How American Health Care Killed My Father - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200909/health-care

<comment><USER2> This isn't a political article. Its author has contributed tens of thousands of dollars to Democratic political causes, but the article itself is almost completely opposed to the Democratic Party's thoughts on health care.

Instead, this is an article about business, efficiency, the impact of IT and modern business process on health care, and the impact our current system has on consumers and businesses.

<comment><USER3> I agree. This kind of article is a de facto test of flagging judgement. For a while now I've been considering having HN learn whose flags to pay attention to. (I already have code to collect stats about rates of crying wolf, but I don't do anything with these numbers yet.)

<comment><USER4> As someone who certainly "cries wolf", I'll go ahead and ask: how are we to judge "good" politics articles from bad ones?

I read The Economist, and think they occasionally do some pretty good politics articles, and having an on-line version, it would be easy to post them here.

<comment><USER3> Actually you're not that bad. You only misflag articles 17% of the time.

As for political articles, the test is whether the article is an instance of the ordinary back and forth of debate on some political question, or whether it's about some deeper underlying phenomenon that only happens to be related to politics. E.g. "Politician A accuses Politician B of X" or "Why policy Y is good/bad" are probably both offtopic, whereas "How political campaigns use statistics" is probably ok.

<comment><USER5> How do you judge misflags? Do you compare against yourself and the other editors kills? Or, do you compare to popular opinion? Which might could be wrong if the community grew too fast. ...Does it help to flag dead articles?

<comment><USER3> A 17% misflag rate simply means that 17% of the articles you flag don't end up getting killed. Which is pretty good: it means your flags are an 83% accurate predictor of whether an article will be killed.

<comment><USER6> That has the unfortunate effect of silencing minority constituencies that may have a substantive and HN spirit-compatible reason for thinking that an article is important to get out there and discuss, but whose thoughts do not mirror the prevailing trend of the groupthink.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The title is misleading, this article is actually an examination of economic distortions in the US healthcare industry, and a quite good one at that.

<comment><USER8> I don't see a contradiction between the article's title and the subject you mention. Various economic factors distort the provision of healthcare to the point that it kills people. The title naturally highlights this crucial point, understandably so given the author's personal experience with this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's quite disturbing that Pronovost had to beg hospitals to adopt a _free_ technique that could cut the average 100,000 deaths from hospital acquired infections down to ~30,000 overnight with nothing but telling your doctors to wash their hands.

This was adopted a long time ago in the UK and became cemented in place with the MRSA outbreaks. Visitors can actually be removed from the hospital if they're seen not using the alcohol based sanitizer.

<comment><USER10> The last paragraph of the article addresses this specifically:

"Imagine my father's hospital had to present the bill for his "care" not to a government bureaucracy, but to my grieving mother. Do you really believe that the hospital—forced to face the victim of its poor-quality service, forced to collect the bill from the real customer—wouldn't have figured out how to make its doctors wash their hands?"

<comment><USER11> Nope. Because collections are outsourced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> For the whole article on a single page: <http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200909/health-care>

</comment><comment><USER13> Some of my favorite parts:

 _"But health insurance is different from every other type of insurance. Health insurance is the primary payment mechanism not just for expenses that are unexpected and large, but for nearly all health-care expenses. We've become so used to health insurance that we don't realize how absurd that is. We can't imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance."

"For that matter, try discussing prices with hospitals and other providers. Eight years ago, my wife needed an MRI, but we did not have health insurance. I called up several area hospitals, clinics, and doctors' offices—all within about a one-mile radius—to find the best price. I was surprised to discover that prices quoted, for an identical service, varied widely, and that the lowest price was $1,200. But what was truly astonishing was that several providers refused to quote any price. Only if I came in and actually ordered the MRI could we discuss price."

"By contrast, consider LASIK surgery. I still lack the (small amount of) courage required to get LASIK. But I've been considering it since it was introduced commercially in the 1990s. The surgery is seldom covered by insurance, and exists in the competitive economy typical of most other industries. So people who get LASIK surgery—or for that matter most cosmetic surgeries, dental procedures, or other mostly uninsured treatments—act like consumers. If you do an Internet search today, you can find LASIK procedures quoted as low as $499 per eye—a decline of roughly 80 percent since the procedure was introduced. You'll also find sites where doctors advertise their own higher-priced surgeries (which more typically cost about $2,000 per eye) and warn against the dangers of discount LASIK. Many ads specify the quality of equipment being used and the performance record of the doctor, in addition to price. In other words, there's been an active, competitive market for LASIK surgery of the same sort we're used to seeing for most goods and services."_

<comment><USER14> That's because the notion of insurance is wrong. People need healthcare coverage, not insurance.

We are all connected in this stupid country - if the family down the street can't afford preventative care, and the wife gets sick, and can't take care of the kids, and the husband misses work and gets fired from his job, and then they can't afford good nutritious food for their kids, so the kids go to school hungry and don't learn as well and don't test as well, the ripples can last for generations.

Here's the thing. People act as if healthcare is something that has to be earned, and deserved, and not only is this viewpoint inhumane (in the Greatest Nation in the World!), but it's _economically indefensible._

If people don't get early medical care, their lifetime economic output can be greatly reduced. And their children are affected. If children aren't taken care of with nutrition and care, their mental abilities, abilities to stay in school, are affected -- and _their_ lifetime economic output is reduced. And targeted poverty (as opposed to where everyone's poor) breeds crime. Which creates greater loss of human economic potential AND greater costs for the government.

The country benefits from more, healthier workers, who can think straight, and don't spend significant portions of their time figuring out how to scrape by. These people can then spend money. Middle- and lower-middle-class people spend far more of their income than higher income brackets, if only they have the money to spend.

Net effect: The benefits to the entire country outweigh the costs, in a system where costs aren't an arms race between health insurance providers, malpractice insurers, and other for-profit companies.

A stitch in time saves nine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> theatlantic: "wow this story is amazing, thoughtful, and powerful, but the title has got to go. How about something catchy like: How American Health Care Killed My Father"

author: "umm..."

</comment><comment><USER16> medical reform isn't political in the sense that what we currently have is obviously bullshit and what the politicians propose is obviously bullshit. if we're talking about a non-bullshit solution we're in the realm of fantasy, not politics.

</comment><comment><USER17> Appealing when presented in the abstract, but I have nightmarish visions of such a system.

On the one hand, you'd further motivate those consumers who were already likely to avoid preventive care and ignore symptoms until they require costly (to me as contributor to the catastrophic plan) emergency and intensive care. And the author's position that folks would be able to withdraw funds that exceed a certain ceiling adds the perverse incentive to risk not spending this money, with the downside being absorbed by the catastrophic plan.

On the other hand, you'd do nothing to discourage consumers with irrational fears about their health from distorting prices upwards, or to discourage unscrupulous providers from fomenting those fears. The plan he describes takes fee-for-service and all its problems to a whole new level. I think of things like the celebrity anti-vaccine mess and the healthcare debate with its distorted media coverage and disingenuous advertising, and I have hard time accepting a consumer-driven market succeeding, even with all the government- collected and -analyzed data in the world.

Even worse, I fear that such a system would result in a tiered system, where the best and brightest providers provide excessive care to those with means while the rest of us continue to struggle with barely adequate, barely affordable care.

I don't think that any system that relies on healthcare consumers making the choice between limiting their usage of healthcare services and spending money is destined for success. Providers need to be rewarded for providing the best outcomes for the lowest cost with the fewest mistakes, not the most and most expensive services. Significant efforts must be made to improve the public health of Americans. The conversation should be about how to make those things happen. All this debate about who pays when is just a side show that is obstructing real reform.

<comment><USER18> Your fears are ones that one could have about any market. But in general, free markets seem to work better than any of the alternatives across a wide range of markets, and I really doubt that health care would prove an exception to this.

It won't be perfect, of course, but a perfect system doesn't exist. I'm absolutely appalled that I'm paying (on average, as an American) over $1.5 million over my life for the present system, and can't imagine this would remain the case if pricing and outcome transparency were drastically increased. I think that quality and service would improve, while cost would decrease.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I kinda wish Hacker News would skip the political articles. There are plenty of technical things about health care to cover (e.g. databases for health, clinical trials, input cost reduction).

That being said, I lived under US government health care for a goodly chunk of my life (IHS), and until they fix that, they really have no biz working on anything else.

<comment><USER20> IHS is the Indian Health Service? They don't care about that because Indians have no political power. It's unbelievable the kind of corruption and incompetence that exists inside that agency.

FWIW, Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, and medical care for soldiers are all pretty good on the US scale.

<comment><USER14> Really? The VA? Did you miss all the scandals about the Walter Reed medical base in DC, where soldiers were mistreated, ignored and neglected, and even one killed himself in his room and no one noticed for 2 days? The hospital had no idea until his parents called and forced them to look for their missing son. This was a guy who was evacuated due to a semi-suicide attempt, and they didn't even bother to monitor him. Shameful.

Not to mention the _older_ vets, especially from Vietnam. They are screwed at every turn and the previous administration cut their benefits even more.

<comment><USER21> The Walter Reed scandal would really reinforce what people have been saying about for profit healthcare.

Walter Reed is a huge military complex with Army and contractor buildings on the base. Most vets that go to Walter Reed end up under the military care. This is the old colonial style buildings that most people see. They are in pretty good shape and most vets don't have a complaint about Army care. The real fiasco is the private contractors. This is the part of Walter Reed people read about in the paper. They work under VA but since they are for-profit companies, you know the rest.

People like to use Walter Reed of why the gov't shouldn't get into healthcare at all. Walter Reed is an example of why private, healthcare companies have no business being in healthcare.

<comment><USER10> Government contractors are vastly, vastly different from most private enterprises.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can believe American Health care killed your father. The people who have insurance, are afraid to go to the emergency room with chest pain, afraid the pain is gas and they can't afford the high out of pocket costs they have to pay.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm tired of health care articles based on anecdote. His entire article is seems biased by the fact that his dad died.

</comment><comment><USER24> He says he is a democrat, but a reasonable interpretation of the article points towards the republican solution of taxing health care benefits. The problem is that both the industry and consumers are very insulated from price sensitivity, so costs shoot out of control and providers have little incentive to improve quality. People need to be paying for far more of their care out of pocket with cash. We need price wars between hospitals.

<comment><USER25> Why is it that you Americans are so two dimensional? Every possible idea for social reform must either be the republican or democrat position. If it can't be pigeon-holed into one of those viewpoints, it's not worth discussion. If it can, it quickly devolves into some form of partisan debate.

Your two party system is killing you in every area, and you don't even know it.

<comment><USER26> Do you mean "one dimensional"?

<comment><USER25> hehe, yes I suppose. I was thinking two dimensional with the understanding that the number of dimensions to an argument (dimension == viewpoint) was infinite.

The argument itself though is very one dimensional. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Et tu, Hacker News?

The political pieces on HN are starting to overwhelm the technical articles. Isn't there enough of this on Reddit?

<comment><USER28> Yes, there's plenty of this on Reddit. That's why I used my 'flag' power to flag this article. This article bugs me for two reasons:

1\. It's about a non-technical political topic

2\. I am British and care very little about the internal political arguments in the US concerning their health care system.

<comment><USER29> "I am British and care very little about the internal political arguments in the US concerning their health care system."

Amen Brother!

Political articles should be (imho) shut down very fast. The "flag and wait for a moderator" tactic doesn't seem to be working as well as it used to.

<comment><USER30> _"The 'flag' and wait for a moderator doesn't seem to be working as well as it used to."_

How can we judge how well the system is working when we have no direct insight into it? Perhaps a moderator reviewed the post and found it to be of merit?

<comment><USER29> "Asserting that the system is not "working as well as it used to ..."

I said

"The "flag and wait for a moderator" tactic doesn't _seem_ to be working as well as it used to."

there is a subtle difference between what I said and what you claimed I said.

<comment><USER30> My response came off snarkier than I intended. I've edited it to hopefully de- snark the point I was trying to make.

<comment><USER29> No harm done!

My response doesn't make sense anymore now that you edited yours! :-) I am leaving it unedited however.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What is a good web-based calendar with SMS/mobile alerts? - <AUTHOR>

Trying to find a replacement for 37 Signals' Backpack calendar. It does 3 things I really like:
- clean monthly view
- quick parsing of new events, "3pm Meet with Joe"
- automatic SMS reminders for all events
Can anybody suggest a good alternative? Google Cal doesn't do the natural language parsing. Fantastical looks cool, but doesn't do the month-long view, and has no web view.
Thanks for any input! <comment><USER2> Google Calendar does do natural language parsing and has many different views and can export in all sorts of formats and has widespread support in other applications and on many devices. It can be set to automatically add SMS reminders too.

It _is_ Google but apart from that it meets your stated spec.</comment>


Anti-Intellectualism and the "Dumbing Down" of America - <AUTHOR> https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201407/anti-intellectualism-and-the-dumbing-down-america <comment><USER2> > Isaac Asimov once said: "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, > and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a > constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, > nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just > as good as your knowledge."

I've often wondered what would cause the United States' empire to collapse, but see now how we've always been on a precipice. Ironically one that even financial greed can't hold together. Even Hitler was democratically elected, so given enough time the right conditions will inevitably come together for someone similar to come into power, likely states will be forced to succeed from the union when that happens etc.

<comment><USER3> Hitler wasn't democratically elected. The Reich Chancellor was appointed by the President. It just so happened that then president Paul von Hindenburg was convinced by people on his staff to form a coalition government with the NSDAP, which had around 40% of the popular vote.

Point is that, although people often point to the Nazis as some failure of democracy, they didn't sweep into power by a landslide election (Hitler ran for president against Hindenburg and lost). They were strong, but nowhere that strong. It took a lot of political maneuvering and dirty tactics until they finally seized power by exploiting the Reichstag Fire [0] in order to pass two decrees [1][2] which essentially made Hitler a dictator.

Furthermore, although Nazis were anti-intellectuals, I don't think that was the key to this whole process.

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

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

[2] : [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enabling_Act_of_1933)

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the correction! That's somewhat encouraging.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > The American Association of State Colleges and Universities report on > education shows that the U.S. ranks second among all nations in the > proportion of the population aged 35-64 with a college degree, but 19th in > the percentage of those aged 25-34 with an associate or high school diploma, > which means that for the first time, the educational attainment of young > people will be lower than their parents;

Maybe because since 1995 [1]: "The average tuition and fees at private National Universities jumped 179 percent. Out-of-state tuition and fees at public universities rose 226 percent since 1995.In-state tuition and fees at public National Universities grew the most, increasing a staggering 296 percent"

[1] [http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for- col...](http://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/paying-for- college/articles/2015/07/29/chart-see-20-years-of-tuition-growth-at-national- universities)

</comment><comment><USER5> Trump might be good for America, in the same way Brexit might prove to be good for Britain. These events pull the mist away, and show that something is fundamentally broken.

Democracy is not supposed to be the rule of the mob. There are supposed to be safeguards, constitutions and general education that mean the mess of voting still leads the country in a forward, progressive direction. Each generation better than the last etc.

Both Trump and Brexit show that somewhere along the line that process has failed. And its their opponents that are to blame - they made too many assumptions, capitalised on the wrong emotions for their personal gain etc.

Bringing it all crashing to the ground in a mix of bad hair and racism gives an opportunity, after the dust settles, to rebuild better than before.

Assuming we survive the global recession to follow shortly of course.

<comment><USER6> I understand your evident discomfort. How galling to find that seventeen million people (dumbos?) constituting the 'mob' (five million more than ever voted at any period in any UK general election) gave a thumbs down to the EU as a governing body that imposes rules and regulations on people irrespective of their wishes. If only those intellectuals who <did> support Brexit had had a better education!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> > The very mission of universities has changed, argues Liu. "We don't educate > people anymore. We train them to get jobs."

And yet I hear about an unemployable student debt crisis. IMO it sounds like we should be doing more training, not less.

<comment><USER8> I can't agree. I think the problems lie with: 0) universities that teach an excess of oft irrelevant minutia via regurgitation -- and not the mastery of essentials followed by forays into lessons of experimentation and invention, 1) corporate HR departments that have no idea if they are failing and don't care, 2) employers that believe matching on an alphabet soup of low level S/W skills are the only way to attract and select the best people.

As long as a keen inventive mind is _not_ the principal measure of a job candidate, corporate America will continue to minimize risk rather than maximize potential, eventually populating itself only with robots, be they wetware or software. And universities will continue blithely down their current path to foster ever more sterile minds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting idea, but any possibility of making a point is hindered by shying away from root causes. The article focuses on contributing causes that are themselves symptoms in a self-reinforcing system.

There is nothing new in saying the American schooling system is falling. Or in blaming it on social mores of popularity in school jocks v. geeks. Or a wider society that doesn't encourage learning. "We don't educate people anymore. We train them to get jobs."

These are all age old whipping boys. -- Stop talking about them in and of themselves and start asking WHY?

It beats a slightly fresher dead horse with the "angry social media posters" but doesn't even mention the clickbait trash bloggers teaching them to have those thoughts.

(Spoilers: Why not? This article is a Psychology Today blogpost, let's click over to the homepage. The cover page of their latest issue touts an article called "The Narcissist: It's not always who you think." Oh.)

(Bonus irony tangent: This point is raised by quoting a NY Times blogger to argue that rational thought and critical thinking are on the decline, and blames it on shouty everyday people. But what about the NY Times itself? Their reporting is still among the best, but how often do they (or other prestigious news outlets) themselves promote rationality and critical thinking? If they spent a fraction of the time asking their audience to think critically about "What is good governance?" instead of focusing on "Watch this trainwreck;" how long do you think Donald Trump would have lasted? He'd be evaporated by the first debate, if he made it that far.)

Of course this article is part of the problem too. Read the last paragraph, then the short bio of the author that follows. He's not trying to solve anything but instead pitching a business management book.

</comment><comment><USER10> Remember, we just elected a black man who was the head of the Harvard Law Review. Whatever you think about him, he did not succeed because of know- nothingism. We have bifurcated in some ways, but there's still a lot to be excited about!

<comment><USER11> > Remember, we just elected a black man who was the head of the Harvard Law > Review. Whatever you think about him, he did not succeed because of know- > nothingism.

I can count on one hand the number of political positions Barack Obama has held with which I agree, but you're right on this count. Obama was successful because he's probably the greatest campaigner in my lifetime. That skill includes the ability to build, manage, and inspire a large organization. His campaign "machine" will have an impact on American politics for decades to come.

> We have bifurcated in some ways, but there's still a lot to be excited > about!

I agree, but I would also like to point out that the bifurcation is not along party lines. It's obvious to me that there are not-insubstantial factions of both major parties who simply do not care about the policies of their party's candidates. They identify with the tribe, see them as the "good guys", and therefore the opposing party are the "bad guys".

<comment><USER10> Yeah, the tribalism isn't really based on party lines so much. Identity politics has gained primary importance, perhaps in part because of social media.

Also, on that note, I thought this was interesting: [http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald- trump-...](http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/01/donald- trump-2016-authoritarian-213533)

Basically, the "Trump tribe" is identified by their embrace of authoritarianism.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I've read that article and largely agree with it.

Personally, I'm as anti-authoritarian as can be, to the point of considering myself an anarchist. My childhood was spent around conservatives though, so I guess you could say that I'm "culturally Republican". I noticed early on that Trump's support within the GOP was predominately among those who had no problems with using the power of government to shape society to their own notions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Reminds me of Jay Walking:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vmI6YpGew1w](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vmI6YpGew1w)</comment>


Ask HN: How much karma is dispensed daily - <AUTHOR> How much karma is dispensed daily, and is there a way to query for that in the api? I've been thinking about how karma is dispersed on various websites, now I'm wondering how much is given out here. <comment></comment>


OCaml bindings for PyTorch - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/LaurentMazare/ocaml-torch <comment><USER3> At the heart of the machine learning that I do with pytorch, most of the errors come from wrong sizes of matrix multiplications, or some matrix input that has a wrong size somewhere in the middle of the net.

How much an extra layer of wrapper of a functional language help with that? Pytorch is not much helpful in terms of the error messages. You have to print out the matrix sizes generated from intermediate operations to find out what is really happening.

<comment> l-m-z (I'm obviously biased as being the author of ocaml-torch) Using functional programming is not of much help for size mismatches, the current bindings don't even use the type system to check the number of dimensions - <USER2> that should be reasonably easy to add. Maybe a better approach to help with this would be tensors with named dimensions [http://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/NamedTensor](http://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/NamedTensor) It's possible that a strong type system would help here but I don't think there have been much attempts.

However when using the Python api I often have errors because of: \- Unused variables when refactoring my code, which are just me forgetting to use some parameters. \- Comparing things of different types (and Python does not report any error and just return that they are different). \- Making changes to some helper functions without adapting all the projects where I'm using them. Using a good Python linter probably helps with these, but that's a place where languages like ocaml naturally shine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Where are cutting edge type systems at for statically verifying the "dimensionality" of computations? I remember a long time ago reading about a language from sun called "fortress" which was going to include the option of assigning units to values in such a way that scientific domain model operations could be defined via a kind of type-sugar ... seems like that technology would work really well for ML (and data science in general) if it were effective.

I remember reading some lengthy hype about fortress and then never hearing about it again ...

<comment><USER5> Note that units are implemented in F# : [https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/units-of- measure/](https://fsharpforfunandprofit.com/posts/units-of-measure/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Do bindings like this help much with the day to day work of machine learning research? Are the kinds of errors you encounter the kind that could be avoided with a smarter type checker?

<comment><USER7> I would say so. There are 4,500 results on Stack Overflow for '[pandas] typeerror': [https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bpandas%5D+typeerror](https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=%5Bpandas%5D+typeerror)

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure that's a good metric. After all type checking does not really answer a question a developer has about type errors, it just informs you of a type error before you run your program.

In fact I'd wager your average Haskell type error has generated more than a few frustrated stackoverflow questions.

<comment><USER9> Right, but learning about the errors without having to run and hit every codepath in your program has a lot of value. So in that way, seeing how many people hit pandas runtime type errors is a useful thing to measure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Does this support all of the features of PyTorch?

<comment> l-m-z Bindings author here. This should support most of the PyTorch ops - this is done by automatically generating the binding code as there are more than a thousand of these. Most of the models available in torchvision should also be there (with pre-trained weights) see [https://github.com/LaurentMazare/ocaml- torch/tree/master/src...](https://github.com/LaurentMazare/ocaml- torch/tree/master/src/vision) Finally it's also possible to export some python defined models and run them from ocaml.

That being said there are some rough edges compared to the PyTorch api, e.g. no parallel data loader, not much tooling and only a couple tutorials...

<comment><USER10> Sadly, a lack of material is to be expected for anything but Python...</comment></comment></comment>


Microsoft's Bing search engine blocked in China - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/au/news/microsofts-bing-search-engine-blocked-in-china/ <comment><USER2> I really hate this. Seems all good search engines are now banned in China: Google, duckduckgo, even Bing. For those of you who do not have a proper VPN and do not want to put up with Baidu's shitty search experience, I recommend searx.me.</comment>


Paralyzed Berkeley student walks again with robotic exoskeleton - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/26775/?p1=blogs

<comment><USER2> As usual, this was foreseen by the Onion [http://wwww.onion.com/articles/stephen-hawking-builds- roboti...](http://wwww.onion.com/articles/stephen-hawking-builds-robotic- exoskeleton,1629/)</comment>


How I hacked hundreds of companies through their helpdesk (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/intigriti/how-i-hacked-hundreds-of-companies-through-their-helpdesk-b7680ddc2d4c <comment><USER2> I used to do this trick to get facebook accounts back when they required a .edu email address. I'd just find some abandoned mailing list under the .edu of my choice, join the mailing list, then use the list's address to create a facebook account. After that I could change the primary email address to whatever I wanted and still view profiles for anyone at the target school.

</comment><comment><USER3> _E-mails sent to firstname.lastname@example.com sometimes turned up in an online support portal such as Zendesk, Kayako, (Fresh)Desk, WHMCS or a custom tool._

I don't understand how the author is able to read email sent to email@example.com?

<comment><USER4> This confused me initially. Basically, he signs up to Company (not Slack) as firstname.lastname@example.com. Then he creates an account at Slack as email@example.com. Slack sends an email FROM firstname.lastname@example.com to email@example.com. The email gets taken by the helpdesk and detects there is a user called 'email@example.com'. Although this email was not verified, the ticket becomes viewable in the helpdesk.

<comment><USER5> And, as I understood it, he was able to read arbitrary emails sent to support@ by getting access to their ticketing system instances just like he got access to Slack.

He doesn't say so explicitly, but _presumably_ he did the same thing with ZenDesk as he did with Slack - he signed up for ZenDesk with support@target- company.com and then the target company's service with, say, no- firstname.lastname@example.com. And then once he had access to their ZenDesk instance he could read all emails sent to email@example.com, which opened up all kinds of doors.

<comment><USER6> No, he can't read arbitrary emails in Zendesk. What he did is simple yet difficult to explain. He covers it in "METHOD #2 — THE SUPPORT DESK"

He signed up to a target company's Zendesk as email@example.com. This is the email address Slack sends email from. He could do this because Zendesk doesn't require email verification.

Then he signed up to Slack using email@example.com. This is the email address the target company uses to open cases in Zendesk.

ASo since Slack send the account confirmation links from firstname.lastname@example.com to firstname.lastname@example.com, he could see them and login to the target company's Slack.

<comment><USER5> I don't think that's quite right. How does signing up for Zendesk using firstname.lastname@example.com give him access to the target company's Zendesk instance? He can't read emails sent _to_ firstname.lastname@example.com. The auto-add-to- organization logic in these systems goes by _domain_ so he needs to sign up for Zendesk using a @target-company.com email address, so that he'll be granted access.

He clearly describes how he got access to their Slack instance, which required finding a way to receive an email at a @target-company.com email address. He did this by signing up for the _target company 's_ service using email@example.com, in order to trick the company's support desk software into making the email from firstname.lastname@example.com visible to him in the customer-facing support portal. The target company's helpdesk software thought the email confirming ownership of email@example.com was from the new user who just signed up with email@example.com, so it made it visible to him in the user-facing support portal as a ticket _he_ had opened. That let him access their Slack instance.

The question was: how was he able to read tickets created when an email was sent to firstname.lastname@example.com, such as a password reset email from Twitter. Just joining the company's Slack instance wouldn't let him read emails sent to firstname.lastname@example.com. And he says he was able to do that by getting access to their Zendesk instance.

Presumably he used the same process, but substituting ZenDesk for Slack. Or else he used a different method that he doesn't describe.

<comment><USER6> > Presumably he used the same process, but substituting ZenDesk for Slack. Or > else he used a different method that he doesn't describe.

He does describe the process.

> How does signing up for Zendesk using email@example.com give him access to > the target company's Zendesk instance?

Because like the author said "any one could sign up with any e-mail address and effectively read any support tickets created by that e-mail address."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I look at all the energy going into ridiculous password requirements and super esoterica attach vectors and of course the real compromises are in plain sight.

<comment><USER8> This is what bothers me about stupid password requirements that create massive user friction because we'll never remember the password. Passwords aren't guessed or brute forced 99% of the time. They are stolen or phished or access is gained in another manner.

<comment><USER9> You're right that passwords aren't BFd often and that phishing is by far the easiest way.

Regarding other methods: passwords are however, guessed, or stolen. If a hacker can grab the app databases store of passwords, they can preform offline cracking and quickly start getting into accounts that have matching hashes to commonly used passwords. All it takes is a few accounts and you can usually pivot around from there to get some more privileged access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'd be interested in a follow-up to see how many companies have made the effort in the past year to address this. I suspect not as many as one would hope.

</comment><comment><USER11> From what I understood you can sign-up at zendesk with any email like ooga- email@example.com and if someone sends an email to that address the email starts showing up in the support software even before you verify your support desk account (probably because the company has configured the MX records to send all email to zendesk, etc).

So now that you are effectively able to read emails sent to arbitrary address at the company's domain, you now get access to SSO links, etc sent on it too. Is this what the hack is?

</comment><comment><USER12> I was fully expecting this to be yet another blog post about a fairly mundane technique, but this was actually rather clever. It's also now something I'm going to double check at work on Monday to make sure we're not vulnerable.

</comment><comment><USER13> Its just my email: [http://almaer.com/blog/its-just-my-email- password](http://almaer.com/blog/its-just-my-email-password)

</comment><comment><USER14> Video website's pretty obvious to guess. Hint: it's not youtube (duh), and there's like two other video websites.

</comment><comment><USER15> I don't think you can simply get an email to email@example.com without subscribing to an email stream.</comment>


The yield Keyword in RUBY - mehdi-farsi https://medium.com/@farsi_mehdi/the-yield-keyword-603a850b8921 <comment><AUTHOR> I don't remember the exact details, but there are drawbacks to using yield instead of naming the block variable in the method definition, even if you're only assigning yield to a variable.</comment>


Giving away the secrets of 99.3% email delivery - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3096-behind-the-scenes-giving-away-the-secrets-of-email-delivery <comment><USER2> As anyone with half a clue about e-mail delivery will tell you: SMTP accept != delivery.

Almost every spamfilter in the world will _accept_ your e-mail and _then silently discard it_. The 0.7% instant rejects that you see are merely the tip of the ice-berg.

Thus, the only secret you gave away is that you don't seem to understand how spamfilters work.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know this wasn't clear from the post... We include a "fake" image (with a unique has for that specific message) in all html email so we know if it's "really been delivered" (ie it was actually opened).

<comment><USER3> And you get a 99.3% return rate on your image? That seems highly unlikely given that many (most?) mail clients do not display images by default.

<comment><AUTHOR> Copied from Noah's comment on the post (I asked him first):

"We do track open rates for emails that are already HTML formatted and making remote requests for images, but you'll never get 100% accuracy with that metric because many people use plain text emails or don't load images. Our experience is that the best you'll ever see is between 60-70% "open" rate because of this. Some of our applications in some contexts only send plain text emails as well, so we don't track open rate there at all.

Why is remote server acceptance rate important anyway? Some thoughts:

1) First, because hard bounces really do happen a lot, and at our scale, a 1% difference in hard bounce rate means 160k messages per week that aren't making it to users, which means a poor experience for many and many support requests coming in to us. Based on all the information we've been able to find, we're pretty sure a 0.7% hard bounce rate at our scale is pretty good.

2) Second, because it is a relative metric of overall deliverability. Our experience has been that when we do get on a blacklist, servers start hard bouncing our mail until we get off of it. As we've improved our SpamAssassin type scores over the last few years, we've seen an improvement in hard bounce rate. We also see a strong correlation between hard bounce rate and the number of email delivery related support requests we get. While it's not the perfect measure, it's the best measure we have available that we can reliably monitor.

Again, there's no perfect way that I know of to reliably tell whether an email is getting to a user, since read status isn't particularly accurate. We use whatever we can (hard bounce rate, open rate, number of support requests relating to email) to get as close to that as we can."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Obviously when you're at the scale of 37Signals... you're gonna roll this stuff yourself. But! I don't want people here to get discouraged about using 3rd party services. I too am guilty of "NIH syndrome" or the need to reinvent the wheel all the time. I've setup mail infrastructure. It's not pretty, and it's actually not necessary any more.

I've been using Postmark for a while now and it's been fantastic. They provide a great admin interface with insight into what is being sent and why mail might not be getting delivered. The setup process is very simple (none of the downsides 37signals mentions... ) you essentially add some SPF and DKIM DNS entries and you're off to the races.

<comment><USER5> Postmark is magical. I've used them for several projects - emails just work. Really excited to try out their new in-bound features.

<comment><USER6> Postmark's inbound email mail parsing feature is very nice. I used it last week to set up automated order shipped confirmation emails for an e-commerce site we built. I just set up an auto forward to the Postmark inbound address, and they turn around and pass a nicely parsed JSON representation of the email to a URL on our web server.

See <http://developer.postmarkapp.com/developer-inbound.html> for details.

<comment><USER7> Thanks John - we're looking for creative uses of Postmark Inbound. If you're interested in sharing, drop me a line: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm disappointed with the hand-waving dismissal of "why should we pay someone tens of thousands of dollars to do it?"

The list immediately after that of some of the headaches that getting e-mail delivered entails (monitoring and responding to blacklists, various configuration, feedback loops, etc.) is a very good argument for paying somebody to learn and handle the details. I don't see a convincing argument that getting 1% better delivery is worth spending time on instead of doing something else; indeed, they make the argument that improving validation and reporting on the app side is a much better use of time than fighting for that extra 1% on delivery.

<comment><USER9> "why should we pay someone tens of thousands of dollars to do it?"

Because it costs us less and we have better deliverability. Also, 1% of 50 million emails a month is a lot of undelivered mail.

<comment><USER10> Do you have better deliverability though? You said you use Campaign Monitor for newsletters and those are a different type of mail than transactional emails from an application (much more likely to be flagged as spam too!). Seems like two different things and would be hard to compare.

Campaign Monitor isn't what you'd use for your apps, you want something like SendGrid.

<comment><USER11> Sendgrid + their whitelabel stuff (SPF/DKIM) = better than 99% delivery for over 100k emails/day.

SG is probably the most pleasant email-related experience I've ever had.

<comment><USER12> We use SendGrid too at my company. It's really great and easy. Integrating with their SMTP server is really simple.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> old-gregg Having a great delivery rates is actually a lot easier when you are big and famous, have your mail being signed by (and contain links to) a domain with excellent pagerank, have substantiation email volume, long emailing history and so on.

But it gets much harder when you are running with a recently purchased domain on cold IPs or with the spammy subnet neighbors, your subnets are blocked by "know-it-all" small ESP admins.

It is very similar to having a great credit history: you're getting approved for much nicer interest rates, there's no secret. So I don't believe an average person will get 37signals results simply by following Noah's advice.

I work at Mailgun and we help startups and established companies get "37signals level" deliverability :) We also offer quite powerful parsing of incoming email into your app, so check out <http://mailgun.net>

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm sure their solution of tailing and parsing Postfix log files works well, but I believe the more typical and elegant solution to tracking bounces is to send every email with a with a unique envelope sender address that identifies that particular email, which makes it easier to collect bounces without relying on correct parsing of an MTA log file.

</comment><comment><USER14> _By far the biggest cause of failed email delivery we see is due to bad email addresses that were entered in to the system—problems like 'firstname.lastname@example.com' or 'firstname.lastname@example.com'._

I wonder if you could hack up an 80% solution by comparing the submitted domain to common email domains, and giving a warning if it looks like a misspelling. That way, 'firstname.lastname@example.com' would see a second step in the signup process asking him to double-check his email address. Any idea what percentage of misspellings that would catch?

<comment> mike-cardwell FWIW, gmal.com has neither MX, nor A records so a couple of quick DNS lookups could have confirmed that the email address was incorrect.

<comment><USER15> What happens if the user makes a typo but enters a valid email address at some other domain?

<comment> mike-cardwell The email goes to that address at that other domain

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Getting whitelisted and managing your mail server isn't easy and usually costs a lot. I think it's only something that should be optimized when you are sending millions of emails pr. month (like they are).

For everybody else, you can save a lot of time and money by going for Amazon SES, Google App Engine, SendGrid or Postmark (etc.) A lot of these services also include analytics and monitoring and will be cheaper than rolling out your own customized solution (in terms of time and money).

Even for them they would only pay around $6000-$7000 pr. month by using Amazon SES.

<comment><USER17> Has it gotten that bad? I remember back in the mid-90s, when I was still young and crazy enough to fiddle with sendmail.cf on my first few Linux boxen, setting up and running your own mail server wasn't that difficult (and again, I'm talking about sendmail here). Has the whole spamocalypse turned this into an nightmare of that magnitude?

There goes my plan for moving my personal accounts away from GMail before March 1st...

<comment><USER18> Can't speak for anyone else, but personally I'm getting fed up of legitimate personal e-mails going missing even when sent to long-time friends I've swapped mails with on numerous occasions, only to find they're in the spam tray. These are plain text messages, all sent from the same very small pool of mail servers, with correct headers, consistent From: address that really is me at a personal domain I've held for years, etc.

I should not have to jump through non-standardised and somewhat broken hoops like SPF and DKIM just to get a goddam e-mail delivered to my friend. When you reach that point, it's not your e-mail client or domain registration that's broken, it's the receiving e-mail system that's so paranoid about spam that it's regularly diagnosing and (silently) rejecting false positives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> No secrets here, these are basics. Since your mail is mostly transactional your volume is significantly low compared to people who specialize in mailing. Transactional email is less likely to produce spam complaints. Misspelled addresses are detected on first sends, which is what you want. You're going to get an error at the smtp level or a bounce.

Here's a secret - Monitor the ip to domain ratios , usually gmail will allow 1k of mail from the same ip per hour.

</comment><comment><USER20> While we all love services like Postmark and Mailgun on HN (and they _are_ great services), does anyone know of any easy-to-setup open source projects that offer similar functionality? Traditional MTAs are a pain to setup and outdated to boot for webapps (mail parsing, signature and quote removal, UTF-8 transcoding, automatically updating spam detection, linkage to arbitrary storage handlers like MongoDB, and an HTTP+SSL JSON API should be a minimum).

<comment><USER21> I don't know if it provides precisely the functionality you're seeking, but Lamson was designed to address the need for an easier to setup, but still programmable and powerful mail system. It's designed to be able to use ORMs, databases, and data stores instead of text files as well.

<http://lamsonproject.org/>

Example list of supported backends:

        Django's ORM
        web.py's simple database library
        Tokyo Tyrant
        Raw SQLite3
        SQLObject
        CouchDB
        Mongo DB
        SQLAlchemy

Part of the problem with this sort of thing is that in most minds, the modern MTA is qmail or postfix which is in my view just sendmail++.

Let me know if this helps you, if not, tell me why so I can try to figure something out.

<comment><USER20> Fantastic, thanks so much! It looks like it's almost there, and definitely something I will check out in more detail. Admittedly, my use case is limited, but as services like Mailgun and Sendgrid are demonstrating -- it is not an insignificant use case. Lamson looks like it's trying to achieve a bit more than that single case.

So a couple of things I noticed that might be missing from Lamson:

(1) Spam blocking auto-updates -- does this tap into Spamhaus, etc.? (2) UTF-8 transcoding? (3) Signature, quote stripping (like Mailgun). (4) DKIM signing? (5) _Simple_ client libraries for sending mail (i.e., I don't want to build a "Lamson application", I just want to talk to a Lamson server on a privileged port using JSON).

Of course, all these concerns might have answers that I'm missing.

A bit more about my (fairly common, I'm guessing) use case: you have a VPS and a MongoDB instance. I want my MTA to take a minimal set of config parameters, say:

\-- MongoDB database name \-- domain -> MongoDB table mapping \-- privileged API sending port

Now I want the MTA to receive mail for me, perform spam blocking, transcode to UTF-8, parse out signature and quotes in a separate field, and dump the whole object to a MongoDB document with the index field = the recipient's email address. I want it to auto-update it's spam blocking rules using whatever external services and internal analysis necessary. I want it to periodically dump some usage statistics into a separate MongoDB table (maybe a circular connection).

Now for sending mail, all I should have to do is connect to the privileged port from a process on the same machine (it's firewalled to the outside world), and submit an HTTP POST request that specifies recipients, message body, attachments, etc. The MTA should accept the request, perform whatever queuing, rate-limiting, and retrying is necessary to send the message.

All failures and diagnostic information are dumped to separate MongoDB tables. The applications deal with the database/storage system directly, to keep the MTA simple.

I'm glossing over a lot, naturally, but I hope that helps.

<comment><USER21> Lamson isn't an open source alternative to mailgun and sendgrid per se, it's an open source alternative to writing your own library for email.

With that said, specific functionality is more a question of learning lamson, and tying in libraries that do do what you want, or finding someone that already has on Github.

For your use case, you would be tying together and implementing bits and pieces of this yourself. Part of the reason for Lamson existing is to enable programmers to solve their own problems with a common sensical base to work off of.

It's more of an equivalent to a web framework than a CMS.

If that isn't workable, you'll have to either hire somebody familiar with Lamson to hack it up for you, or you'll be at the mercy of existing plugins to tie an MTA into MongoDB. (Doesn't exist).

Do you have a more specific question for me to address? The answer to pretty much everything you brought up is "Cool, so go make it". The point of Lamson being the way it is, is so that you're not limited by the creator's intentions, just by your programming ability.

<comment><USER20> Thanks for this. The more I look, the more it seems like the answer really is "cool, so go make it". :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Also not mentioned is monitoring if your users actually read the emails. A web bug will work (some of the time) as will checks to see if users ever respond (eg if there is a link to click for full details) or login to the site after email receipt.

LinkedIn noticed that I never read one of the group messages I was getting and so switched to a far more infrequent digest of highlights. I think they may even have unsubcribed me completely from one group.

<comment><USER23> re: Linkedin: I found it hard to believe. I receive the same emails from them for years and most do not open /straight delete. and they never stop.

<comment><USER22> They are indeed inconsistent. They did the throttling for me for a few groups while others I never read keep on going. At some point I need to figure out how to unsubscribe, but it is currently quicker to hit delete (unread).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> i recently finished a script that ran our 35k customer records through DNS/MX/SMTP servers and flagged all invalid addresses.

sadly any properties that use yahoo servers or sympatico.ca, bell.ca, always return "OK" and you physically need to bounce an email to verify it. many of our customers have @yahoo addresses so we still have about 25% that simply cannot be validated without a "probe" message :(

<comment><USER25> > sadly any properties that use yahoo servers or sympatico.ca, bell.ca, always > return "OK" and you physically need to bounce an email to verify it

This is standard technique used to prevent spammer from mining the whole userbase.

<comment><USER24> yes, i realize this. still doesn't help the situation much :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What are those options for feedback loops? Hotmail got one [1], but Gmail and Yahoo don't, AFAIK.

[1] [https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsjmrpp&...](https://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=edfsjmrpp&ct=eformts&st=1&wfxredirect=1)

</comment><comment><USER27> Can anybody recommend a service that would let me check whether an email (sent via my or the service provider server) was picked up? They discuss this functionality in their system but I'm looking for someone I can outsource it to.

<comment><AUTHOR> It's not worth outsourcing. We just add a tiny gif that has a unique hash. When that file is requested record the hash and mark the identified message as read.

<comment><USER28> Seems like most e-mail clients these days don't load remote images automatically - do you find that significantly affects this technique?

<comment><USER29> The hashed image is the same method the big boys would use to record open rate.

<comment><USER28> Ok, but surely they have the same problem then?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> HN is becoming 37Signals News.

<comment><USER31> Marketing before the release of Basecamp.Next.

<comment><USER32> Regardless of whether HN has too many 37Signals posts, this is a valid point. HN is worth a thousand uniques an hour and startups would do well to study the success of 37Signals in writing popular content. I say this as someone who finds 37Signals very off putting!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Other than the talk about tailing the logs, and using the three servers, there isn't much revealed to why their delivery rate is so high.

</comment><comment><USER34> Cool. Then if you use their findings published in this blog post, they will publicly shame you and your investors.

</comment><comment><USER35> <http://67signals.com/></comment>


Y Combinator Dataset Update Utility Version 1.1 Released - <AUTHOR>

To keep your Y Combinator Dataset ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172701 ) current, feel free to use the update utility used to collect it. It is available by accessing http://www.xirium.com/ycombinator-news-update20080424.tar.gz
This download is 0.004MB. To run, type:
./mirror.pl ycombinator-news
The script can mirror from many sources and it is already configured to mirror about 30 blogs and forums, including CodingHorror, Guy Kawasaki's blog, Paul Kedrosky's blog, MySQL Forge and Microchip's PIC forum. It also has example configurations for PHPBB forums and Yahoo Groups. <comment><USER2> Mirror of the above download link: [http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/programming/datasets/ycombina...](http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/programming/datasets/ycombinator- news-update20080424.tar.gz)</comment>


Ask HN: What do you think of profit sharing? - <AUTHOR>

I have been invited to help out with a promising startup.  There are 3 co-founders, and then 1 engineer.  He is currently building the entire site and they have invited me to help out.
Obviously, they have no money so they are asking me to join the team and work for free.  Rather than offer equity, they have created a profit sharing plan, where 20% of the net income of the company is split among employees who hold a share.  I would have 1/9 of this 20%.  Also the stock in the profit sharing is non-transferable, not sellable, etc.  It's only good while I would be an employee.
I've seen lots of posts about typical equity percentages after a round of funding, but what about early stage startups?
What kind of equity should I be looking for?  What about the profit sharing plan? <comment><USER2> This is so easy to game and screw the employees. All they have to do is reinvest the profits back into the business (by, say, hiring more employees) and that net income vanishes back into expenses. Meanwhile, the value of the business increases through all that reinvestment, so the co-founders stand to make a big buck when they sell out - at which point, you're left with nothing.

<comment><USER3> This is true at the macro level as well, if companies form an alliance, "profit" is whatever the one that actually touches the customer says it is. If you are going to share anything, it has to be _revenue_.

What are these 3 co-founders bringing to the table if not money? 3 MBAs and 1 (or 2) engineers does not a viable company make...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That sounds really convoluted for a 4 person start-up. The further you stray from the "standard" ways, the more unintended consequences you'll run into.

Profit sharing is not terribly helpful when you're not profitable, and many promising startups aren't - by choice. Also, you have to figure out how "profit" is defined (or more precisely, how it can be manipulated).

So yeah, I'd be careful. Even with the best intentions, stuff like this can go sideways.

</comment><comment><USER5> Basically they're offering you a theoretical possibility of a future dividend (without any of the benefits of actually owning equity) instead of a salary or equity. That's a terrible deal. The company has to be making around $2 million a year in profit before your share of the profit starts to resemble an adequate salary (assuming they haven't diluted your measly share by then). If they exit before reaching that threshold then they've made a healthy sum of money whilst you've done all your work for free.

Even if they returned with a much better deal on paper, I'd find it impossible to trust someone that made that offer. And by the sounds of it, the company is at a stage where even 1/9 of 20% of the equity instead of salary would be a poor deal...

</comment><comment><USER6> So, they want your help now, for some slice of theoretical profits at some future date, at which point they might be profitable. Further, they're not splitting all the profits with everybody, but just 1/5th of them, and you would get 1/9th of that even though you'd be %25 of the workforce. Meaning they keep %80 of the profits and all the equity.

You'd be better off going into competition with them. I'm sure you can find an engineer like the one engineer they have and split the equity 50/50. Or find an engineer and one of whatever-it-is the other 2 co-founders bring to the table.

This is not a promising startup if this is the kind of deal they are offering... because they won't be able to get good people.

If you want employees who aren't getting big chunks of equity, then you need to pay them a market salary.

You're giving up market salary and getting a vague promise of a fraction of a theoretical future profits.

<comment><USER7> I don't have anything to add to what the other posters have pointed out already, but holy crap this sounds like the worse deal ever.</comment></comment>


Global Capitalism's Bouncers - <AUTHOR> https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/global-capitalisms-bouncers/

<comment><USER2> Jacobin Magazine always good for a laugh!</comment>


Training a neural net to generate British placenames - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@hondanhon/i-trained-a-neural-net-to-generate-british-placenames-9460e907e4e9 <comment><USER3> There's a subset of Weird Twitter people from the USA who riff on weird UK placenames and sayings every now and then. I frequently have to remind myself how odd they must sound to an outsider.

@arr and @livestock put together the "Wobbingpool Police Incident Report" on Something Awful a while back which is a nice example: [http://www.somethingawful.com/news/wobbingpool-police- report...](http://www.somethingawful.com/news/wobbingpool-police-report/)

<comment><USER4> If you're not British or a serious Anglophile it can be hard to believe that Nempnett Thrubwell or Newton Poppleford are real places.

We used to drive to Portishead to listen to Portishead.

<comment><USER5> Years ago, I heard what I thought was the name of a play, "Western Super Mayor" was opening in the UK. A bit of checking and it turned out that it's the town of, Weston-super-Mare; sort of a Latinized version of "Whatevertown- upon-Rivername."

I'm pretty sure that if you said, "Weston-super-Mare" to a random collection of Americans, virtually none of them would even recognize what you were saying.

<comment><USER6> > "Whatevertown-upon-Rivername." "Upon-sea", actually, but yes.

<comment><USER5> Oh they're seas?! I always (wrongly I guess) assumed that they were all rivers, like Tine, Avon, that kind of thing.

<comment><USER7> No that's right. Parent meant "Weston super mare" literally means "Weston upon sea", not that Upon is reserved for seas.

<comment><USER5> Oh, I'm a goober, thanks for the explanation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Eeesh that's a lot of Stoke.

Place names in Britain are extremely arbitrary and I wonder how this impacts. Some of these don't feel quite "right".

Here's an interesting story that explains my thinking:

There's an area of Salford called Irlams o'th Height. This used to be called the Height as it was elevated over the Irwell.

There was a family in the 18th century who owned a pub on the Height. This was the Irlam family.

The pub, officially the Park Horse, was locally known as "Irlam's". It was literally "Irlam's on the Height".

As the area grew, especially during the industrial revolution, the entire area was just called "Irlam's on the Height". This has continued to this day - nobody really questions it.

There's also an area in Salford called Irlam. This is on the opposite side of Salford and has nothing to do with Irlam's pub (perhaps except that may be where the family name originated). The area was called Irwellham - a hamlet on the river Irwell.

Salford, to finish, I think is naturally due to a ford. Probably a ford in one of the rivers, perhaps the Irwell again, since Salford emcompassed much of what is now Greater Manchester.

Long winded story out of the way, to generate British sounding names, take local natural landmarks/typically British surnames and suffix with "ham", "ton", "chester". Must warn - many will probably exist!

<comment><USER8> Imagine some kind of AI that generates place names by simulating entire histories, Dwarf Fortress style.

<comment><USER9> Seems to me you'd have a far more interesting program than a mere place name generator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There's a significant subset of Americans for whom in their mind Britain looks a lot like Narnia. Frankly the preponderance of cutesy Saxon village names that look and sound a lot like these are part of the reason.

That and the existence of people like Jacob Rees-Mogg.

<comment><USER5> It's a little more sinister when you realize how much money, land, and power rests on those frilly, fanciful notions. It's not just Americans, but plenty of British people who fall for the illusion to some degree, much as many Americans buy into "Exceptionalism" or some flavor of nationalism.

Often the debate ends up centered around the monarchy, and then dies a quiet death when the turkeys in the HoL fail to support the notion of Thanksgiving.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This reminds me of a tremendously unhelpful idea that keeps circling my brain: A bot that trains a neural net using code comments from a specific GitHub project. The bot then replaces all the comments in the project with those produced by the neural net, then sends in a pull request.

You could also use different training data, perhaps mix in some Mills & Boon.

<comment><USER12> Bonus points if it only adds comments to previously un-commented sections, especially ones that look complicated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> These are clearly English place names and bear no relation to the rest of Britain.

<comment><USER14> There are several that are clearly Welsh. Possibly a couple that sound Scottish, though that's tricky to tell without confirmation bias...

<comment><USER15> You get a few Welsh sounding place names in Scotland that are actually from the Old Brythonic/Ancient British that was the forerunner of Welsh - <USER2> (Pen Y Cog) outside Edinburgh being one.

I don't see anything on the list that looks Gaelic, Norse or the old weird Pictish names...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I did this with a list of 10,000 cannabis strain names scraped from a seed database, have had results running on a twitter bot: [https://twitter.com/high_learning_](https://twitter.com/high_learning_)

my favorites so far: 'Grape Meth', 'Bitch Kush', 'Critical Burple', 'Space Hell'

</comment><comment><USER17> Batchington Crunnerton

sounds like you found an actor

</comment><comment><USER18> Lost it at "Fuckley."

<comment><USER19> For me it was Fapton

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My connection is too poor to actually read the article: Can it generate welsh (Compound? Not sure) names like the classic "llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch"

</comment><comment><USER21> Someone with no life could scale this out to all countries (plus generate legit street names and person names).

You'd get an universal fake-address-generator to rule them all.

</comment><comment><USER20> Dull - twinned with Boring, Oregon - can be found in scotland.

</comment><comment><USER22> On inspection of the examples, perhaps even Dickensian.

</comment><comment><USER23> Not to be a downer but put this one under the category of "it's not AI if a character based ngram model can do it".

But fun regardless of the hype-y AI title.

<comment><USER24> This not only has a name, it has a Wikipedia article: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect)

> As soon as AI successfully solves a problem, the problem is no longer a part > of AI.

snip

> Douglas Hofstadter expresses the AI effect concisely by quoting Tesler's > Theorem: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet."</comment></comment>


Android Play Store Privacy - <AUTHOR> http://codebutler.com/2013/02/13/play-store-privacy/

<comment><USER2> Same thing happens if I sell something in a real or internet shop. Why is this so surprising?

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Twenty years ago, the idea that someone from whom you purchased a product might (gasp) _know who you are_ would have been obvious. Even once the web arrived we all dutifully typed our credit card and contact info into every online purchase, and no one cared. Now all of a sudden it's "revealed" that Android app vendors have the same info (broadly -- they don't get credit card numbers) and it's a "privacy" concern?

That said... maybe there's something to this. Apple has shown that a different model can work, that isolates the buyer from the seller. Is that a good or bad thing? I think there's an interesting discussion to be had here, but this "privacy" nonsense has to stop.

<comment><USER4> I am surprised to hear you refer to this as "privacy nonsense"; things like a name and address are obviously identity related information. As such, any identity related information has to have privacy concerns.

In some ways, I see this as a breach of trust; I can trust Google with some of my data but I dont think every app developer is worthy of even a certain percentage of that trust.

<comment><USER3> This doesn't seem responsive to what I said. Every _other_ financial transaction you engage in carries some kind of disclosure of identity. Your credit card has your name on it and discloses it when it's swiped. You can't order anything at all online without giving them a shipping address. You can't even buy a coffee for cash without your picture being taken by security cameras.

Holding this particular kind of transaction up as (no joke: your words) a "breach of trust" is just ridiculous on its face. So much so that frankly I suspect this is just yet another "Apple vs. Google" flame war in clever disguise.

Again, I agree there's an interesting discussion to be had about this stuff. But only if you give up the absurd absolutist flaming.

<comment><USER4> Let me assure you that there was no insinuation of any Apple vs Google flame war in my comment. While breach of trust might see over the top to you, the interpretation was supposed to be quite simple, let me explain:

Most financial transactions do involve exchange of identifiable information; that remains true for online as as well as real world transactions; you are absolutely right about that. However, in all those transaction, you 'choose' to share some amount of information. One of the reasons services like Paypal became popular was the implicit lack of trust in an online transaction; people were more willing to trust an intermediary to keep their credit card information secure, than using it with any and all online merchants. Similarly, I trust Google as a company more than most other companies with my data and that's a 'choice' I made; however, them sharing certain parts of my identity with a multitude of app developers does seem to be something I didn't 'choose' to do. That seems to be a decision that Google took on my behalf and therein lies the "breach of trust" that you seem to have taken an exception to.

There is no flaming involved; I just think Google can do better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another point which backs up something I read once ... _Google is run by engineers, Apple is run by designers, Microsoft is run by MBAs._

<comment><USER6> Google isn't run by engineers anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Having a developer calculate tax seems odd. Does this mean every single developer who puts a paid app on android store needs to figure out the intricacies of digital download tax for every single state / country? Sure big companies can hire someone to do it but that seems excessive for an individual developer.

<comment><USER8> At least in the US you're not responsible for collecting sales tax for a location you don't do business in, and i'm pretty sure there are minimum thresholds or exceptions to prevent people from having to collect sales tax on yard sales or fruit stands, for example.

<comment><USER9> However, if you do business internationally, this is not as clear: you do not have any a priori right to take money from citizens of other countries for your products or services; as a specific example, if you have customers in the EU (and you meet the various thresholds in any of the member countries) you must register for VAT (probably through the VAT on e-Services program designed for streamlined registration of overseas companies selling digital products). Every quarter, for example, I have to remit collected VAT for every EU country through HMRC (in pounds sterling, which is really quite irritating).

(Even domestically, the rules regarding whether you are doing business in a state are dependent on the state. If you travel at all, have any contractors, work with any other companies, or even simply ship goods around, it can be very confusing to determine in what jurisdictions you suddenly are liable for collecting either sales or seller's use tax. I ran into this personally while trying to figure out "am I doing business in Michigan, a state that imposes a 6% tax that includes digital goods?": the Michigan Treasury didn't want to commit to an answer, so I was going back/forth with accountants and lawyers for quite a while.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> As a developer, I can confirm this.

There are some records with only the zip/country & fake email (email@example.com)

But there are definitely some records with full name, full address, phone,

        e.g. (format only)

        John Doe
        101/A, 2-14, Queen Road , Hong Kong .
        HONG KONG ISLAND
        HONG KONG
        1234 5678
        firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't see the address or phone number. I do see zip code and email.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's as it should be: [http://marketingland.com/why-im-glad-google-play-gives- devel...](http://marketingland.com/why-im-glad-google-play-gives-developers- customer-data-33431)

<comment><USER13> "We can better service them by being able to refund them, look up order status issues, and potentially contact them with issues they may have." Order status issues for apps?

Giving developers the option of contacting users regarding issues is alright ... giving every developer of every app I installed my private phone number is NOT (in my personal opinion).

<comment><USER14> >Giving developers the option of contacting users regarding issues is alright ... giving every developer of every app I installed my private phone number is NOT (in my personal opinion).

That's... that's not what it is. It's every app you've PAID for. I would argue that giving people you've given money to direct access to be able to fix issues for you if they come up is a benefit.

<comment><USER6> It isn't giving, it is taking. That is the difference.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Former US cybersecurity chief Richard Clarke interview - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerworlduk.com/in-depth/security/3304612/smartphones-and-digital-certificates-create-huge-security-problems/

<comment><USER2> Quote from the transcript: "If you had the influence, what would you change to improve US cybersecurity?" Answer: "I would require the major internet providers as a matter of regulation to filter the packets to look for signatures of attacks and blackhole them. I'd give the signatures to them. In a regulated industry - finance, power and telecommunications - I'd require all the software be vetted for all kinds of mistakes." - Richard Clarke

Just a lot of more security layers/patches in the form of regulations -> less internet freedom. Vetting software for mistakes is a big waste of time and resources. I read his book. And in it, Richard Clarke asks AT&T Cybersecurity officer, Edward Amoroso, the same question. Amoroso's response is the same: If her were the US cybersecurity Czar, he would like initiatives to look for software errors and make software more secure...C'mon, seriously?</comment>


Nearing Bankruptcy, Fruugo Burned Through €40 Million to Generate €100K - <AUTHOR> http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/04/16/fruugo-financials-bankruptcy

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately this is all too typical of the tech scene in Finland. While there have been a few breakout successes (Rovio, F-Secure for example) and the tech talent in Finland is generally top-notch, much of the scene is dominated by a tight-knit old-boys network in the boardroom, unions and government.

See here for example:

[http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/03/03/making-growth- entrep...](http://www.arcticstartup.com/2011/03/03/making-growth- entrepreneurship-political)

[http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/04/03/the-best-april- fools...](http://www.arcticstartup.com/2012/04/03/the-best-april-fools-joke- is-from-finland-a-couple-of-days-late)

Who do we have ? Jorma Ollila (again) - the arrogant twit who drove Nokia into the ground long before Elop took over. Siilasmaa, another face from Nokia. The same people involved in the Fruugo fiasco. Taxpayer money funneled through Tekes to support no-hope startups run by people who know the right people. Silly little committees - again taxpayer funded - to discuss the "future of IT in Finland" with nary a nod toward the genuinely successful startups.

The tech scene here is anemic, incestuous and poorly managed, propped up by taxpayer money through layers of government bureaucracy. Which is a shame because the tech talent is excellent. What's really needed is a more startup- friendly environment - a reduction in bureacracy, taxation reform, and a more small-business-friendly culture - but these are "hard" problems. Let's just have yet another worthless "steering group" and appoint the same guys we drink beer with in the sauna.

<comment><USER3> Much of this comes from two unfortunate facts: Finland is far from any real markets (becoming less important thanks to the net), and there isn't much capital in the country outside of the public sector.

The latter means that the government has to be involved. Bringing in their heavy processes, risk (and therefore, succeess) aversion, and the old boys' network.

<comment><USER2> What do you think is the best solution to the lack of capital? More Europe- wide VC funding (and networking) perhaps, so we're not so reliant on local funding?

<comment><USER3> I would stay stop dancing with Tekes (state R&D funding org), and take a flight to Stockholm, Frankfurt, Paris, or London. Capitalize on successes like Rovio and emphasize that in Finland there is lots of mobile dev talent available thanks to MeeGo and Symbian getting ramped down.

<comment><USER4> I live in Frankfurt, it's hard to get venture capital here, fly to Berlin instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I went there for a job interview in 2008. They had a vague idea of what they should do, which was more or less "revolutionize global e-commerce by facilitating cross-border trade", I guess fueled by the realization that gee, stuff is cheaper in some countries than others. They had ideas of solutions for things like shipping, price consolidation, translation and customer relations. They were also planning to take what I thought to be an insane commission per trade. I'd worked with European SMEs a lot in the past with the world's biggest search ads product, so I thought I knew what they were ready for and what they needed, and the three chats I had at Fruugo didn't really reflect this at all.

Most alarmingly, while they were in really early startup mode, they had a very front-heavy team of 'top talent' and loads of telco-pedigreed 'old boys' in the helm. I dropped off the interview process when I was told that to continue, they'll do a psychological profiling by an external consultant and that they do that for all candidates. Really. First, wow, that's expensive. Second, in a startup, the recruiting process should be all about the team and the product, not a standardized test. I told them this.

Now, I almost regret not going in for a bit more, maybe even to work with them for a while, to have a better idea of what all went wrong and if there would've been a way to save the company. Will make for a great case study, no doubt.

<comment><USER6> I'd suggest that you were very, very lucky that you didn't continue with the company. There is _nothing_ more soul destroying than to try to fight your case in an organization of people who believe they know better than you do, even when it's clear they are running the organization into the ground.

There is nothing you could have done to save this company. It seems to have shaky foundations to start with, so the best you probably could have done was to put off the inevitable for a short amount of time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I couldn't help but look at the Fruugo website - and I can't say I'm very impressed by the web design!

I have a list of issues:

1\. When I went to the Australian website, even though I'd started in the U.S. website (which uses pretty much the same layout), it was a slow load time.

2\. Massive image in the centre, but my first immediate thought was "that's a large ad in the middle of this site!". then I realised it was meant to be there...

3\. The fonts are strange choices. There are three different fonts I can see here (Times New Roman?!?) I can see over 5 font colours here, one of which is lime green on a white background.

4\. Massive amounts of non-minified _inline_ javascript... what were they thinking?

5\. They seem to have done a lot of work on a global marketplace, but their tag line is "Europe's marketplace".

6\. They use Java sessions, even when I go to the main page for the very first time!

7\. Half the international links don't work! For instance, I try to go to Fruugo Luxemberg, and I got the following URL:

[http://www.fruugo.lu;jsessionid=jghldhzrqq2mbw0vvnwo.webshop...](http://www.fruugo.lu;jsessionid=jghldhzrqq2mbw0vvnwo.webshop- eu1-2/)

For €40 Million, could they not have done some basic link checking?

I have to say, this is not very good :(

<comment><USER7> You say all of that, but imagine how much money they saved by not hiring expensive top-talent.

<comment><USER8> They hired extremely expensive top management instead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A perfect anti-example of why niche focus/positioning is so important.

"Who's it for? Everyone! Where? In every country! What do you sell? Anything! If we can just get 1% of that market, we'll be billionaires!"

<comment><USER10> Indeed, it is supposed to be done in reverse: local niche -> global generalization A nice canonical counterexample is Amazon, starting with just books in US and now basically doing everything. Same deal with Facebook and Craigslist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In defense of the business model, see Rakuten (Japanese company).

Multi-tenant e-commerce platform. 120,000 shops. 92,000,000 products. US$13 billion market cap.

<comment><USER12> Known in the US (at least by me) as Buy.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> From a consumer point of view, I can see two problems. The selection is muddled, and the prices aren't all that good.

They say they have 194,614 products, but that includes things like 5000 rubber mats and 2000 hex keys. Meanwhile, there's a single television and a single MP3 player.

For the few products that I checked, the price with international shipping was always higher than what you could get from a local store.

</comment><comment><USER9> As an exercise; let's say you're called into Fruugo this morning and put in charge (they make an offer you can't refuse).

You can raise money thanks to the connections of the board, if you need it.

You're given the brief that you can do whatever you need to save the company.

What would you do? (Shutting it down and selling off the parts for scrap not being an option).

<comment><USER14> My quick answer? Reduce the team to the minimum needed to explore new business models, raise enough runway to keep that team going for 18 months, restructure the cap table to incentivise this core team, and treat it like any other startup. Perhaps change the name too to avoid continuity and too much press attention early on.

Of course, no one is ever given this much latitude. Existing shareholders would argue that diluting them down to almost nothing (90+% dilution) does not mean "saving the company" (they're wrong, IMHO. Shareholders and "the company" are two distinct entities). The amount of politics involved in pulling this off would be such a distraction that even if it succeeded, it would probably destroy the company's chances - and this is even before you consider the hangover from millions of euros of debts!).

So, in short, the only sensible way for people in that company is to shut it down and start another with a clean bill of health, and chalk this one up to experience.

<comment><USER15> > My quick answer? Reduce the team to the minimum needed to explore new > business models, raise enough runway to keep that team going for 18 months, > restructure the cap table to incentivise this core team, and treat it like > any other startup.

I think they already did this. Three times.

<comment><USER14> Doubt it. You couldn't burn €40m doing that for 20 years.

<comment><USER16> They have stores, albeit online ones, for some 20 countries. Just checking the laws in each country must have cost them a pretty penny

<comment><USER14> Yeah, having "stores for every country" is almost exactly the opposite of what I'd call "exploring business models with a minimal team". So, in short, that is _not_ what they've been doing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there some useful lesson here? I don't think iterate quickly counts. I'm sorry that thing didn't work out for them, and without some insightful analysis this article isn't interesting or newsworthy.

<comment><USER18> I'm with you. Every non-trivial failure looks like a Rorschach Blot. You see in it confirmation of whatever biased theories you already have about why companies fail.

<comment><USER5> I think this is a special case of a big fish in a really small pond (Finland) trying to make it out into the ocean. Having said that, it underlines how adding more dumb money doesn't make you any smarter and that just makes for an ever bigger non-trivial failure in Fruugo's environment (obviously that's my biased theory confirmed).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Their website is a disaster; I wrote a post describing how bad it is imo [http://www.jvandenbroeck.com/2012/04/fruugo-how-to-make- an-e...](http://www.jvandenbroeck.com/2012/04/fruugo-how-to-make-an-ecommerce- site-that-burns-e40m-and-earns-e100k/)

It's fascinating how they can do such a bad job with €40M

</comment><comment><USER20> The idea of competing with Amazon which seems to underlay Fruugo, justifies the scale of investment. To me the execution failed because it did not draw the correct lessons for Amazon's success.

Bezos's grounding in finance played a key role in Amazon's success over the long term. But more critical was that he was taking responsibility for hauling packages to UPS himself - is there any better example of a founder so focused on shipping?

<http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bez0int-4>

It's hard to see a former chairman of Nokia doing that.

<comment><USER21> It's also worth remembering that Amazon had accumulated something like $1 BILLION in losses by the time it started turning profits. €40M sounds like a huge number, but in that space, it's not all that much.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I already told this to vilpponen directly, but it's wonderful to see that this particular company is being discussed out in the public finally. Finland has (had) this weird culture where you can't publicly criticize a person who's achieved a certain "position" in the minds of masses - Mr. Ollila being one of them. I think not only is this a great lesson about funding "air" but also how the Finnish society is changing.

Happy to be a part of the change through Startup Sauna. Hopefully we can "fix" this sinking boat during the coming years.

</comment><comment><USER23> Forty million euros? That's complete insanity.

The idea is like going backwards from Amazon's model. While Amazon goes right to the supplier, Fruugo accesses various shops that sell a certain product from the supplier. And the design looks like someone created it with a free site generator, the whole thing just feels cheap all around.

</comment><comment><USER24> Maybe having a board full of large company execs having their hands full off saving Nokia was not the best idea...

</comment><comment><USER25> Just how were they applying this idea? how did they get around the regional strategies of the retailers?

How did they manage to ship to countries like the BRIC and others in the developing world which have overzealous custom policies regarding imports?

</comment><comment><USER26> Slow motion train wreck. Who are the patsies footing the bill?

<comment><USER3> I would imagine much of it is Finnish pension funds, but not sure

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Wow. This site looks like Quibids.

They actually misspell "jewelry" as "jewellery" right on the front page. Ouch.

<comment><USER28> "jewellery" is a chiefly, but not strictly, british spelling.

<comment><USER6> In fact, it's the spelling used in many countries, including Australia.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 40 million, wth. why would launch in so many countries at the same time

<comment><USER30> Oh, that's an easy one to answer.

Because they were so obviously going to succeed that there was no need to test things with users or do a gradual rollout. And they had a great plan with a big pretty chart showing the multi-country rollout, and of course you're going to follow the plan, right? I mean, it's _the plan_.</comment></comment>