Scientific Peer Review Is Broken – Fighting to Fix It with Anonymity - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/12/pubpeer-fights-for-anonymity/ <comment><USER2> Anonymity can't fix scientific peer review, it can only replace type I errors with type II errors. Instead of suppressing criticism that ought not to be suppressed, anonymity can (and often does) fail to suppress criticism that really ought to be suppressed because it is in fact false and defamatory. And indeed, what this article is really about is a lawsuit that alleges that this kind of error has in fact taken place.

Ironically, the very title of this article is a model of non-scientific thinking that ought to be subject to criticism, but attempts to inoculate itself against criticism by asserting that the subjects of the piece are protagonists "fighting to fix" a broken system. They're not. They're fighting to replace one broken system with a different broken system.

There is no question that scientific peer review is broken and needs to be fixed. But anonymity is not the answer. And holding anonymity up as something that should itself be beyond criticism is _certainly_ not the answer.

<comment><USER3> I agree completely. In my experience as a PhD student (comp sci), all conferences make reviewers anonymous. As a result, there is very little accountability regarding the reviews you receive for your work. More than once, I have had papers rejected simply because a single reviewer barely read the paper and dismissed it. These kinds of reviews are very frustrating to receive, not only because they failed to understand the basic premises of your paper, but because these reviews contain no useful information on how to make your paper better for future submissions.

Of course, the opposite can happen where mediocre works slips through, and the reviewers that allowed that should be held accountable too. Its painful to me that so much of the acceptance process for research papers (in my field at least) is based on luck.

Moral of the story: reviewer anonymity is good but it comes at the expensive of accountability.

<comment><USER4> I'm also a computer science PhD student. I don't disagree with anything you said, but I am even more cynical.

> Of course, the opposite can happen where mediocre works slips through

Slips through? Mediocre work is the norm, or at least close to being the norm. (And, as you say, good work is often rejected.)

> Its painful to me that so much of the acceptance process for research papers > (in my field at least) is based on luck.

I don't think it's based on luck, it's based on politics. Academic science is a racket. There is some luck too, though.

<comment><USER3> > Slips through? Mediocre work is the norm, or at least close to being the > norm.

In computer science, this is likely because of the ridiculous number of conferences there are and how eager each one is to fill out their roster. I want to hear of the conference that published no papers this year because none were good enough for publication.

> I don't think it's based on luck, it's based on politics. Academic science > is a racket.

I've heard (more than once) of people who submit a paper, have it rejected, and then get scooped by a professor who was on the PC of the conference that rejected them. There is a very real possibility of work being accepted or rejected purely because of what the reviewer thinks will be most beneficial to their career.

So, I think your cynicism is well-placed.

<comment><USER4> > In computer science, this is likely because of the ridiculous number of > conferences there are and how eager each one is to fill out their roster. I > want to hear of the conference that published no papers this year because > none were good enough for publication.

Yep. But there is a reason it is this way, which is that to be successul on the academic feeding trough/career path, you have to serve on PC committees and you have to publish a lot of papers.

> There is a very real possibility of work being accepted or rejected purely > because of what the reviewer thinks will be most beneficial to their career.

I think this is right, but it's less often so work can be scooped, and more often about building up your "camp." As a research professor, you need your area of expertise to be popular and you need to get a lot of citations for your work. You want to be a leader in an area that _actually matters,_ where your definition of "actually matters" is actually purely herd mentality: what do other people consider to be important? So you want to reject work that bolsters your camp, cites you, etc., and reject work that poses a threat to the ascendancy of your area of expertise.

<comment><USER5> Agree with a lot of what is being said here. Have seen vicious anonymous reviews in CS - as we all have - both due to someone misunderstanding the work but also due to people from "a different camp" simply disliking a given approach. This must be common in other fields as well. Someone said on this thread that anonymity is not a guarantee of quality - completely agree. The move towards "open reviewing" for conferences in CS is very encouraging, however we will see how far it gets.

<comment><USER4> I'm going to say something controversial.

Minor reform of the referee system is treating the symptoms, not the disease.

The disease is that there is no honest, mutual, voluntary exchange between a party that values a given research project and the party that produces it.

Rather, we have federal bureaucrats handing out money taken from taxpayers willy-nilly via an old-boy network as described above. (The difference between taxpayers and slaves is that taxpayers only must sacrifice a fraction of their productivity to this absurd system, not all of it.)

In CS, all the research we do either goes to benefit shareholders of companies that ultimately profit from it, or (the majority) is just ignored because it's part of the paper mill competition. Those companies should be the ones paying for the research, not the taxpayers. Those companies are free riding, and "we the people" should put an end to it.

<comment><USER6> I'm not sure what the one has to do with the other. My research is corporate- funded and my papers still get reviews from people who didn't read the paper carefully. Unless you're proposing to eliminate the concept of publishing research at all...

<comment><USER4> What one has to do with the other is that the entire system is broken, here's my explanation for why the system is fundamentally messed up, and my explanation for how it should be. Simply trying to change refeering by itself is treating the symptom, not the disease.

> Unless you're proposing to eliminate the concept of publishing research at > all...

I think putting my research on my website would be just as good as publishing it in a conference proceeding. I'm not against sharing research and having it be public, but I think conference proceeidngs and journals in CS are of very little value. If people want my research, they can find it on my website. And I think this generalizes... if I want your research, I can (presumably) find it on your website.

Ultimately, it may be useful to have some kind of aggregation of what research is coming out in various subfields. Internet fora and the like would serve the purpose fine. But sure, having a group of referees and some way to screen research and highlight what is good could certainly be useful. All that stuff should develop organically as it is needed, though.

The model we have now, with peer review, journals made out of dead trees, etc. is a hold-over from a pre-Internet time when a few people in every sphere of life controlled the information that was disseminated, because it wasn't possible for things to be open, since we lacked the technology. That is no longer an issue. Of course, academics will hold onto their little racket as long as they can (probably indefinitely).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The actual complaint filed shows pretty nasty behavior. Here's the full complaint: [https://retractionwatch.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/filed- co...](https://retractionwatch.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/filed- complaint.pdf)

Someone very clearly was trying to get Dr. Sarkar fired. The PubPeer comments are only one small aspect. But the person then also (I assume anonymously) emailed his new employer to allege fraud, and then went so far as to print out these allegations and stamped them with official looking nonsense about being from the an NIH investigation (which didn't exist), and distributed them throughout Sarkar's department mail boxes.

The complaint makes a decent case for why they think pretty much all the negativity directed at this researcher is likely from one angry person. They obviously can't prove that multiple anonymous comments are from the same person, but reading the content it certainly seems likely. What is assumed to be the same person then took things way past the line of what most of us would consider ethical.

There may very well be a place for anonymous calling out of potential research misconduct. But making fraud allegations anonymously online, then printing out those comments, trying to fake them to look like an official government inquiry, and physically delivering them to the researcher's boss at his place of work isn't the way to do that. This case _might_ be one of those cases where the anonymity should be protected at all costs out of principle, but it's a really shitty case to wave your "we're the good guys" flag for.

<comment><USER8> I am also not sure (as was a commenter in a reply) what was objectionable about my first reply to you, but now that I see that I can no longer edit that reply anyway, I should link here to what PubPeer says in reply to the plaintiff's motion to force disclosure of the name of the PubPeer commenter(s).

[http://retractionwatch.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/12/2014.1...](http://retractionwatch.com/wp- content/uploads/2014/12/2014.12.10-PubPeer-Motion-to-Quash-Brief.pdf)

As an aside, I'll mention that the PubPeer lawyer is doing a much better job in filing pleadings, perhaps because PubPeer is a more above-board client, than Sarkar's lawyer is doing. Yeesh, what a mess the Sarkar complaint is. (Yes, I am a laywer, and I have read pleadings before and have a gut sense of which pleadings are convincing.) Note that the American Civil Liberties Union signed off as lawyers for PubPeer.

<comment><USER7> The response from PubPeer's lawyer is certainly interesting, particularly the analysis of the images in question. But I wasn't trying to argue one way or the other about the actual merit of the accusations really. I was more pointing out that it seems fairly clear that someone, acting entirely anonymously, was set on getting this man fired. He did indeed lose a job (in fact two!), seemingly because of the efforts of this anonymous source, without any kind of formal inquiry or detailed analysis of misconduct. And the alleged actions of the anonymous attacker were entirely unprofessional and just plain shitty. Does the guy deserve to have his career destroyed? I have no idea, but trying to do so in such an underhanded mean-spirited way is just nasty. But this is academia after all...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the increase in fraudulent papers getting published is a symptom, not the disease. The disease is that there are too many scientists doing research for a given research budget.

Due to the ferocious competition for grant money, people are either sloppy and cut corners, or do whatever they need to do and outright cheat to publish in top tier journals.

As a society, we need to make a decision about how much we want to fund scientific research - then, once we've made that decision, insure that we put in place a sustainable system in place - we cannot put in a put of money to finance 100 grants, but then build a pipeline that funnels an ever increasing amount of people into a pool that remains constant.

<comment><USER10> One could argue that papers are the disease. It was a good medium, but with today's communication technology, something better needs to arise. The need to "publish to exist" in academia has gotten to the point that it promotes sub- standard work and hinders advancement of knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I take the opposite approach: I sign my reviews and have ever since I was a grad student. It compels me to do a better job reviewing and often leads to further discussion and sometimes collaboration with the authors. Some people don't like what I have to say, but by and large, they respect it. For many topics that I review for, the authors will have a pretty good idea that I wrote the review unless I am intentionally vague. I would rather write clearly and directly and stand behind it. It is a professional risk that I don't think anyone should be compelled to take, but I think signing reviews is generally good for science.

<comment><USER12> Yes, I think anonymity in reviews is largely a myth, even in "double blind" reviews. For many topics, there are only a few research groups actively pursuing them, and you can often tell from what other work they cite, what datasets they use, etc., which lab it is. So identifying at least some of the authors is relatively easy. You might not get the exact grad student right, but you probably know their advisor.

Identifying reviewers is a little harder, but it's usually not difficult to make educated guesses unless they are, as you put it intentionally vague. Otherwise the other comments on this article about bad reviews from 'people from "a different camp" simply disliking a given approach' and the like would be impossible to justify.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It seems plausible to imagine a system where PeerPub could retain their "published author to register

This model relies on t a blind cryptographic signature.([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_signature))

PeerPub generates a public/private key pair.

1\. Alice wishes to register on PeerPub. She generates a Nonce N.

2\. She blinds the nonce with a factor B.

3\. She submits the blinded nonce and her identity to PeerPub. PeerPub checks her credentials and executes a blind signature of the number and returns it to Alice.

4.Alice now separately registers an account perhaps using a privacy protecting system like Tor. She uses the original N and the unblinded Signature.

5\. PeerPub verifies N + signature and registers the account. PeerPub will have no way of linking N to the original credentials. PeerPub can record N and make sure it can only be used once to register an account.

<comment><USER14> Not specific to PeerPub, but I helped work on a prototype of a federated login system based on OpenID that used blind signatures in a similar fashion:

[http://private-idp.appspot.com/](http://private-idp.appspot.com/)

[https://code.google.com/p/pseudoid/](https://code.google.com/p/pseudoid/)

[http://blind-signer.appspot.com/](http://blind-signer.appspot.com/)

I haven't touched it for years and it looks like the login flow is broken now with the demo sites.

Also, this uses unsafe server-side JS crypto for demo purposes only.

<comment><USER13> I emailed the PeerPub people about something like this. Will see if they bite.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Peer review might be broken, but it's not anonymity that will fix it. For the simple reason that we already have double-blind reviews in many fields and the peer reviewing process is not any less broken there.

There are people who are thinking of multiple solutions, one that I think is interesting is the proposition of Open Scholar, dubbed "Independant Peer- Review". I submitted it to HN so we can discuss it without flooding this thread, if it interests HNers: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8734271](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8734271).

In there scheme, the papers are open access from the beginning, the peer reviewing process is open, and reviews are citable. I believe it would encourage better and deeper reviews.

It would also be very nice for young scientists or students who want to apply for a PhD grant to be able to show that they are able to write a comprehensive review of a paper in their field, and that their review was good enough to significantly improve the paper or to be selected by the authors and/or publishers to be released alongside the paper, for instance.

</comment><comment><USER16> As a person who did research until a few years ago, I must say that the problem is the exact opposite. When you send an article to a journal, the paper gets reviewed by a number of peers, which send their comments back to the Editor on the appropriateness of the claimed work.

The problem with this mechanism is that reviewers have no liability, because their comment is anonymous to the author and won't be available to the readers, as it won't be published as part of the article. The result is that reviewers are not made accountable now or in the future for inaccuracies in their review, blatant attacks, or tactical requests for additional irrelevant investigation just out of spite or to stall you so that they can scoop your paper.

Occasionally, the Editor can step in and disregard a particularly obnoxious reviewer, but it depends on the editor, the journal, and the political/scientific strength of the reviewer.

<comment><USER17> > because their comment is anonymous to the author and won't be available to > the readers

You can make comments on your papers available; there is nothing against that. I really think, however, peer review comments should actually be published with rejected and accepted papers (at the author's consent, not reviewers) so that conferences can be more transparent.

<comment><USER16> You can, but 1) there's no official channel 2) nobody will do it if they are not forced.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > A prominent cancer scientist, unhappy with the attention his research papers > have received on PubPeer, is suing some of our anonymous commenters for > defamation

On the other hand, should anonymous commenters have the balance of power: in other words, say whatever they want with impunity, even if it actually is defamatory?

(Not saying that is the case in this situation, but in general).

The problem is that defamation is a legal concept, which can only be tried legally. So for instance, whereas a site can rigorously enforce rules which say that all comments are directed at the research material, and not at persons, and have a factual basis in that material, those measures cannot take away the right of someone, who feels they have been defamed, to take the matter to court (where they will almost certainly lose, which is neither here nor there).

You can't just create a site and declare it above the law, so to speak.

The only way to protect the identities of the anonymous is for the site to take responsibility for the statements it publishes: to assert that the anonymous statements are subject to rigorous standards of review, and when published, they in fact reflect the views of PubPeer, and PubPeer alone, and not of any anonymous persons (who do not publish any statements, but act only as sources of information).

Then if someone feels they have been the target of defamation, the defendant shall be PubPeer.

<comment><USER19> This situation is reminiscent of websites hosting copyrighted material posted by anonymous users. Does the relevant law (DMCA, I think) say anything about defamation? A reasonable compromise might be that websites are held harmless so long as they respond to official defamation complaints in some prescribed manner. (Of course, this might not work as well because defamation is significantly less clear-cut than copyright violations, which already has plenty of cases of over-reach due to disputes over fair use, etc.)

<comment><USER20> I think you may mean "prescribe" rather than "proscribe." :-)

<comment><USER19> Yes, that is an especially confusing error. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> What we need here is a more nuanced approach. Anonymity can solve some problems in research, but it will make other worse.

When people are anonymous, they ARE more likely to be truthful in their criticism. They have less incentive to hold back, and it's just human nature to tone down critical feedback when you're critiquing the work of someone with is either influential or an acquaintance. No one likes to make enemies.

On the other hand, anonymity can pretty clearly bring out some of the worst in us. Some people feel little obligation to be fair or honest when their reputation isn't on the line, and so you see people trying to knock down rivals, people they don't like, or random strangers just for the "thrill of the troll."

Imagine if every time you applied for a job your potential employer had access to anonymous feedback on your past work. Some of it might be fair and honest (whether positive or negative), but some of it might be lies from an anonymous coworker with a grudge. Maybe someone is trying to take you down a rung because you got the promotion over them. You could be penalized for any petty reason, and it would stick with you.

Anonymous feedback communicated publicly is much the same. It holds the reviewer and the object of review on unequal footing. Anonymous feedback would be great for an author or even an editor, but it's just not fair to allow the pettiest of people to attack the works of others while wearing a mask. I'd like a system that helps researchers and others invested in the work to solicit anonymous feedback to make the work better. Public-facing commentary, on the other hand, should be tied to an identity.

</comment><comment><USER22> One of the main issues is that this is just a really tedious process. No one wants to go through algebra; that's why it's siphoned off to grad students. Do you really think a tenured professor is going to spend time checking the grunt work on /someone else's/ paper when they won't do it for their own? I'm intrigued by the possibility of using natural language processing and logical system tools like Wolfram Alpha. Wolfram recently posted on his blog about building machines that could store data about complex mathematical objects, and already you can build machines that confirm first order logical statements.

Farming out low-level tasks to automated systems would be interesting. Imagine if the format of papers changed entirely, ie, you had to submit your proofs in certain formats, or at least certain parts in specific ways. I'm sure that many professors would be elated to see the number of papers they have to review go down drastically; although, I'm sure many will be disappointed to get a return letter that says, "I'm sorry, but the low level flaws were so serious that they were automatically rejected and are not fit for review."

<comment><USER23> I'm a permanent staff member and I do actually check "algebra" and integrals when reviewing papers. Especially "technique" papers, because after the initial paper, people tend to make black boxes, so if the initial errors aren't caught then they can propagate for quite some time...I view it as community service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Let's be sure to point out some terrible journalism, reading the following makes me completely disinterested in finishing the article and have considerably less respect for Wired.

> Have you ever questioned the claims that scientists make? For example, last > year's discovery of the so-called "God particle,"

Using the nickname for the Higgs in the context of questioning science claim is nothing but bait for the foolish and misinformed, and in this way anyone scientifically literate should seriously question any claims or opinions in this publication.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is an interesting problem. On the one hand, there are merits to a referee being anonymous to the submitter. Part of this may be to avoid reprisal for younger referees, but even for more established referees, you may be freer to comment if you are anonymous to the author. BUT, you are not completely anonymous. Hopefully (though there have been some recent scandals related to this) an editor of the journal knows your work and has chosen to use you as a referee based on that. This can help to keep down some of the noise that another poster (lisper) mentioned. Also, the fact that the editor knows who you are may provide some constraint on how you may phrase a review as compared to if you were completely anonymous.

I don't think this is something one should issue a lawsuit over--but I also don't think that their proposal of completely anonymous review is at all useful.

</comment><comment><USER25> My understanding is that most peer review systems in place at various journals and funding agencies today are already anonymous (except for when people are identified by their well known viewpoints.) If you ask me, the real problem can't be solved with communications technology, the real problem must be solved at the source: The funding agencies need to take the importance of reproduction of results seriously and require their grantees to do a certain amount of rote reproduction work in order to qualify for grants for novel research. Will it slow the pace of things down? Certainly. Will it increase the quality of the science? Certainly.

</comment><comment><USER26> Much of the discussion here seems to have become "anonymity vs. non-anonymity" \--- i.e. either anonymity is good for research or it's bad for research. Why not just accept that in some venues there will be anonymity, and in some not, and let them each develop according to the merits of the respective approaches? No need to have all research anonymous or all research clearly attributed to a public identity.

</comment><comment><USER27> I usually think that peer review is broken, but that is because we almost always miss the point of what the actual purpose of peer review is for. Peer review is NOT for laymen. A scientific paper is part of a much longer process of discovery which includes massive amounts of debate and argument. Papers always reflect they very edge of a field where literally the only people who can judge whether the results are plausible are peers because they are the ones who are also trying to make sense of the same phenomenon. Over time some primary research papers are singled out because they really are excellent explanations of a phenomenon most of the time however you have to go look at a review paper. Furthermore peer review is absolutely NOT about reproducibility, it is a prerequisite that says that it MIGHT be worth trying to reproduce this work or work contingent on these results being valid. There are so many reasons why a result might be wrong that it often takes fields years to figure it out and the published literature is a record of that.

</comment><comment><USER28> With Publons.com ([https://publons.com](https://publons.com)) we have different philosophy: the more transparency we can bring to the review process, the better. At the same time we recognise that both blind and double- blind peer review play an important role in generating quality research.

Our approach is to focus on turning review of all kinds (including both pre- and post-publication) into a measurable research output -- something you can add to your resume. We support both anonymous and signed review with the idea that it will lead to greater transparency in the long run and also motivate reviewers to contribute more.

We have a significant number of both types of review now and are starting to look ways to measure if there are significant differences between blind and open review.

<comment><USER29> Hi, I like the site and idea. I was wondering if you were thinking of taking it one step further, however, and making it an actual pre-print server?

I would think that if you expect people to take the "credit for reviewing" model seriously, then likewise they should take seriously the notion of "credit for being reviewed" or "credit for being upvoted".

Also, there would have to be a way to verify submitters/reviewers credentials (e.g. connection to a research institution). Obvious arXiv has a model for how this could be done.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Something I've noticed is that most online articles about scientific misconduct and invalid results revolve around the medical sciences. Granted, medicine is probably the biggest piece of the scientific pie right now, and other branches of science may have their own problems, but I think it misleads the public to have a title like "scientific peer review is broken," for an article that focuses exclusively on one branch of science.

Disclaimer: I'm a physicist. I'm sure that physics is not beyond critique, but unless somebody is willing to take enough of an interest in the inner workings of physics research to say something specific about it or credibly include it in a generalization, I'd rather say something like "medical peer review is broken."

</comment><comment><USER31> _Fortunately, the First Amendment is on our side. It protects the right to anonymous speech._

I don't understand how "The government cannot outlaw your speech" means "Your anonymity is protected by law from private parties". How does that interpretation come about?

<comment><USER32> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrite_International,_Inc._v....](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrite_International,_Inc._v._Doe_No._3) .

> "the court must balance the defendant's First Amendment right of anonymous > free speech against the strength of the prima facie case presented and the > necessity for the disclosure of the anonymous defendant's identity."

<comment><USER33> I don't think that opinion says what you think it says.

What is really being discussed there is if the government could compel Yahoo to unmask an anonymous user. It says nothing about actual anonymity guarantees among private parties. If Yahoo decided to hand over the account details, the court would not have intervened at all. So when you have an account with some service, any expectations on how the company will handle the data come from the TOS.

In a similar fashion, a company is free to delete any content you submit to their website. The government can't curtail your speech, barring a few exceptions, but a company certainly can, as long as the government is not involved.

<comment><USER32> We know that the government could compel Yahoo to unmask an anonymous user - get a FISA order to inspect the business records and, poof, done. So I don't see how that's the issue. Here's the breakdown:

"A prominent cancer scientist, unhappy with the attention his research papers have received on PubPeer, is suing some of our anonymous commenters for defamation."

That's a third-party, who is not a government organization, suing PubPeer to de-anonyomize a commenter on PubPeer's site.

"Dendrite International, Inc., a purveyor of computer software used in the pharmaceutical industry, brought a John Doe lawsuit against individuals who had anonymously posted criticisms of the company on a Yahoo message board. When Presiding Chancery Judge Kenneth MacKenzie rejected one of Dendrite's requests to compel Yahoo to reveal the identity of an anonymous defendant, Dendrite appealed."

That's a third party, Dendrite, who is not a government organization, suing Yahoo to de-anonyomize a commenter on Yahoo's site.

If Yahoo wanted to, they could turn that information over. The question was, could Dendrite compel Yahoo to do so if Yahoo didn't want to. And the answer is that there's a First Amendment issue which must be considered, so the answer is "sometimes."

Yahoo didn't want to. And PubPeer doesn't want to.

So I don't understand why you are bringing up first party actions (actions that Yahoo and PubPeer are free to do) when the issue is what third party actions may compel them to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Not as deep an article as I'd hoped, but it points to a difficult question. As reviewers of scientific papers have unprecedented power over what research gets published, _who reviews the reviewers_?

(A personal example - I have just spent a week constructing a counterargument to a reviewer who didn't read my paper properly. Imagine having an online discussion where your career success hangs on the response of an anonymous, disengaged flamer to a single post of yours: can you imagine how much effort you put into that post? Sadly this particular argument is pointless and serves nobody; it would be better use of my time to get on with actual research, but that's not how the system works).

</comment><comment><USER35> I don't get their stance ... peer-review is already "anonymous". There are also a lot of issues with truly anonymous user forums (see 2chan and 4chan). For me it always seems as if the social aspects of communication disappear when one is truly anonymous, e.g. hate speech. The problem is not lack of anonymity but lack of incentives for reviews (I don't get anything from doing a thorough review of a paper and often it's hard to impossible to judge the contribution without dataset and code). It seems peerpub and similar systems will attract people who have the incentive to attack specific authors (as it happened in this case).

</comment><comment><USER36> The obvious problem here is with fields that are small and highly specialized, such that anyone knowledgeable enough to comment on a topic are known to be from a small circle of scientists.

</comment><comment><USER37> Thank you for helping to promote reproducibility of published results by supporting anonymous peer review! Science Exchange (YC S11) is also making great progress in the facilitation of scientific reproducibility. We just completed independently validating select results from 50 cancer biology papers. [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8731274](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8731274)

</comment><comment><USER38> Pubpeer is not a peer review site, it's site with comments. I think they are doing it wrong by promoting it as "anonymous peer review", because by definition if its anonymous it can't be "peers". It should (continue to) be a companion to published papers that every once in a while does the service of spotting an error.

</comment><comment><USER39> Another anonymous review system. What could possibly go wrong?

If there's anything we've learned by now about "crowdsourced" review systems, it's that, without an elaborate way to evaluate reviewers, they fail. Badly. Facebook "likes", Google "+1", and Yelp reviews are heavily spammed. This just does not work.

</comment><comment><USER40> Anonymity is hard in practice when so much of science consist of small niche fields where it can be pretty obvious who the author of a paper is by just reading the content.

A better solution might be to enforce non-anonymous peer-reviews that can be read by the public after the paper has been published.

<comment><USER41> Some venues are doing this, e.g. f1000. Here's a paper that I reviewed: [http://f1000research.com/articles/3-38/v2](http://f1000research.com/articles/3-38/v2)

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I don't think push some form of crowd intelligence would change much. I guess the best thing we could do is to create some conditions to let new nodes emerge and complete. I also believe better funding distribution mechanism/system will help a lot.

</comment><comment><USER43> Dr. Mark Burgess just blogged "Why I stopped caring about peer review, and learned to love the work". [http://markburgess.org/blog_peer.html](http://markburgess.org/blog_peer.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> The submission here is an interesting article by the founders of PubPeer, which has already been in the news quite a bit for finding examples of shoddy science papers that have had to be withdrawn by journal editors. I learned about PubPeer on the group blog Retraction Watch (RT), and I just bopped over to Retraction Watch after reading the article kindly submitted here. RT reports in detail on the defamation suit against PubPeer that is mentioned in the parent article of this thread.[1] I hope the PubPeer experiment can continue and thrive and promote better scientific research practices.

Some of the other comments here suggest that anonymity of reviewers is dangerous in itself. That's why some researchers promote an open review process. Jelte Wicherts and his co-authors put a set of general suggestions for more open data in science research in an article in Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience (an open-access journal).[2]

"With the emergence of online publishing, opportunities to maximize transparency of scientific research have grown considerably. However, these possibilities are still only marginally used. We argue for the implementation of (1) peer-reviewed peer review, (2) transparent editorial hierarchies, and (3) online data publication. First, peer-reviewed peer review entails a community-wide review system in which reviews are published online and rated by peers. This ensures accountability of reviewers, thereby increasing academic quality of reviews. Second, reviewers who write many highly regarded reviews may move to higher editorial positions. Third, online publication of data ensures the possibility of independent verification of inferential claims in published papers. This counters statistical errors and overly positive reporting of statistical results. We illustrate the benefits of these strategies by discussing an example in which the classical publication system has gone awry, namely controversial IQ research. We argue that this case would have likely been avoided using more transparent publication practices. We argue that the proposed system leads to better reviews, meritocratic editorial hierarchies, and a higher degree of replicability of statistical analyses."

Wicherts has published another article, "Publish (Your Data) or (Let the Data) Perish! Why Not Publish Your Data Too?"[3] on how important it is to make data available to other researchers. Wicherts does a lot of research on this issue to try to reduce the number of dubious publications in his main discipline, the psychology of human intelligence. When I see a new publication of primary research in that discipline, I don't take it seriously at all as a description of the facts of the world until I have read that independent researchers have examined the first author's data and found that they check out. Often the data are unavailable, or were misanalyzed in the first place.

[1] [http://retractionwatch.com/2014/12/10/pubpeer-files- motion-d...](http://retractionwatch.com/2014/12/10/pubpeer-files-motion- dismiss-sarkar-defamation-case/)

[2] Jelte M. Wicherts, Rogier A. Kievit, Marjan Bakker and Denny Borsboom. Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science. Front. Comput. Neurosci., 03 April 2012 doi: 10.3389/fncom.2012.00020

[http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.338...](http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2012.00020/full)

[3] Wicherts, J.M. & Bakker, M. (2012). Publish (your data) or (let the data) perish! Why not publish your data too? Intelligence,40, 73-76.

[http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/Wichertsbakker2012.pdf](http://wicherts.socsci.uva.nl/Wichertsbakker2012.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER44> What the scientific peer review needs is not anonymity, but accountability. Authors put their reputation on the line. Let reviewers put their reputation on the line too. Good reviews and good reviewers need to be appreciated, not anonymized.

Let valued scientific reviewers gain reputation in a similar way to how contributors to HN, SE and other sites do.

There could even be a viable business model in this. Publishers, be creative!</comment>


Uncovering depression's web in the brain - <AUTHOR> http://newatlas.com/depressions-brain-web-decoded/46005/ <comment><USER3> I think this finding is being overblown in some places, but it does seem to get at part of depressive experience that few people want to acknowledge. You can do everything right, have something good happen as a result of your efforts, recognize your role in the good thing happening, and still _feel_ deeply disappointed. The major psychological models of depression pretty much assume that this kind of backward response can't happen, which can lead to borderline gaslighting about how you're "really" evaluating things.

<comment><USER4> When this happens, is this a reasonable sign that the depression is clinical? My understanding of clinical is that it's chemical.

<comment><USER5> "Clinical depression" refers to Major Depressive Disorder, which is the name given to the common set of psychiatric dysfunctions that have persistent depression as their primary symptom. That is, "Clinical depression" refers to an entire disorder (a set of symptoms grouped together in the literature) rather than as an individual symptom. This is to distingish it from "depression" used as the name of a symptom or other disorders, like bipolar.

"Clinical" depression is not depression that is caused by chemistry rather than psychology. We have no idea whose depression is caused by what, really, and chemistry/psychology probably isn't a meaningful distinction to make in this context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It bothers me that they claim to witness "circuits" connecting different areas of the brain. AFAIK they just use FMRI or similar to see which regions are active and make correlations, which is quite different that watching an actual circuit or "neural pathway" firing in real time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Materialistic science is the #1 obstacle to understanding the nature of depression. Depression is a reaction to an unhealthy environment, but science pathologizes the individual biology.

<comment><USER8> Isn't a good chunk of depression genetic? That is, sure, it's a reaction to an unhealthy environment, but you have to have the predisposition that makes you respond with depression, otherwise you just deal with it?

<comment><USER9> It's just another factor. Some people are just more predisposed to depression. However I imagine that it's possible for everyone to get depression with the right circumstances.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > it is increasingly becoming clear that many forms of the condition are > caused by either chemical imbalances, brain abnormalities or connections > between neurons in the brain

Ka-ching!

A drug company CEO just bought another yacht.

I wonder if the people here who support the pathologising of unhappiness support the mass drugging of school children afflicted by "ADHD". Look at how France deals with such issues and you see there are other ways.

Pills for the brain, mass incarceration, gun culture and junk food - <USER2> America fails at and leaves the rest of the world shaking its head in amazement.

<comment><USER11> I'm glad that you haven't had much experience with clinical depression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ad free source: [http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/news/depression146s_...](http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/news/depression146s_physical_source/)</comment>


The myth of 'mad' genius - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/is-there-any-evidence-linking-creativity-and-mood-disorders <comment><USER2> I've always wondered if a lot of "eccentric" people aren't just behaving the way everybody would naturally behave if they could get away with it. I say and do a lot of things because I have to if I want to have food to eat and a place to sleep, but I'll never know how different my behavior _might_ have been if I were rich enough or brilliant enough that people would just put up with whatever I happened to feel like doing at any given moment.

<comment><USER3> On a related note, I think this idea explains the appeal of smart jerk god characters (Doctor Who, Doctor House, Rick Sanchez, Sherlock Holmes...) to a sizeable portion of nerds (including me). "So smart they can't help but need you" is not a healthy goal, but damn if it isn't seductive.

<comment><USER4> To me it's not so much "So smart they can't help but need you", as it is "being right is more important than anything else". The world doesn't work like that (often), but it's an attractive ideal in some ways

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As much as I like to joke that the greatest artists were all deeply flawed people, so I'm trying to become an alcoholic arsehole in order to become a better author, as the article states, there are a lot of good and great artists/creatives who are not substance abusing wife beaters.

I think there are a couple of factors at play here. The first is that you never hear about how normal an artist was. Nobody talks about how Ansel Adams didn't beat his wife and wasn't an alcoholic, because that's just normal. We only talk about Hemingway's alcoholism, or Van Gogh's mental condition. So we're conditioned to believe that artists are flawed people.

The second factor is that people want to justify why they're not a great artist. "I'm not a great writer, but at least I don't emotionally abuse everyone I know and I'm not a raging alcoholic".

<comment><USER6> That's a reasonable theory, but it doesn't explain why this phenomenon is (somewhat) unique to art. The explanation you gave applies equally well to say, Basketball players and business tycoons. And for the most part, there's no social wisdom i'm aware of that says you have to be a drug addicted asshole to be one of those things.

<comment><USER5> I think that it does apply to sports, it's a common trope that athletes (especially in contact sports) are domestic abusers. Business tycoons are often stereotyped as sociopaths.

Plus there's doping in athletics. People love to criticise Lance Armstrong for doping (among his other flaws), but there's no way, even with doping, that the average person would be able to compete in pro cycling, all the steroids, clenbuterol, EPO, and other PEDs in the world couldn't dope you up enough to be competitive at that level.

People love to justify their mediocre existence (not that there's anything at all wrong with mediocrity). They could be a businessman if they were more sociopathic, they could be an athlete if they used steroids, they could be an artist if they took drugs or were more eccentric.

<comment><USER7> Then again, there are people who dropped out of sport, because they thought they would have to take doping or were pressured to. There are people I know personally who refused jobs that required them do something they found unethical - despite higher pay and benefits. It is profoundly unfair to label them as mediocre just because they have moral or ethical lines they don't cross. Doing that is nothing but rationalization of bad acts.

Maybe the _average mediocre_ person is not just _justifying their mediocre existence_.

Maybe you are rationalizing bad acts bad on idea that being socially celebrated matters more then ethics and moral.

<comment><USER8> Being socially celebrated gets you all the things people teach you mean success as you're growing up: Money, probably a beautiful wife, the admiration of your peers. I agree with you that doesn't have to matter but I don't think you should underestimate how much that flies in the face of what most people have been taught matters most.

<comment><USER7> Which is why I am objecting against knee jerk labeling of people who resisted the temptation as "mediocre" and knee jerk celebration of those who did not resisted as "the others are mediocre anyway". It is tempting even without that.

The beautiful wife will get old as any other women, unless you exchange her ever few years. Being wife merely as a social status trophy is not the kind of relationship I would find attractive at all. I know that some girls are raised to believe that is what they are supposed to be, but that is another category of things I would rather avoid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article focuses exclusively on mood disorders, which frankly isn't what most people think of or mean by "mad" in any case. Nikola Tesla for example was mad as a hatter, but it appears to have been a delusional disorder. While depression for example can be psychotic, it tends not to be, and I think psychosis or at least delusional beliefs are the hallmark of what is commonly meant when the public talks about "madness."

<comment><USER10> You're on the money. Tesla, Emily Dickinson, and likely Van Gogh all had schizotypal personality disorder. Which is not so much a personality disorder in the sense most people think of them so much as it's the Aspergers analog of the schizophrenia spectrum. I've seen it suggested that Einstein may have had it, which I find a lot easier to believe than the notion that he had Aspergers given that his son had schizophrenia and these things tend to run in families. (He may well have had nothing, though.) I strongly suspect that Edwin Land, the inventor of Polaroid, was schizotypal.

There IS actually a proven connection between schizotypal traits and creativity where there really isn't with mood disorders (except bipolar to an extent), since you're "mad" but not so much so that you can't function well enough to execute your ideas. It's worth googling about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Article and "meta-research" distinctly not related to genius.

Genius is a distinctly one-in-a-million phenomenon, this is about people of above average creativity and how they relate to those of below average creativity. And very dubious categorization at that.

<comment><USER12> I don't know why you're getting downvoted, you're right (although the definition of 'genius' is always up for debate). This is just one of a million opinion articles on the same questions which happens to have a regression line behind it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Speaking of the stereotype of 'mad genius', as opposed to the eccentric creative which this article is about, I would hypothesize that 'mad' is simply a mislabeling of the fact that those who are more intelligent are _generally_ going to be less guided by social norms and more by their own logic and views. Being able to follow your own logic, without bounds, is something that is most people, for some reason, do not tend to do.

Einstein is the best example of this. Relativity, and its implications, are intuitively insane and absurd. Yet his logic led him there and he invested an immense amount of effort and energy trying to prove it. And it turned out he was correct. In a parallel universe where the laws of physics are more sane, Einstein would have been labeled as insane for even imagining such an 'absurd' idea might be reality.

</comment><comment><USER14> James Joyce said

"To say that a great genius is mad, while at the same time recognizing his artistic merit, is no better than to say he is rheumatic or diabetic"

His daughter had mental health issues. She went to see Jung and the exchange allegedly went

"Doctor Jung, have you noticed that my daughter seems to be submerged in the same waters as me?" to which he answered: "Yes, but where you swim, she drowns."

</comment><comment><USER15> I used to be nuts. And you know what, I went with it.

I could focus on a project 24-7-365. That's how great projects get done. And people who get great projects done are what we call "geniuses".

I'm better now. Sometimes I think of the great projects that I could do but then I think, "no thanks, life is bigger than that".

<comment><USER16> Good that you're better. Maybe try to work lightly (2 hours a day) on a project someday and see if you can complete it without herculean focus or dedication.

<comment><USER17> It's not like that, in my experience at least. I can do amazing things in 6 weeks, but it involves eating, breathing, and sleeping the system/problem/project. It turns out there are 1000 hours in 6 weeks (including sleep time), and if you have the problem loaded into your brain as its 'default mode network', then it takes over and you can get massive cross- functional efficiencies (including dreaming up solutions in your sleep). Working the equivalent for 2 hours/day would take years and does not generate anywhere close to the kind of energy or output that the parent is referring to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> An article about the status/role/context of insanity and society which doesn't mention Foucault's work? Published in the year of my birth (1961), which I like to think is a coincidence...

Foucault M. History of Madness. Khalfa J, editor, translator & Murphy J, translator. New York: Routledge; 2006. ISBN 0-415-27701-9.

</comment><comment><USER19> Yes, why should a shizophreniac who wildly connects everyday experiences to form strange conspiracy theories would have a natural advantage when it comes to wildly recombining seemingly unconnected ideas, to leap over boundaries every 100 recombination?

Of course, if there is a birth advantage there- all the meritocratic idealism and work wont get you or your kids there.

So its very very anti-equalizism. Its okay, though, if that "benefit" messes up someone elses life and strands him/her living in a box. That is just how the world is supossed to work. Sick people must suffer, if they do not fit into the world tailored for average people by average people. No sense in protesting gods wanted order. Move along.

<comment><USER20> Have you ever experienced or met someone with schizophrenia?

It is hell.

Not only for them but often for those who care about them. It's not about a rosy, whacky persons that the society whimsically outcasts. It's often legitimately tortured people that almost always need serious treatment and constant care, otherwise they risk falling into a very dark abyss.

They often wind up hobos or sometimes in prisons/asylums because they don't have treatment and a very supportive family available, falling in disrepair, not because an evil plot of society.

If this condition were the price to pay for breakthroughs, I'd consider the price too high. But indeed it isn't -- there are no examples of seriously ill paranoid schizophrenics that put out meaningful work. It's a massive hindrance, fogging your view of the world and yourself. Often cited cases like John Nash actually stopped being able to conduct any good work once the disease got hold of them. There are countless examples of extremely brilliant people productive through their lives that never showed signs of delusion, and almost no cases of delusional persons doing good work.

This disease largely embodies the obscurantism, mysticism, fear, distrust, that scientific enlightenment was idealized to fight against. I can't wait for its root causes to be found and it completely eradicated (along with MS, Alzheimer's Disease and Dementia, please).

<comment><USER21> > there are no examples of seriously ill paranoid schizophrenics that put out > meaningful work.

I daresay Adolf Wölfli is one counterexample. Institutionalized for most of his life, beleaguered by paranoid delusions (some of which found their expression in his work) but it was under the circumstances of that illness that he produced the art he is so acclaimed for.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Creativity seems to stem from being outside of the "mainstream" mindset, of going down paths not taken and trying unconventional strategies. Most of the time these don't work out putting an emphasis on the tried and true, but when it does it get labeled as a spark of genius, of creativity. I think it takes a certain type of person to continually beat down these paths and blaze unconventional trails and may be a mark of a 'mad' man/woman, but it may just take those kinds of people to not try and conform with conventional wisdom.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's interesting that there was no talk of anxiety. In talking about the availability heuristic, which is refereneced a lot in Daniel Kahneman's _Thinking Fast and Slow_, they also talk about how anxiety tends to activate System 2 (which is the one for deep thinking), as opposed to the intuitive and nearly autonomous System 1.

Creativity and intelligence are considered different, but related, and Kahneman talks about how the activation of System 2 allows people to make more well informed (smarter) decisions.

</comment><comment><USER24> I've always believed that "genius" is simply mental illness with an audience.

People such as Mozart were known for feeling nervous anxious etc, until they wrote music which was cathartic, which nowadays I'm sure would be diagnosed as some sort of mental illness.

<comment><USER25> This is part of the reason why "mental illness" is a broken term for certain applications. Unevenly-matched skill (coping, etc) vs. circumstance (group psychology, social standards) is one alternate POV that better explains why a "mentally-ill" person could create genius works. They have become conditioned to exploring extremes by dint of circumstance and personal history; their liabilities, struggles, and even periodic victories in these contexts allow them to produce works the likes of which are rarely seen or even contemplated in "non-genius" company. The audience knows intuitively that they are experiencing some fundamental truth, though they cannot in a small number of steps arrive at the sequence that allowed the truth to emerge.

<comment><USER26> That last sentence is profound, nice comment +1

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> _The Romantic stereotype that creativity is enhanced by a mood disorder_

That's postulated as a given. If it's not a given, then it's a red herring. The author supplies no evidence that it's a given. As far as I got, the phrase 'mood disorder' was undefined.

 _... But is there any scientific reason to believe in a connection?_

Science doesn't believe, science constructs and improves models based on repeatable observations. That which cannot be observed cannot be modelled. People can choose to 'believe' those models ... which is 'faith'. Which science was invented to get away from.

So in the first two paragraphs, the author prepares us for the illucid neo- phrenology which follows.

<comment><USER28> >Science doesn't believe, science constructs and improves models based on repeatable observations.

That's confusing the scientific ideal, with how actual scientists operate. Actual scientists hope that they get something right, they feel strongly about their research like the mother of a child, they're just as clouded by emotions as any other human being. And if you add corruption into the mix, then yes, what we call science is not as solid as it looks, but it still provides useful results sometimes.

But we can still talk about a scientific reason to believe. Because the reason might be scientific, but it still might be something which we can believe or not. Because scientific reasons are about as flawed as their creators.

The replication problems in many fields are evidence that science is only as ideal as the people producing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't get this article. As far as I can tell, it wants to prove (in spite of the headline) that mental illness and creativity are not really correlated. Then it goes on to say that measuring either mental illness or creativity is hard on its own -- in which case the meta-analysis done isn't terribly useful?

My own unempirical take on genius is it's not so much "you need some insanity to have groundbreaking genius-level ideas" but "some people are so into doing thing x that they will choose to do it almost all the time, and some of these people have talent and luck in thing x too, which is a potent combination that looks like what we'd call genius".

<comment><USER29> Well, the general take is that average intelligence combined with well-above- average drive (motivation, work ethic, etc.) has significantly better results than "smart but lazy". So you'd expect someone who's smart and also fanatical about something to get outstanding results in that field. Monomania also generally comes across as 'mad'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> I taught gifted education at a prestigious middle school for five years. Over 300 kids came through my classroom during that time.

I saw it all. Seizures. Fistfights. One girl was pretty sure there were secret messages from the principal in the tests I gave. Lots of them started taking drugs early too.

The culmination happened in the Fall of 2012, when one girl convinced her friends that, if they killed themselves, they'd wake up already graduated from college, with school behind them. Luckily, they didn't succeed. And so, in a class of 30 people, I had 6 out and in a mental hospital.

Mad geniuses. They're real.

<comment><USER5> I used to go to a gifted education class once a week when I was around 13 years old.

Probably half the class or more had some form of condition, Autism, ADHD, depression, etc.

Looking back at it now, I don't think it was the case that gifted people are generally "mad". I'm a fairly normal person, and so were a lot of other people in the class. I think that rather, it was that these kids didn't integrate well into conventional education, but this gifted education class was very understanding and accepting of people's "quirks", and had a much more open learning environment where people could grow in their own way. I ended up there because I struggled with the structured nature of normal school.

I've met plenty of people over the years who could be considered gifted (in this case, top 5% IQ), most of them are completely normal and probably just dealt with the overly structured nature of normal school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This article is trying to rebute David Horrobin idea that if everyone is creative then the world will soon be become crazy. It takes a geniuses to see a stick as a weapon. If Everyone starts becoming creative then the whole society will quickly devenigate.We need slme order. Horrobin arguement goes against the idea that everyone can be a creative genius. What is interesting about his idea is that how universal craziness is amongst a small proportion of the population, which means it is has been around a very long time.

<comment><USER32> Reminds me of a differing but related idea. Society at large is already crazy but nobody notices because it has been so normalized being rational is looked upon as crazy.

The promoter of doctors handwashing wound up instituionalized. And it isn't a in the past problem. I mean look at interviewing etiquette and ideals for one. They distrust people who can't or won't put on a mask convincingly enough as untrustworthy. Not even as "unsuited for a job where it is relevant like sales or acting". That is frankly barking mad to only trust those capable of faking.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Bicycles on the Information Superhighway? - <AUTHOR> I am interested in more examples of one to three man shops that are thriving (ie profitable) businesses with no plans to become the next billion dollar unicorn, a la Dan Grossman: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10258542
Bonus points if they have a blog (he does, though it does not update very often: http://www.dangrossman.info/)
Thanks! <comment><USER2> You should go to MicroConf - it's full of people interested in that kind of thing! There's a bunch of people here, too:

[http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/](http://discuss.bootstrapped.fm/)

Another good resource:

[http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/](http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Will check these out.</comment></comment>


Magit on Kickstarter - <AUTHOR> https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1681258897/its-magit-the-magical-git-client <comment><USER2> I use Magit daily and this is great to see. It's made me really start evaluating how much I owe to open source devs like Jonas and how much I can help in $ terms.

I sincerely hope it goes well and gets fully backed. It does make me wonder how many great open source initiatives fall by the wayside purely because the main driver behind it can no longer do it on "charity time".

Out of curiosity, can anyone comment on how long one could expect to live comfortably off 55K CHF in Switzerland - considering average rent and living costs? I remember everything being quite expensive there.</comment>


Integrity and bullies with blogs - <AUTHOR> http://joshuatopolsky.com/post/31285353423/integrity-and-bullies-with-blogs

<comment><USER3> I feel like this is an argument that is being irresponsibly being held in public:

1) Do Gruber or Marco honestly believe that _The Verge_ 's ethics are questionable? Both have appeared on _On The Verge_ and frequently link to _The Verge_... I really doubt they've suddenly developed serious misgivings about _The Verge_ 's standards of ethics. And if they have, sniping about it in links and Twitter comments is immature at best.

2) Does Topolsky need to defend the ethics of _The Verge_ in light of such sniping? If so, I feel like a personal, emotional and vitriolic response isn't the way to go. Double down with an editorial piece that restates the ethical stance and integrity of _The Verge_ or ignore the sniping. All this does is bring Topolsky down to Marco and Gruber's level.

Either someone has serious ethical misgivings or nobody does. If there's a serious beef here, I feel like full-on articles and some investigative journalism (2 of the 3 parties are journalists and Marco plays one on the internet) is in order. If not, all three need to grow the fuck up and start behaving like professionals.

 _update: added formatting_

</comment><comment><USER4> Basically, The Verge is being accused of not being sufficiently pro-Apple in its coverage. It's like people who sit around watching mainstream media all day and scream at their TVs "But, but but, you forgot to mention there are 5 scientists who disagree about global warming!" in every story on the environment.

It would be an interesting experiment if every story about an Apple launch contained references about prior devices that did a feature first.

<comment><USER5> I work in and around politics, and in our business we have a term (lifted from the sports world) for this sort of behavior. It's called "working the refs."

An example: American politicians from the right are constantly complaining about the media being biased in favor of the left. Why? Because the calculus of whether or not to make such a complaint is pretty simple: complaining costs nothing if you're wrong, and if you're right you cause PR problems for the publication you're criticizing. So you make the complaint whenever you have even the slightest reason to do so.

Each complaint forces the publication to respond. (If they don't, you just scream louder about how they're so biased they won't even hear you out.) And each response creates tedious work, going back through old stories and checking them with a fine tooth comb for any hint of bias. This establishes a classic conditioning (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_conditioning>) cause-and-effect relationship: writing a story that the complainer won't like results in extra, redundant work.

Eventually the reporters -- the refs in the game of politics -- pick up (consciously or unconsciously) on the connection between the stimulus and the response, and start gravitating towards the less painful option: framing their coverage in ways that the complaining politician likes. Those stories yield no loud complaints, which means no need to go back and constantly defend yourself. So your reporting gets compromised without you even realizing it.

Marco and Gruber are working the refs here. If you're an Apple fan, it's in your interest for every review of every product even remotely similar to an Apple product to mention that, since doing so both positions the reviewed product as a cheap knock-off and reminds the reader that Apple exists and sells the "real deal." So they've picked this particular review and raised a stink about it. And it's already worked, because Topolsky felt the need to stop whatever other thing he was doing and write a response.

But that's not the real goal of the working-the-refs strategy. The goal is that _next_ time a review of an Apple-ish product crosses Topolsky's desk, he'll ask himself: does this review sufficiently do justice to Apple's competing product? And if it doesn't, is it easier to go through another big public fight defending the story, or to just kick it back to the writer with an editor's note to add a sentence mentioning Apple's offering?

Now go through that thought process enough times and the writers (who don't want to be constantly rewriting their stuff) get the message and just start inserting the sentence on their own. Mission accomplished: the refs have been worked.

<comment><USER6> Agree 100% about writers following editorial lead.

Copy and publication editors always prefer anodyne comments in my experience. Almost every time I stated a strong or very strong opinion, I was encourage to moderate my tone. Regardless of how strong the evidence was to back up my statements.

Not quite sure that Arment/Gruber are "working" the refs as much as feeling like they need to continually remind people of how things used to be. Apple users (I'm one) have a lingering sense that things might revert to how Apple was during the Dark Times when Jobs wasn't around.

<comment><USER7> Gruber's tone and attitude are definitely heavily informed by the experience of the "beleaguered" era. (For those who don't know, this adjective was seemingly tossed in front of the company name almost any time Apple was discussed in the press, enough for the word itself to become a joke about perceived anti-Apple bias in the media.)

A lot of Apple fans are still playing a game where they're rooting for the underdog against a world that doesn't appreciate good UIs, well-built computers, or value over cheapness. The situation used to be clear: Microsoft, and to a lesser extent Intel, were the forces of darkness, building a huge market share by saddling the world with cheap crap, while Apple struggles on making something better. Now that narrative doesn't work anymore, but you can see people like Gruber search for new oppressive enemies to try to carry on with the same story. RIM, Google, Samsung, and even Microsoft's phone and tablet division get slotted into the same old story.

Personally, I think you're right that things might revert to how they were during the Dark Times, but that Apple is by far the most likely candidate for the oppressive and massively successful company, and cheerleaders like these guys are helping that process along.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Im glad Josh responded to those accusations. When I read the news on The Verge. I do not really have to worry about how biased it is. Which is a welcome change. I can read some quick facts about what is happening and move on.

I will say, I liked it better when they did more robust stories. It seems they are trying to cover news more like a newspaper. At the beginning it felt more like a magazine.

</comment><comment><USER9> Am I the only person who doesn't give the slightest fuck whether a product looks a bit like another one?

The iphone looks like a rectangular case with a screen attached to one face, my android phone also looks like a rectangular case with a screen attached one face.

This isn't exactly the Sistine chapel.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'd have to agree with Gruber on this one. The forums on the verge have some very anti-Apple group which complain about anything Apple. One of the features that they have on the Verge is where their writers show what is in their bags and 9/10 of the time, its a Mac laptop and iPhone. That really gets the anti- Apple folks in a tizzy for sure. Unrelated, this seems like a weird article to be discussing on Hacker News.

<comment><USER7> So every product review should have a section discussing where the various design elements of the product may have been inspired, even though such a section would be nothing but a waste of space for 99.9% of the review's readers, who probably just want to use the review to decide whether or not the product is worth buying?

<comment><USER11> When it's this blatant, yes. It's not that the Verge are being pro-Apple or anti-HP or whatever, there is a massive elephant in the room that has been seemingly deliberately ignored that warrants at least a passing comment.

<comment><USER7> _Why_ does a review, whose nominal purpose is to give the reader enough information about the product to make an informed purchasing decision, need to mention this sort of thing at all, ever?

<comment><USER11> Arguable how a device looks is part of that. In this case, there is more than a passing resemblance. Topolsky is defending the integrity of his bloggers, but the integrity is questionable if their reviewing skirts around undeniable facts. Doesn't matter if it's Apple or Fisher-Price!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The Verge is the best tech site out there. This type of "Higher moral ground" trolling from Marco and Gruber is absolutely unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER13> Apple has truly become a religion, and one with plenty of zealots.

<comment><USER14> Why is this? Can you explain it?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Responding to criticism in this fashion is a waste of time. It degenerates quickly into a "Did not!" "Did too!" argument. Better to simply write good articles and leave the critics to their own endeavors.

EDIT: Grammar

<comment><USER15> It has begun! <http://www.marco.org/2012/09/10/bullies-with-blogs>

<comment><USER16> That response reminds me of his response to the pushback to his Tweetbot review. In both cases, he links to the original as if it is innocuous and needs no explanation, when in fact it is incendiary.

<comment><USER17> Absolutely. I honestly clicked on his link to the original expecting to read an observation taken completely out of context. I was wrong. It wasn't even a _veiled_ attempt at attacking the Verge's integrity - he outright claimed they were sellouts with dubious ethics.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm a big fan of The Verge but this seems melodramatic and a little hollow. The HP machine doesn't just share a few design features with the iMac, it's lifted the design wholesale. _Way_ more than any Samsung phone did w.r.t iPhone. Not mentioning this in the article was weird.

And Joshua is being "bullied"? Really? Sensitive types, these bloggers.

</comment><comment><USER19> The funny thing is that when Joshua Topolsky made an off-hand joke about Windows being "like poison", he was attacked for being an Apple fanboy. Still is attacked for it to this day.

</comment><comment><USER6> In another life I wrote numerous reviews of hardware and software for national magazines. It's a tough beat; if you don't get gear early, your article is too late and gets lost in the crowd. Articles are planned months in advance, so getting stuff lined up from vendors takes a lot of time, and having a good relationship with both vendors and their PR firms is essential to keeping your editor happy. The workflow just required so much lead time between getting the hardware/software, interviewing interesting people, writing the article, creating images, working with copy editors etc. Time is money, and relevancy is always paramount.

Ethically, things have changed a lot. Apple used to be extremely generous with hardware, but as they became more successful (roughly around 2004-2005) they were much slower in answering requests for editorial "loaners." The print industry changed a bit too, and it was unusual to be allowed to keep review gear. So "freebies" aren't acceptable anymore, nor should they be.

Editorial direction is where things can get crazy. I was writing for one publication, and in a review of SMB firewalls, I was told to include one make that was clearly not up to the standard of the three units in the review. I included an honest evaluation, and discovered that this manufacturer was an advertiser in the publication. Later on, review units were always specified in advance, and the publication quickly became a trade/advertisement journal instead of one with honest, critical reviews.

Online pubs have it worse. Their timeframes are even more compressed, and online readers are more fickle. Having an unbiased site is tough, and recognizing biases (as a pub editor) is harder.

</comment><comment><USER20> Marco's claim is absolutely ridiculous. I don't know how anyone but one of the most rabid Apple fanbois could even make such a claim, or expect from them to mention that other products look similar to Apple's products in every story. Should they mention it when they are 100% clones? When it's 90% similar? 70%? 50%? What would make Marco happy? Maybe he'd like to send the same kind of criticism to sites covering new TV's or fridges.

As for Gruber's claim, that might not be 100% false. I've noticed that after being heavily criticized by a minority of their readers who are very active and Microsoft fans, about "being too hard on Microsoft/Nokia", TheVerge usually tries to "make up for it", by compensating with other positives or writing more stories about Microsoft/Nokia/WP. They even seem to have one full time writer that only writes about these sort of stories lately (Tom Warren).

Whether these moves are good or bad, that's for anyone to judge. I just think they are a little _too_ reactionary, and I'm not particularly fond of it. I think they'd be better off if they did what they thought it's best, although listening to some feedback I guess can't hurt.

And all that being said, I think TheVerge is one of the more "objective" and impartial tech news sites around, and I think they generally do their best to keep it that way, which is something I like about them.

<comment><USER15> Well I mean they're writing more stories about Microsoft/Nokia/WP because the phones were announced and are eventually going to be released soon. And I'm guessing they give one full-time writer one specific topic so they have a writer who actually follows along with what's going on with the subject.

I mean they were one of the bigger news sites to come out and accuse Nokia of doctoring their OIS videos (albeit they also got an exclusive article afterwards showing how well the OIS photos looked compared to other phones). I don't think either Gruber or Marco's accusations hold much weight.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Marco and Gruber are right on the overall message: those HP devices are obvious Apple design copies. For some strange reason theverge and Engadget chose not to mention this fact. As journalists they have to mention that every single time. And for Josh to say he's being bullied or trolled makes no sense. If HP changed their logo to an apple would it be trolling to critize not pointing that out too? On top of that, getting overally defensive isn't a good solution. Gruber and Marco's claims were a little over the top, but everyone knew they weren't being literal. They, just like I, were confused on how respected online tech news orgnizations wouldn't point out the obvious.

The other part of his post I take issue with is Josh's swipe at smaller blogs. As if only massive blogs are worthy of contributing to the conversation in a community.

<comment><USER5> _As journalists they have to mention that every single time._

Why?

Are reviews of the 2012 Honda Accord obligated to mention that the design of the car's steering wheel is copied from Alfred Vacheron's 1894 Panhard (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steering_wheel#History>)?

If not, what statute of limitations are you proposing on this mandatory statement?

<comment><USER21> Obviously the 1894 Panhard will not be mentioned because its design became an industry standard and those cars are not competitors at this point in time. HP and Apple are compeitiors at the moment. Apple's design is not an indusrty standard. HP had millions and millions of design choices but decided to ape Apple. If something's a copycat, journalist should call it every single time because that's the highest standard of journalism. Are you advocating for the lowest standard?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It would be fun to hear those calls from PR people.

Blogs are a PR man's worst nightmare come true.

As useful as these products are, they also suck in so many ways. Such is the nature of most computers. Cheap to manufacture, limited lifetime, and it shows. They are 1/100th as useful as they could be. Damned if we should have to pretend Apple's or anyone's products are just "perfect", and similar products are inferior, cheap knock-offs (the stuff is all the same on the inside! made in the same factories), or that we should have to "upgrade" whenever the manufacturer (or a TV ad, newspaper, magazine or blog) instructs us to do so.

Warn callers from PR firms their conversations will be recorded and then upload some mp3's of the phone calls.

Now that would be integrity.

</comment><comment><USER17> Honestly, at this point I tend to regard Marco and Gruber as slightly more eloquent versions of Siegler. It's been a very long time since I went out of my way to read anything either had to say.

</comment><comment><USER22> Marco's original comment that set this off: <http://www.marco.org/2012/09/10/elephant>

Hacker News seemed to agree at the time: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4500574>

So the lack of the mention (especially around the keyboard/trackpad - <USER2> remember looking at the pictures myself, somewhat aghast) is actually, you know, notable.

</comment><comment><USER23> The question is whether honest journalism demands that every product review come with a copied/not copied score card, and I do not believe that it does.

The audiences are very different. A copied/not copied story is really an industry story, for people who want to keep track of the competition and status within the computer product industry. Whereas a review is for people who want to learn more about that particular product--people who might not have much sense of the industry dynamics at all.

In addition, it is Apple themselves, and Steve Jobs in particular, who have repeatedly made the point that the only thing that matters is whether the product is great. If better than the original inspiration, it will win. Apple will keep winning as long as its products are better than HP's.

</comment><comment><USER24> Though I'm an Apple user myself, the comments from Marco and Gruber and indeed some other Apple users reminds me of Christians in America - heavily imbibed with a misplaced persecution complex.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for slurring an entire religious group. Does a lot for your argument.

<comment><USER24> It's almost like I went out of my way to judicially use the word "some" to ensure that I avoided doing just that.

And what the other guy said.

<comment><USER25> _It's almost like I went out of my way to judicially use the word "some" to ensure that I avoided doing just that._

No. You said "some Apple users" not "some Christians." Definitely came off as gratuitously slamming a random religious group.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Can I Photoshop Athletes wearing my gear if I worded it carefully - <AUTHOR> Hi HN! Deciding on marketing for a lifestyle brand: if for example I said in an ad "Someday Even Tiger will be wearing these" with a shopped pic of Tiger Woods wearing my golf gloves with my logo, is this legal?
If not, what work around might be? Would a disclaimer work?
Thanks in advance for the brainstorming :)
PS: it is not a golf related brand. <comment><USER2> Doing this for commercial purposes without the expressed permission of the featured person is a violation: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights)

<comment><AUTHOR> > Doing this for commercial purposes without the expressed permission

Terrific information via wiki... thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> > is this legal

Consult a lawyer.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Consult a lawyer

Sage advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're asking, then you likely believe in the very least it sits in a gray area.

<comment><AUTHOR> > you likely believe in the very least it sits in a gray area.

Yes I do, but gray is not black.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Its advertising using his face to promote your brand.

<comment><USER6> Also, the original photo has a copyright, so the photographer can sue too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why in the world would you want to exploit someone like that?

For things like this, turn it around. What if it were you?

You find a photoshop with your face using new sex toy, for example. And the slogan:

"One day, even people like RaceWon will be all in!"

:D

Also, laugh. Meant it to be funny, and thought provoking.

There are other ways.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Why in the world would you want to exploit someone like that?

Ask some mega famous online .com's that (and their relatively newfound apps) :D</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Linode equivalent of Dedicated Server? - <AUTHOR> I've been using Linode/Digital Ocean for most of my side projects and I'm quite happy with their service. For one CPU intensive project, I need a dedicated server. What do you recommend ? I'm looking for a reliable dedicated server with lots of CPU power and no-downtime issue. <comment><USER2> If European providers are ok, have a look at [https://www.hetzner.de/ot/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver](https://www.hetzner.de/ot/hosting/produktmatrix/rootserver) or [https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedicated- server-...](https://www.online.net/en/dedicated-server/dedicated-server- overview-table) the former having no ddos protection, so not suitable for anything internet-facing, really. OVH has different offerings for different CPU ranges, and also in Canada I believe: [https://kimsufi.ca](https://kimsufi.ca) are the cheapest, [https://soyoustart.com](https://soyoustart.com) a bit more powerful and from [https://ovh.com](https://ovh.com) even more.

I've used them all without issues, but service can be really slow / even a hassle to deal with.

</comment><comment><USER3> Give [https://www.packet.net/](https://www.packet.net/) a try. They are relatively new (about 2 years old), but are solid and having very nice APIs.

<comment><USER4> Thanks a lot for the suggestion! I'm not the OP but I'm in the process of moving from DO to Packet. Their servers are in New Jersey in case anybody was curious. I couldn't find that information anywhere until I signed up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I suggest Google Compute Engine [https://cloud.google.com/compute/](https://cloud.google.com/compute/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I suggest [http://www.hivelocity.net](http://www.hivelocity.net). They are awesome!! They only do colo or dedicated servers.</comment>


Design Strategies for a Successful Pricing Table - <AUTHOR> http://uxmovement.com/design-articles/7-useful-design-strategies-for-a-successful-pricing-table

<comment><USER3> So, far every article I've seen from uxmovement.com has anecdotal advice with no sources, and no numbers to back them up.

Also, when creating the tiered plans for your web-app, I highly recommend NOT having anything that is "unlimited" in any of your plans. It is very hard to go back and un-unlimit your plan. Don't leave it open-ended.

Sure, make the limits high on the top plan, hell make them higher than anyone could possibly need, but still have limits. If someone needs more than that, you can work something out. If nothing else, have a per-instance-pricing plan ($50/mo for 500 things + $0.05 per additional thing).

<comment><USER4> I can't help but mention... un-unlimit would be better written simply as limit.

"It is very hard to go back and limit your plan."

That is definitely smart advice though, it's always easier to increase limits than to decrease them.

My issue is, how valuable is a web service? How do I determine a reasonable price to charge? Pricing is something I feel is hard to test.

<comment><USER5> This is, I think, the number 1 application for A/B testing that makes it worthwhile, despite so many people loudly screaming that it's worthless.

The simplest suggestion I can make is to test the living daylights out of pricing. Set your base at something reasonable -- definitely more than your rock bottom price, and should be well above break-even. If you can scale your fixed costs and estimate the average cost per user (bandwidth, disk space, etc.) then you can apply a margin. Make sure you're covering overhead (which is insanely complicated if it's Freemium), and then play around.

Offer the 'base' price as a special deal, while testing out prices all over the place. Double that price, and set it as the 'non-discounted' deal to some users. Someone else recommended recently (I can't remember who, sorry) that if you want to be equitable, you can double the price on the sign-in page, then if they bite on that, only CHARGE them what you're charging as the base price -- but if you track the results on that signup page, you'll know how many people were willing to pay double.

Lastly, as a piece of obvious advice, if you can at all help it, don't raise the prices on existing users. Grandfather them in unless you absolutely can't, and if you can't, figure out some way to take really good care of them.

<comment><USER6> You should set your prices based on the value that you are delivering to your customers and not based on how much it costs you to deliver.

To find out the perceived value, you need to get out and _talk_ to customers.

<comment><USER5> You're right of course -- I didn't mean to imply that you should use cost-plus pricing as a baseline, rather, that you should definitely not do anything BELOW cost+, regardless of how much (or little) value you might be delivering to your customers.

That said, there are numerous examples in which even this rule can be thrown away (Facebook, Twitter, et al.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is this actually from experience? Or is this simply cherry-picking from famous web apps?

If the author hasn't built a successful pricing page themselves, then this is just white noise. Best practices for this kind of thing seem to go in and out of style every 6 months.

Disclaimer: I have made 2 SaaS apps and the pricing page is the kind if thing where if you haven't done it before, your opinion about what color green works best etc has zero value.

<comment><USER8> I agree. It definitely seems as though the author is working from their own design intuition rather than data.

On a side note, what effect do you think design has on the decision between pricing plans compared to the decision to buy the product at all?

When I'm buying software I think, "Ok, I'm going to need x user accounts, xx of this feature, what's the cheapest plan that has that".

I dont think many people that need 2 users would go straight to a 10 user plan if there is a 3 user plan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I loved the post, but would be interesting to see some actual data behind these observations.

Some of these seemingly contradict each other: one "rule" claims that ascending order of prices is better, another claims the opposite.

<comment><USER10> Sorry, where did they do this? Some of the examples they gave, certainly, didn't conform to all of their tips - only the one that they were demonstrating at the time, but I didn't see any contradiction in the text?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Anyone have thoughts or experience on using prices divisible by 5 versus 4s/9s? (Plans of $5, $10, $25 a month vs. $4, $9, $24, etc. )

<comment><USER12> I've found that odd numbered pricing - particularly 79, 95, & 99 - <USER2> even numbers almost accross the board.

Definitely test both - but that's accross quite a bit of data, and different products -

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Two issues:

1\. There is no quantifiable data to backup the assertions. Does anyone have A/B test data to back any of the author's assumptions?

2\. There is no discussion on how to structure pricing that scales on a specific metric e.g. users, storage space, number of uses etc.

The common approach is to lump all the plans into 3-4 buckets with the last bucket being an "unlimited" plan. Suffice to say, this approach may not be ideal in cases where users have widely differing requirements.

For example, imagine pricing a product based on impressions/page views. Buckets simply don't make sense.

I'm currently experimenting with a pricing table that allows buyers to CUSTOMIZE their plan from a traditional 3-4 plan table.

See <http://www.trafficspaces.com/plans/> for how I've done it. What do you think?

<comment><USER13> We've done A/B testing at Rypple on our Pricing page, and found most of the principles suggested by UXMovement to be true.

<http://rypple.com/pricing>

You've done some interesting things with your pricing page. Couple comments: \- I'd reduce the complexity of the page by removing the drop down boxes for impressions and just changing the pricing buckets to up to the maximum impressions offered by that bucket. The way you've got it now means there's effectively 13 plans. \- I've found that listing the features in order from those included in all plans to those included in the fewest plans to work the best.

<comment><USER6> Thanks for the advice.

We'll reorganize the feature set as you've described. It seems to make a lot of sense.

Regarding the drop down, whilst it isn't the most ideal implementation, I can't think of a way to allow publishers to pick a plan that meets their specific needs without using the drop downs.

We've tried to reduce the visual complexity by using 4 buckets, hence the drop downs in each category. Getting rid of them, I fear, may create more confusion about the flexibility (or lack of) of the plans. Especially because our customer's requirements are quite varied. We've literally got people on 250,000 impressions and others on the largest plans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty cool. And they're not too sketchy!

The only one I was put off by was #6, hiding your free plan. Although it certainly makes sense, I know I get easily pissed off by this sort of thing. If you follow the other rules, and put it off to the right, I think it'd be fine.

Also, if you have them sorted in descending order AND have a decoy, I feel like that could be offputting: the first price you see would be _huge_.

<comment><USER15> Thus priming you to expect large prices and pleasantly surprising you with the cheaper prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There was a good article I read a while back on how restaurants could improve their menus to increase revenues. I think a lot of similar things apply, and that article seemed to have the evidence to back up the ideas.

Unfortunately I cannot find the link, but one of the things I did remember was that customers spent more when prices were not preceded by the currency sign.

</comment><comment><USER17> On the topic of UX but unrelated to pricing tables: I really like the tops of the social networking logos just above the comment form that pop out on hover. I'm not sure why I like them so much. But there's something about having an onslaught of social media logos encouraging you to share which bothers me and this bothers me less.

</comment><comment><USER18> This seems very useful had not given much thought to pricing grids (easy oversight I guess). Though I don't know about hiding the free packages, if your not going to promote it why have it and surely a free customer is better than none. I Think this calls for some A/B testing.

</comment><comment><USER19> this seemed very scammy and "customer hating / clueless corporate like". the opposite of the clue train. and when i see this kind of shit for real it pisses me off. sure if you want idiot customers who are tricked by simple psycology and you dont mind insulting eveyones intelligence, but really you should / could be better.

<comment><USER6> Care to mention which point you have a gripe with?

Short of not being backed by hard data, I don't think they were all bad. Definitely not "customer hating" or "clueless"

:)</comment></comment>


Nobel Peace Laureate Mairead Maguire on Julian Assange's Arbitrary Detention - <AUTHOR> https://www.transcend.org/tms/2016/02/nobel-peace-laureate-mairead-maguire-agrees-with-the-un-expert-panel-decision-on-julian-assanges-arbitrary-detention/ <comment><USER2> How exactly has Assange been "detained"? Undoubtedly he would be detained if he left the Ecuadorean Embassy, but he hasn't. But there's a difference between actually being detained and voluntarily not leaving the Ecuadorean Embassy.

<comment><AUTHOR> [https://www.transcend.org/tms/2016/02/julian-assange- arbitra...](https://www.transcend.org/tms/2016/02/julian-assange-arbitrarily- detained-by-sweden-and-uk-un-expert-panel-finds/)</comment></comment>


Show HN: Munich Developer Conference – daho.am - <AUTHOR>

Hi!
STYLIGHT is very proud to announce the second iteration of daho.am, the Munich developer conference. This year it'll be even more epic with many interesting speakers from all over the world, like Spotify's director of engineering Kevin Goldsmith and Rocket Internet's CTO Christian Hardenberg. For a full list of speakers, check out http://daho.am/#speakers.
WHEN AND WHERE
The conference will be held June 12 at our beautiful office in the heart of Munich, easily accessible with public transport.
TICKETS
There are still some early bird tickets left and you can get a 10% discount with the code WELOVEHN10. http://daho.am/#tickets.
CALL FOR SPEAKERS
We're accepting proposals for interesting talks, just send your idea over to email@example.com. Deadline is the 1st of May. <comment><USER2> I'm from Munich and I've noticed you're offering your space for a lot meetup events, thanks for that.

And the domain is pretty funny.

</comment><comment><USER3> Any way to get sponsorship for Airfare?

<comment><USER4> We'll certainly provide transport for selected speakers from the call-for- paper. Is that what you meant?</comment></comment>