AdTech Sucks - <AUTHOR> https://lockwood.dev/advertising/2019/06/07/adtech-sucks.html <comment><USER3> Is there a "pull" rather push aspect to advertisement? Sort of a trade-show equivalent of digital advertisement?

Issues with pushing ads down my throat are as follows:

1\. I don't want to buy another Sony XM3 headphones. I just fucking bought them and I am seeing more ads of the same thing.

2\. Even if I saw ads for relevant accessories, say, I bought an iPhone and I am seeing ads for phone cases; I don't want to see them when I am browsing Instagram or a lecture video on YT about how to meditate.

3\. Say the timing is right and the ad is relevant, I _still_ am repulsed by advertisers. I don't like salesmen. I find them sleezy and annoying. It is like walking into Radioshack and a platoon of salesmen are trying to sell you Sprint cell phone and I am here to buy a goddamn electrolytic capacitor.

However, when I am searching for a pressure cooker, it would be great to go to a centralized repository of ads and look through who markets this sort of thing the best and may be have some objective reviews along with it. May be have a standardized ad template and guidelines so the marketing dickheads don't go overboard with flashing lights and sparkles. Have a standardized page full of pressure cooker ads, let them fight over my business in a level playing field. No psychological tricks, no sleezy techniques, I want to see increased competition based on value they provide to consumers. Not weak anti- competitive deceitful marketing.

I _love_ going to trade-shows. They're all salesmen but there is something about serendipitous discovery of new stuff, seeing things that you may not need immediately but it goes in the back of your mind and you remember it at some obscure situation (especially in hardware engineering, I run a lab that serves 50 engineers). Most importantly, I am in the mindset when I visit a trade-show. That mindset is different than when I am desperately looking for a tire shop nearby to fix my flat tire.

Fuck advertisement. It is the worst thing modern society is plagued with.

We need yellow pages, not 60 second interruptions during a cooking show. YC folks are reading this - there is a huge gap for a "pull" advertisement model. AdTech guys can still collect data and be assholes about it, but at least you won't be bothering me when I need not.

<comment><USER4> It used to be that when you looked at kiteboarding forums or blogs you would see kiteboarding or travel ads. No tracking of individuals needed. I think that's what you are talking about.

Now you see ads for blenders because you bought one or looked at one last week. Ads are not context sensitive anymore.

I would have no problem if HN made some money with advertising for dev tools. It makes sense. Personalized ads are creepy and annoying.

<comment> j-c-hewitt They are still context sensitive, just the retargeting guy is bidding higher so that is what is showing.

<comment><USER4> I don't know much about ads but that's something I have noticed. When online ads started they are actually sometimes useful to me because of context. Now they are totally useless to me. They are just noise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > I'd love for data to be seen as a liability - something audited and > discarded often to minimise risk.

Perhaps it's just the industries I've worked in, which tend to be highly regulated, but I have such a hard time seeing why this idea isn't more intuitive to people. Every single scrap of sensitive information you have laying around is something that has the potential to fuel a very expensive, possibly even existential, crisis for your company.

Even for the non-sensitive stuff, keeping it around "just in case" increases the risk that somebody who has taken a couple classes in how to use R or Pandas and is still a bit starry-eyed about Big Data starts making questionable business decisions based on unskeptical interpretations of biased results drawn from convenience-sampled data of uncertain provenance.

The default shouldn't be collecting and warehousing everything, the default should be, "when in doubt, throw it out."

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Yeah, and to expand on the idea of liability, I also additionally mean the possibility of a financial liability. If we were to say, charge per month for a retained customer date of birth, you'd see business analysts internally constantly asking why the data needed to be stored so long, or whether just age could be stored, or something. If the price was high enough, the problem would sort of just... go away.

Obviously much smarter people than me would need to figure out those regulations though.

<comment><USER6> On the liability side the GDPR was already good progress

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> From the article - "If you've been on the internet for any amount of time, you've probably seen very poorly targeted advertising. In my experience, I see a lot of car ads. I don't own a car".

One can argue that advertising cars to person without one make some sense.

At least it's better then advertising vacuum cleaners to person who bought one on amazon 1 week ago.

<comment><USER8> I'll give you a better example - I'm an English speaking guy consuming regular US content. I travel quite often and when I'm in non-english speaking places like Thailand, I see ads on Youtube(mobile) purely in Thai language.

I use Google products extensively and Google most definitely knows I don't speak Thai. I mean it's almost ridiculous the number of Thai ads I've seen on Youtube. For a company that sophisticated with AdTech, I'm shocked how bad they are with this.

Are they doing this on purpose just to sell more ads? The companies spending the money to show me those videos are practically throwing money down the drain if I don't even understand them.

<comment><USER9> This is exactly my experience. Go to Thailand, see ads in Thai. Go to France, see ads in French. Go to Indonesia, see ads in Indonesian.

Google has paid thousands of engineers billions of dollars over 20 years and somehow they have failed on this very simple optimisation!

<comment><USER10> The advertisers you see have specified location but not language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> > Why, oh why, would a company built on ad revenue want to reduce ad spend? > > These companies are perfectly positioned to make ads more efficient - <USER2> > they have absolutely no reason to do so.

The question is not really asking about reducing ad spend, it's asking about reducing advertiser costs per outcome. It's pretty obvious that if you decrease costs per outcome, return on ad spend will rise, and advertisers will spend more. In fact, more advertisers will want to get in on the game (as costs decrease, ads become profitable for more and more advertisers), and this pushes costs up. This eventually creates an equilibrium, but even at that point, it is still the case that decreasing costs increases revenues for ad networks.

Attribution is a really, really hard problem. Ideally you want to do a Lift test, and ideally you want to do it across all your ad spend channels. To do this, you still need the attribution mechanisms ("tracking" in the article).

So I don't find the article coherent. It points out deficiencies in the system (which there are many), it falsely claims that big players have no incentive to improve, and it makes it sounds like all these advertisers are just burning their money. It makes it sound like pervasive tracking is a problem, which it might be for other reasons (privacy, unintended consequences), but certainly is not making ad tech worse.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. I think your response only holds true if both the market acts rationally (which isn't the case if people are optimizing-for-resume), and the benefit from claiming more conversions isn't as low hanging as other "efficiency" gains.

The "attribution mechanisms" you mention are precisely one of the drivers for the pervasive data collection that is in AdTech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The idea that ad targeting sucks because ad networks have no incentive to improve it is extremely dubious.

Google and Facebook have an incentive to use up advertisers' budgets. But they also have an incentive to keep advertisers happy by providing good returns so that they will keep spending / increase spending in the long run. Advertisers are not always perfectly rational, but I don't think they're as dumb as the article makes them out to be.

The simpler explanation for poor ad targeting is the bidding component. If it was the case that you were shown whichever ad had the highest predicted CTR, I'm pretty sure you'd be seeing some damn relevant ads. But instead you're seeing whichever ad has the highest (bid per click * ctr). Or worse, advertisers can also bid per impression, in which case there might be no relevancy component at all.

My guess is the car ads on YouTube mentioned in the article are that last case. Both of those components (YouTube and car companies) are notable for skewing towards "brand" advertising rather than "performance" advertising. They're not trying to get you to buy a car right then. They're trying to get you to feel good about their company in the long run so that five years from now you're more likely to buy their car.

<comment><USER13> Might you or someone else mind explaining how this "bidding component" works? I'm not familiar with it or with the specific bidding models at work - "bid per click * ctr" etc?

<comment><USER12> Advertisers go to an ad network and configure their campaign with: "I want to show X to users who are Y or are on a site about Y, and I'm willing to pay Z for it".

X is just the content of the ad and is usually entirely advertiser-defined. Some ad networks will allow you to do some fancy stuff to help determine the best phrasing or arrangement or whatever of your ad.

Z can be in dollars per impression, per click, or per conversion. An impression is one person being shown an ad one time. A click is a person clicking an ad. And a conversion is advertiser-defined but is usually someone buying the product being advertised. Bidding per click is the most common.

Then when a user loads a page with an ad on it, the ad network finds all campaigns that are eligible - meeting the criteria defined in Y. It then runs an "auction". It has to calculate which eligible advertiser is willing to pay the most for that potential impression. But not all advertisers are bidding per impression, so some prediction comes into play. If an advertiser bid per click, then the expected amount they will pay is the probability the user will click multiplied by the price if they do click. Their probability of clicking is often called CTR which stands for "click-through-rate" so that's where the bid * CTR comes from. Usually an ML model takes what is known about the user, the ad, and the page, and predicts CTR. Similarly for conversion-based bids, it's bid * CTR * CVR, where CVR is "conversion rate". Whichever ad comes out with the highest result of this calculation is shown.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the clear and thorough explanation. The parent comment makes good sense now.

One follow up question - is the "bid per impression" sort of the campaign of last resort then? In other words its the cheapest type of campaign for an advertiser to run as well as the least profitable for the ad network?

Cheers

<comment><USER12> I think bidding tends to just be about what the advertiser cares most about. If they are a "brand" advertiser (Coca-Cola is the canonical example) they might bid per impression since they're not really looking for clicks, and they have some idea of how much an impression is worth to them. Compared to say some app where they want installs and so might bid per conversion.

As for the network, it's also not as clear what's profitable. Bidding per click or conversion probably gives them more opportunity to do well with good targeting. But high per-impression bids are also useful for the users the network knows very little about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> AdTech is wonderful, from a technical perspective. The standards are rich while the ecosystem is rife with opportunity.

If you are a developer in AdTech, you will NEVER hear about interaction, or see contract, with most of the companies listed...other than a handful (maybe FB, maybe Yahoo, maybe Instagram). I've worked for Experian (the US Company) and talking about them in the AdTech space is the same as talking about HN in the cooking recipe space. There's a tiny bit of overlap, but it's largely pointing to shoehorned third parties because that isn't something Experian's existing infrastructure performs.

AdTech is fun, it pays well, and you get to be at the ground level of these moral compass debates. I have refused some pieces of work and AdTech is tolerant to negotiating concerns. I think most developers would benefit from experience in AdTech, even if it's just a short time.

<comment><USER15> I worked in adtech for a bit and thought the tech was really subpar. The engineer's goal is try and find edge cases where the privacy controls of the OS / browser have gaps so you can better target and serve more ads. The ads themselves are garbage. Very underwhelming experience. Also it's a race to the bottom. No VC's want to invest in adtech anymore given that old tech has monopolized it and regulations are coming. No career path. Stay away.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> """The systemic issue occurs because marketers and AdTech companies unreflectively increase surveillance and data collection in the hopes of increasing media attribution. Even the most trivial data point, the most granular site visit or location data, stored on a person-by-person basis, could conceivably be used to demonstrate that a customer may have come into contact with one of your campaigns."""

I'm genuinely intrigued by AdTech. It exists, but no one likes it -- i.e. before internet ads --> TiVo, internet ads --> ad blockers. I understand it can attract talent due to profits and the engineering + data problems, but is that the main attraction for developers? If you worked in adTech, what attracted you to it? Is there a hope you could make more ethical or privacy aware or (<insert positive idea here>) ad tech systems?

Does adTech even work? Is there an active campaign somewhere / grassroots movement to "boycott" recruitment to ad tech companies?

(Just trying to get a better understanding here, ad tech has become symbiotic with the current state of the internet, so I would like to better understand it.)

<comment><USER17> I also worked in Ad Tech - outside of a major tech area, it was the biggest, fastest growing tech employer around.

The pay was only average for the area, but the company clearly had money and was experiencing rapid growth which is always exciting.

As you mention, massive data sets, tens of billions of HTTP requests per day, etc, are simply not challenges you get outside of FAANG, so there was a lot of interesting work.

The really shady stuff only came to light once you'd worked there a while, and realised the entire industry is basically built on fraud and money laundering with almost nobody incentivised to stop it.

<comment><USER18> > tens of billions of HTTP requests per day

Could you elaborate? Seems very high, even for ad impressions.

<comment><USER19> rtb bid request volume can easily go 1m/sec, this is not impressions, but offers to buy for an impression.

<comment><USER18> Makes sense, thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My first ever "earning money in Internet" experience was in my teen years when I ran my own ad farm as a part of an ad farming collective 2005-2007. Back then, things were simple: you open a website, sign for 100+ banner networks, then drive in traffic with all tricks imaginable, including "buying it." Part of your revenue goes to group's 'big papa' who does all the "business cover" in the West: setting up companies, bank accounts, accounting, tax reporting, and cashing out payments from ad nets.

My second venture into Ad industry came rather unexpected. In 2016, when I had to leave Canada because my employer was denied LMIA (a paper "certifying" that you are not stealing a job from locals.) I called up all my friends with whomever I had working relationship before I moved out of Russia.

A man who once was a guy behind of Russia's biggest ad farming group back in mid-naughties called me back. Unbeknown to me, he worked day and night to up his profile for 10 years, and became a "big name man" in Ad industry, moved to USA, and opened one of the biggest DSP on the market today.

What shocked me, is that the nature of the industry and attitudes to the client hasn't changed a dime since 2005. The slang for F500 clients there is still a "whale" (the term itself originally came from either "ad farming" circles or banking)

After passing through shock coming back to Russia after 8 years and coming back to my senses, I said *ck with that and left. Been happily working in OEM electronics again since.

</comment><comment><USER21> Online ads seem to perform poorly and, for larger companies with brand recognition and large budgets, almost no lift. I've been under the impression that adtech is a bubble, but I'm not an expert in the space.

<comment><USER22> It's not a bubble, but it definitely shouldn't be on a pedestal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Imagine you're a marketing-degree graduate in middle management. If you're > lucky, you may have done some statistics courses. In your day-to-day, you > likely don't apply these to a great amount. You hear about this great thing > called "Machine Learning" which is sweeping marketing departments. You might > have read a white paper or two about it, heard about it at a conference, or > been schmoozed by someone from IBM trying to sell you Watson (ugh). You > decide to talk to a consultancy about it, or are referred to one by upper > management, who's been living from cocktail-to-cocktail on the consultant's > corporate AMEX for their entire career.

Lets be real - when you're in this position, the consultants say a lot of words to you that you don't understand and then you say yes to a contract because the PowerPoint looks good. Not only do you get to mention your huge new budget on your resume, thanks to the huge invoice, but you also get to mention you implemented MACHINE LEARNING at your company. But what's next?

I have been working in advertising industry (background in software engineering) for 3+ years as an engineer (for one of the four biggest agencies). I think the author overestimates how much data we can/do collect, and how much we leverage on it. But the excerpt above is absolutely spot on. I'm a mid-level manager and I sometimes baffled at how much bullshit some companies try to sell to our clients (e.g., some big CPG companies), and how much the management folks from our clients and our advertising agency/company alike buy into that bullshit. "ML/AI" and "Media attribution" are really big now. But I believe almost 99% of the people who are leading these efforts (at least in my company) have no clue as to how to do it--thus, the snake oil salesmen are taking advantage of this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your kind words! :)

I worked at a Telecom for most of my time in AdTech so I think I might have had a close encounter with some particularly high overcollection of data there.

<comment><USER23> Ah...I definitely see the Telecoms recording and hoarding a lot of data without any regard to consequence/implication. I know a couple of coworkers who decided to leave my current employer and work for big Telecoms, and they said it's more chaotic there. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> >Tracking is bad, because even if you don't have anything to hide now, you may find that your past activities make you a target under a future political system.

I've been screaming about this for years, but everyone thinks I'm crazy. Here's an interesting point of frustration: one one likes to give out phone numbers in the context of online dating anymore. Usually the request is to move from, say, tinder, to an app like Snapchat. People don't understand why I'm hesitant, especially when they want to discuss relatively personal, indirectly or directly politically charged politics on a platform built to harvest literally everything you write, photograph, and send.

On some level I start to feel like society is deserving of the dystopia it is building, because the average person simply doesn't care to understand the dangers of anything they do when everyone else is doing it. But maybe that's just vindictiveness brought on by jealousy of their blissful ignorance.

</comment><comment><USER25> Yeah, it sucks for advertisers, too.

From another active thread concerning the ad industry:

> Using Google retargeting ads, less than 5% of desktop traffic goes on to > click anywhere on my website. And it's worse for mobile than on desktops.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20124231](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20124231)

<comment><USER26> You mean it sucks for you. How can you speak for all advertisers, especially based on a sample size of 200 clicks?

You have to diagnose what could be off on your end before making extreme blanket statements.

These ad systems are tools, and tools only work as well as how you use them.

<comment><USER25> I find it hard to believe that 97.5% of people can click a link to a website and not even _accidentally_ click something on that website.

I'm not referring to _real conversions_ , where yes, skills in marketing and using the tools does make all the difference.

All I'm saying is that I paid for 200 clicks that appear to not even have real people clicking anywhere at all.

<comment><USER26> No doubt, there is fraud in the system. If you want to be successful in using these ad platforms for your business, you will have to accept that as a fact of life.

What you need to do is to exclude bad placements/websites from your campaign. But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are compelling, or you'll just waste a ton of money.

<comment><USER27> > _But even before that, you have to see if your ads + landing page are > compelling, or you 'll just waste a ton of money._

And how do you determine that, ex ante?

<comment><USER26> This part is more art than science, and requires being objective about the subjective, and what I mean by that is: being honest about what you're offering and if it's actually valuable to your prospects, and then seeing if how you're presenting your offer is simultaneously clear and breaks through the noise.

At the end of the day we're still talking about _sales_ , just in a new form, in a multi-dimensional bazaar called the Internet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I joined AdTech just a few years after graduation (my formative years as a software engineer) and that gave me the opportunity to work on very high throughput systems.

Eventually I got to lead several different project like building ad servers and real time bidder from scratch and scale them to the 100K+ requests per second while maintaining single digit ms avg response times. I also had a head start in the "big" data space because of AdTech.

I will always be thankful for the knowledge I got because of the nature of AdTech, it positioned me really well in the market and just made me a much better engineer.

After 5+ years working in AdTech is was time for a change, I was feeling dragged down by similar reasons, I had a high leadership position and a lot of domain knowledge so a lot to lose, but I made a change to mobile F2P gaming and have been doing that for over 3 years, it's been a great change.

</comment><comment><USER29> The example of the pizza delivery selling the personal details of their customers is precisely why GDPR has value.

People have been dismissing it as being unfriendly to startups. As a software developer I totally get the complaints, but as an Internet user I couldn't care less.

You could say that the free market will adjust itself when consumers will figure out the damage and learn to protect themselves by choosing better alternatives. But there's no way to protect oneself. For example in the pizza delivery case, there's often no way to know that your address and phone will be sold to third parties, unless it's against the law to do so without you giving explicit consent.

<comment><USER30> Selling personal data without permission is illegal without GDPR.

<comment><USER31> And made legal by some very fine print buried in the ToS.

<comment><USER30> Yes, AFAIK GDPR makes it that you have to also opt into your data being shared/sold besides the ToS.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ironically that url is being blocked by Ublock Origin on my phone.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here - I actually had to change some of the image URLs I made because they had AdTech in the name, and uBlock was blocking them. Hahaha!

I solemnly swear that my website has no tracking installed on it (that I know of, welp). Cheers.

<comment><USER32> Probably because of the combination of "advertising" and dates in the path.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Its not always sucks, as a consumer, if I can get cheaper pizza, with the trade of they may sell my data, I'm fine with it.

What is the downside ? My email spammed ? not that much of issue, gmail spam filter work reasonably well.

My phone being spammed by robocall ? smart app can filter those out too.

Ads on the web ? adblocker solve that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here. Would you be ok with your health insurer buying your pizza purchase frequency from a data broker?

<comment><USER33> Whats the actual issue ? They might increase my premium if i I buy too much pizza ? then it may be possible they might decrease my premium if I don't buy pizza that much.

<comment><USER34> Do you really want every decision you make to be available to everyone you interact with, and then used to judge you? You're that confident in the dirty details of your life?

<comment><USER33> Ideally yes, provided everyone else decision is also available to me. Do I have dirt ? Of course. I would be okay if everyone else dirt is exposed too.

True that people can use information to judge me, but it can be both positive and negative.

Right now, having "dirt" is not without its trade off and inconvenient, you have to make effort to conceal it, hide it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> It should be referred to as Tracking Tech, it reflects the actual goal much more clearly.

</comment><comment><USER36> I commented on a different article earlier which was all fear mongering. This, on the other hand, is exactly correct. This article is fantastic and spot on.</comment>


Those lying eyes? Research disputes claim they reveal deception - <AUTHOR> http://www.startribune.com/nation/162445706.html

<comment><AUTHOR> The underlying PLoS ONE paper:

[http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...](http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0040259#cor1)</comment>


"You will not be arrested for using drugs" - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/12/02/you-will-not-be-arrested-for-using-drugs-what-a-sane-drug-policy-looks-like/ <comment><USER2> The UK isn't (obviously) as free with drug laws as Amsterdam, but here it's illegal to possess but not to use - aka if you walk into a police station smelling of weed and high as a kite on coke they can't arrest (or caution or anything) you for it, unless you actually have drugs on you that you haven't yet taken.

As such, if I witnessed a drug-caused medical issue, I'd get rid of whatever drugs were around (frankly I imagine if you put them in your pocket you'd be fine - doctors aren't allowed to inform the police about it unless they have a reason to believe you're a threat to the safety of yourself or others, and being a drug addict, short of being really close to killing yourself, isn't what that mean) and have no worries whatsoever about calling an ambulance.

edit: side-question, is there anyone on here who a.) knows what coke and white heroin are like and b.) would be willing to comment (with a throwaway if preferred) on: is it hard to tell them apart? I've never seen any form of heroin in my life, but find it hard to believe I could sniff it without knowing.. so wonder is it an easy mistake, or were these victims people who didn't know what to expect cocaine to be like in the first place?

edit 2: For anyone who hasn't been to Amsterdam, or at least the red light district... I've never taken them up on their offers, but the number of street dealers there... last time I was over there for work went out in the evening for a few drinks and some smoking, must've been offered coke over 10 times just while walking along streets. (And MDMA a couple of times, but not as frequently.) Never known anywhere easier to get coke if you wanted it, never known anywhere that I'd trust the quality of drugs on the street less if I had wanted it.

<comment><USER3> Cocaine and heroin are sold as white or off-white powders. They are very hard to tell apart. As someone else mentioned, cocaine produces local anesthesia, so that provides a "test" for users, but street drugs are rarely pure so there is always a chance that a batch of heroin has a local anesthetic in it so it produces a false positive (likely very rare though).

The thing that makes heroin masquerading as cocaine dangerous is that typical heroin doses are quite small (~10 mg) vs cocaine (~100 mg). If you get heroin instead of cocaine and snort your regular dose, it can easily be a fatal dose of heroin for a naive user.

<comment><USER4> > there is always a chance that a batch of heroin has a local anesthetic in it > so it produces a false positive

This suggests that there is some motivation to pass heroine off as cocaine, rather than this being a supply-chain mixup. But then why sell heroine as the substitute? It seems like the street value of heroine would still be higher than other substances (say, talc with the local anesthetic). If you're dealing, why not just try and pass that off, increase your profit margin, and not invite criminal investigation into the deaths of your customers?

Or is the presumption here that some people are dealing with the purpose of causing harm?

<comment><USER5> I am far from an expert, but one possible scenario revolves around drug novices who are partying heavily, and a simple problem communicating. A group of tourists, well into a night of very heavy partying, could ask a random person for an ambiguous term (like 'powder') expecting to get cocaine. Perhaps that particular dealer only has heroin, which is technically a powder as well, so he/she sells it and thinks nothing of the transaction.

Moments later, some very intoxicated tourists dive into what they think is cocaine. They do a line each, don't get the cocaine feeling that perhaps one or two of them vaguely remember, but they assume that they just got badly cut drugs, so they dive in and do more.

Snorting heroin (especially if you think it is cocaine) is a surefire recipe to die because it tends to take a little longer to really kick in. And, because of its toxicity, there isn't a lot of room between getting high and dying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'll give Amsterdam credit for not legally punishing drug users who need medical help, but it's not like the US doesn't offer warning when unsafe drugs are being sold[1].

 _Even as authorities await tests confirming heroin as the culprit in the latest deaths, the police and health departments are distributing fliers to community health and addiction service centers warning that "preliminary testing indicates that contaminated heroin may be available on the streets." The fliers also list resources for patients and families struggling with addiction._

[1][http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/08/06/worcester- offici...](http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/08/06/worcester-officials- issue-advisory-after-string-overdose-deaths/xcgLjpHvU9JAUsYXgEPobO/story.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> Over a decade ago Portugal decriminalized drug use. You will not be considered a criminal if you use drugs, and will be treated like a sick person and provided help, by the government, if you want to cure your addiction. On the other hand, selling will take you straight to jail. If you carry drugs with you, the distinction between carrying for usage or for selling is the maximum amount allowed (in grams) which varies from drug to drug.

<comment><USER2> I think Portugal's policy is great, but it's worth noting that they don't _quite_ treat you just "like a sick person" \- there are mandated treatments/etc. that they can (and will) force on drug users, rather than just saying "hey we're opening the doors to treatment should you want it".

They released a 10 year report in 2011 that basically showed drug use had gone down by nearly any metric since they changed the laws in 2001. Not sure the best source to link to, but Forbes have an easy-reading brief piece [1] and tdpf.org.uk has some more detailed stats with references cited [2] (from a quick google for the report's findings)

[1] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years- af...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/07/05/ten-years-after- decriminalization-drug-abuse-down-by-half-in-portugal/)

[2] [http://www.tdpf.org.uk/blog/drug-decriminalisation- portugal-...](http://www.tdpf.org.uk/blog/drug-decriminalisation-portugal- setting-record-straight)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm glad to say some states in the US are enacting similar laws, called "Good Samaritan" laws. In essence, the laws "shield a person who calls 911 from arrest and prosecution for drug use or possession, underage alcohol use and similar crimes."

According to this NY Times article (from 2013), 11 states and DC have passed such laws: [http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/opinion/calling-911-should...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/29/opinion/calling-911-shouldnt- lead-to-jail.html)

(The article quotes someone I know, who sadly lost his son to an overdose.)

<comment><USER8> The reality of drug laws in America is cops and prosecutors mainly use them to target criminals actually causing the community problems. It very rarely happens that an otherwise innocent casual user does time for possession. The system is arguably less broken than internet libertarians think.

It's often surprisingly difficult to prosecute somebody for repeat breaking and entering or gun violence, but the cops generally know who is causing the problems, so they get them on drug possession. This is where the crack cocaine sentencing disparity comes from. Crack affected communities demanded the law get the gang bangers off the streets, and crack possession was the obvious way to pop them.

<comment><USER9> [Citation needed]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bravo to the Dutch authorities for using public information and a focus on public health to try and keep the public, and tourists, safe. I like this approach a lot more than throwing everyone in jail.

TLDR; Sign says tainted cocaine is on the streets, call for help you won't be arrested if you need it.

</comment><comment><USER11> Quite the juxtaposition. Here in Thailand the police are now giving random drug tests on the street and extorting money from you.

<comment><USER12> Wow, that's interesting. Here's a month-old reddit post discussing it: [http://www.reddit.com/r/Thailand/comments/2j9xln/random_drug...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Thailand/comments/2j9xln/random_drug_tests_on_tourists_in_thailand/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Is nobody else on hacker news scared shitless of the convergence of militarized police forces, pervasive surveillance, and now legalized drugs?

Why is drug policy "liberalizing" now? There's no new information. We've known about the risks involved in marijuana and other drugs since it was first scheduled. Harm reduction is not a novel concept.

It seems suspicious to me that drugs are being released into the population, under the watchful eye of regulators of course, now that we're in a permanent recession/permanent war rather than, say, during the Clinton years when the economy was great and we were temporarily not locked in conflict.

Optimists say that ending the "war on drugs" will stop surveillance and overpolicing, but that doesn't seem like such a sure bet to me.

<comment><USER14> _Why is drug policy "liberalizing" now? There's no new information._

There is. And because of it doctors really want to use marijuana derivatives. I know some of the folk running the NHS studies and doing some of the PHD work on endocrine effects.

Here's a couple of recent studies on Sativex.

[http://www.gwpharm.com/oncology.aspx](http://www.gwpharm.com/oncology.aspx)

[http://www.gwpharm.com/GW%20Pharmaceuticals%20Announces%20Ne...](http://www.gwpharm.com/GW%20Pharmaceuticals%20Announces%20New%20Sativex%20Data%20at%20ECTRIMS.aspx)

Also, you have organisations like Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, who have been working heavily behind the scenes for the past decade. [http://www.leap.cc/](http://www.leap.cc/)

<comment><USER13> This is new to me, thanks for pointing it out.

That said, this doesn't mean marijuana needs to be recreationally legalized; in the US it would only need to be made a Schedule II drug rather than a Schedule I drug. Cocaine is a Schedule II drug IIRC, and it's routinely used medically, so it doesn't make sense to have recreational legality, or tolerance of widespread use, just to get medical benefits.

For virtually every cause, there are groups "working heavily behind the scenes for decades" \-- the existence of activist pressure doesn't seem to correlate with policy change. I'd love to see hard data disagreeing with me, but this is my impression from being an activist for some time, and knowing the histories of social change for various struggles.

<comment><USER15> Yet it does make sense to stop arresting people for recreational use of one of the most benign drugs we know of. Marijuana does not wreck homes, it does not kill people, and it does not cause societal problems. It is easy to use responsibly and does little more than make you feel a bit giddy. If you disagree with that then I daresay you haven't ever tried it.

<comment><USER13> I don't disagree with it; I just think it's suspicious that people are publicly acknowledging that _now_ rather than at _any other time._

That said, marijuana is certainly less benign than you're making it out to be. I know several people who started using marijuana in high school and became interested in basically nothing else. Anything can become addictive, but biological components that have tolerance factors are especially effective because they cause you to increase your dosage over time.

It's not like doctors in the 60's thought that marijuana was actually lethal, though. The propaganda about marijuana has been divorced from truth basically the whole time, but it's been scheduled anyway.

I find it hard to believe that this is simply a miracle story of the long work of activists finally paying off. There are no free lunches. If we're getting legal marijuana, we're losing something else. So what is that?

Well, what else are we losing?

<comment><USER15> I knew more than a few people like that myself. Now, I'm about to stray into the realm of anecdote, so take this with a grain of salt, but I knew these people well (I was one of them) and, honestly, if they didn't have weed to smoke they would have found something else to waste their time with. I'm not trying to say that this is true across the board, but i do find it hard to believe that people who are inherently driven and intelligent can be radically changed by something like pot.

Besides, the current laws are not stopping people from doing it. Most know that weed is something which can be enjoyed recreationaly without risking their health or lifestyle. It doesn't hurt anyone around them, so current law is viewed as arcane and unjust. What benefit are these laws providing to society?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What do you want from your DevTools? - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/03/what-do-you-want-from-your-devtools/ <comment><AUTHOR> [shameless-self-plug] I submitted mine at [https://ffdevtools.uservoice.com/forums/246087-firefox- devel...](https://ffdevtools.uservoice.com/forums/246087-firefox-developer- tools-ideas/suggestions/7337960-option-to-apply-sourcemaps-before-running- script) :D</comment>


The HTML and CSS Security Checklist - <AUTHOR> https://www.sqreen.io/checklists/html-css-security-checklist <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, I created this checklist to help fellow web developers avoid common vulnerabilities in HTML and CSS. Have feedback?</comment>


Rethinking the Knowledge Economy - <AUTHOR> http://synaptify.com/?p=613686

<comment><USER2> A thought-provoking article. However, it's not at all clear to me why having a more informational economy is beneficial per se. Because the non-incremental change - or power law change - can work both ways, up and down.

Take the financial system for instance. Finance is one of the most "informationized" industries, with news coming in fast at Bloomberg terminals, ubiquitous access via smart phones, and thousands of trading orders executed every second. Yes, a system becomes more efficient the less (physical) constraints it has, but it also gets less robust. At the core of this problem is that we don't really understand non-incremental change due to the properties of information and a whole host of cognitive biases.

Therefore, I'd like to see a distinction being made to cases where the informationization is beneficial, and where it is detrimental. It's a good thing in industries where there's mostly exposure to positive non-incremental change (e.g. Internet businesses, biotech), but otherwise not.

<comment><AUTHOR> You bring up a very good point. Actually, I think this issue warrants an entire blog post in response. I think there are indeed huge dangers in informationization that could be catastrophic.

So I guess we need to determine whether informationization is a force that can be stopped, and if it's not, what can we do to minimize catastrophic failure. One thing could be to have certain physical/static baselines to fall back to (like shelters, food, minimum levels of non-liquid wealth). Or convert some of NNT's black-swan heuristics into well known practices (e.g. "Learn to be redundant, don't be optimal.", "have small losses if you are wrong, and big profits if you are right", etc.)

I haven't put a lot of thought into the risks and downsides of informationization actually, and perhaps not enough people out there aren't either. At this year's Singularity Summit there was a real lack of skepticism and interest in debating some of these core downsides and dangers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Really nice article. Knowledge as an industry must mostly play a supportive role to the physical world of oil, food production, building and maintaining infrastructure, etc.

Most people probably don't like to think about this, but at least in the USA we are looking at a major transformation in our society. IMO, either our government will go bankrupt or inflate the value of the dollar towards zero.

This economic trend will certainly force us (eventually) to take a hard look on IT spending, military spending, etc. to evaluate what value we get for spent resources. I also expect our society to decentralize as unemployed/under-employed get involved in local food production, etc. The future does not frighten me, and will probably be very interesting to live through, but things will change a lot in the next ten years.

<comment><USER4> I think Knowledge economy will flourish due to rampant <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry></comment></comment>


A closer look at Ingres' impossible ideals - <AUTHOR> http://www.apollo-magazine.com/closer-look-ingres-impossible-ideals/ <comment><USER2> Thought this would be about the database (PostgreSQL precursor), turned out to be about an artist.</comment>


Analog to Digital Failure: the Calendar - <AUTHOR> http://imsoocd.com/2010/01/04/calendars/

<comment><USER2> Here's my number one problem with this approach: It's not obvious right away which day which day of the week a day is since the columns of the days of the week keep rotating. This is an absolutely critical feature for me. Maybe it's just me, but I think it's easier to remember something as "on next Tuesday" than "on the seventeenth".

<comment><AUTHOR> This isn't a solid design (obviously), but I'd like to think the names of the days would be highlighted well. The week day names do line up in a column still. The weekends, especially, would be colored differently.

The weekends kind of count as an scheduled event on their own, but having "THE WEEKEND!!!!" typed out every 7 days might get distracting/annoying.

PS If you like this, follow <http://twitter.com/ImSoOCD> so I don't spam HN with every little thing I think up. It's only one update a week.

<comment><USER3> I think this idea is interesting and possibly great, but that the details will make or break it. If you fiddle around with an implementation, I'd like to see it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> i did look into reinventing the calendar with socialhelix.

the problems with calendar design don't stop there, for one, time is not metric, it's actually really messy.

did you know that GMT time and UTC time are not second -> second equal?

time varies based on geography, different locations have different rules.

politically - time changes when political will needs it to, so ... the rules can change from year to year.

time varies with history, over time the rules have changed and so, the dates when those rules change must be tracked.

the importance of a calendar item can change drastically based on emotional reasons, physical ones like traffic, or even cost.

events are a very hard thing to quantify.

</comment><comment><USER5> I like the idea of the Today view in a calendar as an addition to the standard week/month view. I'd like this along with a view of recent history to see my deadlines whizz right past me!

</comment><comment><USER6> This strikes me as a useful view, but please don't call it a calendar anymore.</comment>


Specializing is usually the right answer - <AUTHOR> http://redanchortech.com/why-your-company-needs-artisanal-chocolate/ <comment><AUTHOR> Full disclosure: I'm the author :)</comment>


The World Reimagined - Sized By Population - <AUTHOR> http://forrst.com/posts/The_World_Reimagined_Sized_by_population-tEx

<comment><USER2> a much wider set of maps based non-geographic country data existed at the worldmapper project[0], e.g. gdp[1] and violent deaths[2], it's a very interesting site although the visualization is not the best possible imvho.

[0]<http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/index.html>

[1][http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/display.php?sel...](http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/display.php?selected=169)

[2][http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/display.php?sel...](http://www.sasi.group.shef.ac.uk/worldmapper/display.php?selected=291)

</comment><comment><USER3> Wow, Bangladesh.

Population greater than Russia. Area slightly smaller than Montana.</comment>


U.S. May Launch Strike If North Korea Reaches for Nuclear Trigger - <AUTHOR> http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/u-s-may-launch-strike-if-north-korea-reaches-nuclear-n746366 <comment><USER2> The 2 thinnest skinned humans are in a global pissing contest... How we forgot the lessons of our forefathers... Sad :(

</comment><comment><USER3> So they strike a random target in retaliation for testing a nuke? What does that accomplish? Now Kim can just test another nuke. Then what do we do? We nuke NK?</comment>


Young Girls Are New Super-Communicators - <AUTHOR> http://internetrack.blogspot.com/2008/06/young-girls-are-new-super-communicators.html Whenever we think of a typical net user, the image of a pasty-faced male geek comes to mind. But things have started to change now. Now a days, the prolific net users are now girls and young women. <comment><USER2> Structural, ingrained sexism in the education system stifles boys' communication skills. This is the only explanation I can think of.

Seriously, I wish all those boys/girls stories just disappeared from HN, until the day public discourse on sex becomes rational. Today it's all like this: males are still ahead, boo! Girls are getting ahead, yay! It's as bad as the pedo scare and the racism scare.</comment>


How to Be Successful (At Your Career, Twitter Edition) - Sam Altman - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/sama/status/1214274038933020672 <comment><USER2> "There are exceptions, but the people at the top of almost any field worked very hard to get there. Be skeptical of people who tell you that you don't have to work hard if you want to have an exceptional career unless they have exceptional careers."

This advice seems to contradict the study below

[https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-mundanity-of-excellence- an-...](https://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-mundanity-of-excellence-an- ethnographic-report-on-stratification-and-olympic- swimmers?utm_campaign=Ali%20Abdaal&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20newsletter)

Perhaps it would be better to say "watch out for survivorship bias"</comment>


Christian Owens (16yo who made 1mm in revenue) live on Mixergy now.  - <AUTHOR> http://mixergy.com/live/#owens

<comment><USER2> Revenue or profit? I don't want to sound like a hater, but revenue is meaningless - it's fairly easy to buy lots of things people want, sell them very cheaply, and make a loss (but turn over a lot of revenue).

I'm guessing Mr Owens did actually make profit (I haven't read his experience in detail), but just wanted to point out the flaw in the title of this post - revenue is ego. Profit is what matters.

<comment><AUTHOR> revenue...breaks down to:

~700K pounds with the mac bundle...but 60% of that went to the developers whose stuff he bundled, and another 10% went to ads. + I'm sure there other costs like servers etc.

with the current one it's ~500K pounds in ad sales...so figure they make 50% as revenue, then you subtract the salary for 8 employees + all the servers to serve the ads and it goes down quite a bit.

but never the less, still impressive.

<comment><USER3> 50% is large for a web-based ad network. Unless they're highly verticalized or doing direct sales (and therefore have less competition), 20-30% is more reasonable.

AdMob (Branchr also does iPhone ads), for example, has a default 60/40 split in favor of publishers. That's the ceiling -- it will be lower for people they want to keep as clients (i.e., clients with leverage). They're also the #1 mobile ad network, so smaller networks will have to be more publisher friendly than they are.

For my FB properties, I have most of the ad networks I work with negotiated down to the 10-15% range.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> COO/CTO of Branchr is Mark Bao

<http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=markbao>

</comment><comment><USER4> Interesting article about Christian: [http://swns.com/next-alan-sugar-makes- first-million-aged-16-...](http://swns.com/next-alan-sugar-makes-first- million-aged-16-131345.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> "Just get out there and do it," is probably the best insight from the interview.

Software doesn't cost anything in terms of capital to build; you just have to put the effort into your ideas and run with them.

I don't think he planned to get rich doing what he's doing. But he's definitely starting to get a knack for it.

Also helps that you probably live at home with your parents. ;)

</comment><comment><USER6> One millimeter doesn't sound like a lot of revenue.

</comment><comment><USER7> Side note, but <http://branchr.com/> is really nicely designed: clear what it does, what the value proposition is, and even signing up is nice and straight forward.

big kudos to the success, but I still find the age kind of irrelevant in this day and age.

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MM>

mm, symbol for millimetre, a unit of length equal to one thousandth of a metre

$MM, symbol for million dollars

</comment><comment><USER9> Mixergy has the best interviews! Each time, so much value.</comment>


Enabling Secure HTTP for BBC Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/f6f50d1f-a879-4999-bc6d-6634a71e2e60 <comment><USER2> > There are always practical limitations to site-wide technical changes, and > HTTPS Everywhere is no different. Sites and content we consider 'archival' > that involve no signing in or personalisation, such as the News Online > archive on news.bbc.co.uk, will remain HTTP-only. This is due to the cost > we'd incur processing tens of millions of old files to rewrite internal > links to HTTPS when balanced against the benefit.

Not to be snarky, but haven't people written tools to help with this? This seems like a common issue. I mean, there's `sed` and similar tools, obviously, but something that could go, validate that the link works over [https://](https://), and update it. I don't see why that would need to be some monumental amount of work.

HTTPS is more than just privacy. See [https://certsimple.com/blog/ssl-why-do- i-need-it](https://certsimple.com/blog/ssl-why-do-i-need-it) and [https://www.troyhunt.com/ssl-is-not-about- encryption/](https://www.troyhunt.com/ssl-is-not-about-encryption/)

<comment><USER3> _Sites and content we consider 'archival' that involve no signing in or personalisation,_

 _AUGH_! Seeing this "SSL is just for private things" mindset in 2016 is really disheartening. It's to keep people from screwing with your connection, not just snooping on it.

I really hope the browser vendors start treating HTTP the same way they treat broken certs sometime soon. This will change once users start asking, en masse, "Why am I getting all these warnings", not before.

<comment><USER4> Pretty sure a diluted form of the broken cert treatment for HTTP is available behind a flag in Chrome, so it might be in the pipeline.

Source: [http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line- switches/](http://peter.sh/experiments/chromium-command-line-switches/)

See:

        --mark-insecure-as

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> > Earlier in 2016, the Chromium development team decided to implement a change > to Google Chrome, preventing access to certain in-browser features on > 'insecure' (non-HTTPS) web pages. In practice, this meant that key features > of certain products, such as the location-finding feature within the > Homepage, Travel News and Weather sites, would stop working if we didn't > enable HTTPS for those services.

I think this shows how valuable it is to use incentives to get people to Do The Right Thing(tm). Perhaps more things should be changed to require HTTPS.

</comment><comment><USER5> It was gutsy (and insightful) of them to publish to the world their upgrade experience. I wish people would be a little more positive about that instead of pointing out how much they suck.

<comment><USER6> A lot of people think they know better and think it's just a case of a few webserver directives, but have no idea of the scope of the BBC content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The CPU overhead of TLS encryption has historically been significant. We've > done a lot of work behind the scenes to improve both the software and > hardware layers to minimise the load impact of TLS whilst also improving > security.

I thought that it hasn't been significant overhead for a while now?

related: [https://www.maxcdn.com/blog/ssl-performance- myth/](https://www.maxcdn.com/blog/ssl-performance-myth/) [https://istlsfastyet.com/](https://istlsfastyet.com/)

<comment><USER8> > Even a 2012 MacBook Air can sign an SSL key in only 6.1 milliseconds.

The BBC has to deal with machines much older and much less powerful than that.

<comment><USER9> Every TLS speed concern I've heard has been about the server speed, not the client speed.

The servers shouldn't be running on old MacBook airs.

<comment><USER10> It _is_ the BBC

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> And just yesterday I told someone to visit BBC when trying to connect to public wifi that requires a redirect to a login page first. Guess I'm going to have to find a new go-to http site now

<comment><USER12> Space-bar heater :)

ON a more serious note, I always use [http://example.com](http://example.com). Being reserved and maintained by the IANA for documentation and testing, it's the most stable site I can think of.

<comment><USER13> Be aware that plenty of ISPs sadly MITM example.com. I ran into this when our test suite that curl'ed example.com and checked its output failed when we ran our binary on a new provider.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Despite such late upgrade to https, the site looks good, uses html5, works without Flash and even not accuses me of piracy for using adblocker.

</comment><comment><USER15> Although this is good news, it will stop me from injecting a hidden breaking news banner to stop it popping up. Should still be able to block the domain, but that won't cache for as long when off WiFi. [^1]

At least this will stop ISPs like BT from doing deep packet inspection and serving stale pages from their cache. Once it's been rolled out to the news site over the next year, of course.

If they use ChaCha-Poly then the load on low power devices shouldn't be much. I did a lot of reading on this for my recent book and it's pretty good for devices lacking hardware AES acceleration.

[^1]: [https://unop.uk/block-bbc-breaking-news-on-all- devices](https://unop.uk/block-bbc-breaking-news-on-all-devices)

</comment><comment><USER16> Good on BBC for coming right out and talking about their plans in public. Love reading this stuff!

</comment><comment><USER17> Haha, here's what I got on the first page load:

string(240) "[https://ssl.bbc.co.uk/dna/api/comments/CommentsService.svc/V...](https://ssl.bbc.co.uk/dna/api/comments/CommentsService.svc/V1/site/blog101/commentsforums/blogs_internet_f6f50d1f_a879_4999_bc6d_6634a71e2e60/?sortBy=Created&sortDirection=Descending&filterBy=none&itemsPerPage=10&startIndex=0&includepostid=") string(40) "Error in cURL request: SSL connect error"

</comment><comment><USER18> I don't get it ... for me their entire website is still http only, even if I add https myself I always get redirected back to http

<comment><USER18> Ah ok I see [https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel](https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel) is now https, but [https://www.bbc.com](https://www.bbc.com) still redirects me to the http version, I thought when they mentioned their "domestic" website they were talking about www.bbc.com or www.bbc.co.uk ... funny even their blog post that informs us about their https support can only be accessed through http ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Did anyone else notice the irony that this proud announcement is served over insecure HTTP?

</comment><comment><USER20> Apologies if I'm being naive, but how does it take 3 architects a whole year to upgrade a family of websites to HTTPS? The BBC are way behind the times here, although the article alludes to issues with suppliers.

<comment> vertex-four The BBC's web infrastructure is a patchwork of disparate systems, run by separate product teams, on lots of different technology dating back potentially a couple of decades in some cases, with lots of third-party dependencies. Additionally, many of the original teams developing their websites are no longer with them, and as with most systems, documentation has no doubt suffered over the years.

For each individual product, they need to figure out what modifications it needs to become HTTPS-enabled (lots of links and identifiers are hard-coded to HTTP, and third-party CDNs might not support HTTPS by default), and update their testing procedures to ensure that it remains HTTPS-compatible, before they can enable HTTPS. Given that this is the BBC (a publicly-funded entity), they also have to ensure that everything continues to be fully supported on browsers going back to IE6, Firefox 3, and Safari 3 - with partial support for some browsers older than them.

In my opinion, a year is doing pretty well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> They enabled Secure HTTP don't forget. Not the insecure kind a lot of people might be thinking about here.

</comment><comment><USER22> BBC used to be the organization that other broadcasters followed when it came to technology. Now it's the follower.

</comment><comment><USER23> > HTTPS has been around since 1996

A blog post about spending several years updating to a protocol that's been around for 2 decades and has been standard for full sites for years. This makes me feel like anyone who has an account on BBC should be afraid of their security practices. Calling a plaintext password leak from BBC right now.

EDIT: People are taking this comment more seriously than I intended. I don't actually think you should distrust BBC's security practices because of this, but I do feel that major websites should have side-wide SSL by now. It is clear that a lot of people below me disagree with that, that's okay, I'm glad I spawned a debate here.

<comment><USER8> Calling FUD on your comment.

It hasn't been "standard on full sites for years", and still isn't now. Only recently with the 'HTTPS everywhere' move has the idea that public sites with no authentication should support HTTPS. And even now, that's not a universally supported opinion, because of its effect on caching.

The BBC has used HTTPS on pages with forms that submit secure data, as has been the historic standard.

Moving a site as massive as the BBC, which spans multiple domains and subdomains and has millions of pages is a big task. Note how you can still see news articles from the late 90s at the same URL. So, yeah, I can understand why writing a blog post about it is worthwhile.

<comment><USER23> Can you point out some other major sites used by the general public which have spent the last few years without site-wide SSL to back up your claim?

<comment><USER8> I can do better than that - I can give you a report published by Google in March 2016 which listed lots of them.

[https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/https/grid/](https://www.google.com/transparencyreport/https/grid/)

For example, the following are all in the world's top 100 websites and none of them support any form of HTTPS. The link includes quite a few more.

* alibaba.com

* ask.com

* ask.fm

* baidu.com

* cnet.com

* cnn.com

* dailymail.co.uk

* ebay.com

* globo.com

* go.com

* goal.com

* goo.ne.jp

* imdb.com

* live.com

* mirror.co.uk

* naver.jp

* nytimes.com

* onet.pl

* pornhub.com

* telegraph.co.uk

* uol.com.br

* weibo.com

* wikia.com

* wikihow.com

* wp.pl

* yahoo.co.jp

* yelp.com

* youporn.com

<comment><USER23> That's scary honestly. Thanks for sharing at least.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Your Company Needs Fanboys -- Lots of 'em - <AUTHOR> http://mindpetals.com/blog/2007/04/your-company-needs-fanboys-lots-of-em/ <comment><AUTHOR> _Fanboys are the people who not only protect your brand, but also push it. They won't just tell a few people about your service, they'll tell the world._

PG must've already read this article. Think about it.. how many other VC/Angel firms do you know that are generating the kind of buzz that YC has?

Wow.. I just realized that's us. We're the fanboys for YC.

</comment><comment><USER2> They sure are useful, but I think they're kind of creepy. I've seen them cheerlead beyond all rational basis for other companies, and I think having much of anything to do with them can give you a very warped perspective. It's like they're passing around Dixie cups of rather suspicious Kool-Aid.</comment>


It's getting harder to defend Edward Snowden - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/08/03/as-evidence-mounts-its-getting-harder-to-defend-edward-snowden/

<comment><USER2> Even before Snowden, _everyone_ (terrorists included) knew that the NSA was devoting vast resources to spying on terrorists, building a huge data center in Utah to store communication intercepts, etc., etc. Quite a while before anyone had heard of Snowden, Osama bin Laden was very paranoid about his communication security because he knew that the U.S. was capable of eavesdropping on cellphone conversations. Snowden's only surprising revelations were that the NSA was spying on all U.S. citizens and on friendly governments like Germany.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's getting harder to thwart terrorists using outdated techniques they know are compromised. Shocked.

</comment><comment><USER4> Because until Snowden they had so much success arresting random muslims^W^Wterrorists.</comment>


Anyone with a day job looking for part-time cofounders? - <AUTHOR>

With all the posts recently about working on startups after a fulltime job, I figured there would be some people who are working on stuff part time after work and want a partner for motivation as much as complimentary skill sets. <comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on security hardened VM's/AMI's of standard operating systems. Not a fan of how "corporate" security companies are. Looking for a designer and/or a biz guy/gal.</comment>


Generation Sell - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/opinion/sunday/the-entrepreneurial-generation.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&pagewanted=all <comment><USER2> I wanted to hate this piece, but I can't. This idea of "post-emotional" is ridiculous, and probably overestimates how passionate previous generations were. There were a lot of half-hearted hippies and punks too. But I think he's right about a few things:

\- the ideal personality is now someone gentle, who gets along with everyone

\- the ideal social form is now to start a business or non-profit, or at least be an independent professional

\- to this end, and due to social media and blogging, many of us are always selling ourselves, however subtly.

<comment><USER3> i think i've found a way to hate it. the author is spot on, but entirely misses the point by labeling us "generation sell". it's not about the selling, it's about working for ourselves. the band as a self-promoting, self-managing independent entity isn't doing it to make money, they're doing their own sales so that their music remains their own. small-time independent entrepreneurs are very specifically _not_ selling themselves. they're selling a product so they don't have to sell themselves to an employer. being a small business owner isn't about selling something, it's about not selling out.

<comment><USER4> I suspect most people still want the comfort of a stable job or career. Problem is that for the last ten years it has been hard to find good ones in the general economy, outside a few growth areas of questionable sustainability (housing, finance, health care). So the opportunity cost for 20-30 somethings to doing their own thing has fallen, even if people don't want to admit it.

The other difference is that startups and small businesses give people a more comfortable narrative of how their life is going. It is a lot more comforting to tell yourself, "I'm doing badly now so I will do better in the future," than "I'll never get a job that pays as well as my parents."

If this was not the case, there would be much less romanticization of venture capital and angel investment on these boards, more startups would be focused on revenue-generating than traction-generating products, and lifestyle businesses would not be perceived as failures of boldness for "not swinging for the fences".

<comment><USER5> >I suspect most people still want the comfort of a stable job or career.

I suspect a lot of people are starting to realize there is no such thing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I wouldn't say we're looking at a culture of salesmen. I'd say it's a culture of craftsmen. The salesman prizes negotiation; he does whatever he has to to get his commission. The craftsman focuses on building and presenting his product (and himself) in a way that maximizes the respect he gets from his peers. The difference between salesman and craftsman is subtle, but it's clear. And I think it's a good way to explain elements of youth culture that don't really jive with the article's point (e.g., the OWS movement).

<comment><USER7> Perfect example of the type of bullshit belief structure that generation sell is built on.

A craftsman focuses on making things. He focuses on his craft. Period. He does not focus on presenting his product at all. The product does not need presentation or sales, its craftsmanship stands for itself.

The difference between salesman and craftsman is that they are completely different things.

OWS has NOTHING to do with the article, except for the very end where he mentions a new culture forming.

I'm sure you know that words have meaning. You just aren't very good at working out what those meanings are or how they are different from eachother.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is clearly written by someone who has not interacted much with real-world entrepreneurs. "Agreeable" is not the first word that comes to mind when I think of the entrepreneurs I've met. I'm not saying all entrepreneurs are cantankerous, but I would say they're more inclined to do things "their way."

I also think entrepreneurs are a lot more threatening to the status quo than previous youth-culture archetypes. If you are a recording executive who would you fear most: 1) a drugged out punk rocker who is pissed at the world and letting everyone know it 2) a hacker entrepreneur like Sean Parker.

I think history shows us who the establishment should be more fearful of.

<comment><USER9> Pretty sure the Beatles had a pretty big effect on society and the status quo. The power of art and music tends to be a second order effect: it inspires people.

Without the music of the 60's/70's, do you think Steve Jobs would have dropped acid, become a Zen Buddhist and built Apple's brand as a the challenger of the status quo?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I place this mostly at the feet of social media. Since your past now never fades, you have a few choices:

1) Don't put/do anything dubious online. (Theoretically easy, harder in practice.)

2) Don't put/do anything that could be de-contextualized and subsequently re- contextualized as dubious, online. (Hard, but not mathematically impossible.)

3) Create some kind of autonomy so that you're not subject to the effects of social-media-based judgment, because social networking never forgets who you were. (Moderate difficulty).

Individuals choose one of more of the above approaches for the various parts of their life... possibly all three simultaneously.

Since social media makes no distinctions about who you were then vs. who you are now, every moment of behavior counts equally into future perception... so being polite, and deferential, and constantly "selling", is not a independent life choice, but rather the result of a most subtle form of coercion.

Coercion is not only from the barrel of a gun. You may completely swear off of social media altogether, or only post precision-calibrated Markov-chained text blurbs that make you look like a model citizen, but you get much less control about what your friends post.

<comment><USER11> I don't think it's only the fear of putting things out there that might reflect negatively, but also the temptation of putting things out there that might reflect positively. I actively try not to do it, but I do find myself participating in even online discussion groups with one eye towards potential "personal brand" building. Am I just posting at HN for the discussion, or to build a platform?

Or: I used to submit essays to Usenet or Kuro5hin, mostly out of a desire to stimulate discussion and get feedback. But now I post them on my blog, and when I'm writing them there's, consciously or not, always this background thought of where I'll advertise that post so people read it, whether it'll get me new RSS subscribers, etc.

I even sometimes think, on the occasions where I've written a long-ish Wikipedia article from scratch, that if I were _really_ doing it right, maybe I should've posted it on my personal blog instead of submitting it as a Wikipedia article--- because I can't fully capture the personal-brand-building at Wikipedia. I'm sure there are people who do give in to that temptation, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The author describes youth culture's social _form_ by calling it "post- emotional," "entrepreneurial," and eventually "generation sell." As underwhelming as this is, I think it's incredibly generous, as I would call its social form simply "nothing."

The tendency to start artisan businesses is not a social _narrative_ , it's just another part of the _aesthetic_. The author compares modern youth culture with the hippies, beatniks, and punks. But those generations were doing what they were doing _for a reason_. Read anything from the heroes of those generations, and you'll see a clear "grand narrative" that described the social relationships of the world they were trying to create. The social narrative of punk culture was not "a tendency to start bands that played three chord songs." That was part of the social aesthetic. The narrative was one of anti-authoritarinism, collective autonomy, and a vision for a world without hierarchy.

The truth is that youth culture today has no narrative. Yes, money is cool again, small-business entrepreneurship is a common pursuit, and "maker" culture has taken root, but these are just the things people do. Ask someone why they made the latest LED clock design out of "make magazine," and they'll more than likely say something along the lines of "because it's neat." Look at the average young entrepreneur, and you'll find someone who discovered technology before they discovered themselves -- someone who is "innovating" because that's what they read they're supposed to do, rather than out of some informed sense of the social reality they're trying to create.

<comment><USER13> > The truth is that youth culture today has no narrative.

You couldn't possibly be more wrong. The narrative of today's youth culture is passion. The passion to pursue your craft and the freedom to do it your way. To satisfy your curiosity without harming the world around you. It is unbelievably positive and optimistic. Liberty is the narrative of today and it's a narrative that has far more substance than those prior to it.

<comment><USER12> If you seriously think that the passion of running a taco stand is more substantial and more liberating than the narrative which led to the events of Paris in May 1968, then I'm sorry for you.

<comment><USER2> What, you prefer tossing bricks and overturning vehicles, in some spastic orgy of revolutionary zeal that fails to bring about any measurable change? At least tacos are tasty.

I pretty much hate May 1968. Not so much for the event itself; there was a lot to admire in what workers did to advance their rights. But for what it meant to the progressive ideal. There was much conflation between the starry-eyed ideals of the students, and the real effects that the strikes had on government. The academic left thought that one caused the other. Hence the glorification of dippy slogans like "I declare a permanent state of happiness". It seems to be the watershed when leftism stopped being about education and material welfare, and started being some kind of conceptual art project.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Spot on the "post-emotional" generation : no anger, no edge, no ego.

Is the entrepreneurial model so attractive that everything that may set you apart has to be shaved, to avoid displeasing anyone?

To me, hating something is at least as important as loving something else.

I'll place the first brick here and proudly declare that I hate organic food and the whole "bio" movement, since it is not scalable and mostly used for class signaling (ala overcomingbias)

<comment><USER15> I think his "selling ourselves" argument is overstated. Judging from me, we keep down emotions because we are more rational than previous generations, we believe in science and reason vs pointless sentimentalism. Organic-foods are just that: trying to emotionally engage people to buy products for reasons never explained.

<comment><USER14> Science, reason and rationalism are not incompatible with an ego. If you believe in some right and wrong, there should also be an emotion, and eventually an action.

I don't think selling ourselves is an overstatement here. And I would also say that we have one of the least scientific generation- not only because enrollment is scientific studies is low, but also because there is now a pride in being ignorant.

Also, while trying to protect everyone feelings, all opinions are considered as equally valid - even when some proved wrong. If that is not selling ourselves, how do you call that?

I only took organic food as an example of what one must love to be "in", trendy, hipster. A dissending opinion, even based on scientific facts, seems to be frowned upon by hipsters, and by extension the new moral order. In the organic food example, we want to believe in something other than facts. This is not science.

Let's follow that example, see [http://reason.com/blog/2009/03/26/norman- borlaug-happy-95th-...](http://reason.com/blog/2009/03/26/norman-borlaug- happy-95th-birt) \- with organic food alone, the earth population would have to be around 4 billions. We're 7 billions. Oops. Internal consistence for organic food proponents would require suggesting china-like one child policy or genocides.

Here, the "selling generation" is using emotional engagement as a sale tactic, for "feel good" stuff.

Personally, I boycott organic food. I usually ask if the food I'm about to order is organic. If it is organic, I ask for something else. If I can not be served food that is not organic, I explain that I boycot organic food, and that I have to place my order somewhere else.

Regardless of your analysis of the organic food, you can say that's is very bold, and unfashionable, in today's culture.

So I guess I won't be a social media icon. Never mind :-)

<comment><USER16> > with organic food alone, the earth population would have to be around 4 > billions. We're 7 billions. Oops.

And if everyone had a car and lived like Americans then the world would be in a tough spot as well. That doesn't mean I'm going to give up my good life. I eat organic because I don't trust non-organic food, because I don't want to eat animals that lived their lives in feces, themselves consuming ground up animals that were too sick to survive. Is organic scalable? It'd be great if were, and I encourage industry to try, but I'm not in it to save the world, I'm in it for myself.

<comment><USER14> "I'm not in it to save the world, I'm in it for myself"

At least, that's self consistent and honest. Maybe not a good sales strategy though.

<comment><USER17> That strategy would sell to me better, than dishonest "organic saves the world" rhetoric.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This misses two key motivators (and ignores the fact that Portland is an extreme example). One is an ambivalence about the products and marketing of large corporations and a corresponding search for authenticity through DIY. Why buy Heinz when you can make preservative-free ketchup from heirloom tomato varieties unavailable in any grocery store? And selling the product mainly sustains the enterprise, offering the potential for work with a degree of autonomy. Put up a web storefront and your niche local business has global reach.

As to "self-branding" and innocuous politeness: to Deresiewicz, these identify a salesman. More probably, they result from a generational awareness that one's words and actions are immortalized online. One cultivates a persona or risks letting others do so for you.

</comment><comment><USER19> Maybe the author just needs to surround himself with some different people? The things I see in my social circles certainly aren't the sort of feel-good, homogenized things he's describing.

And is this really new? Haven't people (and I'm half tempted to apply the term pseudo-intellectual here) been complaining about life being a bit passionless "lately" since...ever?

The longing for the "old days" of the wild west is such a common complaint that its just a cliche now.

If this article feels like it has any sort of merit to you (and you agree with the implication that this is bad), I suggest surrounding yourself with a different group of people.

</comment><comment><USER20> I think in some ways the feeling of this piece embodies the phenomenon, real or not, it attempts to describe. The writer clearly harbors some negative feelings about hipster culture and his perception of its salesman roots, but he won't come out and explicitly rip it--similar to the attitudes of the hipsters he finds so enigmatic.

</comment><comment><USER21> (Hopefully very slight) tangent: The article describes the Millenial Generation as "born between the late '70s and the mid-'90s." Yikes.

I suppose when attempting to reduce such a group to a simple catchphrase ("post-emotional"), no additional harm is done by throwing those who were 21 in the year 2000 with those who were five.

My opinion is that it's always difficult to describe phenomena while inside; easier to categorize the mood of an era once the era has passed.

<comment><USER11> At the risk that it might degenerate into too much meta-level academic theorizing, I'd actually be interested in an analysis of generation-analysis itself. The way generations are segmented seems pretty strange, and shifts depending on who's writing, what/why they're writing, and when they're writing it. It'd be fascinating to get some sort of overview of how that process works.

As someone born in 1981, I've ended up in all sorts of buckets. Sometimes '81 is considered the tail end of Generation X. When I was younger, I thought of myself as solidly Gen-X, because "my" culture all seemed to be quintessentially Gen-X culture: Nirvana, MTV, skate-punk, the microcomputer revolution, cynicism about both staid corporate life and the hippie alternative to it, etc. Later I realized that many people considered '81 a bit late for Gen-X, but I had considered myself in it because as a teenager I identified with culture-drivers who were actually 5-15 years older (e.g. Kurt Cobain somehow seemed in my generation at the time, but was in fact born in '67). This article, and some others, by contrast would group me as a Millennial, but many of the other descriptions I've found of Millennials seem aimed at people younger than me, mainly people born in the late-80s/early-90s.

<comment><USER22> I was born in 83, and I agree. I was homeschooled, so growing up I was never part of a group of children my own age. I was smart at the time, and so I tended to spend most of my social time hanging out with folks who were 5-10 years older and absorbed a lot of culture from them. I've always identified more with the "ideals" of Generation X than with those of the Millenial generation or Generation Y. I'm cynical almost to a fault. I have extreme problems accepting un-earned authority, such that my wife said "you just aren't meant to have a boss" the other day. I really just want to be left alone to live my life in peace, like a less violent Daniel Plainview.

To get meta, I think that it's probably easiest to envision generations as phases of an ideological sine wave. At any given time, one set of ideas and culture - one phase - will be dominant and will contain most of the population. However, no phase ever dies out completely - there's always a few oddballs who will find medieval chivalry, for instance, appealing. I think that you and I were just born in between the peaks of Generation X and the Millenial generation, so our values are somewhat harder to predict.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> That's a whole lot of waffle extrapolated from Portland's food carts (which are great, btw) and handmade wallets.

<comment><USER24> i see waffle did there

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> He missed mods. Watch Antonioni's "Blowup" (1966) and tell me how Thomas (mod) differs from today's hipster startup founder. He doesn't -- except perhaps that he is a bit less polite and drives a vintage Rolls-Royce.

</comment><comment><USER26> Beware of cantakerous smart wordsmiths. They can articulate poisonous thoughts convincingly.

</comment><comment><USER21> When I think about branding a generation, which is always done by a member of a previous generation and with not a little whiff of "kids these days' syndrome, it occurs to me that there might be a feedback loop involved.

If you're firmly part of Generation G (for Generic, a theoretical generation) which has qualities X, Y, and Z but born in the mid-to-late period of said generation, you're told from the moment you're born that you're part of a group that is X, Y, and Z.

I don't have an answer, but I suspect that the problem with 20-30 year- spanning "generations" which are defined and classified by older folks is that, over time, they take on the qualities imbued by an outside observer.

</comment><comment><USER27> I liked the article, though I do think he over-generalizes a diverse subculture full of both crusading, idealistic boys and girls as well as truly despicable characters. Regardless it does put into words ideas and feelings we have all had for awhile, or at least he tried.

Being post-emotional myself (I guess), I have no real opinion to add other than another observation that once again holds true: that the comments about the article here on Hacker News has been a way better discussion on the topic than the comments on the NYTimes site. Why is the NYTimes always so behind the curve?

</comment><comment><USER28> >According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a "post-emotional" generation. No anger, no edge, no ego.

Sounds like Prozac has really had an impact. These kids, when they get the rare moment of depression or rage now, should savor it, like tasting a dish that one only eats once or twice a year.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is not a new idea, I remember having this discussion back in high school with my friends, in 1996, during the dot-com boom.

</comment><comment><USER30> Our society is "fundamentally agreeable"?

Seriously?

Let me counter with: Two land wars in Asia, thirty (!) years of cancerous deregulation of the private sector leading to an economic implosion, 9/11, OWS protests, raging unemployment...

Having said all of this, I would agree that PORTLAND, OR is a fundamentally agreeable society...it is difficult to communicate this in writing, you really have to visit the place to understand.

<comment><USER31> Of these, I would say that the only one the Millennials have any hand in is the OWS protests, largely because many of them are unemployed now with nothing else to do. Western society has apparently forgotten the grave danger that comes from leaving vast swaths of your young population without work and riddled with debt. The reteaching of that lesson is going to define the coming decade, I think.

But the wars? Neo-liberal baby boomers cooked that up. Deregulation? GenX loves that shit.

<comment><USER32> Actually, seventy-something percent of the OWS protesters are employed.

<comment><USER31> I've seen that statistic as well, and wondered if someone would point it out when I wrote that. Apparently it's more than the Tea Party, for all the media bullshit about the two.

At any rate that's still a large portion of it unemployed, being around a quarter, compared to the population-wide unemployment rate of 9%. And surely you would find overrepresented among the movement folks who are underemployed or otherwise frustrated by the lack of mobility in the current market. So (I think) my point stands.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Having a large number of much younger cousins who are, oddly enough, from the Portland area, I think the author is painting an entire generation on the basis of a few highly visible examples.

</comment><comment><USER34> If you don't control your personal brand. Someone else will</comment>


Today Is Norwegian Constitution Day - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_Constitution_Day <comment><USER2> If you're in Seattle or nearby and want something fun to do to celebrate this day, come join us at the Syttende Mai parade in Ballard. It is on 24th Ave NW between 62nd and Market, then turns to go south on Ballard Ave to 20th. The parade starts at 6pm and all are welcome. You'll see many different groups representing countries and their heritage from across Puget Sound.

(It is not recommended to drive to the event. Metro routes 40, 44, and RapidRide D serve the area. If you need a park and ride, park at Northgate TC and take route 40.)</comment>