Google Maps is filled with false business addresses pretending to be nearby - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/google-maps-littered-with-fake-business-listings-harming-consumers-and-competitors-11561042283?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> Odd that this doesn't mention the long-running locksmith scam wherein a Google search invariably indicates that there are dozens of locksmiths within a few miles of the searcher's location, most or all of which go to call centers for scammy locksmith services.

Honestly, the problem the article describes is the exact same scam, just extended to other business types.

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

<comment><USER3> I was burned by this before (in SF Bay area). The call center dispatched a guy that took over an hour to finally arrive in his broken-down family van. He came out of his car with a power drill in his hand and asked me where the lock was. The entire time he was smoking. Apparently, he wanted to drill through the lock and replace the whole thing instead of picking the lock like a true locksmith. Luckily there were enough red flags in the whole process to where I promptly told him to get off my property. They still charged me $20 and I ended up paying because I didn't want them to come back and do something to my house. The guy ended up sending my credit card details to "HQ" through a text message.

<comment><USER4> This is why that Reply All podcast about this topic (posted by someone else in this thread) is titled "Very Quickly to the Drill."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Xoogler here... my favorite Maps spam story is how there was a cron job that ran every (I think) 6 hours to analyze and clean up suspected scam listings [1]. The scammers figured out when the cron job runs, and set up their own cron job putting up their listings again in the minutes after Google's finished.

It's a well-known problem on Maps and has been known for years. It boils down to: scammers are smart and resourceful and very good at making their scam listings look like real listings.

[1] if you're wondering why they didn't do the filtering at submission time, there was a good technical reason for this at the time that I don't remember anymore

<comment><USER6> This is not a technology problem, its a process problem. Vast majority of submitters could be cheaply verified and for small number of potential spammers, there are several options:

1\. Require submitter to be legally traceable and identifiable. Establish fines/fees for misuse of your property and charge their bank accounts for cleaning fees. Blacklist them for life.

2\. Once a submitter is identifiable and legally traceable, charge exponentially higher fees for number of submissions unless they want to show up as chain business in which case charge reasonable fee for validation and background checks.

3\. Detect and avoid autonomous mass submissions except for highly trusted entities such as big chains.

<comment><USER5> Google Maps is not optimizing for "percent of listings that were completely accurate at time of submission". That's how paper maps (and to a lesser degree, the Yellow Pages) mostly worked. There's a reason we stopped using them.

What Google's doing is harder and more nuanced -- they want to accurately capture the world as it exists around you right now. That means understanding what parts of the world around you you care about and understanding what level of accuracy (as opposed to promptness of updates) they should optimize for. Given Maps' extraordinary success as a product, they've done this quite well. But, yes, it has failure modes that users should be aware of and that Google tries to combat without compromising the main goal.

<comment><USER7> Google is trying to build maps without human verification, because humans are expensive, and to some degree because humans can be tricked too.

Accepting content without verification certainly has a side effect of getting businesses on board the instant they open, too, but that's just a happy accident.

<comment><USER5> Google is fine with _expensive_ (they sunk many billions into Maps over 10+ years and only just started monetizing it). But humans don't scale. If you want to have ten thousand data points about every business on Earth, you can't get there by relying on humans. You need to automate everything from top ot bottom.

<comment><USER7> Humans can scale, it's just that Google chooses not to use them. Anything that requires a human in the loop is something they won't do.

Customer service, not going to happen. Having Youtube Kids actually have appropriate content for kids, unlikely. Being a trustworthy source for businesses on maps, no way.

<comment><USER8> Google products have up to 2 _billion_ users. It's nearly impossible to scale any human support to this size.

Because it's actually billion _s_ of users. It's a billion of users for Google Maps. It's two billion of users for Youtube. It's nearly a billion for GMail. And the requests for those different products have to go to different support personnel.

In areas where there's significantly less users they do provide human support, for example in GCP.

<comment><USER7> I work for a product with big numbers too. We have humans reading the support queue (with a _lot_ of engineering to prefilter and group for bulk replies and what not). People may or may not like our support, or may complain it's not as good as it used to be, but it's there.

Frankly, we couldn't have as many users as we do without a human connection in support. Users tell us what we're doing wrong, and what we need to do that we're not doing, and where we need to improve --- but only if you listen to them.

<comment><USER8> > Frankly, we couldn't have as many users as we do without a human connection > in support.

Different companies and different products are different. It looks like many Google products are good enough to attract many users without support.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Mr. Abuhazim tried reaching Google to explain his dilemma, but he was > repeatedly routed to an offshore call center. Operators, he said, "treated > me like I'm stupid." With his businesses pushed off the first page of Google > Maps results, incoming calls halved. He said he was on the verge of closing.

Google Ads customer support has been like this for many people ever since it was outsourced offshore. It is basically useless at this point.

On a different note, I do find it amazing that this business owner thought it would be a good idea to do the following:

"Last year, he was approached by a marketing firm that offered to lift his business listings on Google Maps for a fee in the tens of thousands of dollars. Mr. Abuhazim agreed to the deal."

If you wonder where that money went, see the screenshot in the article where he clearly shows an average CPC of almost $9.

<comment><USER10> Its easy to explain — actual business people don't understand how to work the inscrutable nature of Google. So they look for advice.

I think it's bizarre that stuff like this is trivial for scammers but impossible for legit businesses.

My son's catholic school has been around since 1950. A few students goofing off wrote some negative reviews, and somehow they are in a limbo where nobody can post reviews or modify the listing. I'm on the board and help with advertising... The funny thing is that it costs Google money — we can't associate AdWords with the Maps listing. Just a few thousand bucks a year, but still money.

<comment><USER11> Why should a Catholic School be advertising on Google?

<comment><USER12> So they can attract students whose parents are searching for a school.

<comment><USER11> Seems like a crummy way to reach potential students, wouldn't you want to tap the local church's congregations? That is how the Catholic schools run in Seattle, though they don't have the same 20% non-Catholic full ride scholarship that they do in Portland (which made for a much better educational experience IMO).

The Summer Lunch Program (which has a much broader target audience/geographic area) in Seattle has experimented with online advertising, but had poor results. The keys to the kingdom really are reaching kids (and their parents) where they are, in schools, after school programs, and perhaps some online platforms (though the targeting is generally ineffective on Facebook/Google for this type of advertising).

<comment><USER13> > wouldn't you want to tap the local church's congregations?

I'm assuming they do both. I don't know about the US, but around here Catholic schools accept non-Catholics as well, and those may not be connected to the church.

<comment><USER14> Yes, Catholic schools in the US are frequently the only advanced educations for grade schoolers in nonmetropolitan areas. My folks were Methodist, and I attended a couple Catholic schools.

<comment><USER15> What is an "advanced education for grade schoolers"?

<comment><USER16> It is a less offensive way to say "alternative to systematically underfunded and failing public schools".

<comment><USER17> Yup.

I went to a Catholic high school, despite my family being basically non- practicing Presbyterians. And in an area with a ton of private schools.

At the time public schools were a road to nowhere, and private schools were easily $20,000 in today's dollars, maybe $30,000 depending on the school. Catholic high school cost $8000 in today's dollars, and the only "downside" was a couple of mandatory masses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> User-fed databases like this are all full of absolute garbage data, and have been gamed.

I think we're going to see the pendulum swing back in favor of yellow pages like curation. And higher paid listings.

I already don't trust sites like Yelp and Angie's List, and instead go to places like Consumers' Checkbook to look for local vendors.

There's something to be said for the quality of data curation and not user- generated data.

<comment><USER19> > User-fed databases like this are all full of absolute garbage data, and have > been gamed.

Is OSM equally bad? There's many ways to run a "user-fed" project.

<comment><USER20> OSM isn't, but I suspect it's mostly because it's not high profile enough (the old "nobody bothers writing viruses for Linux" problem). If it were, I'm sure we'd see junk data. OSM's data is version controlled in some way, so I'd assume it could be rolled back, but that sounds labor-intensive.

I use OSMand instead of Google Maps, and love it, except for the absolutely atrocious address parsing when searching. There's also a general lack of street numbers in my area (Pacific NW USA), which can make things difficult.

Amusingly, it also suffers from the "won't show you street name labels" problem that other posters are accusing Google Maps of.

<comment><USER21> Using the app Streetcomplete, it's really easy to correct OSM data like street numbers and opening times around you as you walk.

<comment><USER22> I have been working on adding all street numbers for a small town of 40,000 people. Two years into this project, I am still little more than halfway done. Adding a handful of street numbers with StreetComplete might be "easy", but it is incredibly labor-intensive to add street numbers in an amount that makes OSM actually useful for navigation purposes. Google only managed to get their house numbers by forcing the world to do the work through ReCAPTCHA or by buying the rights to various preexisting databases.

<comment><USER20> I wonder if OSMand could take advantage of having a _few_ street numbers. Right now, in the "address search" mode, if the number you're looking for doesn't exist, you're out of luck. But theoretically it could accept any street number, and if a street even has a few numbers in place (I often find random street numbers probably entered by residents or shopowners) it could at least tell you "it's somewhere between here and there". Even that would be vastly more useful.

Then mapped crusaders like yourself could first focus on adding numbers in the middle of streets, and then gradually, in binary search fashion, continuing to halve unnumbered street sections.

<comment><USER22> One of the biggest challenges with mapping house numbers is simply getting to that street to begin with. It takes a volunteer making an effort to go to various parts of town that he/she doedn't normally go to, since most neighbourhoods don't have their own local mappers interested in adding house numbers.

Once someone has made that effort, then it isn't too much extra effort to do all the house numbers. So, no need to restrict oneself to the middle of the range.

OSMAnd's address search feature already allows you to choose from among the house numbers that do exist for a street, even if the whole street isn't mapped, so it is often easy to navigate to the general ballpark of your destination.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Is it just me or has the usefulness of Google Maps declined substantially over the past year or so? A miscellaneous listing of complaints:

* It supports double-tap to zoom, but the first tap always causes it to lose context and open whatever I happened to tap on. This is extremely annoying when searching for restaurants in an area with one hand because that first tap will always cause me to lose my search context.

* Places I _know_ are there don't show up, even when I zoom in to the point where the only thing in the viewport is the block where the store is located.

* Street names are still impossible to discover. In NYC, whenever I find a place that's on an avenue I have to scroll blocks left and right just to find out what street the place is on because street labels aren't automatically placed in the viewport.

* I routinely make a journey to places that turn out to be closed. I'm not talking about little mom and pop shops, although plenty of those are reported as open right now despite being permanently closed. I'm talking about major, newsworthy bankruptcies. I used to see Toy 'R Us on my map for _months_ after the stores themselves shut down. It's gotten to the point where I call ahead whenever I want to go to a store I've never been to.

* Automatically generated markers obscuring mass transit markers. I recently spent ten minutes trying desperately to find a subway station that I knew was close to me because its marker was hidden underneath a Dunkin' Donuts. I've literally never set foot in a Dunkin' Donuts, something which Google literally knows for a fact, and yet it decided that notifying me of that store's location was more important than the entrance to the mass transit system I use every single day.

* While we're at it, let's talk about the little store markers. Google is running an ad auction on each impression, and that the reason you see useless stores that have nothing to offer you is because they decided to pay their way into your map. It's hard to believe Google is "organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible" when they shove Dunkin' Donuts in my face.

If I seem mad, I'm not. I'm disappointed. So disappointed that I did the unthinkable and installed Apple Maps, and I have to say, I'm very glad I did.

<comment><USER24> It's not just you. Google Maps seems to be stuck in this sad state of being almost, but not quite, good at being a map. Street names in particular seem like a low-hanging fruit that would vastly improve the UX, but for some reason, they don't do anything about it.

<comment><USER2> I don't know for sure, but I think that's a problem that they had previously solved - I remember being impressed years ago by the fact that the street names always moved on zoom or scroll so they were always in view.

It seems like they've regressed for some reason.

<comment><USER2> Update: I did some testing and this still works for me - every time I zoom or scroll, the street labels move to remain in frame. Tried on Chrome desktop, iOS native app, and iOS Safari, same behavior in all three.

<comment><USER25> I've never understood these street name complaints on Hacker News either. It's always kept the street names in the frame for me. If I zoom in a lot, it even starts repeating the street name over and over[1], getting denser and denser as I zoom in more.

[1] Example screenshot in Firefox today: [https://i.imgur.com/BDa4Dr2.png](https://i.imgur.com/BDa4Dr2.png)

<comment><USER26> Same area, Google Maps on modern Android: [https://ibb.co/18wVw9k](https://ibb.co/18wVw9k) [https://ibb.co/84tsSYS](https://ibb.co/84tsSYS)

It kinda works, but it's not that hard or uncommon to get to a zoom/pan level where it breaks.

<comment><USER25> OK, so it's probably a browser vs. phone difference. Thanks for the comparison.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'll use Yelp/Apple Maps/Google for places to eat. That's about it. For everything else, I will drive around town and look for a van or a truck with a business/service that I need. Billboards. Even local newspapers. Word of mouth, too.

The last A/C, plumbing, and appliance repair folks I've used have all been people who drove by or were recommended to me by a neighbor. They'll also be the people I end up recommending, too.

This is part of the reason I like Nextdoor so much. Since these are people who (at least, ostensibly) are within my community, I know that they are at least somewhat honest in their recommendations. They have nothing to gain but also nothing to lose. But those companies that people do talk about are ones that give great service or are a pleasure to work with.

Let's face it: we're seeing the pendulum swing back the other direction: it used to be nobody would find you unless you are online, but now it seems that physical advertising seems to be the litmus test of "are you real?"

</comment><comment><USER28> Pornhub told me that there was a mature divorced woman waiting to have sex with me, just three miles away. Which puts her in undeveloped forest wilderness in any direction. I'm a little worried about her out there but don't want to get involved. Should I call search and rescue?

</comment><comment><USER29> My neighbors (college students) advertise their home as a comedy club on Google Maps with shows on Saturday nights. It has a lot of good reviews from all their friends (5 stars). Once in a while they get a call from people visiting town asking for tickets. And if anyone shows up, they'll put on a show. But mostly it's a huge gag and... it's actually kind of funny.

<comment><USER30> So they essentially pulled what that shed did: [https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed- the...](https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/434gqw/i-made-my-shed-the-top- rated-restaurant-on-tripadvisor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Back when growing up, my schoolteachers pushed like crazy the idea that Wikipedia was inherently untrustworthy because anyone could edit it. At the same time, we were all going crazy over Google Earth, which was the exact same system, except a for-profit company owned it.

Having corrected mistakes before on Google Maps, it seems like there's essentially no moderation at all for most listings. At least with sites like Wikipedia, people will occasionally look at the edits I make.

It's strange to me to see community run projects get laughed at sometimes in the mainstream, given that a nontrivial portion of the most successful commercial products out there are essentially crowdsourced community efforts except with worse moderation and higher stake by advertisers.

It feels sometimes like the standard is, "trusting random people to contribute data is naive... unless a company then gets to own all of the data. Then it's innovative."

</comment><comment><USER32> I've definitely seen the phone number on my dad's business listing get changed before. I'm not even sure how they did it, because we had control of the business listing, but I am not sure if Google still lets ordinary users suggest changes.

<comment><USER33> Ordinary users can suggest changes, but I believe that if you have a Google My Business account that's active in the last 6 months, you get notified and can approve / reject changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Whelp, that's what you get when anyone can claim a business and or edit maps without verification.

Since it's a conflict of interest, likely Google will do little about it.

<comment><USER33> Google has a large organization dedicated to map data quality. It's a hard problem to solve - there's money from 3rd parties to be made from spamming the maps. It's in Google's best interest to try and protect the end user from fakes.

Local Guides is one of the many ways you can help police this in your area. Verification is hard. To verify you need evidence and a way to prove it is correct. Proof is hard.

Street View is one of the best evidence sources, but it's not allowed in all countries, expensive, and not updated as frequently as the world changes, and even user-provided street view images can be subject to forgery.

Unfortunately, the best course of action is vigilance. Report errors when you see them.

<comment><USER35> I tried to report things a few times but was stuck at some kind of UI so I gave up.

As for evidence, if someone (or several people) uses the maps app to travel to a location, reports that it is closed for good, and travels to a competitor, also using the maps app, that could indicate the report is valid. If other people however navigate to this place and _stay_ before they head back home, that could mean the place is actually not out of business.

Google is also good at spam detection, they know everyone who does anything and could flag other actions by a fraudulent user etc.

We know that if Google wants to, they _can_ be this smart. But often aren't these days. I think they just don't have both super capable people AND a functional management in ALL of the many fields that they are in. That would probably be impossible.

<comment><USER36> Most of the spam discussed are specifically for businesses that come to you. Repair services, locksmiths, etc. Or do delivery (florists, e.g.).

I think you're underestimating how hard this is and/or how motivated and smart the scammers are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm looking for a dog and I find this to be a big problem with Petfinder as well. One in every three dogs, roughly, is listed as near me but the fine print says it's currently being fostered hundreds of miles away (often in Arkansas for some reason).

</comment><comment><USER38> Wouldn't they be able to solve this by requiring each registered business to install a beacon at their store? Each beacon has a unique ID that is tied to the business and the only data it sends back to the server are the ID and the coordinates. It's 2019, why do we have to send people down to manually watch or surveillance a business? That sounds more like a murder case investigation and a bit excessive.

</comment><comment><USER39> I have an (odd) simple solution: If google offered to pay $X for each good bit of business address data, anyone submitting bad data would be committing fraud. Google could send their whole profile to law enforcement. Would probably get much higher quality data as well.

<comment><USER40> And "law enforcement" would be deluged with so many reports, with so little actionable data, that they would simply ignore all of it. It's not even clear to me exactly who Google would report this to. Is it the jurisdiction of Google's headquarters? The jurisdiction of the fake business address? The (possibly unknown) jurisdiction of the perpetrator?

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Read an article recently about someone in Europe who successfully sued Facebook to have their business removed from the social network. Apparently Facebook were adding pages for businesses by themselves, including pictures and everything and were even showing ads for them.

Said person was upset that they did this behind their back and asked them to take it offline, whereas FB suggested instead that he creates an account and takes over the page. He sued and won, then Facebook of course appealed and lost several times, needing to pay in the end 70.000 EUR as punishment. Now anyone (in the EU probably) can refer to this case and ask their business to be removed without having to create accounts.

Maybe someone should sue Google and create a precedent.

<comment><USER32> The problem is that Google is so universally relied upon by consumers to find businesses, that delisting yourself from Google is shooting yourself in the foot.

<comment><USER42> Shouldn't this fact ring all kinds of alarm bells at appropriate agencies, e.g. FTC?

<comment><USER32> Apparently the DOJ is taking the reigns, actually, and is letting the FTC other tech companies in exchange: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-01/google- an...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-01/google-antitrust- scrutiny-to-fall-to-doj-under-deal-with-ftc)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> There's a phantom Burger King on an on-ramp here, which doordash sends people to. I've also ended up trying to go to a fake Wendy's. Lots of other weird things if you look. Still though, Google Maps is great and gets the job done well in 99% of cases.

</comment><comment><USER44> This seems like one of those problems that can be solved realtively easily with crowd-sourcing. A kind of "verified purchase' but in real life. Open your Google Maps app while standing in the law firm's offices - and click 'yes I can see them' Maybe a photo.

Tie it perhaps to a UUID sent to the business owner (similar to adding a UUID to your DNS TXT record)

And even the reverse is possible, I could vouch that there is no law firm at this location - if I owned the building I probably would want to ensure that it only had registered businesses there.

<comment><USER5> The Maps mobile app has had this for at least 3 years -- they ask you questions about places you know. You can also suggest edits on Google Maps which are sent to others for review But not _that_ many people use either feature.

<comment><USER45> Even further back than 3 years. They previously used to even allow you to edit the underlying map, business and _road data_ in a nifty UI kind of what OSM does now. That was a good 5 years ago I think. But they deprecated it and I guess replaced it with local-guides which is much more restricted and "gamified".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Google maps is definitely filled with spam businesses. I am in digital marketing for side projects, and there is a whole underground industry right now that is teaching people how to game Google Maps to appear as real businesses. It's stupid easy to get "verified" on google maps as a real local business, even though you could be several state or continents away. I've often wondered when google is going to crack down on this kind of thing, but for now, it's still wide open.

</comment><comment><USER47> Nothing about this problem is new or unique to Google Maps. This was a problem in old phone books too (literally thousands of fake locksmiths, etc). And the yellow pages profited there too. Just because it's fashionable to hate on "big tech" these days, it doesn't mean that they've created problems like this. These are the same old problems, evolved to modern medium. What's the alternative? That we don't have services like this?

</comment><comment><USER48> I think Yelp do a pretty good job of avoiding this, simply for the fact that they don't have a cushion of associated traffic: people use Gmaps for this because they use Gsearch or navigation, and if Gmaps isn't great at filtering out spammy listings, well it's plenty good at other things. But if Yelp get a reputation for poor business data quality, users wont want to use it for that and there's not a lot else to get them to visit & keep monthly active user counts up & give sales impressive stats to quote to businesses when they call.

Also without quality business listings how would sales know the number to call to pitch ad campaigns??

It's a pity this approach doesn't scale as wildly as search, Yelp shut down all the non-North American sales stuff in 2016 presumably because it wasn't profitable.

</comment><comment><USER49> I see this very occasionally on Apple Maps, too. I use the automated reporting feature and in a day or two I get a notice that the problem has been fixed.

I'm not sure what the solution is, though. As soon as you ge the general public involved, data becomes messy and unreliable.

<comment><USER50> I think Apple has some sort of trust system for user submitted corrections, don't they? It seems reasonable to assume that they do. if someone is submitting bogus corrections, they're less likely to have them published. I use the "report an issue" feature sometimes and like you, i get a message a couple days later. I've even gotten an email asking for some other details.

the "add a photo" option they have is quite handy too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Back in the day when I was working in the places team in Nokia Maps, now Here, we had some funny issues with data suppliers for things like hotels. The hotel coordinates would invariably be in some favorable location (e.g. near the beach) when in reality the location could be kilometers away from that. We also had tens of thousands of user generated places named "My Home" or variations of that in different languages. User provided content is not necessarily very good. I always liked the Foursquare approach of asking their users. They seem to be good at keeping their data up to date though their coverage outside the hipster areas tends to be not great.

<comment><USER52> >I always liked the Foursquare approach of asking their users.

I have never used Foursquare, can you say a bit more on how they do it.

<comment><USER51> They basically ask users to verify information about the places they are checking into. This is how they learn about new places and meta data such as categories, price ranges, etc. Google does a similar thing where they ask their users to confirm information about places they've been to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It's really hard to get towing outside of town with this kind of stuff going on with all searches (not just google).

I finally solved it because I realized I have roadside assistance with my car insurance, and I just call my car insurance company.

</comment><comment><USER54> My friend is trying to remove 3 fake Google My Business ads that are not controlled by himself. He has no way or recourse to do so. Google does not care. He spends $1500/mo on AdWords. For shame.

</comment><comment><USER55> I happened on a YouTube video of a TedX talk where a guy is really into this Google Maps scam. He got to the point where he was able to impersonate the US Secret Service and recorded a bunch of phone calls. The Secret Service told google to fix their maps issue, but he said they just disabled some features and reactived them without change a few weeks later.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c6AADI7Pb4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5c6AADI7Pb4)

</comment><comment><USER56> Not quite the same, but I lived in a house whose previous resident had run a photography business out of it. It was still listed as the business address on Google Maps, so I got a ton of junk mail (and some real mail, like bills!) for the business. I reported the business as closed or moved a bunch of times, but I never heard anything from Google and nothing ever changed. I just checked, and it's still listed at the same address.

<comment><USER57> This happens for LLCs that have never been properly closed (its a pain to actually close an LLC in Georgia). So when they initially seeded maps, that LLC data would pull up all around you or in your house even though the owner of the LLC had moved when you bought the house. :) yeah it happened to us. My only way to get rid of it was to get my "Local Guide" points high enough so that I could say that the business was closed...don't ask me what the threshold was...I just kept increasing my points until it finally removed it. On another note, apparently if you get enough Google Local Guide points eventually they send you some free socks. Seriously...not kidding.

<comment><USER56> Interesting! I don't live in the house anymore and I just bought some socks. Otherwise, I'd have to give that a try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Tangentially related: I'm currently staying in a cheap hotel that's literally called "<ChainName> Near <SomeHospital>".

The funny thing is that the hotel is more than 2km away from the hospital. YET there's _another_ hotel from the _same_ chain that's literally next to the hospital and it's called "<ChainName> @ <StreetName>".

Imagine calling Uber to pick you up from the 1st hotel.

</comment><comment><USER59> This is related to combating fake news.

What systems are the best for ensuring that it's very costly to submit false information? How can we improve on top-down corporations? Wikipedia seems to do a good job being a honeypot for hacking the source of truth.

How does BGP do it? Does OpenStreetMap vet its info somehow? Does SETI@home or Protein Folding@home check the results? Or is it just trusting everyone to not mess with it?

<comment><USER60> > Does OpenStreetMap vet its info somehow?

Not in a strict sense of approving before it goes into the DB. But on the other hand it's easier to monitor what's going on if you have access to data and can monitor edits (e.g. with whodidit, achavi, overpass etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> My favorite Maps BS spam is when you look at the Q&A section for any famous monuments, like the Tower of Pisa: It's non-stop children(?) asking the most banal questions ("When was the tower built?"), and other questions that sound suspiciously like homework that could be found in 5 seconds using a Different Google Product.

</comment><comment><USER62> And apple maps is full of not having the addresses or even knowing many places exist. Iphone user that has attempted to use maps many times, especially for privacy concerns but I'm tired of typing places into maps that I know exist and it has no clue.

<comment><USER36> I've submitted a few of those to apple (from within the maps app) and they've been added within 24 hours. That may vary depending on the geographical region.

But, yes, it's frustrating. I use Apple maps for the clean interface and option to get a sane and pleasant route overview. ("Hey Siri show overview" also works.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> It's amazing how many multibillion dollar companies have arisen by, fundamentally, creating a worse version of the phone book that's nonetheless more popular because it's on the web

</comment><comment><USER64> The Google Maps team is losing core focus. Google Trips was recently killed and they are trying to "integrate" pieces of it into maps. Not impressed by this downward trend.

</comment><comment><USER65> Ran into this when I had a car towed somewhere for repairs and the shop didn't exist anymore.

Instead it was a guy using the name and working out of a van.

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm misremembering the details, but I believe there's a laundry service in Abu Dhabi named "Laundry Near Me".

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm using Maps pretty intensely and haven't seen a single fake business yet. Worst I've seen is single-person shops marking their home address as business location, I just report those as "private" through the Android app and move on. I'm sure the problem is there but it seem to only affect niche businesses and use cases.

For locks in particular, just leave a backup key with your neighbor. It saved us multiple times over the years.

</comment><comment><USER67> This isn't news to anyone who has used Google maps. Sure this was happening a decade ago.

</comment><comment><USER68> amazes me the myriad ways google is gamed (and how long it takes google to do something about it)

</comment><comment><USER69> Don't be evil, just rent to it.

</comment><comment><USER70> Google Maps, aka Wiki Maps... you can add whatever you want on there.

</comment><comment><USER71> While the WSJ does mostly excellent reporting on Google, I can't help but feel that their seemingly obsessive focus on Google over other stories is part of Rupert Murdoch's years-long vendetta against Google.

<comment><USER72> NYTimes have been on a similar kick, and you can find a general techlash across most media these days.

<comment><USER49> Techlash isn't something invented by the media. The media merely reflects the change in public opinion.

In the SV bubble, people still think the world loves, envies, and adores them. For the most part, it does not. That tide turned long ago.

<comment><USER57> Some would say that outside SV it really never came back after 2000.

<comment><USER72> I'd argue otherwise.

Tech was derided largely as a scam following the dot-com bust. But then it seemed to be a general positive at least through about 2013.

I'd pin the public shift to Snowden, 2013.

This is all very subjective and squishy, of course.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Long-dead reptile gave live birth - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-02-long-dead-reptile-gave-birth.html <comment><USER2> Original non-clickbait title: "Fossil discovery rewrites understanding of reproductive evolution".</comment>


Ask HN: How do you pitch your B2B product, when no one knows you? - <AUTHOR>

It would be awesome, if you share actual stories.<p>Cheers! <comment><USER2> "When no one knows you"

I run a small B2B product. The biggest lesson I have learned that most clients do not care who you are as long as you can show them a good product that meets _their_ requirement. Yes, there are a few who care about who _you_ are but those have never turned out to be good clients in my specific experience.

So don't focus on the "who you are" part that much. You are who you are. You cannot suddenly become Steve Jobs. Think about it this way. You know Steve Jobs or Wozniak or zukerberg not because of who they are personally but because of the great products they built and shipped.

Focus on making a great product. Focus on talking to those B2B users and convicing them that the product they need is what you are selling. Also, focus on doing this at a very personalized level. Get on the phone, go see them in person. Yes this sounds not very scalable but this is what you need to do in the beginning.

<comment><USER3> I totally agree. I run a Saas from my home office and have some large customers (as in multinational corporations). They completely focused on features and service. There were questions about myself and my company but in the end it was the product that impressed[1] them.

[1] Their words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am 25 years old and the youngest in my team at www.ideatory.co which is a completely sales driven company selling a B2B SaaS product. I am also the CEO and head of sales and our clients include some of the largest banks and tech consulting companies in the world.

Sale to a large Asian bank: Met an influential person at the bank who thought I am smart and sincere. He pitched to 5 departments at the bank on my behalf that got me meetings. I reinforced mine and my team's credibility at the meetings and committed to delivering. (revenue over $200k from this client)

Sale to a large US Bank (we're based in Singapore): Contacted via cold email stating our exact value and past client work. Ended up being the right guy who sold us to 5 departments internally. One worked out immediately. Took 6 months to complete legal procedures but the sale happened without ever meeting face to face. We said the right things which showed we understood their problems exactly, had solutions and credibility.

Conclusion: You need to present yourself in the most credible way possible, show that you and your team are resourceful and are committed to delivering no matter what. Then most importantly, you need to find a "hero" within the organization who sells you internally. Stick with this hero.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much for responding. And thanks for sharing these awesome cases.

If you are willing to share - how did you get your first 3 B2B customers?

<comment><USER4> The first one was the Asian bank I wrote about. I made an influential friend and that helped.

After doing some good work with them, I was able to ask for referrals to some other people. I showed them the case study of the work we did and that worked. Referrals are key in the beginning :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Awesome! Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am in the B2B space. We have mostly large/F500 customers and all my suggestions below come directly from my experience from the field.

The B2B sales journey ain't for the faint of heart (6-9 month sales cycles are all too common) but it is a journey that has recognizable steps and milestones. You may not see the steps now, but they are distinct and you will learn to read them. Be patient and persist.

#1. No one may know you today, but you surely know someone who knows someone. In other words, hit your LinkedIn. Pitch to anyone who will listen and listen to objections, questions, comments and feedback. You have to cast the widest net at first.

#2. Talk to system integrators and IT consultants. They are easier to approach than, say, a CIO at a F500 company. Not only do consultants know the problems intimately, they can also recommend your product to a Director of IT.

#3. Attend industry trade shows, if you can afford it. It's a great way to meet customers and pitch your ideas over drinks or lunch.

#4. Ask former colleagues, friends (or even family) for referrals to corporate managers. When I started out, we pitched at every level (manager, director, even analyst - sometimes, you will be surprised at how much influence a humble analyst wields at a large company.)

#5. Obviously, a website, a LinkedIn and a Twitter account are standard tools of business.

#6. Learn to speak the language of TCO and ROI. If you are unfamiliar with those acronyms, you have some exciting reading for tonight!

#7. Who are your competitors' reference customers? Read up on them and their case studies. Now build a target list of your prospects. E.g.: Walmart bought a software from a competition. Therefore, you should have Target on your prospect list.

I could go on and on. But let me know if you need any specific advice. I'm happy to help.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much. For all of this!

You said 6-9 months is a standard time-frame for a corporate sale at F500 level. Shouldn't a new business therefore start with companies that are still smaller and faster at approving expenses?

I am mostly interested in learning how to do #2. I found this which seems to be much on that topic: [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141015215831-48424446-the-b...](https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20141015215831-48424446-the- best-startup-cold-email-i-ve-ever-received-and-how-it-could-be-even-better) Whatever else you can think of adding on this, it would be very beneficial to the topic (and me personally). How do I get a conversation going? Do you start by giving a general idea about your service? Or maybe you study very thoroughly the company and make an educated guess on the amount of money you will save/make them?

Maybe #7 is a common knowledge to many people, but I find it absolutely brilliant.

Thanks again!

<comment><USER5> > Shouldn't a new business therefore start with companies that are still > smaller and faster at approving expenses?

Yes, that's a valid approach. But only you know what the right market for your product is, however (aka "Product-Market Fit".) Not everything can be sold to every company. Plus you will also realize that your product changes depending on the size of the company.

> How do I get a conversation going? Do you start by giving a general idea > about your service?

That's a very broad topic. You may want to start following B2B sales and B2B Marketing blogs to get some best practices for these things. There is absolutely an art and science to these things and it can be learned.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

<comment><USER5> Welcome, and good luck!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Referal is the key to my B2B success, I have closed a top 5 insurance company, a top 3 grocery wholesale company and a 5k+ engineering company all by referals from friends and people I am doing business with.

I learned everything about referal from Steli Efti here [http://blog.close.io/how-to-do-referral-sales](http://blog.close.io/how-to- do-referral-sales)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm going to focus on the "no one knows you" bit since I don't know anything about the industry/vertical you're in.

Step 1 -- The first thing to do is to build some social proof. I hope you already have a few customers. Request them to be references for your product and feature them and their feedback on your front page

Step 2 -- Ask your customers about who else in their network they think could benefit from such a product and reach out to them.

Step 3 -- As you sign on more customers, repeat Step 1 + 2

Step 4 -- Figure out if there is a pattern in your customers and try to truly understand the market they exist in.

Step 5 -- Once you understand the market, try to figure out which channels through which you can best reach that market (e.g. google ads, billboards, tv ads, partners, etc.). Of course, word of mouth is the best bet, but there are often other really lucrative channels too.

Iterate. This is just the beginning!</comment>


Neural Architecture Search with Reinforcement Learning - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.01578 <comment><USER3> The primary author is a Google Brain Resident ([https://research.google.com/teams/brain/residency/](https://research.google.com/teams/brain/residency/)). The Brain Residency is a really great program for starting a career in Deep Learning and ML research, and I'm really impressed by how quickly these new researchers churn out great work like this.

disclosure: I work at Google Brain

<comment><USER4> I really would like to, someday, do the residency, but at the same time, I don't know if I can.

Right now, I'm doing the Udacity Self-Driving Car Engineer Nanodegree. I won't rehash that or my other knowledge here...

My issue, though, is my age, coupled with the fact that I don't have a real degree (I've got this old associates degree from a tech trade school that is almost worthless). After I finish the Udacity thing, I have this idea of pursuing an online BA, then an MA - likely in CompSci. But, we are likely looking at anywhere from 4 years or more (likely more) to do both things - <USER2> not a small amount of money. After that point, I'll be close to 50 years old.

There's a very good and likely chance that the residency won't be around at that point; or even the possibility that technology around ML may have radically changed the world to the point where it would be difficult (or even meaningless) to try to "catch up"...

Still - I'm not going to let that possibility stop or restrain me; that said, is it viable for me to even think about this kind of thing - doing such a residency? Would I even have a chance of being considered, vs someone younger? Furthermore - how does one do a residency of this nature, while still paying bills (I live in Phoenix, AZ - I own a house, plus have other bills)?

These are just questions I have - not really concerns, as I am no where near the point I need to be to do the residency - and there isn't any guarantee that I will be. I'll just continue to enjoy to journey, rather than worrying about a specific end-goal.

<comment><USER3> > is it viable for me to even think about this kind of thing - doing such a > residency? Would I even have a chance of being considered, vs someone > younger? Furthermore - how does one do a residency of this nature, while > still paying bills (I live in Phoenix, AZ - I own a house, plus have other > bills)?

Good on you for pursuing continued education.

Yes it's viable - never lose hope in yourself for _anything_. The Brain Residency has no age requirement; in fact, the program looks for diverse academic/career experiences. You'd be surprised how close you are to your dream job if you are passionate, hardworking, and lucky.

I too, was intimidated by the math & magic of ML when I first took Andrew Ng's Intro to Machine Learning Course 4 years ago (my first exposure). I took regular CS courses in college and started focusing on ML 1.5 years ago. Beyond taking courses, I highly recommend building your own projects - it exercises your independent research ability and creativity.

The Brain residency pays a good wage for the SF Bay Area (comparable to new grad salary at average tech firms), so you should be able to pay your bills. I've heard rumors that many other companies highly invested in ML are following in Google Brain's example and starting similar residency programs. Your ML career path need not be at Google, though we're a pretty solid choice ;)

<comment><USER4> > I too, was intimidated by the math & magic of ML when I first took Andrew > Ng's Intro to Machine Learning Course 4 years ago (my first exposure).

Thank you for your kind words and encouragement. I will take them to heart.

I got my first taste of modern machine learning when I took Andrew Ng's ML Class (sponsored by Stanford), in the fall/winter of 2011; I completed and passed it. At the same time, I was also taking Thrun and Norvig's AI Class; I had to drop out due to personal reasons.

In 2012, after Thrun founded Udacity, they released the CS373 "Build Your Own Self-Driving Vehicle" course (I probably have that title wrong for the time; they changed the name of the course later) - it was meant as a stand-in for the original AI Class (I think there were licensing issues or something that prevented them from presenting it - they later incorporated it as a part of their offerings). I jumped at the chance, and completed that course as well.

When they announced this Nanodegree course, I knew I had to apply. So far, things are going well with the course. I'm in the November (2016) cohort, and currently working on the behavioral cloning project.

I do have in mind several personal projects to pursue, once I can come up for air from this course (most of my free time has been consumed by it). I do need more education, though, which is why I want to pursue the BA and MA. Two of my weak areas are calculus and stats/probabilities - which ML is heavily reliant on (plus, I really want to understand what is going on "under the covers" as well).

Onward and upward!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is the way that Neural Networks achieve some modicum of generality - chaining them together.

Let's say you have a robot that you want to grab a can of beer off the counter. You say "grab that beer" and point to it. The first neural network interprets the speech and visual input. A second neural network chooses the proper neural nets to continue the task based on the information interpreted from the first net - it picks one for walking and one for grabbing.

<comment><USER6> Of course compound task federation like this is not exactly new. Blackboard systems did the very same thing using expert systems back in the 1970s-80s.

The problems then remain today: complex and compound tasks don't decompose neatly into well-defined constituent subtasks. Sub-task recombination rapidly devolves into a rat's nest of selecting from competing subtask components that don't have clearly distinct semantics, that are not free of contextual dependencies, nor do they plug-in-and-play independently.

<comment><USER7> Do you have any interesting material on this? Where's a good in-depth analysis of blackboard systems' pros and cons?

<comment><USER6> I'd start here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_system)

I'm not up-to-date, but I haven't heard of new work on blackboards or federated rule-based systems for maybe 20 years now, after expert systems grew increasingly probabilistic (and procrustean), and BBSes based on binary rules showed little sign of escaping the classic brittleness of RBSes.

The wiki article mentions 'Bayesian Blackboard' systems. Maybe they had greater success?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Extreme paper tldr - Humans usually construct neural network components and the graph of how they fit together by hand. This work sets up a "controller" neural network that constructs two core components in many neural networks, an RNN and a CNN, through reinforcement learning. This is an intensive and slow process, requiring 400 CPUs and 800 GPUs for the RNN and CNN respectively, but achieves better than or near state of the art results for language modeling and vision classification respectively.

This paper is currently under review for ICLR 2017 and is one of the papers I was most excited about. I previously wrote an article, "In deep learning, architecture engineering is the new feature engineering"[1], which discusses the (often ignored) fact that much of the work in modern deep learning papers is just assembling components in different combinations. This is one of the first works that I feel provides a viable answer to my complaint/concern.

The paper itself tackles two problems - first, that optimizing architecture is usually black magic directed poorly by humans, and second, humans rarely spend their time tailoring towards a specific task, instead seeking generality. Zoph and Le do this by having one neural network generate the architecture for a later one through a large series of experiments. They perform experiments in both vision (classification) and text (language modeling), replacing the convolutional neural network component and the recurrent neural network component respectively.

First is that many of the choices regarding constructing the neural network architecture are somewhat arbitrary and only hit upon experimentally by the practitioners themselves. Andrej Karpathy noted in one of his lectures (paraphrased) "Start with an architecture that works, then modify from there" \- mainly as there's a lot of "black magic" in these architectures that has only been discovered by spilling blood to the experimental god of a hundred GPUs and/or "graduate student descent" (i.e. where you lock a poor grad in a room for an indeterminate period of time and tell them to do better on task X). Being able to turn to a neural network to run this painful search for you instead is a good idea - assuming you have the large number of GPUs or CPUs necessary. In the paper they use 400 CPUs for the language modeling search and 800 GPUs for the CNN classification search!

The other is whether we should generalize or specialize these architectures. There are many variants of architectures that are not built for or tested against each possible new task. For example, within recurrent neural networks (RNNs) we have the RNN/GRU/LSTM/QRNN/RHN/... and a million minor minor variants between them, each of which perform slightly different depending on the task. While we would like to imagine the architectures that humans make would get progressively closer to "the perfect generic RNN cell" over time, it makes sense that certain cells are, could, or should be optimized to a specific task. Seeking generality isn't always the correct answer. Humans want to seek generality as we don't have the time to tailor to each specific task - but what if we could? Maybe in that situation Occam's razor is actually an impediment to our thinking.

While this is early days, and hugely resource intensive, it is likely to get more feasible over time either as we get more computing power or become smarter regarding how we use it. As a researcher in neural networks, I don't consider this a threat, but instead a useful tool, likely in the same way that a compiler likely only helped assembly programmers.

If people are interested, I can write an article covering many of the details of this paper like I did for Google's Neural Machine Translation architecture[2]. In that article I try to step through how these systems work from the ground up, and the reasoning behind many of the decisions in the paper, hopefully in an understandable manner for a general audience.

P.S. Merity et al. is one of the numbers they beat in the language modeling section, so you may read this entire post in a bitter tone if you'd like ;)

P.P.S. This paper has been out since November 2016 or earlier - I think it was a recent MIT Tech Review article that might have resurfaced it? (oops: wrote Wired initially, meant MIT Tech Review - thanks @saycheese)

[1]: [http://smerity.com/articles/2016/architectures_are_the_new_f...](http://smerity.com/articles/2016/architectures_are_the_new_feature_engineering.html)

[2]: [http://smerity.com/articles/2016/google_nmt_arch.html](http://smerity.com/articles/2016/google_nmt_arch.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Found it on MIT Technology Review:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13439691](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13439691)

Do you have a link to the Wired article you're thinking of?

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would love to see a Neural Architecture Search that create Neural Architecture Search as a future research project. Meta-meta-learning. I like the idea of improving the network which creates other networks.

Also the size of the network can be used as part of the evaluation in order to minimize the networks and maximize the accuracy.

<comment><USER10> I would guess the computational complexity involved in training the top level network would make the project infeasible.

<comment><USER9> You can relax the problem in order to reduce complexity and calculations. For example: cut the training of slow learning networks, have a database of already trained networks, decrease the number of epochs and examples, etc. Or even create another network which predicts the convergence of a network and use it as heuristic. If you also take into account the size of the network and force the learning to minimize them, then you can train them faster.

We cannot do it at home, but for sure Google can try it in their servers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Ran across this research reading this article, "AI Software Learns to Make AI Software" \- which is already posted here:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13436195](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13436195)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is pretty old, and neural nets can train neural nets too (better than humans as usual). Check learning to learn w/ gradient descent by gradient descent

<comment><USER10> Err.. this paper cites the one you're referring to, so I do not think it's older (also, the dates they were published).

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Wait... if the neural net can design other neural nets, can it be taught to design itself?

<comment><USER13> Ironically, this is one of the oldest ideas in computer science [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_construc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_universal_constructor)

<comment><USER14> Von Neumanns constructor is about self replication. Not quite an AI that can self improve.

I think the first person to put the idea forward was I. J. Good in 1962. He speculated that someday AIs would be good enough to do AI research better than their human masters. Then they would start making even better AIs. Which would make even better AIs, and so on. Leading to what he called an "intelligence explosion". He thought it would be "the last invention that man need ever make."

[http://web.archive.org/web/20160428183531/http://le- cretin-t...](http://web.archive.org/web/20160428183531/http://le-cretin- transnational.ch/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Good-Speculations-Concerning-the- First-Ultraintelligent-Machine.pdf)

<comment><USER13> Parent's comment was about self-replication, I was addressing that.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Amazon is now punishing Time Warner, too - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2014/06/11/amazon-is-now-punishing-time-warner-too/

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting Amazon has started more aggressive pricing tactics with digital/published media providers. They must be pretty confident that they have the distribution share to squeeze them.

Since their acting in a way beneficial to the end customer (i.e., by reducing prices), they're in a good position to avoid antitrust allegations.

<comment><USER2> MS were shipping a free browser which got them into anti-trust trouble, so it's not just about being cheaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Amazon is big, but I don't think they're big enough to take on Time Warner in a fight.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd be very curious to know how much of Time Warner's DVD/digital distribution is through Amazon. That's probably the most relevant metric for measuring Amazon's leverage.

Admittedly this is a crude metric, but Amazon's market cap [1] is about 3x that of Time Warner [2].

[1] [https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN&ei=wWeYU_CtKs...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3AAMZN&ei=wWeYU_CtKsOG6AHJ4IHYCg) [2] [https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWX&ei=sWeYU_CkLcea6...](https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3ATWX&ei=sWeYU_CkLcea6AGPz4DgCQ)

<comment><USER3> The leverage Amazon has is how hard it would be to replace Amazon.</comment></comment></comment>


Too Much Power For One Man - <AUTHOR> http://www.drewdavismedia.com/details.php?pid=1 <comment><USER4> A fitting cartoon analogy for cartoon logic.

I am reminded of an Alan Moore quote:

"In the mid 1980's I was asked by an american legal institution known as the Christic Legal Institute to compile a comic book that would detail the murky history of the C.I.A., from the end of the second world war, to the present day. Covering such things as the heroin smuggling during the Vietnam war, the cocaine smuggling during the war in Central America, the Kennedy assasination and other highlights.

What I learned during the frankly horrifying research that I had to slog through in order to accomplish this, was that yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists, and ham fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the C.I.A., you really have nothing to worry about. If however you have a name similar to someone on a list targeted by the C.I.A., then you are dead?

The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening.

Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless..."

<comment><USER5> The concerns expressed in the post have nothing to do with conspiracy, and everything to do with power. Democracies are usually built in such a way as to prevent concentration of power -- not to fight a real or imagined conspiracy. Concentration of power in itself is bad enough even without malevolent intent behind it.

<comment><USER6> The commenter is arguing the opposite - without concentration of power, you get chaos, which is _a bad thing_

<comment><USER5> Which is why democracies have checks and balances, and it is our responsibility to make sure that the power held by private institutions does not grow unchecked. The US made that mistake once, and it took a heroic struggle to wrestle that power away [1].

[1]: [http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital- Libr...](http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital- Library/Record.aspx?libID=o278539)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I like Google, and what Page has achieved. If they act in ways I don't agree with, I can stop using their service(s). It's not like Google take my resources by force, and then use them to do unspeakable evil.

Page and cohorts have demonstrably shown a knack for developing tech which the world finds useful. And for that I'm grateful.

Yet! I don't need to express my gratitude to him. Instead, he's rewarded with 'disagreeable' money & power.

What does he do with the acquired wherewithal? New projects. And in counterintuitive directions, which others only find insightful after the fact!

Page's et al. investment in Calico -- their pro-longevity/healthspan biotech company -- is one such example. They're investing in one of the world's most significant problems. Maybe the most! Dismissed by others, but seen as doable by someone who has been prescient time and again!

This 'power-hungry' character may just save or extend your life one day! Contra to what others would have done with the same power/money.

</comment><comment><USER8> ..."But by the end, Lex Luther spent his final years fighting off increasing government regulation and a growing mass of lawsuits while trying to keep his company from succumbing to bureaucratic rot and his employees innovative. The good employees kept jumping ship while the mediocre ones were proving impossible to dislodge. He eventually died in a bizarre yacht accident involving a prostitute, several chickens and some ketamine, having failed to maintain his dominance of the world. He was replaced by a guy with an MBA from Stanford who had very straight teeth and that said all the right things at the right time and who slowly ran the company into the ground by selling off divisions one after the other in order to meet annual bonus growth profit targets."

</comment><comment><USER9> Article forgot to mention Lex's many biometrics acquisitions (e.g. Neven Vision) prior to sending his fleet of cameras down every road in the civilized world, dabbling in mass genetics (23andme), "accidental" mass capture of open wifi traffic, spyware he convinced 63% of all web sites to deploy (Analytics), or the sensor-packed mobile devices he has root on in a few million peoples' pockets.

It would only require something like 0.25 9/11's to turn Lex into the worlds largest and most terrifying defence contractor. Of course this sounds ridiculous, but it's probably just a few short pieces of emergency legislation from reality

<comment><USER10> Isn't it nice how you can make most things sound evil if you just use the right wording. What you wrote reminds me of cases where law enforcement takes terms like "subversion" used by an engineer and extrapolates evil plots out of them.

<comment><USER9> Which wording do you speak of? About the only loading used here is "Lex", which was borrowed from the article. The remainder is a fairly plain depiction of reality

<comment><USER11> "spyware"?

<comment><USER9> Wikipedia:

> Spyware is software that aids in gathering information about a person or > organization without their knowledge and that may send such information to > another entity without the consumer's consent, or that asserts control over > a computer without the consumer's knowledge.

Save me the boring arguments about how regular people who can barely work a toaster can still somehow magically elect to avoid Analytics using browser plugins and editing their hosts file

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's not a question if someone with too much power will abuse that power. It always happens, always. It's not a question of if it will happen or not, it's a question of when and under what circumstances.

That's why we have the division of power in governments, that's why we have countries, because too much power concentrated by too few individuals will always get abused. If not by the individuals themselves, someone else or another organization, the NSA comes to mind, will find a way to abuse that power at some point in time when the conditions are right.

<comment><USER13> Yes. The problem is that while we have division of power in governments, there is little stopping private enterprise from accumulating worrying amounts of power. There is antitrust law, which in theory should be the solution, but in practice is hardly applied in modern times.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wild conspiracy theory aside, I just realized that in a few years after the nest userbase grows more, they could tweak the temperature setting algorithm to secretly and gradually lower the user's "acceptable" temperature over time to acclimate users to lower temperatures, cutting energy usage in the world by a significant amount. Conspiracy for good? :)

<comment><USER15> Good mind! Come to France ;) We're not keen on AC, our office temperatures are rather 23-27 in summer, we sometimes stink and we know it's good for ecology. BTW, I'm not sure Nest has any potential in France. Maybe in international hotels only?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Eh. This article emphasizes the wrong things. Larry Page isn't some super villain building robot armies to take over the world. Any significant harm he/Google might do to the world will likely be via the unintended consequences of actions motivated primarily by profit. We already see this -- the slow erosion of privacy expectations, etc.

As for all of the internet of things/robotics acquisitions and R&D... well, I'm not in the board room during these discussions, but I highly doubt that building robotic armies is on anyone's mind. More likely, Page et al. see this as a next major growth area and would like to stay ahead of the curve. Esp. the Boston Dynamics acquisition is probably less about military applications than general experience with complicated robots.

<comment><USER17> > _This article emphasizes the wrong things. Larry Page isn 't some super > villain building robot armies to take over the world._

The article doesn't say that. The author just lays out the facts, then concludes by stating that he is _not_ saying that Page will abuse his power, but simply that he _could_.

> _I highly doubt that building robotic armies is on anyone 's mind._

On what basis do you doubt this? Because it's unpleasant to imagine? Hard to believe?

Regardless, the point of the article (and indeed, the very title) is that we have placed a lot of power into one man's hands. Perhaps we should consider the potential consequences (intended or not), and whether simply "doubting" that this power will be abused is sufficient.

<comment><USER16> > The author just lays out the facts, then concludes by stating that he is not > saying that Page will abuse his power, but simply that he could.

Right, and I think emphasizing nutty conspiracy theories distracts from the more important systemic and gradual, but perhaps less exciting, impact that Google _actually_ has (e.g. on privacy.)

You don't need to resort to conspiracy in order to isolate real ways in which Google has having large -- arguably negative -- impacts on our everyday lives.

> On what basis do you doubt this?

Mostly motive. Google doesn't particularly stand to benefit from building a private army. But also, I used all my tin foil heating up potatoes.

<comment><USER17> > _Right, and I think emphasizing nutty conspiracy theories_

I missed the conspiracy theory in the article. Can you point it out? Again, it appeared to be a series of facts illustrating the power of Google/Page and a rational question: Do these facts represent the concentration of too much power in one man's hands?

> _distracts from the more important systemic and gradual, but perhaps less > exciting, impact that Google actually has (e.g. on privacy.)_

Why can't it be _both-and_ vs. _either-or_? Sure, the privacy issue is clear- and-present. But, keep in mind that when Google first started, we were just happy to have such a powerful search-engine. Perhaps it would have been a "nutty conspiracy theory" then to worry about your privacy. After all, why would Google abuse their access to your data when _" Google doesn't particularly stand to benefit from"_... abusing its customers' trust?

What seems most counter-intuitive, however, is that you don't trust them with your data, but you trust them with, say, launching satellites and wielding combat-robot technology. I'm not being facetious when I say that it's honestly kind of hard to find the line with you.

> _Mostly motive._

Pretty amazing that you think you know Page's motives. Actually, scratch that: we can all surmise. What's amazing is that you're so _certain_.

Regardless, even with the "purest" motives, it's worth considering whether so much power can lead to unintended consequences.

>* Google doesn't particularly stand to benefit from building a private army.*

Nor does it from abusing your privacy. Or does it?

> _But also, I used all my tin foil heating up potatoes._

Apparently, not. The article never stated that Page was building a private army. You did.

<comment><USER16> I wish you would read what I'm writing instead of what you want me to (not) be writing.

>The article never stated that Page was building a private army. You did.

Oh come on. It's the entire damn point of the article. Without this running narrative, the article's just a list of Google's most successful products and its recent acquisitions. Despite your claim, the article isn't simply a list. And the editorializing is the only reason this article is on the front page of HN. Period.

I realize it's just a rhetorical device, but the article reads still like a conspiracy theory. The only thing this article does is, at best, lump critics of Google's privacy behavior in with conspiracy nuts.

And there's no reason to appeal to fantastical "what-if's" when there are real, demonstrable problems.

> Why can't it be both-and vs. either-or?

It can be (see below), and I think the notion that I somehow implied Google's new expansions cannot be problematic is mostly a fabrication of your indigence.

It's just that I think the narrative of the article is completely ridiculous and trivializes actual avenues for abuse.

What is Google doing to do with military technology? It has 3 options:

1\. Use it to create technology which augments its other ventures.

2\. Sell to US Govt or our allies.

3\. Create a private army or sell to our enemies.

2 and 3 don't worry me for the same reason I don't worry about Boeing taking over the world; military tech is closely monitored and regulated. I don't have to know Page's motives to know that he knows that if he were try try 3, he'd probably end up in prison or dead.

I don't have to be omniscient to assume he probably wouldn't take that kind of risk. And hell, I don't even need to know anything about him to know that if he did, the US military would be able to easily unilaterally shut him down.

Scenario 1 worries me (despite what you've read into my previous comments), but it's really just an additional element of the _privacy_ problem. And the author was too busy telling a cute story to focus on non-insane potential avenues of abuse.

TL;DR: Rhetoric matters, and the rhetoric of this article is unhelpful at best, and possibly harmful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> That's quite a bit of headpatting.

Because you know, B.O. - a young man has risen from humble begginings to rule over one of the most powerful countries in the world. K.J.U. - a pudgy asian young man that enjoyed pointing at things and cake now holds the keys to the awesome power of NUCLEAR WEAPONS.

And let's not mention that wiley rascal, V.P., an unassuming ex secret agent in a semi frozen country, that has risen to the rank of president, controlling as many 2 MILLION TROOPS.

Anyway, did you guys know amazon has tinfoil now. Also drones. And they now what we buy. And an army of people at their command, driving around every corner of the earth for no reason! Sure, they say that they "deliver" stuff, but you know what else is delivered? MILITARY PAYLOADS! Damn that handsome J.B.!

</comment><comment><USER19> With truly evil billionaires out there - the Koch brothers come to mind - <USER2> family run organizations that take horrible advantage of employees - <USER3> Walmart and the Waltons - why is it so many people want to make a case against Google and its founders?

Yes, it makes sense to keep a check on powers. But I'm way more worried about all of our three-letter agencies and the private billionaire donations behind the power structure in Washington than the company that may in fact give me self-driving cars, give Internet access to remote parts of the world, and so on.

This article feels like it's doing nothing but trying to build an evil genius narrative where none exists. When you summon images of Lex Luther in the first sentence, you've lost me.

<comment><USER20> >With truly evil billionaires out there - the Koch brothers come to mind

what the fuck do you think gives you the right to claim someone is evil? I literally cannot imagine how much of a goddamn bubble you must live in to think you have any right to call someone evil because their political opinions differ from yours.

<comment><USER21> Isn't evil as undefined as good?

<comment><USER22> Although people have different definitions of 'good' and 'evil', in practice most people roughly agree about most of it. Humans have very similar minds. It's easy to lose sight of this, since discussion mostly focuses on the parts where we disagree, but that's some pretty serious selection bias.

<comment><USER21> I think the opposite is the case.

There is a big bunch of people who thing gays are bad or blacks or jews or people who don't believe in their god.

The war on drugs also made many people "evil" in the eye of those who don't did drugs, but most of them just were a bunch of spaced-out-hippies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What about the Presidency of the United States? Anyone that gets elected to this position has quite a bit more power than Larry Page.

<comment><USER8> I don't think modern presidents actually have as much power as people commonly assume. The massive bureaucracies under them take awhile to learn to navigate... and by that time your 4-8 years is up.

Not to mention checks and balances.

<comment><USER24> The POTUS is unquestionably the most powerful person on the planet.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_the_President_of_the_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_the_President_of_the_United_States)

The ability to engage in wars of almost any scale by itself is enough to command the respect of anyone. They're suppose to have congressional approval but they regularly bypass that.

The President of the US also is tasked with appointing over 6000 of the top federal officials and federal judges. The POTUS can change the CIA director (which is arguably the 2nd most powerful organization in the world, only seconded by the US Navy), and the NSA, FBI, NASA, and many others.

Foreign and domestic policy is greatly influenced by the President, they can very easily change the direction of humanity, (Iraq and Afghanistan wars, millions killed, so much money spent, unknown what the world would be like today if they hadn't happened).

If the president really wanted to, he could declassify almost anything and even give the order to launch a nuclear missile (might require Emergency Powers, which he has the right to use).

Forbes says Putin is more powerful, it's debatable I suppose. [http://www.forbes.com/powerful-people/list/](http://www.forbes.com/powerful- people/list/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm not sure I buy into the Larry Page-as-Lex-Luthor analogy, even if it's meant to be more evocative than literally descriptive. (Page has achieved, circumstantially, what Luthor single-mindedly strove to do.) People seem to want to attribute sinister motives to Page, and while I don't know the man, all available evidence suggests he's more ambitious business tycoon than Big Brother-in-training.

I do, however, think there's something very interesting in this piece. Namely, what does it _mean_ for someone to hold such potential power over the lives of so many? In the grand sweep of history, the amount of theoretical control over the world afforded to someone in Larry Page's position has accumulated in the blink of an eye, and it's staggering.

Technology is changing more quickly than our ability to understand its ethical, socioeconomic, and even existential implications. That doesn't mean we have to adopt the Luddite program, to be frightened of technology, and to slow its progress. We should welcome the rapid progress, and encourage technology. At the same time, perhaps we need to get a lot more serious about developing a coherent philosophy of technology, and a forward-looking technology policy. For instance: it's still a bit crackpotish to suggest we should be working on a Three Laws of Robotics in 2014, but that notion will become less outlandish in the next few years. And maybe, as Asimov subtly suggested, _we 're_ the robots who need the guidelines.

We live in very interesting times. More accurately, we're living the prologue to some very interesting times.

</comment><comment><USER26> I don't really agree with the premise, which is that drewdavismedia is intelligent enough to decide for other people what they are allowed to have.

</comment><comment><USER27> _I'm not saying that Page is going to abuse his power. I am saying that he could._

And do what? Be specific. Read my e-mails?

The constant fear of corporations has been puzzling me ever since I saw RoboCop. Back then at least it was tied to the fear of rising Japan who contributed to the world war not too long before.

The tech companies on the other hand have to be some of the most meek and least abusive organizations in existence. They pale in comparison even to a provincial police office who will dispatch storm troopers and search your house for plants based on the flimsiest of evidence.[1]

Yet in some people's mind they are this imminent threat, though not really specified. How does that happen?

[1] [http://www.fourwinds10.net/siterun_data/government/law_enfor...](http://www.fourwinds10.net/siterun_data/government/law_enforcement_and_police/news.php?q=1395942059)

<comment><USER16> 1\. Society has lots of problems. Probably mass incarceration is a much larger problem than over-armed local police departments. That doesn't mean we shouldn't address the problem of over-armed local police departments. It also doesn't mean the problems are unrelated.

Similarly, militarization of police and decreased personal privacy expectations are probably not completely unrelated. And we don't have to focus on one to the exclusion of the other.

2\. Actually, yes, Google is reading your emails. Even if you don't use gmail, they probably know who you are and who you talk with and what you talk about.

Eroding privacy is a real social problem. I'm not sure why you are so quick to trivialize.

3\. Tech corporations may have great PR, but they are certainly aware of the fact that they externalize costs in the forms of e-waste dumping and horrible labor conditions. Just because you don't have to see this stuff doesn't mean it does not exist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I am pretty sure there is a much larger vision behind all these seemingly disjoint acquistions and ventures. One day when the final piece is put together, we mere mortals will realize what is happening behind the scenes right now. But it might be too late by then.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't disagree with the general point that power easily corrupts, but found it odd this was the only post on the website (bar an About page - the Contact page links to the About page, which contains what I read as blurb as best).

So, like usual, I did a WHOIS.

This domain was registered yesterday: July 12th.

       Domain Name: DREWDAVISMEDIA.COM
       Registrar: LIQUIDNET LTD.
       Whois Server: whois.liquidnetlimited.com
       Referral URL: http://www.liquidnetlimited.com
       Name Server: DNS1.FREEHOSTIA.COM
       Name Server: DNS2.FREEHOSTIA.COM
       Status: clientTransferProhibited
       Updated Date: 12-jul-2014
       Creation Date: 12-jul-2014
       Expiration Date: 12-jul-2015

Seems like FUD to me.

</comment><comment><USER30> Don't forget that he's also trying to "beat death". [http://time.com/574/google-vs-death/](http://time.com/574/google-vs-death/)

This could expand his control beyond the world, and as far as the universe! Or perhaps even, The Multiverse!!

</comment><comment><USER31> I've always got the impression that Sergey Brin is the true visionary of the two.

</comment><comment><USER32> The whole world dominance theory is an exaggeration. The biggest markets in the world (by population) are completely closed to Google.

They have their own versions of Facebook, Youtube, Google and everything else we use here in the west, and that's not going to change anytime soon since the governments have protectionist policies in these sectors.

And even in parts of the west, namely the EU, policies are implemented which are trying to push Google out of the market, or at least weaken it severely, to allow their local industries to grow.

Whatever you might fear that Google will become some day, it wont happen, since they wont even get a fair chance in most markets to get dominant. And even if they do, they will be pushed out by the government, if it can afford it.

<comment><USER13> True, but that doesn't change things for people living in North America. Also, even in Europe Google is doing extremely well (look at market share in search, for example), despite legislators being somewhat adversary.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Last I checked, GOOG is a public company that answers to a board of directors and shareholders. Not a private company with a megalomaniac potentate heading it up.

<comment><USER34> Larry and Sergey control 55% of the voting rights:

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2014/04/02/google- sto...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2014/04/02/google-stock-split- in-larry-and-sergey-we-trust/)

if the rest of the shareholders don't agree with them they can... do absolutely nothing about it

<comment><USER35> I actually don't worry too much about them.

It's if/when these massive tech companies go bankrupt and monopolistic control crudely goes to the highest bidder (likely some leveraged buyout organization) that I worry about.

<comment><USER36> This.

We've already seen a number of cases where technology that was originally royalty-free or open source becomes encumbered after sale of a company.

Theoretically, companies that want to "do good" could put IP and data in a separate trust, but that's kind of like throwing away money you might need when times are tough.

I remember people saying "but Sun would never.." before Sun was acquired. Oracle has been a decent caretaker, but I doubt that (for instance) that anyone ever imagined that there would ever be a need to fork Hudson.

The takeaway for all of us is - Don't trust assurances of companies about their assets unless they have taken steps to protect them independently.

<comment><USER35> Indeed Detroit is going through this with their museum's assets, which could be liquidated to pay creditors. Suddenly I understood (part of) why owners of art lend things to museums instead of giving them.

As a further comment to my post, I guess it's safe to say I trust Brin and Page more than I trust control split apart a million ways to a million middle- class people like myself. If someone made the argument that Google could do something evil and I'd only have to work 30 hours per week for the rest of my life instead of 40, I'd be tempted. Brin and Page have no such incentive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I like a good story that appeals to emotions but unfortunately emergent self organization appears to dispel conspiracy: [http://www.ted.com/talks/james_b_glattfelder_who_controls_th...](http://www.ted.com/talks/james_b_glattfelder_who_controls_the_world)

Unfortunately, because I think modulation is easier with less moving parts.

</comment><comment><USER38> What was the point of this awfully written collection of words? Also, could someone contact the author and let him know of the existence of Microsoft Word? His contact link is broken and he has way too many typos to be in the front page of Hacker News.

</comment><comment><USER39> "Of course this is not a fictional story. The company in question is not Lexcorp, it is Google." Another mission for Captain Obvious

</comment><comment><USER40> This, and some of the comments sounds like something out of Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged". Damn those that make profit and dont share it with those with less ability...

<comment><USER16> What the hell are you talking about?

The article is about power, not money. Also, there's no suggested course of action. In fact, a legitimate course of action could be "stop using Google's services so that if shit hits the fan, they don't have your data".

How could enlightened self-interest of consumers ever possibly be construed as an assault on liberty (or whatever-the-hell)?

It's really best never to think of those you disagree with in terms of flat caricatures.

<comment><USER40> Have you read Atlas shrugged?

<comment><USER16> To reiterate, how could enlightened ( _individual_ ) self-interest of consumers ever possibly be construed as an assault on liberty (or whatever- the-hell)?

edit: Pretty sure not eating McDonald's every day is not an affront to capitalism. To assume that critics of McDonald's food are automatically calling for regulation/whatever, instead of just trying to educate people to help them act in their self-interest, is a caricature. Similarly, suggesting any critic of Google is automatically some sort of proto-communist is a ridiculous caricature.

<comment><USER40> >>To reiterate, how could enlightened (individual) self-interest of consumers ever possibly be construed as an assault on liberty (or whatever-the-hell)?

Read the book and you'll know...

<comment><USER16> To the extent that you think objectivism is inconsistent with choosing not to use a product or convincing others not to use a product, I think you've missed the point. In particular, not using Google because you think your privacy is more valuable than the value generated by google's products is pretty exemplary of rational selfishness and individual freedom.

To the extent that you're correct, you're just discrediting Rand as a true private sector authoritarian.

edit: I've read the book.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Let's say Larry Page knew who I was, and didn't like me. Does he really actually have the ability to go in and read my email? I would guess not...

</comment><comment><USER42> I assume that this comment will just be buried so that others can't even read it, since it will go against most people's belief systems.

I saw several people in here say something about "conspiracy theories" as if to refute a "conspiracy theory" that was stated in the thread. But I didn't see any such thing said. Maybe I missed it.

I will go ahead and start on the "conspiracy theories" by linking to the following story from Al Jazeera:

Exclusive: Emails reveal close Google relationship with NSA

[http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief- goo...](http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/6/nsa-chief-google.html)

Why would anyone think that everyone (the world) would just let Larry Page and Google do whatever they want? At a certain point, either people with power attached themselves to this enterprise, or they just decided to give up their power and let Page and Google take it.

I think its a fantasy to believe that there aren't governments involved or that they really just have everyone's best interests in mind.</comment>


Deleting a Few LOC Can Yield "Significant" Power Savings on Some Linux Systems - <AUTHOR> https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-5.8-ASPM-PCIe-PCI-PCI-X <comment><USER2> It's increasingly difficult to do power saving in modern laptops with highly integrated SoC - a single component can prevent the entire system from entering a deeper power saving state. In the old days, CPU and graphics were basically everything, but there can be an endless number of traps today, a SATA driver, an audio driver, or a PCI bridge in this case, not to mention that many subsystems are poorly documented. And even if the potential of power saving in a device driver is identified, it's often plagued with mysterious bugs (the Window driver may include nonstandard workarounds).

Only Intel knows everything, I guess even Microsoft doesn't (try running Windows without all the Intel chipset drivers installed...). If you take a modern laptop and put Linux on it, it's possible that you'll only able to get 50% of the battery life. And there's nothing you can do about it.

<comment> frosted-flakes Even Microsoft's own hardware can't get it right. I have a Surface Pro 3, and it will not stay in sleep mode. The screen frequently turns on for no reason at all, even if the keyboard cover is closed. I've taken to putting it in hibernate mode whenever I know I won't be using it for more than a few minutes, otherwise I'll come back to a dead battery.

But even hibernation doesn't always work. My custom-built desktop PC frequently wakes itself out of hibernation in the middle of the night. I don't even know how that's possible, because I thought hibernation was "off, with RAM saved to storage". Which is just _wonderful_ when I'm sleeping in the same room.

<comment><USER3> > But even hibernation doesn't always work. My custom-built desktop PC > frequently wakes itself out of hibernation in the middle of the night. I > don't even know how that's possible, because I thought hibernation was "off, > with RAM saved to storage". Which is just wonderful when I'm sleeping in the > same room.

This is generally using ACPI 'wake timers', which allow the RTC on the motherboard to wake up the system at a particular time (which I think is a useful feature, but only if explicitly requested by a user). Windows is particularly bad at this, since scheduled events are allowed to use this by default to wake up the PC when they are supposed to fire (and 'UpdateOrchastrator' has one which fires in the middle of the night). There's a decent bit of info on how to identify why this is happening and stop it here:

[https://superuser.com/questions/1020768/laptop-wakes-up- from...](https://superuser.com/questions/1020768/laptop-wakes-up-from-sleep- every-several-hours)

<comment><USER4> For me it's only my cat walking over the keyboard or mouse.

The third allowed option (Linux) is wake on lan, which is only triggered through my laptop. I automate WOL events sometimes over cronjobs, when the big machine needs to do some work overnight for some minutes, but very rarely, because it's too loud. But I do those wake up, sleep cycles occasionally automatically when the machine processes big events like the Berlinale, Cannes or Sundance Film Festivals.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To save you a click: There was code that disabled ASPM[1] when you have a PCI bridge connected downstream of PCIe. That code is gone now.

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

<comment><USER6> Reminds me of the Raspberry pi 4 update, where enabling ASPM shaved something like 10% off the idle power consumption:

[https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/06/29/new-raspberry- pi-4-v...](https://www.cnx-software.com/2019/06/29/new-raspberry-pi-4-vli- firmware-lowers-temperature/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I see this as a flaw of Linux development model, and how code from hardware vendors gets a free go.

When Linux was still small, each and every major hardware platform was worked on until mirror polish, and it worked "well."

Now, the only criteria, when Linux mainly relies on hardware maker programmers to do their job, is that the code compiles and works.

Without much pressure from users, there is nobody to push against "barely works" driver code.

<comment><USER8> I don't think this is a specific PCI driver but core to how the PCI subsystem works.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Old patch disabling Active State Power Management deleted, significant energy savings expected on some ancient hardware."

</comment><comment><USER10> So what's the cumulative amount of power wasted?

<comment><USER11> Depends on the system. On newer Intel machines, it will prevent the SoC from going into lower power states than PC2. On my laptop, that means idling at 5 watts instead of 2ish watts.

That said, I don't think any laptop has a PCIe to PCI bridge. This should only affect some desktops and servers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Clickbait title

<comment><USER13> Agree. It would be better if it gave the maximum amount of technical detail possible given the space constraint.</comment></comment>