What Clayton Christensen Got Wrong (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://stratechery.com/2013/clayton-christensen-got-wrong/

<comment><USER2> I get a little bothered when people expect pundits like CC to be right 100% of the time. If they get nit-picked too much, then people stop making predictions. And CC may indeed be correct on the iPod - it had a great run, but sales are falling through the floor. Similarly, Apple is looking great in the iPhone, but it is still under attack on the low end.

<comment><USER3> I see my kid's teen friends running around with android phones. Also, there's something to be said for competitors catching up in terms of design. Several are catching up and forcing apple to complete on their terms - see phablets starting with samsung galaxy note.

<comment><USER4> Oddly I saw the opposite: my nephew and his friends using iOS only.

Yesterday he bought an iPad mini with his savings, I suggested him to get an Android tablet "hey, an android will cost you 1/3", but he declined, because all his friends had invested a LOT of time on their (iOS) games.

<comment><USER5> That's exactly what you would expect if a "low end disruption" is just getting started. The low-cost disruptor picks off some but not all of the market, and doesn't immediately compete for the most attractive customers (because that fight's too hard for them at the moment).

That's what puts the incumbent in an "innovator's dilemma": do you chase the high end and high margins, and if so which high-end niches do you chase (gamers who want graphics performance, design-lovers who want a precision machined marvel of industrial design) or do you go lower cost and high volume? The latter is a race to the bottom, so the incumbents tend to pick the former and retreat up-market. It's not unusual for the incumbent's profits to increase temporarily when this happens because of their focus on the most profitable customers.

The problem is it doesn't last: the low-cost producers who are already good enough for the low end of the market continue to improve, until they become good enough for the middle of the market too, and grab more and more market share and more and more profit share. And then, looking for even more growth, they head for the top end of the market (or get disrupted themselves).

Ironically, if there wasn't an up-market to retreat to, there would be no dilemma. Android and iOS would have to compete head to head for the same customers with the same requirements (rather than one taking all the budget consumers and the other taking the gamers and others with higher requirements).

As it is, we could be seeing a low-end disruption, and the high-end consumers will be the last to notice.

<comment><USER6> The thing you've gotten wrong with wrong the "design lovers" you mentioned is that Apple's customer base are entirely those quote-unquote design lovers who happen to be just normal consumers.

The entire point of the article is that competing on user experience pretty much side-steps the whole theory of low-end disruption.

<comment><USER5> I understood the article, thanks. I'm just not convinced.

The debate hinges on this: is UX a special basis of competition that can't be disrupted? Will consumers pay a premium for better UX forever? Will the cheaper alternative never be "good enough"? Won't people put up with a few minor annoyances? What if it saves them money?

I think UX is a hygiene factor: when it's bad it annoys you to the point where you do something about it, but when UX is good enough, most people start worrying about other things.

That's different from design: I think some people will continue to pay a premium because they love Jony Ive designs and they can afford it. And some will pay for a status symbol. And some will need the performance. But none of that is the mass market.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I doubt very much that businesses are as rational as he makes them out to be. Many businesses buy extremely expensive software for completely irrational reasons or pay business consultants for obviously meaningless fluff.

The difference between consumers and businesses is that businesses that act too irrationally for too long are more likely to fail and get replaced by more rational businesses. I suspect that the statistics on rational businesses often suffer from survivor bias.

</comment><comment><USER8> Ben Thompson is mostly wrong: Customers don't 'buy' iPhones, Carriers do i.e. iPhones are protected from low end disruption by carriers subsidizing and obscuring the price with plans/contracts. In markets where carrier subsidy isn't as popular (e.g. Europe) iPhone market share is very low. Likewise, iPad market share is dropping quickly becausr there are few subsidies for that product.

NB Apple was always careful to sell low end iPods like the nano and shuffle so they continuously disrupted themselves in that product market and kept other companies from doing so.

<comment><USER9> I disagree. I think people shop for a phone the way many people (unfortunately) shop for a new car: On the monthly payment, not the sticker price. All that matters is that the carriers finance the phone, subsidies are dying. Every major US carrier now has installment options.

> Likewise, iPad market share is dropping quickly becausr there are few > subsidies for that product.

You don't think it's because they essentially invented the market, starting out at 90% market share?

<comment><USER8> > You don't think it's because they essentially invented the market, starting > out at 90% market share?

Apple essentially invented the harddrive digital music player with iPod+iTunes and maintained a +80% marketshare for the lifespan of that product

> I disagree. I think people shop for a phone the way many people > (unfortunately) shop for a new car: On the monthly payment, not the sticker > price. All that matters is that the carriers finance the phone, subsidies > are dying. Every major US carrier now has installment options.

The monthly payments for cars vary widely with the differences measuring in hundreds of dollars per month. The monthly payments for contract cellphones in USA are mostly the same for a $0 low end phone or a $0 iPhone. Indeed for many years AT&T/Verizon/Sprint wouldn't give a discount on the monthly plan even if the consumer brought their own phone which made it slightly irrational to not sign a contract. It's impossible for the low end to disrupt when the high end is the practically the same price.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I guess this is a 2013 article, but I'm surprised that what hasn't been mentioned in the comments yet are the platform/network effects of iOS apps and the App store.

I think it's interesting to identify a consumer focus on status/UX/psychological benefits, but I actually think it's wrong to say that the consumer isn't paying for more functionality because I think the iOS app ecosystem actually provides pretty compelling additional functionality in addition to the incremental, but still relatively meaty, upgrades between phone models and nominally nicer UX.

I mean, the App Store is still much better curated than its open Android counterpart. The iOS development seems to have more robust developer tools, offer better return, have a more or less standard device structure for testing, etc etc. ([http://thinkapps.com/blog/development/platform-build- first-i...](http://thinkapps.com/blog/development/platform-build-first-ios-vs- android/))

The iOS ecosystem isn't just the handsets. It's the App store, the developer tools, etc. This allows developers to better create functionality on top of all these Apple devices and enables Apple to surface those quality apps/functionality better and faster. That's a significant benefit.

<comment><USER11> which comes first, a good consumer product or a healthy ecosystem around it? it's a positive feedback loop thing in later stage but product always comes first. it's not a big secret but only few nailed it occasionally in a decade.

<comment><USER10> that's a good point, but Apple's bet on this ecosystem continues to pay off with each of their new consumer product reaping pretty sizeable dividends from that ecosystem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't relate to this at all, but accept that I'm an outlier in the marketplace. I have a cheap android phone on a cheap month-to-month plan. Other than the apps it came with, I have installed very little from Google Play. I use the phone for texting, phone calls, mobile email, maps, occasionally mobile browsing, and that's about it. I don't play games with it, I don't listen to music with it, I don't take pictures with it. Even this cheap phone does way more than I need. I would never consider an iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER13> That's a very interesting theory, but it's supported by very few examples, and the examples are pretty weak.

In the example of clothing and fashion - the consumer really buys buys psychological value(status, attention, etc), not user experience with his extra money, and i'm not sure those goods can be "good enough", because some have arms-race logic build internally(for example status).

In a sense, the same applies for the BMW - you could probably get as great car as the BMW , for much less , but the BMW holds important psychological advantages.

And as for consoles - i'm not sure we've reached "good enough" level of graphics for true gamers. When we'll reach that - it would be interesting too look at that market.

So yes, consumers aren't rational and for some thing you can never satisfy them, but i'm not certain user experience is one of those things.

<comment><USER14> > the consumer really buys buys psychological value

I think that's what the author is saying - businesses don't buy printers thinking about how the printer will make their staff feel, whereas when people buy iPhones, how they feel is a big part of the decision. The idea that I can afford to buy an excellent user experience for myself is very much part of that status value. Apple has exploited those feelings so that its design value outweighs the economies of scale that can be achieved by modularisation.

<comment><USER15> I think the important point is not that it just outweighs what can be achieved by modularisation, but that it is fundamentally more difficult to achieve using modularisation. Had that not been the case, you would expect companies that emulated the psychological value _and_ used the modularisation path to make more money than Apple would.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> iPhone and iPod are very interesting and unique case studies in that they combine high-end differentiation (the devices, or at least the brilliant marketing-fueled perception of the devices) with low-end disruption, and with network-effect ecosystems (music, apps).

The low-end disruption is cheaper music (iPod) and cheaper computer (iPhone). Computer in that many consumers initially saw iPhone as a way to do email, web and apps without paying for separate computer and Internet.

</comment><comment><USER17> [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the- disruption-...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption- machine)

<comment><USER18> This article is pretty bad.

The OP, however, is quite good. In a nutshell, it argues that (1) disruption theory assumes rational actors and (2) consumers are much less rational than businesses.

<comment><USER19> ISTM that the author is not so much saying or arguing people are not rational, but that the economic definition of "rational" is missing the modeling of consumer behavior in this area. (i am not an economist.)

<comment><USER20> My GF is an economist, and she takes great exception at any phraseology that describes people as irrational. As far as she's concerned, everybody is rational. See this for more details: [http://mises.org/library/what-do- austrians-mean-rational](http://mises.org/library/what-do-austrians-mean- rational)

<comment><USER21> Praxeology is a fringe theory espoused by radical libertarians. I'd even go so far as to call it a just-so story.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Were Steve Jobs, John Ive, Tim Cook and other Apple guys crystal clear about the theory when they started iPod/iPhone? I don't think so. Apple has a unique weapon called design and is willing to pay whatever it costs to enhance it. Its business is to use the weapon wherever there is a chance: mp3 player, tivo, mobile phone, watch and more to come. The rest is upon professors in business schools to figure out.

<comment><USER22> I think their secret weapon is design expertise, not design itself. I have a 2014 moto X, and I like it. I switched from IOS due to bugs I was experiencing with IOS 8, and I liked the idea of a more open environment.

I can say with a high degree of confidence (but not 100%) that I'll switch back to iphone next year.

The reason centers on two things: Google's baffling lack of design sense (google's own apps look bad), and google's inability to filter out sham reviews on their app store.

The google app store and the apps are just awful. There are some diamonds in the rough, but they are few and far between and hard to find because nearly all the apps (good or bad) have 4+ stars.

There are tons of crap apps on the apple store too, but the good ones are easier to find because the _ratings_ still have meaning on the apple store.

There is something seriously wrong with google's store. The AT&T app, which is a marginal semi web app, has 25,000 5 star reviews on google's store. It averages somewhere above 4, I can't remember the exact number. I'm sorry, there is just no way 25,000 honest people gave that app 5/5 stars. It's ridiculous to even consider.

It's barely a 3 star app on apple's store and that sounds about right. I'd give it 3 just because it is functional.

I think the real problem behind it is the concept of freemium apps. Apple has it too, but I think because of scale android/google are head of the game in terms of the damage caused by fremium apps.

I think the best way for either company to fix it would be to not allow in-app purchases on free apps. The reason I think it would fix it is that both app stores require you to have the app to vote on it, but with free apps it's no big deal to download-vote-delete an app. This opens you up to mechanical-turk type exploitation.

If it costs a buck to download, you've raised the cost of buying a vote, you've raised expectations of buyers. It has a side benefit of destroying the freemium market which in my opinion can only be a good thing.

My gut tells me that google could filter out sham reviews if they wanted to. I'm sure they can detect the download-vote-delete pattern easily, and if 25000 come in over the course of week or something, well, it just seems like it'd be obvious if the spent time mining the data.</comment></comment>


Time series data: the worst and best use case in distributed databases [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedotpost.com/2015/06/paul-dix-time-series-data-the-worst-and-best-use-case-in-distributed-databases

<comment><USER2> I'm looking forward to InfluxDB cluster so we can use it as long term storage for Prometheus.io. I'd like to focus on our strengths at high-throughput low latency metric processing, rather than having to solve the very hard problem of creating and maintaining a distributed storage system.</comment>


Handling Intermittence: How to Survive Test Driven Development - <AUTHOR> http://joblivious.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/handling-intermittence-how-to-survive-test-driven-development/

<comment><USER2> As much as TDD irks me to think about when I'm in the middle of a program, it's a very useful thing.

Its saved me from making countless mistakes.

JUnit isn't good for beginners though, because you have to define an equals method for each class. Not only is that completely repetitive, but it is also very difficult for beginning programmers to write good tests. If you haven't been programming for very long, how do you know how to define equality? Do you consider two objects that have the same fields (only the fields you're testing) to be equal? Or are you checking whether or not two objects are the same (bit for bit in the stack)? What happens when you have super-classes that have less fields than their subclasses?

Anyway, one of my professors is working on a new tester for java (<http://www.ccs.neu.edu/javalib/Tester/index.html>). It's very elegant; the syntax is very clean:

"public void testGresterThan(Tester t){

         t.checkexpect(7 > 4, true);

}"

</comment><comment><USER3> Although my projects are small and not currently using TDD, I found this analysis in systematizing development strategies. Present five ways of breaking down ways you set yourself up for intermittent failures during development:

Hidden data dependence

Race conditions

Time sensitive tests

Unstable 3rd party software

Intentional randomness in code.

</comment><comment><USER4> TDD means you write your test before you write your code.

Test code is code. You must write test code for your test code before you can write your test code.

Test code for test code is code. You must write test code for your test code for your test code before you can write your test code for your test code.

TDD is trapped in a loop of infinite regression. This means that TDD never produces actual application code. In fact, it can't even produce test code. How do you define a test of a test of a test .... of a test ... of a test ..... so you can write it? You can't define it so you can't write it. You have no starting point.

The answer must be that you really cannot do TDD. You just call it TDD. At some level you rely on the old standby of clean simple design, incremental implementation, inspection, and manual testing. Why not cut to the chase and do that on your application code?

<comment><AUTHOR> Each test you write is a value-add. You get increased safety that what you're testing works the way you think it does, and that it will continue to do so as people modify it. Not all cases need to be tested; "test to your level of paranoia" is our motto. In the case of tests themselves, the value add for testing individual tests has never been worth the ROI. There are, however, tests for the testing _system_, insofar as that's possible (which it is, for the most part).

As for the "I happen to view TDD as a completely obnoxious and unnecessary exercise" objection, I'd be willing to bet you've never tried TDD. It doesn't take long for proper TDD to _save_ you time. Each iteration cycle is slower, but the marginal cost for adding new code to a complex codebase doesn't increase nearly as much.

Without TDD, you soon have to spend time on manual testing, and then you've got humans in QE basically practicing TDD for you, as the walk through script after script doing things that could be done faster by a computer. The only time it's appropriate to consider skipping TDD, IMO, is on tiny one-man projects.

<comment><USER4> I see. TDD works on poorly designed, poorly implemented, basically lousy code. Code that is highly coupled, withlow cohesion, and is inappropriately modularized. This necessitates that all code must be tested every time there is a "modification". Add to that the random unthoughtful modifications made by careless programmers who have identified the wrong problem to fix and you get constant disaster.

I say, fix the fundamental problem by not writing lousy code in the first place. THAT would really be adding value rather than simply adding job security busy work. Automated testing cannot fix lousy code. Most of the time, it can't even discover it.

There is no magical way that gets good results without knowledge, skill, understanding, thought, discipline, and effort. With those things, all you need are good enough tools. TDD may be one of those good enough tools in some limited circumstances. It is not a _Silver Bullet_ that cures all, most, or even many software flaws.

Keep in mind that one really good programmer can out produce a team of twenty poor programmers. Also keep in mind that one poor programmer can keep twenty really good programmers busy cleaning up the trash they create.

TDD is a very poor band aid used to cover up an even more fundamental problem: most programmers are lousy at programming. That is the problem that need fixing.

<comment><USER5> TDD is like bumper lanes at a bowling alley. If your goal is to knock down the pins, it can help prevent problems, like falling in the gutter.

Of course, if you're incredibly good, you don't need the bumpers. You might even forego bumpers to show off that you are -that good-.

Your solution is to make all the bowlers really good. Here's the issue - historically, that doesn't scale across a growing dev team.

Imagine 5+ bowlers all using the same lane. The more bowlers you have, the more you will have balls bumping into each other, getting in the way, crossing paths, and falling into the gutter.

As you increase the number of developers, the more likely it is that tools like TDD and Source Control can help mitigate issues that inevitably arise on a larger team. They aren't silver bullets to great programming, and they aren't a bandaid to cover up bad programming. They are time-tested, proven ways to get people going the right direction.

<comment><USER4> "Imagine 5+ bowlers all using the same lane. The more bowlers you have, the more you will have balls bumping into each other, getting in the way, crossing paths, and falling into the gutter."

I suggest THAT is the problem. TDD is a band aid to cover the fact that such a team cannot function. The right team of <=4 can blow the roof off of ANY team of 5+ based upon communication network overhead alone. If you don't have the right team, you are hosed no matter what.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How Mattermark Teamed Up With Bloomberg Beta to Predict Who Will Start Companies - <AUTHOR> http://mattermark.com/how-mattermark-teamed-up-with-bloomberg-beta-to-predict-who-will-start-companies-next/ <comment><USER2> Take two random people, Bob and Sarah. The chance that each of them is going to start a company is equal.

 _Leave Bob to get on with his life. Maybe he 'll start a company, maybe he won't._

 _Invite Sarah to a private event at a well-funded VC company and call it "Future Founders"._

If either of them definitely wasn't going to start a company then they still won't. If either definitely was then they still will. Nothing has changed.

But if either of them had considered starting, and was wondering whether to or not, being labelled a "Future Founder" and being granted access to a group of 349 other people who rank highly on an entrepreneurial scale, plus direct contact with high profile VCs seems likely to influence their decision. That nudge could easily account for the difference between founders and non- founders.

Did MatterMark factor that in to their findings? Seems a bit self-fulfilling as prophetic judgements go to me.

<comment><USER3> Hey... I run Bloomberg Beta. I think that creating a self-fulfilling prophecy is absolutely a dynamic here. Our goal wasn't to succeed at predicting so much as it is to get to know great people before they start companies. If that action induces them to start companies, and they have a great experience doing it, but our prediction's accuracy is compromised -- that's fine. We're using data as a tool to make things better, not for its predictive value in and of itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title here seems quite exaggerated, as does the claim that "Mattermark Founder Prediction Is 25X Better Than Chance."

Predicting who in a group of 1.5 million technology professionals is likely to start a company presents an unsupervised learning problem. Short of contacting all 1.5 million people and asking them, there is no way to confirm whether the predictions the system made are correct, so you cannot make claims about efficacy.

There are approaches used to deal with unsupervised learning problems, but there are no details in this post even indicating that the folks involved recognized they were dealing with an unsupervised learning problem in the first place. Instead, we just have claims like "While we believe the future founders group has a 17% chance — 25x higher..." for which no further information is provided.

Perhaps more interesting than the bold claims sans important technical details is the notion that an early-stage fund would look to court potential founders before they even made the decision to become founders. While it's true that many seed stage investors adhere to the mantra of "we invest in people," this is as good an example as I've seen of the fact that there is currently way too much capital chasing too few opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow! This is really cool.

In statistics and machine learning this would be considered an unbalanced data set: predicitng who will start a company when the vast majority of people will not is a very difficult task. It's similar to predicting who will be a terrorist (another really difficult problem).

I think the threshold they are using is way off however. Even if someone has only a 5% chance of becoming a founder (or less), that's pretty significant. I understand that would probably increase the population by many orders of magnitude, but only capturing 17% of 350 means ~60 startups will be found as a result of this program. Given that the large majority of those are likely to fail, the numbers could be better.

Some really interesting predictors might be what meetup groups does the individual belong to, what is their current job title, what is skills and connections do they have on linkedin and facebook, how many founders are they "connected" to, and who are they following on twitter.

It's also worth mentioning that this is probably biased, because the data set of individuals includes data points for founders only after they became founders. You would ideally want the data from before they became a founder. Perhaps over time this model would get better, as non-founder individuals become founders.

<comment><USER6> CTO of Mattermark here. It is a really interesting problem, because as you say even if you boost the odds 25x they're still really low. We trained the data set on venture backed founders (e.g. Series A or beyond), which is a bit higher bar than just any founder. The hope being that once you reach Series A you're less likely to fail than just having seed funding. At some point we want to go back and look at what differentiates founders that reach seed vs. venture backing.

<comment><USER7> Can you talk a bit about your feature selection or models?

I run a statistical quality control company using machine learning, and picking up on flaws with tiny probabilities (one batch in every twenty or thirty million) might benefit from similar techniques!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465150](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465150)

</comment><comment><USER9> Hmmm... My email must've ended up in the spam box...

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm curious where the date came from - LinkedIn seems obvious but I'm not aware they make that kind of corpus available for purchase.</comment>


Rethinking the test pyramid, and other topics: TalkPython#45 - <AUTHOR> https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/45/the-python-testing-column-now-a-thing <comment><AUTHOR> There's also a book give-away if you comment on the episode show notes. But please do listen to the discussion first.</comment>


The Internet of Furbies - <AUTHOR> http://blog.memsql.com/the-internet-of-furbies/

<comment><AUTHOR> I was one of the hackers on the project, if anyone has any questions, shout out!

<comment><USER2> Cool hack! How are you driving the furby?

<comment><AUTHOR> Essentially, we fed audio out from an Android phone through a mini audio amplifier, then soldered from the amplifier directly in the Furby's speaker.

<comment><USER2> Ahh, cool, that makes sense :)

For a second I thought you guys might be related to this connected furby project I saw recently:

[http://vimeo.com/106770438](http://vimeo.com/106770438)

[https://community.spark.io/t/internet-chat-furby-with- spark-...](https://community.spark.io/t/internet-chat-furby-with-spark- core/7073)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Progressive Growing of GANs for Improved Quality, Stability, Variation [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=XOxxPcy5Gr4 <comment><USER2> I love how using training data from the Internet has resulted in the GANs believing that a picture of a "cat" often contains text -- or, at least, shapes resembling text -- at the top and bottom of the image. (Visible on the right side of the screen starting around 4:20.)

<comment><USER3> The interpolating animals look so much like my dreams it's unsettling. I often wake up when things get too "unrealistic" and people or animals are changing shape too rapidly. Whenever I see something come out of a NN that looks like something that came out of my brain I get a little future shock.

<comment><USER4> Did you see the the horror faces it generated for humans? Good for Halloween!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The progress in this field is astonishing. It wasn't even a few years ago that the typical demonstration in a paper on GAN would have been an array of very small images. I recall often seeing numbers between 64x64 and 256x256. At the time, the argument was raised that the resolution can hardly be increased because it is our brain that tries to identify objects and faces in the photos to figure out what they are representing.

Then here we are, with indistinguishable 1024x1024 recreations and trippy latent space interpolations. I know not every researcher or entrepreneur has the resources of NVIDIA to train for this many days, but let's not forget, that part needs to occur only once. It makes me wonder about the day that a GAN manages to bankrupt stock photography services.

<comment><USER6> > I know not every researcher or entrepreneur has the resources of NVIDIA to > train for this many days, but let's not forget, that part needs to occur > only once.

It's not like they trained this on a GPU farm. According to the paper [1], they "trained the network on a single NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPU for 20 days".

[1] [http://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2017-10_...](http://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2017-10_Progressive- Growing-of//karras2017gan-paper.pdf)

<comment><USER5> Where I live that thing alone is $17,000.

<comment><USER7> P100 is essentially 1080Ti, so you can grab 1080 Ti and have the same speed. V100 might be the expensive version, up to 10x faster.

<comment><USER8> You should look at GPU memory bandwidth for a proxy for performance when training DNNs. The P100 is about 40% faster than a 1080Ti. The V100 is only about 75% faster than a 1080Ti.

Based on this, i expect these commodity GPU servers (with 10 1080Ti cards) that cost 1/10th of the DGX-1 will be huge: [https://www.servethehome.com/deeplearning11-10x-nvidia- gtx-1...](https://www.servethehome.com/deeplearning11-10x-nvidia-gtx-1080-ti- single-root-deep-learning-server-part-1/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Worth pointing out the main criticism of GANs, which is that right now researchers don't really have a way to tell if a GAN is just copying and pasting the training data or not (there is no "test set" unlike in supervised learning). And in fact an _ideal_ GAN could just learn to output the training set. One example someone found in the generated images for this model: [https://twitter.com/nalkalchbrenner/status/92401333254951321...](https://twitter.com/nalkalchbrenner/status/924013332549513217).

<comment><USER10> That is true, but if you don't look at them as a machine learning method, but rather as a computer graphics method, then it is quite impressive. It has the added benefit of being allowed to overfit as long as the average human does not find out. If you optimize for psychovisual metrics, GANs are fine.

<comment><USER11> Actually, GANs reach state of the art in anomaly/outlier detection and drug/molecule prediction, so there is certainly more to it than just artistic applications:

[https://openreview.net/forum?id=S1EfylZ0Z](https://openreview.net/forum?id=S1EfylZ0Z)

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28703000](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28703000)

[http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.7b0034...](http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.molpharmaceut.7b00346)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looking at synthetic celebrities is unsettling. They're all familiar. They're obviously celebrities, but it's impossible to remember their names.

<comment><USER13> Exactly as the actual celebrities then... I think i recognized one of them.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Generated images start at 0:43 in the video. Link to paper here:

[http://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2017-10_...](http://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/pubs/2017-10_Progressive- Growing-of//karras2017gan-paper.pdf)

Source: NVIDIA

</comment><comment><USER14> Well, I guess the propaganda bots will be a little more convincing now that they can have unique profile photos.

Would be nice if I could use this to convince Facebook that some fictional image is myself, though.

<comment><USER13> Oh, damn. I've already had enough of fake personas, but now there is virtually no limit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Holy crap that video. It makes me think of the scramble suit from A Scanner Darkly[1]

[1]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWne23FfKW8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWne23FfKW8)

<comment><USER16> Had the same thought! Imagine how much time they could have saved drawing it all!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've seen this going around twitter and the video looks cool but I don't really understand what's going on.

Can someone explain it in layman's terms?

<comment><USER18> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw9r8CL98N0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw9r8CL98N0)

<comment><USER19> Wow. Watching this guy is painful

<comment><USER20> Why?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder if something like this could be combined with 3D animation to produce super realistic computer-animated films.

<comment><USER22> Nice idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Some of the generated celebrity images seem pretty much indistinguishable from reality. Does reality exist any more? In the future, it may get harder and harder to know.

</comment><comment><USER24> Wonder how long until this is co-opted by the porn industry and what the law will have to say about it.

Is it illegal to own a digital brain that can think up illegal porn?

<comment><USER22> I would say that it probably is. If you trained a network using illegal data (e.g. cp images) then not only did you have to have that data once, which is of course illegal, but the data itself is at least partially encoded in the network weights which I think should make it illegal.

<comment><USER25> I guess you might be able to get around this if you train only on legal content and can interpolate into content that would be illegal if a real recording.

However, I'm not sure whether there are any other applications for this specific interpolation scenario that would lead to it being developed, as the effort required to make it work is likely much higher.

<comment><USER26> Having the model produce realistic interpolations through areas of the latent space that had no associated training data is surely something that people will be trying to make happen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The authors have a GitHub repo containing code and links to the paper and more outputs:

[https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans](https://github.com/tkarras/progressive_growing_of_gans)

<comment><USER28> Written in Theano, of course! R.I.P.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A GAN is a Generative Adversarial Network[0], the video is like animated Deep Dream[1] stuff but way more refined.

I don't like the horizontal sliding transition because I'm way focused on the bizarre iterations of the various targets.

Gonna have to update our camouflage patterns again to combat computer vision...

[0]: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_netwo...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generative_adversarial_network)

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

</comment><comment><USER30> For people interested in the details, I wrote a small summary of the paper: [https://github.com/aleju/papers/blob/master/neural- nets/Prog...](https://github.com/aleju/papers/blob/master/neural- nets/Progressive_Growing_of_GANs.md) (Prior knowledge of GANs is recommended, otherwise its probably hard to understand.)

</comment><comment><USER31> This+VR = porn industry dream (also propaganda industry dream)

</comment><comment><USER32> Meanwhile, my Neural translation models don't converge. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER33> Interesting. In another 300-500 years, I am pretty sure we will start simulating sensory experience and ultimately the past. I am not sure if I am a toy simulation of the past from the future, right now.

<comment><USER34> > In another 300-500 years

instead of "In the future", triggers me. Do you know something we do not? I am resigned to the notion that everything is up for grabs.

> I am not sure if I am a toy simulation

We need "reality discriminants". The trippy thing is if they could exist and their output is not necessarily boolean. There would be a threshold point at which beings can exist along the _simulated-real_ spectrum, were by they can understand the output of the "reality discriminants", yet they are not real.

<comment><USER16> The way these GAN algorithms work is precisely by building a network that discriminates reality from fake. That's why they become so good at this!</comment></comment></comment>


Deploy - <AUTHOR> http://pubpub.media.mit.edu/pub/deploy <comment><USER2> Wow this PubPub platform is pretty sweet. I would definitely love to contribute to this. Combine this with Arxiv and its community and you could very quickly completely revolutionize publishing.

</comment><comment><USER3> I wonder when pubpub will be deployed to open source.

<comment><USER4> PubPub here - hopefully before March :)

We weren't expecting any hacker news attention yet - so our 'launch package' (open source, better landing page, better on-boarding, etc) isn't quite finished. Watch @isPubPub for updates.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Building has a different kind of rigor than academic writing, because when you build, you have to make something that works._

that's stupidly offensive (i'm not an academic).

<comment><USER6> _The idea that it was more important to demo and build than it was to publish was–and is–an important part of the Media Lab culture. It's through the building of things that we learn, explore, and discover. Building has a different kind of rigor than academic writing, because when you build, you have to make something that works._

I didn't read that as offensive. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

<comment><USER2> Stop with this context nonsense. I've already got my pitchfork at the ready!</comment></comment></comment>


Paint your 2D arrays with ArrayPainter - <AUTHOR> http://www.arraypainter.com/

<comment><USER2> Compare with Tile Studio: <http://tilestudio.sourceforge.net/> And Mappy: <http://www.tilemap.co.uk/mappy.php>

The market for tilemap editors is a fairly competitive one. I'm working on a combo tiles(collision) and stamps(graphics) editor myself.</comment>


The future of finance is self-driving money - <AUTHOR> https://venturegrit.substack.com/p/why-self-driving-money-is-more-important <comment><USER2> > 78% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and most Americans would > struggle to cover an unexpected $400 expense. > How did we get here? > Why > aren't we doing better? > Managing Money is Hard

We aren't here because millions of Americans didn't manage their savings optimally. They went to work, played by the rules, and saved what they could. We're here because the gains due to productivity growth for the last 40 years have increasingly gone to the to top wealth and income percentiles. That is the result of tax and trade policies changes that began in the 1970s and were cemented by the 1990s.

Meanwhile, concurrent with those changes, the cost of things that used to be "basics", like health care, higher education, and housing, have skyrocketed, while previously "universal" rights like good public primary education have been turned into lotteries. Society's capital has been sold to the highest bidder, and most of us have had no choice but to be part of that auction.

None of this is to excuse banks extracting revenue from savers via fees, or other similar practices pointed out in the article, but better management of personal financial capital won't be effective in helping people who can't cover an unexpected $400 expense, because those people have no financial capital to begin with, and due to tax policies designed to keep wealth in dynasties, their children likely won't have any capital either.

<comment><USER3> there are doctors making $500k/year living paycheck to paycheck. There are people working fast food who manage to save money. It is a spending problem.

The things you list do not help either group, but the fact is most people spend every penny.

<comment><USER4> > there are doctors making $500k/year living paycheck to paycheck

This isn't true, at least in any sense of the word we would agree with. (Wife works in medicine, is a doctor at this level, we run in these circles). They are "living paycheck to paycheck" in the sense that they've set their stock brokerage to automagically deduct 10k usd/month from their bank account, and they pay 10k/month on a mortgage (which accumulate equity) and their checking account doesn't grow in size and their monthly float is the same. Some of them pay for private school which means they only save 3k/month instead of 10k/month, how oppressive. Their checking account "funny money they allow themselves to spend on anything" isn't growing and is the same, but their net worth is growing 15k/month.

<comment><USER5> The assertions like GP are laughable every time they come up. Having no liquidity is not the same as living paycheck-to-paycheck. LP2P means not being able to scrounge up any money for vital necessities until the next pay period. Most doctors (and for that matter, most people who complain about high COL lifestyles while working in tech) can obviously pull a bit of cash from their investment accounts if need be. Yes there are fees attached but you can handle those. LP2P means you're living in your car if you can't get the money in the next 4 weeks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> For those looking for financial institutions that don't gouge you here are some recommendations:

* Vanguard - They have been around since the 1970s and started the whole war on investment fees. Wealthfront tries to sell how advanced they are, but it's mostly a re-packaging of what Vanguard has been doing for decades. Customers are shareholders so you don't have misaligned incentives. They have tons of well managed low fee index funds. Vanguard works for most people * Ally Bank - they don't charge many fees, reimburse atm fees, and give competitive savings rates * Local credit unions - there are many local credit unions that have very fair policy and terms.

I find it ironic that this article hypes all these vc driven startups who are largely have the same incentives as the existing greedy banks and ignores existing institutions that have fair governance models and have been delivering fair and affordable financial products for decades.

<comment><USER7> > Wealthfront tries to sell how advanced they are, but it's mostly a re- > packaging of what Vanguard has been doing for decades.

Can you elaborate on this? My understanding is that Vanguard provides a variety of passively managed funds, but does not give automated financial advice based on the specifics of clients' situations and needs. (Maybe you could consider target date funds the equivalent of this, but they're based on at most one dimension of client needs.)

Wealthfront, on the other hand, provides passively managed portfolios with financial advice based upon questions they ask their clients. The portfolios may be equivalent to Vanguard's funds, but the value-add is the financial advice. Maybe you don't value that advice, but it doesn't seem fair to characterize this as simply a repackaging.

(Note that this comparison will change once Vanguard launches its own roboadvisor, which was announced in October.)

<comment><USER6> > Wealthfront, on the other hand, provides passively managed portfolios with > financial advice based upon questions they ask their clients. The portfolios > may be equivalent to Vanguard's funds, but the value-add is the financial > advice. Maybe you don't value that advice, but it doesn't seem fair to > characterize this as simply a repackaging.

So I worked at a competitor of Wealthfront and while this is how a robo- advisor is marketed, this isn't actually what Wealthfront does. There is no real personalization of the product; you merely fill out a survey and it comes up with a risk score that adjusts your asset allocation. I know how those surveys work (because I built one) and it is laughably close to a Buzzfeed survey that guesses which game of thrones character you are closest to. The survey gets a measure of risk, which is really just one of a million inputs that you need to give proper financial advice.

The truth is relevant financial advice requires inputs beyond a generic 15 question survey. You need to do a data dump of all your assets, your financial goals, and then you need a human (or robot) to do analysis to figure out the path forward. Wealthfront doesn't do that. It doesn't adjust my asset allocation in my wealthfront account because I already have existing funds in those areas in other brokerages. It doesn't tell me about the backdoor Roth IRA trick which will maximize my retirement savings. It doesn't analyze my 401k funds to tell me which funds make the most sense. It literally is a re- packaged target date fund that is customized based on one data point (client risk). For 99% of Americans it doesn't do any more than a target date fund or a mix of index funds do. Yes, I guess it works for the 1% of americans who's biggest financial issue is that their passive index funds don't exactly match their risk profile.

I'm a personal finance junkie, and in the last year I've talked to a lot of people about their financial goals and challenges and I've yet to speak to one where the main solution to their problems was a robo advisor. It's just not a real use case.

Here are real use cases I've encountered: * Figuring out how loan refinancing can reduce debt burdens long term * Figuring out how to contribute to their kids future education expenses * Figuring out the size of an emergency fund you need and where to put it (the answer is a high yield savings account) * Figuring out a reasonable living budget based on income and debt * Figuring out how to maximize tax burden through a combination of 401K, IRAs * Figure out how to get tax savings once you hit income limits on IRAs

The point I'm trying to make is this "variable mix of index ETFs based on a 15 question survey" is not as much of a gamechanger as the roboadvisor's tout. It's a very limited product that is actually quite easy to build, and doesn't really help most of Americans (but it sounds cool).

For me the sharedholder structure of a credit union and Vanguard is way more revolutionary than the current Wealthfront product.

<comment><USER7> I too have worked at a roboadvisor and to my understanding (as an engineer, not a financial advisor), its advice was more complex and useful than how you describe Wealthfront works. I haven't personally used Wealthfront so I'm not as familiar with what it does specifically.

> "variable mix of index ETFs based on a 15 question survey" is not as much of > a gamechanger as the roboadvisor's tout.

I agree that if that's all your roboadvisor is doing, it's a bad roboadvisor. You point out a wide range of other financial advice people need. The thing is, quite a lot of that is possible algorithmically.

> Figuring out how loan refinancing can reduce debt burdens long term

You can absolutely do this algorithmically, and Credit Karma's offering is already moving in this direction, if it's not already there.

> Figuring out how to contribute to their kids future education expenses

If this gets into "how do I change my current spending and income to be able to contribute to my kids' education", you're right, that's not something that fits into the algorithmic model easily.

> Figuring out the size of an emergency fund you need

Not difficult get a reasonably good outcome here with a questionnaire.

> Figuring out a reasonable living budget based on income and debt

Agreed, this becomes similar to the education bullet point above. YNAB is a much better example of how to solve this with a software product.

> Figuring out how to maximize tax burden through a combination of 401K, IRAs

This fits into a roboadvisor's model reasonably well, right? (Although they likely can't make money on the 401K part without being the employer's 401K provider.)

> Figure out how to get tax savings once you hit income limits on IRAs

Is this so different from what TurboTax does algorithmically? (Depending on how fancy you want to get with the tax savings).

You've made a great argument about the original point you made that I challenged, and convinced me. Where we may differ is that I see a large number of corollary services that a roboadvisor could offer that together would be substantially more useful than a glorified target date fund.

<comment><USER6> I think I have a different perspective because even though I'm an engineer I worked in finance before and am a huge personal finance nerd. Some of the engineers on my team were impressed with the "sophistication" of our product, but I remember talking to our head of finance and thinking that's it? Even he admitted it was just basic asset allocation strategy. When I talked to our head of finance, he strongly believed Wealthfront (or Betterment) were doing the same thing. We actually back tested our competitor survey's and asset recommendations to ours and it was pretty obvious that all the roboadvisors in the space were building almost exactly the same risk model with very similar recommendations.

At the end of the day it's not a roboadvisor but it's a robo allocater. Frankly asset allocation isn't a hard problem, I've been doing it manually for years.

> Is this so different from what TurboTax does algorithmically? (Depending on > how fancy you want to get with the tax savings). Turbotax does not do this > at all. It just fills in your tax forms. It does not advise you on tax > strategy. To give an example, I'm gonna assume that since you are/were a > roboadvisor software engineer, you are most probably out of the income > limits of a roth IRA or IRA. If so, did you ever have TurboTax suggest you > to do a backdoor roth when filling out taxes? I've filed taxes with TurboTax > and I've never them suggest that (not saying they couldn't). My human CPA > did though :)

I think your other objections are that automation could do this work. I totally agree. In my original response, I called out that this work could be automated. So yes, I agree in theory that fintech could do this, and I wish they would. But in my viewpoint, I actually don't see this happening. Specifically a lot of the challenges for everyday Americans finance wise are not profitable to serve.

The point I'm making is that a lot of fintech players like to play this marketing game where they are helping out the "common" man against Wall Street with super "sophisticated" products. In my view thats largely marketing, the products are are not very sophisticated and they aren't interested in serving the common man since they can't make easy money off of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is an ad for Wealthfront. They are trying to coin the term "self-driving money". Their CEO has been talking it up a bunch in podcasts and articles.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is not an ad for Wealthfront. I am not an investor in Wealthfront, Digit or Tally and have no relationship with these companies.

<comment><USER9> As South Park pointed out, some ads don't even know they're ads.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Uh...isn't an index fund that tracks the S&P 500 basically self-driving money? That with something like Mint is basically all you need to do well financially speaking. It feels like this blog post is massively overcomplicating the problem of personal finance. It really isn't rocket science. If anything, the basics are simple and boring and unsophisticated.

<comment><USER11> Dilbert's One Page Personal Finance List

• Make a will.

• Pay off your credit card balance.

• Get term life insurance if you have a family to support.

• Fund your company 401K to the maximum.

• Fund your IRA to the maximum.

• Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it.

• Put six months' expenses in a money market account.

• Take whatever is left over and invest it 70 percent in a stock index fund and 30 percent in a bond fund through any discount brokerage company and never touch it until retirement

• If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issue), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges you a percentage of your portfolio.

[https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scott-adams-financial- advice/](https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/scott-adams-financial-advice/)

<comment><USER10> Is that in order? I'd say having six months' expenses saved should be higher up in that list. After you've paid off all debt besides a mortgage, but before you start maxing out a 401k or IRA.

<comment><USER12> I'd put maxing out a Roth IRA ahead of saving for emergencies. You're limited to a certain amount you can contribute each year, and you can withdraw your contributed principal from a Roth with no penalty—it can effectively be your emergency fund (or part of it). Of course, long-term you definitely want a separate emergency fund to avoid needing to raid your Roth.

<comment><USER10> Hmmmm that could work, but I worry that if people treat their Roth IRA as their emergency budget in the event of a recession their total amount they can withdraw will be lower than their needs.

That is why keeping an emergency fund as a separate savings account at a bank makes me feel more comfortable. At most I'd put my emergency fund in a money market account to at least earn something, but the point of the emergency fund is to be liquid and available for emergencies. If there's a steep recession and all of a sudden you need to tap into your savings for 6-12 months until you find another job, you don't want to be doing that when your Roth goes down and cashing out your contributions means selling more shares than you purchased.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Count me as skeptical when it comes to all these robo-advisors.

The primary issue is the principal-agent problem [1]. You need to align the incentives of the financial advisor with the incentives of the client. There are a few ways to do that. One example is the fiduciary duty mentioned in the article that makes it a legal responsibility to act in the best interests of the client. Another option is to allow the customer to share in the profits of the advisor through some type of customer ownership like you see with companies like Vanguard or with credit unions.

VC funded robo-advisors like Wealthfront have no solution to this problem. In order for them to be trusted with full control of your money, they would have to be satisfied with growing their profit simply by increased customer base and not want to increase profit per customer. Publicly owned or privately owned VC backed companies simply don't work like that. There is a constant need to continually increase profits. It is just a matter of time until someone at robo-advisors says "we can make more money if we add this fee". And since they control all your finances already and you are apparently the type of person who doesn't want to think about or look at your finances, odds are you probably won't even notice the new fee. That is a recipe for obvious abuse.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem)

<comment><USER7> > In order for them to be trusted with full control of your money, they would > have to be satisfied with growing their profit simply by increased customer > base and not want to increase profit per customer.

> It is just a matter of time until someone at robo-advisors says "we can make > more money if we add this fee".

There are a number of options beyond fees that keep incentives aligned between advisor and client. For example:

1\. The advisor grows the client's assets by investing them well (because the advisor's revenue is a portion of assets under management).

2\. The advisor encourages the client to invest more. This could either be moving more of their portfolio to the advisor, or encouraging regular deposits (which is a valid investing strategy.)

<comment><USER13> Option 1 doesn't do a good job of aligning incentives because you are taking a small percentage of a small percentage. The article says Wealthfront charges 0.25%. Let's use 5% as the difference between a good and bad investment (this is an arbitrary but I believe realistic number). This means the difference between Wealthfront doing a good job and a bad job for the customer is the equivalent of them increasing their fee 0.0125%. That is a $1.25 increase per $10,000 invested. So what is the better bath to increase profits, doing a fantastic job of investing, which likely comes with increased expenses, or increase your fee some tiny percentage that will almost surely go unnoticed by the customer?

Option 2 is moot for the authors example since they suggest these companies manage everything and therefore a customer can't give the advisor more to manage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this an advertisement? A lot of cool facts in here but it names one specific company as the solution

<comment><AUTHOR> No. I am not an investor in Wealthfront, Digit or Tally and have no relationship with these companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This looks a lot like an advertisement. It's got over two screensful of "self- driving money is", like it's trying to drum a slogan into the mind of the reader.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Here again we have misaligned incentives. Banks optimize revenue when > customers have as much debt as possible.

> While expensive to develop, the beauty of software is it can be infinitely > replicated. And at scale, the marginal cost of one additional user > approaches zero.

So if I understand the article correctly, companies like Wealthfront can make money by signing up more users. Their technology scales so that marginal costs become zero and they earn an income from fees, so marginal profit also scales.

But in the long term is this enough? Surely their also needs to be an alignment along the lines of savings: if users save more and if banks can benefit from this, then everyone would be doing it.

</comment><comment><USER17> Maybe we could start with some simpler services?

Context: I very rarely set up autopay because the cost of a mistake is high.

I wish I had a bank that showed my money in a cashflow view: Money coming in per day / week / month / year, cost of bills and services per day / week / month / year, and some semi-smart automation to autopay my loans, save, and invest.

What do I mean by semi-smart? For loans, know the interest rate, date due, length, ect, and calculate when it's better to invest versus pay off early.

For example, if, when adding a loan to billpay, I could add some of this additional information, it would be much easier than just adding autopay.

</comment><comment><USER18> > spend no time in school—or anywhere else—teaching them what money is, how it > works, and what the rules of the game are.

Things have sure changed from when I was in school. I remember that a significant amount of time was spent on this.

</comment><comment><USER19> In a 2 person economy, if person A stops cycling money back (thru trade not debt), person B suffers. Something similar happens in a 300M person economy, so I agree, self driving money would be a great solution.

</comment><comment><USER20> So basically... let an algorithm make financial decisions for yourself and all problems are solved?

</comment><comment><USER21> Self driving money is just index funds?

</comment><comment><USER22> I'm so disappointed. I thought this was going to be an article about how the money pouring into the self-driving industry/AI industry matters more than whether we actually get self-driving cars.

<comment><USER17> I also thought the same, but I'm not disappointed. The article was much, much more interesting and really interested me.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Deciso, a collaborative music player - <AUTHOR> https://deciso.audio/ <comment><AUTHOR> Sample room here: [https://deciso.audio/hey](https://deciso.audio/hey)

I worked on the server and web interface of Deciso. Ask me anything about the project and please tell me what can be improved on! Deciso can be used to share music with others, vote on a playlist, and listen to the same audio in sync on multiple devices.

</comment><comment><USER2> Cool site. Keep up the good work!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you!</comment></comment>


Create a Troll Fantasyland to stop trolls and improve discussion - <AUTHOR> http://factore.ca/on-the-floor/79-stop-trolls-and-improve-discussions-by-creating-a-troll-fantasyland

<comment><USER2> The automatic replies thing wouldn't work.

What you -could- do, however, would be to give all the trolls a share fantasyland. They'll feed each other.

<comment><USER3> I've heard of several news websites doing a version of this, with some success.

For instance, one New Jersey newspaper has a forum called "Take It Outside," where the comment policy is not as strict as in other areas of the site -- basically, only profanity and pornography get banned, but everything else is fair game.

The idea is that if you give people who want to post trollish comments a dedicated place to do so, maybe they'll gravitate there and stop bugging everyone else.

Then again, I suppose a true troll _wants_ to bug everyone else.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Quite a number of newspaper websites employ exactly this technique.

At the site I work for, we call it "bozo-ing." We've had users who have been in their own Troll Fantasyland, as you call it, for many months without realizing it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Apparently it's an ancient idea:

[http://ask.metafilter.com/117775/What-was-the-first- website-...](http://ask.metafilter.com/117775/What-was-the-first-website-to- hide-trolls-activity-to-everyone-but-the-troll-himself)

So much for what I thought was an original idea!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I tried this once, but they figured it out very soon and it generated a lot of additional anger. Many trolls honestly don't consider themselves trolls, and will be angered by being invisibly treated as trolls once they found out.

<comment><USER5> How did they figure it out?

<comment><USER6> I imagine that perhaps they visited a site without logging in, or spoke with their friends who also frequent the site.

<comment><USER4> Yes, both of those. They also often have multiple (dozens of) accounts. Trolling seems to be one of those activities where you really get in the zone, because they seem to have infinite amounts of time and energy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A Troll Honeypot. But the AI just isn't quite there yet.</comment>


The Apple Watch can detect atrial fibrillation: so what now? - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-019-0330-y <comment><USER2> When you consider this came from research that was funded by Jawbone, Eight and that the author has equity in InCarda, it makes me question the authenticity of their claims. Can someone from this field corroborate what is claimed?

<comment><AUTHOR> The review by Dr. Marcus, a cardiologist [1], refers to a study funded by Apple and published in The New England Journal of Medicine [2]. His main point is that "insufficient evidence exists to recommend atrial fibrillation (AF) screening in asymptomatic adults." [3] There would be a significant number of alarmed users with false-positive results who would undergo costly additional evaluation and treatment where there may be of little benefit. It is troublesome, in his view, that "private industry has bypassed expert consensus to initiate screening for AF in the general population." He adds that "this is an industry instigated inversion of the relationship between patients and physicians..." [4] Larry Husten at the Cardiobrief blog gives a good overview of some of the pitfalls [5].

[1] [https://profiles.ucsf.edu/gregory.marcus](https://profiles.ucsf.edu/gregory.marcus)

[2] [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1901183](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1901183)

[3] [https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2695678](https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2695678)

[4] [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-019-0330-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41569-019-0330-y)

[5] [http://www.cardiobrief.org/2019/11/13/what-can-we-learn- from...](http://www.cardiobrief.org/2019/11/13/what-can-we-learn-from-the- apple-heart-study/)

<comment><USER3> Mr Huston in the last link is complaining that there were too many subjects in the test and that the test was pretty expensive for Apple. How am I to take this seriously? It's just another Apple hater.

<comment><AUTHOR> In regards to your observation, Husten's review notes that the study [1] included subjects where the incidence and prevalence of atrial fibrillation (AF) is low [2], and given the study's design flaws, its findings turned out to be largely irrelevant except as a marketing tool with relatively negligible costs for Apple [3].

I don't know if Mr. Husten is an Apple hater, but it would be more interesting if you challenged his actual arguments including those in the study's accompanying opinion piece: "The uncomfortable fact is that our personal health data have considerable financial value to those who want to use them in the myriad marketplaces connected to our $3.7 trillion health economy." [4]

[1] [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1901183](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1901183)

[2] [https://www.ajconline.org/article/S0002-91491301288-5/fullte...](https://www.ajconline.org/article/S0002-91491301288-5/fulltext)

[3] [http://www.cardiobrief.org/2019/11/13/what-can-we-learn- from...](http://www.cardiobrief.org/2019/11/13/what-can-we-learn-from-the- apple-heart-study/)

[4] [https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1913980](https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe1913980)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure how the fact that data has value is a comment on Apple Health studies. The health data collected in these studies is not connected on contact information, so the only thing a user can be profiled as is as a person who participates in the study. The author is quick to dismiss this data that first was worth billions as worthless though.

> Now the same sort of breathless optimism about technology is infecting > medicine and healthcare.

Clearly the author made up his mind before he even started.

> In other words, nearly half a million people were required to identify a few > hundred people with AF.

Or, the study identified a few hundred people with AF, using nothing but the watch they were going to wear anyway. Impressive!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm neither partial nor against Apple, but picked up a Series 4 watch recently with the ECG crown feature. It's a pain because it only registers when the app is activated and the opposite arm touches the crown. I'd also consider wearing a chest strap for constant ECG and sleep apnea monitoring if such a QS device existed at a reasonable price-point. Lastly, it would be nice if there were a continuous non invasive blood pressure monitor (CNAP/cNIBP) similar to CareTaker but more compact and tasteful in appearance that could also gather data (I have tachycardia and high diastolic BP from unknown causes, in addition to obstructive sleep apnea because of a Marfan-ish CTD and I'm overweight).

</comment><comment><USER5> What's not clear is the difference between owning a watch and getting your annual EKG with your primary doctor? Can the watch detect fibrillation not detected in your annual? I've never understood that.

<comment><AUTHOR> The Apple Watch used a sensor to intermittently measure changes in blood flow as long as the user carried the device. The signals then generated pulse intervals over one minute which ran through an algorithm to infer the presence of an irregular ventricular rhythm. Further evaluation was conducted for the group with abnormal results. On the other hand, a 12-lead electrocardiogram measures electrical activity over a very short period of time. It's just one quick snapshot of the heart, therefore, episodic atrial fibrillation can occur outside that quick peek.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Alas the article is behind a hard paywall and not available on Sci-Hub...</comment>


Introducing Docker Links (Docker 0.6.5 release) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.docker.io/2013/10/docker-0-6-5-links-container-naming-advanced-port-redirects-host-integration/?from=hn

<comment><USER2> This has the first bit of big changes Redhat did. I know Alex Larson (mentioned in this blog) is a very talented Redhat develooer</comment>


Ask HN: How to find a topic and motivation for a side project? - <AUTHOR> I'm 27, I'm a SW Engineer and I have some experience also as a Data Scientist. I know how to create webservices, android apps and I have knowledge about artificial intelligence (I have a master degree in this area).
I have the feeling that I have a wide knowledge of a lot of tools, and somehow I would like to do something that is mine, but I struggle to find the project where to apply them and the motivation to keep working on my own for a long time.
Any advice of how to find the topic and motivation? How did you start yours? <comment><USER2> Finding somebody to team up with might be the way to go.

Perhaps somebody who can motivate you would be the perfect match. Reach out to me if the idea of teaming up with somebody sounds appealing.</comment>


Treating Tumor Fields: Electrical fields improve survival in brain tumors - <AUTHOR> http://abstracts.asco.org/156/AbstView_156_151667.html

<comment><AUTHOR> This was for me the most surprising abstract at the American Society of Clinical Oncology this year. Note that apparently this costs US$20,000 a month.

More info: [http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternating_electric_field_th...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternating_electric_field_therapy)

[https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_doyle_treating_cancer_with_el...](https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_doyle_treating_cancer_with_electric_fields?language=en)</comment>


At the Expense of U.S. Tech, a European Star Is Born - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/at-the-expense-of-u-s-tech-a-european-star-is-born-1532729696 <comment><AUTHOR> Relevant sentence:

 _The sole practical consequence of the EU's action would be to raise an obstacle to this person's discovery of the opportunities created by access to the world through the mobile internet._

What would be the other practical consequences? That some magical OS will appear to capture Android's market share? That Google Apps will somehow become less awesome thus paving way to some magical competitor apps to gain market share? That two-bit competitors like Foundem or Yelp with shitty services will somehow find a way to win users?

Latest salvo by Vestager only ensures more regulatory barriers to everyone, more hurdles for consumers at the low end of the market and a stunt by her to further her political ambitions.</comment>


The Race to Create the Amazon of Cryptocurrency - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/02/amazon-of-cryptocurrency-what-will-it-look-like.html <comment><USER2> Not a single mention of OpenBazaar, easily at the forefront of the sector.

Terribly lazy journalism.

[https://www.openbazaar.org/](https://www.openbazaar.org/)

"A free online marketplace to buy and sell goods / services using Bitcoin. OpenBazaar is a peer-to-peer ecommerce platform with no fees or restrictions."</comment>


The CEO's job - <AUTHOR> http://jessicamah.com/the-ceos-job-part-2

<comment><USER2> The bit about hiring contractors, especially for vital functions such as infrastructure and support is bad advice. A high quality contractor charges a very high hourly rate (it also usually isn't feasible to give them a sizable equity grant in its place), so you're left hiring people who would prefer a full time job but can't get one. This creates a poisonous and unpleasant atmosphere, which makes you even less likely to hire strong people full time.

I understand that "war for talent" is a popular narrative, but you note that those writing about it are almost always journalists who aren't programmers themselves. Non-technical writers don't understand quality developers want something more than a paycheck: they want to work on challenging problems, with people who they can learn from and in a company that has a shot at making an impact on the world. If you want to hire quality people than you should take hiring (all steps: from employment branding to interviewing to closing) a top priority: give employees time to interview candidates (expect each engineer to interview at least two or three candidates each week), be willing to let a position go unfilled for a _long_ time until the right person is found.

In short, be ready to reply "we'd like to do Y, but either we must strip out a feature X from Y, spend more time working on it or transfer an engineer working on Z to work on Y". If you're working on a hard technical problem, then your investors and customers shouldn't have a problem with that. If you're not (and there's nothing wrong with that), change your hiring strategy appropriately e.g., if you're building CRM software, stop trying to go after TopCoder finalists and ex-Google Search Engineers and instead look for engineers who are interested in business and product design/development. The former aren't going to be interested in joining you (other than at an exorbitant rate) until you're ready to use their talent, the latter will help you build the business to the point where you will need their help scaling it.

To use a vulgar analogy, the strategy of hiring a contractors to "move faster" is analogous to a man having nine one night stands hoping to conceive a baby in a month ("because I can't find the right long-term partner, and nine months is too long to wait anyway"): it's wrong on many levels and will poison your culture. It's long been known (Brooks' Law) that adding more "bodies" to a project to a project that's at risk of being late will only make it _more_ late. Creating a company full of dubious quality contractors (with no loyalty, no "fire in the belly" about the product) will make your company look toxic to engineers used to working at "talent brand" companies where engineers are passionate about what they're working on and are confident in their technical abilities.

The CEO's real job is to manage the managers ("no, we don't have the resources to ship X at time T"), and sell the company (including to prospective employees). The blog post doesn't read "wow, this is a company worth leaving or turning down an offer from {Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc...} for!".

<comment><USER3> "...and instead look for engineers who are interested in business and product design/development."

Isn't this the same as the generalists she recommends hiring?

<comment><USER2> Wasn't direct at her in particular. Also note that she isn't building CRM software. The example wasn't about her. In addition, generalists may actually not be appropriate for _some_ kinds of software development: it depends on your application.

Generally heavy complaints of "it's impossible to hire engineers" comes from a dissonance between engineers you're trying to hire and the engineers you actually need to hire (or at least the engineers that are interested in your product).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I agree that a startup should hire multi-talented people. But it's a bit extreme to say that startups should hire people who can do UI design, backend programming, and do business deals. Certainly such people are useful, but they're incredibly rare and are probably more interested in founding their own startup.

Also, I don't agree with the "just contract it out" philosophy. The problem you run into with contractors is that even if they're good, they don't have anything invested in what they produce. They don't have to live with it long- term.

I'm not saying that it's bad to hire contractors, only that you have to be careful with them. And I certainly don't think that it's a good idea to hire contractors because they're easier to find and fire than full-timers. In fact, many times it can be harder.

<comment><USER5> The important thing that I think Jess forgot to mention is that inDinero doesn't contract out critical parts of the sites. It's usually smaller things that we want to get done that aren't important enough for the full time engineers. Example is a small ad that we run to get user feedback on the dashboard page, something easy to build but not super critical part of the site.

We also make sure all contrator code goes through code reviews, which takes up my time but ensures that no code enters our site that isn't up to our caliber of quality.

P.S. I'm an engineer (Rohan) who works at inDinero in case that wasn't obvious.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I come from a retail management background, so I'm a newbie to the tech industry.

The guys who taught me retail management put extreme emphasis on training. Training and knowledge dissemination was a top priority for the management teams I worked with. Once I was managing my own stores, I adopted this world view and had great success.

Coming from this background I'm sometimes surprised there aren't more articles about improving the flow of knowledge and communication within organizations.

So what gives? I learn a lot of stuff on my own (as do most of my tech savvy friends), is that the way things work in tech? Or are training and communication just not discussed very often because they're seen as so elementary?

<comment><USER7> training in the UNIX industry is largely ignored (or done so badly that it might as well be ignored) by the business folks. But informal mentoring is extremely common.

Your UNIX folks will informally organize themselves around the best people, regardless of the org chart you try to impose from above. Part of the job of being the senior person is mentoring the newer people. This is done informally, but fairly consistently across most places I've worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Someone who can do business deals, write code, and do user interface design, > is 5X more valuable to us than a typical backend engineer.

Absolutely.... If you can find someone who is _equally_ good at all of those. Very rarely (I personally have never) you will see someone _equally_ apt (and good) at both left (Writing programming logic, Solving tough technical problems etc. ) and right ( designing User Interactions, Doing business deals etc.) brained work. Humans are not programmed like that.

Sure there are people who can get by doing multiple domains, but they are rarely fit/enjoy/brilliant at all of them.

<comment><USER9> Talent is subjective and fairly assessing one's own abilities is impossible, but I have been employed in both programming and design jobs and have received a lot of positive feedback in both domains. Given that, I think the thought processes behind each are very similar:

In programming, design is just as important as logic. Code not only needs to be functional, but it also needs to look good. A visually attractive codebase is much more maintainable due to the basic human response to beauty.

In design, logic is also just as important. When designing an interface, for example, you are constantly solving problems about how the user is going interact with the design. The process of getting there is exactly the same as solving a programming problem.

I think there is a lot of ebb and flow if you don't typecast yourself. As a young kid I was quite interested in the arts. I remember spending a lot of time drawing and honing my visual skills because that's what I enjoyed doing. As I got a little older, I became fascinated by logic problems, remember spending a lot of time learning how to program.

Interestingly, as it relates to this discussion, now that I have grown older still, I actually have become much more interested in business and is one of the reasons why I follow this website. While I've closed a few deals along the way, my business deal abilities definitely lag behind the aforementioned skill sets. That I chalk that up to being much less experienced, not because of any genetic hinderances, however.

It is of my opinion that the biggest limiting factor is time. I was, perhaps, lucky that I started young which afforded me more time to put focus on both design and programming. Whereas for someone else who started programming in college it becomes difficult to fit in time for other interests, such as learning design. I know I spend less time doing business type work than I would otherwise like to because my plate is already full with other jobs. Because of that I miss the opportunity to grow in that area.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> After reading most of the posts in this discussion, I really feel like people here see contractors as uninvested workers. I always invest 100% of myself in every single project I join as a contractor, and this is very important for me, which makes me read your comments like insults to what I do.

My age and relative lack of typical corporate experience may of course give me a bad vision of the market. Maybe most contractors are not working the way I do, which would make the advice Jessica gives a bad one. But even in this case, generalization may prevent you from working with interesting people.

Disclaimer: I'm working as a self employed engineer, mostly doing jobs with my team, and far from being someone "who would prefer a fulltime job but can't get one".

</comment><comment><USER11> I like reading Jessica Mah's blog, so I'm sorry to jump right into the nitpicking. But something in she wrote doesn't sit quite right with me...

She writes that finding talent in silicon valley is like trying to find water in the sahara, but then a few sentences later says "We had a lot of talented people apply for full-time jobs, but they either lacked culture fit, or cost too much money."

Unfortunately, there's a lot left unsaid here, and it would help to hear something more specific. For example, what was "too much money"? What attributes contributed to a candidate's "lack of culture fit?"

</comment><comment><USER12> If you're looking for fast on-boarding I would recommend Vagrant (<http://vagrantup.com>). It's built for reducing project setup overhead which can be an expensive proposition if you're juggling resources as she suggests in the article.

</comment><comment><USER13> 5\. His name should sell company products/services

</comment><comment><USER14> > It's typically difficult, if not impossible, to scale up and down your > engineering team in the way you can spawn up new cloud servers. We're trying > to change that by having a reliable source of contract engineers who can > help us grow non-essential components of our codebase.

Sounds like an awful place to work. Treating your most valuable asset as a commodity? Let me know how that works out for you.

<comment><USER15> > ... _non-essential components_ of our codebase ... to build _lower priority > features_ that our core team doesn't have time to get to." [emphasis added]

Sounds like they've already got their most valuable assets, the employees, where they need them the most (presumably on core product). Using contractors to fill the lower priority gaps doesn't seem so bad in that context.

However, I could see it becoming an issue if something that was previously considered non-core suddenly turned out to be critical (e.g after changing direction based on customer/market feedback)

<comment><USER16> I disagree. How many features are there that are 1) not high priority enough for a full time employee _and_ 2) high priority enough to justify bringing aboard another person, train them in the code base, have them code the feature and let them go after coding is complete?

I think Jessica Mah is misunderstanding the purpose of contractors to her and her business' detriment. Hiring contractors because the team isn't able to accomplish its tasks in a timely fashion is disastrous in the long run. What happens is that the contractors will write code in the most expedient fashion possible, without care for the long term harm to the code base. The team then sees an inexorable decline in its ability to iterate, which causes the business side to think that even more contractors are required. This self- reinforcing cycle inevitably leads to a codebase that's almost impossible to change or improve in any way; it leads to a place where moving a logo is a three week project (don't laugh, I've been there).

There is another way of approaching contracting that is more valuable for both the team and the contractor. Instead of thinking of the contractor as a hired gun whose sole responsibility is to finish a feature or fix a defect, the founder should think of the contractor as a teacher or a coach. Hire contractors when your team needs to learn a new skill or improve some aspect of their development cycle. Approaching contracting with this mindset ensures that each successive contractor hired improves, rather than degrades the team's skills. Otherwise, your team becomes trapped in a maze to which they don't know the exit, and you wonder why every new version seems to have fewer improvements and worse performance than the last.

EDIT: After further reflection, there is another way that contracting can improve the business in a sustainable fashion. I know of a few companies that practice "contract-to-hire". In other words, you're brought on as a contractor for a period of 6 months or so. During that 6 month period, you and the company have a chance to evaluate each other. At the end of that period, the company makes an offer to you if you've managed to prove yourself as a good fit for the company.</comment></comment></comment>


Go Ahead and Change Bodies; Just Remember to Take Your Soma - <AUTHOR> http://exolymph.com/2016/03/13/go-ahead-just-remember-to-take-your-soma/ <comment><USER2> Being able to choose one's outward gender and race appearance in public reminds me distinctly of the Steiner adage "On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog."

<comment><USER3> One of my friend's online acquaintances that was a Japanese girl living in Canada. Then one day she forgot to turn her voice modulator on, turns out the her was a him. My friend had known this person for several years.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's really interesting -- how did it resolve? Did they stay friends?

<comment><USER3> Nope, the guy cut contact w/ my friend and all the mutual people with whom they played. Most of those people were my friends real life friends.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a disjointed story. I am not sure what the things it wanted to tell me were. It presented like4 or 5 unrelated high concept points but they didn't tie together meaningfully.

<comment><USER5> I took the main meaning to be that societal problems were being solved from the wrong end, by changing people (forcibly, even) instead of changing society.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think the point of stories like this is not so much "what about the future?" but what about NOW? We already have serious problems in the world. This story basically exaggerates our current ills. It is a caricature of current issues. The actual future is likely to be far different in important ways we cannot yet imagine.

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting read that strikes home for me a bit.

As a kid, my mom was a working mother -- a terribly unpopular choice in rural Michigan where we lived. My mom drove 30 minutes away from home to get me to a suitable child-care provider. She didn't pick the place because it was close to work -- she was a traveling sales-person -- she picked it because it was the closest available (located at a church because commercial daycare was non- existent where we lived). When I started looking for a partner in life, one of my "absolutes" was to find a woman who would be OK with one of us staying home with our children (I was and still would be perfectly fine with being a stay- at-home Dad). As a result, my ex-wife stayed home with the children (and my current wife does the same).

The tables have turned in my adult-hood. It's unusual to have a parent stay home. The job is as hard as it was when I was a kid (if not harder due to social pressures that make women feel badly for _not_ pursuing careers). As a society (in the US anyway), we're setup for both parents to work full time. When my wife and I chose not to enroll our children in pre-school most of our friends thought we were out of our minds and holding our children back. As parents we felt it was unnecessary to hire a professional educator for teaching our children the ABCs/123s and were surprised at the reaction we received even from families who didn't have two working parents. As a child, preschool was purely the domain of families of working parents and enrollment was considered an unnecessary expense when mom or dad was available.

Personally, I don't have strong feelings about stay-at-home vs. work full-time parents. I knew I didn't enjoy my experience as a kid but I knew that a lot of that was due to jealousy since nearly all of my friends had moms that stayed home. Our kids are school-age, now, but we're still a single-parent earning family by choice. Having children is a _lot_ of work and I personally don't think we could handle raising them the way we desire if we both had priorities outside of the home. Don't read that as me saying that it cannot be done -- I'm sure it can, as my parents remind me "you turned out just fine"[1] -- I just don't know that _I_ could do it.

[1] People get _very_ touchy about parenting choices. When I told my family that we had no intention -- from the beginning -- to have both of us working, they assumed that we were calling them bad parents for choosing differently. I know the situation my family was in when I was young. They had little choice but to both work in order to keep the lights on. And I'm not the least bit upset with how I was raised, but the added time we get to enjoy our children and the reduced stress that I experience knowing that our home life is taken care of while I'm working is worth the loss of income, especially since we live in a place where we can comfortably get by on my salary.

<comment><USER8> The article mentioned:

> "Now, we are free to pursue our goals. We contribute to society every waking > moment...

It also seemed to assume a method of universal child care and education.

Given that we don't have either of these, and based on the experiences you described, which method do you think is better for "society" and the child in the long term: two-income households with childcare, or one-income households with a stay at home parent?

<comment><USER9> The stay at home parent _is_ childcare. You get personalized child care or you can outsource it for economies of scale and have the second parent work so long as that parent earns more than the cost of childcare.

But I think there's more than just taking care of children. There is research into how important family units are, and those units are better strengthened by greater time commitments of the parents than by less.

Plus there's the issue of parental choice in teaching values. If everyone in the society agreed upon values than the preschool teacher's example would be equivalent. But parents often have their own way of seeing things. Different religions. Different economic and civic philosophies, etc. So there's another reason to increase parental involvement, so that the parents spend more time being role models and conveying values. This is especially true if the childcare is provided as a universal service from the government, because then you can't even choose childcare at your local church.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The writing style in this article is really jarring for some reason I can't quite put my finger on.

<comment><USER11> Because you didn't take your soma, did you..

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is based off the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I hope this helps you understand the story better.

</comment><comment><USER13> I thought article was about Soma from the Vedas[1] which vedic people took to 'change bodies' during sacrificial rituals.

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

<comment><USER14> Yep. I think that was a direct, literary reference in the story.

<comment><USER13> Are you sure? Article had nothing to do with SOMA from RigVeda. Maybe I am missing something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> You can also watch Surrogates, the same themes are explored in that film.</comment>


Google Takes A Bite Of PIE - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/28/google-pie/ <comment><USER2> Having known the crew at PIE for a while now, I can confidently say that Google made a great choice.

Special points for co-founder Rick Turoczy; it's clear he's worked hard to make sure PIE is the success I always knew it would be. He also runs a quality blog covering the Portland startup/tech scene (in his spare time?) at <http://siliconflorist.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank very much for the kind words and votes of confidence. We're really excited to have Google joining Coca-Cola and Target as sponsors/mentors for us.

And I would be remiss not to highlight Renny Gleeson's leadership and vision in making this all happen. I'm just the operations guy who takes credit for his hard work ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Awesome!</comment>