boot disk and a keyboard that actually works.

Far worse is the fact that there is no linux driver for the entire logic board (as it's a single unit with the keyboard and touch bar). No logic board means no access to the hard drive at all. So I can't fix the partition with a linux boot disk even if I do have multiple USB converters. Now both laptops are either used as bookends or to hold my coffee. So yeah, thanks Apple.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I entered my computer's serial number, but it's unclear if it is affected or not:

> _The serial number you entered is not eligible under this program because > either:_

> _• It 's not in the affected serial number range. _

> _• Our records show that your battery has already been replaced._

> _• Our records show it 's no longer eligible for a free replacement under > this program._

> _If you have questions, please contact Apple._

If even they don't know which one of these three options apply to the serial number that I have, what hope is there to guarantee that my computer will not explode in front of my face while I am working? I bought mine during the time frame mentioned in this page, custom built _(upgraded RAM and disk capacity)_ , and never had taken it to an Apple store for repair _(which means, option #2 doesn 't applies)_. I wish there was a better way to double check if option #1 or option #3 apply to my device, other than scheduling an appointment with their "Genius Bar" which usually takes several days.

<comment><USER5> I mean, the page itself states that the battery just expands and poses no safety risk.

Even if you _were_ affected, it wouldn't explode in your face.

<comment><USER6> LiPo Batteries expand because they're being charged/discharged incorrectly. Batteries burn because they're being charged/discharged incorrectly.

"poses no safety risk" is a fairly high standard when discussing incorrect battery management.

<comment><USER5> And after the whole exploding Samsung Galaxy Note thing, and Apple's extremely high status, I doubt they're taking chances here when making such a claim.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The only thing that keeps me with OSX instead of Linux on laptop is awesome touchpad in MacBook. Wandering if there are any ThinksPads/System76's with comparable touchpad quality ?

<comment><USER8> I love Thinkpads but, no, I've never seen one with a comparable touchpad to a Macbook. The closest PC device is Microsoft's Surface Laptop, but the Macbook still takes the crown, it is just a much tighter contest.

<comment><USER9> I'm curious even after a decade no vendor can produce a comparable touchpad is there any technology that only apple have the patent

<comment><USER10> RANT: The others just don't care? Lenovo, HP and Dell are catering the corporate market and build most of their models with the corporate bean counter in mind. You don't see stunning displays or fabulous track pads because those are hard to measure in numbers. If two laptops have the same measurable features, then the one with cheaper price tag is likely to win.

<comment><USER11> Same goes for the LCD, Lenovo was infamous for putting the shittiest panel for so long because it doesn't really matter for business use cases. They offer more quality panels nowadays, but everytime I open my old thinkpads my have need 5 seconds to readjust to such sad levels of contrast and luminosity.

These days I'd be looking into DIY mods, so many people are into hacking I'm sure it's possible to swap these.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I get a hit on serial number but no symptoms. So I think I should replace but:

"Your 13-inch MacBook Pro will be examined prior to any service to verify that it is eligible for this program and in working order. Service may take 3-5 days."

So I might go through that and still not get a new battery? Feh!

<comment><USER13> It will be examined before service by a genius. They do some additional tests in the store. When they take it in, pretty sure that you get a new battery. I had several devices changed already in similar programs and it always worked like that. You can also ask to have it serviced immediately, I had some luck with that and had only to wait for 30 mins.

<comment><USER14> > It will be examined before service by a genius

That sounds so wonderfully sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> My 15 inch has the same problem and the touchpad is unusable. Has anyone else experienced this? For all the benefits people tout about the macbook touchpad, this really is a damper.

<comment><USER16> I experienced something similar: Many of my keyboard keys don't work. I have to use external keyboards.

People say that it might be due to a swollen battery. Either way, Apple wants >$400 to replace.

2015 MBP

<comment><USER17> [https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Retina+Disp...](https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Retina+Display+Early+2015+Battery+Replacement/45137)

you should stop using it as soon as you can, it's a fire hazard

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So, since the SSD is soldered to the mobo, I'd need to encrypt my entire drive, travel to an Apple store, be without a laptop for 3-5 days, and then travel back to the store again? Bleh.

<comment><USER19> macOS encrypts by default, but otherwise yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Late Nov, I brought my MacBook to the genius bar to repair, that was a display problem but they replaced a new top/bottom case and battery for me. It seems like it's related now.

</comment><comment><USER21> I had my dell's battery bursting through the touchpad like something out of Alien and they told me since it was out of warranty I was shit out of luck. At least I could get a replacement off amazon and fix it myself. Doesn't stop the laptop crashing every time it flexes slightly though.

</comment><comment><USER22> Darn... I'm reading this on a 13" macbook pro with no touchbar, manufactured during that time. Guess I better find that product number.

<comment><USER23> Try "About this Mac" in the Apple menu.</comment></comment>


iPhone App Review sites to email when you're about to launch - <AUTHOR> http://mytangibles.tumblr.com/

<comment><USER2> Following this formula might get you a post or two but are those reviews going to get you up the charts? Nope, not at all.

\- If your goal is impact and reach...you should be analyzing the traffic of the blogs you're contacting. A lot of those sites probably only have a few hundred readers. A review on Gizmodo & TUAW would probably be 10x more effective than mentions on all of those sites.

\- We sometimes tend to forget that the R in PR stands relations. So build those relationships don't just spam. \- Get to know bloggers (do your research) and get them to know you well before you go pitching (add value, send them tips, get to know them on twitter and IRL)

\- Intros are also very helpful. Have a friend who got a review on _insert blog name_? Ask him to make an intro since he's established himself as someone who's made something newsworthy.

PR is kind of like trying to get a job. You could blast out 50+ generic resumes + cover letters and hope someone calls. Or you could do your homework, choose the top 3 companies you really want to join, get intros and do something remarkable to get noticed.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply! It's true that these reviews might not help immensely to get us up in the charts, but they have worked for us in the past imo. We've had some of our most loyal users coming from those review sites so we're currently happy to stick with that list as our initial list to use.

I agree 110% on building relationships and finding well-known bloggers to write about your post as well as reviews on Gizmodo or TUAW being worth 10x more traffic on the list currently provided. You might've missed the last part where I mention that the list is incomplete though because we usually do end up delivering a better pitch to the mentioned top level tech news sites after a week or two.

From just our experience, we've found that doing a blast of 50+ generic "resumes, cover letters" AND posts by the top companies is a perfect combination. Not to mention, it really doesn't hurt to post to the 50+ sites either way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Shotgunning isn't the best approach either. Ideally, you should be in contact with reviewers BEFORE launch.

<comment><USER4> This is key!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think it's easy to overestimate the importance of being blogged about. My app was chosen as "App of the day" by thenextweb.com and it was retweeted about 200 times - I got a download spike of about 100 (remember the link was retweeted 200+ times!) for one or two days, then it quickly dropped back to the normal level.

<comment><USER6> what does you app do? The link on your profile is broken.

<comment><USER5> EmptyInbox - it's a little Inbox Zero helper for GMail. <http://app.net/emptyinbox>

Thanks for the pointer re: the kickfolio link. Kickfolio apparently "kicked" their app portfolio offering for devs (apparently without warning?). Bummer.

<comment><USER6> That's interesting: i never knew that one can host such presentation pages on app.net

<comment><USER5> That's actually how app.net originally started off as...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is it me or is publishing a list like this a bad idea? I'm thinking these 50+ (or maybe the first few, since people generally stop reading or get lazy) will be flooded with requests, thereby decreasing the odds that they'll actually pay attention to yours.

Basically I read it as "quick fix! get publicity here!" which is probably not a great attitude to encourage.

</comment><comment><USER8> You might also consider the list at Apptlantis <http://www.apptlantis.com/app_reviews> with 175 app submission sites. It is one of the most complete and actual lists. Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER9> What about if you're launching a game?

<comment><USER10> try to drum up some support from the toucharcade forums <http://forums.toucharcade.com/forumdisplay.php?f=13> ahead of time and you can try to submit to TouchArcade too (editorial side), but a ton of games come out every day, so it can be hard to get found.

(TA is my site)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does somebody have a list like this for Android?

<comment><USER8> Here it is <http://www.apptlantis.com/app_reviews?platform=android> 70+ sites</comment></comment>