Baffling ABC maths proof now has impenetrable 300-page 'summary' - <AUTHOR> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2146647-baffling-abc-maths-proof-now-has-impenetrable-300-page-summary/ <comment><USER2> Two paragraphs that highlight the potential source of the problem in the sublinked article:

> Despite mathematics being a universal language, culture clash could be > getting in the way, says Kim. "In Japan people are pretty used to long, > technical discussions by the lecturer that require a lot of concentration," > he says. "In America or England we expect much more interaction, pointed > questions coming from the audience, at least some level of heated debate."

> There is a growing consensus that Mochizuki has over-engineered his work, > contributing to the confusion. "Most of the large theories that he builds > are not essential. He could have written things in a much more streamlined > way," says Voloch.

This is a problem in a lot of technical fields but also in writing in general. It's always easier to write 1000 words to say something than 100 to say it well.

<comment><USER3> My verbosity is a shortcoming. Were I able, I'd be more precise and brevity would be the result. This is actually something I work on improving.

<comment><USER4> Not a dig at you, but I tend to use $5 words when a normal word would suffice. Even though the obscure words usually express my thoughts more precisely than common words do, they do a worse job of conveying understanding, since people often do not know the word and infer an incorrect meaning from context.

<comment><USER3> I try to communicate at a level where the intended audience can easily understand me. This is also partially out of laziness. I don't like having to repeat myself.

<comment><USER5> I'm not sure if this comment thread is a parody of itself.

<comment><USER4> That was at least part of my intent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The article didn't explain the abc conjecture in much detail ("The original proof is of the long-standing ABC conjecture that explores the deep nature of numbers, centred on the simple equation a + b = c."). That's unfortunate, because even though the proof is inscrutable, the conjecture itself isn't very complicated:

 _If three numbers a, b, and c are coprime and two numbers a and b have large prime factors, then their sum c generally does not._

To make that a little more formal, it means that the radical (product of distinct prime factors) of their product abc is usually less than the sum c, up to some exponent 1+eps:

        rad(abc)^(1+eps) < c

... for some eps. That eps is important! There are infinitely many numbers a, b, c where this isn't true for some eps (and there are ways to construct those), but the conjecture states that for any given eps, there are finitely many.

To find maximal counterexamples (which, because mathematics consistently uses intuitive terminology, are said to be "high-quality") you typically look for numbers that are smooth (small prime factors) but not powersmooth (larger prime-factors-raised-to-a-power). Typically you'll also fix a to be really small, to limit the search space somewhat. [MM14] describes other methods for finding triples.

Here's a simple example of a high-quality triple:

        a = 1
        b = 2*3^7 = 4374
        c = 5^4*7 = 4375

Because all factors are unique, rad(abc) = rad(a) rad(b) rad(c).

        c     > (rad(abc))^(1+eps)
        c     > (rad(a) * rad(b)     * rad(c))^(1+eps)
        5^4*7 > (rad(1) * rad(2*3^7) * rad(5^4*7))^(1+eps)
        5^4*7 > (1      * 2 * 3      * 5 * 7)^(1+eps)
        4375  > (210)^(1+eps)

This is a great example, because the exponent (sometimes called q) is about 1.57, which is extraordinarily high. In the first billion c's, there are only 34 with q > 1.4. This is the fifth best such triple we know of. [triples]

Consider a trivial case where all three numbers are prime; a = 2, b = 3, c = 5. Primes are their own radical, so:

        5 > (2 + 3)^1+eps

This is the edge case.

[triples]: [https://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~desmit/abc/index.php?set=2](https://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~desmit/abc/index.php?set=2)

[MM14]: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.2974.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.2974.pdf)

<comment><USER6> I can no longer edit this comment, but there's a typo at the bottom:

        5 > (2 + 3)^1+eps

... should be

        5 > (2 * 3 * 5)^1+eps

Which is a good example of the "common case", i.e. not a triple of particularly high quality (this is q=0.4-something).

<comment><USER7> Thanks for the edit, I was wondering how that would make sense otherwise. More generally, thanks for clearly communicating what's really going on! Math can only be extremely beautiful if it is actually understood.

<comment><USER2> > Math can only be extremely beautiful if it is actually understood.

This is why I've found relearning math very rewarding. Even if I haven't found as many applications in my day-to-day programming life as I hoped (other than maybe when writing Haskell-esque languages or when I'm fortunate to get to use pure FP concepts).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Some bitter conflict is referenced in footnote 1 of the 300 page summary.

""" The author hears that a mathematician (I. F.), who pretends to understand inter-universal Teichm¨uller theory, suggests in a literature that the author began to study inter-universal Teichm¨uller theory "by his encouragement". But, this differs from the fact that the author began it by his own will. The same person, in other context as well, modified the author's email with quotation symbol ">" and fabricated an email, seemingly with ill-intention, as though the author had written it. The author would like to record these facts here for avoiding misunderstandings or misdirections, arising from these kinds of cheats, of the comtemporary and future people. """

I wonder if "I.F." is referring to the same "I.F." quoted in the original article.

[1] [http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~gokun/DOCUMENTS/abc_ver6.pd...](http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~gokun/DOCUMENTS/abc_ver6.pdf)

[2] [https://www.maths.nottingham.ac.uk/personal/ibf/activity.htm...](https://www.maths.nottingham.ac.uk/personal/ibf/activity.html)

<comment><USER9> I've personally modified thousands of e-mails with the ">" symbol; it's called replying. That, _per se_ , has nothing to do with fabricating an e-mail; why mention it?

Of course > symbols are fairly likely to be used in a forged e-mail, possibly next to fake quoted text; but that then is not simply an alteration of genuine text by the addition of those symbols.

<comment><USER10> >I've personally modified thousands of e-mails with the ">" symbol; it's called replying. That, per se, has nothing to do with fabricating an e-mail; why mention it?

I read it as "I.F." making it look like something the author wrote was the author quoting "I.F.", or vice-versa.

For example,

        From: John Doe <firstname.lastname@example.com>
        The meaning of life is 42.

becomes

        From: John Doe <firstname.lastname@example.com>
        > The meaning of life is 42.
        Thanks for the help!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The opening sentence of a linked article sums it up quite well: "If nobody understands a mathematical proof, does it count?"

The abc conjecture may be solved today but only when a sufficient number of people understand and accept the proof as a proof.

<comment><USER12> >"If nobody understands a mathematical proof, does it count?"

Just wait until general AI really kicks off, then all of new math will be like that. It's not that humans are bad at logical thinking, our weakness is memory. That won't be the case for an artificial agent with instantaneous perfect recall of everything it has ever seen.

<comment><USER3> Mathematics is a language. You don't really need to memorize it, you can read it. Unfortunately, most people aren't exposed to anything higher than arithmetic.

<comment><USER13> yeah, well, have fun reading e.g. the stacks project[1] of round about 4000 pages without remember the necessary steps leading up to a corollary.

[1] [https://stacks.math.columbia.edu/browse](https://stacks.math.columbia.edu/browse) \- abstract algebra as far as I can tell

<comment><USER3> You're sure as hell not going to memorize it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I'm not a mathematician, so I don't know the significance of the ABC conjecture, but for those that are laymen like me, here's a quick introduction to the ABC conjecture:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RkBl7WKzzRw](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RkBl7WKzzRw)

<comment> Joe-Z Not sure why you're being downvoted. The video actually explains the ABC conjecture, which the article really doesn't.

Also, the second-highest comment in this thread right now is one explaining this conjecture.

<comment><USER14> I don't understand it either, but I've learnt to mostly ignore downvotes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I know there has been a lot of work in automated theorem proving.

I'm curious if anyone here is able to describe the state of the art in that. Is it really just a toy for basic things right now, or how realistic is it that we'd ever get to a point where the author of a paper like this could use a formal language to show that their proof is indeed valid and complete?

<comment><USER16> It is realistic in the sense that it has already been done! But it's still laborious in the extreme.

Kepler conjecture was stated in 1611 and had been unsolved since. Thomas Hales started a project to attack it in 1992. After six years of work, he announced the proof in 1998, in the form of 250 pages of argument and 3 gigabytes of computer calculation. He submitted it to Annals of Mathematics, one of the most prestigious math journal, for review. Reviewers and the author tried valiantly for five years, gave up, and published it in 2003 with a warning that while reviewers were 99% certain, it couldn't be completely reviewed.

Soon after getting this both rejection and acceptance, Thomas Hales announced the plan to formalize his proof to remove any uncertainty. It was enthusiastically received by automated theorem proving community. For a while Thomas Hales "shopped" for the prover tool to use and basically leaders of every significant provers tried to "sell" it to him. He decided on HOL Light, wrote the detailed plan for formalization, and estimated it would take 20 years. He actually carried out this plan, announced the completion in 2014, wrote the paper on formalization, and submitted the formalization paper, with 21 collaborators, in 2015. The formalization paper was published in 2017.

So there's that. The formal proof of Kepler conjecture is at the moment the most significant corpus of formalized mathematics in existence.

<comment><USER17> > After six years of work, he announced the proof in 1998

then

> plan to formalize his proof ... estimated it would take 20 years

so is it just me, or is the "work" of the normal proof only took 1/5th of the time it took for the automated/formalized proof?! that seems counter- productive imho...

<comment><USER18> > so is it just me, or is the "work" of the normal proof only took 1/5th of > the time it took for the automated/formalized proof?! that seems counter- > productive imho...

It took 5 times to make it not a hunch but a real demonstration. If that's counterproductive or not remains as a something opinable.

<comment><USER9> It _looks_ counterproductive when it's not demonstrating informal work to be _false_.

> _make it not a hunch_

That's not what automation is doing; it doesn't turn conjectures into proofs. It finds mistakes in proofs; those proofs are not "hunches" but rigorous efforts.

Something which finds faults demonstrates is value mainly whenever it finds a fault. (Or at least that is a very easy perception to slide into.)

<comment><USER16> And a fault was found! The original proof, as published, is incorrect. The error and the fix was published in "A revision of the proof of the Kepler conjecture" (2009). [https://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0350](https://arxiv.org/abs/0902.0350)

Note that we now actually know there is no more fault, because formalization is complete.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> question: if a reviewer is given a proof to verify, then is it possible to simply step through each transformation and verify it, without really understanding the entirety? Or in cases such as this are there steps that are new or obtuse enough that there isn't a way to verify them without understanding the whole thing. Or, are there individual steps that require so much work that it is impractical to verify them?

<comment><USER20> In practice, a proof contains many steps that are highly non-obvious unless you have a deep understanding of the subject. This is done not just for the sake of brevity, but also clarity. In a proof, there are a few key ideas you want to show. Around that, you need glue to convince the reader that your key ideas work, and save them from some the tedium and hard work of verifying that stuff.

A 1/4 page proof, when made as simple as you suggested, could easily bloom to 2 pages. At this point, your reader can no longer find those few key ideas, and is instead lost in the rigor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This sheds an interesting light on the referee process in that referees are given an inordinate amount of power in the scientific process.

Suppose I am a referee, then I am a mathematician and I generally want new and interesting work released having to do with my subject area because I want more students interested in those topics validating my general area of research. If I dont plan to personally build on this work (because maybe its too confusing or doesn't shed light on what I am working on), then in a case like this where the paper is so confounding, whats to keep me from simply saying "I understand this and its correct" even if that is not the case? Its not like if you referee and approve a paper that is later proven wrong (especially in a case like this) you are run out of the mathematical community. Do they need to provide detailed explanations as to why they think its right?

What would stop a referee from simply going along with it and approving this paper, especially when the community is confounded by it and doesn't want to do the work itself.

Does the rigor of scientific process ultimately just come down to unrigorous consensus?

<comment><USER22> Professional mathematician here.

That can occasionally happen with much less important papers; e.g. someone is asked to referee something, and doesn't really feel like actually reading it but would still like to see it published. If they are not conscientious they might only briefly skim the proof and write a hasty referee report.

But ABC is a _major_ claim. The community will not be nearly so quick to reach a consensus. In particular, from what I can tell now there are a handful of mathematicians other than Mochizuki vouching for the proof, but even that is still not enough: overall, the community has yet to come to a consensus that this is enough.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The proof apparently rests on an entirely new (not yet vetted) branch of number theory developed by the proof's author, "Inter-universal Teichmüller Theory". 45-page overview linked:

[http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/%7Emotizuki/Panoramic%20Over...](http://www.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/%7Emotizuki/Panoramic%20Overview%20of%20Inter- universal%20Teichmuller%20Theory.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER24> > "The language strikes me as substantially more accessible than that of the > original papers."

So is not really a summary, is more of a reformulation, an easier to read rewrite.

</comment><comment><USER25> This reads like an academic paper created by 'machine learning' to be unintelligible yet look legitimate at-a-glance...

</comment><comment><USER26> They should probably break it up into more manageable pieces. Maybe by starting with Frobenioids?</comment>


A/B Testing You'll Actually Use: Optimizely (YC W10) Launches Out of Beta - <AUTHOR> http://www.optimizely.com/?utm_source=hn It was three months ago to the day that we announced our private beta. We were thrilled to see thousands of people sign up for the beta. We've worked hard to improve the product over the last three months based on their feedback and we're now ready to come out of beta and launch to the public!
Our goal is to make it as easy as humanly possible for you to create and run A/B tests on your site. All you need to do is enter your website URL and point and click on what you want to change. Absolutely no coding or engineering required. You don't even need to create an account to get started.
We're working hard to improve the product every day based on your feedback-- just reply to this comment or shoot us an email at email@example.com and let us know what you think! <comment><USER2> You might want to adjust the pricing tiers. With $19/$79/$399 per month tiers, I have to guess that most people will start by trying the lowest tier; but that's limited to 2k visitors.

If you're doing an A/B test with 2k visitors and you've got an "A" conversion rate of 1%, you need to see a 60% improvement (16 conversions vs. 10) in order to have statistical significance. That's a huge improvement, and I doubt many people will be that lucky.

You'll probably be better off setting the limit for the lowest tier at 10k (and adjusting the others upwards too); that should dramatically increase the number of new users who find your service useful and stick around.

EDIT: Or another option would be to have a "free 10,000 visitors" trial rather than a "free 30 days" trial.

<comment><AUTHOR> All our plans start with a 30-day free trial so anyone can start with Silver or Gold plan and at the end of the trial period switch plans.

We also offer 100% Money Back Satisfaction Guarantee so if at the end of any month you aren't satisfied for any reason (including not reaching statistical significance), we'd be happy to offer you a full refund for the month.

<comment><USER2> _All our plans start with a 30-day free trial so anyone can start with Silver or Gold plan and at the end of the trial period switch plans._

True, but that doesn't help people who don't get that much traffic within a 30 day period.

 _We also offer 100% Money Back Satisfaction Guarantee so if at the end of any month you aren't satisfied for any reason (including not reaching statistical significance), we'd be happy to offer you a full refund for the month._

Offering refunds is great, but it's even better if they're not needed. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> _Offering refunds is great, but it's even better if they're not needed. :-)_

Certainly agree! :)

<comment><USER3> Why not just collect their credit card, but don't bill them initially so that the barrier to entry is low, then notify that they'll be charged at the end of the month. If they're pleased with the service, they'll probably ignore the email.

Requiring the user to remember to cancel or downgrade seems potentially sneaky.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's actually how it works right now. We ask for your credit card initially but you don't get billed until 30 days later.

<comment><USER4> If you intend to keep things this way, then don't call it a Money Back Guarantee. Instead, be really clear that users have a trial, and billing is in arrears. Something like:

      YOUR CREDIT CARD WILL NOT BE CHARGED!

      We collect credit card numbers during signup to
      prevent fraud. But we won't take a cent until your free
      thirty day trial is complete.

      The trial is obligation-free; just visit our easy-to-use
      cancellation page during the first thirty days and you'll
      never be charged.

Consumers know that guarantees and rebates are intentionally painful to collect. They feel more confident and empowered when you don't have their money yet.

One caveat: I've seen successful trials that are a week or two long. At thirty days (and with users who aren't very committed), you might have an issue with users forgetting about the forthcoming charge, and then getting angry when it shows up on their bill next month.

<comment><USER5> You can alleviate a little of that with an email on day 25~27.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Disclaimer: I have watched the video but not tried the product, so some of these observations may not apply to the the product itself.

Overall, this looks like a great product. I know a number of people who find Google Website Optimizer complicated to use, and I would definitely recommend this to them as a simpler option. I love how slick the browser interface to edit pages is, and I think having the default 'engagement' metric so people can see results without having to set up a goal page is a brilliant idea.

There are a few things you have done which I would consider doing differently.

1\. It looks like your mission is to make A/B testing really easy, but your pricing page at the moment doesn't really reflect that. Number of visitors tested is an easy metric, but one that it is hard for me to interpret without lots of knowledge of A/B testing. How many tests does this mean I can run how quickly?

I would also reconsider the additional features you offer in premium packages. Cross-browser testing sounds complex and makes me worry that your site edits will fail in IE6. I don't want to have to test it, I just want it to work. With uptime monitoring, what does this have to do with A/B testing? Bigger sites probably already have some form of monitoring already anyway, so it looks like they are going to pay for something they don't need. I think your core product is strong enough that you don't need to offer these.

2\. Showing me the percentage significance level appeals to my inner stats nerd, but I suspect the sort of people I think will benefit most from Optimizely will have difficulty interpreting this number. What level is 'ok'? Having a rank out of 5 below doesn't really address this, is 4/5 ok or do I need 5/5? Google deal with this very well with their bars which turn red or green when they reach significance.

3\. The 'select container' option to expand the selection seems non-obvious, and isn't how multi-select works in any other interface I've seen. Maybe allow people to select multiple components and then take their deepest common parent?

There are also some additional features I personally would like to see

1\. It would be great if you gave an estimate for how long until my experiment will reach an appropriate significance level (obviously based on % change and traffic seen so far).

2\. I would like to be able to choose my conversion action by clicking on a form button or link in your page editor.

3\. It would be amazingly useful to have some automatic suggestions for how a page could be changed - on many occasions I've seen people resist A/B testing because the options are so wide and they don't know what to do. Doing this for some simple suggestions sounds possible - e.g. making key links bigger and moving them up the page. Doing anything more sophisticated could be a good challenge though :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback!

On pricing page: I agree this isn't perfect. What metric would you like us to segment our plans by ideally? We want to make this as simple as possible so folks know how to budget for this and so they can easily know which plan makes the most sense for them.

On additional features: Are there any other "value-add" services you think bigger companies might want besides just more visitors?

On 'select container': we realize this is a bit confusing and we're working on implementing a multi-select almost exactly as you described.

On choosing conversion action: right now we automatically track all reasonable conversion events on a page (clicks, form submissions, subsequent pageviews, custom events) and we want to make this even easier by allow you to explicitly create a custom conversion event to track by specifying it when you are editing the experiment.

On automatic suggestions for how a page could be changed: this is a hard one and we hope to get there eventually. In the mean time we're going to try to do a better job blogging about best practices and lessons we've learned working with our customers.

Thanks again for all the feedback!

<comment><USER7> Another possibility for pricing would be to simply buy a one time number of visitors for a test. I think that would be a much easier first time sell in my organization.

One test, 30k visitors, x statistical significance - $100.

Perhaps with the option of only deleting variations on the fly that don't work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It was three months ago to the day that we announced our private beta. We were thrilled to see thousands of people sign up for the beta. We've worked hard to improve the product over the last three months based on their feedback and we're now ready to come out of beta and launch to the public!

Our goal is to make it as easy as humanly possible for you to create and run A/B tests on your site. All you need to do is enter your website URL and point and click on what you want to change. Absolutely no coding or engineering required. You don't even need to create an account to get started.

We're working hard to improve the product every day based on your feedback-- just reply to this comment or shoot us an email at feedback at optimizely dot com and let us know what you think!

<comment><USER9> I actually got excited watching that video, and I don't even have something to use it for right now. Looks fantastic. I also really like how you have the plans setup to record stats from all visitors, but only unlock them if you buy the appropriate plan. I assume that means you can start out with the small plan, then upgrade and see stats that have already been recorded? If so, very cool.

Based on the results in the promo video, looks like you should have your video autoplay! ;-)

<comment><AUTHOR> _I assume that means you can start out with the small plan, then upgrade and see stats that have already been recorded? If so, very cool._

That's exactly right! Glad you like it.

You can also start at a Silver or Gold plan for your 30-day free trial and downgrade at the end of your free trial if you like.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's the USP on Optimzely when compared to the already quite formidably awesome Visual Website Optimizer?

Also, as someone that really wants to incorporate this tech into my larger scale marketing efforts I am put off by the pricing models to both of the above mentioned sources.

When only one of several ad campaigns are doing 100k visitors a day you can see how that pricing model does me no good. Particularly when you take into consideration that I never stop testing -something- on a campaigns landing page.

Also would love an API so that something like this could be tightly integrated into my custom conversion analytics solution.

Congratulations on your launch nonetheless.

<comment><AUTHOR> Right now our biggest competitor is non-consumption. Businesses see the value in A/B testing but just aren't doing it. The pain points we are trying to solve are setup & implementation, easy-to-understand real-time results, and resolving the marketing & IT impasse within organizations when it comes to doing A/B testing: marketing wants to do it, IT doesn't have time to help. We want to enable marketers to run A/B tests without having to rely on engineering or IT.

Great feedback on the pricing model. I agree this isn't perfect. We do offer a 100% Money Back Satisfaction Guarantee so if at the end of any month you aren't satisfied for any reason, we'd be happy to offer you a full refund for the month.

<comment><USER11> _Right now our biggest competitor is non-consumption_

You think like a winner, my man. You had your opportunity to rag at the "competition" but you were wise enough to see the big picture. Cheers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anyone do a comparison of Optimizely and Visual Website Optimzer?

<comment><USER13> DISCLAIMER: I'm the founder of Visual Website Optimizer but I will try to give a fair and honest comparision. Optimizely team, please feel free to correct me if I am wrong in my understanding.

What VWO has that Optimizely doesn't

\- VWO has (JavaScript based) A/B and multivariate testing and split URL (based on traffic redirect) on while Optimizely is strictly (JavaScript based) A/B testing. You cannot do multivariate testing with it.

\- VWO has heatmap and clickmap reports while Optimizely doesn't

\- VWO has various advanced features such as visitor segmentation, cross- domain tracking, testing behind login wall pages, test results notifications, variation screen shot generation, etc.

\- VWO has team collaboration such as multiple-permission based logins and subaccounts. Optimizely doesn't have that.

\- In VWO, for all plans, CEO equally shares the support work ;)

What Optimizely has that VWO doesn't

\- Changing layout of the page. Optimizely has a drag and drop feature in its test designer which is useful if you want to test different layouts (say sidebar to the right). To achieve the same in VWO, you need to enter some CSS (say float:right v/s float:left) as there is no drag-drop support (yet)

\- Since Optimizely exclusively focuses on A/B testing (and not MVT), in its test designer you can change several elements of the page (say headline, image and text) at once to create a variation. In VWO (currently), you need to change one element at once for A/B test and multiple elements for multivariate test.

\- In optimizely, results update on the page in real time. In VWO, results are also realtime but you have to refresh the report to see latest results (no auto-refreshing)

I hope this was a fair comparision. I wish Optimizely team great luck for their product. I hope A/B testing market is big enough for multiple players to survive!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great honest and fair comparison, Paras.

One benefit you forgot to mention is that your cheapest plan ($49) comes out to $0.0049 per visitor. Optimizely's cheapest plan ($19) comes out to $0.0095 per visitor.

One thing I think we do well is allow you to try Optimizely and create your experiment without needing to create an account or give us your email address. The only time you need to create an account is when you want to save.

We also offer cross-browser testing and uptime monitoring and reporting.

One small correction: we do support testing behind login wall pages. You just need to put the embed code on your page and the tool will load your site even if it's behind a login wall or on your own local intranet behind a firewall.

Our biggest competitor is non-consumption. I'm glad there are other startups out there helping to educate the market about the benefits of A/B testing. A rising tide floats all boats!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Can someone A/B test a web startup's name with words ending phonetically as "ly" or "er" versus a more "normal" name?

Kidding aside, the product looks really great - congratulations on launching!

For a critique, I'll say that the intro video is very dry. A/B it with something less Ben Stein?

One thing I'm always interested in is pricing. How did you go about determining your various plans and rates?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry you thought the video was dry. I'm not the best voice actor in the world. We were thinking of putting a song from the Inception soundtrack in the background or using a real voice actor from <http://www.voices.com/>

Do you think either would help?

Also, would love to share how we went about determining our various plans and rates. We did a lot of customer development on this and it might be interesting to other entrepreneurs. Let me know if you are interested and we'll blog about it.

<comment><USER14> I actually would be interested in seeing results of testing this video vs. a voice actor and maybe even against a set of videos that were split up and shorter.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea! We're actually running an Optimizely experiment on the <http://www.optimizely.com> homepage right now. I won't give away what we're experimenting with but we'll blog about it once the experiment is over and share what we learned.

<comment><USER15> This post prompted me to have a look at optimizely's source. I won't give it away either, but I'll certainly be surprised if there's an appreciable difference between the 3 variations. In fact, if turns out there is, I'd be much more inclined to use A/B testing in general!

Now, a coding question. I'm wondering: For the all_experiments_json property of the main optimizely object, why is the value JSON-as-a-string, rather than just JSON? You're forcing yourself to parse it from a string to native JSON for no apparent reason. Just curious :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for not giving it away. :)

As for your question, I think you're right that we could just write this as straight JSON without wrapping it in quotes. What are the benefits of doing this?

I tried just putting the all_experiments_json property in Firebug without wrapping it in quotes and I get a 'SyntaxError: invalid label' error. Looks like that is because the keys of the dicts are strings. Probably a way to generate this JSON server-side that makes Javascript happy.

One potential downside of making it just straight JSON is that this is generated by our Python template and if for whatever reason this isn't valid JSON it would throw a javascript exception when the file is loaded.

Right now our backend that generates this JSON does this:

        dump = simplejson.dumps(experiments_dict)
        dump = dump.replace("\\", "\\\\")
        dump = dump.replace("'", "\\'")

The dump is the block of text that gets wrapped by '' in our template.

Thoughts on a better way to do this?

<comment><USER15> First off, there aren't really any benefits, other than it being simpler and more elegant. Right now you're going from Python Dictionary -> JSON-like- string -> JSON. There should be a way to go Python Dictionary -> JSON. It just seems like a code smell. Really though, if it ain't broke, don't worry about it. I was just curious as to why there was this roundabout.

Removing the quotes won't fix the problem, because you've also altered the way characters are escaped via the .replace() calls.

 _One potential downside of making it just straight JSON is that this is generated by our Python template and if for whatever reason this isn't valid JSON it would throw a javascript exception when the file is loaded._

I'm not familiar with Python, but there shouldn't be any reason why simplejson would return invalid JSON. In the event that it does, your script would still break, anyway. Granted, it won't be a javascript exception, but it would certainly fail elsewhere.

Like I said before, it really doesn't matter because it works :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I don't understand people _using a CMS_ thinking that Google Website Optimizer (GWO) for A/B tests is hard

I got myself a plugin for WordPress that lets you insert in any page the GWO javascripts I created a variation page on WordPress, identified the original one and the conversion page. On the site i created the test, started it and it's just working.

But even if you're not using a CMS, copy/paste some code at the beginning and end of a HTML page? how is that so hard?

Edit: clarified

<comment><USER5> Using variation pages causes SEO and site problems when the test ends unless you manage your 301s properly, and the marginal load for the redirect to B artificially biases test results. Also, I did a bit of an eye popper demo at a company I just consulted with: deploying an AB test live on my site took two minutes twenty six seconds while slowing my typing speed to explain every step, while the company reports their experiments with GWO require 15 minutes at a minimum. That gives the typical engineer 12 reasons not to AB test.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi Patrick, glad to hear that! Curious what you think about client-side A/B testing products in general (Optimizely being just one of them) vs. server- side products (like A/Bingo). Do you face pain points with A/Bingo that might be solved with a client-side javascript based solution?

<comment><USER5> In general, I feel server side is _far_ superior for developers and client side with a WYSIWYG UI is a fabulous option for other stakeholders. I could talk on this subject for a while but my plane is about to take off. Suffice it to say you can't match power, flexibility, and speed of server side with client side testing. You can move away from just twiddling text to actually redoing workflows or business logic.

I didn't write ABingo with a pain point included, but for Appointment Reminder it will be helpful to do AB testing in non-Rails marketing pages, too. I wouldn't append too much effort optimizing your solution for the needs of people who have written AB test frameworks though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Really cool A/B Testing tool :)

Your variation editor looks really awesome too. How much effort does it take create something like that? I mean just the HTML hover/manipulation etc. I am planning to write a scraper related tool similar to <http://open.dapper.net/>

Did you encounter any serious cross browser issues? Or any other notable info you would like to share with the HN community. Is there any open source basic implementation that can be used as a starting point? Do you preprocess the page on the server or is it all Javascript magic on the client side?

<comment><AUTHOR> Our biggest challenge in building this tool was compatibility. Every webpage is different and even seemingly innocuous things things like frame busters and javascript redirects presented quite a challenge for us. We were fortunate to have a great set of early beta customers that gave us feedback when things didn't work and we took it one website at a time.

We'd love to share the lessons we learned along the way with the HN community in a blog post. Let me know what you're most interested in and we'll share what we've learned.

<comment><USER15> How did you overcome frame busting and javascript redirects?

<comment><USER17> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framekiller> may be useful. But I am curious about how it is done at Optimizely

<comment><USER15> This is frame busting. I'm looking for anti frame busting. There's one way which involves calling a page which returns a "nothing" header code when the iframe tries to bust out. Though some sites like stackoverflow even take this into account. I wonder if SO works with optimizely (I'm on iOS, can't test it ATM).

Since optimizely has access to the document, there might be a way to wrap the window.location object and prevent it from changing, before any experiment- site js is loaded.

<comment><USER17> [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/958997/frame-buster- buste...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/958997/frame-buster-buster- buster-code-needed) This keeps getting funnier and funnier :)... that must be the state of the art in recursive busting ;-)... And if someone is so obsessed that his page must not be framed... I guess it is best to leave such a guy alone...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This looks extremely slick and well executed. Hats off, my feeling is you guys will be quite wealthy in short order.

<comment><USER19> I certainly hope so. Great product idea, well executed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Suggestions:

In a couple of spots, the edit HTML dialog overlaid the items I was trying to edit. I attempted and expected to be able to move the edit dialog around the page and out of the way of what I was editing.

On my own site, I was particularly wanting to play with colors/themes. Not sure what the best way to implement this is, but the only way I could do that through this interface was with style tags.

Awesome product! I will likely use it in the near future.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a great suggestion. We try to automatically put the dialog in the right place depending on the action you are trying to perform. For example, if you use drag-and-drop and move something to the right-edge of the window, we move the instructions dialog to the left-hand side of the element.

This certainly isn't perfect and we'll work to improve it. Would you mind sending me the URL you were trying and some steps to repro the frustration you had? Feel free to email us at email@example.com

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> This looks brilliant, you just need to nail your pricing structure.. perhaps consider per test or limit the number of tests and variations? Either way, congratulations, some serious skills on show form your engineer(s)!

</comment><comment><USER22> Great stuff, the video made me want to jump right in and test stuff; too bad I don't have any medium/big sites to test :)

For us folks with small-traffic websites (ie. your Bronze plan), an useful addition would be a suggestion to people to not try too many variations at the same time. (I don't have the math, but I assume less variations means less datapoints until you get significant results)

Perhaps, as another commenter suggested, by estimating how long (in time or visitors) it will take - and by showing this estimate _while_ adding variations.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are correct, the more variations, the longer the experiment will need to run to reach statistical significance. Estimating how long it will take to finish is a great suggestion and something we plan on doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> nice idea. I tried to setup a new a/b test for a site and it became 'not easy' when I wanted to track an adsense click as a goal.

I wrote a manual a/b test for the same site about 7 years ago, and got adsense click goals working with 40 variations of the page, after about a week of working on it after work at night after my regular job.

There is some jquery code you can add to track javascript events which would probably track adsense clicks, but it's 'not easy', ie: I might as well not pay for it.

Cool idea though! I would pay for it if I could track adsense clicks without having to write code. Also, having an option to select multiple dom elements at once would be nice. In addition, logging into the web site and editing the html to add the code in the  tag would be nice too, especially since it's kind of a hassle for me to open eclipse and re-deploy to app engine at 1am when I am tired.

haha, hope this helps.

<comment><AUTHOR> Certainly something we are well aware of and trying to improve! We'd love to automatically track ad clicks for you and provide the corresponding reporting to let you know which variation gets you the most clicks.

Please email us at firstname.lastname@example.com and let us know if you're interested in this and I'd love to learn more about this use case.

<comment><USER15> I think it'd be amazing if you could work smething out with the ppl at mouseflow or thier ilk. They could track the clicks and mouse movements for you. Maybe offer it as an add on for a test.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Do any of these A/B testing tools support offline conversions in any meaningful way? For us a phone call is a conversion. I'd love to be able to build the logic to support that once (give me an API call along with GET parameters to the page that I can post back to you), and then be able to use tools like this to actually try different tests.

<comment><USER25> I imagine it would be quite difficult to match up the phone call with what version of the website was being used. One idea: depending on how your incoming calls work you could try using different extensions on each version which would let you track it. A different phone number all together would work too, but might be confusing and bad for SEO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's a great product, we have been using it at Shopify with great success. Fantastic news that it's available to everyone now!

</comment><comment><USER27> Great job on the product and video - really easy and slick.

What's the use of real-time results for A/B testing? Most likely, it's only going to lead to erroneous conclusions, as discussed in this thread - <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1778104>.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point. Jumping to pre-mature conclusions is certainly an easy mistake to make.

During the Obama campaign we were frustrated by having to wait 24 - 48 hours to get results for our experiments. We were lucky to be getting a ton of traffic and hence be able to get statistically significant results in just a few days.

Another big benefit of real-time results is helping our customers answer the question "is this working correctly?" Seeing the data come in in real-time helps reassure folks that the tool is working properly and collecting data.

<comment><USER27> _During the Obama campaign_

Whoaa why isn't there a crazy big testimonial screaming that on the homepage?

[EDIT: Sorry I misunderstood as you having used optimizely for the campaign, but it sounds like you probably thought of the idea as a result of your frustration.]

I can understand customers getting frustrated for having to wait. But, that's probably what will make them jump to conclusions. I don't know how much you want to get into advocating "best practices", but it would probably be good to ask the user to set their minimum number of visitors beforehand.

The "is this working correctly?" question sounds like a very good practical issue you picked up during your beta testing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This website is great. I was able to jump in and mess around with my website's home page within seconds after watching the video. I'm not a developer and being able to help out with A/B testing will be a huge help and one less thing our developers will have to deal with. Looking forward to using it!

</comment><comment><USER29> This is great, just in time for my testing :), I'll definitely give it a try! I would love for one of your pricing packages to include speaking directly with an optimization consultant, or perhaps receiving a detailed report that includes optimization recommendations.

</comment><comment> dav-id Why do all of these companies create cookie cutter names like 'Optimizely' is ' _ly' the next .com?

To me _ly says 'We have no track record, use with caution' I would feel more comfortable using something with a name that isn't following some online fashion.

</comment><comment><USER30> Optimizely sounds like a great service but after entering my URL it took a long time to load. It would be great if you could speed that up... If I hadn't heard of the link from Hacker News, I would have closed the tab after a few seconds.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great feedback and certainly something we plan to improve. Thanks for bearing with us!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I get the impression that home page has been optimised to within an inch of it's life and converts like crazy. A very impressive landing page, I had the overwhelming urge to put in my Url and try it out. Well done.

<comment><USER32> I didn't believe it could possibly be that easy until I watched the video. Subsequently, I think they should add text to that effect near the video. After all the positive talk on HN, I was expecting something clever but was still surprised by the implementation (single line to paste in!).

I doubt I'm the only one who doesn't always jump to watch demo videos (unless referred by HN) or throw my URL into a strange form. For Ask HN's, I usually just check out the design and try and get a rough idea of the concept, FWIW.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Will it be possible to define URLs to different, already existing versions (as google does)?

Your online editing is awesome esp. for small things but sometimes one might be able to render already existing pages…

</comment><comment><USER34> This is a company of really smart and talented people. I have had limited experience with the beta, but have been following the project with much interest. I expect great things from Optimizely.

</comment><comment><USER35> Just gave it a spin and it's a really cool product - feels a bit buggy at the moment but for the right application this would be a really valuable tool to have. Great job, guys.

<comment><USER8> Hi Kevin, great to hear! I'm curious what felt buggy. Feel free to email us at email@example.com and give us a heads up. We'd love to look into it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is a really sweet product. Congrats on the launch!

</comment><comment><USER37> I just went to dropbox.com and the play button got larger and larger each time I hovered over it. Could this be a bug, or a weird optimization test?

<comment><USER8> Hi Reedlaw--I'm not able to reproduce this. I'm assuming you mean you created an experiment on dropbox.com and that the play button somehow gets larger every time you hover your mouse over it. What browser are you using? Thanks!

Pete

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Any chance this would work with dynamic content? i.e. a listings page that has similar structure from page to page but different content?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we designed Optimizely with precisely this use case in mind. Here is the documentation on how to set this up: [http://support.optimizely.com/faqs/getting- started/experimen...](http://support.optimizely.com/faqs/getting- started/experiment-urls)

To clarify: If you want to run one experiment on a single dynamic page (not multiple dynamic pages) you can do that as long as the structure of the page does not change. The best way to find out is to just try it. Load one of these dynamic pages in the tool and create your variations. Then put the embed code on your site and click "Preview variation" from the variation drop-down menu (you can get there by clicking the small upside down triangle next to the variation title, e.g. "Variation #1"). If you have the embed code on your site this will show you the page on your live site. You do NOT need to start the experiment to do this.

Hope that answers your question

<comment><USER38> Awesome, I'll give it a try!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Fantastic stuff. I was wondering if users are just shown the different pages randomly or is there more granular control involved?

<comment><AUTHOR> Great question! Visitors are bucketed randomly into each variation. Once they have been bucketed they are cookied and will see the same variation over and over again if they reload the page

You specify how much traffic you want to allocate to each bucket. You can do this when editing an experiment and going to "Advanced Settings" :: "Percentage of Traffic to Variations"

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> This looks great. It looks like you are using google app engine, maybe a future post about how well it is working out for you.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great idea! I'll try to convince my co-founder to write a blog post about his experience going from product manager for Google App Engine to coder using GAE every day as a customer!

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Looks really exciting. Sounds like a great idea. I'm looking forward to checking it out.

</comment><comment><USER42> Very impressive. I will definitely share this among my peers.

</comment><comment><USER43> Does this work well on https pages?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! https pages are a great place to start experimenting because they are so close to the conversion event most businesses care about: making money. Optimizely works seamlessly on https and http pages alike.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you need a new Issue Tracking and Project Management tool? - <AUTHOR> I've been working for quite a while on a new issue tracking/project management tool. The goal was to make it as a native cross-platform application (think Slack), with potential offline support.
Now I've been demotivated a little bit after making some more research on this whole topic, as there are so many Jiras and Asanas out there, that making another one is like starting a new Facebook - at least, these are my thoughts as of right now.
To either confirm or deny the conclusion, I decided to simply ask community.
Is anyone looking to replace existing project management and issue tracking software with something else? <comment><USER3> I think it depends on who you ask.

Developers I know typically like something simple, flat, and issue-focused. Think GH issues.

PMs tend to want more feature rich tools with advanced reporting and customizable views. Think salesforce.

Product owners (I haven't had many) just want to know "are we there yet?" and will rarely open any tool or learn how they work - they just badger the PM via email or in meetings.

My problem isn't that there aren't tools that I like, its that there aren't a lot of tools that can be "all things to all people."

If a tool was built on something simple (GH Issues) and added a layer of complexity on top for PMs I think you'd have a winner. Waffle (waffle.io) is going in that direction, though they aren't heavy in the PM tooling area yet(?)

<comment><USER4> > Product owners (I haven't had many) just want to know "are we there yet?" > and will rarely open any tool or learn how they work - they just badger the > PM via email or in meetings.

A little off-topic, but that's definitely not what I expect from a PO. On the contrary, a PO should be highly involved in the tool used to track the features that _they_ have requested and defined, the bugs that _they_ have identified, etc.

Most of my career has been at smaller startups so maybe product owners have a different role in larger organizations.

<comment><USER3> I have seen that in smaller companies - especially startups. The closer I get to a large, enterprise environment, the more the PO resembles a sales person who is in meetings all day. Not actively using any PM tooling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you ask the community like this, you'll probably get a lot of "yes" answers, because very few people like the tools they have. But it probably won't help you make a good decision.

Asking people how they feel generally isn't a great way to evaluate your product -- you have to build it and see how they act. You can ask potential customers what features they would like to help guide you, but I wouldn't necessarily add or cut features based on their answers.

The best way to tell if someone needs your products is to just get it out there and see if people actually use it.

Some anecdotes: I was in a focus group once about cell phones, many years ago. They asked us all if we would want a camera in our phone. All of us said no, it wouldn't be worth the extra expense, because we couldn't think of a single thing we'd use a camera on a phone for. It's a good thing Nokia didn't listen to us!

On reddit, check out the /r/ideasfortheadmins subreddit. It is filled with ideas users think they want, including features reddit used to have that no one used.

What I'm saying can be summarized by the (incorrectly attributed to Ford) quote, "If you had asked people what they wanted, they would have said 'a faster horse'".

</comment><comment><USER6> Yes.

My opinion is that nothing that currently exists really solves the whole problem of information management well (aside from git). Most teams mash together three or four different solutions for strongly related problems. Some teams are as bad as: gitolite for central code repo, a bug tracker for managing issues, a spreadsheet for managing who works on what features, a _separate_ bug tracker for issues found in QA, personally-managed to-do lists for each developer, a Trello, a dozen bespoke reports for status to upper management, and all team communication goes through e-mail. Yes, slack and github would replace about 3 of these, but you still have 5 solutions to the same general problem -- what needs to be done and who is doing (or will do) it, how, and when.

Obviously this is a very hard problem, or it would be solved now. I have tried for a long time to decide what I think would be a good solution, and for all intents and porpoises, I have gotten nowhere.

I really like the approach Trello has taken -- provide a simple, flexible concept and let users build it all from there. Obviously Trello doesn't tick all the boxes, but I wonder if some other deceptively simple idea can accomplish it.

<comment><USER7> Atlassian is cheap (like a dollar a user per year, per product) for startups (up to 10 engineers IIRC - so lets say if you have less than 20-25 employees) and basically does everything from high level PPM all the way down to code- reviews. I've played with all of the major (and maybe half of the minor) solutions and Atlassian wins hands down. (They bought Hipchat, so you have your Slack integration -- Confluence as your wiki -- Bitbucket is now feature parity with Github -- and its all on premise. Watch this[1] 3 minute promo to see the tooling. And if its extendable/integrates into basically everything (see this: [https://youtu.be/YdHtj0ymMqY?t=22](https://youtu.be/YdHtj0ymMqY?t=22). Oh yeah it has all those Kanban Trello features too). It was a RAM hog back in the day (mid 2000s) but thats a non-issue now. And re: licensing fees, if you make it past their startup-pricing, the software has delivered enough value to you that spending a few thousand an engineer a year is literally the cost of one day of labor for a FTE.

There are other alternatives with pretty decent ecosystems if you don't want to pay the $10 dollars to get 10 seats for Atlassian (which again, I think youd be crazy not to at least demo it). RE: OSS - Even with a "crappy" 8 year old Redmine install, you're given a git master remote to push to, a document share, bug tracking, and a whole lot more out of the box. GitLab also has a really integrated free set of tools which is a huge huge RAM hog in itself, but it's free and has eye candy so you can probably get management to sign off.

[https://youtu.be/8KPoZ5g8NqU](https://youtu.be/8KPoZ5g8NqU)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Well, I'm "building my own lightsaber" in that respect. So yes.

Productivity tooling is a very crowded space. And building you own issue tracker is the very height of yak-shaving. That being said, there's always room for new ideas. I don't _need_ a new tool but I'm building one nonetheless because the solutions that exist now, IMHO, miss out on some really neat ideas. So my side project is more of an experiment, trying to tease out some new UX ideas, rather than a utility to aid in building other projects.

If you need to build some other thing, just use existing tools. Focus on the real work, not the "meta-work." If you think you can make headway into the crowded arena of existing solutions with some out-of-the-box idea, go for it. But don't mix up the two, cause you'll never get anything done... which is the opposite effect a Project Management tool should cause.

TL;DR I'm always looking for new tools. But don't get stuck yak shaving.

</comment><comment><USER9> Issue trackers seem to be the most prevalant "scratch your own itch" project for programmers (well, after time trackers). I'm sure there's always a new way to approach a problem, but be aware that it is an over-saturated market with a large trail of abandoned/out-of-businessed solutions in its wake.

EDIT: Not trying to dissuade you, I guess what I mean is that if you're going to do it you should do it because you're in love with the idea and think you have something new to offer (and can clearly elucidate the problems that other systems don't solve, but yours does)... not because it seems like an easy way to make money. (Which I guess holds true for any business.)

<comment><USER10> Hell, Jira started this way and has become a bloated, uber-customizable piece of software over the decade since.

In a market like this, your company will not be a unicorn. If you ever make a billion dollar valuation, it will be the way Atlasssian did it - after many years of grinding through blood, sweat and tears. So you need to really love the problem and be passionate about serving your customers because that's the ONLY way you can win.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The major thing for me is proper search and filtering tools. Jira and TFS seem to get this right with JQL and Queries respectively, for most non-technical people however, they seem to be quite daunting.

I think the other main thing that could be improved is integration with other tracking software.

I work in testing. The main thing I see is projects using more than one project or defect management tool. I feel is an area that could be seriously disrupted.

For example... One project I worked, we had the developers (external company) using JIRA, whilst we used Smartbear ALM.

So I ended up writing something that used both the JIRA and ALM API's to save me updating two systems. Imagine if this functionality was out of the box?

<comment><USER7> What sort of problems are those non-technical people trying to solve w/r/t JIRA. I.e., what do they find daunting, how badly does it obstruct their workflow, etc. (I've written a decent amount of JQL but it's hard for me to imagine what a non-technical average user of JIRA would be trying to accomplish.)

Off topic but I've used a lot of ALM's, never Smartbear. A few sentences on how you like it compared to other products would be great!

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The largest issue I've run into with respect to issue tracking is making it accessible and easy to use/understand for the entire team. Non-technical team members don't have GH accounts, they don't know if what they are seeing is a bug, they don't know if its already been reported (because they don't understand the root cause), always seem to be afraid of doing it wrong.

Further, a tool that tracks the resolution of issues into a simple to read 'This was just deployed' or some kind of digest would be insanely useful. It's not an easy task, but so often someone is waiting for a fix, or waiting for a feature, and then gets upset or something gets overlooked because they didn't know the feature/bug was deployed.

Something simple, with an app-store style approach to customization could be really handy.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you're looking to make it native with offline support, there's one feature that I think would get you a ton of traction among developers. Use a git/mercurial branch as the underlying storage mechanism. Being able to clone a repo and get the full issue tracking history would be pretty cool and a storage mechanism with offline and built-in audit tracking is a non-trivial part of the problem, so using something that's as proven as the major DVCSs are would help make solving that issue easier.

But more importantly, it's a hook. It's what would differentiate you from other issue trackers. It's distributed issue tracking that allows you to take advantage of all the infrastructure that's been built up around the underlying DVCSs. Right off the bat, you have a reason for your project to exist.

</comment><comment><USER10> > I've been working for quite a while on a new issue tracking/project > management tool. The goal was to make it as a native cross-platform > application (think Slack), with potential offline support.

I don't know that this is a huge benefit in a work tracking tool. These features are useful in Slack because it's a real-time communication platform. Work tracking systems are more ok with being asynchronous - there's usually a business function that performs synchronization whether or not your work tracking system does, so having everything update across multiple cached versions in real-time is less meaningful.

I would focus on the process - it sounds like you're just building something to build something. What in the process of software development is broken? Is building a new tool the right solution?

</comment><comment><USER14> Yes. I have worked with Trello (too lightweight), Github issues (too bare), Jira (a huge monster no one is bothering to configure right) and others.

In the end, I want an open-source tool with a focus on easy customization with plugins and custom solutions through code itself.

<comment><USER15> This.

There aren't enough of these, actually. Every new web app seems to be in the SaaS model. Frankly where I'm at is too small to justify the spend (our content team uses and loves Basecamp but our three-person dev team absolutely hates it). We just want something to run internally within our team.

All of the open-source tools are quite old and a pain to set up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Offline support would be cool, but not useful enough to be a selling point for me.

My current employer uses Jira, and I find it to be decent. I've used Asana in the past, and I like it a lot, but it has its own holes and pain points. Same for Pivotal Tracker, Github issues, Redmine, Bugzilla... Every tool I've used has had some strong suits and some drawbacks—mainly related to how well it fits with the project and workflow. A big plus is if the tool has a good API (REST, plugin, etc.) so that I can easily write tooling to reduce friction.

Unless you can find a really strong selling point—and I don't think offline support would qualify, for most people—I don't see it getting much traction.

</comment><comment><USER17> I would argue that the world needs better issue tracking software, in much the same sense that the world needs better software per se: there are lots of things that are good, and a few that are great in their own way; the Enterprise spends the most and gets the least for it; and for any two software developers you will find three values of $GREAT when trying to come up with your requirements.

Like many (most?) programmers working collaboratively, I have often wished I had the "perfect" issue tracker, but my version of "perfect" maps very tightly to the way I think software "should" be developed, at least among teams of people working full-time for money.

In spite of my natural tendency to be sure, like every good programmer is sure, that my hypothetical solution is vastly superior to all the horrible, slow, confusing, buggy things that actually exists, I am forced to concede that the corporate software world is not following my implied instructions.

So, in all seriousness, I think there are three huge challenges facing the would-be creators of an issue tracker that would be $GREAT:

1\. You have to either accommodate a bunch of different workflows and be good at most of them, or commit to One True Workflow and hope you can convince people you're right.

2\. Even if you actually do make one that's more $GREAT than anything else, the Enterprise world will not care -- and that's where the _only_ serious issue-tracking money is, so you'd better do this for love and/or have a very long runway. And if you get so far that they ever do care, you'd better have a bunch of data-migration "whitepapers" ready.

3\. In order for anyone on a small team or open-source project to switch to your software, you will have to convince them not only that it's better than whatever they're using now, but also that it won't be offensive to people with longstanding allegiances to other software. And making it unoffensive is likely to contradict your definition of $GREAT.

All that said, go for it! You might be your only customer, but if that means you've got the greatest issue tracker in the world then it might be worth it.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think this problem is not solved yet. we have gh issues that are confortable and friendly for the developers, but is not good enough for the pms.In other way we have jira ( or others like that) that are good for pms and worst for developers. So I think who solve this problem with a good price will have a space in this market yet. ps: once a year the last 4 years I've searched for tools that solve this problem, and until now I haven't been successfull

</comment><comment><USER19> Instead of asking broadly - and obviously get the answer "Yes! We need better tools!", you might ask yourself why you wanted to make the tool firsthand. You present two reasons:

\- Cross-Platform - well, web based applications all are \- Offline - <USER2> would be extra value, Trello for example does not offer that

But neither of these two reasons alone would encourage anyone to get a new project management tool.

You need some standalone features or feature a workflow that noone features so far. Focus!

Here are some questions you might ask yourself or the community:

\- Do we need an issue tracker or a complete PM? This will determine your target market \- For how many people do you need a PM? Single developer? Group of 5? Group of 100s? \- Which type of projects do you work on? Software? Marketing? \- How does your typical project workflow look like? \- Which part of the workflow is still cumbersome, even when using software? \- What's the one thing that a new project management tool should me with? \- If the new PM tool was to do only one thing, how would you know that it does it perfectly?

You should probably come up with even more questions. Your goal must be to find a use case and a market and find out what pains are not solved yet. The more time and hence money a pain causes, the better you might create a product that sells.

</comment><comment><USER20> Are you me OP? I've been working exactly on the same project myself, and also got demotivated.

First I planned to make it as a desktop app, but then I realised desktop apps are thing of the past and nowadays you need to make web apps to be accessible and portable.

Then I got demotivated by the number of great and established products.

Now I'm trying to figure out a new (developer oriented?) product to develop in my free time.

It's tough not being among the first at something.

<comment><USER21> You never want to be first in a market. You spend way too many resources educating the market, and you have no idea the size of the market. Especially if you have finite resources. Better to enter an established market with a better product.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Honestly, you have to be better than trello for lightweight stuff, and rally or jira on the heavyweight end. There really isn't room in the middle.

<comment><USER23> "Better than Rally" is a _really_ low bar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Issue tracking is a crowded space, but there are definitely niches to be found. Almost everywhere I've worked has wanted to move to something different. Focus on differentiating your product with existing competition, even if it's just the number of integrations it has. Personally, I would also suggest working on a developer-friendly alternative to service desk

</comment><comment><USER25> At work, No, I don't want another one, I just want to be able to interact with JIRA from chat without having to open the damn thing.

On my side project I'm using Trello, and for the issue tracking bits, it's not perfect, but it's fine, if there was something better and free I'd use it, but I like that it's SaaS and I don't want to install a native app.

</comment><comment><USER26> Have you seen [https://www.realartists.com/](https://www.realartists.com/)?

</comment><comment><USER27> As a single developer, I've not been able to find something:

-Lightweight -Easy to use -Has a desktop client

Everything is oriented around being cloud driven, complex team-based features I don't need, and just generally being more overhead than it's worth for what I need.

</comment><comment><USER28> there is bugzilla. it's scalable, configurable, etc. the search is a little clumsy, but a little work on it would make it just like jira's or any other modern query based instead of form based search.

but you're not a startup cto if you use those dinosaur tools. just like you won't use awk or make. because 1. it's not sexy 2. you're too lazy to learn your job properly. 3. nobody gets ridiculed for selecting the sexy tool instead of the right one, but the opposite is almost sure.

</comment><comment><USER29> No.

</comment><comment><USER30> > Is anyone looking to replace existing project management and issue tracking > software with something else?

I think lots of people are, or could be, but the deciding question is what makes what you are thinking about different? What's the unique benefit you plan to offer?

</comment><comment><USER31> When it comes to these types of tools I think you need to figure out a target market.

There's a lot of folks taking on the large scale software space, however I think the non-technical space is still a bit wide open. I think a new Basecamp would do well.</comment>


The myopia boom - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/the-myopia-boom-1.17120 <comment><USER2> My wife is co-authoring a review paper on this topic with the group from Zhongshan. The rise in myopia prevalence is really quite staggering, especially among asians.

It's a long article, but the essential point is that insufficient time spent in bright light >10k lux (roughly corresponding to being in shade on a bright day) during early childhood increases the risk of developing myopia.

Normal eye growth requires dopamine which is released in a circadian fashion, which requires exposure to bright/daylight. Absence of this dopamine cycle may cause the eyeball to be more elongated, leading to refractive errors.

The precise number of hours needed to prevent myopia is difficult to say, but studies in schools with even 40-mins extra have shown benefit, and there's some evidence supporting 3+ hours/day.

Importantly, it doesn't seem to matter how much close-focal work kids do, such as computer use/studying, as long as they spend sufficient time in bright light. I'd consider setting up a study desk in front of a large window, and taking breaks at school outdoors instead of inside.

<comment><USER3> Would the rise of wearing sunglasses during the last 50 or so years might have any effect as well, I wonder? After all, the eye presumably responds the same whether it's getting insufficient light because someone is indoors or because that person is outside but shielding it from >10k lux light with tinted shades.

<comment><USER4> The article states that 10k lux is about what you experience when wearing sunglasses, or sitting under a shady tree

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The summary of this, which was surprisingly difficult to distill, is that low light levels induces myopia.

Or more specifically, elevated light levels causes a dopamine release which prevents myopia.

Not sure why the article needed to spend the first 2000 words not just saying that.

<comment><USER6> Journalists are paid by the word. There is no incentive for being brief (and not wasting the time of the reader)

<comment><USER7> Is this actually true? It's pretty hard to believe, I honestly feel like you pulled it out of your ass, but it's also possible I'm totally out of touch.

This article is a "feature" (not entirely sure what that implies) in a scientific journal (targeted towards a relatively general audience, compared to other scientific journals). Is this particular publication, or this type of publication, known to pay by the word?

Which other publications pay by the word?

Is it more common in some areas of publication than others?

How could such an incentive-perverting mechanism not have died off by now?

Do any companies still pay/evaluate their developers by lines of code written?

<comment><USER8> I used to work in newspapers and it's still pretty common in that industry. But they also usually give you a word count to hit, so it's not like you can just write yourself a Mercedes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> All right. What you don't want to do is increase _artificial_ light intensity. A big part of the issue is the light spectrum and distribution of it. There is a pretty easy way to test / verify this, if you have an eye chart handy. Compare your acuity in outdoor, shaded light, to a solely fluorescent lit environment. Once you get to where you can barely make out the line, note the difference in acuity natural vs. artificial light.

Also, the minus lens creates focal plane stimulus inside the eye that prompts axial elongation. Lots of studies on this subject, it's basically uncontested. What you really don't want to be doing is wear a lens that gives you sharp distance vision, while working up close. You want to have a specific reduced prescription for close-up, that just gives you correction to the distance you need.

Breaks, also. Initial myopia is a ciliary (focusing muscle) spasm. Lots of studies there too, look for pseudo myopia or NITM (near induced transient myopia). Part of your current deficiency is ciliary, part is axial elongation. Take an hour break every three hours. Get outside. Focus at a distance. Your ciliary muscle isn't meant to be all tensed up (close-up use) all day.

For more on the subject, take a look at www.frauenfeldclinic.com, those guys are fairly awesome.

<comment><USER10> > Compare your acuity in outdoor, shaded light, to a solely fluorescent lit > environment

The amount of light in the shade outdoors, or on an overcast day, is around 12 EV [1]. A bright indoors office with fluorescent lights is around 8EV. This means that the human eye will be receiving 16 times more light in the outdoor shade, compared to even a bright indoors room. That's a big difference that has nothing to do with the source of the light.

Common sense also dictates that fluorescent lights did not get popular in homes until the last 10 years due to the rise of CFLs, and yet kids grown up in the 1970s have increased myopia rates- the source of the myopia therefore cannot be due to the indoor lights.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exposure_value)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> > About one-fifth of university-aged people in East Asia now have this extreme > form of myopia, and half of them are expected to develop irreversible vision > loss.

Which means that 10% of university-aged people in East Asia are going to develop irreversible vision loss. This sounds too terrible to be true. Am I missing something here? I interpret vision loss as blindness, but maybe it is used to describe degraded vision instead?

<comment><USER12> People in the US often use the phrase "legally blind" while they can see just fine given sufficiently corrective lenses. Let's hope it's that.

<comment><USER13> Then they're using the term incorrectly. Legally blind is having 20/200 vision in your best eye with the best correction possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I have wondered why the eye stays elongated. My quest for answers has been from dubious sources on the internet and so everything said below is suspect. It is all based on reasoning and thoughts from potentially bad information. I read that the eyeball is a sack filled with a viscous fluid, and therefore, its shape is determined by the eye muscles. I determined the viscosity of the eye fluid is thicker than water, but less than motor oil. The idea behind the eye muscles is that near work puts tension on the muscles and they stiffen up and thus elongate the eyeball. So now I wonder why the eye muscles don't relax. Surely, a good night's sleep or two would do the trick. Could the eye muscles return to their proper position by not wearing my glasses and spending more time focusing on distant objects? After about 3 years of experimenting with this thought, my vision has not improved. But I work indoors in front a computer everyday with glasses on. I have read the eyes muscles lack any counter force to pull the eyeball back into shape. Perhaps the eyeball shell has grown deformed and it is stiff enough to hold the shape. Maybe the eye socket determines the shape. Maybe the eye muscles have nothing to do with the shape. I would like to think that there is some corrective measure built into the eye system. Otherwise, it would seem everybody's eyes are on a one-way trip to becoming myopic and only the speed of this transition can be affected. I know that for me, I wore my glasses all the time, even when I was reading. Looking back, when I was first diagnosed, I really only needed them to play baseball at night under the lights. I sort of wished that was the only time I wore them. I wonder if my eyes could have corrected themselves. Now it seems too late, because I need to wear them just to read a computer screen 18" away. I have also read that wearing glasses forces your eyes to focus at a close up distance. So wearing glasses is like doing near work all the time and thus puts you on the fast track to becoming more myopic. After all this rambling, I guess the real question is what is keeping the eyeball in the wrong shape? If this were known, then maybe one could figure out how to fix the condition. As a final note, I have also read that maybe the eye ball is not elongated, but that the cornea is not shaped correctly.

<comment><USER15> I have thought about this myself, but I thought that elongation being permanent or difficult to reverse was intuitive. If you stretch a piece of a plastic it stays that way.

I believe the prevailing theory is when you focus near, your lenses expand pushing on the aqueous humor, causing expansion of the eyeball. When you focus far, they shrink, but these lenses don't pull the eyeball back in because they aren't connected to the front or back of the eyeball. This is why people with myopia often have increased intraocular pressure. I don't understand how this fits in with the findings in this article though.

I have never heard of anyone becoming less nearsighted. And even presbyopia is simply when your lens cannot change anymore, it doesn't actually shrink your eyeballs.

It seems like the optical industry is content with making a lot of money constantly prescribing stronger glasses every year or lasik which has significant risks and doesn't stop the elongation.

Whoever cracks this problem will make a lot of money. But shrinking eyeballs is probably a very difficult task and easier and very profitable to just fix the symptoms. And most people don't become blind from this so it doesn't seem like a priority.

<comment><USER16> > I have thought about this myself, but I thought that elongation being > permanent or difficult to reverse was intuitive. If you stretch a piece of a > plastic it stays that way.

May be different for living tissue. I wonder if there might be some brace developed to reshape the eye ball, that could be eventually removed. Of course the implant procedure might be incredibly, prohibitively invasive.

<comment><USER17> There's scleroplasty, developed and only practiced in Russia and some other ex-USSR countries. Seems dangerous, but somewhat effective (if you trust Russian research results): [http://www.nature.com/eye/journal/v24/n7/full/eye2009322a.ht...](http://www.nature.com/eye/journal/v24/n7/full/eye2009322a.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Between the ages of 15 and 17 years old, I spent hours every night in a dark room in front of a (really bad) 14" CRT display.

I never had issues with my vision. Then I developed Myopia. I have always felt that it was related to my late night computing.

<comment><USER19> Same thing, around the same age. A somewhat famous ophthalmologist who did a decent amount of research insisted to my mother, at the time, that there was no statistical correlation between CRT use and myopia. Interesting to see the consensus move since then...

<comment><USER20> CRT use != low light conditions. I bet the studies were focused on eye strain in work environments.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I became curious about this when I became significantly less short-sighted during each of my years of maternity leave. A few more kids and I won't need glasses any longer :-) Indeed, I spent much more time outside while on maternity leave than when I was working.

I found this interesting too: [http://www.katysays.com/pumpkin-eyes-and- pelvic-floors/](http://www.katysays.com/pumpkin-eyes-and-pelvic-floors/)

</comment><comment><USER22> I would love to see a second control group where the kids spent 40 minutes a day inside a 10,000 lux illuminated classroom.

</comment><comment><USER23> I've always thought eyes work remarkably well for something hacked together out of meat and jelly. I guess part of that is probably a feedback mechanism where the growth of tissue is effected by where the image is focused. Presumably staring at books throws off the mechanism that evolved for gazing at the scenery. Guess it needs bright light to work?

<comment><USER24> That's a tempting thought, but if you read the article, it has nothing to do with where your eye tends to be focused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> 10000 lux is something achievable with 100W of LED light.

Why not, instead of limiting children exposure to computers and kicking them outside, just paint the wall behind their computer white and point 100W worth of LEDs at it?

I'm sure (s)he will spend at least 3 hours per day in that environment without trauma associated with forcefully exposing the child to boredom of outside.

EDIT: Yes, yes. I know. Being outside and kicking ball has lots of other benefits. But still... People are not doing it today despite potential obesity that predictably can kill you and they won't start doing it due to potential myopia that will force you to wear glasses. So why not go with pragmatic solution?

</comment><comment><USER26> This is some fascinating research.

I feel like there should be some other correlates if light is a dominating factor, such as between geography and myopia (should see some trends around super-cloudy vs. super-sunny areas).

</comment><comment><USER27> Anecdotal, etc, etc:

I was home schooled through fourth grade. Lots of time spent outdoors, even on school related things (setting up little rubber army men in the sandbox when studying the revolutionary war, for example). My eyesight was quite good, despite spending quite some time on the computer (balanced, of course, with out-door activities).

Half-way through my first year in public school, I needed glasses. My eyesight went from 20/20 to ~20/80 in less than five months. 20 years later, it's around 20/300 - though fairly stable for the last ten years.

</comment><comment><USER28> As someone whose myopia gets worse every few years, I feel any concrete research into myopia is a bonus.

</comment><comment><USER15> I hope this leads to an actual cure for myopia instead of burning off your cornea to compensate.

</comment><comment><USER29> If you don't wear glasses (or contact lenses) then you are in a minority. I am in this minority and I find it worrying. Who would have thought that all of those long walks home would be beneficial?

I think that cycling helps my eyesight. If I cycle in to town then, for survival reasons, I am fully testing out my eyes. It does not matter what time of day this is, going through traffic or rolling home late at night on empty roads, I am really working those eyes. I get to look to the far horizon as well as those quick glances over the shoulder. Thinking about it, I cannot think of a better eye exercise!

As well as the normal light I also get enhanced levels of UV reflected from the road during the summer months.Normally we try to bar UV with glazing so I am just rebalancing the spectrum if non-visible light is bouncing off the tarmac.

So, if I was calling the shots here on planet earth I would mandate that all children cycle to school. For comedy value I would make the punishment for those that drove their kids in be harsh - eyes scooped out and donated to medical science. For now, in the run up to the introduction of that I would want public information campaigns that just tell parents that driving their kids to school makes them go blind, which is totally true.

</comment><comment><USER30> So would installing much brighter lights indoors help mitigate this? What does it take to illuminate a room at the suggested 10k lux?

<comment><USER31> It's a good question, but it seems unlikely to be feasible given that "a well- lit office or classroom is usually no more than 500 lux." I have a hard time believing that it's 20 times brighter outside than inside, but then again I have no issues seeing my phone's or laptop's screen indoors, while it's almost impossible outside (even in the shade) to see anything.

<comment><USER32> No need to believe here, there are possibilites to measure that. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux) [http://www.wikihow.com/Measure-Light- Intensity](http://www.wikihow.com/Measure-Light-Intensity)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> An opthamologist in Finland advocates the use of plus glasses for children (and everyone else) for all close work to prevent myopia.

<comment><USER34> A small anecdote:

I was diagnosed with myopia at around 7 years of age. I had -1. I went and got prescription glasses. The guys there fudged it up and gave me +1. I wore those for more than a year, but I could not, for the love of me, see with them. My parents were FURIOUS I did not wear them. I kept telling them I couldn't actually see anything with them. They made things worse. But no dice, they thought I was just being stubborn. Anyways, I get another checkup after a year, they realized the error.

On the second checkup, I had -1,75. Either the +1 glasses exacerbated my myopia, did nothing for it, or actually helped curve it, I could not say. I think it made things worse. And it was a pain in the ass having to wear something that made things worse and have people lash on me because they thought I was just being stubborn by not wearing them.

<comment><USER35> With plus lens therapy, you only wear the plus lens while doing close work. If you were wearing the plus lenses while looking more than a few feet away, you wouldn't be doing plus lens therapy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I laughed to myself after reading the first few paragraphs. When I saw the image of young Chinese students I immediately thought of the literary use of myopia, not the medical condition. Given the source of the article was "Nature", I assumed it was an article about the Chinese exploitation of natural resources for the sake of short term profits and the destructive effect on the environment; hence, myopia. Is that irony?

</comment><comment><USER37> It's interesting that the widely derided See-Clearly method has as one of the exercises staring at a bright light bulb with the eyes closed.

</comment><comment><USER33> An opthamologist in Finland advocates the use of plus glasses for children, for any sort of close work to prevent myopia.

<comment><USER9> Kaisu. She's a bit nutty perhaps, but knows what she is talking about. Only works before you start to get into more than pseudo myopia (since at that point you just can't see anything with a plus lens).

<comment><USER35> you can get the same effect with whatever is a plus lens for you, though. So if your normal rx is -1.5, do close work without glasses.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Since a lot of people are chiming in with anecdotal evidence I'll add some of my own.

There's circumstantial evidence to suggest that eating white rice can exacerbate myopia. And asians eat lots of white rice. I found my eyesight deteriorating and cut white rice out of my diet. I think it's stopped now.

<comment><USER39> But then Asians have been eating white rice for centuries haven't they?

<comment><USER40> Not to mention, myopia in Asia is the prevalent in dense populated areas such as Singapore, South Korea or Japan where rice consumption per capita is lower than anywhere else in south-east Asia since they can afford more variety of food when compared to Vietnam, Thailand or Philippines.

You could almost make an opposite case that rice consumption decreases myopia but most likely there is no link whatsoever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > well-lit office or classroom is usually no more than 500 lux

I guess we need to update what "well lit" means.

<comment><USER41> It won't be long until we "solve" this problem by buying special lamps. Anything to avoid our children going out into reality!

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think I got lots of sunlight as a kid but I don't think I slept properly so my circadian rhythm was disrupted all the time. I blame it on getting up early for school and sleeping late because of David Letterman.

</comment><comment><USER43> One could easily find a correlation between my need for glasses and the time at which I (and a lot of others) began using computers heavily, like being on a computer for more than 8 hours a day.

<comment><USER44> I, on the other hand, started using a computer heavily about 5 years after getting my first pair of glasses. Some of it is just genetic and not all myopia is preventable with just more time outside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> So you're telling me, acquired traits are inherited?

</comment><comment><USER46> I always wondered why I had an entire childhood of obsessive close work (computer, Lego, drawing, etc.) yet have better vision than my parents had at my age. I don't know if computer screens are bright enough to have a protective effect, but I did grow up in a culture insistent on kicking kids out of the classroom for breaks no matter the weather.</comment>


Facebook news feed ads generate 49X more clicks at 45% less cost - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/27/facebook-news-feed-ads-generate-49x-more-clicks-at-45-less-cost-study/#7xwxv2PcMUZxIql2.02 <comment><USER2> Ha ha ha! The jokes on them!

I'm part of a movement called "fake clickers". Everybody involved tries to click on ads by theme. For example, I've decided to click on gout, knee- replacement and diabetes ads, in order to give the ad AI the impression that I'm a diabetic, gout-ridden old fart. It's working, at least for me, as I now see neuropathy, AARP, erectile dysfunction, and strangely latina bikini model ads that I never used to see.

</comment><comment><USER3> You can avoid news feed ads completely by writing the following into your Adblock Filter Preferences:

> facebook.com##.storyInnerContent.storyContent</comment>


Where'd You Get That? - <AUTHOR> http://us6.campaign-archive2.com/?u=88819455cab0b1139f96cec4d&id=4c937a83d2 <comment><USER2> Online archive of an email newsletter. Snippet: "Today we look at how ideas move through humans, societies, and countries — sometimes it's an engineered process, and sometimes it's a chain of serendipitous events"</comment>


Is Apple running out of juice? - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/09/debate-apple-out-of-juice

<comment><USER2> Wow.</comment>