The Algorithmic Foundations of Differential Privacy (2014) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cis.upenn.edu/~aaroth/Papers/privacybook.pdf <comment><USER2> Differential privacy appears regularly on Hacker News, with either theoretical articles or projects that aim to implement it. Yet often there is a huge gap between both.

For example, Apple has touted about its use of differential privacy, but researchers [1] have shown that the privacy budget is reset every day and the parameters, buried inside the code, lack a proper derivation. Similarly, Uber seems to use DP for internal analytics. However, the proposed model does not seem really robust and does not provide accurate results at all [2]. One should always carefully review claims associated with implementations of differential privacy.

[1] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02753](https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.02753)

[2] [https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018...](https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018-02-25.md)

<comment><USER3> One problem I've found with differential privacy is that no one talks about how to set \epsilon. I've read this book, and it's quite well written and complete, but as the title says it focuses on the algorithmic foundations.

This paper [1] is much better for practitioners, and actually gives very reasonable values for the privacy guarantee (e.g., (1.2, 1e-9)), and builds on this great paper: [2]. Worth a read if you train neural networks.

[1]: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.06963.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.06963.pdf) [2]: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.00133.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.00133.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't know anything about DP, so my question might be unrelated. But I think perhaps someone can answer it. Almost 20 years ago, I was told of the following problem at the university:

You have two identical databases (sets of n bits) that do not communicate. You want to know a single bit from the database. How many bits do you have retrieve from each database so that neither database would learn about which bit you were looking for?

The simplest answer is n, retrieve all bits. But we were also given a better answer, square root of n - you order the bits into a square, ask for a xor of random subset of columns but to the first/second database respectively with/without the column you're looking for.

And here is my question, we were also told that this can be done even better, in cube root of n bits. But I never learned the answer, and since I wonder, was that claim correct? Does anyone know this problem and the better solution?

<comment><USER5> What you are looking for is "Private Information Retrieval". For the cube root result, check out: [http://www.tau.ac.il/~bchor/PIR.pdf](http://www.tau.ac.il/~bchor/PIR.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some interesting concepts to consider: K-anonymity, ℓ-diversity, t-closeness.

From the paper ([https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/bio.2014.0069](https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/full/10.1089/bio.2014.0069)) I wrote a while ago:

While the risk of re-identification (of a record or individual participant) might be virtually non-existent with synthetic data, one could predict unknown attributes of a known individual, given an ideal model of synthesis. In other words, an attacker could find unknown attributes of some individual with a certain probability by looking for the closest match in the synthetic data. This is known as attribute disclosure.

There are several methods for quantifying attribute disclosure, most notably t-closeness, which is defined as: An equivalence class is said to have t-closeness if the distance between the distribution of a sensitive attribute in this class and the distribution of the attribute in the whole table is no more than a threshold. A table is said to have t-closeness if all equivalence classes have t-closeness.

In short: the distribution of a particular sensitive value should not be further away than a distance t from the overall distribution.

Using the t-closeness metric circumvents issues associated with k-anonymity and ℓ-diversity. Briefly, k-anonymity states that a certain attribute class should be present in at least k records, which introduces ambiguity in the data set. However, if each of the k equivalence classes are the same, properties could still be resolved simply by elimination. The ℓ-diversity metric circumvents this problem by adding a further requirement: in addition to the class to being seen in k records, these records must have at least ℓ 'well represented' values. But if an attacker knows the real-world distribution of values, then attributes could still be disclosed with a certain probability, simply by combining different data sources

</comment><comment><USER7> Way back in 1978, Demillo, Lipton and Dobkin published a note in the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (SE-4(1):73- 75 · February 1978) called "Even databases that lie can be compromised" The basic idea was to look at the idea of giving slightly wrong answers to median type queries in order to protect results for individuals. They showed that, even when the query system deliberately lied, it was possible to compromise the data base. I am surprised that this note is not listed in the bibliography of the differential privacy article.

</comment><comment><USER8> Peter Kairouz [1] gave a talk [2] recently describing mechanisms to get around the limitations of DP described in other comments.

[1] [https://web.stanford.edu/~kairouzp/](https://web.stanford.edu/~kairouzp/)

[2] [https://youtu.be/6Uur2_TnwYE](https://youtu.be/6Uur2_TnwYE)

</comment><comment><USER9> I love the concept of differential privacy, but it seems hard to incentivize the "data hoarders" to actually use it, even if you ignore the challenges of building real-world differentially private systems. Google and Apple use it for some things, but in general it doesn't seem like something the market will use by itself.

Also doesn't help that differential privacy itself is maybe too arcane and subtle for the public to talk about and demand, unlike for example encryption which people probably generally at least understand to mean something along the lines of hiding their data in some sense.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd just love to debate a fascist Justice Department over the meaning of "You will not be affected..." as I am led off into detention. Real rights are often negative rights. My home ownership has little to do with entitlement to activities within. It has everything to do with keeping you out of my house if that's what I choose. Get it?</comment>


Ask HN: Why do we still need the HTTP-User-Agent-Header? - <AUTHOR>

All I know is that it's bad for privacy. Are there any useful things that can be done with it? <comment><USER2> I simply find it annoying that I have to use a User agent switcher to use a mobile site on desktop...

</comment><comment><USER3> Work around browser bugs.</comment>


Explain "Event-Driven" Web Servers to Your Grandma - <AUTHOR> http://daverecycles.com/post/3104767110/explain-event-driven-web-servers-to-your-grandma

<comment><USER2> Terrible analogy, especially when there exists a better one within the food service industry. How about rewriting that article from the perspective of a coffee shop?

We've all been to the neighborhood coffee place where the girl will take your order, turn around and make your entire drink, hand it to you and ask for payment. We've all stood in that line.

We've also all been to Starbucks, where the girl takes your order, writes it on a cup, takes your money, then moves on to the next customer. And by the time you walk to the other end of the counter the guy in front of you already has coffee in his hand.

It still doesn't fit web servers exactly, but at least it fits the real world.

</comment><comment><USER3> Grandma, "Event-Driven" is just a fancy word for magic. Don't worry about it.

<comment><USER4> Why are people upvoting this comment? not fully implemented and readily available != magic.

<comment><USER5> Not fully implemented? I'm pretty sure all of the billions of requests that hit nginx, varnish, haproxy, and Zeus would disagree with you. What about all those massive sites using memcached on the backend? You know -- Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Craigslist, YouTube?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> "Event-driven" architecture doesn't imply a fundamentally different way of handling requests than thread-based. The only difference is that in an event- driven architecture, the scheduling is handled in the userspace code. In a thread-based architecture, it's done in the kernel. The advantage of doing it in the userspace code is that it can be done in a simpler, more specialized way.

The hardware is doing fundamentally the same thing either way, but in the threaded model, it's also doing a lot of other stuff that you probably don't care about.

So, to explain it to my grandma: It's just a simpler way to think about it. There isn't really a big difference.

<comment><USER7> "The advantage of doing it in the userspace code is that it can be done in a simpler, more specialized way."

No, the advantage of doing it in userspace code is that you can paper over the deficiencies of the layers under the one you are working in with significant manual effort. Node.js _introduced_ the concurrency problems when it selected Javascript as one of the layers, it doesn't get much credit in my mind for then solving them at great effort and with horrible damage done to the resulting program structures. The problems Node.js solves are not fundamental to programming, they are fundamental to _Javascript_.

Pick something like Erlang and the problem never exists in the first place. You don't have to paper over the deficiencies in the lower levels, because the levels below the code you're writing aren't deficient for concurrency in the first place.

I should point out that in general this is not necessarily a bad thing; alas, there's always some way your lower layers are deficient, and it's far worse when they make it impossible to paper over the problem. Still, you will never end up with simpler code. More specialized, oh my yes, but certainly not simpler. And the wisdom of picking a layer that is fundamentally deficient for your core target problem then papering over it seems pretty limited to me.

<comment><USER6> _Pick something like Erlang and the problem never exists in the first place. You don't have to paper over the deficiencies in the lower levels, because the levels below the code you're writing aren't deficient for concurrency in the first place._

Now, be fair: Erlang papers over the deficiencies of the lower layers (namely, the kernel) with significant manual effort. It's just that someone else has already gone to this effort. BEAM _is_ an event-based server behind the scenes, with lots of syntactic sugar to make it look multithreaded. The PLT Scheme webserver is another example of this.

I also didn't mean to suggest that the code itself is necessarily simpler. It can be, but (as the node.js example proves) it is certainly not always. The _scheduling algorithm_ , on the other hand, is typically much simpler. Namely, it's typically "round-robin cooperative multitasking." No serious operating system since Windows for Workgroups has actually tried to use round-robin cooperative multitasking.

All the other "thread stuff" is typically simplified as well: smaller stacks (if any at all), simpler context-switching code, that sort of thing. The actual encoding of the business logic? That depends on the problem.

<comment><USER7> "Now, be fair: Erlang papers over the deficiencies of the lower layers (namely, the kernel) with significant manual effort."

Since the various Xpolls were added to the kernel, I would disagree. Even based on a select loop the kernel has still been happy to do many things asynchronously for a long time now, it's just a bit of a klunky API. What stopped it from being easy was that C had no good concurrency story except "lots of manual effort", so nobody could really effectively use those things in C. (The kernel has actually had the "lots of manual effort" applied to it.) The vast majority of concurrency failure has been layered in at the high-level language point. There is a large class of "better C than C" languages (or the implementations thereof as the case may be) that simply shoot you before you can even think about fine-grained concurrency, CPython, Perl, Ruby, Javascript, etc. And another class of languages that permit it but don't really help much, like C(++), Java, C#, and anything where you might seriously use a semaphore directly.

This is the core error that Node.js hype and its partisans make, mistaking the deficiencies of a set of languages for deficiencies in programming itself. It's not even in the OS; the OS doesn't mind threadlets/green threads/OS processes, it's all in the high-level languages.

The kernel may not have provided you a threadlet system out of the box, but the Erlang VM isn't particularly _fighting_ the kernel either, it's _building_ on it. In this context, that's not particularly what I mean by deficiency. Missing things can be added, I'm talking about things where the underlying layers actively fight you.

Also, yes, in some respect I'm still really responding more to the hype than directly to you. Saying that BEAM is an event-based server behind the scenes is basically the point I think needs to be made more clearly. You can be "asynchronous" and "event based" without having to embed the asnchronony and eventedness visibly in every function and nearly every line in the code base.

<comment><USER8> _the OS doesn't mind threadlets/green threads/OS processes_

Except for the blocking system calls and blocking page faults that block all your green threads.

<comment><USER7> To the extent those can be papered over, they have been by most good runtimes; the remainder is evenly applied to all languages and runtimes under discussion because nobody can escape from them at all, no matter how awesome the top layers are.

This is what I was referencing when I offhandedly mentioned the fact that some layers can make papering over them actually impossible; if the kernel can not be convinced to do it with any series of syscalls, or worse yet the hardware itself can not be convinced, you lose, game over. Another example, Haskell's very strong type system can do a fairly good job of making really damned sure you don't escape from the system, which is useful for making an STM that is actually usable precisely because the smallest escape hatch tends to bring it down. But the downside is that a library or something can actually make it _impossible_ to hack around a problem (with any reasonable degree of effort).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Explain "web server" to your grandma. Oopsie.

<comment><USER10> > Explain "web server" to your grandma. Oopsie.

It's like a waiter at a restaurant- you tell it what you want and a few moments later, the waiter (or server) returns what you've ordered.

Good?

<comment><USER11> The waiter is the user's agent, the kitchen is the server. Each food preparer in the kitchen is a thread/process.

The waiter takes the customer's order and then waits for the food to be prepared before returning with the dish.

Asking the the waiter to ask the chef whether or not the fish is fresh is like making a head request.

<comment><USER10> Your metaphor is clearly better; grandma performing HEAD requests on fish (a URI) is priceless.

However, if granny were in a hurry, she may ask the waiter "Will my order be up soon?" to which the waiter would, after checking with the kitchen and receiving a 304 Not Modified on the still raw fish resource, he could decide to then 307 to some free breadsticks resource.

Of course, after lunch, dear granny will eventually receive a 402. Let's hope she has money today, or she may end up 401'ed and have to start washing dishes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While a great attempt at an analogy, I don't think that it really helps things. I've never misunderstood THAT part of event-based asynchronicity (is that even a word?) The part that is confusing to me is HOW it works and eventually to the point of WHY and/or HOW it is supposedly better than traditional threading (other than cleaner-looking code). I've never seen a good explanation in non-OS programmer terms.

To me, it seems that no matter how you take the "messages" to do work, that work still has to be done. It surely doesn't magically use less resources because you told the OS that it could just call you back when it is done, as opposed to you having to hang around? Something has to be hanging around on one side or the other, and the "call back" takes resources as well, surely? It seems that you are just trading tit for tat. Maybe the reason is to not utilize some specific resource in the meantime?

</comment><comment><USER13> What a terrible analogy. I mean, there is a pizza-shop or other food service analogy in there, I've made it plenty of times. The problem is that when you make the phone call = request in the analogy, you make the phone connection analogous to the socket. At least have the operator put the caller on hold!

Of course then Grandma, not being an idiot, will say "why not just have driver bring the pizza and not have the phone all tied up to begin with?" and she is _absolutely correct_. It is better to just set up a scenario where you have waiters, and customers show up a the shop, and in blocking your waiter doubles as the cook, so you need one waiter per meal... and so on. This analogy passes a slightly closer examination.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hmm, perhaps a closer analogy:

Traditional Web Server:

The pizza shop receives a call for the initial order and starts the pie. Then the customer calls back periodically to check if the pie is done because the pizza shop cannot call back or deliver.

<comment><USER14> No I don't think so. He is talking about a single request here, you seem to be talking about a session.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh hey, I came up with the exact same analogy about 6 months ago in explaining Tornado and epoll on quora with a bit more technical detail, just replace pizza with pies:

[http://www.quora.com/Can-someone-explain-poll-epoll-in- Layma...](http://www.quora.com/Can-someone-explain-poll-epoll-in-Laymans- terms-How-is-Tornado-taking-advantage-of-this-technology/answer/Ben-Newhouse)

</comment><comment><USER16> What is being described here is blocking and non-blocking IO. The analogy is pretty good.

However, the pizza company can probably still only cook 256 pizzas at the same time (due to running out of pan-handles).

</comment><comment><USER17> event driven development should be avoided whenever possible. coroutines exist for a reason.

Writing event-driven applications is very prone to errors and invalid(impossible) states.

</comment><comment><USER18> I feel that this analogy seems to overlook the work that goes into having a 'customer' being available for, listening and receiving the call back.

</comment><comment><USER19> No! I refuse to explain event-driven web servers to my grandma. You can't make me! I am a free man!</comment>


Porting Linux to a new processor architecture, Part 2 - vezzy-fnord https://lwn.net/Articles/656286/ <comment> s-macke Call me crazy, but what I would really like to see is a port to the Javascript "architecture", that you can compile via emscripten. In principle this should already be possible by using the current User Mode Linux target. But I guess no one was insane enough so far to try it.

<comment><AUTHOR> A good approach might be to add a coprocessor to jor1k that validates and accepts page sized chunks of asm.js code for execution in a restricted manner. Validation would check that memory accesses go through a software MMU, all loops can escape on timeout or other events, etc. Emscripten would need modification to emit collections of restricted code blocks that make up an executable. The kernel and userspace would be incrementally ported until the regular emulator is wholly unnecessary.

<comment> s-macke Well, just look at these lines of code: [https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k/tree/master/js/worker/or1k/...](https://github.com/s-macke/jor1k/tree/master/js/worker/or1k/dynamic)

I tried something like this already. I mean to recompile parts of the code into Javascript. In my test cases the speed benefit was a factor of two or three. However in the real world, it was around a factor of two slower for different reasons.

1\. The heuristic to find code chunks, which are good to recompile takes a lot of time and memory.

2\. To stay on the safe side I can only recompile from jump to jump like QEMU does. Anything else would mean a much more complicated heuristic and recompilation which would beat the complexity of QEMU.

3\. asm.js code runs through an foreign function interface. That means, you have to stay very long in the asm.js styled code that it is worthwhile. I got a drop of a factor of 10 in speed when I try to compile ~20 lines of code into asm.js code instead of normal Javascript code.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, even if you increase the chunk size and omit dynamic recompilation, there still may be unavoidable slowdowns due to shoving all that Javascript through the browser.

I am currently designing a software-only CPU with sliding register window (128 entries) and dirt simple instruction set. The for/switch/loop emulator for it should be quite a bit faster than any emulated silicon CPU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER2> For those that didn't see the first part [https://lwn.net/Articles/654783/](https://lwn.net/Articles/654783/)</comment>


Tell HN: We launched Gaia GPS on Android today - <AUTHOR> http://www.gaiagps.com/news/article/Gaia%20GPS%20for%20Android%20on%20Sale

<comment><USER2> Just bought it and trying it out. Very nice app! It runs pretty well on my slowish MyTouch. Everything works as expected (better than expected actually). The map download is particularly nicely implemented (well, I somewhat take that back. A download progress bar would be nice :).

<comment><AUTHOR> If you click Saved Maps from the menu, then the table will show the progress of each map :)

Thanks for the compliments! One nice thing about the Android app is we have already been working on the iPhone app for many moons, so there were a lot of lessons learned. The biggest one I think is that we launched a very minimal feature set at first - on the iPhone we included tracking, waypoints, and all kinds of stuff right of the bat.

Because of this, our iPhone app started out buggy and we have had to do significant refactoring over time. Also, we later cut some features we originally viewed as important.

I always thought I understood the credo of launch a "mimimum viable product," but I really didn't until after launching something that WASN'T it.

<comment><USER2> Hmmm... I see it now. I guess I just found a bug as the first time I tried downloading the app. I clicked save and it just stalled for a long while until I clicked cancel.

But I still don't see any download indicator in the notification drop-down which is typical for Android apps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, would you mind emailing me at firstname.lastname@example.com?

I'd like to ask a couple questions, and then we'll fix it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I had no idea this product existed, thanks for the heads up. I'm skeptical of installing anything on my clunky G1 but will keep it in mind for my next backpacking trip. Storing cached map images locally is great. I used the heck out of Topo! back in the day, nice to see a mobile device equivalent.

</comment><comment><USER4> Gaia is a great product and the beta has been fun. The different maps you can use, offline maps, and just the all around ease of use is great. Hope others try it out.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also, we're still looking for more beta testers, so if you would like to get early releases and such, drop me a line at the email in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER5> it's $5 bucks for the anrdoid version (99c for iphone). QR Code to android market: <http://bit.ly/9PEzjs>

<comment><AUTHOR> FYI... the iPhone app will also be 4.99 as soon as Apple approves v3.2... hopefully today :)</comment></comment>


Proton Pump Inhibitors Linked to Gastroenteritis - <AUTHOR> https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/921883 <comment><USER2> I know it is a stub but it would be nice to see the control rates for the virus in at least the general population - let alone an otherwise comparable control group. One out of 153 compared to what?

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle...](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2755852)</comment></comment>


Why Are Newspaper Websites So Horrible? - <AUTHOR> https://www.citylab.com/life/2018/04/why-are-local-newspaper-websites-so-horrible/558152/ <comment><USER2> I actually did some freelance website development for a local newspaper website around 15 years ago. I can't speak for larger newspapers, this was my experience with a much smaller one. The biggest challenges I found were:

1\. Lack of a real technical / engineering department. Having said that, their core business is news and they really just need a functioning website, not a full (and expensive) engineering department.

2\. They wanted the website to "feel" more like a real newspaper, including things like incorporating custom layout, design and other elements on the website. Explaining the limitations of HTML, CSS and Javascript was a bit ... frustrating for both sides.

3\. Too many opinions on what the website should look like. Ditto for even small features such as what the photo gallery and subscription pages should look like.

4\. Too many feature requests, often contradicting each other. It wasn't clear who was in charge of making decisions on website changes.

<comment><USER3> > 1\. Lack of a real technical / engineering department. Having said that, > their core business is news and they really just need a functioning website, > not a full (and expensive) engineering department.

I agree with the rest of your points but this one doesn't really make sense. My guess is it would take _fewer_ engineers to make these websites better. The horrible parts of newspaper websites are the pop-ups and broken scrolling and ads that follow you and fixed-position "dickbars" at the top and bottom-- things that don't come with simple HTML and need to be deliberately added by developers.

Newspapers really do just need a functioning website. Instead they pay developers to add in all these horrible things.

<comment><USER4> It makes total sense to me. Having web developers is not the same thing as "a real technical / engineering department." Most of the cruft on newspapers sites is not carefully implemented custom code. It's a library, or vendor- supplied code, or CMS plugin that is just installed, configured, and forgotten about. Without strong engineering leadership, shit just gets piled on top of shit as the feature requests come in.

Which also relates to items 3 and 4... without strong technical leadership, a developer team can easily just settle into triage/service mode, where they just try to keep up with satisfying each request that comes in. The result is growing technical debt and an unfocused, confused product.

<comment><USER5> > Having web developers is not the same thing as "a real technical / > engineering department."

That's a dangerous opinion to have around these parts. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I worked for a media conglomerate for several years on several high volume media sites. The GMs and POs that I came across often had a great sense for what made user experiences great, but those would take a back seat every single time for revenue opportunities. A company wants to do an ad takeover for the sites and slather sidebars/banners/popups everywhere, Ad Ops wants to sell a new module in the right rail, Outbrain/Taboola/whatever wants to pay you to throw their script and "suggested" stories at the bottom of the page - of course you jump at the chance to do any of these because the revenue can easily be in the hundreds of thousands or even millions.

Every time an AMP thread comes up, there is a minority being positive and trying to find a way to make it work, and it's for the reasons mentioned above. Apple and Facebook want walled gardens where they control the content and give the providers whatever revenue they consider "fair", with the huge benefit that the stories would be fast to load and provide a friendly, uniform interface. AMP is the only reasonable alternative I've seen pitched since RSS has essentially died.

<comment><USER7> You don't need AMP, you just need PM's with the ability to grasp the tradeoff between more ads and less users as a result of that.

Obviously it's not an easy thing to decide, but they should be trying to measure that because I can't handle this crap either.

TV is dying because it's jammed full of annoying commercials. And it's getting worse as they are dying.

<comment><USER8> No, TV is dying not because of commercials, but because other formats of access to the content are easily accessible. There's simply no point in checking if there's anything interesting on TV now, when you can just pick a movie from a streaming service or read news on the website. After all, free online services also show a lot of ads, but this doesn't prevent us, say, from watching a music video on YouTube (one of those things that made MTV irrelevant).

<comment><USER9> There are many ways of watching TV; a lot of people I know want to have _something_ , not necessarily a particular thing, running "in the background", as they do their chores. TV would be absolutely fine for this use if not for the ads.

Also, free on-line services "show" a lot of ads, but everyone I know deals with it using ad blockers.

<comment><USER8> Indeed, that's why TV still exists as a niche product, one among others. I'll tell you more: some people are actually watching ads or not annoyed with them enough to do something. I haven't even seen people who would bother to find an ad blocker for YouTube - they just wait those 5 secs and click "Skip" (or actually watch the ad, if it's good enough).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why are _newspapers_ so horrible?

My family used to get a paper newspaper when I was growing up in the 70's and 80's. It had all the regular stuff - news, local news, editorial, sports, etc. But mostly it was ads. On Sunday it was a monstrosity, being nearly unmanageable due to the number of ad inserts. Most of it you threw away without looking at. Most of the stories had no value. One day later I couldn't remember what I'd read, and years later it didn't matter. I've never gained any lasting knowledge from the news.

Very little has changed. News has been, and is, nearly worthless.

<comment><USER11> I agree. The thing that most conversations on how to get people to pay for news miss out on the most important element: the news has to be worth paying for.

When I was in grad school a few years ago the college had a program to encourage newspaper readership that gave out "free" copies of the New York Times and USA Today (which we probably paid for in our tuition fees). I would pick them both up on most days and there was rarely anything in either of them worth reading past the headline. I can't imagine ever subscribing to a newspaper now.

There was so much in a newspaper that I have zero interest in or even if I did I would look somewhere else than dead trees (sports, stocks, fashion, travel, horoscopes, advice columns).

I grew up in a rural area and even in the local paper most of what was original, non-syndicated content was simply stating facts: the high school basketball team won/lost, there was a wreck, obituaries, births, weddings.

<comment><USER12> _that gave out "free" copies of the New York Times and USA Today (which we probably paid for in our tuition fees). I would pick them both up on most days and there was rarely anything in either of them worth reading past the headline._

No newspaper can really overcome a combination of idle cynicism and incuriosity. Perhaps you just don't like news.

<comment><USER9> Hard to call it "idle cynicism and incuriosity" if you know that most of what's in the news is _at best_ a surface-level coverage, most likely bullshit, and also completely inconsequential for anything.

News is great as a social object - you and me both read some reporting about an event at the same time, so when we meet at a bar, we have something to talk about. It's really bad if you're trying to learn accurate information about the world.

<comment><USER13> As a general statement this seems plainly false. Just go to the Pulitzer site, to the last year's winners, skip to the "investigative journalism" category, and click around the finalists and back year over year.

Nerds discussing journalism on HN are obsessed with something called the Gell- Mann Amnesia Effect (it's really the Michael Crichton effect but whatever). It suggests that if you have an area of expertise --- computer science in our case, resurrecting dinosaurs in his --- you can fact-check the news media, and, upon spotting errors pertaining to your expertise, draw conclusions about the quality of the whole publication.

But of course, that's a silly thing to argue. However good journalists might or might not be at reporting on tech startups (and John Carreyrou seems to have done a pretty amazing job with that for WSJ), they're also the ones staffing bureau's overseas, cultivating sources in state and local governments, breaking the Harvey Weinstein story, and reporting on toxic fire retardants in crib mattresses.

<comment><USER14> _they 're also the ones staffing bureau's overseas_

As someone with repeated direct experience with the elite corps that staffs their bureaus in Japan, I cannot provide evidence in favor of your hypothesis that they keep a special breed of Pulitzerschreck around for that purpose. They _still_ call me for Japanese domestic political analysis on the basis of a) in Japan b) speaks English c) was in the NYT in 2011.

<comment><USER13> I believe that you got contacted by a dumb reporter about a Japanese political story by an NYT reporter, but I also know that there are people like Tom Wright getting paid by major news outlets to cover Asia; the evidence I have suggests that those outlets do a great deal of important investigative journalism.

<comment><USER15> I agree there's good journalism being done but Chricton's observation is not completely off either. The nature of _most_ reporting requires that journalists talk about stuff without being adequately informed. They have to produce stuff on demand and there's little penalty to getting stuff wrong.

In any field there's going to be variability in quality and it's not fair or wise to tar the whole field with the same brush but I think journalism sometimes attracts people who have a different relationship with facts and ideas than I do.

I read a piece by a moderately famous journalist a while ago (and I've been trying to figure out who even since with no luck) who when talking about his practice said that sometimes there _are_ no experts in a particular subject and the journalist has to do a 'deep dive' and become the expert. Now he didn't say exactly what constitutes a 'deep dive' but it struck me as profoundly arrogant and symptomatic of this problem.

<comment><USER13> Sometimes they're talking about becoming experts at linear algebra† and we roll our eyes and fair enough, but sometimes they're talking about becoming "the" expert about disability compensation for West Virginia coal miners, and they aren't fucking around, that is for real.

But popping a couple frames back off the stack: the argument that most of what's in the NYT is superficial or "bullshit" is silly. Though maybe stay away from the opinion section.

What's annoying is how hard these dumb barbs are to rebut, even when they're plainly fatuous. Like, I had to go navigate through the Pulitzer categories and relay back to the thread how to do it, and all the original commenter had to do was write "the NYT and USA Today are the same thing and both are just superficial made-up trash".

† _though I 'm sort of waiting to spring a little quiz on the next person who takes a shot at Gladwell for "Igon Values"._

<comment><USER12> I have to admit, since I'm tut-tutting at other people, that I like spoken- Gladwell much better than written-Gladwell. And it's the same style and the same stuff. It's disturbingly subjective (although it would have kept him out of Igon trouble).

<comment><USER13> He's really quite excellent at what he does, which is "writing and speaking". I don't know why it was ever supposed to be a sick burn that he didn't know what a characteristic polynomial was.

I agree with you, I think. His writing is fantastic (just, like, as a deployment of the English language) but his podcast is better than most of his New Yorker stuff and definitely than his books. I've re-listened to the university funding stuff a couple times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I work in adtech and know all the top publishers. There are 2 reasons:

1) Business. Nobody pays for news so they need to generate income from ads.

2) Bad tech (talent, infrastructure, resources, etc) on both publisher and ad vendors which creates horrible bloated pages.

That's it. Anything else is so secondary as to be insignificant. Take a look at private subscriber only sites and you'll notice how fast and pleasant they are to use, because they don't have the poorly implemented heavy cruft added to the page.

<comment><USER17> That is the conclusion of the article as well:

</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>=

These aren't so much questions of the online business of news so much as they are matters that speak to online news design—the look and feel of a newspaper's website to the reader, or what a designer calls user interface and user experience. But the business and design of news are inextricably linked. As print ad revenue cratered, the need to squeeze revenue from digital sources grew. And that pushed news websites to their breaking point.

"Ads are just brutal for what they do to your browser and the sort of utter lack of regard they have for user experience," says Ian Adelman, founding design director of Slate and current chief creative officer at New York Magazine.

</comment><comment><USER18> Hamilton Holt's 1909 book, _Commercialism and Journalism,_ tells the story of the incredible growth of the publishing industry, fueled by six factors, but to which Holt (a publisher himself) credited advertising for virtually all of it. And to which he had extreme and justified concerns. He quotes another journalist (anonymously, though from elsewhere, this is John Swinton):

 _There is no such thing in America as an independent press. I am paid for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, before twenty- four hours my occupation, like Othello 's, would be gone. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the foot of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. We are the tools or vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes._

[https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft](https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft)

This from a lecture series at the University of California, Berkeley, on the Morals of Trade.

Selling news has been a tricky busines from the start.

Circulation has been falling consistently for a while now:

[https://cdn.opendemocracy.net/files/Figure2.png](https://cdn.opendemocracy.net/files/Figure2.png)

</comment><comment><USER19> The business model is driving these poor choices.

This article addresses the business model which I believe would make room for better site experiences.

[https://stratechery.com/2017/the-local-news-business- model/](https://stratechery.com/2017/the-local-news-business-model/)

</comment><comment><USER20> One large component is the inability of these companies to calculate the cost of the adtech on their pages.

They simply don't have anyone who can measure the negative impact of slowing page speed, obscuring articles, increasing comics rate, scrolling jankiness, etc.

The adtech providers optimize around ease of install (one line of JavaScript!) over any costs that will entail for customers.

<comment><USER9> It's most likely on purpose. Adtech is as much about making you money as it is about making you think that it's making you money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> It's funny how they scream "free media", "support us", "internet is dying", while the core content of an article is perhaps 2-4kb of text. That's how they react when being cut off from income from tracking and advertising providers. They monetize the 2kb of text till the last drop of blood at the cost of privacy of their visitors.

</comment><comment><USER22> I work at a educational publishing company developing interactive digital books. Everyone involved in the publishing/editorial dept. is quite frankly completely clueless about technology. Not only they don't know it works, but most importantly they couldn't care less about it.

It would not surprise me the people at the helm in large newspapers don't really care about "the experience" and still think in terms of content + ads. Heck, even Wired's website is horribly bloated and slow.

<comment><USER23> Gotta be a startup opportunity somewhere here

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> For quality news I typically pay a service like Blendle ([https://blendle.com/](https://blendle.com/)) which curates content and gives me an ad free viewer to read the curated content.

It selects the best long form essays across publications like The Guardian, The Economist, WSJ, NYT, etc and presents to you in a nice clutter free format

Otherwise I also Desktop AMP Chrome extension which shows a AMP version of a news page where possible

([https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amp-accelerated- mo...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/amp-accelerated-mobile- pa/abbbnefchbpffkbnadnopdahjcmbheho?hl=en))

</comment><comment><USER25> I used to work for a company as a dev that owned a few papers in various areas.

Our dev team was like any other company. You had a few senior guys that were good, some decent mid level, and one or two that did notbelong.

A few people mentioned what I saw in my short time at the company, the ad ops and sales folks came up with all these ad placements and IT had to work it in, with no regards to affects on UI.

The other thing I noticed was that the people in charge had a hard time during redesigns in removing elements that people had fought to add in the first place.

</comment><comment><USER26> Advance Local Media owns a lot of newspaper companies online presence. Their software is terrible, there are so many ads the content doesn't load half the time.... plus with all the cutbacks over the last few years the actual articles are garbage. No details, bad writing, spelling errors, street names that are wrong, nobody proofread a these days.

</comment><comment><USER27> Building a newspaper business for the digital age is a hard problem that has yet to be solved.

<comment><USER28> Check what we are up to at NewsBlocks: [http://newsblocks.io](http://newsblocks.io)

<comment><USER29> > The decentralised platform for trusted news applications

> The NewsBlocks token sale is planned for Q4 2018. The token sale will fund > the creation of the NewsBlocks blockchain, seed the content, and fund > application development.

Spam your scam elsewhere.

<comment><USER30> Attacking fellow users like this will get you banned on HN, even if you find their website annoying. Please don't post like this. The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER31> As an innocent bystander, and at the risk of getting banned, I have to say I think the post you're replying to was thoughtful and had a substantive point which is that posts that use the comment section to promote their business ventures, especially those that are most likely pyramid schemes, are unwelcome. You'd rather ban the whistleblower? I guess you don't like the word "scam" because it assumes a value judgement? The fact is, scams do exist, and they are promoted online, as we all well know. In fact, this very article is about how newspaper websites have turned into advertising spam sites instead of journalism destinations. The fact that you seem to be advocating advertising in your comment section is worrying to me. I was attracted to HN because it doesn't feature advertising that I'm aware of (at least not with javascript turned off and an ad-blocking proxy). If you're trying to let comment-advertisers know you're a safe space for them, I probably won't want to continue visiting. Next you'll be telling us you make $7,000 a month working from home and here's how!

<comment><USER30> I'm glad you've noticed that HN is relatively spam-free. If you continue to read HN, you'll also notice that we don't ban people for replying to us. We ban them for breaking the site guidelines, and even then we're pretty lenient.

It's not spam when a longtime user is linking to their work in a relevant context and hasn't been making a habit of it. The two cases are trivial to tell apart if you're willing to take a minute, and it has always been ok to for users to tell others about their work this way on HN—as long as they don't overdo it. Whether you like the project or not is a separate question. As for thoughtfulness, "spam your scam elsewhere" is basically leading with a punch in the nose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> The better question is - why are newspapers so horrible?

I think that in today's age, we need to focus on a new way of presenting the data instead of converting them into narratives/prose. The problem is there's a limit to how much information you can cram into prose, or read back from it. It's hard to quickly get an overview of any particular bit of data relative to all the others that are nearby. You have to trust the news author actually understands the whole story and didn't discount anything. Plus stories aren't static, there's constant updates that are coming out, why not see all the information and the timeline all at once, continually updating? Especially in a distraction free format.

<comment><USER33> This is all tangential, but fascinating. Newspapers are the way they are because they're still printed, and the digital version ends up straddling the line between the preexisting print format and a web site. What you're describing only makes sense in the context of purely digital newspapers, or newspapers that are digital first, and print a distant second. A site like Axios may be a step in that direction, but it's only scratching the surface of what could be done in that space. I would love to see something like what you described someday.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Slightly off-topic bc the NYT is clearly not the target here, but I'll say it anyway: the webdev crew at NYT is first-rate. They've even open-sourced some cool stuff. It's a shame other papers generally can't hold a candle to the standard they set.

<comment> fsck--off The NYT website has gotten worse and worse over the years. Decreased contrast, JS bloat, hamburger menu, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is exactly what pushed me to get a Guardian subscription over a more local (U.S. based) paper (although I wish I could get the actual paper here too on more than just weekends).

Their website doesn't auto play video, I've never seen a modal, it looks okay everywhere and doesn't use too much unnecessary JavaScript that will only lead to broken menus or whatever on phones, when you have a subscription all ads go away, when you're not logged in there's no annoying paywall, and when they do ask for money it's a small banner at the bottom of articles that doesn't get in the way, doesn't cover content, etc. and to top it all off the frontend is on their GitHub account.

I wish other papers would follow this model.

</comment><comment><USER36> Web-sites are better if you use an ad blocking service. Sure, some sites like the Wall Street Journal won't let you read content with an ad-blocker enabled unless you're a paying subscriber, but I can almost always get similar content elsewhere.

But yes, that's one of the problems with taking one form of medium (a physical newspaper) and abstracting it into a new format.

When the original Windows came out, they had to figure out which low-res icons would most accurately represent their real-world counterparts. But that was decades ago.

Now, things (icons, UI, design) are more symbolic of what we want to do, not the way they were.

I feel like newspapers, sometimes, try to keep their newspaper look and feel, all the while, adding a crap-ton of useless content. I'm there for an article, not for all the rest of it.

I have a few friends who work in the news(paper) industry, and I know that the job of photographer, in some newsrooms, has also taken on the role of web- developer, and even reporter. I mean, you're on the scene taking pictures, why not ask questions too? A difficult job made more difficult by lowering circulation levels, and lower budgets.

So I guess the best way to encourage good on-line news is to subscribe to the digital formats, and let them know when they aren't doing their job?

</comment><comment><USER37> Funny you should ask, modal-window toting Citylab.

</comment><comment><USER11> I used to like the local newspaper's terrible site. On the rare times I went to it looking for news, they would put up a div to blur out the article if you weren't a subscriber. It was easy to just open the inspector and delete the div to read the article. Now they update their site to actually not load the article unless you subscribe. Progress...

<comment><USER16> That actually is real progress... I'm not sure why its a problem if the content is meant for subscribers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Quick and simplistic answer to the titular question: Because they're not newspapers but petri dishes for online advertising.

</comment><comment><USER39> Oh the irony of reading this article on a website full of ads

</comment><comment><USER40> I guess there are two problems:

1/ Usually through an evolutionary process the whole CMS structure for a paper becomes rather cumbersome with many patches and suboptimal services that nobody really knows about in details. Especially if the tech team rotates. And this leads to the next point.

2/ Bad administrative control of who put what on a page--sales, marketing, editors etc., and this results in a crappy experience with 50-100 different tracking garbage on every page.

As a result, almost every paper becomes a pretty ugly monster that nobody wants to touch not to ruin everything. Any potential change could lead to the whole system collapse.

</comment><comment><USER41> Modern webdesign, along with most of modern "computing", threw common sense out the window along with most of history in a quest to create the most bland, shapeless, flat websites and apps full of white space as far as the mouse can scroll. I can see flattening out things. but for the love of god use the damn pixels for drawing things like text and graphics instead of white nothingness.

</comment><comment><USER42> So, besides the many negative things I could say about how bad newspaper sites yes in fact are, I have a question: is there anywhere out there a newspaper site (even local) that IS just static HTML, with unobtrusive or nonexistent ads? Like, we only need one maybe, and we could support it. Does it exist?

<comment><USER43> [https://eu.usatoday.com](https://eu.usatoday.com) Seems pretty nice after they were "forced" to remove all the nasty scripts.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Citylab.com is just as horrible...

</comment><comment><USER45> Newspapers slit their own throats back in 1994-5 or so when they decided to put their content up for free because they could sell ad space. It was a bad idea then, and I don't think anyone's tried to fix it in the past 25 years.

<comment><USER46> > Newspapers slit their own throats back in 1994-5 or so when they decided to > put their content up for free because they could sell ad space.

Newspapers had little choice, because they compete with lots of other free information and because payment mechanisms are too costly (in reader time and frustration).

> It was a bad idea then, and I don't think anyone's tried to fix it in the > past 25 years.

In fact, in journalism in the last 25 years - maybe the last 50 or 100 years - I doubt anything has gotten more attention than than a solution to this problem.

<comment><USER45> 1993 -- 25 years ago -- was an experimental time for the Internet.

The only competition they had was other pioneers slitting their own throats because that's how you got recognized on this new-fangled World Wide Web.

      A lot of newspapers thought they could sell ad space against their Internet properties for at least as much as they were selling their newspaper-based classified ads.  That was obviously not the case.

I appreciate that you think the WWW has always had the power it does now, but back in '93 it was a niche in the multiple ways a content provider had to distribute their wares.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> [https://twitter.com/pakastin/status/1039020252791795712](https://twitter.com/pakastin/status/1039020252791795712)

</comment><comment><USER48> Turn JavaScript off and most of them are fine.

</comment><comment><USER49> My local newspaper site works just fine with javascript disabled and with 20 or so tracking urls blocked in my hosts file.

</comment><comment><USER50> I find it ironic the site has a big cookie modal you need to accept before reading anything.

<comment><USER51> I don't see it. Is for EU users only?

<comment><USER52> Yup, it's a GDPR-driven options configuration thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> s/Newspaper//g

</comment><comment><USER54> I subscribe to a few online publications. I know paywalls can be easy to cheat, but I prefer not to. I would love it if news sites would add pay per article, where I could buy 50 articles upfront and use them up over a few months.

<comment><USER55> That's a similar model to Blendle IIRC. It's been some time since I used Blendle but I remember it being a cool idea, just the app was a little half baked back then. Not sure what sort of state it would be in now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I think historians will look back on this era and point society's decline towards two companies, they both start with "Go".

<comment><USER57> ... which co. Is the not Google one?

<comment><USER58> Goldman Sachs?

<comment><USER57> We can blame them for much but not this. I don't even blame Google for this. The newspaper initially giving away their content for free is the "problem". Now it's to late to change people's habits.

What they should have done is only making the web site accessible for subscribers or people with a day-pass from buying a paper. The transition from paper to digital would then be more or less seamless for the consumer as they would have both for a while.

Making people realize they don't need the news papers was their mistake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I think people want it. I do not think most news sites will reach the same number of visitors after passing a good interface. maybe people like horrible interfaces. yes i am joking. maybe i don't not.

<comment><USER59> why do you give this comment a negative score? Are you a newspaper site employee? :)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Weekend project - just relaunched the Open Exchange Rates website - <AUTHOR> http://openexchangerates.org

<comment><USER2> This is going to be handy for our coming SaaS product. Thanks a ton really! (and slick site design, too).

</comment><comment><USER3> Just discovered this. Thanks. Will be adding to my project this week. I'll probably wrap some ruby around it, so if useful, I'll handover the code. Great job.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome Joss! Thanks for your hard work.</comment>


Google on why Orkut should not export email contacts (10/26/09) - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/26/orkut-slows-hemorraging-to-facebook-by-making-friend-export-tool-nearly-useless/

<comment><USER2> Relevant quote from Google:

"Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks - when a user friends someone they don't then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click"

Lets recap:

1\. Users use data exporter en masse to abandon Orkut.

2\. Google breaks the exporter. Supposedly a bug, coincidentally when people are actually now using it.

3\. Google changes the exporter so emails are no longer included.

4\. Google says social networks shouldn't be expected to allow mass email exportation.

5\. 12 months pass

6\. Google breaks the gmail exporter to Facebook. Social networks apparently are now expected export all e-mails. Press eats it up.

Look, I'm not arguing that email exporting should or shouldn't be allowed. I don't really want my friends giving my email to Farmville so they get a golden banana, but it's not the end of the world. What I don't get though, is people talking about this like Google is some godly force of good, championing the rights of users against the evil Facebook.

Please. Google is getting scared, and made a calculated business decision to try and slow down Facebook's growth. The rest of this is BS PR spin and Techcrunch sensationalism to fan the drama fires.</comment>


Bricklayers Think They're Safe from Robots - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/07/upshot/bricklayers-think-theyre-safe-from-automation-robots.html <comment><USER2> Bricklayers are already a dying breed... workers compensation makes it way too difficult to build many structures out of brick. Most "brick" or "stone" you see in new construction is some prefab panel glued to something.

IMO you'd employ more bricklayers doing trim work and operating the robot than you do now. And we should move away from shitty manufactured wood, glue and toxic treatments.

<comment><USER3> >Most "brick" or "stone" you see in new construction is some prefab panel glued to something

Prefix that with "In the States".

<comment><USER4> What countries is brick still popular for primary construction? Japan is wood, China and much of Asia is majorly concrete. Europe?

<comment><USER5> Yep. My house, and all neighbors around live in brick houses. In my country people have this strange notion from Hollywood movies that if house isn't made from bricks, you can punch though the walls with a fist :) And we also know kid stories about tree piggies.

<comment><USER6> Even now folks in India (my home country) are always amused when they see an American house being built. They say "it looks like it was built from toothpicks" – and my answer is always "have you actually held a 2x4? Hardly a toothpick."

I'm not sure about the structural pros and cons of wood vs brick, but from what I've seen here in the mid-atlantic, brick is nowadays used more as a decorative outside layer, rather than a superior structure (for homes at least).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Bricks are expensive these days, and laying them is an artisan art and skill.

Where I live in California houses are currently erected in days out of cheap wood and cladding. As soon as it is feasible this process will be automated and ways found to construct them more quickly using the cheapest materials.

We recently had some terrible fires where entire subdivisions burnt. Dozens of houses burnt simultaneously yet the trees and cars didn't catch fire. This was due to embers landing on roofs and getting into attics - the houses went up like paper bags.

Making sure the next generation of cheap building materials are fire retardant and robust is a worry given the rush for maximum profit for minimum investment and wealth sharing automation brings.

<comment><USER8> Does any one know why are bricks expensive ? It is just dirt. right ?

<comment><USER9> It's clay, and wood is much more abundant in the US. However, in other places such as the UK, wood isn't abundant, so most houses are made of brick.

<comment><USER10> The UK has a particular problem with a fungus that attacks lumber, _serpula lacrymans_ aka 'dry rot'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Reminds me of the folklore of John Henry.

He beat the steam engine in a steel driving competition and was treated as a hero, but died from over exertion. The steam engine continued to work the next day.

</comment><comment><USER12> Whats the setup time for a robot that lays bricks? If you've ever seen a team of skilled masons/bricklayers build a wall, they're pretty freaking fast at it. I imagine the time to transport/setup/calibrate/etc a robot would eat up whatever performance gains it would have over humans - unless perhaps its a really big job, but how many of those are being built these days?

<comment><USER13> Fairly significant, apparently - you have to put up a scaffold alongside the wall for SAM to work. (And presumably, you need firm, open ground to put the thing on.) And they can't do corners or complex features, so when you hit those you need to either stop the machine or move it to a different part of the project. Headlines say they're 6x faster than normal masons, but that's during a given span of operation; over the course of a day, with overhead, it's apparently more like 3x.

That said, the machines are in field use, since masons are scarce and expensive. You're right about the big jobs, too; they're apparently pretty much limited to sites like universities and hospitals which have lots of big, featureless walls. The Tech Review article about it is much more informative than the NYT one here. [1]

I think this sort of automation worry seriously over-generalizes from factory robots. Robots are spectacular at doing repetitive tasks with nicely-arranged inputs and fixed workspaces. Hence, Amazon warehouses and Ford factory floors. But (as the SAM people admit) outdoor, new-worksite tasks are going to involve way more mixed human/robot tasks.

[1] [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay- three-t...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-times- as-many-bricks-as-construction-workers/)

<comment><USER14> Ideally you want a small robot that climbs the wall it builds with a crane follower being fed by brick fetching robots on the ground. If it was done properly you could fit it all on a flatbed and have it cheap enough to be bought by standard building crews.

<comment><USER13> It did cross my mind that the one guaranteed "work surface" present when building a wall is the wall itself. I'm curious how the weight situation would work out, though.

On one hand, fresh mortar can clearly support several new layers of brick as a wall is laid. On the other, common estimates suggest a 24 hour wait to reach 60% of final strength. How light would an on-wall robot have to be to work at a steady pace without disrupting the still-drying brick?

The other question, I suppose, is whether the brick-supplying robot makes that redundant. It's either going to need a scaffolding or a cart/flatbed that moves frequently to keep feeding target that moves back and forth, and if you need a ground-supported robot arm right near the wall it might just be easier to do everything that way?

<comment><USER14> I was thinking that the crane robot would run along the wall behind the laying robot and fetch bricks from robot hovercraft that move pallets of bricks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The replacement will not be laying bricks but new technologies.

Computers didn't replace human "calculators" by using abacus.

<comment><USER16> 3D "printing" walls and entire buildings onsite from epoxy, resins or other raw materials seems the most plausible.

<comment><USER17> I'm not an environmentalist, but even I would prefer we don't graduate to epoxy or resin for home construction. These things are all petroleum based and I have to imagine they outgas for a long period of time after construction. If they do burn, they will also doubtless emit lots of toxic gasses.

I would prefer 3d printing type automation, but applied to compacted dirt or clay. I love adobe and wish it was more popular. Big thick walls that keep out the heat and the cold seem like a no-brainer, if you can reinforce them to not crush you during earthquakes.

<comment><USER16> Agreed, although we already have a significant amount of petroleum based products in modern (US, anyway) homes: insulation (more and more styrofoam), sealing wraps, glues over fasteners, flooring, and plumbing. Your basic plywood by weight is a large part resins already, although no idea the makeup.

Maybe automation will make more "organic" building materials more affordable or feasible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Just makes me think there's a market for a better brickie robot. The one they show is lethargic and built like a train. Even two robotic arms, working like a human does would be tons more efficient.

(I'd also like to complain about the stupid title, but it's what NYT picked)

<comment><USER19> Why emulate a human at all? I think that's the main issue. There has to be a better way to lay brick once you get robots involved.

<comment><USER20> It's probably anticipating corners and arches, but for the majority of bricks this seems quite inefficient. Bricks could be rolling off a conveyor belt in to place.

<comment><USER21> Conveyor belt doesn't help, as you would still need an arm to take bricks from the pallet and place them on conveyor.

<comment><USER20> True. You could also have an unskilled laborer grab two bricks at once and place it on the machine at a rate of 1 brick every 2 seconds or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Clearly, SAM is a shitty robot. It looks as if it were designed by someone who had no intention of using it to lay bricks.

<comment><USER13> They're already in field use, and are apparently fine at it. They just do big, straight wall stretches for things like hospitals. The "would lose to master masons who have to put up corners in a speed contest" metric is a bit silly - on non-corner work they're operating 3x as fast as the masons they're alongside. No real risk they're replacing humans, but they do work.

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay- three-t...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/540916/robots-lay-three-times- as-many-bricks-as-construction-workers/)

<comment><USER23> Since they replaced journeyman masons there will be no new master masons and once all the master masons are dead they'll have to do that corner work too.

<comment><USER13> Fortunately, they don't seem to have replaced journeyman masons either. Journeymen still do corners and other complex features, they just do it with oversight. Rather, there's a shortage of masons at all skill levels, and so far SAM is only cost-effective as a way to help fill that gap on very large projects.

I'm sure that will change with time regardless, but I don't think it'll be because SAM drove out human expertise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> When you see at brick buildings built 100 years ago, it's works of art. It's apparent that amount of attention to detail is just not within range of most brick layers today. Especially when you consider price point.

I'm talking stuff like this: [http://www.etovidel.net/appended_files/big/4ea52a818bc08.jpg](http://www.etovidel.net/appended_files/big/4ea52a818bc08.jpg)

BUT, robots can change all that. You can render a wall on PC, with all mosaics and tiles and all kind of super precise stuff, it will produce a complete program for a brick-laying robot, which will then be executed up to a millimetre. And it will also account for ventilation shafts, drainage, internal structures within the wall to decrease weight, increase toughness, heat- and soundproof.

<comment><USER25> I'd blame Bauhaus (the movement, not the band) for the lack of fancy features on modern-era buildings before I'd blame the bricklayers -- they just do what they're paid to do and modern architecture doesn't call for that level of detail in the brickwork.

<comment><USER26> And it's such a shame that the radicalism of Gropius got all the attention and imitation when he was surrounded by equally modernist architects who pushed the subtle decorative qualities of brick to new heights. Even Gropius himself is best when he puts brick into the mix.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> An article with some more (past and present) "state of the art":

[https://www.theb1m.com/video/a-short-history-of- bricklaying-...](https://www.theb1m.com/video/a-short-history-of-bricklaying- robots)

using adhesive (for thermal blocks) removes a lot of the variables, to have thermal efficient structure the smallest (thinner) the junction layer is, the better, and as a matter of fact various kind of adhesives are already replacing mortar in construction sites, with precision ultimately depending only on dimensions of the bricks used.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think they are right, at least for a long time.

I'm not a luddite, but every time I hear people talk about how everything from laying bricks to flipping burgers to landscaping will quickly become automated I have the following thought:

Humans are amazingly versatile, and amazingly cheap.

If I'm making, say, peanut butter, automation makes sense. I'll put up millions of dollars to leverage large-scale automation technologies (mixers, conveyors, etc) because of volume and consistency.

The smaller the scale, the better advantage humans have, and will for a long time.

Even if a burger-flipping robot existed today, it wouldn't have a great ROI compared to the ongoing cost of labor. A restaurant just doesn't make enough burgers for automation to be cost-effective yet. That is why most automation has occurred at centralized points of supply chains, and why a patty that enters a McDonalds is already the product of automation.

Someday, small scale automation technologies will have reached a low enough price point, and an effective versatility that we won't need humans to lay bricks or flip burgers. My bet is that occurs when the components (including software) of such a robot become commoditized and modularized far beyond what they are today.

<comment><USER29> _Even if a burger-flipping robot existed today . . ._

Sorry, I had to point it out; the burger flipping robot does exist (though, I don't think this really takes anything away from your point):

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43343956](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-43343956)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> It is a new tool, not any sort of replacement. There is much more to brickwork than laying bricks. Show me a robot that can crawl under a house to fix a cracked brick, or one than can shovel a trench without breaking something.

</comment><comment><USER31> Why aren't they using shims and jigs? If you want to line it up right, make sure you have the right amount of mortar in the right place, etc, put a jig around it with some shims. It's the easiest way to build anything precisely that has to be done over and over again.

<comment><USER32> That might be the easiest way for a novice to do it, but would it be the fastest for someone who has experience?

<comment><USER31> Oh sure, someone who's an expert may do it faster without a jig. But we don't need more expert bricklayers to lay 9 bricks a minute, we just need more bricklayers. By using jigs you simplify the process and make it easier to perform by less experienced people, and make the process more reliable, which reduces waste, which increases efficiency, which brings down cost, and improves quality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Bricklayers are probably safe from a robot that can perfectly replicate human bricklaying skill. What they're not safe from is whatever machine-built module that can be easily assembled by unskilled labor on site replaces brick walls.

</comment><comment><USER34> So what are we going to do with the people who get displaced by robots? They still need money to buy food and house their families.

</comment><comment><USER35> Those brick layers (the human ones) look happy and healthy.

<comment><USER36> You are correct. We should commission a study on brick layers.

Maybe the secret to long term health and happiness lies in mortar work.

<comment><USER37> Next up: voluntary labour camps where unhappy desk workers can go lay bricks to gain better life satisfaction. Learn the same techniques used by real blue- collar workers! $20,000 per team for a weekend retreat. For an extra $2,000 an ornery foreman will come out of his trailer every two hours and yell at you to get off your ass.

<comment><USER38> Considering there are already places where one can learn hands-on the operation of large heavy equipment - your idea doesn't sound all that far- fetched, and might actually be profitable.

<comment><USER36> I did this in Las Vegas. [https://digthisvegas.com](https://digthisvegas.com)

I think $500 is too much if you have to pay for it personally, and I also feel gross about paying to do other people's "job", but goddamn it was fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Robots and humans alike are due for unemployment with our move towards pre-fab and additive manufacturing.

<comment><USER40> So the prefab parts are just going to put themselves together in the factories? Then walk themselves to the job site? And erect and inspect themselves?

<comment><USER19> Maybe stuff more like this[1]?

1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUdnrtnjT5Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUdnrtnjT5Q)

<comment><USER41> But a 'robot' built that house... Didn't you say prefab would put robots out of business?

<comment><USER42> Prefab robots with delivery infrastructure put local robots out of business.

<comment><USER43> "Off-shore robots are stealing our jerbs; maintain me, puny human. EOL" /robot

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> What a bizarre turn of phrase that bricklayers are "safe" only if they continue to engage in their profession, which comes with a substantial risk of injury.

Of course bricklayers will be _safer_ when robots are able to build houses. Then bricklayers will be able to stay home and do as they please.

How have we come to think of the challenge of automating the matter of the universe as within our reach, but the challenge of seeing each other as viable individuals defined by something other than a "job" as unattainable?

<comment><USER45> Oh come on, commuting comes with a substantial risk of injury. People doing work aren't victims, they are moral agents making informed decisions to pursue larger goals.

<comment><USER44> Of course - I love work. But I also don't think that it makes sense, in a world of automation, to continue to define people by their work. There is no risk of being "unsafe" just because our species has figured out a way to train robots to do what was once your job. That's really ill thinking; the future is much brighter than that.

<comment><USER34> "There is no risk of being "unsafe""

I would say the risk of being homeless because a robot means I can no longer afford my home means there's a risk of being "unsafe".

<comment><USER44> I'm not sure how to make my point more clearly - that's exactly the part to which I'm objecting.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>