Show HN: Ziggedy – Shopping while helping your charity - <AUTHOR> http://www.ziggedy.com/?hn=1

<comment><AUTHOR> Most of you would probably have known about Amazon Smile. Here at Ziggedy, we're providing you the same concept, but for other online retailers that doesn't have similar program: you shop at our supported retailers, and we donate a percentage to your charitable organization of choice. A list of retailers we currently support can be found at [http://www.ziggedy.com/Retailer/#filter=popular](http://www.ziggedy.com/Retailer/#filter=popular) .

The process is simple: register for an account, choose your charity and start shopping!

You can also search for products and do a price comparison directly on Ziggedy or creating your wish list (called boards). Our search result isn't the best right now, but we're working hard to improve it. Bonus: if someone buy an item from one of your lists, and have no interest in helping any charity of their own, we will donate instead to your (the poster's) charity!

I'm one of the developers at Ziggedy. We've love to see what you guys think about our site!

<comment><USER2> I saw the title and thought, "But what about Amazon Smile?" XD

I can see that like Smile you can donate to pretty much every registered charity. I also assume the donations are made in Ziggedy's name?

Other than that, I love this kind of thing. It makes donations easier, it kind of makes it so you don't have any excuses not to use the service. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> We have the same list of registered charity as Amazon Smile too! And yes, the donation will be made in Ziggedy's name (same as Amazon, I believe).

However, if the charity want to claim an accout on Ziggedy and see who's helping with the donations, they will be able to do that too.</comment></comment></comment>


The Shirky Principle (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/ <comment><USER2> I've worked in a lot of different organizations and have seen this happen over and over again.

One point the author misses is that it becomes received knowledge that certain parts of the problem are insolvable. After a dozen or two meetings trying to solve something, the participants believe (and tell one another) that this part of the problem can't be solved.

There's a certain pivot point that happens when you join an organization. At first, you're asking "Why can't we do X?" and "If we do Y, won't that fix this part of the problem?"

Each time, you are told that yes, we tried that. Several times. Really smart people tried. It didn't work.

Now the trick here is that you don't know if that's true or not. You don't know how many times it was tried, who tried it, what strategy they used, or exactly how things played out. It's all just secondhand information.

Do that enough? Pretty soon you're the person telling the new guy that we've already been down this road. It just can't be done. You stop being part of the solution and start being part of the problem. (And then some new organization comes along and solves the problem quite nicely. Cue up a lot of "Well, we could do it to if we only had Z like they did!" sour grapes talk.)

For an outsider trying to help people, when you hear yourself doing this, it's time to go. You are no longer a positive agent of change.

<comment><USER3> Isn't there a famous monkey experiment that describes this situation. Long after the original monkey that exhibits some (natural monkey) action and gets reprimanded for it, other monkeys try to stop new monkeys coming into the group from doing the same action generations later, even after the original monkey is no longer in the group and the action is no longer reprimanded against.

<comment><USER4> Yes: [https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the- ex...](https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/6828/was-the-experiment- with-five-monkeys-a-ladder-a-banana-and-a-water-spray-condu)

<comment><USER5> Your link indicates that there is no evidence that this experiment ever took place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One of the scariest examples of this phenomenon is the lobbying that police and prison guard unions do:

[https://theintercept.com/2016/05/18/ca-marijuana- measure/](https://theintercept.com/2016/05/18/ca-marijuana-measure/)

[https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/07/us/political-gains-by- pri...](https://www.nytimes.com/1995/11/07/us/political-gains-by-prison- guards.html)

<comment><USER7> ... until you think about what this means for CPS, and mental health services/institutions. Then the police actions seem positively polite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The post linked in the post is a better read:

[http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of- complex...](http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2010/04/the-collapse-of-complex- business-models/)

</comment><comment><USER9> Let's just keep in mind that while we observe this in others we probably play the same game ourselves.

Lately I have developed doubts that a system I was part in building up over the last few years and is generally well regarded is still necessary. It's pretty hard to admit this in public if a potential consequence may be to lose your job. I think people would be less prone to preserving problems if they wouldn't potentially lose their job and livelihood.

<comment><USER10> > I think people would be less prone to preserving problems if they wouldn't > potentially lose their job and livelihood.

I agree with that. And I think part of the problem is the cultural notion that everything has to be "efficient". But a trade-off must be made between efficiency and robustness.

I think it's a big myth that free market is efficient. No, free market is ridiculously redundant, but what actually makes it working so well is its robustness resulting from the redundancy.

Hierarchical planning, like in big companies, is actually efficient. Global optimization. But being too efficient at the expense of robustness is what leads to unexpected disasters. Being ultra-efficient means no margin for failure. And unfortunately, the executives in big companies are motivated to take risk and overshoot the desired efficiency.

And this idea came to public policy, where we don't want the public money to be "wasted", so we would rather have unemployment than people who are redundant for one reason or another. And that's what the basic income (as other commenter noted) debate is about, essentially.

In the other comment here I also suggest 20% innovation time as a solution. It's actually the same problem - innovation time is seen as wasted, because it doesn't increase efficiency, only robustness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I like to think of organizations as large living things. Just like people are made out of numerous living cells, organizations are living things made out of numerous living people.

As such, they behave similarly to other living things is some ways. And all living things want to keep living.

<comment><USER12> > And all living things want to keep living.

But there is often also an element of resistance to change.

<comment><USER13> Well, yeah. Most living creatures tend to do whatever it is that they do that has let them live until this point. Inertia is commonly a habit of the successful.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> e.g. Tax preparation companies lobbying to prevent the tax authorities from supplying candidate computer generated tax returns for tax payers.

</comment><comment><USER5> Could this apply to social movements too?

</comment><comment><USER15> Another aspect of this is that an organization will create busy work for itself when none is needed.

E.g. the IT or HR department brain farting new things that solve no problem and nobody asked for just because they can't just sit idle.

</comment><comment><USER16> More or less a corollary of Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy.

</comment><comment><USER17> >So now the problem with unions is that they are locked into the old framework, the old system.

Wait, there is a new system? This needs some context.

</comment><comment><USER18> H&R Block is the egregious example, with their lobbying against making tax returns simpler for taxpayers, their customers.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hello pharma industry

<comment><USER20> Yes _but_ ...

Big pharma currently doesn't want to cure medical conditions, it wants to sell drugs continuously. (See also: lack of development of new antibiotics, huge over-investment in anti-depressants, etc.)

New medicines are _very expensive_ to develop because of the extreme regulatory environment and relatively short patent duration (two decades from registering a patent on a drug to it going into a free-for-all of cheap generics: development takes 8-16 years and the remaining 4-12 years are all the time the developer has got to amortize their costs and turn a profit).

But the regulations and requirements for extensive testing exist for very good reason, to prevent this sort of thing from happening:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_Sulfanilamide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elixir_Sulfanilamide) (1938: at least 100 dead)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide#History) (1950s: use for morning sickness caused >2000 deaths, 10,000 born with severe deformities)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vioxx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vioxx) (2004: 88-140,000 cases of serious heart disease)

There's no solution to the problem of complex, emergent, lethal drug side- effects on the horizon. So we have to have expensive clinical trials and statistical tests to rule out a high risk of harm before a new drug can be released. So the pharmaceutical industry has a baked-in incentive to maximize revenue by ignoring certain conditions (brief/acute illnesses, especially those afflicting the poor or the developing world) and prioritize chronic diseases of affluence. There's no fix within the established framework, because the established framework is defective by emergent design.

We could tinker with the international intellectual property regime governing pharmaceutical patent duration, but that kicks the ball up to WTO treaty level. Or we could consider non-profit bases for pharmaceutical R&D, but that goes against the current dominant free market ideology.

<comment><USER21> > Big pharma currently doesn't want to cure medical conditions, it wants to > sell drugs continuously. (See also: lack of development of new antibiotics, > huge over-investment in anti-depressants, etc.)

I'm so tied of hearing this claim.

Gilead created a cure for hep C and tried to charge users X% of the lifetime cost of the existing interfeuron therapy which only managed symptoms but was not a cure. You would expect that this would be received favorably: patient gets cured, insurance companies save money over the long term, Gilead makes a healthy profit. Wrong; people flipped a shit, screaming about how this was price gouging and that a single treatment should never be this expensive. Gilead has been embattled ever since. If you want pharma companies to make cures, inventivize them to do so.

<comment><USER22> >> _If you want pharma companies to make cures, inventivize them to do so._

You stopped _just_ short of a breakthrough. The institution of for-profit healthcare is something we could do without. No one should suffer or die because they couldn't get rich enough before facing a life-limiting illness or injury.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's basic systems theory. If you want to get really disillusioned, read one of Niklas Luhmann's many books on the matter.

<comment><USER24> Where would you start? Wikipedia says he wrote more than 70 books. Thanks.

<comment><USER23> You can always start by picking one about a subject that interests you.

<comment><USER24> Will do but I was asking for suggestions, not permission.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >> Unions, or example.

Unions were defanged, waylaid and driven into the ground by neoliberal policies in the US and the UK, in particular. They lost most of their power and were rendered incapable of supporting workers' rights, which was their reason to exist. That is the problem with unions, not that they perpetuate the problems they solve. For that, we have free-market capitalism.

</comment><comment><USER19> Pair this with Taleb's views on globalism, and how it enables this kind of interconnected environment, that doesn't leave much room for error. And if an error happens, it's going to be systemic.</comment>


Pennsylvania Is First State to Use Automated System to Expunge Criminal Records - ga-vu https://www.routefifty.com/public-safety/2019/06/pennsylvania-becomes-first-state-use-automated-system-expunge-criminal-records/158085/ <comment><AUTHOR> I was surprised at how cheap, relatively speaking, this system is:

> _The state police used a vendor to build their program, at an estimated cost > of $195,000, and the courts used in-house tech experts at an estimated cost > of $50,000._

I don't have any experience in government IT, but even in corporate terms, this seems relatively cheap given the scope and lifetime of the system (though I'm assuming these stated costs don't include maintenance and ongoing operation) and the consequences when there's a system failure, e.g. lawsuits.

<comment><USER2> In practice, I agree: this is pretty cheap given the market.

But now take a step back and think about it: the actual problem is probably pretty simple. If the databases are well made, it would just take a few requests for this operation to be done. Even with the tests, that's one or two programmers' job for two weeks, and maybe one week of a partial review of results by a legal specialist to validate the quality.

Imagine if the state had two in-house programmers up to this task available. $195,000 would cover their salary for a year.

> and the consequences when there's a system failure, e.g. lawsuits

Another saving grace for doing things in house: you take actions internally. You can correct very quickly, shuffle incompetent people, save all the litigation costs and the bad faiths over misinterpretation of a SoW.

<comment><USER3> Those two in-house programmers would never get the time to do this. They would be swallowed in various maintenance task on the other 500 custom systems the state owns.

(from experience in the private sector)

<comment><USER2> That's a difference I observed (in France) between the private and public sector. In several administration, public workers have a reputation of being lazy because they don't always have work to do. They are on demand, and work on projects as appropriate.

That's what a well-funded public task force looks like.

In such a case, a manager would look at the schedule, reserve the time necessary for this dev, take into account the other missions of the devs and get it done.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unfortunately expungement doesn't really do much - most questions on employment forms or professional associations (state bar, FINRA, etc) ask about arrests not convictions. Secondly, despite being "expunged" the data still resides in numerous data bases etc. and I don't believe you have any practical recourse against that. E.g. you go to buy a gun and the NICS system holds you up, or an employer fires you for a conviction found on a third party database what are you going to do?

<comment><USER5> In the US, most states ban the use of an arrest that did not lead to a conviction for the purpose of excluding you for employment.

Many states limit how far you can go back in considering convictions. I believe California allows background checks to look at seven years of history.

<comment><USER6> Those bans come with loopholes that you could drive a bus through.

You can determine from free public records search that somebody has an arrest without even knowing what it is, and people use that to filter folks all of the time.

<comment><USER5> Yes, you can illegally discriminate in hiring if you choose to. Most major companies are very careful not to do this. In every case I have had a background check done on me I have asked for the company doing the check to send a copy and in every case the report sent to me certainly appeared to be following the law (the reports explicitly mention how far back they are reviewing).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I known it's not the main point of the story, but the fact that this legislation was intentionally held up by a congressman (a die-hard Ohio State fan) in committee who relented only after meeting with a famous former Ohio State football player who turned his life around after prison is really interesting given the blowback athletes like Kaepernick have gotten for getting political.

<comment><USER8> Kaepernick tried to change the system in a manner that lots of people found offensive, rather than by trying to be a good example.

<comment><USER9> As did every single peaceful civil right leader throughout history.

Many of the same people who hold up MLK as the way you "should" protest were calling him a troublemaker riling up the good people that didn't want any trouble.

<comment><USER8> Obama used the Betsy Ross flag at his inauguration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I think this is great, and I hope programs like this expand nationally over time.

<comment><USER11> It is a way toward better rehabilitation. Same should be true for financial data. Private prisons the US maintains leave the impression of abusing slave labor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _...interesting given the blowback athletes like Kaepernick have gotten for > getting political._

Colin Kaepernick didn't get blowback for recognizing a cause , he got blowback for dragging it into the game, and choosing a particularly _political_ way of expressing it.

In this case, the cause remained personal rather than political, and was not dragged onto the field.

<comment><USER13> >he got blowback for dragging it into the game

Why are we playing the national anthem before games in the first place? The NFL dragged politics into football long before Colin was in the league. He just used the only platform he had to peacefully protest.

<comment><USER14> Why not play the national anthem? The whole song is about the war of 1812 with Great Britain, and it's a ceremony of unison just before a competitive game. It's a reminder that we're on the same team even though we're rooting for different teams.

It's also laughable to say that a very rich NFL star's only platform is the national anthem. Especially in 2019, when even unheard of people go viral via Twitter and YouTube.

<comment><USER13> He literally did go on YouTube. And you just proved my point - he used the platform he had available to reach the broadest audience. Which absolutely wasn't YouTube.

And why not play the anthem? Because this constant barrage of "support the military or else" is toxic to democracy and is yet another page out of the playbook to stop the public from ever being against another Vietnam.

It has absolutely nothing to do with "even though we're on different teams we're all on the same team". The visceral reaction to his protest proves that out.

<comment><USER14> The national anthem isn't about supporting the military or else. It's about supporting your country. And it is about remembering that sports is just entertainment. It's all for nothing without a unified country. Every other country on the planet plays their national anthem before sports events. It's not unique to the U.S. and it's not toxic. It's okay to be proud of your country. Even when it's not perfect.

<comment><USER15> > It's okay to be proud of your country. Even when it's not perfect.

I think the problem is Americans are taught to be proud of America just because it's America (or more specifically because it's the land of the free...although few people can define what "free" is other than being in America). It's jingoism and, based on my own observations, removes critical thought from the process of supporting your country. Just because other countries do it doesn't mean it's right (or wrong).

I'm pretty cynical, but it seems pretty easy to draw the connection between playing patriotic songs at sporting events (and grade school, before students are even able to comprehend the words they are saying) and how it instills a sense of zealotry in fans.

<comment><USER12> > _or more specifically because it 's the land of the free...although few > people can define what "free" is other than being in America_

Like the freedom in the fact that the U.S. government, unlike all other governments I'm aware of, is prevented by superiour law from considering a law that would prosecute you for this criticism you are writing. Lots of other places have "free expression... until it's inconvenient" or "free expression, while the establishment appreciates it", the U.S. has free expression especially when the establishment dislikes it.

> _I 'm pretty cynical, but it seems pretty easy to draw the connection > between playing patriotic songs at sporting events (and grade school, before > students are even able to comprehend the words they are saying) and how it > instills a sense of zealotry in fans._

The fans of sporting events are zealous everywhere, regardless of national anthems. Participation in the anthem seems low here in southern Ontario, and yet the fans will gladly riot, burn vehicles, etc.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


NIST Uncertainty Machine – User's Manual [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://uncertainty.nist.gov/NISTUncertaintyMachine-UserManual.pdf <comment><USER2> Applied statistics is really useful for beginners if it is documented so well like this webpage.

I now have a very good understanding of two widely used uncertainty measurements (GUM and Monte Carlo method) just by reading the first few pages.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a fantastic resource, not only because its convenience, openness and reproducibility, but also because of the educative value of the documentation.</comment>


Cocktail of flu, HIV drugs appears to help fight coronavirus: Thai doctors - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-health-thailand/cocktail-of-flu-hiv-drugs-appears-to-help-fight-coronavirus-thai-doctors-idUSKBN1ZW0GQ <comment><USER2> Of the drugs mentioned in the article, Oseltamivir is generic Tamiflu and readily available at U.S. pharmacies. The other two are protease inhibitors used to treat HIV. Is there a doctor or other qualified heath care professional to discuss any risks with taking the latter two compounds?</comment>


Human or Machine: Can You Tell Who Wrote These Poems? - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/06/27/480639265/human-or-machine-can-you-tell-who-wrote-these-poems <comment><USER3> 6/6, and I didn't read more than half-way through most of these. What's the tell? Focus. The human-written poetry develops a single, coherent subject with each passing line. Each new line adds new light to the ones that preceded it. Any single line of the machine written sonnets, considered alone, might appear to be written by a human but, when taken together, they simply don't add up. The progression of a single idea just isn't there.

I freakin' hate poetry. Give me prose or give me epigrams! To me, a poem is an awkward combination of prose without clarity and and epigram too bloated to be stated succinctly. I point this out, because I want to be taken seriously when I say that this machine-written poetry is bad in a way that makes me appreciate human poetry just a little bit more.

<comment><USER4> Same here! 6/6 within five minutes. The computer ones are just laughable gibberish, reminiscent of word salad generation from some 1993 dated Perl tutorial.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Poetry that scans correctly should be fairly easy to write for a machine - just find words with the right rhythm patterns and rhymes. Poetry that connects on an emotional level must be a lot harder.

<comment><USER6> Right, because you have to convince the high-status authorities to say that it connects on an emotional level so that everyone else will nod their heads to avoid looking stupid.

Truly, AI is a long way from beating the Emperor's New Clothes game.

But frankly, there are easier, more useful AI goals to target.

<comment><USER7> I'm not a high-status authority and I was still able to connect emotionally to the human ones. Or, at the very least, each line contributed to a consistent mental picture or idea.

<comment><USER8> I found an overarching theme or message above and beyond the words in the human written ones (guess 5 of 6 correctly). This isn't just a theme tying together the lines, it's more of an arc of understanding.

Of course, I did incorrectly guess that one of the poems was written by a machine, when it was a human.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is another variation of the Turing test. Time to realize: the Turing test is useless because: (a)the goal is to game the jury and (b) humans don't necessarily make sense either (example: bad or even just confusing poetry) so the human baseline is not always well-defined. Need Turing Test 2.0

<comment><USER10> I found a website once advertising "have a conversation with me or my chatbot, and try to guess who it is".

My counterparty quickly made some bizarre grammatical errors, prompting me to guess "chatbot" and be rewarded with a screen saying "No, you fool! See, telling the difference is harder than you think!"

Telling the difference between a robot and a human pretending to be that robot is apparently viewed as a Turing test, but it isn't actually the same thing.

Similarly, there's a Turing test that's run every year with very strict rules on what you can and can't say to the other side. This defeats the idea of the test (while making the _event_ less nonsensical, in that the rules allow for people to misidentify chatbots some of the time).

I guess my point is, your point (a) is an artifact of a certain culture that's trying to appropriate the concept of a Turing test so that they can declare they've beaten it. Point (b) is better.

<comment><USER11> Turing Test is a personal experience. For example, I will only believe TT has been passed if I personally had a chance to talk to the "Entity Under Test", and I can't tell it's human or not. I don't really care whether other people have been fooled or not.

Obviously, the EUT should be, or pretend to be, my intellectual peer (e.g. similar education, age, social status, country, etc). It should be a native English speaker, or at least as fluent as I am. I should be able to converse with EUT for as long as I need to (several conversations if needed, perhaps limited to a couple of weeks).

Most importantly, the human participants should be motivated to convince me they are human (e.g. they only get paid if they manage to do so).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> As others have mentioned, lack of an overall theme is an easy way to distinguish the human from machine poetry.

Keep in mind, the machine poems are those hand selected by humans, twice filtered -- this publication and the original publication. That means these poems have a high degree of coherency that you wouldn't otherwise see.

People are reporting 6/6 ability to distinguish. If you had a person and an algorithm each generate two (or even one) poem without any filtration from a field of poems then it would be even more obvious which was machine and which was human.

<comment><USER13> Unfortunately the problem reduces to qualia. Poems that have a theme evoke the experience of that theme. Likewise for generative music and art.

If you have no model for experience (it doesn't have to be metaphysical - something mechanical would do) you can't include that element in the output.

Except by accident - which is how Deep Dream works. The designers found a model that was good at mimicking a certain kind of experience - partly through luck, and partly through analogy.

But Deep Dream is limited to that one kind of trippy experience. It's very good at it, but a competent human artist has a much wider range. [1]

Real AI creativity needs a system that can mimic that much wider range - <USER2> you'll never be sure what _kind_ of human experience you'll get from it.

[1] Sometimes. A surprising proportion of professional artists repeat the same theme, style, or imagery over and over. But that's sometimes because of commercial pressure - when you find a formula that sells, experimenting with a formula that might not isn't always wise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Poetry is the literary equivalent of minimalist painting. The machine is doing just enough, or as little as possible to tick the boxes needed to make the art identifiable as art. But art only exists in context. These poems' only value is that they have come from a machine, just as many paintings derive most of their value from the person who paints them. They are interesting, but as art they are next to worthless because the process of their creation is so easily replicated.

This is art: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IKB_191.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IKB_191.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER15> I find poems given at [http://botpoet.com](http://botpoet.com) by bots to be a bit better. Above one are completely incoherent. Haiku would be probably more easier to generate.

</comment><comment><USER16> If a machine writes 1000 poems and a human chooses the best one did the machine make a poem with emotion or a human?

</comment><comment><USER17> I see a future where as the "rise of the machines" takes hold in things like News Items, Stories, Poetry, Paintings, Movies etc, there will be a commensurate rise in Detection software. The detection software would flag things as human-generated vs machine-generated.

Pretty soon anything created by Humans will be intrinsically more valuable just because it was human-created and hence somehow better than "machine- generated".

We live in interesting times...

</comment><comment><USER18> I read only the ending rhyme of every sonnet => 6/6.

<comment><USER19> I really doubt if you only read this sentence (last sentence of sonnet #2) you'd know it's a machine:

        A thousand pictures on the kitchen floor,
        Talked about a hundred years or more.

If you don't know what's written in the preceding sections, this could very well be written by a human.

<comment><USER18> Oh you're right,

I read upwards at that poem and looked at the ending words of the sentences. Decided that the combination "tripping" / "dripping" wasn't very poetic. -> machine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> sid- Maybe we should have a machine learning algorithm do this ? :)

</comment><comment><USER20> But if there aren't human examples that machine couldn't write poems. They are just mimicking within the samples and structures.</comment>


Scientists reverse ageing in mammals and predict human trials within 10 years - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/12/15/scientists-reverse-ageing-mammals-predict-human-trials-within/ <comment><USER2> Original publicity materials: [http://www.salk.edu/news-release/turning-back- time-salk-scie...](http://www.salk.edu/news-release/turning-back-time-salk- scientists-reverse-signs-aging/)

As I've said in the past, it has always been pretty random as to what the popular press picks up versus what they ignore in the output of the aging research community. Possibly it doesn't much matter, as they'll horribly mangle the significance and meaning regardless.

In this case, this is an intervention which falls into the same general area as telomerase gene therapy and stem cell therapies that work via temporarily altering the signaling environment rather than integration of transplanted cells. It is putting damaged cells back to work, getting them to do more than they would otherwise have done.

The question mark on all of these things has been the degree to which they'll produce cancer - and certainly, inducing pluripotency in random cells throughout the body sounds very much like a terrible idea on that front. The decline in tissue maintenance in response to rising levels of cellular damage (e.g. over the course of aging) is thought to be an evolved balance between death by cancer and death by frailty. So far it seems that there may be more leeway than was feared when it comes to putting a thumb on the scales to shift things back to increased cellular activity.

But this isn't rejuvenation. This isn't reversing aging. This is (very) partial compensation for downstream effects of aging, achieved without addressing any of the root causes. The outcomes are going to be limited because root causes are allowed to continue as they are. The outcomes only look good by comparison to present day medicine for age-related conditions because that is even more limited, since it acts on consequences even further along the chain.

<comment><USER3> A variation on this idea of an "evolved balance between death by cancer and death by frailty" is described here: [https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/sunday/octopuses-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/02/opinion/sunday/octopuses- and-the-puzzle-of-aging.html)

basically that evolution favours traits that are beneficial during reproductive age, regardless of negative effects later in life

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> My god the clickbait is getting bad. This is the kind of title I would expect to see in a supermarket rag

<comment><USER5> For some reason all topics involving the ageing progress have clickbaity headlines when repeated by the news. How come that they always call it 'reversing', when it obviously can't be nothing more than 'slowing down'?

<comment><USER6> Why can't it be 'reversing', or at least reversing effects of ageing? A major part of ageing is the progressive degradation of the body's ability to repair itself, resulting in illness. If a therapy improves the ability of the body to repair itself, and age related illnesses are thus overcome, then arguably ageing has been reversed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Would it be possible to apply machine learning to the human genome to discover other therapies similar to this one? I'm sure there are groups working on something similar, does anyone know of any offhand?

<comment><USER8> People have been applying ML to genome analysis ever since it was first sequenced.

<comment><USER9> Arguably, bioinformatics was one of the driving forces which differentiated early machine learning methods from classical statistical methods.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Obligatory XKCD: [https://xkcd.com/678/](https://xkcd.com/678/)

<comment><USER11> Title: Researcher Translation

Alt: "A technology that is '20 years away' will be 20 years away indefinitely."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Just what we need: baby boomers who never die.

<comment><USER13> I'm not proud to say I'd have a lot of schadenfreude if they wait until after Kurzweil passes before they make the world changing breakthrough which eliminates natural death

<comment><USER14> I see some mean spirited stuff on here from time to time but this really takes the cake.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > Obviously, mice are not humans and we know it will be much more complex to > rejuvenate a person.

No, not really.</comment>


Show HN: Vulcand – Proxy for microservices and API - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/mailgun/vulcand

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi All! I've built Vulcand to support Mailgun's micro services infrastructure. I think of it as Hystrix + Zuul embedded in the proxy. Let me know if you have any questions or comments!

</comment><comment><USER2> Very nice. I'll definitely be looking more into this.

How does it compare to hipache? [0]

[0] [https://github.com/hipache/hipache](https://github.com/hipache/hipache)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! It uses Etcd for backend configuration and has emphasis on resiliency (implements circuit breakers and anomaly detectors)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Found this talk really interesting when looking to learn about Vulcand: [http://youtu.be/VnsA9q9hKEY](http://youtu.be/VnsA9q9hKEY)</comment>


Graffiti Networks: A Subversive, Internet-Scale File Sharing Model (2009) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~pavlo/static/slides/graffiti-dc401-oct12.pdf

<comment><USER2> Really cool, now all someone needs to do is mash this up with the RedditStorage project ([https://github.com/Rossem/RedditStorage](https://github.com/Rossem/RedditStorage)) to make this a real live thing.

<comment><USER3> reddit would be awesome for storing magnet links.

post the media description, and then people would comment the magnet links for that and everyone would up/down vote based on if that really is the content advertised or something that does not match the md5, low quality, etc.

the only downside is that they archive older threads. defeating the purpose of this research, which is the longevity of data.</comment></comment>


AI powered app for taking beautiful long exposure photos - <AUTHOR> https://spectre.cam/ <comment><USER2> Looks good as a first draft but 9s maximum exposure is way too short to get decent light trails from e.g. planes.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you think Ubuntu has lost its way - <AUTHOR>

Recently Microsoft Azure started supporting ubuntu and Mark shuttleworth praised microsoft, does Mark shuttleworth stand has shifted towards capitalism and forgot how often microsofts threatens GNU/Linux with patents. <comment><USER2> _Recently Microsoft Azure started supporting ubuntu and Mark shuttleworth praised microsoft, does Mark shuttleworth stand has shifted towards capitalism and forgot how often microsofts threatens GNU/Linux with patents._

I'm sorry to tell you that your question is at best confuse. You mix Capitalism, Microsoft Azure and patents in the same phrase while questioning the "ways" of Ubuntu - this makes no sense.

1\. If Ubuntu runs on an MS platform more power to Linux, this means even MS recognize the strength of Linux.

2\. Capitalism - from where you think the money for developing Ubuntu and Linux in general are coming ? Do you really think Linux is developed by people in their free time ? Sorry to break it to you but today's most Linux development is made by people hired by private companies.

3\. Mark Shuttleworth is a businessman, don't confuse him with a member of FSF.

<comment><AUTHOR> >Capitalism - from where you think the money for developing Ubuntu and Linux in general are coming ? Do you really think Linux is developed by people in their free time ? Sorry to break it to you but today's most Linux development is made by people hired by private companies.

Agreed, but joining hands with someone who fight against linux(ubuntu is linux) for patents doesn't make sense.

<comment><USER2> Last year MS was in the top 20 Linux kernel contributors:

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/03/microsoft_linux_kern...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/04/03/microsoft_linux_kernel_contributions/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, main reason was for virtualization(Hypervisior) and I remember greg kroah warning the code which they contributed had maintenance problems. That behaviour is expected from windows

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Shuttleworth founded Thawte in 1995 and then sold it to VeriSign in December 1999, earning about US$ 575 million. Does this sound like a man whose stance needs to "shift towards capitalism"?

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. I intended from Ubuntu point of view.</comment></comment>


Battleheart developer drops Android as 'unsustainable' - <AUTHOR> http://www.electronista.com/articles/12/03/10/mika.mobile.says.android.money.losing.platform/ <comment><USER2> The update rate of Android is really disappointing, Google can't even update the Nexus phones in a timely manner. They are heading in a good direction, but they should have done some stuff sooner, they should have ported Chrome earlier, they should have enabled UI customization earlier.

Now that they have Motorola, they have the chance to show the world how to make an awesome phone.</comment>


Urine Deflectors in Fleet Street of the Early 1800s - <AUTHOR> http://catsmeatshop.blogspot.com/2013/07/urine-deflectors-in-fleet-street.html

<comment><USER2> A present-day Irish solution to "al-fresco urination": electrify your shop front.

[http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/shops-shock-and-awe- pla...](http://www.irishexaminer.com/ireland/shops-shock-and-awe-plan-to-stop- al-fresco-urination-103995.html)

<comment><USER3> Unless you've a nozzle on your knob, you won't achieve the laminar flow required to have an uninterrupted stream to carry the electricity from electrode to knob.

QED via Mythbusters

<comment><USER2> Interesting. Would that depend on how close you were to the source?

Either way, I assume - crucially for the shop owner - most backed-up, drunken revellers would be unaware of this :)</comment></comment></comment>


Decade in review: How the Internet ruined everything - <AUTHOR> http://2010.newsweek.com/essay/a-decade-of-destruction.html

<comment><USER2> ...and this kind of shallow 1 page article which tells us nothing we already know is a prime example of why old media is failing. It's a great story idea, since the political and economic impact of the internet have surpassed the wildest dreams of the early 90s (ie when the web was created).

And Newsweek still has plenty of skilled writers on staff, plus enough readership that they could have interviewed anyone they wanted for this story, from Bill Gates or Al Gore to...well, anyone. They're read by millions of ordinary Americans, and have decades of experience in telling complex, multidimensional stories and making them accessible for a broad audience. Instead, a a 500 word essay which was apparently written by Captain Obvious. I know 'review of the year/decade/century' articles are superficial by nature, but this reads like a sidebar in an 8th grade social studies book.

I preferred the 'decade in seven minutes' video at this page: <http://2010.newsweek.com/essay/one-dazing-decade.html> not really my preferred media style, but at least it has a high signal to noise ratio.

<comment><USER3> Isn't this written by the real life Fake Steve? Which shows the irony that someone with a successful voice on the web comes across as Captain Obvious when tied to the "main stream media" column format.

Wouldn't this piece be much more interesting in the Fake Steve voice? Or maybe it says something that "Fake Steve" would never discuss something this boring in the first place.

<comment><USER2> Now you mention it, it would have been a _lot_ more interesting if it had been 'How I helped to ruin everything (else)' by (fake) Steve Jobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well-written survey of the damage.

Newspapers: tradition-bound. In about 1985 I wrote an article about shopping for a home computer. The local newspaper editor refused it with the comment "Aren't those kind of a niche product?" Their formula had worked a long, long time; they were asleep. Funny though: their newsrooms were full of boxen when the 'net took off. Obviously a piece of wire between the newsroom and me made the presses obsolete.

TV was used to deciding what was good enough for us. And they added more and more advertising until a two-hour movie became a four-hour movie, so chopped up that it was impossible to enjoy. So once the net starts hitting them, do they compete by producing _better_ shows? Nah, they go for the cheesy easy. Good riddance.

Bangs leaves out the telcos ... who've also done everything they could to stall the inevitable. Google buying Gizmo5 is another symptom that their money-grubbing, metro-WiFi-blocking, stonewalling asses are getting nearer the lawnmower. Long live fiber, long live the net!

</comment><comment><USER5> Newsweek's audience isn't people on Hacker News. Shallow to us doesn't mean it's shallow to them. I thought the tone / depth was appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER6> It works to show the underlying thread in the downfall of 'the old business model', but it would be nice to have a forward-looking extension of the article. Okay, we know that internet changed the game - great. But now that it's becoming the new norm, what are the watchouts...what's next?

There's an interesting article that attempts to touch on the "what next" on the HBR blog that talks about the digital economy's weakness/flaw written by Umair Haque: [http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/11/facebooks_sca...](http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/haque/2009/11/facebooks_scam_ads_and_the_loo.html)

</comment><comment><USER7> Blaming the internet for the downfall of print media is like blaming low pressure for the evaporation of water.

</comment><comment><USER8> Basically, this is a retread of articles I saw in 1996, with all the verbs changed from future to past perfect.</comment>


Universes created by Black Holes? Big Rebound rather than a Big Bang. - <AUTHOR> http://www.insidescience.org/?q=content%2Fevery-black-hole-contains-new-universe%2F566

<comment><USER2> Ah yes, but is it turtles all way down?</comment>


Funny Anecdote: Software design for an elevator system - <AUTHOR> During my undergrad years, I had never travelled to US/UK/Europe. During my final years, while interviewing for FAANG, I was asked to design an elevator system. Of course, I did not know about the type of elevators where you need to enter floor number first and you are assigned elevator number separately. I went ahead and started designing for elevators I had seen with up and down buttons.
Later, I received feedback that I did not ask for clarification. I am sharing this today so that interviewers out there are also mindful of the culture and background of candidates before judging them.
I am in one of the FAANG companies now where I have the most amazing manager and frequently discuss drawbacks in the current interview system and this has helped us build an amazing team. <comment><USER2> That's funny. I've also never seen one of those until I came to the US. Also, sometimes while I wait for the elevator I stop to think if the algorithms that power elevators are complex or not. I didn't know some companies ask that question during interviews. Now for sure I'll do some research on it.

<comment><USER3> I once interviewed at a major German elevator manufacturer in the department that works on those traffic algorithms and from what I can tell, it is quite a complex problem for larger office buildings where you have a lot of traffic that mostly flows into one direction at various times of the day, such as in the morning or at lunchtime.

But they also told me that one of their main problems is that the optimal strategy often doesn't feel optimal to the customer, so that's why they sometimes use less-than-optimal strategies.

Sounded like an interesting job.</comment></comment>


Facebook emotion manipulation study: an explanation - <AUTHOR> https://www.facebook.com/akramer/posts/10152987150867796 <comment><USER3> This comment on the piece aptly sums up my response, it's by Sean Tucker:

Adam, I don't know you -- I came here from the Buzzfeed article criticizing the ethics of the study that linked to this post, but it appears we do have a friend in common.

I just have to ask - you honestly had a hypothesis that amounted to 'perhaps we can make people more depressed,' and decided to test it on a group that hadn't consented to the experiment, with no way to track its impact on their actual lives, only on the language they used in their Facebook posts? And you ask us to trust that this passed an internal review so it's ethical?

Please take a moment to step back and consider that. That appears to have been the train of thought that led to this.

That's appalling. Completely appalling. The Atlantic piece is right -- there's absolutely no way this passes APA deceptive research standards.

Beyond that, you'll never know what impact this actually had on depressed people. You can only measure what they posted to Facebook, which isn't a particularly meaningful or realistic indicator of their emotional state.

If this passed an internal review board, that's only proof that Facebook's internal review standards aren't what they need to be.

You're in a position of extraordinary power, with access to more subscribers than any other field study in history, a larger population than most nations, and subject only to how you review yourselves. You could deceive yourself into believing you have informed consent because everyone clicked 'accept' on the Terms of Service years ago, but there's no way even you think that's a meaningful standard.

I trust you're a reasonable person who doesn't set out to cross ethical boundaries. But on this one, I think Facebook needs to admit it did and make some changes. This study was unethical by any reasonable standard. There's nothing wrong with admitting that and figuring out a way to do better.

There's a lot wrong with going ahead with anything like this, ever again.

<comment><USER4> This is Facebook. Is has a tremendous effect on peoples lives. And that's precisely why it's worth $100B. This is nothing more than a tweak in their ranking algorithm -- much larger and even targeted/dynamic modifications occur all the time. How can a reasonable person be upset by this?

If the study is unethical by any reasonable standard, does this amount to condemning the whole company, even the whole industry? Because if this is unethical, you are calling out an extremely widespread practice...

<comment><USER5> There is no difference between tinkering with an algorithm with the intention to negatively influence people's emotions and tinkering with an algorithm to make it work better?

<comment><USER4> Who is to say those two statements are at odds with one another?

Also, almost every A/B which results in a measurable impact in user response will have done so by positively vs. negatively impacting the users' emotions on the A/B legs of the study.

But more to the point, this is not even a fair characterization of what Facebook did. The made a tweak to their ranking algorithm which they deployed to 1/2500 of their users. Much later they discovered there was a extremely small but measurable impact to those users' engagement, and the types of words they included in their subsequent posts. They actually didn't know at all ahead of time what the effect would be, and in fact the effect they observed was the opposite of the widespread expectation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wow, what an amazingly tone-deaf post. It demeans Facebook users who were offended at the company's actions into simpletons who did not really understand what the study was really about. Sample this:

> _Nobody 's posts were "hidden," they just didn't show up on some loads of > Feed._

How is hiding any different from not showing up?

> _And at the end of the day, the actual impact on people in the experiment > was the minimal amount to statistically detect it._

Not what your own study claimed.

> _I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors > and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any > anxiety it caused._

We are not sorry about the research, but only for "the way the paper described it".

> _In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all > of this anxiety._

In hindsight, our users are hyperventilating frogs. They should learn how to relax in the nice warm(ing) Facebook waters.

<comment><USER4> I am really trying to understand both sides of this. Focusing on the actual research, what about it do you think requires informed consent?

Do you understand how widespread this kind of research is? Literally everyone does this.

The act of publishing can't be the ethical breach -- just focus on the research, what do you think they did wrong there?

<comment><USER7> Perhaps it could be summed up as "Attempting to negatively influence a visitor's mental state without their knowledge or consent IS NOT COOL."

<comment><USER8> The assertion that this study refuted was that too much positive bias in a filtered source of information causes negative sentiment. Reducing said positive bias had heretofore unknown effects. The attempt was to learn, not to negatively influence anyone's mental state.

<comment><USER9> Just like the Milgram Experiment was designed to see whether a small number of people could be coerced into believing they are torturing and killing people when so ordered? It wasn't designed to cause mental distress, but to see what happened.

You see, that's why there are ethics committees at Universities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _I can understand why some people have concerns about it, and my coauthors and I are very sorry for the way the paper described the research and any anxiety it caused. In hindsight, the research benefits of the paper may not have justified all of this anxiety._

Ignoring the classic "I'm sorry you were freaked out" non-apology here, this response completely misses the point, and tries to re-frame the concept of informed consent into an inconsequential piece of red tape that anxious people worry about.

People were made subjects of a scientific experiment without their knowledge or consent. It doesn't matter that Facebook took steps to make the changes as small as possible; it doesn't matter that the effect on the individual subjects may have been minor; it doesn't matter that the results were interesting. It was an ethical breach, and this tone-deaf response is fairly unsettling.

<comment><USER11> Is it an ethical breach if I don't get informed consent from users when I do A/B testing on my website? Or is it only unethical if I publish the results afterwards? Or is it only if I'm actually trying to affect the user's mood specifically?

<comment><USER10> If your A/B testing is intentionally inducing a negative mental state in your users without letting them know up front, I'd say that's probably an ethical breach.

In general, A/B testing is studying the website. You're not testing us, you're testing the best ways to convince us to do stuff. On top of that, when users visit your website (which is presumably pitching something to them), they know they're being pitched. They know the website is going to try to convince them to do stuff--click over here, watch this video, sign up for foogadgetmcawesome. Same drill with advertising. Yeah, this commercial with the freaking Budweiser puppy made me cr--er, chop onions--in its attempt to get me to buy beer, but I know they're trying to sell me beer, and I knew as soon as the puppy hit the screen that I'd probably start sniffling.

<comment><USER12> I don't see the distinction. It's fine to market your product, but there is such a thing as distortion and as a scam. Providing a fair representation of your product factors into ethics, as does Facebook fairly presenting the feed of your friends news, with a reasonable attempt at NOT distorting it.

<comment><USER10> I agree! I'd put unethical behavior like distortion and lying in a different category than Facebook's, but I agree. I was trying to kill the parallel between Facebook intentionally manipulating user emotions for science, and Budweiser intentionally manipulating viewer emotions for beer sales. Video games work here too: Amnesia scares the unmentionables out of me, but I'm ok with that, because I know that's the whole point.

Another missing component here is user control. I can turn off the commercial and stop playing the game. I'm currently working (in a minor capacity) on the National Children's Study, and our participants can walk away at any time. When the Facebook subjects on the negative side started feeling slightly more sad, they had no idea why, and no clue how to stop it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Am I alone in being completely un-surprised and accepting of Facebook doing research in this way on its users? The News Feed as an interface for using FB is and has always been an evolving product and in the control of FB. They've been constantly messing with it, A/B testing different combinations of user/advertiser content and post/comment structure. They do this to test outcomes, and achieve goals that most likely include (and are certainly not limited to):

      - Optimizing ad targeting
      - Maximizing click-thru
      - Maximizing engagement
      - Minimizing abandonment/bounce rates

The News Feed already doesn't show you _all_ your friends' posts and hasn't for quite some time. How they choose to "curate" what they do show is going to be dictated by their incentives/needs.

Getting outraged about any of this seems akin to getting pissed that the new season of your favorite TV show sucked...

Edited for formatting...

<comment><USER14> You're not alone, but I think you do yourself a disservice by underestimating the potential negative impact of an experiment _designed for the purpose of manipulating a customer 's emotions_. There's no defensible business objective here, and furthermore, any business objective that relies on this kind of emotional manipulation is suspect.

Intentionally making a customer depressed is not something you fuck around with. It's incredibly dangerous, and doing it to a huge subset of your audience with no mechanisms to ensure you don't inflict real harm is utterly reckless and irresponsible.

The individual mechanisms and approach used here for the experiment are not, in and of themselves, objectionable. Many A/B tests are wholly defensible. The end goal and process are the problem here.

<comment><USER15> > _"... any business objective that relies on this kind of emotional > manipulation is suspect."_

So all modern day advertising then, that attempts to create a connection with the viewer/reader (as opposed to presenting bare facts).

I agree that there was a _process_ problem from the point of view of a _research study_ but had this just been an A/B test for engagement levels, we might never have known what Facebook did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> When addressing criticism, it's not great to start "Ok so." (Or "Calm Down. Breathe. We Hear You" [1], to dig farther back in time.)

[1] [http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/calm-down-breathe- we-...](http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook/calm-down-breathe-we-hear- you/2208197130)

<comment><USER17> Do you have any thoughts about the explanation itself? I made it past the first two words, and thought the explanation was fairly reasonable and satisfying.

<comment><USER16> The last paragraph does not give me warm feelings about Facebook's internal controls on this kind of research:

"While we've always considered what research we do carefully, we (not just me, several other researchers at Facebook) have been working on improving our internal review practices. The experiment in question was run in early 2012, and we have come a long way since then."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm going to try and avoid the minefield that is this research vs. ethics.

One thought I've had is that the blowback against this incident is less about the research itself and how ethical it is, and more about perception of Facebook in general. My suspicion is a lot of the opposition at this point comes from long-simmering distrust of Facebook and the increasingly negative perception of its brand - this incident is merely the straw that broke the camel's back, for some.

And if the popular response to this revelation reflects people's general views on Facebook, it's not good for the company.

<comment><USER8> It's also, unfortunately, deeply harmful to humanity.

[http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2014/06/28/in-defense-of- face...](http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2014/06/28/in-defense-of-facebook/)

> by far the most likely outcome of the backlash Facebook is currently > experience is that, in future, its leadership will be less likely to allow > its data scientists to publish their findings in the scientific literature

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Not a single point in that response directly addresses why there was no informed consent in the study. There are reasons why research goes under ethical review before it is conducted, and this is certainly going to be a tough lesson for Facebook.

<comment><USER20> Experimenters have tell fibs in order to discover the truth about your behavior: the only way to prevent you from thinking of the word "elephant" is say the experiment is about cats. This is generally considered OK, provided that you won't be upset when you find out what was really going on.

And, without the benefit of hindsight, it is hard to see why people would get upset about this experiment. I reckon Facebook users are more upset by the truth, that their "personal" feelings are so influenced by trivial aspects of their environment, than by the way Facebook demonstrated it. The truth sometimes hurts, but science isn't to blame.

<comment><USER19> That's not quite right; Even in circumstances where participants are mislead for other purposes, they are still informed that they are taking part in an experiment.

The issue here is that Facebook conducted behavioural experiments on participants whom were not informed that they were part of a study. It is unethical. Whilst the outcomes are tame for those involved, the shear number of those involved and Facebook's influence and presence in everyday life makes it all the more alarming that they attempted it in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I wonder where the line is between A/B testing and 'psychological experimentation' and when it's been crossed. Was it crossed just because it was published in PNAS? The outraged don't seem to think so.

What if I'm Amazon or Yelp, and I want to choose review snippets? Is looking for emotionally charged ones and testing to see how that impacts users wrong?

What if it's more direct psychological manipulation? What if I run a productivity app, and I want to see how giving people encouraging tips, like 'Try starting the day by doing one thing really well.' impacts their item completion rate. I'm doing psychological experimentation. I'm not getting my users' permission. But I am helping them. And it's a valid question - <USER2> these helpful tips actually end up hurting users. I should test this behavior, not just implement it wholesale.

It seems like Facebook had a valid question, and they didn't know what the answer was. Did they go wrong when they published it in PNAS? Or was it wrong to implement the algorithm in the first place? I don't think it was.

<comment><USER14> The main indications that a line was crossed are the combination of a blatantly questionable hypothesis ('we can make people depressed or unhappy') with an intentional lack of informed consent & a huge set of test subjects.

If you're doing medical testing in order to roll something out as a pharmaceutical for prescription use or over-the-counter sales, the tests are rolled out in stages, with initial testing being done on a _very small_ number of patients under extreme scrutiny, and even that is only done after the medication has been vetted carefully using animal models. It's extremely important to avoid harming your test subjects.

In comparison, they basically went full-steam on this experiment on hundreds of thousands of people despite the fact that emotional manipulation of this sort is _EXTREMELY DANGEROUS_. When I say extremely dangerous I mean potentially life-threatening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> For posterity's sake, I want to clarify what is going on here.

What's been happening, over the last five years, is that American society has become more trigger-happy in deducing "accurate" moral conclusions from following online media outlets.

I outlined some of this in cjohnson.io/2014/context, although I didn't appreciate the full power of this conclusion at the time, and so the essay mostly falls short to explain the entirety of what's happening currently.

In a nutshell: The Web has broken down barriers between contexts that used to live in harmony, ignorant of each other. Now, as the incompatibility of these contexts come into full focus, society has no choice but to accept the fluidity of context in the information age, or tear itself apart at the seams.

All that was needed to precipitate the decline of Facebook (oh yes, Facebook is going down, short now while supplies last) was some combination of words and contexts that fully elucidate the power of online advertising / data aggregation to have real impact upon people's lives. Put in terms that the "average person" can understand, the impact of this story will be devastating. I feel so bad for the Facebook PR team -- they're simply out of their league here.

The reason _this_ scandal will be the one we read about in the history books is because it provides the chain link between two separate, but very powerful contexts: 1, the context of Nazi-esque social experimentation, and 2, the run- of-the-mill SaaS-style marketing that has come to characterize, well, pretty much every large startup in the valley.

We've reached a point where nobody knows what is going to happen next. Best of luck, people.

</comment><comment><USER23> > The reason we did this research is because we care about the emotional > impact of Facebook and the people that use our product.

That.. or getting users to click more ads.

Maybe ad inventory can be optimized for people in an certain emotional state, and the user's wall can be used to induce the most profitable state of mind for fb's available ad inventory. That would be awesome in an evil villain kind of way.

<comment><USER17> > That.. or getting users to click more ads.

Or both, with no contradictions at all.

<comment><USER23> The omission of truth is more disingenuous than contradictory.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It seems to be that Facebook did something like an A/B test of their ranking algorithm, and then did a cohort study to see if there were any longer term impact.

If what they did requires informed consent, what about when the end goal is maximizing click through rate, e.g. by inciting an emotional response?

Let's say FB finds that certain types of posts in the feed cause a nearby ad to be clicked on more. They determine this through pervasive testing of everything that you see and do on their site. They could then adjust their algorithm to account for this behavior to increase clicks/profit.

I think the actions FB takes to monetize the user base are not only more intrusive by far, they are actively searching for and exploiting these effects for profit. If informed consent for TFA is not ridiculous, then I think we have much bigger problems on our hands? What am I missing about the informed consent issue?

<comment><USER14> You're not missing anything. Informed consent is important for many things currently classified as A/B tests and it isn't currently acquired by anyone. There are many existing products that rely on A/B tests to identify the best way to psychologically manipulate (if not addict) their customers (F2P games, online gambling, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> For those like me who lived under a rock, here's the study: [http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/29/1320040111](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2014/05/29/1320040111)

<comment><USER25> In their summary there's a pretty massive gap in their lack of obtaining informed consent and how dangerous that might be:

"Significance:

We show, via a massive (N=689,003) experiment on Facebook, that emotional states can be transferred to others via emotional contagion, leading people to experience the same emotions without their awareness. We provide experimental evidence that emotional contagion occurs without direct interaction between people (exposure to a friend expressing an emotion is sufficient), and in the complete absence of nonverbal cues."

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Simple fix:

"We're conducting a scientific study on mood for the next three months. Would you mind participating? The study won't require you to do anything special or take any further action. Y/N?"

There we go kids, easy as pie; it's called consent to participate! Pretty easy to do without spilling the beans on the study.

<comment><USER9> This is a wider issue, but how do they prevent knowledge of the experiment adversely affecting the results?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Based on the other comments, it appears that the difference between kosher A/B testing and unethical experimentation with dire mental health consequences is either "Did you publish a paper when you were done" or "Are you a big, noteworthy company".

<comment><USER11> I'd say that (based on comments here) the real different is _intent_. People seem to be suggesting that the exact same experiment, but measuring ad-clicks instead of emotional state, would be a perfectly fine A/B test. It doesn't matter that the experiment manipulated people's emotions, it matters that Facebook _wanted_ to manipulate people's emotions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Universities and think tanks have internal review boards for a reason. The fact that Facebook can make use of its users' data in other (business-related) avenues does not excuse them from the most basic of research ethics.

It did pass the muster of Cornell's review board, but that was after the data was actually collected, which amounts to ex post facto approval.

</comment><comment><USER29> There's not really any excuse you can give at all, FB. I'm astounded that you didn't apologise without reservation and implement an end use agreement change that specified you wouldn't do it again.

Messing with people's mental health is outrageous.

</comment><comment><USER30> People calling this unethical have to explain why it is but A/B testing is not.

<comment><USER31> A/B testing is for _commercial_ purposes, it's wildly different when you are testing the user's psychological state.

<comment><USER30> But a lot of A/B testing _does_ test a user's psychological state. One could argue that doing it for commercial purposes makes it _worse_.

<comment><USER14> That's absolutely true. The main difference here is that the experiment's negative impact was unabstracted yet they still went ahead with the experiment. The hypothesis was more or less 'we can make people depressed', without the slightest hint of defensible motives or objectives ('we want to make our ads more effective', 'we want to find the best way to convince customers that they want our product'.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Does someone remember the name of the NSA program concerning psychological manipulation on social networks ?

<comment><USER32> GCHQ, NSA 'infiltrate' social media to spread disinformation, with slide concerning psychology aspect of social network, including facebook :

[http://inserbia.info/today/2014/04/gchq-nsa-infiltrate- socia...](http://inserbia.info/today/2014/04/gchq-nsa-infiltrate-social-media- to-spread-disinformation-and-propaganda-report/)

The Intercept article concerning JTRIG actions on social networks :

[https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig- manipula...](https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/02/24/jtrig- manipulation/)

This study would fit pretty well in documenting possible manipulations.</comment></comment>


Apply HN: article reader based on Twitter instead of RSS - <AUTHOR> I have begun to notice that a lot more people follow articles/blogs on Twitter instead of subscribing to the corresponding RSS feed.
I'm working on an app which lets you 'subscribe' to twitter accounts (eg @newsyc100, @longreads etc), instead of the corresponding RSS feeds.
Additional features:
1. It does a periodic fetch of the link's content (ala pocket), so you can use it even when you don't have access to internet (subway, airplane)
2. It lets you organize feeds in 'folders', eg, technology, comics, news
3. It comes with a default set of feeds so you don't have to start from a blank slate
4. Users can bookmark or share any article
I'm also thinking of letting users follow their facebook friends, but given what my facebook feed has turned into, I'm a bit hesitant here.
Status: the backend is ready, I'm learning swift to start on the ios app.
Thoughts? <comment><USER2> I don't mean to be discouraging or 'that person', but I'm curious if you're aware of Nuzzel and how you would plan to differentiate from their product.

</comment><comment><USER3> Intelxdk is easy to learn and i think it would be a good fit for your project. Plus, you get to build for iOS, android and Windows with the same code...</comment>


Richard Stallman Braved a Winter Storm Last Night to March Against DRM - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/read/we-marched-with-richard-stallman-at-a-drm-protest-last-night-w3-consortium-MIT-joi-ito <comment><AUTHOR> I posted this with the actual title of the article, but it is misleading. I was part of the protest:

This march against DRM, organized by Zak Rogoff of the FSF, was ~75 people strong and was after the LibrePlanet 2016 conference. It was cold outside, but this was hours before the winter storm that hit later that night. We spent some time outside the Strata Center where the W3C was meeting (and the LibrePlanet Conference was being held), outside the Google office, and outside the Microsoft office where Danny O'Brien also gave a good talk.

After the protest, we headed to the MIT Media Lab for a nearly 2h discussion with rms, Danny O'Brien, Joi Ito, Harry Halpin, and some pizza.</comment>


Bye, Bye Cookie: Microsoft Plots Its Own Tracking Technology - <AUTHOR> http://adage.com/article/digital/microsoft-cookie-replacement-span-desktop-mobile-xbox/244638/

<comment><AUTHOR> Related to this, about Google: [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/google-is- exploring...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/19/google-is-exploring-an- alternative-to-cookies-for-ad-tracking/?_r=1&)</comment>


USA vs. Russia arms sales from 1950 through today - <AUTHOR> https://www.disclose.tv/follow-the-money-usa-vs-russia-arms-sales-from-1950-through-today-344541 <comment><USER2> Some countries that surprised me (without knowing the full historical context):

\- Finland heavily linked to Russian exports in the 1960s-1990s while Sweden and Norway linked to the US?

\- Peru being a sort of battleground between US and Russian exports?

\- Russia maintaining a dominant connection with India until the 2010s, while the US was mostly supplying Pakistan instead?

</comment><comment><USER3> Song list?

<comment><USER4> It's at the end of the video</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Feedback on Listeria, my new app - <AUTHOR>

http://mylisteria.com
Listeria is (supposedly) a more beautiful way to view, create, and organize lists.
Do note that this is not meant as a serious startup -- just a weekend project I did for a bit of practice (and a creative outlet for procrastination!) I've always considered myself rather terrible at design (be it for the web or otherwise), and I wanted to make something that I liked to use, aesthetically speaking.
Sure, quite a few obvious features are missing, and I hope to fill those out in time. I would, however, appreciate any comments, particularly with respect to design flaws/bugs. I already know that I can code, but I am very interested in lessons concerning UI, usability, aesthetics, ect.
Btw, I recommend the combination of rails3+heroku -- it made setting this up really easy. <comment><USER2> Change the name. Listeria is a (sometimes lethal) genus of bacteria: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listeria>

<comment><USER3> I was entirely aware of the parent's info but still read the name as "list- eria" giving the impression of "mad list-making, list-hysteria".

I like it, but then I tend to like clever names that others may not get or might be put off from.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> First impression is good: clean, professional looking, I like the color scheme.

Small things to change: \- The contrast is too low on the sub-heading that actually tells what the app is about. \- A screenshot of the application would be useful. \- I'd give more padding between the elements Signup/Signin and About/Contact/Blog. Give them more room to breathe. Additionally, the yellow pipe is more distracting and noticeable than the links themselves — making the pipes dark grey instead will keep the visual separator without overwhelming the links.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'd like to see some sort of demo, maybe a video a la <http://teuxdeux.com/>? It would be nice to know what I'm really signing up for before I sign up.

</comment><comment><USER6> It should be serious.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-pathio-the-stealth- start...](http://www.businessinsider.com/meet-pathio-the-stealth-startup-from- napster-founder-sean-fanning-2010-2)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable: <http://mylisteria.com></comment>


Ask HN: Are there any programmers working on a novel and/or series? - <AUTHOR> I'm also open to hearing from programmers who write non-fiction as well. I've been working on my first book for a series and feel like I don't hear enough about programmers doing the same. What has been your experience trying to get published and how do you manage your writing life with your coding life? <comment><USER2> On a related note, I've noticed several manga and anime that focus on a career/profession in such a way that they seem to be geared toward encouraging youngsters to take it up. I would think they do a good job of it, at least, because I finish them with a new respect for and knowledge of whatever profession the story was about.

An example of this is the manga Act-Age that explores acting, or the anime Shokugeki no Soma for cooking, or Yakitate!! Ja-pan for bread baking.

Stories like these sometimes involve some kind of realistic, profession- related "superpower", like the protagonist in Act-Age being very talented at method acting, and the protagonist in Yakitate!! Ja-pan having optimally warm hands that allow him to knead dough better.

Is anyone working on something similar for programming or can recomend one? A story that involves programming that is realistic (as in no magic, etc, but can be exaggerated to a point) and that a reader can learn significantly from?

<comment><USER3> Thumbs up for Yakitate Japan, whoever hasn't read / watched it should immediately. Unfortunately I am not sure a similar thing can be done for programming himself. I mean what would that be like? "hehe, you'll never managed to win that hackathon, you software use way too much memory! Oh but what are you doing, instantiating your class in your export statement... Masaka!" "Sono masaka desu. SINGULUTON desu!" // main character clicks the compile button 5 second before the deadline, and thanks to his nakama optmisation of the webpack build using cache, it manages to compile in time. "So you managed to use a little trick to make your memory under the maximum allowed, but you will need more than that to beat me, the Prince of Functional Programming" // Judge arrives, try the application of the oponents, gives him perfect score as expected,then goes on to the hero. He doesn't even understand the code just by looking at it. But then as he try to open the application, he realises that actually, he implemented the form in WEBU GEE ELU, and he's blown away by the quality of the interface, giving the hero higher than the maximum score."

Scratch that, I would watch the fuck out of that show.

(initially I was gonna say it could be more about the business side i.e silicon valley but damn did that thing write itself)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a manga series on STEM topics: [https://www.amazon.com/Manga-Guide- Databases-Mana-Takahashi/...](https://www.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Databases- Mana-Takahashi/dp/1593271905)

[https://www.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Electricity-Kazuhiro- Fuji...](https://www.amazon.com/Manga-Guide-Electricity-Kazuhiro- Fujitaki/dp/1593271972)

I actually learned more from the manga database book than from many other serious database books.

</comment><comment><USER5> I've always wanted to write. I started this year with the goal of writing one - two pages per day. I read somewhere that Stephen King shoots for six pages per day. My goal for this year is just to establish some kind of writing habit and produce any kind of manuscript at all. I like science fiction and fantasy.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good goal to have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes, I write short stories for fun and have attempted to write a novel a few times. So far I have only dabbled in publishing on blogs and such. PM me if you want to exchange notes!

</comment><comment><USER7> Check out Ted Chiang. He did technical writing for programmers, and science fiction writing for the public. His famous piece, "Story of Your Life", was turned into the film, "Arrival".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for this. This is the first I heard of him but I did hear about 'Arrival' :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I did NaNoWriMo a couple of times. I should probably get around to editing and releasing the second one, it's been uh... an amount of time since.</comment>


New York warm winter weather sets record - <AUTHOR> http://www.rappler.com/science-nature/environment/115907-new-york-warm-winter-record <comment><USER2> Um... I guess nobody at Rappler can read a calendar. Winter doesn't even _begin_ for another week.</comment>


YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-02/youtube-executives-ignored-warnings-letting-toxic-videos-run-rampant <comment><USER2> >…Fully 81% of all parents with children age 11 or younger say they ever let their child watch videos on YouTube. And 34% of parents say their child watches content on YouTube regularly.…

…

>…Some 81% of YouTube users say they at least occasionally watch the videos suggested by the platform's recommendation algorithm, including 15% who say they do this regularly…

[https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/11/07/many-turn-to- youtube-...](https://www.pewinternet.org/2018/11/07/many-turn-to-youtube-for- childrens-content-news-how-to-lessons/)

<comment><USER3> I have Youtube Kids on my mobile phone, the recommendation engine only recommends child-friendly videos - Blippy, one of the millions of videos where people play with toy train sets, Wiggles, etc., it hasn't yet recommended a Neonazi video (however it doesn't care for language, often recommending Spanish or Russian kids videos). It's very useful for when I need my toddler to be quiet for 10 minutes or so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Some of what's in the article seems to contradict what YouTube's product chief said in a recent interview.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19523415](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19523415)

The chief contradiction I see - The product chief claims youtube has been taking this problem seriously, while this report implies youtube has ignored the problem for some time, going as far as to avoid searching for videos to claim plausible deniability. According to the bloomberg article, YouTube was aware of the "bad virality" problem for sometime, but it was never addressed.

</comment><comment><USER5> A summary:

Let's protect people from the ideas and content we think is bad to provide a better platform for our advertisers, then blame our focus on revenue as the reason for why we didn't focus more on censoring the content our advertisers and corporate leadership find offensive, so that we can continue to generate ad revenue, which we call "responsible growth."

This article is littered with fascist ideation. Like this line:

> "YouTube should never have allowed dangerous conspiracy theories to become > such a dominant part of the platform's culture."

So, this "dangerous" information needs to be removed, since it's apparently harming the public who are assumed to be unable to think for themselves. The same public, who, apparently, likes conspiracy theories.

>"The primary goal of our recommendation systems today is to create a trusted and positive experience for our users,"

But what if you had a positive experience and were enjoying the way the algorithm populated new and unusual conspiracy videos? Sorry, you're out of luck. But hey, Google is making sure you get "trusted" information now. What a relief!

>The company's lackluster response to explicit videos aimed at kids has drawn criticism from the tech industry itself.

The lackluster responsibility in parenting has resulted in explicit videos being aimed at kids by an algorithm that is incapable of discretion.

An algo that, apparently, works so well that humans need to modify it so we don't popularize popular content we find offensive.

It doesn't matter if information is true or false. YouTube's stance on "objectionable" content with a holier-than-thou-you-can-trust-us-to-filter- content-so-your-toddler-can-mainline-garbage-without-your-input is outrageously disgusting.</comment>


Leaky (YC S11) Relaunches with Real-Time Price Updates - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/26/leaky-relaunch/

<comment><USER3> The fact that I pay substantially less for my insurance than anything Leaky quotes me is actually disconcerting.

I got my policy through an independent agent that came recommended by a relative. They set me up with Travelers for my home and car. My auto policy for a 2009 Nissan Altima with comprehensive and collision coverage is only $800 per year. The lowest quote from Leaky was about $650 per 6 months, or $1300 per year.

I've looked through the actual policy documents for my coverage and the limits all look the same as when I was with Geico paying twice as much. Now I wonder if I'll find out there's some kind of mistake and I'm not actually covered if I get into an accident. The discount for having multiple policies with the same company is usually 10%, so that doesn't explain the 60% difference.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Dan, sounds like you're getting a good deal! As for Leaky, the prices we show are based on switching/new customers - so there are longevity discounts and multi-line discounts (such as insuring your home) that aren't included in our current prices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the best website i've ever searched for insurance on! The lack of spam alone is a major selling point, but in addition to that, its quick, and snappy. Quite the amazing job. Also, you just saved me $100 on insurance... so my opinion may be biased :D

It would be nice if you integrated with CarWoo, so while I search for my car I can see how my insurance will change.

<comment><USER5> i never searched on anything else than the providers website before.

if they agreed on a naming convention for their forms elements so autocomplete would work on all sites, they would take out every agregator out of business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I don't think they are out of woods yet. They are still reliant on the insurance companies for their revenue(essentially they are just an affiliate site)...so they've complied with the letter of the complaint, but not the spirit.

They are still doing something that insurance companies care enough about to shut them down over.

<comment><USER7> I don't really think that's something to be worried about. Millions of insurance agents are reliant on insurance companies for their revenue - <USER2> don't see how this is any different.

As far as just being an affiliate site, you seem to overlook the fact that there is currently no way for consumers to price-compare different insurance companies without going through an agent. This is huge and I'm willing to bet they're hard at work on expanding into the even more lucrative homeowners insurance space as well.

<comment><USER8> I am willing to bet that prices being only comparable through an agent is completely intentional on the side of the insurance companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Talk about tenacity! And there's such a huge amount of disruption to be had anywhere in the insurance industries - looking forward to them earning the 'hipmunk for insurance' title.

</comment><comment><USER10> I enjoyed that the prices refreshed (though they did not change) when I entered my first name. I could imagine: "Oh, your name's Phillip? +$30/year."

</comment><comment><USER11> A huge (multiple million policies) missing market that no one is covering here is motorcycle coverage. Almost every site caters to car insurance, but no one touches bikes.

Opportunity for someone for sure.

<comment><USER12> care to elaborate, pls?

<comment><USER11> I have multiple motorcycles. I'd like to buy insurance for them (already covered, but I wouldn't mind price shopping). Nearly all websites like this cater to finding you a better price on coverage for a newer car. I have a 30+ year old motorcycle and a 2 year old motorcycle. If there was a site that made it so I could find a cheaper (and better) insurance policy, I'd be totally up for it.

One key point here is 'better' as well- not just cheaper. If the insurer is likely to triple my premium after a claim, and another would only increase it by 10%, then I'd rather have the latter.

Kinda like Hipmunk- not just about the flight price purely, but the agony involved in flying that trip. No use on saving $5 on a ticket, only to need to spend 12 hours and 3 meals in an airport on layover, or stuck at an airport that will always leave me stranded with cancelations.

I doubt this is a 300 billion dollar business (it isn't), but I can only imagine there's enough money in this to employ a few dozen people and make real money.

<comment><USER13> I've never found a company whose motorcycle coverage came even close to being as cheap as Geico's. So there's your comparison right there :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Geico offers all new cars extended warranty for 30/year. 7 years 100k miles, 250 deductible. This caused me to go with Geico, they also have very inexpensive road side assistance. $20/year for two vehicles. It would be nice if these types of add-ons are also included in the comparison.

Dealers hate Geico extended warranty. They try very hard to not let you talk to the Geico rep, because they want to sell you an outrageously priced extended warranty.

I had a bad experience with a Nissan Sentar (motor went at 90 k miles) and was looking into extended warranty for my next new car purchase. The Dealer tried to add the new car to my Geico policy without me talking to the Geico rep. Geico will not insure a vehicle with out talking to the owner. I ended up driving the car (2011 Chevy Cruze) off the lot without insurance (very long story).

</comment><comment><USER15> Not to sound like that guy.. but I'm skeptical of their model.

Normal price comparison sites make a ton of money.. why? because they dominate the search results. Makes sense.. hard to make a brand out of something that sounds boring like comparing prices. Yet I think Leaky is betting the brand will attract users.

And if they do acknowledge they'll need search engine visitors, then that's a huge risk because 1 penalty and they're dead. And where's the "thick" content? Google frowns upon any site that looks like thin content.

Second, this is insurance. Noone's gonna compare prices regularly, like they do with regular purchases. It's not like airline tickets where people buy them 3-4 times a year either. It sounds like something someone would use once, then forget for a long time.

<comment><USER16> You are looking at this from the point of view of what's currently in the market - insurance affiliates who compete on who can better game Google. There is no reason why Leaky should get a penalty, they are in the insurance comparison business, not the SEO business.

While many people (I don't know if most people) buy more plane tickets than they do insurance, when it comes to commission, the insurance market is more lucrative than the airline ticket market. Airlines pay very little for every ticket sold.

If Google does it's job right (which I agree it doesn't always do) than if Leaky is the best online insurance comparison site than it will be the first result for that search term. I don't think Leaky should be worrying about this at the moment. The way the site currently works is how most visitors would want it to work, clean, fast and intuitive.

<comment><USER15> They are in both businesses. Without SEO, Leaky is going nowhere in the long- term. And to us, Leaky may seem like the best insurance comparison site, but if you don't have thick, valuable content (that can be crawled by search engines, you aren't going to be found.

Also, google "TeachStreet Panda". This was a site you could've said the same thing. "No way they should be penalized"... they went out of business after Panda because Google deemed their content to be non-valuable even though it filled a need.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I almost was part of a startup (which we were going to submit to YC) that did exactly the same thing. We were trying to negotiate with providers of insurance comparison quotes to get the data, with web scraping as a backup precisely because I knew the insurance companies would not like us scraping their sites. We were not able to make our data deals go through, and so the only option left would be exactly what Leaky is doing now: compute from the publicly available data. We did not feel we could do a good job of that at the time and that combined with other reasons caused our efforts to fall apart. (This was 2010, though we'd tossed the idea around since 2008 I believe.)

Anyway, I get what Leaky is going through and also the need for a product like theirs in the industry.

</comment><comment><USER16> The insurance market is very lucrative. It's up there with gambling and loans. There are so many insurance quotes affiliate sites who do nothing but blackhat google so they can get their useless site on top. I say useless because these sites can't really offer you the insurance rates comparison that they promise, they do not have the data. They are just in it to collect your details and pass them over to an insurance agent.

I used to run sites like these and it was frustrating because there isn't much you can to differentiate yourself from the competition.

</comment><comment><USER18> Thinking more generally than just insurance, there are a lot of things I buy on a recurring basis which, if I just allow my current providers to have their way with me, tend to get more and more expensive over time. Lawn weed control/fertilizing is the example which comes immediately to mind. I'd love to set-up a profile of my lawn with a site which would then allow providers to quote me prices for services semi-continuously. This would keep my current provider in check.

<comment><USER19> A "dating" service for your home. So brilliant that you shouldn't have given it away here :)

Plug in your particulars (house/room sq. footage, number of rooms, number of doors and windows, if it's on a hill, the acreage of your yard, soil type, etc.) and have companies compete on services ranging from exterior painting to mowing and tree planting to powerwashing to deck work to carpet shampooing.

No estimates, no (total) surprises, no upcharge. Do work, pay bill (or release escrow hold),happy home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here is what I'd like from a service (like this):

I submit my insurance profile/needs (cars, bikes, boats, RVs, home, life, disability and umbrella). Your service checks for a combination deal every month and emails me if a better deal is out there.

I buy insurance for many things and auto is only one of them. Usually I use the same company for all/most policies because of the combination discounts and the less hassle in dealing with multiple companies.

</comment><comment><USER21> I've always wondered if YC would fund ideas that were based on scraping (like this one) and therefore liable to receive this sort of letter at any time

Now I know! Usually there is _some_ sanctioned way to get at the data that you're scraping, but it's impossibly expensive. Looking at you, ATPCO... (raw airline fare data)

Kudos to these guys for sticking with their idea and finding another way to feed it data!

</comment><comment><USER22> The deals in insurance don't come when an insurer follows its filings religiously. They come when insurers make a big move for market share and max out their deviations from manual/filed rates, which vary by state.

This happens infrequently, unpredictably and, sometimes, for short periods of time. Real shoppers are probably still better off going direct.

</comment><comment><USER18> I spent a few years working for a P&C insurance company. The most valuable variable for determining the expected value of future claims (and therefore one which significantly impacts price) is one's credit score. That Leaky is quoting without knowing my credit score means that the rates provided can't be terribly accurate.

</comment><comment><USER23> Hey Jason, I worked at a company called Comparison Market that later bought Insurance.com between 2002 to 2008. I might be of some help to you, and if you have any questions about pretty much anything in that industry my email is in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER24> If you want to compare real quotes coming directly from the insurance companies you should check out Answer Financial (www.answerfinancial.com). We're a national auto and home insurance agency that represents over 20 insurance carriers. You can compare quotes and buy online or over the phone with an insurance agent. We do this via direct XML connections into the insurance companies we've contracted with.

</comment><comment><USER25> Fascinating! The real time aspect is actually fun to play with.

It allows you to probe the black-box and see what comes out the other end. For example, I would be saying a lot of money if I were a married 60 year old woman called Mary. But I guess we all knew that!

</comment><comment><USER26> Congratulations, looks good. It didn't appear to have information for my zip- code (01267), but I was able to play around with pricing and get an estimate (which is frighteningly high for a 20 year old male).

</comment><comment><USER27> These companies are the only way anyone buys insurance in England. Fantastic businesses that make tons of money.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is a pretty awesome hack.

</comment><comment><USER29> Great work guys!

</comment><comment><USER30> I just tried it, and it quoted me double of what I'm paying.

</comment><comment><USER5> their drop downs bugs made me give up halfway.

doesn't help that they were $1.300+ off real quotes either.</comment>