Podcast Advertising: What We Learned - <AUTHOR> https://ahrefs.com/blog/podcast-advertising/ <comment><USER2> I listen to quite a few podcasts, and I'm increasingly annoyed by ads being repeated word for word in each episode.

There are two podcasts that do things a bit differently, which I enjoy more:

* [https://risky.biz/](https://risky.biz/) has short-ish interviews with the sponsors that focus not only on the product, but often on the market, insights that the advertiser gained from analytics that their products gather etc.

* [https://www.acquired.fm/](https://www.acquired.fm/) has 30s spots where they ask their advertiser one question, which gives the advertiser the option to show off some special knowledge in their area, but can also be interesting to the listener. And a different question each episode.

I'd love to get some metrics on how those approaches compare to the traditional 30s to 60s ad reads (in terms of conversion).

<comment><USER3> The most unique ad readings are probably Bill Burr's, on his Monday Morning podcast.

He would often read the copy sent to him by companies advertising, criticize their terrible writing or the product itself... and he's not faking it either, as he often loses these advertisers. (but it's Bill Burr! so not running out of advertisers any time soon)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlBreqGEQ70](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlBreqGEQ70)

<comment><USER4> The Sherry's Berries reads were hilarious. It sounds like they were annoyed with the first read, but came around to his style as they kept re-up'ing.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMLn57oS9Yk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMLn57oS9Yk)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I hoped would come through was something like:

ROI for that spend was XYZ. LTV for user acquisition was ABC compared to Adwords/FB/print etc...

Is 129 signups good compared to other efforts? Are inbound leads from podcasts more engaged or higher likelihood to pay than other channels?

I'm not sure what the value here is, other than saying something like "don't spend advertising money in an ad channel if you're unfamiliar with the details of the ad channel"

 _My main takeaway: it's not always all about measurable ROI.If you look in the right places, you're likely to see some other kind of magic at work._

Sounds like good advice if you want to waste ad money, even considering the "half of all advertising money is wasted..." koan. At the end of the day this "magic" has to turn into measurable ROI.

<comment><USER6> yeah, i was looking for something like that too.

also, thank you for saying "waste ad money" instead of "waste ad spend". (some people think it's a good idea to use "spend" as a noun. i wish i knew why. it sounds idiotic.)

<comment><USER7> Are we ok with buying compute on AWS ?

<comment><USER6> ha! ya got me.

imho, "compute" is ok if a true technical person or nerd says it because it makes them sound cooler. and they usually need as much coolness as possible.

but ad people use "spend" to make it sound like they have a specialized, impenetrably cool language, one which alienates and excludes the rest of us. but, the thing is, ad people are already cooler than the rest of us. that's how they got their job in the first place. also "spend" is a dumb choice for that because anyone can guess what it means.

that's my lame theory and i'm pretty sure no one else buys it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's very weird that the article starts by saying that the writer had never listened to a podcast and ends without ever mentioning listening to a podcast. You'd think when spending $50k on advertising in 6 podcasts, you'd at least spend the 3 hours to listen to an episode of each one to better understand what you're doing.

<comment><USER9> Step 5: "Enjoy the shows when they air. Keep in touch to answer any final questions along the way."

She pretty clearly said she listened to the podcasts she sponsored

<comment><USER8> I guess I missed that. I read it originally as being more about enjoying the results of the airing rather than listening to the actual show.

There's still no mention of listening to a podcast before paying them money or why this would be important in creating an effective ad. I really expected this to be one of the main points.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> One of the podcasts that does sponsorships best is the Fantasy Footballers Podcast.

Every week they have a branded segment called "Pump the Brakes with O'Reilly Auto Parts". To intro the segment they sing "O O O O'reilly Auto parts" and then keep going with the segment.

I'm surprised more shows don't do branded segments...I always skip the 2 minute ad segments, but I sure know about O'reilly.

P.s. remember 2 years ago when every single podcast was sponsored by Squarespace? I'm glad that the market has grown a bit since then.

<comment><USER11> It like 100% ziprecruiter now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I have this nagging belief that advertisers know well that nobody in this generation wants to be advertised to, and that ads generally don't work as a direct call to action. Something that allowing podcasters to loosely do ad reads achieves is a small sense of authenticity.

This seems to fit in nicely with the assertion that they know people dislike ads; when a podcaster stiffly or sarcastically reads an ad and throws in a side comment, the ad-averse listener reads this as an irreverence to commercial advertising that both the podcaster and the advertiser are both acknowledging.

I truly think that the advertiser sneaks into the podcast listener's authenticity dome this way, and I feel like this must be a well-understood phenomenon for advertisers who buy ad reads on podcasts known for having a primarily gen z and millennial audience.

Incidentally there's a podcast episode by New Models that briefly discusses this idea, which they call the "authenticity dungeon". [https://www.librarystack.org/new-models-podcast- episode-07-a...](https://www.librarystack.org/new-models-podcast- episode-07-authenticity-dungeon/)

</comment><comment><USER13> I found it odd that he wanted to pay the host to completely lie about their experience with a product. I thought that violates FTC rules.

<comment><USER14> The FTC requires the sponsor relationship to be explicit, which, on podcasts, it always is.

<comment><USER15> > ... which, on podcasts, it always is.

That wasn't the question and it's out of the question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I feel like there is some real innovation to be had in the podcast monetization space. At this point, it's still basically treated like a radio ad from 1935. Surely there is some unique functionality that podcasts have over radio.

Throwing out some ideas:

\- Alexa integration lets you purchase/view the product directly after hearing it advertised

\- "Choose your own ad" \- 5 different ads can be played, each for 5 seconds each. You can then reply to say which one you want to hear about, which then triggers a longer ad. If there is no voice reply, the default one will play.

<comment><USER17> I'm actually glad Podcasts are still like that and don't need any special interaction. I don't mind the ads, especially if they are not pre-recorded but just embedded in the show like on Gruber's Talkshow where he speaks them live and sometimes guests even say something in the ad too.

<comment><USER18> If you appreciate this style of ad delivery (and don't mind his...uh....language), comedian Bill Burr's Monday Morning Podcast and Thursday Just Before Friday Monday Morning Podcast has some hilarious ad reads. He hates doing it, he hates having to do it, and he openly mocks how silly some of the ad copy can be.

Which apparently is fine by his sponsors because apparently they convert incredibly well (it might also have to do with Andrew Themeles, producer and comic as well allegedly is very particular about who they are willing to be sponsored by since neither of them are hurting for the money).

But I agree, ads that are just naturally read and we get back to the show is preferred. The minute someone tries to get 'disruptive' with ads in podcasts I fear the whole house will come crashing down.

<comment><USER19> My impression is that the vast majority of podcast listeners skip through ads, because that's what I do. It's easy to hit the 15s forward button four times and get right back to the funny interesting stuff. It's a lot harder to skip the ad if the funny, interesting host is riffing over the entire ad read - which means that the listener is still getting the product info, even if the host is making fun of the copy the whole time. Other hosts I've seen include references to the products they're hawking in the actual show (host response to guest's story about sleeping on a mattress on the floor: "I hope that mattress was a Leesa!") and I imagine they're getting a little premium for that.

<comment><USER20> That second approach is pure product placement. I'm sure it's being monetized.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> TLDR: About 126 paid trial signups for about $30k.

Comes down to about $238 per signup.

Now the question is: What is the lifetime value of an ahref customer?

Say 20% of the trial signups result in a full signup. And let's say they all chose the lowest tier of $99/Month. And let's say they stay for a year on average.

Then that's ... 126 * 0.2 * 99 * 12 = $29937

That would be about break even.

<comment><USER22> As the article describes in the end of its second chapter:

 _Sometimes an existing user would mention that they were happy to hear about us on their favorite show; sometimes a random person (not even in marketing) would remember us from an old podcast mention. Even if they didn't convert at the time, they thought that Ahrefs was kind of cool—and this brand recognition stayed in the back of their mind._

 _That's when it all clicked._

 _We were going about it all wrong—rather than being a tool for lead generation, podcast advertising is a tool for gaining exposure and brand awareness._

Sometimes converting a benefit gained from service, podcasts in this case, to monetary value is a simple matter of counting gained profit. But one has to remember that not everything can be measured in dollars, such as brand awareness. Doesn't help to pay the bills but I'd think of it more of a long term investment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is a really useful insight into podcast advertising. I've often wondered what it costs to advertise on a podcast and here is the answer (in part at least).

</comment><comment><USER24> I think there was a time last year when a couple of mattress brands were sponsoring the entire podcasting world. Quite amazing really, it shows that even a medium priced mattress has a staggering amount of margin. Makes me wonder why I am in the software business. (!!)

<comment><USER25> Don't worry! Squarespace sponsors literally everything I listen to, so there's money in software yet!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you just want to get those promo code without listening to podcasts, search here [https://lnns.co/GCrJF9YQ-k4](https://lnns.co/GCrJF9YQ-k4)

</comment><comment><USER27> I love the "Hello from the Magic Tavern" ads

</comment><comment><USER28> Silicon Valley "disruptors" discover they're actually reinventing the wheel. Film at 11.

Welcome to radio.

<comment><USER29> I'm not posting this as an "advocate" of Alex Jones, however his model works well for a news site. There is no advertiser creep of the message, there is not much outside influence at all.

Its a shame something like the NY Times didn't pivot to that model early on (essentially a news site thats funded by in-house e-commerce).

Whats funny is that that model was the first model of media, and truthfully it may be the future.

<comment><USER30> A media company doesn't have a competitive advantage when making unrelated products, compared to companies that specialize in those products. The Alex Jones model is profitable because he exaggerates the benefits of his products and trades on his viewers' mistrust of other information sources. The NY Times would have to change completely to follow this strategy.

<comment><USER29> >The NY Times would have to change completely to follow this strategy.

Becoming profitable will require lots of change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> For an audio based campaign I'd prefer a catchier and more memorable name than 'ahrefs'? Type that in slightly wrong and you get to a dead end pretty fast.

<comment><USER32> are hyperlinks in html.

<comment><USER31> I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're trying to be helpful but I don't get why this makes it a good name?

What was that ad I heard the other day, hrefs.com or href.com? Ooops!

<comment><USER33> I'd always (and always do) google an advert rather than trying to remember the exact website anyway. If you search 'href sep' or 'hrefs seo' or even 'aref seo' it always still comes up as the first result for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> > From July to October 2018, we've seen 126 paid trial signups from "podcast."

We all know surveys lie (even if they're required) so the conversion numbers aren't telling the whole story. If my company were burning tall coin like this and not somehow tracking micro-conversions I'd probably have to tell the marketing lead sorry no holiday bonus for the next 38 years.

Honestly they could've probably hired a temp-worker with a good voice and a lot of Podcasting buddies and gained more traction for the cost of feeding a homeless man. What a colossal waste of resources.</comment>


Unanswered Steve Jobs questions - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2011/10/unanswered-steve-jobs-questions/

<comment><USER2> > Maybe he was a closet philanthropist.

Wasn't he a buddhist? My understanding is that buddhism encourages philanthropy without acknowledgement or attribution.

<comment><USER3> That was the teaching in Buddhism and Steve Jobs was a devout Buddhist. It is likely that Steve Jobs was a closet philanthropist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here's some unanswered Steve Jobs questions of mine I haven't be able to stop thinking about.

Did S.J pick the right successor? S.J built Apple as a machine he controls, optimised for himself, to build many wonderful products. The co-pilot is now in charge. Apple will be able to milk the iPhone, just as it was able to milk the Apple II, but will Apple be able to move on to the next great thing? How long will Apple's success continues for? Assuming it will continue for the next half decade, will we keep getting advances in consumer technology in the 10 years after that?

<comment><USER5> I'm cautiously betting that Apple will end up like current Microsoft. They'll stagnate to some degree, have some more ups and downs, and they'll still be around for a long while. They've grown to a tremendous height, they have a long way to fall.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> The question of whether there was a grand plan is certainly an interesting one, but it seems unlikely that in 1998 there was a big whiteboard in Cupertino with "iMac -> iTunes -> iPod -> iPhone -> iPad -> profit!" written on it. But some of those internal steps may have been planned. iTunes came out about 10 months before the iPod did, but obviously the iPod was in development for longer than that. I wonder if iTunes was specifically designed to be the interface between the computer and the iPod? Or if it was just part of a "digital hub" strategy (this was a term Apple bandied about a lot in the early '00s) that was envisioned as being focused on the Mac and that only pivoted when it became clear what a runaway success the iPod was.

</comment><comment><USER7> More than a plan, it seems that there is a _method_. Technical advances and Moore's law make different kind of devices first possible, later practical for mass production and finally appealing. Apple seems to be waiting for the last phase to focus all its forces in the release of one optimal product. So far it has had a very good eye.</comment>


The (partial) state of the mobile data market - <AUTHOR> http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2007/08/partial-state-of-mobile-data-market.html <comment><USER2> I thought Americans text message a lot.. But it is still only half of how much Europeans do. Amazing. Untapped startup potential maybe?

What I really want to see is comparable data for Japan. But like this blogger suggests the data is scarce. As a culture, they do blog and text message a lot though.

<comment><AUTHOR> My favourite stat is:

"A third of South Korean students send over 100 SMS messages a day"

That'll give you an idea of how much more Asian countries use SMS than European ones. Also Japan tends to be a special case as they use different protocols. There mobile email is popular whilst SMS is non existant.

As for startup potential, look at twitter for a start. They added the ability to make one-to-one private text messages into a one-to-many public broadcast network. Theres plenty of other possible permutations left to try.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What's the most amount of entropy two humans can create in 30 seconds? - <AUTHOR> Every day, my colleague Jonny and I give each other N handshakes, where N is defined by:
N = 2 * (closest lower prime to today's date) % today's date
This has worked well (today, for example, is the 15th, so we shook hands (13 * 2) % 15 = 11 times today.
But we want to increase the complexity of it for fun, so we're looking to add some random process. But how do two humans generate a random number just by talking to each other? (We don't want to use a computer.)
So the idea is, we need to generate the most amount of entropy and output some pseudo-random number... but it has to be done through a human process (like talking.)
Any ideas? Thought this crowd may enjoy the question.
This is not a homework question... we actually do do this and are genuinely seeking your help. <comment><USER2> From sci.math google group post: "How to generate random number sequences (in your head)"...

With the most relevant answer for you being George Marsaglia's:

<comment><comment><comment><comment><comment>~

Choose a 2-digit number, say 23, your "seed".

Form a new 2-digit number: the 10's digit plus 6 times the units digit.

The example sequence is 23 --> 20 --> 02 --> 12 --> 13 --> 19 --> 55 --> 35 --> ...

and its period is the order of the multiplier, 6, in the group of residues relatively prime to the modulus, 10. (59 in this case).

The "random digits" are the units digits of the 2-digit numbers, ie, 3,0,2,2,3,9,5,... the sequence mod 10. The arithmetic is simple enough to carry out in your head.

This is an example of my "multiply-with-carry" random number generator, and it seems to provide quite satisfactory sequences mod 2^32 or 2^64 , particularly well suited to the way that modern CPU's do integer arithmetic.

<comment><comment><comment><comment><comment>~

source: [https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!msg/sci.math/6BIYd0c...](https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en#!msg/sci.math/6BIYd0cafQo/Ucipn_5T_TMJ)

edit: so with two people, one of you could chose the seed on alternate days based on some other criteria (like the N you already have or the things @nenadg mentioned (nearby people, cars, windows, cats, dogs, buildings, whatever you agree upon, those things are pretty pseudo-random))

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I worked in a shop where we played a game called Chino. Everyone started with 3 coins in their left hand. Each transferred 0, 1, 2, or 3 coins to their right hand and extended their closed right hand. Each made a unique guess of the total coins. A correct guess wins the benefit or liberates the guesser from subsequent rounds to determine who had to do the dirty work. Modified for your situation, each would agree to have 0-3 coins when you meet. The total could pass for a pseudo-random number.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm not sure what's allowed. Can use current seconds in someone's watch, for example? Or maybe ask some random person to say a random word, and then use the position of the first letter of that word in the alphabet? This sounds like a really fun problem but I'm certain about the rules.

</comment><comment><USER5> You can count nearby people, cars, windows, cats, dogs, buildings, whatever you agree upon, those things are pretty pseudo-random, only limit is familiar environment, but you can find other alternatives there (number of pens on one's desktop, number of books, etc.).

</comment><comment><USER6> Rock paper scissors? Since you are both trying to win, and being predictable means losing you'll be as random as you can be.

</comment><comment><USER4> this is the nerdiest thing I've heard in my life, haha

</comment><comment><USER7> Are dices allowed?

<comment><AUTHOR> Ideally we'd use nothing besides ourselves, but dice is a good idea.

<comment><USER7> Another idea, use the color of your t-shirt as a random number source. If you know electronics, you may use [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_color_code](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_color_code) , it's easy to remember because it's almost as a rainbow. And pick ((color(x)+color(y))%3)+1 or something.</comment></comment></comment>


Books on Philosophy of Technology Recommended by Evgeny Morozov - <AUTHOR> https://fivebooks.com/best-books/evgeny-morozov-philosophy-technology/ <comment><AUTHOR> Quite a surprising selection; I'd have expected to see books by Neil Postman, Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer or any number of other authors. A fifteen minute read.

</comment><comment><USER2> All book links are shrouded Amazon affiliate links (tag=fivebooks001-20).</comment>


Y combinator Video Interview?? - <AUTHOR> has anyone ever gotten an email from y combinator asking to schedule a video interview? Is this a good or bad thing? Any feedback would help!! <comment><USER2> Yes we have. This is just to better understand your business. Prepare for this like you would for a YC final interview. Enough resources out there to help you with that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Was it as intense as people say the final interview is? What type of questions did they ask?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> We just got one yesterday, but don't know what it really means. Seems as though its for startups they like but just need more info before making a decision

<comment><AUTHOR> Same here. Apparently they started doing the video interviews last year, I wonder if they give a video interview to every startup that they're thinking of inviting for an onsite interview, or only to the ones that they are on the fence about...</comment></comment>


Reducing spam and encouraging helpful behaviors in web 2.0 sites by pairing up users randomly. - <AUTHOR>

Would something like that make sense?
Imagine for example on a social news site pairing up users randomly when they log in.
You would be able to see the activities of your partner in real-time. You could help each other and even report on each other in case of spamming.
Since this partnership lasts the entire session, you will feel some connection to your partner and a greater sense of responsibility in ensuring things go well. <comment><USER2> Watch this fantastic talk if you haven't seen it already:

<http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143>

He randomly pairs players in games to complete boring tasks (e.g., tagging photos) in a fun way (e.g. Predict what the other person is thinking).

</comment><comment><USER3> Very cool idea. To play devil's advocate though, it might require a heck of a lot of explanation, which might prove distracting when you might be better off helping people use the application.

A couple places it might work nicely though - established web 2.0 sites or places like Second Life where having a buddy might make venturing into unknown territory feel safer.

Good luck with it.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen Interesting. There are things you'd have to work out (like if someone logs off before his partner) but it sounds cool.

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like work - I don't want to work when I log in to a social network.

</comment><comment><USER5> why all this "pairing jazz" if i can simply click on "report spam?"

Too much effort for too less benefit, I believe...

</comment><comment><USER6> sounds interesting ... should be tried ;)

</comment><comment><USER7> please make it pair you when you hit a button, not when you log in. revealing your activities to a random person should be opt-in, not opt-out. and people wouldn't want to do this every time, anyway.</comment>


Opinion: A.I. Could Worsen Health Disparities - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/opinion/ai-bias-healthcare.html <comment><USER2> Dr Khullar suggests that AI will exacerbate biases in medical practice. His fundamental concern is that machine learning will codify biases and become self-fulfilling prophesies. But there is scant evidence that AI will _worsen_ these disparities.

If anything, a machine-learning point of view better addresses his concerns than a traditional one, because they can be much more quickly updated to correct for identified biases. Doctors spend years and years of hard work becoming efficient and effective human algorithms themselves, and updating those human algorithms in the face of newer evidence is difficult. In standard practice, biases are often invisible and uncodified to begin with. "Moral intuition" is something all doctors use, but it's also something of a black box in nearly every real-world use case.

<comment><USER3> I'm speaking as former CTO/Co-Founder of medical image ML firm (for 3yrs):

1\. there is already a major bias in medical diagnosis - a bias favoring those who can actually pay

2\. automating even parts of the diagnostic process saves money and reduces cost, that is a huge benefit to _everyone_

3\. not everything gets done immediately. lets figure out the basics first (getting classifiers working on whatever dataset we have) and then focus on getting it to work on everything. It isnt like medicine was right from day one...heck, I seem to recall leeches and bloodletting being the norm for a long time.

4\. Almost every doctor i spoke to was afraid of ML/AI because it pierced their forced scarcity and threatened their wages. I might argue that Health Disparities are worsened currently because medical boards throttle residency programs and fellowships to create an artificially constrained supply and hence high prices. (before I get the rot response of...of course doctors will never go away...:yes, they wont go away, but they will focus less on rote things and increase throughput thus increase supply thus decrease wages.

5\. We got all our training data from minorities. Incidentally, foreign countries are a lot more generous with training data. For our ML diagnostic firm, we had envisioned giving the product away for free in poorer countries where we could just get training data.

<comment><USER4> How do medical boards throttle residency programs? The biggest limiting factor today is the Medicare funding cap.

[https://news.aamc.org/for-the-media/article/gme-funding- doct...](https://news.aamc.org/for-the-media/article/gme-funding-doctor- shortage/)

<comment><USER3> In the US, the average resident makes ~57k USD these days. If you're familiar with medical bill rates in the US, a week of billings covers the entire annual salary. For specialists (e.g., derm, radiology, etc) a _day_ of billing can cover the entire annual salary for the resident. Even if you assume not all bills are collected, or that many are negotiated down by insurers, the profit margin on residents is off the charts.

Given billing rates, "we dont have money" is a very convenient answer for why there arent more residents (and hence more future supply of doctors.) Heck, given the wild profit of a resident, I'd personally fund their annual salary for a share of the annual billings.

The real answer is...current doctors, specifically specialty boards must actually be willing to train a resident, however they are funded (medicare, by hospitals, by me, etc.) -- and specialty boards do not. It would increase supply and decrease their future wages. Openings are very carefully throttled to create artificial scarcity.

Medical specialty boards are essentially cartels.

This is hard to imagine as a technologist because we largely operate in a free market. Anyone can enter the market and opt to work for less money than you. A foreign worker can try to do your job for less. The job can be off-shored.

<comment><USER5> Do technologists truly operate in a free market? There are rampant anti- competitive practices across tech, I think it's a SV libertarian fantasy that they are in a free market, a fantasy they tell themselves to paper over their squashing of rivals.

<comment><USER6> The _job market_ is very competitive. You don't need anyone's permission to enter it, all you have to do is do good work. Salaries are high due to a combination of massive demand and the fact that it takes a long time to get good at it. Even their stupid collusion attempts are basically fruitless, because the tech market isn't just four colluding companies, there are thousands. You don't have to go from Google to Apple, you can go to Amazon or Red Hat or numerous others, or create your own startup. That number of companies could never secretly collude -- they couldn't even get away with four. Which is why salaries are still high.

The true threat is companies crushing smaller rivals, because that's how in the long term you end up in a situation where there _aren 't_ thousands of tech companies because no one can compete without the assent of one of the major ones, and they prefer to destroy you or compete with you or buy you out than let you grow independently. And that's how salaries could fall in the long-term. But you tell people that supporting walled gardens and closed proprietary services could lower their long-term salary and they don't hear you, because they're after the quick buck today.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> James Mickens on this topic:

[https://youtu.be/ajGX7odA87k](https://youtu.be/ajGX7odA87k)

> Some people enter the technology industry to build newer, more exciting > kinds of technology as quickly as possible. My keynote will savage these > people and will burn important professional bridges, likely forcing me to > join a monastery or another penance-focused organization. In my keynote, I > will explain why the proliferation of ubiquitous technology is good in the > same sense that ubiquitous Venus weather would be good, i.e., not good at > all.

> Using case studies involving machine learning and other hastily-executed > figments of Silicon Valley's imagination, I will explain why computer > security (and larger notions of ethical computing) are difficult to achieve > if developers insist on literally not questioning anything that they do > since even brief introspection would reduce the frequency of git commits. At > some point, my microphone will be cut off, possibly by hotel management, but > possibly by myself, because microphones are technology and we need to > reclaim the stark purity that emerges from amplifying our voices using rams' > horns and sheets of papyrus rolled into cone shapes. I will explain why > papyrus cones are not vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks, and then I will > conclude by observing that my new start-up papyr.us is looking for talented > full-stack developers who are comfortable executing computational tasks on > an abacus or several nearby sticks.

<comment><USER8> Thanks for the link. At some point he says "the gadgets are the true people of the Earth", which more or less resembles what Jacques Ellul first wrote about 60 years ago [1]:

> Hard determinists would view technology as developing independent from > social concerns. They would say that technology creates a set of powerful > forces acting to regulate our social activity and its meaning.

and

> According to this view of determinism we organize ourselves to meet the > needs of technology and the outcome of this organization is beyond our > control or we do not have the freedom to make a choice regarding the outcome > (autonomous technology) (...) In his 1954 work The Technological Society, > Ellul essentially posits that technology, by virtue of its power through > efficiency, determines which social aspects are best suited for its own > development through a process of natural selection.

I used to be a pretty big believer in things like "technology will make everything better", but after reading some of Ellul's books I've started to have my doubts about that.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism#Hard...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_determinism#Hard_and_soft_determinism)

<comment><USER9> Great now I can quote somebody about why I think technology is evil who isn't the Unabomber thanks.

<comment><USER10> Sarcasm?

I only ask because you're saying this on a website. A website focused on funding technology startups. Hosted on the internet. Build by darpa grants. Like, this doesn't seem like your sort of place if you're serious about thinking technology is evil.

<comment><USER7> Sometimes the people in the best position to judge are the ones who know the most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What I"m getting from the article: People seem to think that AI is magic, and similar to any other technology. ("THESE DEVELOPERS PUT IN BAD STUFF") That's not how AI works. You have to be aware of bias, introduce random error, accept false positives/negatives, and avoid overfitting.

That's not something that someone that took a boot camp on Tensorflow is going to understand a lot about.

EDIT: Also if you're using the results of the AI process, you should understand what the metadata about the results and where a good balance is.

</comment><comment><USER12> Any technological progress in health tech worsen disparities, because when it's new, it's expensive. The more the tech is ground breaking, the more the disparity because the effect is so drastic for the money.

Doesn't mean we should not improve health tech.

<comment><USER13> It's also sometimes needlessly expensive when companies make excess profits on medical gear. It's up to governments (is really) to help everyone get access to improved care.

<comment><USER14> Medical device companies have very high gross profit margins but net profit margins around 7%, which is pretty typical for high tech manufacturing. That suggests that there isn't much in the way of excess profit.

<comment><USER15> Agreed I think the (financial) excesses of the health care system are mostly related to the litigiousness of the USA and the administrative burden.

<comment><USER4> "Overall annual medical liability system costs, including defensive medicine, are estimated to be $55.6 billion in 2008 dollars, or 2.4 percent of total health care spending."

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048809/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048809/)

Litigiousness is an issue but it's not the biggest one.

<comment><USER14> My understanding is that the main proposed mechanism of action is that fear of lawsuits results in excess treatments.

<comment><USER4> That's included in the 2.4% estimate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Dhruv Khullar (@DhruvKhullar) is a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, an assistant professor in the departments of medicine and health care policy at Weill Cornell Medicine, and director of policy dissemination at the Physicians Foundation Center for the Study of Physician Practice and Leadership."

OK. Also noted that this is an opinion piece and not journalism.

From the opinion piece: "A recent study found that some facial recognition programs incorrectly classify less than 1 percent of light-skinned men but more than one-third of dark-skinned women. "

Study link: [http://news.mit.edu/2018/study-finds-gender-skin-type- bias-a...](http://news.mit.edu/2018/study-finds-gender-skin-type-bias- artificial-intelligence-systems-0212?mod=article_inline)

Exact stats:

"In the researchers' experiments, the three programs' error rates in determining the gender of light-skinned men were never worse than 0.8 percent. For darker-skinned women, however, the error rates ballooned — to more than 20 percent in one case and more than 34 percent in the other two."

From the NYT opinion piece: "A.I. programs used to help judges predict which criminals are most likely to reoffend have shown troubling racial biases, as have those designed to help child protective services decide which calls require further investigation."

Associated links: [https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk- assessm...](https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-risk-assessments- in-criminal-sentencing) [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/magazine/can-an- algorithm...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/02/magazine/can-an-algorithm- tell-when-kids-are-in-danger.html?module=inline)

Relevant quotes from each:

"The formula was particularly likely to falsely flag black defendants as future criminals, wrongly labeling them this way at almost twice the rate as white defendants."

"48 percent of the lowest-risk families were being screened in, while 27 percent of the highest-risk families were being screened out. Of the 18 calls to C.Y.F. between 2010 and 2014 in which a child was later killed or gravely injured as a result of parental maltreatment, eight cases, or 44 percent, had been screened out as not worth investigation."

<comment><USER17> It blows my mind that anyone thinks AI for recidivism is a good idea, given the well documented biases inherent in the existing system.

<comment><USER14> Well, the well documented biases in the existing system are exactly why you might think that AIs would be a good idea.

<comment><USER17> Not if by AI you mean anything in the same neighborhood as supervised learning.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I would respond that A.I is the -only- realistic hope we have for reducing the biases in our medical system. The systemic and individual level bias of the medical system is not going to go away due to some sudden enlightenment. It's true to that to some extent the first wave of AI applications will inevitably carry with them some of the biases that exist in the current medical system.

These biases are going to lead to measurably disparate outcomes. Fortunately measurably disparate outcomes are exactly the type of thing that can be used to train or otherwise guide the improvement of a machine learning model.

As long as we have mindfulness that there will be similar biases in the first wave of applications, AI and the typical associated data slicing and dicing that is done when doing model development will be the best tools for detecting and then mitigating these biases.

<comment><USER19> > I would respond that A.I is the -only- realistic hope we have for reducing > the biases in our medical system.

I would counter that the only realistic hope is social change. A.I. or not, biases will persist in medicine as long as they persist in society at large. The idea that an unbiased A.I. will arise from a process designed and run by biased individuals sounds like utopianism. Technology is not magic and it won't solve our "hard" social problems for us.

<comment><USER20> Yeah really!

There's plenty of evidence that medicine today has deeply embedded biases. Disparities in Black maternal health outcomes have been thoroughly covered in the literature and even mainstream media.

On the other hand there's plenty of evidence that ML and AI _magnify_ inequality in other areas.

So relying on technology as a magic bullet to solve these societal problems seems ... naive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Not my exact field, but I keep track of the research for potential applications.

The general vibe is that there are potentially large welfare gains to be achieved if algorithms, ML or statistical methods are integrated into human decision making in principled way. People have innate tendency treat noise as a signal. That does not mean that the dangers mentioned in the article are not real [2]. We should be very aware of them in their current forms and prevent repeating them.

Few of my favorite papers:

1\. _Human Decisions and Machine Predictions_ The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 133, Issue 1, 1 February 2018, Pages 237–293, [https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx032](https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjx032) [https://www.nber.org/papers/w23180](https://www.nber.org/papers/w23180)

2\. _Dissecting Racial Bias in an Algorithm that Guides Health Decisions for 70 Million People_ (2019) [https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3287560.3287593](https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3287560.3287593)

3\. _Simplicity Creates Inequity: Implications for Fairness, Stereotypes, and Interpretability_ [https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04578](https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04578)

4\. _Direct Uncertainty Prediction for Medical Second Opinions_ [https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.01771](https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.01771)

</comment><comment><USER22> I work in healthcare and one thing that's always top of mind for me is that that the data we work with is only (generally) indicative of the physicians'/billers' best guess.

So - say we get a bunch of diagnosis codes from a hospital. Codes are generally added in via medical billers after a patient is discharged, based on the physicians input and other data on the patient record. So at this point the data in which you generally work with has gone through two different humans, who used their (best attempt) subjective viewpoint for this patient.

This generally works fine for a lot of common conditions, evident conditions, so things like heart attacks, fractures, and so on. But for things that are complex, like sepsis leading to more evident conditions, the data may not necessarily capture that sepsis even occurred.

Not to say this is a unique problem to healthcare, but something that's not talked about often. A lot of the data we train and model on is based on a human's best guess, which may in some ways be limiting given really complex, dynamic processes.

</comment><comment><USER5> Like all discussions of AI, I feel the discussion in the comments seems unmoored from actual predictive analytics in healthcare. We have this fantasy future of omnipotent AI machines controlling our destiny, when in reality the here and now is all we have solid evidence about. The reality is all of this "AI" in healthcare is just fancy mathematical equations crunched on increasingly large data-sets, and until humans themselves are much less biased, the math isn't going to solve these social problems.

My job involves creating predictive modeling for the VA hospital system. I have recently, in the past month, worked on models predicting the probability of death in the next year, probability of receiving Social work services, probability of receiving a screener which indicates food insecurity, and more. The idea behind all of these is to take our clinical intuitions and the intuitions based on prior research, then gather variables that allow us to use our theoretical intuition to predict future health outcomes. These predictive models may turn into dashboards, which are basically daily or weekly tables that show clinicians which of their patients are predicted to get certain outcomes.

Now, how does this all circle back to biases and disparities? All of our models include racial, ethnic, gender, rurality, age, and many other categories of sociodemographic information. However, at every step of this process, there is a human (whether PI, analyst, or clinician in the final step) looking at numbers/variables/values and making decisions.

Thus, I don't think we can truly separate the AI from the human in current healthcare analytics. We do our best to control for disparities and get down to the brass tax, the actual medical information, but there is simply too much human decision-making in the current workflow to truly divorce the "disparity differential" from whatever humans would do on their own sans mathematical modeling.

Overall: our models are mere collaborators, and until we minimize our personal and systemic biases and disparities, we can't hope to use our fancy mathematical models to minimize them for us.

<comment><USER20> Great comment! One thing I'd add:

> until we minimize our personal and systemic biases and disparities, we can't > hope to use our fancy mathematical models to minimize them for us.

And as long as technologists are in denial about the extent to which personal and systemic biases influence reality (as we're seeing in this thread), tech will continue to reinforce and magnify these biases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Another potential problem is that minorities are often more reluctant than average to let their genetic information be used in health research. It's understandable given historical issues but will probably lead to bad outcomes in the future.

</comment><comment><USER23> This may be true, but it happens today as well without AI. Big pharma corporations choose to do research on treatments for diseases that affect the ocidental world. Often setting aside the needs of poor nations.

<comment><USER16> This is addressed in the article:

"The risk with A.I. is that these biases become automated and invisible — that we begin to accept the wisdom of machines over the wisdom of our own clinical and moral intuition. Many A.I. programs are black boxes: We don't know exactly what's going on inside and why they produce the output they do. But we may increasingly be expected to honor their recommendations."

<comment><USER24> I do understand that there is a serious possibility of deploying a bad black box AI, a number of questions come to mind though.

Isn't it true though, that human intelligence (and especially corporate/government/etc. intelligence) is also susceptible to biases which are invisible? Also, do we know why humans or groups of humans produce the output they do? Is there some kind of black box testing procedure we could use to increase trust in AI to a point at least equal to humans?

<comment><USER16> The presumed argument here is that you can challenge individual people, corporations, etc. more easily on discriminatory behavior than you can challenge an algorithm. If an algorithm happens to refuse to issue loans to black people, who's the class action lawsuit going to sue?

<comment><USER25> Presumably you could sue the bank that is using the AI to make the loan decisions, or is there something I'm missing?

<comment><USER19> You'd have to prove that the A.I. was discriminating based on a "protected class" and not on some other basis. But you have no insight into the A.I. or its training data. Nor do you have a comparable A.I. of your own to run A/B experiments that can prove discrimination. Now what?

<comment><USER25> Don't these problems already arise when trying to prove bias in a legacy meat- based intelligence?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> What this article is also missing is the fact that a lot of the existing data problems have to do with the cost of obtaining this data. When we move to a more universal collection of the data in a structured format that can then be used to further train the model, you actually end up with a better representation.

However, this all falls apart with the current access to healthcare. If the access is not universal, then you can't expect the results to be anywhere near equal or at least similar. We really need to solve the healthcare access problem.

The other item I find questionable is the example with home-based rehab vs a facility. Sure, for better-off patients with a good home environment, transportation, good food, etc., being in that good/positive environment will likely lead to better outcomes. However, if the person doesn't have that, is that still better than a facility? Would be great if we saw data adjusted for this disparity.

<comment><USER19> > When we move to a more universal collection of the data in a structured > format that can then be used to further train the model, you actually end up > with a better representation.

I'm not sure how that's true. Access to products and services that do this kind of collection is very much a class issue. Poor people, especially in the US, can't afford regular physicals nor personal health trackers like a fitbit. Additionally, personal health technologies with the best, most accurate data are the most expensive ones - e.g. Apple Watch vs. generic fitness band.

If we lived in a world where class was separate from race or gender, you might be correct. But that's not the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I would have thought that a scaled medical diagnosis AI/ML system with zero marginal cost for each additional user would provide "better, faster, cheaper" diagnosis thru increased primary health care capacity, reduced costs per patient, and reduce disparity.

What am I missing?

</comment><comment><USER13> AI could be used to improve the health outcomes of everyone. It all depends on how we use it.

</comment><comment><USER28> As A.i. does more of the diagnostic work for doctors, the skills of doctors grown through accumulated experience will atrophy. Similar to how few people now farm, and traditional farming methods end up being generationally forgotten.

</comment><comment><USER29> >failing NYTimes casts FUD on vaporware >Frontpage of HN sounds about right</comment>


Real-Time Yammer Competitor Hall Launches New Apps - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/07/real-time-yammer-competitor-hall-launches-new-apps-for-ios-and-mac-hits-10k-businesses-double-digit-growth/

<comment><USER3> I read the article top to bottom and couldn't figure out what it is that Hall does.

> _This startup is interested in building what comes next after the "social > intranet."_

I don't know what the social intranet is or was, I certainly have no idea "what comes next" -- and the article doesn't say.

> _At Intuit, Hellman was the only person on his team at the Mountain View > office, which led to the original inspiration that later became today's > Hall. "That's where I learned we needed a better way to communicate," he > says._

What was that better way??!? Better than what? He doesn't say.

These "articles" don't try to inform, they just throw buzz words around; they are instruments for companies to do PR, but the reader is the victim.

<comment><USER4> Hi bambax, I'm one of the founders here at Hall. Apologies for any frustration... Does visiting our landing page help? <https://hall.com> . If not, send me an email at brett @ hall-inc.com . I'd be happy to give you a live demo.

<comment><USER5> Help me with

      The Hall web app is 6 times faster than existing enterprise solutions

That's just as confusing? Can you explain that in a couple more sentences? My CTO just raved about 'We need to give Yammer a try, someone just recommended it'.

Why wouldn't we (ignoring my own 'what the hell is a social intranet' questions)? Can you give me a pitch in three sentences?

<comment><USER6> Hi darklajid, I'm CTO of Hall. Let me know if you have any additional technical questions about the app. As Brett said, it's probably time to start doing some more technical blog postings.

<comment><USER7> Hi

I'm just wondering what did you use to package your webapp for desktops?

Thanks!

<comment><USER4> stokanic, we started with adobe air which was a quick way to test our hypothesis early on that a desktop app would increase retention. We have since moved on to building native experience w xcode.

<comment><USER7> Ah, I see you've only done the desktop app for osx and not win. I was hoping you'd use something like CEF[1] and that you'd blog about it

[1] <https://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Your copy on the landing page (under the blue circle-ish images) is very hard to read.

The logo has an issue with spacing between the letters. The "a" is too far fromn the first "l".

The pricing page is not quite clear. What do I get with the free plan? Can I "friend" my co-workers? A paragraph explaining it would be nice. Five dollars seems like the wrong price for this sort of deal. Even the cheapest option on github is seven dollars.

I would love to test your headline.

The top segment of the landing page says nothing. There are no testimonials, no text explaining what you do, nothing. Just a signup box which does not seem to fit in the whole context.

This copy has the wrong rhythm:

 _About Hall

Hall helps teams and companies communicate in real-time. Our all-in-one unified communications app has everything your company needs to communicate and get things done. There are thousands of companies using Hall, from small businesses to the world's largest enterprises like Amazon and Nike. Professionals love using Hall to communicate._

Sentence structure is way too long, and confusing. Let me take a quick stab at it.

 _About us:

Hall aims to do one thing. Help your team communicate in real time. It achieves that with a state-of-the-art status panel. You can easily keep track of what your team is doing. Get things done by using our hassle-free communication tools. Its your own intelligence network.

Who uses Hall to make their lives easier? Big Companies like Nike, Amazon to smaller team like yours. They all have one thing in common: No matter the size, everyone just loves Hall.

But don't take our word for it. Try Hall now. See what you have been missing. Its free._

By the way, go ahead and use that if you want. :)

</comment><comment><USER9> "Real-Time Yammer", social intranet... The enterprise jargon in this article makes it almost impossible to understand that Hall seems to be just another group chat tool for companies similar to Hipchat and Flowdock.

</comment><comment><USER10> About time! Besides the hype & price of Yammer, it really sucks at real-time comms for teams smaller than 5-6.

I have never had a chance to use it with a bigger team but at that size they have abysmal state management - if you have more than 1 conversation && use more than 1 device = notification_hell. Its just silly how badly they manage this stuff.

Just discovered Hall earlier today and so far, so good! Good job @bretthellman & team.

<comment><USER11> I'm using it at a 100-person office but nobody wants to integrate yet-another- step into their daily processes or have to hop around different places to get different pieces of information (because naturally, John Doe will always want to do it his way if there isn't a policy otherwise or when it becomes too chaotic). It's the same 5-10 of us that make irregular posts and maybe an additional 5 that will occasionally lurk when they remember to. I suspect those people use the desktop client and just always have it running. No one takes advantage of the chat, the secret groups (okay, maybe one team is that I'm not aware of), or the file-sharing. That said, I've complained about the shoddy design and the confusing interface here before, so I'm happy it didn't take off internally.

This has led me to believe that if they're not able to use social features from within the software they're already using (that's already connected to our existing data), they probably won't use them to any effective capacity at all. We run a homebrew CRM, but I don't think slapping a chat or a file system into it will suddenly fix the problem. That said, I think company culture has a lot to do with it too; getting up and talking to people and scheduling meetings with them is highly encouraged here.

That all said, Jive's business enterprise stuff is probably the best in this arena right now because of how much you can do with it and how extensible it is, but I've been asking for us to switch for two years to no avail because management doesn't see the value in constant, but passive, streams of information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The first comment is a self promoting alternative (daPulse) whose website looks very similar and whose product, much like the one being promoted, just looks like a slightly different Yammer. This seems to be an unnecessarily crowded space.

EDIT: Not the first comment...just the top one at the time I read the article (didn't realize comments on TC are sorted as newest first by default)

<comment><USER4> aguynamedrich, What Yammer did well is reinvent the social intranet for making announcements inside the firewall. It allowed for one person inside a company of 1000s to broadcast to the entire company.

What Yammer never had a chance to perfect before being purchased/killed was how to be the place where people actually work... The way people work has changed in the last few years. People are working 24/7, using multiple devices, working in distributed teams, in teams that are cross-company etc... These changes making communicating in real-time a necessity which is why Hall is focused on real-time communications.

<comment><USER13> So how do you guys solve the issue of most "enterprise social software" being nothing but a fairly shallow replacement for / complement to, email?

(Disclaimer: I'm the founder of a startup that's also playing in this space (depending on how broadly you define "this space"), and I don't really know if we're competitors or not!)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So, I'm playing with this with my team... And I'm not so sure that I "get it". How is this better than using Skype or IRC? What am I missing? I like the clean interface, but I'm not sure what value I'm getting out of it. How does this compare to Yammer or Jostle?

<comment><USER5> Our company's using Lync internally (MS shop, everything is golden if it comes from Redmond).

I'd like to understand as well what this would offer that Lync doesn't - <USER2> that's from a guy that isn't a fan of Lync in the first place.

I guess a decent Android client would be nice.. What else?

<comment><USER4> darklajid Would love to discuss... Can you msg me at brett @ hall-inc.com or if you're on hall, <https://hall.com/brett>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How is Hall's "real-time" real-timier than those of Yammer's or a number of other enterprise activity-stream apps?

Its pretty much a given that an activity stream app will use an socketi.io-ish messaging systme for real-time updates, some sort of APN service for mobile notifications and a visual tool for in-web-app notifications.

What does Hall bring to the table that differentiates it from other Activity stream[1] apps

*disclaimer: I work for Socialcast, VMWare's Social Enterprise App that has had these features for a while now.

#hint We have a Freemium model where 99% of features are provided for free to companies with less than 50 users.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Activity_stream>

<comment><USER6> Hi codenerdz....I'm CTO and co-founder of Hall. Our entire application is a single page application (no refreshing). That immediately makes our product more realtime than Yammer. This includes one-on-one messaging, file sharing, group chat, collaborative notepads, 3rd party integrations and friendship/contact management in multiple rooms and multiple networks. While Yammer may have elements that are RT, our entire world is RT.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> A few people at our company signed up for Hall and invited others, causing a runaway chain of invitation reminders that drove our entire team nuts. Not a great way to get introduced to a product.

<comment><USER6> Hi cal5k....CTO of Hall here. We apologize for the inconvenience. We're constantly trying to optimize the way we send network invitations. We're still working out the kinks and finding the right balance for notifications. You can contact me at ron @ hall-inc.com or if you're on hall, <https://hall.com/ron> if you'd like us to take a look at your specific case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> How is this different than Skype?

* I can have permanent group chats in Skype

* 1-on-1 chat

* Skype is supported in all devices

* I can share files

Am I missing something?</comment>


How packaging can make food more flavorful - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/02/accounting-for-taste <comment><AUTHOR> _adding two and a half ounces to the weight of a plastic yogurt container makes the yogurt seem about twenty-five per cent more filling_

Weight loss product idea - food weights.</comment>


Power plant executives to face Fukushima charges for first time - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/07/31/power-plant-executives-to-face-fukushima-charges-for-first-time/

<comment><USER2> Wow, the concept of citizens' panels sounds awesome. I wish we had something similar in the US. It's the perfect solution for dealing with police shootings, where prosecutors are reluctant to indict an officer (since they need to work closely with police in their everyday work).

<comment><USER3> A pre-trial in the court of public opinion? I thought that is the purpose of grand juries. After all, a grand jury would _indict a ham sandwich_. (Though not all pork, evidently)

On one hand, it's a massive waste of judicial bandwidth. On the other, it's an effective check on the coziness between AGs, DAs, and law enforcement organizations.

<comment><USER4> The difference seems to be that a US grand jury can indict on a prosecutors motion (and even, IIRC, in certain cases independently), but no one is obligated to prosecute based on an indictment once it is issued (obviously, one sought by a prosecutor will probably usually be followed up on by that prosecutor.)

But, from the description in the article, when a citizens' panel finds that charges should be issued after a prosecutor has decided not to prosecute, the case is reopened by prosecutors. Assuming this isn't just a reconsideration where the prosecutor can again decide not to actually prosecute the charges, this is a fairly substantial difference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> NOVA's documentary on Fukushima [1] is a very informative watch and shows the immense challenges faced by TEPCO.

I don't think they will be convicted.

[1] - [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/nuclear- disaster.html](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/nuclear-disaster.html)

<comment><USER5> The blame should not be with the operators, but with decision makers who signed off on a fatally flawed plant design. Really, you'd think it was common sense: if you absolutely need these generators in case of a disaster, like a flood, don't put the generators and their gear/infrastructure at a lower flood level! Much the same mistake was repeated many times in Houston, and came to light after Hurricane Ike.

Other things that came to light that were shown in the video:

Completely passive backup cooling systems that were dependent on actively- actuated valves for proper functioning. (Should have defaulted open in case of a power failure.)

Dependence on sensors that would fail without power.

Dependence on sensors that would provide dangerously misleading readings in precisely the most dangerous situation. (Water already boiled away)

I think it's a good video to watch if you are doing operations of any kind that requires worst-case thinking and planning.

<comment><USER6> In hindsight it is obvious, but at the time of construction, you would have to justify spending money to protect against _both_ a 9.0 earthquake (pretty rare) _and_ a tsunami larger than one ever recorded _at the same time_. Which can only happen if you have the 9.0 quake right off your coastline.

At the time the plants were built, there was no geologist on the planet that believed Japan could even _have_ a 9.0 quake, or a 30 meter tsunami (which you needed the quake for anyway). Thus, at the time, the plant was over designed for all possible scenarios.

<comment><USER7> This is why defense in depth is important. Even without anticipating a 9.0 earthquake, they could have anticipated that their floodwalls would fail for an unspecified reason, and desighned the plant to be resiliant to flooding in the event of flood wall failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The people who lived near the plants lost everything, perhaps 80000 of them. I'm not sure what became of them, but I'm pretty sure no one came up and said, here is a check for the fair market value of your property. It was more like, you can live in this cardboard cubical in this community center now. I'm sure they've moved on by now.

I'm sort of surprised they weren't treated better. All of the nuclear reactors in Japan are shut down now, and the financial interests would like to see them turned on. But how do you expect public support with 80000 refugees from the meltdowns that are grumpy about it?

<comment><USER9> Global warming will cause far worse problems than Fukushima did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Can someone kindly explain how the photo of Norio Kimura and its caption relates to the article?

<comment><USER11> I was wondering the same thing. It feels like the article is implicitly blaming the Fukushima meltdown for the tsunami somehow.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> About time.

</comment><comment><USER13> The article indicates that Fukushima was the "world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl in 1986" but let's not beat around the bush, by now many of us have come to the conclusion that this is the worst nuclear disaster ever as the distrubing ecosystem collapse [1] currently underway in the Pacific Ocean would seem to confirm.

When Chernobyl had its meltdown, they weren't pumping up to 400 tons of radioactive waste into an ocean every single day [2].

Either way, am surprised but delighted to see the Washington Post bring the issue to the forefront today.

[1] [http://enenews.com/govt-official-chilling-report-pacific- oce...](http://enenews.com/govt-official-chilling-report-pacific-ocean- silence-seas-very-very)

[2] [http://tass.ru/en/world/759657](http://tass.ru/en/world/759657)

<comment><USER14> There are 187000000000000 _million_ gallons of water in the Pacific Ocean, meaning that "radioactive waste" is 2.1 x 10^-10% of the body of water itself.

The waste we're talking about is HTO --- tritiated water --- which is a low- energy beta emitter that has intrinsically low bioavailability, because it is literally just water and is eliminated quickly.

Before developing an opinion about how terrifying this radiation leak is, a good number to have handy --- exercise for the reader --- is over the 12 year half life of tritium, assuming 400 gallons pumped into the ocean every day, for 4384 days, what percentage of the background radiation of the Pacific ocean are we talking about elevating it to?

Another number, which will not make you feel better about the world, is what elevation to background radiation is produced by the coal plants it would take to offset all the power produced by nukes.

Finally: if you believe that HTO leaks from TEPCO are, or are going to be, responsible for mass die-offs of marine life, you're going to have to account for the fact that we basically carpet-bombed the oceans with HTO during the insane nuclear weapons testing of the 1960s; nothing TEPCO is doing will come close.

<comment><USER13> In an attempt to grasp how toxic the water is, wouldn't it be more effective to measure levels of cesium 137 instead of overall background radiation? I don't care what background radiation the entire Pacific has, I care if the sushi I'm eating has ionized, cancer-causing particles in it.

 _" Michio Aoyama's initial findings were more startling than most. As a senior scientist at the Japanese government's Meteorological Research Institute, he said levels of radioactive cesium 137 in the surface water of the Pacific Ocean could be 10,000 times as high as contamination after Chernobyl..."_

[http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/asia/concerns- over-m...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/17/world/asia/concerns-over- measurement-of-fukushima-fallout.html)

<comment><USER14> Your analysis might confuse two different phenomena.

When you mention TEPCO pouring "400 million gallons" into the Pacific, what you're talking about is them dumping contaminated cooling water from tanks into the ocean. The scale of that dumping is caused by (a) the ongoing need to pump water into the compromised reactor to cool it and (b) the large amounts of water they've already stored. However: that water is also filtered, to remove the (actually dangerous) Sr-90. What's being dumped into the ocean is HTO, not Sr-90 or Cs-137.

On the other hand, the meltdown at Fukushima contaminated the entire area with Cs-137, most of which is in the soil, sediment, and sand. The Cs-137 contamination is much worse than the HTO contamination. However, it is also not ongoing; in fact, increase in cesium detected around the plant has fallen dramatically in the last two years.

<comment><USER13> Fair enough - though I'm not sure if I will just take your word for it that the potential for new releases of new cesium 137 is not an ongoing threat from Fukushima Daiichi. The only way we can know for sure I suppose, is through the efforts of independent researchers brave enough to get close to the facility.

In the spirit of HN, it would be neat to see an open technology solution for the purposes of monitoring. Ie:

      if(waterSample.cesium137 > 0.001) return ALARM(waterSample)

<comment><USER15> > it would be neat to see an open technology solution for the purposes of > monitoring

It's trivial to do so. Decay of Cs-137 releases a 662 keV gamma ray that is easily measured and the count rate is proportional to the source activity (or ultimately the total amount of Cs-137 present). You can calibrate an inexpensive NaI detector such that it will tell you how much Cs-137 is in a given volume of water. If you place it next to a pipe that has a constant flow rate, you can infer the average amount of Cs-137 in the liquid flowing through the pipe. It's something that you can build in an afternoon if you know what you're doing and have the equipment.

This is pretty much how they monitor liquids for contamination in a real plant, except they use more detailed spectral measurements to monitor multiple isotopes. If you ever have the rare opportunity to go into a reactor control room, there will be a display somewhere that reads out this exact measurement.

<comment><USER13> Good info!

If the technology is cheap, as you point out, then the next logical step might be a collaborative project to get a network of inexpensive, miniature, buoyant craft's out to sea - for the purpose of actively measuring levels of cesium 137; sharing these results for everyone to see, to graph, and to check on at any given time of the day.

One-time results from a fish is useful data but to have a whole swarm of devices actively monitoring levels in various locations would be ideal.

Thinking ahead, the next hurdle could be the logistics of internet connection - maybe they could connect to each other in a mesh-network that daizy-chains back to an internet connection closer to shore. Oh, and power (solar panel maybe?). Navigation. Yeah - some challenges for sure, but it all seems within reason.

<comment><USER16> Somebody did this. Before the experiment, they expected a background level of Cesium 137 of between 1 and 2 bq/M^3 (caused by 1950s nuclear testing, which released a ton of it). They found actual levels between 1 and 2 bq/M^3 across the Pacific with some small variation above and below: [http://ourradioactiveocean.org/results.html](http://ourradioactiveocean.org/results.html)

Think about it this way. Worst-case estimates are that 2-4 kilos of Cesium 137 were released. If it all ends up in the ocean, the total Pacific Ocean weighs on the order of 638,000,000,000,000,000,000 kilos. The total new Cesium 137 is: 0.000000000000000000627% of the ocean. At a 30 year half-life, that's one decay event per 70 liters per hour.

<comment><USER13> Thanks for the headsup - but there's nothing wrong with some competition and not to mention getting more coverage; for example it doesn't look like they have any data near the coast of Fukushima preficture which is the most important spot. Also the monitoring does not appear in realtime and if we are getting nitpicky there are certainly a few UX issues with how the data is presented.

On a related note, I'm sure Ken Buesseler is a good guy and his site is nice and I have nothing bad to say about him; I don't know him - but you can find comments about him from people who claim he's a "nuclear shill" and so regardless as a matter of principal it would be prudent to get more independent researchers involved in gathering data.

<comment><USER15> > but you can find comments about him from people who claim he's a "nuclear > shill" and so regardless as a matter of principle it would be prudent to get > more independent researchers involved in gathering data.

You can also find a large number of people on the Internet who claim Obama is a lizard alien ([http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/polling-theory- embarrassment-453096](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/polling-theory- embarrassment-453096)). This comparison is hyperbole, I know, but his data and methodologies are peer-reviewed and support his claims. He's far from the only person studying the issue, it's a hot topic (pun intended) [https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=fukushima+radiati...](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=fukushima+radiation+levels&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C34&as_sdtp=) .</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


R Tutorial for Beginners - <AUTHOR> http://www.statmethods.net/r-tutorial/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> This is a new and concise learn r guide on the stat methods site.</comment>


Show HN: just released our beta, please give us feedback - <AUTHOR> http://getinch.com/

<comment><USER2> Some honest feedback:

Get someone to thoroughly proofread your site copy. I'm unsure if it was done in a rush or by someone who speaks English as a second language,<br /> but there's a lot of odd phrasing and ambiguity (more below).

The tagline doesn't make the product's intent clear and doesn't really capture my interest.

"Inch makes the dirty job for you. It performs on-the-fly synchronisation with the biggest CRMs while you can keep focus on clients and don't waste more time with non-revenue activities hereafter." \- Awkward phrasing and typo (synchronization)

Add a light text shadow to the main hero image text - white on white is unreadable.

I'm not sure how I feel about the "be 1 of the 250" promotion. It seems fine to encourage people to try the beta as it provides incentive to try the latest thing while still having some level of forgiveness if/when things break, but 250 just seems very very small.

Header image transitioning on secondary pages (when the header is only ~100px tall) causes a lot of unnecessary overhead and lag.

The "How It Works" page having a "Get Inch" button every section seems a little too desperate. I'm all for optimizing conversion rates but that's just getting a little annoying like some kid trying to shout at you.

What is a "Millennial CRM Experience"? I mean, I understand that the younger generation is often categorized as "millennials", but it doesn't mean I like being associated with that generalization. Also, a large portion of your potential user base likely wont be millennials.

Blog layout is significantly different from the rest of the site. Logo goes back to blog root, not the site root.

"During our beta we are syncing connected CRMs every 20 minutes. That means if you add new or modify any data in your inch app, those changes will be synced into the connected CRM within 20 minutes maximum." I don't work in sales but anything less than near-instant updates seems unacceptable.

"Yes, we treat data safety seriously. You can read it further in our Terms&Conditions , or Privacy Policy" Nobody wants to read your T&C or Privacy Policy to find out why their information is secure. Provide a concise summary on the FAQ and then have the legalese in those.

Most of these things are small stuff that can be fixed, but at the end of it I think the biggest problem is I'm still not quite clear on what your product does and how it'll make my life easier (assuming I was in sales). Either way, congrats on launching beta (big milestone) and keep iterating until it sticks.

EDIT: Fixing formatting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> As someone who has no idea about sales, I did not understand what you do from the tagline

"The human touch of your everyday sales".

However when I scrolled down, I found this

"It performs on-the-fly synchronisation with the biggest CRMs while you can keep focus on clients and don't waste more time with non-revenue activities hereafter."

Now that makes it more clear to me the dummy. How about you use this instead as a summarized tagline ? Something like:

What: "Increase sales and revenue by focussing on clients and not multiple CRM systems"

How: "Manage clients across multiple CRMs in one single aggregated view"....

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the average person you've driven to your website you've got maybe five seconds before they hit the back button.

Took me a good thirty seconds before I understood your product and that is far too long.

Give me two sentences max on the front page that tells me what you do and makes me want to invest the time to know more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comments!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can almost guarantee you that with this domain (getinch.com), and phrases like "human touch", "love your crm","highrise", "kept playing with my" you won't get past a lot of spam filters :)

<comment><USER6> "It's time to #PlayHard"

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> _The human touch of your everyday sales._

I don't know what this means. I manage a small sales team. We use salesforce.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment. We'd be eager to know what you guys think about the app, feel free to drop us a line.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> After 30 seconds of staring at the homepage, and then the about page, I have no idea what this product is, or what it does.

</comment><comment><USER9> Congrats on the launch! You are in a space close to money (Sales) and that will help you. However, the site needs work. It didn't convey clearly what the product is and didn't get me excited enough to try it. I'm your potential customer.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wasn't sure what the product was. From the homepage I can see above the fold that it's "The human touch of your everyday sales. Inch is here to help you make and live more everyday." from that I'm still not sure what it is. Something for people in sales and some kind of productivity tool?

Scrolling down the page I get to see "Inch plays your tune. Inch completes your current workflow in the most natural, seamless and productive way. It is triggered by the way you work and gives back and asks for information right when you need it.". So generic, that still doesn't tell me what the product is or does.

Further down the page I can see that it links in with CRMs. So maybe some kind of productivity tool that's for sales people and links in with CRMs.

As a user by now I'd have given up as I still don't know what this thing is.

Scolling back to the top I clicked "About" to learn about the product. First I see some pictures of the team, definitely not something that's very important or warrants being the first item in the top level menu. Still nothing on this page tells me what the product is or what it does.

The "How it works" does give me some more info about what the app does. Pretty sure it is for sales people and it's not for me.

I'm not a marketing expert, just trying to give a narrative of how I experienced the site. I think you need some kind of clear message about what your product is and what the USP is so that users can (in the few valuable seconds that you have their attention) find out what you do and why it's so great.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback, we appreciate it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Ack. Add a drop shadow or border or something to your headline text, it's illegible on a lot of the background images.

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/dsmyknbh7gpp91u/Screenshot%202013-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/dsmyknbh7gpp91u/Screenshot%202013-10-29%2012.31.59.png)

[https://www.dropbox.com/s/mu0at7n464nkjpp/Screenshot%202013-...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/mu0at7n464nkjpp/Screenshot%202013-10-29%2012.32.08.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Is this a CRM skin for Android? It's not very clear to me. Almost every line is marketing speak.

I think you should get rid of "Inch is here to help you make and live more everyday." and replace it with what the product does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Can someone explain what this does? I wasn't able to discern it from the website.

<comment><USER14> My first instinct was that this was some sort of parody of beta launch sites. If I was previously familiar with the idea of a CRM it probably would have made more sense, however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Crashed when I first opened the menu.

Menu randomly refuses to come on screen, freezeing after the settings logo comes into view.

When trying to enable gravatar, it says "email goes here" might be better to have Email there. Looks a little unprofessional.

Settings menu doesn't feel like it gives a response, action just occurs. Changing the colour of the select tray might be nice.

Animations seem a little odd. Settings page fades in towards you and everything else just fades to replace the current page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Please tell us what kind of phone did you try it on!

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> The Suits references on [http://getinch.com/how-it- works](http://getinch.com/how-it-works) made me smile.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, Suits rocks! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I don't have an android phone so I can't try it out but it seems like a pretty cool concept. I wasn't able to work out what it does from the home page. I had to go to the "How it works" page and then I began to understand. So my feedback would be to try to get the message across better so the user instantly "gets it"

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip, we're on it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For the average person you've driven to your website you've got maybe five seconds before they hit the back button.

Took me a good thirty seconds before I understood your product and that is far too long.

Give me two sentences max on the front page that tells me what you do and makes me want to spend the time to know more.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I might be interested to try it since I use 37signals Highrise. But I don't understand what it does. Can you please elaborate?

I guess this is lesson for my small SaaS: the landing page should explain uses cases and how it helps - not really what product does.

</comment><comment><USER20> I couldn't tell what your product/service was within 10 seconds and left.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hmm...so looks like its a better UI for popular CRMs? I can't really tell what the app does :(

Also, consider getting the text on all the pages proof read..there are a lot of grammar mistakes...

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, we're fixing it ASAP!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Great! Consider giving a background color to the menu at the top right, improve footer

Also, there is a typo on green button (Take a ___feautre_ __tour)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, fixed the typo

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't want to sound trollish but the domain name makes me think penis enlargement.

<comment><AUTHOR> :) Thanks for the comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Site is unviewable on Chrome for iPad (ios7).

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, we're fixing it ASAP.

<comment><USER17> Fixed! Thanks for the tip!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> good looking website. one small typo: at the bottom, it says "be one of 250 proud member". should be members.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks, fixed :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> The lead copy complained about is really hard to read with all those light background pictures.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the tip, we're on it!</comment></comment>


Apple's latest F-you to iPhone developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/apples-latest-f-you-to-iphone-developers-2009-6

<comment><USER2> This is the second article I've seen on HN this morning using very similar language. If Apple skipped the Q&A to avoid negative confrontations, it certainly backfired!

<comment><USER3> That's because businessinsider is repeating the DF story. Which makes it more than a bit blogspammy unfortunately.</comment></comment>


It Never Hurts to be a Joel Fan - more on Fog Creek Recruiting - <AUTHOR> http://www.internmatch.com/blog/it-never-hurts-to-be-a-joel-fan-qa-with-anna-lewis-of-fog-creek-software

<comment><USER2> First thing I thought: "Sure, he might have looked like a stoner, but the invention exchange showed that he had more of a work ethic than Mike". Then I read the headline again.</comment>


Capability Myths Demolished (2003) - <AUTHOR> http://www.erights.org/elib/capability/duals/myths.html <comment><USER2> There's something called "Macaroons" that can be used for this.

"Macaroons: Cookies with Contextual Caveats for Decentralized Authorization in the Cloud" Arnar Birgisson, Joe Gibbs Politz, Úlfar Erlingsson, Ankur Taly, Michael Vrable, Mark Lentczner ; Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, Internet Society (2014)

[https://research.google/pubs/pub41892/](https://research.google/pubs/pub41892/)

"Google's Macaroons in Five Minutes or Less" [https://blog.bren2010.io/2014/12/04/macaroons.html](https://blog.bren2010.io/2014/12/04/macaroons.html)

A Javascript implementation: [https://github.com/nitram509/macaroons.js](https://github.com/nitram509/macaroons.js)

</comment><comment><USER3> Anyone know when this was released?

> largely dismissed by computer security reseachers and practitioners due to a > history of misunderstandings

seems incorrect now as virtually all web auth systems are capability based

<comment><USER4> ~2003, assuming its related to the paper[0] of the same name (and sharing an author/diagrams). The paper was very influential and helped change minds on the subject.

[0]: [http://srl.cs.jhu.edu/pubs/SRL2003-02.pdf](http://srl.cs.jhu.edu/pubs/SRL2003-02.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Yes, that's the paper, from 2003. Please everyone read this paper [http://srl.cs.jhu.edu/pubs/SRL2003-02.pdf](http://srl.cs.jhu.edu/pubs/SRL2003-02.pdf) rather than the web page.

And thanks! There's a story behind why this paper became so influential.

The paper was submitted to Usenix security and famously rejected [https://web.archive.org/web/20160730083134/http://www.eros-o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20160730083134/http://www.eros- os.org/pipermail/cap-talk/2003-March/001133.html)

Although we don't know who the specific reviewers were, they were from the Usenix Security program committee, and so from the elite of the field. This rejection captures perfectly the tone of dismissal common in academia at the time. The common wisdom was that capabilities were a failed and unworkable idea that we need not bother further discussing. As you can see from the date on that email, when we got this rejection, we immediately posted it publicly.

My sense is that the paper together with this referee rejection, posted and discussed publicly, caused the initial influence. The embarrassment from that rejection was not on the authors. Within two years, many still thought capabilities were wrong. But the sneer was gone. Arguments could be heard. I dare say it marks the beginning of the capability revival in academia.

<comment><USER5> Much of my work on capabilities, from 1988 till now, can be found at [https://research.google/people/author35958/](https://research.google/people/author35958/) and at Agoric [https://agoric.com/papers/](https://agoric.com/papers/) Agoric is bringing distributed object-capabilities to the modern world of decentralized crypto-commerce, including blockchains. Starting from object- capabilities, we're building a framework for highly composable smart contracts. Hack it at hackathon [https://medium.com/agoric/spend-the-pandemic- inside-join-our...](https://medium.com/agoric/spend-the-pandemic-inside-join- our-gitcoin-cross-chain-hackathon-and-win-prizes-d58e0437a874)

<comment><USER6> > [https://agoric.com/papers/](https://agoric.com/papers/)

For someone who hadn't really read about this before, I found this[1] article, linked above, to be a really nice introduction.

[1]: [http://habitatchronicles.com/2017/05/what-are- capabilities/](http://habitatchronicles.com/2017/05/what-are-capabilities/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So I haven't been exposed to capability systems before so this might be a dumb question.

In an OS like KeyKOS, how does the OS protect against privilege escalation using side-channel attacks similar to how encryption keys are extracted via hardware side-channels?

<comment><USER7> AFAIK, there are two ways to represent a capability. One way would be through a cryptographic token or key, where knowledge of that token or key allows using the capability; in that case, a side channel attack which leaks that token or key would allow privilege escalation. The other way is to represent the capability as an index in a per-process or per-thread table managed by the operating system, similar to how Unix file descriptors work. In this case, a side channel attack does not help, since knowledge of the capability is not enough; you have to convince the operating system to add it to your capability table.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The main myth we discussed over coffee and biscuits back in the compsci staffroom was .. expensive as all hell on the computers we have now. (a good handwaving often used to say "one day, in the future, somebody will make it work")

<comment><USER9> Looking at it strictly from the outside, it looks like there's a ton of indirection to make it work. People usually do want revocable capabilities, which implies that every capability grant has one or more levels of indirection that go with it.

Indirection's costs haven't gotten cheaper in well over a decade.

<comment><USER10> Considering now every time you want to do anything on a computer you're getting interpreted code in a memory heavy gui environment to send a HTTP request over a TLS connection to a remote computer via a flaky wifi connection, the cost of doing an indirection might be relatively much less than it was a decade ago. In those days, you might recall, most of the time you clicked in your software it would be doing direct lookups in the machine's comparatively fast spinning disk using native compiled code in a gui api designed with a considered tradeoff between developer's convenience and memory usage - designed in the days when there were fewer developers and much less memory.

Of course, half the time those indirections will probably be remote to the server you're already waiting on...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Shouldn't permissions ultimately be Turing-complete functions?

E.g. you could do fancy things like grant someone access to a folder, and also to all subdirectories whose name starts with "collaboration_".

And you can build any kind of permission system with it, if you don't like the power or complexity.

<comment><USER12> Absolutely not. Turing-complete functions are subject to Rice's Theorem - meaning that they are undecidable in the general case. Also, if it's Turing- complete then anyone can make a ridiculous mess of an area with little or no tooling. Configuration should be Turing-incomplete unless you have a very good reason to do otherwise.

Being Turing-incomplete is a valuable feature.

<comment><USER11> You haven't given an argument for why "undecidability" would be a problem in this case. Please give a compelling example.

We're not banning regular applications either because they are undecidable.

Also, we could change Turing completeness into something less powerful, for instance programs without loops.

<comment><USER12> Undecidability means loading your configuration could never complete or could consume an indeterminate amount of resources. Which means it's a security concern as a bad config can DOS your system.

This type of attack exists even without Turing-complete config but just with references: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billion_laughs_attack)

> Also, we could change Turing completeness into something less powerful, for > instance programs without loops.

Yes, this is a strategy. For example BPF does not support loops.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Apple wins over Motorola in 'slide-to-unlock' ruling - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-17058508

<comment><USER3> > Mr Mueller, a patent expert who has in the past consulted for Microsoft, > described the ruling as a "very significant win for Apple against Android".

How did this guy come to be known as a patent expert? Everything I'm reading in Wikipedia suggests a rather checkered past with regards to reporting on patents.

<comment><USER4> Who's predictions are often at odds with other commentators and ends up looking misguided (a lot of his commentary on Oracle vs Google).

He has some strange axes to grind. I just can't work out why (or exactly what his precise angle is)

<comment><USER5> As far as I can tell, his predictions on Oracle vs Google have been pretty accurate, despite being at odds with other commentators. Shouldn't we be looking at how predictions match reality, rather than how they match other predictions?

<comment><USER6> His predictions on damages have been at odds with the Judge's comments which seems quite important.

<comment><USER5> The only dispute I can recall about damages was many people claiming that Oracle had lowered its damages claims, and Mueller saying they hadn't. When the full damages report was released, it turned out Mueller was right - <USER2> changed methodology, but the overall figure did not go down.

It's true that the judge has been hard on Oracle's damages report, but I don't recall Mueller ever saying otherwise. He's always said that they key issue is Oracle's ability to get a permanent injunction rather than money damages for past infringement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hm, I thought the prior art argument was pretty convincing the last time Apple tried this.

[http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/dutch-judge- consider...](http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/dutch-judge-considers- apples-slide-to.html) [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj- KS2kfIr0&t=4m10s](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tj-KS2kfIr0&t=4m10s)

<comment><USER8> Yeah in the Netherlands the patent was discarded because of this. It just absurd that they can use this patent in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Next they'll go after the zipper manufacturers.

</comment><comment><USER10> Because slide to unlock wasn't invented hundreds of years ago for doors.

</comment><comment><USER11> good riddance. all i need is slide keyboard to unlock.

...of course that that would require keyboards to be back. Hate apple and the touchscreen fad. I was happy with my crappy nokia, were it not for the speed. or lack of.

<comment><USER12> grumble grumble

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The bright side is that Android won't be infected with the user-unfriendly finger-straining slide-to-unlock gimmick.

<comment><USER14> Is it really that user 'unfriendly'? It seems sort of obvious, you have this button that looks raised above a track with the guide to slide to unlock. From what we've seen of toddlers and babies grabbing iPads and iPhones and unlocking them on first use I think Apple has created a pretty friendly unlock interface.

I wouldn't call it a gimmick either, because it works. I've never had an iPhone pocket dial on me.

<comment><USER15> I have. The home button has become pressed down long enough to trigger Voice Control, which has then interpreted background noise as a command to call somebody random.</comment></comment></comment>