The American Dream, RIP? - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21586581-economist-asks-provocative-questions-about-future-social-mobility-american <comment><USER2> The American dream of meritocracy and working your way up has been a lie from day one. In a pyramidal social structure, even if rising is possible, it's probabilistically unlikely. You should predict that your "merit" is in the normal range and you will remain in the largest class, subsistence workers. To convince people that "anyone can make it" implies "everyone can make it" has been a triumph of political bullshit, and the sooner it unravels the better.

</comment><comment><USER3> _First Person_ : Lack of upward mobilty and income inequality is a real problem.

 _Second Person, living in some Silicon Valley or other bubble, only meeting similar people (the worser-off of which are some "ramen enterpreneurs" with upper-middle class parents and university education), ignoring tons of homeless people, millions of minimum wage workers, immigrants, who almost never ventures outside his urban comfort zone, etc_: Is there a source supporting this claim?

For some reason, for other claims, which the same people have a first person experience with, like sexism and racism, they don't feel the need for a "source" that much. But when there's something they haven't cared about ever, don't see in their circles, and doesn't affect their middle/upper-middle class lives, then suddenly they need citations, which they will then scrutinize.

</comment><comment><USER4> So the worst case here is that the poor might move to _GASP_ Texas! And enjoy a better quality of life associated with a smaller government. What a bizarrely narrow-mindedly ignorant perspective, which I imagine will resonant quite well with the anti-Walmart crowd that is equally too narrow-minded to appreciate the impact and empowerment Walmart has on the poor.

<comment><USER5> How's that small government working out for ya?

[http://norfolk.legalexaminer.com/medical- malpractice/investi...](http://norfolk.legalexaminer.com/medical- malpractice/investigation-reveals-dangerous-inaction-on-the-part-of-state- medical-boards/)

[http://www.patheos.com/blogs/kathyschiffer/2013/05/other- sho...](http://www.patheos.com/blogs/kathyschiffer/2013/05/other-shoe- dropping-another-gosnell-emerges-in-texas/)

[http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/06/dr_christ...](http://blogs.dallasobserver.com/unfairpark/2013/06/dr_christopher_duntsch_plano_s.php)

I don't consider it a high quality of life when you can't have a reasonable expectation that a surgeon isn't going to kill you on the operating table and has been killing patients for years with complaints about him while the state board does nothing.

<comment><USER6> So a failure of government agencies is an argument for more government? I don't quite see how that follows.

<comment><USER5> No, I was implying that what the parent comment meant by "small government" was actually "useless government" and that his supposed higher quality of life was anything but.

Texas sucks. Hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "The American Dream" was a myth from its very inception, perpetuated to suppress labor and preserve the capitalist status quo.

<comment><USER8> "suppress labor" and "preserve the capitalist status quo" seem to be completely antithetical goals.

And really, I disagree. The American Dream to me is the simple idea that if you work hard, you can climb the social ladder. This is as true now as it ever has been.

There are no castes in America, only people born into classes of varying privilege. For some people, therefore, the American Dream is attainable more easily than others — but that doesn't mean it's a myth.

<comment><USER9> _This is as true now as it ever has been._

Whilst it is true that one can climb the social ladder, it is much harder now than it was. To simply say it is true/false is to ignore that it's significantly harder now than it was. It has always been true that the strongest indicator of success is how rich one's parents are; it's more true now.

<comment><USER8> That is _precisely_ my point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Social mobility and income distribution are not the same thing, and people leap to some intellectually dubious conclusions when they conflate the two.

A lot of comparisons are being drawn, for example, between the 1920s and today. While the income distribution curves look startlingly similar, the concentration of wealth is very different. Most of today's 1%+ are "working rich," i.e., they receive the bulk of their income from salaries and bonuses -- not from ownership or direction of capital.

Most of the turn-of-the-20th-century rich were actual capitalists/industrialists -- "robber barons" who secured monopolies on commodities, trade routes, new technologies, and so forth. These robber barons built generational fortunes whose relative scale and unshakable concentration are unmatched by anything since, including today. Their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren enjoyed lavish fortunes not of their own merit or creation.

Today's income gap appears troubling, and I don't want to downplay it. But the frequent comparisons to the Gilded Age are superficial at best, and they veer us off topic. This is true whether one is looking at the comparison from either side of the politico-economic spectrum: the pro-capitalist side (because the majority of today's elites are not capitalists, per se, but wage earners in highly paid fields like finance), _or_ the egalitarian side (because what, exactly, are we proposing to redistribute? Opportunity? Wealth? Salary? Market demand? And how will we do this?).

And that's not even touching on globalization, which seems inevitable, and which has had a major effect on the disappearance of working-class and middle- class jobs. The article touches on the effects of new technologies, access to them, and ability to master them -- but this seems pretty meritocratic _unless_ access is restricted to the children of privileged families. That's where we need to turn our lens. That's where things start to look less meritocratic and more aristocratic.

It's time we took a more nuanced view of this issue. For one thing, we should look beyond the present income inequality and toward the future implications. Is social mobility going to suffer for the next generation? Is wealth concentrating in generational amounts? Is the current power-law distribution crystalizing into a caste system? By some indications it is, and by other indications it's not. Let's go there. Let's dissect this. We need less hand- wringing and more investigation.

I'd be much more troubled by an uneven playing field than by uneven scores at the end of the game. By many accounts, today's playing field is fairly uneven -- and that's where we should be focusing our attention and effort. At the same time, we need to be comfortable with the probability than a perfectly _even_ playing field will still produce uneven outcomes. It might produce _more_ uneven outcomes, depending upon one's choice of modeling. Nevertheless, we're looking too much at the symptoms and not enough at the underlying sickness in the system.

<comment><USER11> Actually, upward mobility has been regressing in the US for a while now, and is much worse than in countries like germany or sweden. If you are born in the bottom fifth, your odds of making it out of there are roughly fifty/fifty. You don't have to wonder about the next generation because the current one is suffering enough already.

There's no need for nuance here. Nuance is what you apply when something has merit. The direction the US economy is headed in has no merit. The ship needs a course correction.

<comment><USER12> > upward mobility has been regressing in the US for a while now

Do you have a source for this?

> If you are born in the bottom fifth, your odds of making it out of there are > roughly fifty/fifty.

Are you sure? In a longitudinal study of US income earners during a 20 year period [1], a _majority_ of people who started in the poorest quintile cracked the richest quintile at some point. The degree of opportunity this points to is really quite astonishing if you think about it.

This study is a little dated now (1990s). I can't imagine it's changed dramatically, but I'd love to see a new longitudinal study that went up to the present.

[1] Google Books, "Basic Economics" by Sowell: [http://bit.ly/grnsDF](http://bit.ly/grnsDF)

<comment><USER13> >> upward mobility has been regressing in the US for a while now

> Do you have a source for this?

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans- to...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/05/us/harder-for-americans-to-rise-from- lower-rungs.html?pagewanted=all)

This one doesn't talk very explicitly about the time trend, but it mentions studies conducted in different decades finding progressively higher levels of correlation between parents' and children's incomes; unclear if that's due to random chance or an actual trend.

<comment><USER14> This only measures relative mobility, not absolute mobility. It doesn't show at all that it's harder to move up in the world, but merely that it's harder to move up _relative to someone else_.

<comment><USER13> The absolute mobility measure isn't really indicative of what most people think of when they hear "social mobility". For example, in 100% rigid caste society, with any economic growth whatsoever, everyone will make more than their parents.

<comment><USER14> Relative mobility isn't indicative of people's intuitive notions of mobility either.

Consider an farmer living in a village where incomes for everyone range from 200rs/day to 250rs/day depending solely on random chance (weather, locusts, etc). Relative mobility is high - depending on your crop yield, you could go anywhere from the bottom 1% to the top 1%. And you have no chance to go anywhere besides your farm.

<comment><USER13> That's both a very short-term (years to days) and localized (in one specific sector of the economy) measurement. If you look at inter-generational mobility (as these studies do), and look at the level of mobility that you care about e.g. over a whole national economy (as these studies do), a son of such farmers who grows up to be in the same job as his father will be shown as moving around solely within the small slice of the class structure (a decile at most?) that makes up the farmers of the village. Even that much movement will only show up if his income is fairly consistently (averaged over at least a year) in a higher percentile than his father's. So yeah, I think relative mobility is a pretty good indicator.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Feels like somewhat of an overlap with the kind of trends Nassim Nicholas Talib has been writing about -- extremely non-gaussian curves for the probability of various outcomes including wealth.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't know, at this point I've read a great deal of similar articles that seem to imply a golden age for software developers and technology entrepreneurs and a dark age for everyone else. Even worse, the implication seems to be that the winner-takes-all mechanism will concentrate wealth in an ever-shrinking elite. I don't think this is completely true, while on one hand we have more automation and ever-lowering operating costs for many kinds of businesses that in the end let relatively few people service even millions of customers (think Instagram for a recent, technology-related example) I think, we're also heading to an even more globalized landscape where every company will try and capture customers in every country. Servicing not millions, but billions of people and offering services in every corner of the world will actually create demand for people with average skills, a new form of middle class will emerge. If the future will get to a point where everything will look really bleak, I think jobs will be created with the sole purpose of keeping the cash flowing. Unemployed, unhappy people aren't customers, are lost sales. A middle class is needed, middle class jobs are needed, if they won't come up naturally, someone will make sure they'll exist somehow.

<comment><USER17> Its hard to test a very large scale theory based on optimism about human nature, but you can downscale it and try it on smaller scales like states and cities. So why didn't your example of Instagram benefit West Virginia or Detroit?

If a self organizing phenomena doesn't happen at a small scale in almost all examples, you need a theoretical reason why it doesn't downscale if your claim is some time in the future it'll self organize at a larger scale.

The future of the whole country probably resembles WV or Detroit much more than SV. This has certain startup implications; for example, creating a luxury electric car startup in a permanently down-trending country seems unwise, in comparison sharing photos sounds like something poorer people can continue to cheaply do as they gradually become permanently poorer and poorer because even the 3rd world has mobile phones.

<comment><USER18> Exactly, anything that scales up to large, especially to fast ends up becoming an inefficient and uncontrollable behemoth. Take a look at any corporation(ie. Microsoft, HP, IBM) or governments(USG, China vs. Canada, Poland, Finland) or media (News, MTV, Cable) where large entities cannot function efficiently and only get worse as they become larger.

The only thing that works is some sort of self-organizing nature that similar to the way biological organisms form, which then end up creating neuron/brain like structures which form higher intelligence. Take a look at the universe, there is an interesting talk on how the Internet is starting to show that phenomenon, it's appearing more and more like a brain and may be starting to show some signs intelligence.

Take a look at this post from LinuxCon2013(it's not about Linux).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6425227](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6425227)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've read various reviews of Tyler Cowen's new book (and I read his blog, very occasionally). I'm not worried about what he is worried about. I have lived overseas, twice. I'm back in the United States because the joint conclusion of my family (including my wife, who grew up in another country) is that the United States still offers us, and millions of other people, a whole lot of opportunity for personal advancement that is hard to find in other countries, even thriving, developed countries that also have representative government, a free press, and broad protection of individual liberties.

The death of the middle class in the United States has been predicted for a long time, but middle-class Americans still look like rich people in most other countries. The whole economy has been transformed over the last century (my uncle farms land that was first developed into a farm by my grandfather a century ago, when a large percentage of the United States population were farmers), but people are still mostly employed, and living in larger, more comfortable houses, eating better, and living longer[1] than ever. What is called decline in the United States looks a lot like progress anywhere else in the world. People are still very eager to immigrate to the United States,[2] so what exactly is the problem?

[1] An article in a series on Slate, "Why Are You Not Dead Yet? Life expectancy doubled in past 150 years. Here's why."

[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science_of_longevity/2013/09/life_expectancy_history_public_health_and_medical_advances_that_lead_to.html)

Life expectancy at age 40, at age 60, and at even higher ages is still rising throughout the developed countries of the world.

[http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity-w...](http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=longevity- why-we-die-global-life-expectancy)

[2] [http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/232...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/09/232-million- people-left-their-countries-for-new-ones-where-did-they-go/279741/)

[http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide- drea...](http://www.gallup.com/poll/161435/100-million-worldwide-dream- life.aspx)

AFTER EDIT: I've still got time to edit this comment, so I'll respond to the people who think I am ignoring important trend lines. I respectfully disagree. (Note that I am well known here on Hacker News for saying that United States K-12 education needs improvement, so I am by no means saying that there is nothing left to improve, or nothing to worry about, here.) A funny comment posted on Hacker News about Japan's "lost decade" (posted before I opened my user account here)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=329218](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=329218)

shows how difficult it is for a developed country to lose ground:

 _It was terrible. People were forced to eat raw fish for sustenance. They couldn 't get full-sized electronics, so they were forced to make tiny ones. Unable to afford proper entertainment, folks would make do by taking turns to get up and sing songs._

I've grown up in the United States, and I've been hearing predictions of doom here throughout my life. Doom here still looks like heaven to most people in most parts of the world.

<comment><USER20> _a whole lot of opportunity for personal advancement that is hard to find in other countries, even thriving, developed countries that also have representative government, a free press, and broad protection of individual liberties._

Out of curiosity, what kinds of things? I was born and raised in the U.S. (have lived in Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, SF Bay Area, and Atlanta), and now live in Copenhagen, and don't feel like I am missing a lot so far, apart from the general experience of foreignness occasionally being strange (might be ameliorated if I were better at learning Danish). If anything the opportunities for personal advancement feel somewhat stronger, due to the social safety net meaning you can start companies or nonprofits or whatever without worrying about ending up homeless or without healthcare.

I'll probably move back at some point, but mostly just because it's where I'm from, not out of any particular dissatisfaction with Denmark. And I'll probably only move back if I have a good job with a salary and benefits lined up first...

<comment><USER5> The "American Dream" for a lot of my friends nowadays is to relocate to Europe. Copenhagen is a frequently-mentioned destination and my destination of choice as well.

I definitely felt like there was more opportunity in Denmark than here. Gotta say, I'm a bit jealous.

<comment><USER21> What kind of opportunity are you referring to? Strip it to nuts and bolts as much as you can.

I ask because, for instance, it is harder to run a company in Denmark than in the US. Danish employment law requires months of notice before terminating an employee, and allows termination only with cause. It also appears to be somewhat expensive to incorporate there.

<comment><USER22> Interesting first criteria for judging a country's economic opportunities: the ability to easily terminate your staff.

The "Ease of Doing Business Index" actually removed "how easy is it to fire people" from its indicators because of the controversy.

Do you think everybody in the USA would agree that being able to fire people at will is a good thing for the US economy?

<comment><USER21> Yes. Employment at will is one of the major reasons --- perhaps _the_ major reason --- why it is easier to start a company in the US than in, say, France.

In a 3-person company, particularly in knowledge work where headcount costs dominate all other operating expenses, a bad 4th hire is a catastrophic problem: it means 1/4 of your staff is dysfunctional, maybe 1/5th of your operating expenses are being wasted, and as many as 1/2 your existing employees are (a) unhappy and (b) steadily becoming harder to retain. Now imagine _not being able to terminate that employee_.

The Ease Of Doing Business index includes _no metrics on employment law at all_ , not just termination; for instance, employee minimum wage, mandatory holidays, prohibition on contracted employees, prohibition of night work, and maximum work week are also not considered. That they aren't says more about the World Bank index than it does about the importance of these issues.

<comment><USER20> For small tech companies in Denmark (I don't know much about other sectors/countries), it's common to hire people on a contract or fixed-term basis initially, something like 3-12 months. Then each side can decide if they'd like to make the arrangement more permanent in the future. For tiny companies with uncertain revenues it's pretty common to just have that be the default mode of employment: when you get 12 months of funding, you hire people for another 12 months, because you can't honestly promise any more than that anyway.

<comment><USER21> Oh, cool, are you a small tech company person in Denmark? Can I ask: why aren't there more small tech companies in Denmark? It can't be for lack of quality education!

<comment><USER20> I'm not; I'm a useless academic. :) Many of the students in my program start small game companies, though (I teach in a game masters program), so I follow that scene a bit.

A few examples that have come out of the program here: [http://conquistadorthegame.com/](http://conquistadorthegame.com/) [http://machineers.tumblr.com/](http://machineers.tumblr.com/) [http://www.knapnokgames.com/](http://www.knapnokgames.com/) [http://gutefabrik.com/](http://gutefabrik.com/) [http://duckandcovergames.com/](http://duckandcovergames.com/) [http://www.seriousgames.net/](http://www.seriousgames.net/)

Most of the small tech companies I know are pretty low-key, though. Besides the game company route, another common one is a small team of 1-3 people making a living doing iPhone app development, that kind of thing. Some congregate around hackerspaces like: [https://labitat.dk/](https://labitat.dk/)

Not as much of the typical 'startup' route per se, although there have been a few (Unity3d and Bitbucket come to mind). There's also Copenhagen Suborbitals, which isn't for-profit, but is probably the most widely recognized organization to come out of the Copenhagen hacker/maker scene.

<comment><USER5> Shameless plug for where my friends work, but there are consulting companies like [http://bestbrains.dk/](http://bestbrains.dk/)

Definitely a small tech company but larger than what was mentioned.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't see any problem is what's explained here. One potential thing to worry about is a surge in crime rates, but statistics does not show that: crime rates are falling, and violent crimes especially so, with no sign of reversal. Otherwise why should we worry?

Really, worry about mass unwarranted wiretaps. Worry about ever increasing rigging of democracy. Worry about useless wars started by corrupt crooks. Don't worry about income distribution. It was artificially low in second half of 20th century due to the fear of communism. With communist system collapsing and nobody wanting a red revolution anymore, there is no need to redistribute income in favor of the potential revolutionary class.

</comment><comment><USER24> I think the final paragraph points out the obvious point - social mobility has never really fully existed. Previously large swathes of the workforce were never expected or enabled to progress - women and ethnic minorities. When they are included I doubt the golden age looks so golden from the point of view of "everyone" suddenly getting rich off the economic returns of work.

Now the economy is much more open to merit - the problem with meritocracy (as the article points out) is that once you open it to everyone whole swathes of people lose out. See the trends of successful women marrying successful men thus creating a more closed top tier of society.

<comment><USER17> "Previously large swathes of the workforce were never expected or enabled to progress"

The article listed several reasons why little social turmoil was expected... I suspect the old "divide and conqueror" will be applied to the above historical facts. "Sure we're all getting poorer, but the white guys are getting poorer at a faster rate than we are, so its OK".

I suspect this will be a popular "calming" strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> >Is the current power-law distribution crystalizing into a caste system?

Of course it doesn't. Because the majority of income earned in top 15% and even top 1% is not derived from capital (at least not financial/material capital, to be precise). It is salaries and bonuses. Ability to get these is derived mostly from education (and also social skills which are evenly distributed among income brackets), and education is going free or cheap online. So no reason to worry.

</comment><comment><USER17> I had to LOL at the paragraph incorrectly beginning with "It describes a future largely stripped of middling jobs". He's describing the present.

The future is already here, just not smoothly distributed.

<comment><USER8> What is the basis for your conclusion? I don't see any evidence of modern America being "largely stripped of middling jobs". There are millions of generic corporate, retail, or otherwise "non-elite" jobs being held by millions of Americans.

<comment><USER25> The presence of corporate functionaries and so on is decreasing steadily over time as their purpose becomes superfluous through different organization and evolving technologies. And retail jobs are not "middling", retail jobs are low-level and were at one point not too long ago almost completely entry- level.

You are making his point for him.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This should sound familiar:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q)

<comment><USER18> "The owners in this country know the truth, it's called the American dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it." \- George Carlin.

<comment><USER27> So says the multi-millionaire comedian who rose to the top complaining about everything and everyone. I'm sure he would have had the same success in a place like China.

BTW, George was a comedian, that is, entertainer. He was saying stuff that would sell more tickets.

<comment><USER28> George Carlin was IMHO one of the most insightful people America produced. Yes, he was a "comic" because in his time that's how he could follow his calling and make a living.

While he was very funny, and he was riotously funny, he was basically the high priest of pull your head out of your ass and think for yourself.

R.I.P. George Carlin

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is a typical extremist view of the universe. One in which things are always absolutes operating at the ideological limits. A social digital scale, if you will. Nothing in the middle. Everything is either a one or a zero.

It is utter nonsense.

The real world does not work this way.

The United States is still a place where anyone can reach nearly any goal he or she desires. The pre-conditions are simple: You have to be willing to make the effort to reach your goal.

It's that simple.

Do you want to be somebody? Then be somebody. Don't waste your time playing games and watching TV. Optimize for future success rather than for current comfort and self-satisfaction. Be uncomfortable. Be hungry. Understand that ignorance is not a platform for success and learn something. Learn lots of things. Take risks. Fail. Take more risks. Fail again. Don't give up. You will succeed. And, when you do, you'll get to read an article by someone pointing to the great unfairness and inequality of our society. And the first thought that will pass through your mind is likely to be "clueless".

This is my problem with folks who have never touched the real world. If you look at his CV [0] it shows he has lived in academia his entire adult life. This is like the idea of sex without having the experience of sex. It's like watching a bird fly, learning and researching the physics of bird flight and not really understanding what it is to be a bird and fly. There's a huge disconnect between people who operate in these sterilized environments and those who actually touch the real world.

I've had mind-blowing conversations with experienced business owners who barely got a high-school diploma. The insight and understanding of the real world some of these people develop is absolutely amazing. And, in most cases, the results parallel their understanding. They are successful, build great businesses and enjoy a fantastic quality of life.

I realize I am shooting the messenger. This approach perfectly valid and logical when justified. People who come from a purely academic world view have, through no fault of their own, a view of reality that is utterly distorted. There's a huge difference between talking about the statistics of business and wealth and the act of actually getting out there and devoting ten or twenty years of your life putting it all on the line to create businesses and wealth. That's the perspective their writings lack. And that's why, despite credentials, these messengers are not to be trusted to understand reality. It's like a teenager thinking they understand sex by watching lots of porn. Not the same thing.

How many economists warned us of the economic implosion of 2008/9? Not many. The folks who did were actually living in the trenches and neck-deep in the muck of reality.

[0] [http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/faculty%20pages/Tyle...](http://www.gmu.edu/centers/publicchoice/faculty%20pages/Tyler/tylervita.pdf)

<comment><USER30> I've never made the connection before... but the ideology behind the American Dream could fit just as well on the back of a Self Help book.

<comment><USER29> Not sure what you mean by that.

<comment><USER30> I'm saying that the ideology behind the American could be mistaken as being from a self help book.

<comment><USER29> I don't think so. I think there's nothing unique about this thing called the "American dream". I've lived in a couple of countries outside the US and have travelled extensively. I can't think of many people who don't strive to improve their lives, provide for their families, own a home, perhaps own a business and, generally speaking, have a good life without worries, health or financial problems. This is not an idea rooted in the US at all.

How do you achieve these things? Well, should these things be handed to you by a government? Well, that's not going to happen anywhere in the world. You have to work for these things. That doesn't mean hard labor. That means that you have to focus on what it is you want and lay out a course through which you can reach those goals. No matter where you put your finger on the globe this requires determination, lots of work and focus. It might mean going to a vocational school, college or university to learn something in preparation. It could mean saving money for years in order to open a small business. It could mean learning how to find people who will invest in your vision. It could mean dedicating every free moment you have to slowly inch towards your goals. It could mean a million different things. None of which are unique to Americans or the United States.

A lot of Americans have this myopic ego-centric view of the universe. I don't know of anyone who's been exposed to a variety of cultures and ideas who things this way. There are brilliant and exceptional individuals all over the world. Not one of them succeeds without a solid dedication to a vision. Not one of them succeeds because the State drives them to succeed. Not one of them advances in life because they waste their lives away watching TV, playing video games and hanging out on Facebook all day. Those who do succeed work hard. With "hard" not necessarily being defined as "hard physical work" but rather an intense and sustained focus and dedication to what it is they want out of life despite their current circumstances and station in life.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Another clown(writer) with an agenda.

</comment><comment><USER32> Time to move to Texas.</comment>


Use Maps in Lite mode - <AUTHOR> https://support.google.com/maps/answer/3031966 <comment><USER2> If there is one thing Google services seem to have in common, it is that they're burdened with sluggish javascript. Whether it is Google Maps, Google Groups, Google Image browser (in Image search), all of them like to spike the CPU at 100% for a while doing their thing, leaving the user staring at a frozen tab or window. Having been around a bit I remember where Google Groups came from, it used to be called Deja News. Back in the day I made a 2-pane browser for reading news groups, functionally comparable to what Google Groups does nowadays with one big difference: it loaded instantaneously and was fast. Mind, this was in the time where we counted ourselves lucky with our 4 Mbit fixed line and our 400 MHz Pentium II developer machines, using Netscape 4.x on a Linux 2.x kernel with Afterstep or FvWM (or olvwm for Sun-OS aficionados).

While these 'modern' services might be more flexible with their largely client-generated UI, I feel that this comes at too high a price. This problem is not just limited to Google services, other sites and services are similarly hampered. Thing is, I'd have expected better performance from Google.

<comment><USER3> > with one big difference: it loaded instantaneously and was fast

When things were HTML, like most things "back in the days", thing were fast. Frames, maybe iframes, and ready-to-consume HTML.

Does Squirrelmail rings a bell? It was one of the earliest popular webmails in PHP, and it run every machines I accessed internet with, including 96MB RAM Pentium I MMX laptop.

The current trend of outsourcing rendering to the client is not really a gain for anyone: the server side still does a lot of arranging and magic on that data which is served, while it could just generate HTML. Serve the already done HTML, replace the parts in the DOM like we did in the beginning of the AJAX days, and things would be much faster.

Out of curiosity, I installed a lesser known browser, Dillo. It's dumb: it can parse a minimal amount of CSS and probably HTML ~4; the rest, it drops. And voilá: the internet - well, the ones that are still serving a viable miminum HTML without JS - became instant. Using the word "fast" would be an understatement.

We need to go back to the roots, otherwise we're using a lot of CPUs as heaters.

<comment><USER4> I feel like this is a situation where developers are looking back to an internet that doesn't exist anymore. In 2002, there were 665 million internet users, now there are 3.4 billion and growing [[http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet- users/](http://www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/)].

If we were still stuck with terrible standards implementations and lack of processing power, I would side with the "Lets do everything on the server again!" argument, but we're not. For most use cases only privileged information has the requirement of server processing, and if thats not a requirement, why not take advantage of the device requesting the service?

Set aside the 5 second delay user experience annoyance, and realize that as a business there is no way to scale your services profitably without offloading as much work as possible to the web client.

<comment><USER3> > In 2002, there were 665 million internet users, now there are 3.4 billion > and growing

A significant part of that 3.4 billion are on mobile, which is even deeper prone to the overused JS problem.

> terrible standards implementations

Ah, you mean IE6. In it's prime time, it was a brilliant browser, standards or not; it was a necessary evil to forcefully move things ahead. It has XHR, webfonts, a gazillion things none of the browsers had yet. It indeed stuck around for too long, but this was not the case in it's initial state.

> lack of processing power

[https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the- fastes...](https://hackernoon.com/10-things-i-learned-making-the-fastest-site- in-the-world-18a0e1cdf4a7#4509) -> Read the paragraph "#2 Do mobile first. Like, really do it." We do lack processing power on mobile, so for that 2-3billion people, who are using mobile _only_ or mobile first, we need economical solutions.

> why not take advantage of the device requesting the service?

Because you can't assume the device is powerful enough to do so. Why do you think [https://mbasic.facebook.com](https://mbasic.facebook.com) still exists?

> Set aside the 5 second delay user experience annoyance

You go against one of the initial hard rules of the web with that. I wonder if is the importance of speed had changed, but judging by the grouchy voices all around, it did not. People only keep using the services because they deliberately made it hard to leave or because they learned tactics from Microsoft and are constantly eliminating competitors.

> and realize that as a business there is no way to scale your services > profitably without offloading as much work as possible to the web client.

Now, this is complete nonsense; there is no money you save there. How is generating all those React apps, shuffling all that data is better then generating HTML? :)

Of course, there are exceptions, there are always exceptions, but most of the things would not need mammoth sized invisible JSONs to be parsed in the browser while the pre-rendered HTML could be served and manipulated only when needed.

<comment><USER4> I think your misunderstanding surrounds the amount of processing required to render HTML on the server, if you believe that rendering JSON is just as expensive, I'm open to the discussion but I don't agree.

Usually these applications are compiled once, and delivered by CDN. That's a huge savings.

Also I'm not saying the speed of Google Maps in your browser is acceptable, but with tools like Webpack Chunking, you can optimize even the initial load to nothing. This is a software architecture problem, not a javascript problem.

<comment><USER3> Maybe you're right, but I'm interested on your opinion about the rest of my answer, such as mobile browser capacities.

<comment><USER4> There is no way you'd want to leak even more information about the machine such as RAM and CPU power, I feel like it's already dangerously easy to de- anonymize users across websites simply using what's provided in headers and described in the "navigator" global.

So with that in mind, I believe that Google Maps is purposefully not optimized for most mobile clients. It's designed as a fallback if you don't install the app (which they are deeply incentivized to peddle).

I also think other web applications that get to the point of ~5 seconds of loadtime need to rethink their compiling strategy (if at all possible). I mentioned webpack before, but spreading out the work of large payloads is a well documented issue with many different solutions. If it's the CPUs fault, you should be using Web Workers.

My original point stands though, processing on the client is free, scalable and an effective solution even considering the harm it could inflict on UX, and those harms can be mitigated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google Maps is the best for businesses, but the site is extremely slow (lite mode or no) and, at least in the Netherlands, they're behind with road data. When I want a map I use osm.org; when I want aerial I use bing.com/maps; and when I need opening hours or find the nearest restaurant I reluctantly open Google Maps.

<comment><USER6> What do you use for turn-by-turn driving directions in the car?

<comment><USER7> I still prefer TomTom, don't mind to pay for all the time it saves me. It's not perfect, but it works for me.

<comment><USER8> Interesting, how does TomTom save you time over the gmaps navigation? I just tell my phone, "navigate to <business name>" and 15 seconds later it's telling me where to go. What am I missing?

<comment><USER9> You are (not) missing mobile data. Granted, Google maps now have an offline mode, but even the it is for a limited region only.

<comment><USER10> The only limit to how big an area you can cover with Google offline maps is your storage. Each individual offline map is limited in size but you can download as many as you want to cover as big an area as you can fit in your phone.

<comment><USER9> That's not practical for me...not very fun saving 100+ areas of the regions and countries.

Also, from [https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291838?co=GENIE.Plat...](https://support.google.com/maps/answer/6291838?co=GENIE.Platform%3DiOS&hl=en..).

> Note: Downloading offline areas isn't available in some regions because of > contractual limitations, language support, address formats, or other > reasons.

<comment><USER10> 100+ 120,000 sq km areas, huh? You visit 12 million sq km of land on a regular basis?

Yes, Google can't provide offline maps in some countries. This is true of all mapping applications, though some have better offline coverage than others, nobody has everywhere. For example HERE does not offer offline maps in Japan or South Korea.

<comment><USER11> You'll need 100s of areas if you want to minimise your local storage usage, and micro-managing that would be a PITA. GM announces 'up to 1750mb' to download the part of my country I traveled to in the last month, it's a non- starter.

Compare that to the 179mb/113mb that I need with OSMAnd/Maps.me for the _whole country_ without fiddling. Add to that the fact that OSM's data is significantly better than Google Map's for my country (YMMV) and that there's no such thing as "offline mode not available in some regions" with OSM.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tangential question: Maps automatically switches to Lite mode under certain browser conditions. It does so on my home Firefox machine (Dev. Edition 52.0a2, Linux, Intel HD Graphics 520), and:

\- When I deactivate all my addons it still does.

\- When I try a new profile it no longer does.

-> If not an addon, to my knowledge of Firefox, the cause has to be a changed Firefox preference (right?). But if right, I changed so many of them, I have no idea which one causes the behavior. Before I binary-search that, any clue what the culprit pref might be?

The support page doesn't answer this question; its only relevant snip is that _" Maps will take you to Lite mode and your maps won't have 3D images if you have the following cards: [...] Intel GMA 3600"_, which I have (GMA3600 == HD520), but it must be outdated documentation, as Maps stays non-Lite with a fresh profile.

<comment><USER13> Do other WebGL applications work? Anything suspicious in the Graphics section of about:support?

It's probably a preference, and you might start with something obvious like webgl.disable=true. However, you might rather just try Refresh Firefox, which resets your profile while keeping your bookmarks/history/open tabs.

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox- reset-a...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/refresh-firefox-reset-add- ons-and-settings)

<comment><USER12> Yeah, other WebGL apps/demos work, and webgl.disable isn't set to true. I have quite a few modified prefs and would like to avoid a Refresh, so I'm going to just bisect across prefs. Thanks for the suggestions.

<comment><USER12> Ffffound it, it was a my general.useragent.override

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wish Google would allow classic maps back :(

For some reason, here Google Maps force lite mode, no matter how hard I try to force normal mode.

Still, even in lite mode, it is incredibly slow, if it was slower it would go backwards.

And it is missing basic features that classic maps had, like latitude and longitude lines, and measurement.

<comment><USER15> I cringed when I realized bing maps were closer to classic gmaps than anything google maps today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Actually this feels just as sluggish as the full version. Where exactly do you guys see/feel the improvement?

<comment><USER17> It looks like this lite version loads all the map imagery as images (tiles) from the server.

This compares to full version which uses Javascript to render some of the roads and symbols as some kind of vector drawing on top of less detailed map tiles.

I'd expect the Full version to require slightly less data transfer and behave better when zooming in and out rapidly. When you zoom in on a vector drawing it still looks sharp, so you just have to wait for more detailed roads to appear. Whereas in Lite mode, you'd zoom in and stare at a blury tile until the higher resolution one loaded.

I'd expect Lite to work better in a browser or network that just can't cope with a web application. Old versions of IE, weird embedded browsers in smart TVs, that sort of thing. Given what it is, I wouldn't expect it to work better.

<comment><USER18> Actually the full version uses more data, it turns out vectors take more data than jpeg tiles, at lease for urban areas.

The big differences excluding 3d features are things like

* you can rotate the map

* zoom is continuous

* the map can be customized on the fly to make it more relevant to your search. So for example a road can be highlighted for one search vs a different road highlighted for a different search. Different buildings/roads get labelled etc.

This was all covered to Google I/O when the current version of Google maps was released 4 years ago

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I find it amusing that the list of features not present in the Lite mode exactly matches the list of features I do not want.

<comment><USER20> I get coordinates quite often to enter them into my Garmin GPS.

<comment><USER19> All my Garmins are collecting dust since I tried Waze a year ago.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The previous title was more informative (add "?force=lite" to the URL)

</comment><comment><USER22> Funnily enough, a few days ago I was looking up some information and noticed I'm stuck in "lite mode" on Windows 10 with the latest dev channel of Chrome because apparently my system doesn't meet the minimum requirements. Of course, Edge works fine.

<comment><USER23> Isn't the Dev version essentially an alpha build?

<comment><USER22> From my personal experience, not really. The Chrome dev channel is really nothing more than a more recent build that is considered stable enough to release into the wild to those that have opted into it. Things might break but in reality they rarely do.

I won't go as far as to say I've never encountered bugs that I've noticed in the dev channel release but anything that serious is usually fixed within a matter of hours and it's happened to me like maybe twice in all the years that I've been using it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Thanks, can anybody explain why google allowed maps to turn into a such a sluggish feature bloat?

<comment><USER25> Gotta keep adding features, otherwise what are all your team members going to do?

<comment><USER26> Performance is a feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> i wish lite mode is the default, and you have to toggle on the lesser used features.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm quite happy that Google has added this feature.

Sometimes Google maps on PC is that bad I have to get phone out.

<comment><USER28> FYI the lite mode has been available since they introduced the "new" Google Maps in 2013 or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> btw, what happened to the satelite images? I used Google Maps yesterday for the first time in months and I can only switch to some horrible, slow, and low-res 3D mode?

<comment><USER30> It's still available in the side menu. If you click hamburger in the top left > Earth > 3D On, it will switch to satellite imagery.

<comment><USER29> Thanks, I will give it a try later!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Thank you Google. Maps has been sluggish for so long. A faster lite version is very much appreciated.

</comment><comment><USER32> I see that ?force=lite seems to enable this mode, but I have no indication of it in the hamburger menu.

Anyone else seeing this? I'm currently on the Kindle web browser, and it definitely seems faster, but I can't tell want mode it's in except by diggimg around the URL.

<comment><AUTHOR> You should see a lightning bolt in the lower right hand corner

<comment><USER32> Weird, I get nuttin. Same in my Droid Turbo Chrome browser.

Will try on desktop Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's interesting that it doesn't have a point of interest I added recently (on 13/Dec/2016).

I was assuming they would be using the same data as regular Maps.

Does anyone know more?

<comment><USER34> The Lite version uses image-based map tiles, wheras the "full fat" version uses the data directly. I imagine the image tiles are rebuilt at regular intervals, but not on demand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Much better. Thanks. :)

</comment><comment><USER36> Would have thought Google got really clever and detected if bandwidth is low to load lite version.

<comment><USER37> It's more about device/browser performance than bandwidth.

<comment><USER8> Tell that to someone with a slow connection.

<comment><USER38> I think the full version might even use less bandwidth because it renders the tiles on the client and only sends some vector data.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Excellent, this actually makes Maps usable for me. I don't have flash installed which seems to break place searching on standard Google Maps but not the Lite version.

<comment><USER40> I do have Flash installed but it's configured as "Ask to activate". Search for places on the full Google Maps works and it doesn't ask me about Flash.

<comment><USER39> I may be mistaken about the cause. I'm on Linux and use FF without flash. Chromium with in-built flash (or flash emulation?) handles maps fine.

<comment><USER40> I'm also on Linux and Firefox. Ubuntu 16.04. I don't remember if Flash came with FF or I installed it. Anyway it doesn't run unless I OK it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Predatory Songbirds: The Case of the Murderous Tits (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://unm-bioblog.blogspot.com/2018/09/predatory-songbirds-case-of-murderous.html <comment><USER2> As I was reading the article I couldn't help but hear the hauntingly beautiful song 'Shrike' by Hozier, that is thematically based around the same-named birds in the article.

"Dragging along // Following your form // Hung like the pelt of some prey you had worn // Remember me love when I'm reborn // As the shrike to your sharp // And glorious thorn"

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgsLoYuns6Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgsLoYuns6Y)

</comment><comment><USER3> What a great title! Also, that Great Tit photo definitely reminds me of those old "Big Game Hunter" portraits.

</comment><comment><USER4> I remain sceptic about killer great tits, at winter they would crave for any fat source available, but using carrion looks much more probable

The roadrunner video is impressive.

Totally different animals in any case. Roadrunners aren't passeriformes (not songbirds).

</comment><comment><USER5> > The great tit is a distinctive bird with a black head and neck -Wikipedia

If only I had known about this species of bird when I was a kid. Call me immature but there is something ticklish about disguised vulgarity.

<comment><USER6> You might find Sarah Edmonds' shop funny then: [https://www.etsy.com/shop/sarahedmondsmarket?section_id=2631...](https://www.etsy.com/shop/sarahedmondsmarket?section_id=26315567)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Death by Snu-Snu</comment>


An Update on In-Stream Payments on Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ribbon.co/an-update-on-in-stream-payments-on-twitter/

<comment><USER2> The card pictured on that page[1] looks nothing like the payment cards they introduced, it is just a movie clip. If they want to claim that their implementation is valid they should show the validation for a payment card.

[http://rbn_prod.s3.amazonaws.com/blog_images/2013/04/Screen-...](http://rbn_prod.s3.amazonaws.com/blog_images/2013/04/Screen- Shot-2013-04-10-at-1-1.48.29-AM-1024x905.png)

<comment><USER3> That's because these guys submitted using a "Player card" which is meant for embedded video streams, then swapped out the content for their widget after getting approved. A total bait-and-switch.

Player cards are meant for online video players, not any sort of interactive virtual content. Twitter wants to keep experiences consistent across platforms -- for mobile, Player card users are supposed to provide direct links to media streams. The docs are fairly clear on this. This whole thing just stinks of media stunt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's called PCI. Taking payment information in the context of the twitter.com same origin would pull Twitter into PCI compliance scope for Ribbon & possibly impact Twitters own PCI compliance state. For this to happen there would need to be contracts in place.

<comment><USER5> It's an IFrame, so no credit card info is ever actually on Twitter.com. In fact, the entire Ribbon card interface is served on a different host. Because of that, Twitter doesn't actually have to be PCI compliant-- they never see credit card or payment information.

<comment><USER6> Wrong! Check the Feb PCI clarification update. iFrames don't take anything out of scope because at the end of the day the SSL session shown by the browser is that of the originating site.

[https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/pdfs/PCI_DSS_v2_eCommer...](https://www.pcisecuritystandards.org/pdfs/PCI_DSS_v2_eCommerce_Guidelines.pdf)

<comment><USER6> In this case Twitter is the only company that can secure the page containing the iFrame code:

Merchant is responsible for:  Managing website and servers (if self-hosted), including applicable PCI DSS requirements  If website/server hosting is outsourced, applicable PCI DSS requirements for management of third parties (e.g., Requirement 12.8)  Having written agreements with any third parties and ensuring that they protect cardholder data on behalf of the merchant, in accordance with PCI DSS  Securing the web page(s) containing the iFrame code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Already killed by twitter: [http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/well-that-was- fast-twitter-...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/10/well-that-was-fast-twitter- shut-down-ribbons-newly-launched-in-stream-payments-feature-built-using- twitter-card-technology/)</comment>


Natural Language Corpus Data: Beautiful Data - <AUTHOR> http://norvig.com/ngrams/ <comment><USER2> This is a great start, but as you get more serious about NLP, keep in mind that a Web crawl from 2006 is not the same as ground truth about language. The top 100,000 words in this data include a lot of ephemeral spam. If you're looking for slang, it'll mostly be outdated. And words like "sitemap" and "Shockwave" are not as common throughout language as the Web alone would indicate.

The later Google Books Ngrams [1] data sets are cleaner, but that comes at a cost. You lose spam, but also a lot of other uses of language, when you only consider text that has been published in print. It's all in the formal register. And then you also get correlated OCR errors, as in [2], and you still get data whose collection ended in 2008.

So what am I suggesting you should use, if data from the Web is bad for some things and data from books is bad for others? Well, both of them, and a lot of other things too. An analysis that depends on word frequencies should use the consensus of many sources.

I've been working on compiling together many of those sources, in many languages, in the Python package wordfreq [3]. Now I'm working on an update to include excellent corpus data just released by the OPUS project, including OpenSubtitles 2016 [4].

[1] [http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2....](http://storage.googleapis.com/books/ngrams/books/datasetsv2.html)

[2] [http://drhagen.com/blog/the-missing-11th-of-the- month/](http://drhagen.com/blog/the-missing-11th-of-the-month/)

[3] [https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/wordfreq](https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/wordfreq)

[4] [http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/OpenSubtitles2016.php](http://opus.lingfil.uu.se/OpenSubtitles2016.php)

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Rob - Thanks for posting this. I took a peek at the wordfreq project -- looks interesting. Are you decomposing to a unicode normal form, such as NFKD [0] or storing words as UTF-32 (that's what Python uses internally [1]), combining multi-character code points into the 32-bit code unit [2] represented by UTF-32?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normalizat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_equivalence#Normalization)

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32#Use](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32#Use)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding#Terminology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding#Terminology)

<comment><USER2> I use NFKC form for scripts that seem to require it, such as Arabic, and NFC for others. If I used NFKC for English, for example, then encountering a brand name with a trademark sign on it would add the letters "tm" to the end of the word.

In general I use tokenization rules that follow the Unicode standards in [UAX 29], with language-specific external libraries for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and with some language-specific tweaks to handle cases the Unicode Consortium didn't go into. [0]

I use Python 3 strings, and it's a peculiar bit of abstraction-busting to worry about what they look like inside the Python interpreter. It's only UTF-32 for strings that contain high codepoints. See [PEP 393], "Flexible String Representation".

I don't think there is such a thing as "multi-character code points". At no point do I use UTF-16 (which has code points made of multiple surrogate code points, which are not characters), if that's what you're asking about.

[0] [https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/wordfreq/blob/master/word...](https://github.com/LuminosoInsight/wordfreq/blob/master/wordfreq/tokens.py)

[UAX 29] [http://unicode.org/reports/tr29/](http://unicode.org/reports/tr29/) (fixed link)

[PEP 393] [https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0393/](https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0393/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the info. I'm looking at this from the perspective of designing a backend datastore and query engine for a knowledge system. The idea is to encode a spatial data structure (similar to Google's S2 Geometry Library [0]) that enables content-based addressing of non-spatial data types for data fusion.

One idea is to make a lattice of unicode characters that builds up to combination of words a la Formal Concept Analysis [1] -- on one level, the characters compose into words that represent properties (key/value pairs), and then the KV pairs compose into higher-level objects. Each property and higher- level object is encoded with an integer derived from its constituent objects/properties, and each object is encoded in such a way that its constituent objects/properties can be determined algorithmically from the integer without having to traverse the structure [2] -- ANS encoding [3] embedded into a space with a VI metric ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_of_information](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_of_information)) [4] might make this work. Have you played with this type of design?

[0] [http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry-...](http://blog.christianperone.com/2015/08/googles-s2-geometry- on-the-sphere-cells-and-hilbert-curve/)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuxm929tIRY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xuxm929tIRY)

[2] [http://www09.sigmod.org/sigmod/record/issues/0506/p47-articl...](http://www09.sigmod.org/sigmod/record/issues/0506/p47-article- tropashko.pdf)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_Numeral_Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_Numeral_Systems)

[4] [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047259X06...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0047259X06002016/pdf?md5=71251a6300127946404246c8f8d8f7ea&pid=1-s2.0-S0047259X06002016-main.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Aw, I was hoping for an actual corpus. A couple years ago I had wanted to find a corpus of news stories or similar things in order to analyze relationships between entities (people/places/events) mentioned. It was then I discovered that every corpus I could find was specifically only permitted to be used for natural language analysis, and content analysis was specifically forbidden. Very disappointing. Still hoping to find a dump of a few decades worth of news or something some day to play with.

<comment><USER4> Take a look at the Google book corpus. I used it several years ago by renting the largest disk/RAM server Hetzner rents and collecting the most common 1gram, 2grams,...5grams in the book corpus. Many classification, summarization, etc. systems that rely on simple bag of words approaches can be improved by including ngrams. For a simple example, to label sentiment of text, considering 2grams lets you correctly handle 'not good', where considering one word at a time, ignoring word order, etc. is not so good.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> What's the best source/method to get the frequency distribution to build an Arithmetic coding model [0] for English (multilingual ideally) with emoticons?

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#Defining_a_m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arithmetic_coding#Defining_a_model)

<comment><USER5> Onr of the main points of arithmetic coding is that you don't have to do a frequency count first like you would for Huffman. It's efficient enough that you can build your model piecewise as you go, and only sacrifice a few bits of coding inefficiency.

You're not going to find many public datasets on SMS or other emoji-using entities regardless of language. Twitter or Instagram are your best bet, but building your model on those will only work best on those types of input.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just discovered Matthew Rothenberg's Emojitracker project:

* [http://www.emojitracker.com/](http://www.emojitracker.com/)

* [http://github.com/mroth/emojitrack](http://github.com/mroth/emojitrack)

* [https://medium.com/@mroth/how-i-built-emojitracker-179cfd823...](https://medium.com/@mroth/how-i-built-emojitracker-179cfd8238ac#.hhoymvyp1)

* [https://medium.com/@mroth/how-i-kept-building-emojitracker-c...](https://medium.com/@mroth/how-i-kept-building-emojitracker-c31378810136)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> (2009)

Just noting this content is from 2008-2009 and the related book was published in 2009.

</comment><comment><USER7> Beautiful data is a beautiful book!</comment>


Read it later for Places - <AUTHOR>

Imagine you're on holiday and found a good restaurant for dinner. To find this place later again, just get your iPhone out, hit the Visit it later button and eat well that evening. But there are so many other ways to use Visit it later: Mark the stores where you can get the presents for christmas, locate your car at a big car park, mark places you want to visit later when you're in a hurry, etc. Want to get notified when this cool app launches? Take a look at http://www.visititlater.com and stay in touch. <comment><USER2> I really like the idea. It is like Evernote for places :)</comment>


Noam Chomsky: Life Expectancy in the US Is Declining for a Reason - <AUTHOR> https://truthout.org/articles/noam-chomsky-life-expectancy-in-the-us-is-declining-for-a-reason/ <comment><USER2> > Half the population has negative net worth, meaning debts outweigh assets. > There has been stagnation pretty much for the workforce over the whole > neoliberal period. That's the group that we're talking about. Naturally, > this leads to anger, resentment, desperation. Similar things are happening > in Europe under the austerity programs. That's the background for what's > misleadingly called "populism."

The way Chomsky thinks (and expresses himself) is always fascinating. The linguistic background is as evident as his political activism, perhaps a tad uncomfortable for conformists.

<comment><USER3> It would be nice for him to stick to topics he's an expert in. Though considering he's a "word" guy, he does know how to manipulate language to achieve his goals.

<comment><USER4> I'd assume that for long time he's an expert in much more than linguistics. Even his colleagues from computer world still assume he's only a linguist, but a man can learn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting that the article barely covers the reason for the decline of life expectancy. Instead he goes on a very long tangent about the second amendment. Murder rates are continuing to decrease, so the murder rate has nothing to do with the decrease in life expectancy.

It could be as simple as overprescription of them and aggressive marketing and sales by manufacturers.

This article goes into the actual statistics which are impacting the life expectancy.

[https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us- li...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-life- expectancy-declines-again-a-dismal-trend-not-seen-since-world- war-i/2018/11/28/ae58bc8c-f28c-11e8-bc79-68604ed88993_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e7200cf4a8ec)

Chomsky asserts (without evidence) that opioid abuse is a disease of despair and that it is a result of unemployment and the wealth gap. He doesnt provide any data or citations demonstrating this link.

It seems that it is more likely that opioids became over prescribed as a result of aggressive marketing and sales by pharmaceutical manufacturers. Ironically the factor protecting nonwhite communities from opioid addiction is the lack of health insurance to meet with doctors that can prescribe them.

This paper supports prescription as the possible underlying cause.

[https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2723625)

<<Conclusions and Relevance The race/ethnicity and income pattern of opioid overdoses mirrored prescription rates, suggesting that differential exposure to opioids via the health care system may have induced the large, observed racial/ethnic gradient in the opioid epidemic. Across drug categories, controlled medications were much more likely to be prescribed to individuals living in majority-white areas. These discrepancies may have shielded nonwhite communities from the brunt of the prescription opioid epidemic but also represent disparities in treatment and access to all medications.>>

<comment><USER6> I guess Chomsky didn't point out the fact that opioid deaths fell last year for the first time in around 30 years. That actually dovetails with the idea that increased opportunity, low unemployment and improved wages helps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Liberals have embraced capitalism leading to stagnation? I prefer Eric Weinstein's formulation of the root cause. There has been limited technological growth in almost all tech fields (except semi-conductors) from 1970 through present day. Physics, chemistry and biology for example are not producing new technology that fuels growth. The explosive growth in semi- conductors and computers have obscured this reality. We have greater knowledge in all those fields today, but it's not translating to the rate of tangible progress that was seen in previous years (like 1920-1970).

<comment><USER8> I think you don't actually disagree with Chomsky. This is what you'd expect (1) shifting resources from the public sector to the private sector and (2) financializing the economy because a corporation is by design oriented towards short-term profits and highly trained workers such as mathematicians and physicists are being tied up in finance.

<comment><USER9> The smartest people today are working on optimizing the number of ad clicks for Facebook and Google, or on optimizing profits on stock market manipulations for Goldman Sachs and the like.

A lot of talent is used not to create new value for society, but to optimize profits for rich people.

<comment><USER10> Why are business paying Google and Facebook for those ads?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The shocking obesity epidemic?

</comment><comment><USER12> I doubt Chomsky is the entire reason.</comment>


Ask HN: Which TLDs are safe and reliable? - <AUTHOR> Recently, I read a few articles stating that .io TLD is very unreliable (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15663988), not to mention security issues they had. Considering that is there a list of TLDs which can be called safe and also reliable? how to tell if a TLD will be reliable? Does it matter which domain registration service I use? What causes the unreliability?<p>Recently, there are a lot of options in which TLDs to choose, such as .live, .coffee, etc. It would be great to be able to use them if they are reliable and secure. <comment><USER2> Good ones are run by experienced operators, have money behind them to support that (many domains), reasonable policies and have something behind them promising that it'll stay that way.

For older ones you can look at history: e.g. .com, .org, .net, .de can be trusted because they've been run under the same rules since "forever" and work. Same for other large ccTLDs.

New gTLDs are run by all kinds of organisations. They can set their prices as they want, so there might be ugly surprises (some have raised prices by hundreds of percent), and they might or might not have the other factors. E.g. Google and Amazon own a bunch, they'd very likely do a good job of running them technically, probably stable price-wise, we'll have to see how their other policies are. Small companies that exist just to run a few TLDs are more risky, but don't necessarily _have_ to be bad.</comment>


AskHN: How do you deal with grumpy forum members? - <AUTHOR> I have a forum with a couple hundred members. Mostly they are nice. There are two members that are very active that are generally grumpy. I have lost really good members of my community because one or both of the grumps have pissed them off.
One is a hard worker and adds so much value to a different part of the site that it is difficult to envision asking them to leave. The other is like that grumpy uncle that shows up to all of the family reunions. They are going to die in a couple of years but allowing them to stay comes at a cost.
I'm a little bit Asperger's in real life and I am very much not in tune with the pain that the grumps cause. I am only aware when people complain which always surprises me.
I am open to any suggestions! <comment><USER2> Depends what you care about more, revenue or a more humanitarian customer experience.

There's plugins like "Miserable User" available to get rid of members without offense / them knowing (unless they are intelligent).

Or you could just...ask them to be less grumpy?

"One is a hard worker and adds so much value to a different part of the site that it is difficult to envision asking them to leave." Agreed. putting up with that might be the duality involved.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think if you have a better customer experience revenue will figure itself out. Asking two people to leave will definitely cause issues. And the production of the one may not be replaceable. I was told by one of the complainers that "others will pick up the slack" except no one does. The opportunity is there. No one comes close.</comment></comment>


Facebook Advertising is Fool's Gold - <AUTHOR> http://behindcompanies.com/2012/05/facebook-fools-gold/ <comment><USER2> I agree with this and have posted numerous comments here to that effect, particularly on the value of intent (with respect to the effectiveness of online advertising).

Th attitude of "eyeballs not revenue" and finding that repeatable, scalable formula are almost a religion on HN and in startups. It's generally a strategy I approve of.

Even dropping 20% since the IPO (currently trading at just over $30 as I write this; and bear in mind that even _Groupon_ \--at least initially--enjoyed a nice IPO bounce), the company is trading at a huge P/E ratio.

I get why this is: it's speculative. FB is still viewed as a growth company and the speculators feel that there is huge unrealised monetization potential.

I remain a skeptic regarding the value of "social" in advertising. The OP is right: all this data just means--maybe--a slightly higher CTR, at which point Facebook is just another display ad network and that doesn't justify their valuation.

As an aside, IMHO Twitter is in this same "put up or shut up" boat. I don't believe Facebook is doomed (IMHO Twitter is). I just believe the value of the data silo they have is both overstated and transitory (at some point--one way or the other--Facebook won't be the gatekeeper to your profile and social graph).

Facebook has done a lot of things right as a business (the Like button being foremost among those IMHO). Personally I believe their biggest mistake was spurning Apple: Apple wanted to use Facebook for their Ping boondoggle.

Disclaimer: I work for Google in display advertising.

<comment><USER3> I'm confused over the significance of the P/E ratio. It seemed like a big deal when I was reading these stories about the FB IPO, but then I got to look at other ratios in tech. Amazon's is much higher than FB's 93.72 at 175.23 [0]

[0]: [http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AMZN&authuser=0](http://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:AMZN&authuser=0)

<comment><USER4> Some interesting observations about Amazon's P/E ratio here [http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/05/27/decoding-share- prices-a...](http://www.mondaynote.com/2012/05/27/decoding-share-prices- amazon-apple-and-facebook/) on Jean-Louis Gassée's "Monday Note".

Basically, Amazon forgoes profit to get market share, will push out all competitors, build a huge barrier to entry with excellent execution and logistics, and then raise prices to increase profit. Traders are buying now and holding until that happens.

<comment><USER5> Supposedly. Everyone has been waiting for the big payoff since the 90s, but Amazon remains a stubbornly low-margin retailer. Eventually people are going to be forced to face the fact that there is no sinister Phase 2. Amazon is just happy being a low-margin, high-volume Walmart-of-the-Internet with little interest in its investors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For me, this is the strongest case yet for niche social networks being the future of social media. FB is too broad and demographics tell you little about the people you are speaking too unless you can inject some sort of context.

If (via a Distributed Social Networking Protocol) people were subscribed to several social networks focused on their hobbies and interests, then I believe Social Media Advertising would be more viable, and more useful to the audience.

I also think that when you look past all the fanfare and hyperbole surrounding social networking, what you're left with is really sophisticated bulletin boards and forums.

I can see that from a marketing point of view, having one point of access to that many people might seem like a dream come true, but the numbers are suggesting that's not the case at all. Facebook is not the answer to an online advertisers dream. I don't think it ever will be.

<comment><USER7> _For me, this is the strongest case yet for niche social networks being the future of social media. FB is too broad and demographics tell you little about the people you are speaking too unless you can inject some sort of context.

If (via a Distributed Social Networking Protocol) people were subscribed to several social networks focused on their hobbies and interests, then I believe Social Media Advertising would be more viable, and more useful to the audience._

You don't need DSNP: niche social networks already exist. Ravelry and GoodReads, as examples, seem to be making a decent go of it. Would love to know how their advertising does.

<comment><USER6> I think DSNP is essential. Imagine if you could only email someone with a GMail account if you had a Gmail account.

Imagine if you could only check your Hotmail emails on the Hotmail website or through one of the official Hotmail Apps.

That's how Social networking works right now. API's won't cut the mustard. We need a DSNP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Facebook's advertising model is a simple classical displaying advertising model. It need be disrupted seriously. Nowadays, the most popular marketing model is displaying advertising model, which is actually an attention-driven marketing model. However, no matter how good they are context-awared and personalized, they are always guesswork, which can hardly achieve high relevancy. It is extremely difficult to guess users' actual intention for most cases, even you may have a lot of information of them. For example, it is super difficult to guess what an individual is exactly looking to buy when he walks into a Trader Joe's, no matter how much information you obtained on him, like his income, profession, age, education and etc. Users' intentions are always dynamically changing from time to time. There are no general equations that can perfectly predict people's intentions. As a result, no matter how perfectly a system can attract attentions, attention-driven marketing can never achieve high efficiency and accuracy.

As a matter of fact, nowadays advertisement industry is the biggest bubble of the world. Every year, trillions of dollars completely wasted by irrelevant advertising unnecessarily. What is even worse is, the user experience is badly hurt by ads and spams. Such marketing system can be called as attention-driven marketing system. Everything is done to attract attentions. However, only a few attentions are really attracted, but majority of the attentions may not be finally turned into intentions. As a result, majority of the marketing costs are totally wasted.

The future marketing systems will be built on intentions. Intention-driven commerce systems need let every user to express his/her intentions freely and help him/her achieve his/her intentions in highly optimized way by socialization and crowd-sourcing. The future world needs to be a world without displaying ads, but only pure relevant information that matches users' intentions dynamically and real-timely. This is the very objective of my current startup project as well.

<comment><USER9> How do you promote events in your non-bubble view of the world? An event can be in person (imagine TechCrunch Disrupt for instance), or a new TV series launching...

I can imagine very well how I would target people who like the series 24 if I'm launching a new thriller. Or readers of Hacker News for a tech conference. Etc...

<comment><USER8> If we have such a system, everybody can input his/her intentions. I would input my intentions of attending startup events, and set the expiration date of this intention to for example 10 years. Then whenever there is an event like TechCrunch Disrupt, I will receive a notice with a short list of such events. All users who have set up similar intentions will receive such notice. Meanwhile, TechCrunch Disrupt organizers will receive a list of all users who have such similar intentions. As a result, they can directly send mails, or emails, or even phone calls to these users for highly targeted marketing instead of blindly broadcast their event to the whole general public.

<comment><USER9> Your system doesn't sound realistic. Here's a version that works today: once several of your friends sign up for TechCrunch Disrupt, then I'll start showing you ads for the conference. No need to pre-enter any kind of vague intent into some omniscient system.

<comment><USER8> My system will be very realistic in 5 years. You're still talking about socialized and context-awared ads. It is actually based on very old Attention Economy, which is dominant probably in the past thousand years just because there is no Internet. Now with the help of the Internet, Intention Economy is coming to dominate, because it will optimize the world very much.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Seems reasonable to me.

Facebook is gathering what amounts to a static picture of each user then selling ads based on the pictures. There really isn't a time component in the data (though perhaps they can add one now that the service has existed for many years).

On the other hand, Google has more or less assembled a bunch of archetypes based on behavior (people who search for X later purchase Y, etc.). Then they match queries to these archetypes. The time component is front-and-center here because the archetype match was prompted by a user action.

A purchase is really a time-related event that transforms the user in some sense. By purchasing something you're changing "who" you are from the perspective of an advertiser (e.g. a Chevy driver could become an Audi driver).

So Facebook has a great picture of "who" each user is at a the moment, but no real way of knowing "who" each user would like to become or when. Hence, perhaps, some of their difficulty in selling ads.

Or not.

</comment><comment><USER11> There are two primary types of ads

1) ones that give you what you want

2) ones that drive demand

Google dominates (1) and I assume Facebook is trying to dominate (2) which includes a lot more display advertising (and TV, and billboards). Facebook probably thinks a lot of demand-driving advertising can be accomplished through viral online marketing through FB platforms and they are likely trying to exploit these channels with services for paying customers.

Imagine paying Facebook to simulate something being trendy among people's trend-setting friends. It'll be a fine line but this must be what they hope to do.

Agree the $100B is too high, but certainly they're easily a profitable company, long-term.

<comment><USER12> > 1) ones that give you what you want > 2) ones that drive demand

A big part of Google's success is that #1 is much easier to prove than #2.

"People bought our product more because they had become familiar with it over the last month via newspaper/radio/Facebook ads" is a hard-to-prove claim.

"We got X clicks from Google ads leading directly to Y purchases" is much easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not trying to defend the viability of FB ads here, but this analysis seems a little shallow. Falling within a certain demographic may not "make" you click an ad, but the same could be said of performing a search on Google. If circumstance Y makes one want to buy a product, then as long as falling within demographic X is correlated with being in Y, targeting X could be a good idea. It is (obviously) the reason why toy commercials air during children's shows and not during basketball games.

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder what would happen if Facebook ran a scheme like AdSense.

Advertising on the Facebook site itself seems not to be working, but I could foresee a situation where website owners allow Facebook to display ads on their site for a fee per click just like AdSense. Facebook already has a javascript presence on many, many websites already.

<comment><USER15> Adsense makes up a minority of Google's ad profits. The billion dollar business is in Adwords, not Adsense.

<comment><USER16> Minority? It almost half of all Google ad profits.

<comment><USER17> It is more like Adwords: 70% Adsense: 30% [http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q1_google_earnings....](http://investor.google.com/earnings/2012/Q1_google_earnings.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I agree that Google can target alot better IF you have a product that solves a problem people search for. IF.

> What researchers discovered was that people bought milkshakes as a breakfast > replacement because it was entertaining during a long, boring commute, and > would keep them full until lunch.

How do you advertise for them on Google? If they search for "breakfast replacement for long, boring commute"?

For anyone who can match their product to search queries, Google is the way to go, agreed. But not all products can, because people are not actively looking for solving a problem/need that your product solves.

If I look at my current facebook ads, these are not things I actively search for, e.g. drinks, shavers, parties, facebook games, ... If I had to spend marketing $ on these, I'd probably choose facebook ads over AdWords as well.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ever since FB has gone public, I've noticed so much 'negative' stories/comments, and I really wonder why these are only coming out now... FB has been around for a long time and nothing has changed in its marketing strategies since it seems.

Personally, I don't have a FB account, or own any stock but this targeted 'bashing' seems useless and has the smell of targeted anti-FB propaganda. Why don't we focus on the real issue being people rights to privacy and the shady practices of FB?

More focus on the real issues please, do not get distracted by the 'anti-hype' of the week.

<comment><USER20> > _"Why don't we focus on the real issue being people rights to privacy and > the shady practices of FB?"_

These things are all connected. The public is being sold the idea that this is a $100BB company, one of the biggest in the world. Yet when some of us look at it (yourself, even) we see a great tool that doesn't justify the price _as a business_ : as cletus says at the top of the thread, Facebook may just be another ad network that depends on its massive, engaged user base. Yet FB has problems with how it actually treats those users, through privacy issues and shady practices..

<comment><USER19> I don't think that anyone who did their homework would have bought FB stock as a 'sure thing for long time investment'. FB didn't fool anyone who wasn't too greedy for their own good. Obviously I'm not saying FB is not a hugely successful product with an immense user base, but obviously the fact that this IPO is not 'going as predicted' by it's underwriters was clear to me waaayyy before the stock hit the markets ...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I am so glad that email didn't depend on advertising to eventually support itself "sometime in the future." Email is useful to me as email, and useful to my providers as a billed service.

Yes, they're different things.

</comment><comment><USER9> I call survivor bias. Historically, the only player in online advertising is Google, which is 100%-focused on intent-based advertising. So the article, logically concludes that intent is the only way to advertise (despite decades of TV and radio ads).

Some products do great with intent-based advertising. Other products (that you didn't even know you needed) need other forms of advertising.

</comment><comment><USER22> Google's ads are better because you have intention when you are searching. That's not true when you are checking into Facebook to see what other people are doing. Are there other times when people use Facebook and they have some intent? Planning an event, or asking a question, those come to mind.

</comment><comment><USER23> This argument continues to come up, but I don't buy it- At least not without some data.

My personal anecdote: Facebook ads are the only online Ads I click with any regularity. They are targeted to my interests, such as programming. They also hit me at a time when I am mostly bored and clicking around on anything that interests me.

When I find myself on Google, I am on a mission for very specific information. Even if I am shopping, I do a research phase and a purchasing phase. Ads in the research phase don't woo me. I google straight to trusted sources. Once I'm in the purchase phase (shopping for best price), I am not wooed either because the ads are too broad. E.G, I want the D3100, not just any camera in general.

I completely understand Google's strategy of "intent" based ads. I just think Facebook's user data is even stronger.

</comment><comment><USER24> You are mistaken to think that the search-engine show-people-what-they-were- searching-for-anyway kind of advertisement is the only kind of advertisement that can work on the internet.

I used to work for Hyves, which was until a year ago or something the biggest social network in the Netherlands. Hyves lost to Facebook in terms of number of users, but something that they did do right was modernization. Hyves had an in-house sales team and studio, which sold custom viral campaigns to cooperate advertisers. These campaigns could usually go together with a TV campaign and/or other media.

For some products search engine advertisement is the right kind of advertisement (parrot secrets, maybe cars, I don't know), for others not such much (food stuffs for example).

</comment><comment><USER25> But consider Facebook's "friction-less sharing". Facebook now knows you just listened to a song, read and article, took a trip, had a baby, got married....

Now think of the targeting you can get there.

<comment><USER6> You sell cars.

I listen to Donovan, The Beatles, The Stone Roses, Mozart, Au, REM, Dj Shadow, Handsome Boy Modelling School, Chopin, Ludovico Einaudi and Daft Punk (to name but a few).

I've liked pages for five star greek hotels, the burger place on the corner, the guy who sells awesome falafel's on Hoxton market. You know I saw this video of a talking dog that I thought was totally awesome.

Just this month, I read an article on the Greek debt crisis in the economist, an article on David Beckham in the Daily mail website, I shared a wikipedia page about Rommel, I liked an article about continuous integration with node.js and Jenkins.

Now sell me a car.

I actually like Volkswagens and Volvos, but you won't find that anywhere in my Facebook data.

<comment><USER26> _I actually like Volkswagens and Volvos, but you won't find that anywhere in my Facebook data._

I'd bet there's actually a pretty high correlation between many of the things you just listed and a preference for VWs and Volvos. It doesn't really take that many data points to start filling in the blanks.

But I think this kind of targeting is going to be more useful in selling you a product you don't yet know about but are likely to want than it is a car that you are almost certainly already aware of.

<comment><USER27> Yeah, the preferences listed may not indicate a preference for Volvo over Audi, but they're certainly consistent with someone I'd target for near-luxury European cars rather than giant Chevy pickup trucks, Korean mini-vans or tiny econo-boxes.

Daft Punk? You're 30-ish. Mozart and Chopin? College graduate. Like a 5-star Greek hotel (but not _that_ many other luxury items)? Shit, I've narrowed down your disposable income into a fairly narrow bucket. I can also tell that you don't have any children. I would target the _shit_ out of you for Volvo, Volkswagen, Acura, Infiniti, Mercedes, BMW and Audi.

And that's just my own guesstimates. Backed up by proper data I'm sure I could do way better.

<comment><USER20> > _"I would target the shit out of you for Volvo, Volkswagen, Acura, Infiniti, > Mercedes, BMW and Audi."_

And why not Lincoln, Cadillac, Lexus, Saab and Jaguar? In fact, Volkswagen isn't a luxury brand (no more than Honda, Nissan, Toyota), and hardly fits among the brands you mentioned above. Yet it's a preference of the OP. So, I think you've proven his point; your targeting hardly tells us anything.

<comment><USER27> Sure, maybe those too. Except perhaps Saab, which last I heard was broke, and Jaguar, which I'd probably target at a slightly older crowd.

Lincoln and Cadillac maybe not, too -- perhaps Americans who holiday in Europe are much more likely to buy European cars. If I had more data I could draw up some correlations and tell you exactly how _much_ more likely they are to buy European cars and whether it's still worth waving a shiny new MKZ in front of our Volvo fan.

There's always exceptions to any of these correlations between stuff we like and other stuff we might like. In fact we're all exceptions; we all like things which are anticorrelated with other things we like. But that's not a big problem -- your targeting algorithm doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be significantly better than random scattershot... and ideally, better than Google.

In an ideal world, I'd only serve Acura ads to people who:

a) Are buying a new car soon

b) Are certain to buy an Acura if they see an ad for one, and

c) Are certain to not buy an Acura if they don't see an ad for one.

but failing that I'll settle for targeting people who are in vaguely the right age group and income bracket.

Actually, I think car sales are a bad example; if I wanted to sell cars I'd use google ads, because people buying a new car already know they're buying a new car, and are probably out there doing research on the subject of new cars. Whoever posted the milkshake example had the right idea for facebook ads.

Google ads can sell you stuff that you're looking for, Facebook ads (if implemented properly) can sell you stuff you don't yet know that you want.

<comment><USER6> Yesterday I created a paste bin with the brand of footwear I prefer. Go!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> It does seem obvious. There is just a wall of hype hanging. And factor in the fact that it was reported that approximately 40 % of all social network accounts are created by spammers.

</comment><comment><USER29> Cached version for those getting the 509: <http://tinyurl.com/c7ozldn>

<comment><USER30> Thanks for this!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> So basically this is saying that Facebook needs a search engine to be effective at advertising. Is DuckDuckGo up for sale?

<comment><USER32> Why would they buy DDG when they (FB) already have Bing? Oh...yeh. Is DDG for sale? :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Was just reading the JTBD literature a few weeks ago. An obvious concept, but so oft ignored.</comment>


The worst day of a CIO's life, if your CIO isn't good at their job - <AUTHOR> http://searchcio.techtarget.com.au/news/2240024758/The-worst-day-of-a-CIOs-life

<comment><USER2> This is horrifyingly devoid of content. I mean is this supposed to be useful to someone? I shudder to think of who that person might be and what responsibilities they might have.</comment>