Tools To Help You Hide Online Raise The Ire Of Advertisers - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/07/02/198006118/tools-to-help-you-hide-online-raising-the-ire-of-advertisers <comment><USER4> This reminds me of the MPAA and the formation of the hollywood "production code". In the late twenties there was pressure from the american public to reign in what could be shown in movies. Hollywood was absolutely terrified of what might happen if the government listened and imposed regulation on their industry, so they adopted the code to make that unnecessary. Movies that didn't obey the code were locked out of theaters, so the code was obeyed. Hollywood, not Washington, decided what the code was. In the end, the code died without any pricey court challenges or lobbying. Hollywood just abandoned it when american society became more permissive.

The "Do Not Track" flag is similar to the late-twenties public outcry against the content of movies. The difference is, the ad industry totally failed to act on it. Instead, their tracking only grew more invasive. Now, they pay for their hubris. They didn't regulate themselves to meet public demand, so the public has demanded that regulations be imposed on them. There's no international government of the internet however, so in comes Mozilla. It's still a thoroughly democratic process however, since people can vote with their choice of browser and not opting out of the cookie tracker.

If the ad industry were to act fast and make a big show of respecting "Do not track" flags and find ways to enforce this policy amongst their peers, this might remove the allure of cookie white-lists. Honestly though, I have no idea how they'd manage to do that, let alone _fast_. If the ship hasn't sailed just yet, it's certainly cast off the last line.

Moral of the story: The public will get what it wants. If they want you restrained, either do it yourself of watch somebody else do it.

<comment><USER5> I'd like to add to story that shows just how intrusive some of this advertising has become.

Last week I searched for flights on skyscanner.net from 'place A to place B'. Yesterday I was reading the Guardian online, and wham, there is a big advert stating "book now to fly to 'place A to place B', from 224 GBP".

Advertising is starting to get so personal that I have started to balk against it on principle. There is just no way I will click on that advert, ever, sorry.

<comment><USER6> And this is new to you? Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but you have been seeing personalized ad retargeting like this for the past few years and not even noticing. The ad is going to get more and more personal because that is what makes it effective. If you choose to opt-out then expect to see more ads and ones that are of the spray-and-pray variety.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> May I be the first to say, "tough cookies" (pun fully intended) to their ire :-) My browser, my rules. If advertisers want to sell me something, they can find a less-underhanded way to do it than tracking my every mouse-click.

<comment><USER8> But it's not _your_ browser. Some kind people have created one for you. Should they not explore potential avenues of revenue? (what if advertisers pay browser makers 1% of their earnings via this cookie tracking thing?)

<comment><USER9> Worse, the advertisers have made their own browser and it's pretty popular.

 _" Not signed in to Chrome (You're missing out -- sign in)"_

Now they don't even need tracking cookies anymore.

<comment><USER10> Chrome's open-source. If there's tracking stuff in there, why doesn't somebody fork the code and delete that part?

<comment><USER9> There's no need for "tracking stuff". You get users to hand over data willingly by making it a useful/convenient feature, at least to some. In this case, simply let users sync their everything[1] to your servers. Now you can do whatever you want with this information.

[1] Browsing history, bookmarks, saved passwords, form autofill data, see [https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/185277)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> People always forget that something tracking companies can always do is simply ask their customer to create a dns subdomain that forward to their ip adress. Then all your browser see is a first party cookie, but it actually sends information to the third party. That's already what omniture is doing, and having a strong policy against third parties will only make others do the same.

<comment><USER12> At that point it becomes a question of whether browsers can be uniquely identified so they can be tracked across sites. If the advertiser can place a cookie from site A and a cookie from site B, they don't have a way to link them unless the browser is unique. Users who care about privacy are going to have to defeat browser fingerprinting[1].

[1] [https://panopticlick.eff.org/](https://panopticlick.eff.org/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "hide online" is some nasty implied shady active process of behaving like it is something bad while in reality people are just putting a stop to being tracked mostly unknowingly and (i am missing the word, advertisers aim to exploit people, making them spend money on things, that's evil).

<comment><USER14> > in reality people are just putting a stop to being tracked mostly > unknowingly and (i am missing the word, advertisers aim to exploit people, > making them spend money on things, that's evil).

Wow. I don't think English has a single word for the concept you put in parentheses. I doubt any other language does, either.

The best way I can rephrase the part I quoted into an English sentence is this:

"In reality, people are just putting a stop to being manipulated and unknowingly tracked."

Context has to determine precisely what 'manipulated' means here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> "commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets". - Chomsky

<comment><USER16> Zzzz. Advertising is an element of _monopolistic competition_ between goods that are imperfect substitutes for each other. Perfect competition can exist only in markets for fungible products.

I mean, I'm no fan of advertising, but what does St. Noam expect - <USER2> manufacturers should abstain from advocacy of their own products? Of course bigger ones spend more money on advertising - but then they also invest more heavily in stock and production lines, and have a correspondingly greater need to recover their investment.

By this logic, musicians should be required to wear uniforms and perform in the dark, since all that visual spectacle is just an effort to undermine listeners' acoustic perceptions.

<comment><USER17> Hes not stating anything of the sort, and you just built a ridiculous strawman.

He is simply warning of the nature of advertisement, and the moral hazard inherent to it. Being aware of stuff like this is real empowerment.

<comment><USER16> Yes he is. He says advertising is an attempt to undermine markets; there's an implicit corollary that markets operate more efficiently absent any advertising. _Perfect competition_ and _monopolistic competition_ are terms with specific meanings in economics, and Chomsky is asserting that they are isomorphic, which is not the case. I'm simply pointing out the absurdity of his argument by applying it to a market for goods that are not fungible - <USER3> work of competing musical artists, whose output is not easily substitutable for that of their competitors.

Being aware of stuff like _this_ is, in my view, even more empowering. The idea that advertising panders to its readers in order to shift their preferences is so obvious as to be trite. In fact, Chomsky's habit of doing this to his own readers is one reason that I dislike him so intensely. I suggest you try Marshall McLuhan's _Understanding Media_ as a contrast to Chomsky's brand of polemic.

<comment><USER18> You've either misinterpreted the quote (stripped from its context as it was) or I'm misunderstanding your point. Here is that context:

 _In fact quite generally, commercial advertising is fundamentally an effort to undermine markets. We should recognize that. If you 've taken an economics course, you know that markets are supposed to be based on informed consumers making rational choices. You take a look at the first ad you see on television and ask yourself... is that its purpose? No it's not. It's to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices._

The full interview can be found here, though I think the above passage is sufficient: [http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind- an...](http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-anarchism-i- believe-and-whats-wrong-libertarians) (The quote appears at the top of the fourth page. Presumably, the interview is paged to create more room for advertisements. That's irony for you.)

Which of the two is it?

<comment><USER16> I guess I'm not communicating my point well. Thanks for providing the pexapnded verison of the quote. What I disagree with is this:

 _It 's to create uninformed consumers making irrational choices._

That's true when advertisers lie to consumers, which is often the case. But there's lots of advertising that just consists of 'Our product has features XYZ, and does (whatever it is) really well. We think you'll love it, so please go to the store and buy it right now.'

Chomsky's not saying 'oh, you better take adverts with a big pinch of salt because advertisers often exaggerate or try to appeal to emotions like fear, lust and greed.' If he said that I'd agree with him, that's absolutely true and it's something I find offensive about a lot of adverts. But he's making a wild claim that all advertising functions that way, disregarding perfectly valid uses of advertising that _are_ informative to the consumer.

I dunno, maybe Noam Chomsky thinks manufacturers (or whoever) should just submit their products to some institutional equivalent of _Consumer Reports_ without comment, and then everyone could decide what to buy based on the findings of independent assessors. But as I tried to show above with my example of musicians, consumers' tastes are subjective to a large degree, and this is especially true for products that are not fungible.

So where it's true, I'm happy to agree with him. Take bottled water, for example - 99% of advertising claims made there are total bullshit, and you'd be better off buying a good shatterproof bottle and filling it from your tap or a filter jug than buying a bottle of water in a store. Some water, like Dasani, isn't even sold as spring water, it's just the water supplied to the same bottling plant where they make Coca-cola. They're selling it on the basis of having a nice-looking bottle and whatever pleasant bit of music they put into commercials showing attractive people having fun, in hopes that consumers will identify with that and pick Dasani next time they're thirsty for some water.

But that's not the entirety of advertising by a long shot. I work in the film industry, so I look at a lot of ads for things like cameras, pro audio gear and so on. Those communications have a lot of value for me, and while I may discount that value based on the style of the communication (are you showing me a camera, or trying to make me feel like this camera will turn me into a successful photographer?), it's not making me less informed. Nor is the monthly advertisement I get from the local supermarket chain telling me what new products they have on the shelves and why I might wish to buy them - they're on sale, or in season, or now available frozen or whatever. Chomsky treats all advertising as mendacious, ignoring the entirely legitimate purpose of merchants announcing the goods they have to sell.

BTW I don't work in adverts or marketing or anything related to that. I just have strong opinions about this topic because I was thinking through these issues for myself long before I ever heard of Noam Chomsky, and when I did come to read him I was disappointed at how frequently he set off my bullshit detectors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Personally, I've taken a blunt-force approach to removing advertising from my web and have put [http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/](http://someonewhocares.org/hosts/) in my /etc/hosts.

</comment><comment><USER9> Good. That means we're doing it right.</comment>


Hosting your code for free - <AUTHOR> http://veerasundar.com/blog/2010/12/hosting-your-code-for-free/

<comment><USER2> this would have been better titled as 'free subversion hosting'.

<comment><USER3> Although that would have made it seem spammy.</comment></comment>


The price of Happiness: $75,000 - <AUTHOR> http://www.inc.com/news/articles/2010/09/study-says-$75,000-can-buy-happiness.html

<comment><USER2> Same topic, many articles:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668979> <\- This one

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668909>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668478>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1667603>

</comment><comment><USER3> Interesting article. Key idea is:

"We suspect that this means, in part, that when people have a lot more money, they can buy a lot more pleasures, but there are some indications that when you have a lot of money, you will savor each pleasure less."

So, our perception of happiness is explained by Weber-Fechner Law (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weber%E2%80%93Fechner_law>), too, similar to our sensory perceptions: it is logarithmic and saturates after a point.

This is why it is impossible to design a paradise (or hell for that matter) that humans can enjoy indefinitely.

</comment><comment><USER4> If people understood and believed this, doesn't this bode poorly for recruiting people to work at startups? If you can make 100k at a stable, established software company, and you've already saturated the utility of money, a compensation based argument for working at a startup is hard to make. This bounds the reward for "hitting the lottery" with a successful startup. With small some chance you make a ton of money, and you aren't much happier than if you'd only took the sure bet of a steady income. On the other hand, there is a large chance that you'll actually living under the money-happiness saturation point when the startup fails.

</comment><comment><USER5> Does it follow that happiness and life satisfaction should be adjusted for inflation?

My interpretation of the findings: High incomes typically demand more time away from people and health-inducing activities (e.g., more time spent at the office and on airplanes). There are different stressors associated with low and high incomes. The holy grail is to find that incomes level that minimizes the number and intensity of stressors while maximizing time spent in activities that you control that bring you pleasure.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is this per-capita? My salary is higher than that but I'm providing for 5 people, so _I_ get nowhere near that.

</comment><comment><USER7> It used to be $60,000, but now after adjusted for inflation, your happiness is priced at $75,000.</comment>


Quizup hack using native OCR engine for Android - <AUTHOR> Using mediaprojection api to get the screen shots and run OCR on the screen shots and calculate the mathematical expression value and show the value on the screen using toast, link to play store, https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.murali129.screenocr <comment><AUTHOR> probably we can do lot more cool stuff using this idea, this is just on of the use case</comment>


The Dark Secret at the Heart of AI - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/s/604087/the-dark-secret-at-the-heart-of-ai/ <comment><USER2> This is kind of a silly strawman in some ways, simply because all software - including the code helping fly jumbo jets, steer oil tankers or run MRI machines - is written by fallible humans, and is generally considered safe only because of QA testing, rather than code analysis. There are some rare instances of insanely complex code having every line thoroughly vetted like those in NASA projects, but pretty much everything else out there is simply "good enough" until a flaw is (inevitability) found and fixed. The decision trees generated by AI will be no different. Until, I guess, an AI can perform the analysis of the code of another AI... cue Inception music.

</comment><comment><USER3> 'Getting a car to drive this way was an impressive feat. But it's also a bit unsettling, since it isn't completely clear how the car makes its decisions.'.replace(/car/g, 'human')

</comment><comment><USER4> I've always heard that argument in favor of decision trees or random forests, yet those decision trees had 400k nodes :). So no one ever really looked at them, but in theory you can could check the long node paths doing arbitrary splits on weird features :).

Apart from that, the strength of DNNs is exactly that complex decision making compared to, say, the simple algorithms physicians learn and manually apply for diagnosis. Those are obviously vastly underfitting in many cases.

</comment><comment><USER5> This article makes the assumption that we are learning a complete model that goes from sensor inputs to control outputs, but I don't think anyone is doing this outside academia. There's a whole lot less controversy when we use deep learning to do scene understanding, where we understand at a high level the model is recognizing entities in its sensors, and we can evaluate whether that subsystem failed, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> That's the big plus of AI algorithms. For instance, all voice recognition algorithms use a patented algorithm. Nuance holds the patent.

But, the reasoning goes, because this was learned, and there is no code in there implementing that algorithm (just "weights" implementing an unrolled version), that code does not violate patents.

It's not a bug, it's a feature. Know any valuable algorithms ? Figure out how to learn them.

<comment><USER7> Whether it's a big plus or a big minus depends on the application. I probably wouldn't mind if voice recognition software in a device like Google Home or Amazon Echo uses an opaque and unverifiable algorithm. But the creator of an algorithm that controls something that can kill me - like a car or a plane or a nuclear power plant or a robotic surgery tool - had better be able to prove that their software works safely.

<comment><USER8> But if the voice recongition is part of your driving experience and it bugged out you can end up in a car crash. One such example is Siri and Google Home must hear the phrase to starts with 'Siri' or 'Google', but what if your car's has a bug and it heard you say 'stop the car'? Or that came out of your radio host's mouth? I remember a couple years ago some news covered this, you can trick Siri to think it was you commanding if Siri hears a conversation starts with the phrase 'Siri'.

<comment><USER9> The problems you mention are valid (bugs that result in accidents & closed source algorithms) but the example is unlikely. Surely, carmakers will not allow vehicles to respond to commands in such a literal way that would definitely result in an accident. For example, if the voice recognition hears "stop the car" the response will be to stop the car, but safely rather than immediately/unsafe. This goes for all other valid commands. The alternative to a safe execution will be a prompt requesting clarification because the command cannot be safely executed, cannot be understood, etc.

<comment><USER8> Friend: "So my father said 'stop the car, Jack.'"

Me: "That's funny."

Friend: "Do you want to get lunch tomorrow?"

*car assistant: Do you wish to stop the car?"

Me: "Yeah." (responding to my friend's question)

This is a valid response. Yes, but this is the case if the assistant has a bug, so the safety meter isn't working quite properly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If we want to "understand" what a network does, that really means we want to disentangle cause and effect and spit out simple algebraic models for it after distilling them from a training set.

To the extent this is even possible - which is debatable, for all kinds of reasons - we're going to need a different set of tools. ML is not the right tool for that problem.

Something similar to ML may be, but ML itself definitely isn't.

</comment><comment><USER11> Model decision interpretation is a solved problem: [https://github.com/marcotcr/lime](https://github.com/marcotcr/lime)</comment>


Bukkit no longer available for download. Hit with DMCA takedown. - <AUTHOR> http://dl.bukkit.org/downloads/craftbukkit/ <comment><USER2> So, from reading the notice and looking at commits:

This guy, whoever he is, has been making fixes/adding features to his fork of Bukkit, and some (most?) of them have been getting merged to trunk. Bukkit's repo is apparently GPL.

Now he's pissed off for some reason so he issues a DMCA to take down software _he participated in the development of_ because it violates the GPL by depending on the closed-source Minecraft server software? Super confusing. I don't understand how you would be a developer on this project without _knowing_ that it depends on closed-source software to function (and yes, is basically incompatible with the GPL as a result).

The end result of this appears to be that nobody can use the software he works on other than developers able to do the build locally and violate the GPL by hand themselves. Bizarre.

<comment><USER3> As a copyright attorney (stonevaughanlaw.com), I can tell you this is total b.s. I've sent hundreds of takedown notices for various clients, namely FUNimation Entertainment. Over 9,000 notices, in fact. And I've actually handled lawsuits involving specifics of the 17 USC § 512(c) provision.

No one can issue a DMCA takedown notice on behalf of Mojang without Mojang's authorization. Period. A regular notice, yes--but not a DMCA takedown notice. This is because a DMCA notice triggers very specific and harsh liability if not acted upon. (Unless the alleged infringer files a counter- notification...but I digress)

As for copyright and the code this guy wrote, it's considered a work of joint authorship and no joint author can prohibit the exploitation of a joint work by any of the other joint authors. They can each do what they want with it. All that the disgruntled dev can do is to sue for an accounting of royalties to be paid based on monies earned from the exploitation of the work. Have fun with that calculation. And notably, such a suit is NOT an infringement suit. So it stays in state court and doesn't carry any of the crazy statutory damages or attorney's fees penalties that an infringement suit would, assuming the work was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, which it isn't.

As for the GPL, it's a nonexclusive license, revocable at will as to new users. Any dev who contributed to the work can license the work however he/she wants. Only the licensees (us users of bukkit) are bound by the GPL if and only if we downloaded bukkit pursuant to a GPL agreement.

All Mojang has to do is file a counter-notification and the files can all be reinstated without the webhost worrying about liability.

<comment><USER4> It appears the basis for the takedown is that the distribution includes code that is in violation of the license. Specifically, Bukkit includes code that is not GPL licensed. The GPL prohibits this, and so the author is able to exercise his rights under the GPL. To restate it more concisely, the claim made is that the code authored by the DMCA issuer is being distributed in violation of the license under which it was written (the GPL).

What makes this extraordinarily messy is the fact that it is almost indisputable that the author was aware of this at the time he contributed. IANAL, so I don't know how that effects the license, but entering in to agreements that you are knowingly violating at the moment you enter them has the effect of providing a basis to challenge the validity of the agreement. Again, IANAL, but my concern would be that if the license were found null and void, the whole situation would fall back to copyright law, which still gives the author ownership of the code he has written, because there was no explicit assignment of copyright.

Basically, the choice of GPL for the Bukkit project was a timebomb from day one. Any project using the GPL would be wise to take note of what has happened here. Should someone find any significant amount of proprietary code in your GPL project, they can quite simply nuke your entire project with a single DMCA.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fun fact: Mojang bought Bukkit. (@jeb_ tweeted the other day. This notice states that bukkit uses Minecraft's code without permission, and it did at one point. Now, though, as Mojang owns both, I think it should be allowed. Oh, and a Mojang employee (Dinnerbone) has stated he will be updating it to support 1.8.

</comment><comment><USER6> This has wide ramifications for quite a lot of projects that have implemented parts of the Bukkit API that this guy has contributed code towards. CraftBukkit and Spigot are used on most servers but it also affects a lot of mods like Tekkit, MCP etc

I hope they sort it out.

</comment><comment><USER7> [http://www.reddit.com/r/admincraft/comments/2fd0rt/multiplay...](http://www.reddit.com/r/admincraft/comments/2fd0rt/multiplays_wesley_wolfe_issues_dmca_takedown/)

</comment><comment><USER8> It is available. [https://dl.bukkit.org/downloads/bukkit/](https://dl.bukkit.org/downloads/bukkit/)

Your welcome. =P

<comment><USER9> That's not CraftBukkit. That's the API.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What's bukkit?

<comment><USER11> It seems to be related to Minecraft servers. [http://wiki.bukkit.org/Main_Page](http://wiki.bukkit.org/Main_Page)

There's not a lot of context in the take-down notice... does anyone know the actual story? [http://dl.bukkit.org/dmca/notification.txt](http://dl.bukkit.org/dmca/notification.txt)

<comment><USER12> Bukkit is a wrapper around the Minecraft server that is one of the two major modding APIs. It is used for a lot of server plugins for multiplayer gameplay.

It consists of two major projects. Bukkit itself is an API that plugin authors code against. In theory it could be implemented for e.g. Terraria too but in practice its completely tied to Minecraft. Bukkit (the api) is licensed under GPL with little issue.

CraftBukkit is the implementation of this API. It is licensed under LGPL.

This was originally started as a community project. However the issue is that CraftBukkit includes a decompiled Minecraft server, which mojang never officially allowed.

This meant that Bukkit (the server) contained the bukkit api (GPL), the craftbukkit implementation (LGPL) and the Minecraft server ( All rights reserved) and was being distributed as "GPL". While mojang looked the other way about their proprietary software being distributed as GPL, everyone was pretty much happy.

The issue gets muddier when Mojang hired the core Bukkit devs to work on Minecraft. They left the Bukkit project to run itself and everything continued as is for two years.

Then two years later the community team announce they're shutting down the project. At this point, Mojang reveals that when they hired the original team, they also acquired the Bukkit project (trademarks, infrastructure, the original core teams code, etc) and as such it didn't belong to the current community team to shut down.

Now one of the GPL contributors is demanding that Mojang take down the project because it contains his code under the GPL but isn't validly licensed under the GPL due to containing the all rights reserved mojang code.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> mind = blown</comment>


TPP leak: states give companies the right to repeal nations' laws - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2015/03/26/tpp-leak-states-give-companie.html <comment><USER2> An example of how this can play out:

        Australia enacts a law on cigarette labeling,
        requiring warnings on the package.

        Tobacco companies sues Australia under a
        Hong Kong - Australia trade agreement, to
        get them to revert the labeling law.

        (this isn't hypothetical, it's already happening)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_cigarette_packaging#Tobac...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_cigarette_packaging#Tobacco_industry_response)

I'm definitely a big champion of capitalism, but these investor-state dispute settlements seems really wrongheaded.

Also, I cannot understand why these negotiations are secret? All in favor of trade-deals as long as they remove/reduce tariffs and tolls, but they should be conducted in the open.

<comment><USER3> Nitpick: you have stated that tobacco companies are suing Australia using a HK-AUS trade agreement to get them to "revert the labelling law". That's simply not true: they are suing for compensation, not trying to force a change in the law (they'd have to try and get the law struck down as violating some other constitutional law to do that).

> I'm definitely a big champion of capitalism, but these investor-state > dispute settlements seems really wrongheaded

Why? Can you at least see the underlying motivation for them?

As it happens I don't like tobacco companies at all. I'm very sympathetic to what Australia is doing and think other countries should adopt the same idea. Nonetheless, I'm OK with the idea of Australia paying compensation to Phillip Morris and other cigarette companies in this case, even though these companies are quite loathsome. The reason is the higher principle might still be worth it.

The rationale for ISDS is simple: politicians answer to citizens, citizens want jobs and a growing economy. Period. They want that more than anything else. In hard times "the economy" is _always_ at the top of voters concerns. Politicians know this and will do almost anything to juice the economy e.g. quantitative easing. One of the ways to boost the economy is to increase trade, it's classical economics and it seems to work. Hence there's always some free trade agreements being worked on somewhere.

Free trade is a great idea. However in the developed world most of the easy, low hanging fruit has already been picked. Tariffs are mostly gone. The remaining bottlenecks to trade are often things like differing technical standards or different regulations, which are hard to fix.

One bottleneck is that business values a stable and predictable business environment nearly as much as citizens value jobs, however "stable and predictable" is obviously in tension with the desire politicians have to change things around at a moments notice in order to try and win votes. In particular, businesses fear sudden and arbitrary banning of their business model or sudden seizure of their assets.

This holds back trade: company executives say to themselves things like, "our factory is in the USA and lots of our customers are in the EU so we have high shipping costs. We could set up a factory in the EU but that will take five years and be a very expensive and complex project. If we do it and after seven years the laws change such that it's no longer economic for us to do that, we're screwed. And we don't trust the politicians over there not to screw with us, so maybe we'll just stay as we are". Result: Europeans have fewer jobs so are less happy, they pay more for the imports so are less happy, the company doesn't expand so it's also less happy.

With ISDS maybe the decision looks like this instead: "we _should_ set up a factory in the EU, because even if the laws there change and suddenly our factory can't operate or doesn't make sense any more, we'll be compensated and can use the compensation money to smoothly transition our business somewhere else ..... so let's do it".

So by agreeing to compensate companies for changes in the political environment, the hope is that there will be more trade, more investment, more jobs and thus more happy wage-earning citizens.

Of course, politically this is a hard sell because people like to think that if their elected politicians start whacking a foreign company doing business in their country it's because the dirty foreigners are immoral and nasty and generally deserve it .... and not, say, because their votes are easily bought by a bit of crafty populism. But then again, they really want the jobs too. So we'll have to see how this works out.

<comment><USER4> If this is that fine and dandy, why is it being done in secret?

<comment><USER5> Free trade agreements are always negotiated in secret in order to enable the two sides to come to a comprehensive agreement. Transparent negotiations fail.

<comment><USER4> That is circular reasoning. That sentence says agreement is secret so that there can be agreement.

What nonsense.

<comment><USER5> No, the sentence says _negotiations_ are secret so there can be agreement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150325/17151130431/corpo...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20150325/17151130431/corporate- sovereignty-provisions-tpp-agreement-leaked-via-wikileaks-would-massively- undermine-government-sovereignty.shtml)

This is a slightly better discussion of the problem in the recently leaked draft.

edit:

I guess they aren't bothering to even pretend this is would be anything other than a show trial:

        "...the tribunals would be staffed by private sector lawyers unaccountable
        to any electorate, system of precedent or substantive appeal. Many of those
        involved rotate between acting as "judges" and as advocates for the investors
        launching cases against governments. Such dual roles would be deemed
        unethical in most legal systems."

Regulatory capture is a helluva drug.

<comment><USER7> This sounds like a typical arbitral tribunal system that companies commonly use to settle various contractual disputes - nothing sinister or unheard of there. What is odd is that it appears to me the agreement would effectively equate changes in legislation that affect profits to a contract dispute.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Is anyone surprised that examples of this power being used currently and in the past includes an oil company complaining that environmental regulations hamper its profits and a tobacco company trying to prevent plain packaging?

Most democracies do not create laws which scare away multinationals. There really is absolutely no incentive for it. Even corrupt politicians don't want to scare away multinationals because the bribes from those companies are their largest source of income.

This law effectively neutralizes democracy. It's also hilarious in a macabre way to see supposedly nationalist Americans railing against Agenda 21 which is non-binding, while treaties such as TPP which allow an international tribunal which override national laws to be pushed forward by their govt.

<comment><USER7> I wouldn't way it neutralizes democracy, just makes it less effective. To me the core mechanic of modern democracies is control of society through legislative power and the democratic procedure to rotate those that have it.

Taxation, even if just nominal, is one of the most powerful proven mechanisms to control human behavior. This is effectively a tax on changing legislation, thus impeding the democratic process.

Effectively this says that the rights of the stock holders to profits are more valuable than the rights of the citizens. Which is a rule that has been historically enforced in various countries time and again.

No wonder this is secret. Everyone who gets most of their livelihood through labor and not capital investment are the unwilling benefactors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It is completely unacceptable that this treaty is being written and negotiated in total secrecy. Its even more unacceptable that the thing is supposed to be secret even after it goes into force. This treaty will have a power of law and you will be subject to it without knowing what it actually says. God knows what it will contain when it comes out.

International trade can be very beneficial for all countries involved. But they should be entered into force like all other treaties and laws. They should be publicly known and subject to public debate.

<comment><USER10> Trade is good, secrets are bad.

Worst part of secret trade agreements is that it is isn't fair to the future of workers affected by agreements.

If your business or career is going to be affected, knowing about this as it happens is good to prepare and make a change. No doubt there is no changing what capital, corporations and wealth want to do but at least give the little guy a heads up.

In secret, all you are doing is harming people and then when it affects them in the end it will be too late or put them in a bind.

In an age of information and being smart about careers and futures, a secret trade agreement is feudal in nature and only for the kings.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I cannot understand how nation states can willfully enter into an agreement that actively curbs their sovereignty and moreover empowers global corporations to leverage profit mechanisms that can hurt their national interests.

Sure, western capitalism especially in anglosaxon countries has always been neck to neck with foreign policy and had been able to leverage considerable national resources (including military) to the benefit of their shareholders. So this is a continuation of that tradition.

I understand bilateral treaties where USA has considerable leverage but this... this is so many countries unanimously lowering their pants expectantly to wallstreet. What the fuck. Sure, most of the corporations that benefit from this have issued stocks so in a way 'everyone can benefit' but what I do not understand is this: why are so many countries passing away their sovereignty to companies. Or, to look this in another way, enable companies to tax countries for legislation that is incompatible for their nexy quarter strategy.

<comment><USER11> National sovereignty is unpopular these days, on both sides of the aisle. Liberals started it decades ago with their love of international criminal tribunals and increased UN power, and now the conservatives are getting in on the act. The underlying premise of both movements is that your pet issue is more important than the sovereign right of nations to have domestic processes free from foreign influence.

<comment><USER12> There's a long history of conservatives co-opting liberal ideas and techniques. During the 2000s the right played both identity politics and deconstructionism to great effect. The deconstructionism went into play in areas like the "intelligent design" assault on evolutionary science -- if you read the IDist arguments they are basically deconstructionist attacks on the validity of induction and reason in general. The right has always done identity politics better than the left.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is out and out fascism folks, only it should be being spelled with a capital "F", which of course can also be used to represent the huge FUCK YOU that is being sent the way of the sovereign citizens whose very rights of existence are being usurped by this agreement. And, it _is_ an agreement, no less, to destroy the very fabric of the societies in which we all participate, enjoy, perpetuate and belong. Because .. after a 5 year evolution has occurred, once the pre-teens grow up and get used to the machinations of this agreement, and it 'becomes normal', and 'always how its been', then we can kiss our freedoms goodbye.

Make no bones about this, it is a play for total fascism to take over. A new era of civilization will be in play - it will only take 5 years of this act to be compelled by the societies-at-large which it seeks to destroy - and this new age will be basically this: a trademarked boot, stomping hard on a human face.

Fight this now, or watch your children devolve into a state of lesser being. What we enjoy now will not be possible in 5 - maybe 10 - years from now. The world is devolving, it is not getting better. Modern civilization is the perpetual fight against those who would bring us - all of us, not just a few at a time - down.

</comment><comment><USER14> I saw a TED Talk [0] a while back about how Git could transform the legislative process and help bring transparency to how our laws are formed.

I've known about the TPP for a while. I tried to discuss it with people and no one had even heard of it.

What if we had a Github-esque site where all of our legislation (and all revisions) are readily available with annotations. Would society be more interested in participating in the creation of our laws? I know I would be.

[0] [http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_o...](http://www.ted.com/talks/clay_shirky_how_the_internet_will_one_day_transform_government?language=en)

<comment><USER11> I think it's unappreciated the extent to which Congress has been doing version control long before programming existed. Public laws (i.e. commits) are written as amendments (i.e. diffs) to the United States Code. When a bill is voted into law, they are accompanied by reports in the Congressional Record (i.e. commit messages) explaining the rationale of the changes. And it's all documented with decades of CSPAN footage.

The biggest missing piece is the United States Code Annotated. It has notes showing for each provision the public laws that changed it (like svn log). Unfortunately, this information is collected and maintained by West and Lexis in proprietary databases. But everything else is out there and web-accessible.

<comment><USER15> The rationale might be explained in the commit message, but it seems courts never refer to it, preferring instead to reverse engineer the meaning from the compiled code(law).

The rationale for the PATRIOT act was to fight terrorism. The rationale for copyright extension was ... well, there was some gooblydock. But the courts never seem to reference that when they actually apply these laws.

<comment><USER16> The metaphor works better when you imagine the courts as part of the runtime (or similar). The comments are available for us to use, as citizens, but when the system is executing, it only cares what's in the code.

<comment><USER15> > The comments are available for us to use, as citizens, but when the system > is executing, it only cares what's in the code.

In that case, the comments are entertainment.

We are not the users of this system. We are its input/output.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Potentially - only after a trial - having to pay compensation is not exactly the same as repealing a law.

Then again, disincentivizing the creation of such laws in the first place more or less has the same outcome as repealing them after they have been passed and may even be more surreptitious as the public may never learn how the law would have looked like without that kind of pressure.

</comment><comment><USER18> Title is complete biased linkbait. The actual content talks about companies being able to appeal to an international TPP tribunal, not being able to "repeal laws" themselves.

<comment><USER13> Whose tribunal? Who delegates that power? Who enforces those decisions?

Don't play the fool - this is heinous, totalitarian fascism, at its finest. The TPP represents a far greater thread to modern civilized society than, for example, the ISIS/Daesh 'threat'. These treaties - which must be fought on a regular basis - are being pushed onto the world by ideologues and extremists whose fundamental desire is the suppression of us all.

Fight this, at all costs. Or watch your children grow in a society far more degraded than the one you live in, and enjoy, today. This is not a pro- survival proposition; it is absolutely the end of civilization as we know it.

<comment><USER18> Poe's Law definitely applies here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting that current capitalism is about choice right up to the point where it comes to what kind of government and laws you want to live under. Then it is what you are born in to.

<comment><USER20> How is capitalism about choice? I thought capitalism was about having the means of production privately owned and operated for profit.

<comment><USER21> Preferably (from the point of view of the owners) in an unregulated monopoly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is yet another example of how the Obama administration continues to undermine us. What happened to being the most "transparent" administration in history. Bullshit!

<comment><USER23> Honest question: do you think Obama is writing the agreement himself, or do you think he lacks political power to stop international corporations from making these deals, or do you think he just doesn't care?

<comment><USER22> I think he knows about the agreement and the process by which it is being put together and doesn't care enough to open the process and make it more transparent or is deliberately making sure that it's done in secret.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I can't see how this agreement is supported in the US constitution since it essentially voids the judicial system in favor of some external agency. Even if they can't force a change in laws, fining the U.S. a trillion dollars or something or face crippling trade embargoes amounts to the same thing. Of course U.S. politicians see it as allowing U.S. corporations to dictate foreign laws but are blind to the likelihood of that backfiring terribly.

</comment><comment><USER25> On April 18 there are planned to be protests in many places across the globe in a Global Call to Action to Defeat Free Trade and Investment Treaties: [https://www.globaltradeday.org/](https://www.globaltradeday.org/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Flagged as obvious linkbait.

</comment><comment><USER27> Is this agreement negotiated by reptilians? Where are names of people who is working on this stuff? Were they elected? Were they appointed? By whom? How in the world contents of such agreement can stay secret?

Donated money to wikileaks.

[https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate](https://shop.wikileaks.org/donate)

<comment><USER28> I heard it was being negotiated by Joseph Manderley of the United Nations Anti-Terrorism Coalition (UNATCO). I'm sure it's all above board and the outcome will be majestic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This reminds me of the corporate dystopia described in [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_%28TV_series%29](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_%28TV_series%29)</comment>


Help! I'm Being Forced To Pirate Game Of Thrones Against My Will  - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/03/20/a-winter-of-piracy-is-coming/

<comment><USER3> He wants to watch a TV show, and there is not a way for him to do it at a reasonable cost. If he really is concerned about following the law, he would just not watch the show. He is not being "forced" to do anything; he is making a choice.

I'm not arguing that what he is doing isn't understandable, or that he doesn't have cause to complain. The statement "I'm being forced ... against my will" completely misses the meaning of "force" and "will". I don't mean to be pedantic; I only point it out because it reflects a common outlook that does not bode well for people's ability to choose wisely in a difficult moral dilemma. Other examples of this kind of talk might be: "I was forced to pay an undocumented worker substandard wages against my will because I could not otherwise afford to have my lawn cut," or "I was forced to buy from a company that I object to because the competition's product is not as cool."

<comment><USER4> You miss the point. People tend to write in extremes (e.g. "I'm so hungry, I could literally eat a horse"). No one in their right minds believes he has no other choice but to behave illegally but he is just highlighting how much of a pain it is to behave legally. It is more of a business issue than a legal/ethical one. Your business model sucks when your most rabid fans are struggling to find ways to give their money to you.

ps. given this is the internet, I do somewhat have to concede that quite a significant number of people may not be in their "right minds"

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> A while back i pirated a bunch of old episodes of This American Life so i could listen to them on my commute/long runs. The episodes were available to stream from the website, but (at the time) i was unable to do that on the go. So I torrented them... and then i donated $100 to the program. Listening to the radio shows was only really practical when i was commuting and it turned me into a huge fan. Now i donate regularly, if it wasn't for bitorrent I'm not sure that would be the case. Nowadays i have a smartphone and there is a TAL app that lets you download episodes for 'offline' listening. So i probably wouldn't do it that way again, but still bitorrent provided an extremely valuable service to me, and i think it also provided a good service to TAL.

<comment><USER6> The interesting bit is that no matter how much you donate this is still illegal.

You can't unilaterally buy yourself out of a transgression like that. Sure it makes you feel better but the letter of the law has no spot for the honour system.

<comment><USER7> Well even if not legally, morally he did the right thing. The spirit of copyright laws is that the authors get paid for their work, right?

And whether it's illegal depends on the jurisdiction. In some countries (such as The Netherlands) it's legal to download.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I want my next door neighbours Ferrari, but Ferrari only sell them through dealerships, and they want _heaps_ of money for them! I could wait for a second hand one at a reasonable price, but I'd have to wait a year or two. I've got no alternative!

(Yeah, I know, physical goods vs digital goods, but _ye ghods_ there's a sense of entitlement in that post!)

<comment><USER9> Your analogy doesn't work. The author's gripe (which is mine) is that he doesn't want to pay for cable because it includes paying for a bunch of shit he doesn't want. He's willing to buy the Ferrari from Ferrari, but not if it also includes paying more for a Vespa, a Dodge Neon and an Escalade..

As consumers, if we want to purchase something you'd hope the manufacturer would do everything in their power to sell it to us. That's not the case currently and that's his point..

<comment><USER10> Here's why HBO requires you to subscribe to their channel to watch Game of Thrones.

If you watch Game of Thrones, maybe you'll also watch Veep or Girls or Eastbound & Down or Life's Too Short. You might notice that HBO staggers their series so they overlap for roughly half their run. The Sopranos and The Wire never ran in lockstep, The Wire would start roughly halfway through The Sopranos run. They're trying to get you to continuously subscribe, rather than just subscribe for the 13 weeks Game of Thrones is on.

I know, you're too smart to fall for that, you're just gonna PVR Game of Thrones and stop recording exactly when the episode ends. You're never going to see anything except Game of Thrones no matter what HBO does. You, however, are still atypical. Maybe the day will come where HBO's trick doesn't work and their subscribers routinely cancel and resubscribe so it's most advantageous for them, but for now it works well enough that offering Game of Thrones a la carte is a money losing proposition for them. The sales they'll get from MG Siegler and yourself will not offset the subscribers they'll lose who would rather just pay for HBO continuously than go without Game of Thrones.

HBO (and other content producers) may be stubborn and short sighted, but they are not stupid. They've run the numbers. If you want to change their minds, you have to change the numbers and, regrettably, that means you have to boycott them completely. Pirating their content just signals it's valuable and HBO is right to keep availability costly (whether through direct pricing or obnoxious distribution terms).

<comment><USER11> _They're trying to get you to continuously subscribe, rather than just subscribe for the 13 weeks Game of Thrones is on._

This may have worked in the 90s but people have other options now and they expect other options.

 _Pirating their content just signals it's valuable and HBO is right to keep availability costly (whether through direct pricing or obnoxious distribution terms)._

I think that's the point though, people do find it valuable and may be happy to pay a premium price for it but they don't want to have to pay for a ton of other stuff especially on a monthly subscription.

If it is popular then there is no real reason they should be losing money on it, I think the piracy signals an untapped market.

It's arguably worse for those in the UK, if we want to see game of thrones then we have to fork out for a sky subscription which adds yet another set top box to our already overburdened collection and puts the money into Rupert Murdoch's pocket (there are many who would feel that piracy is a morally superior option to that).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm going to get downvoted for this, but here's my opinion:

I recently had a similar issue with OnLive - I registered for free and found that you can play over 100 games for $10 a month - a great deal, right?

Well, for some unfathomable reason, I couldn't PAY for the monthly subscription because I am outside the US. I used a VPN and added my (Bank of America!) credit card to the system without problems - now I have a subscription and enjoy Dirt 3, TR:Legend, Driver: San Francisco on my laptop AND Android phone (it's really impressive).

I'm also practically forced to order a physical CD of a band I like (I'm NOT going to do that, because I'll have to wait a month, then just rip that CD to my computer and throw it away, which is quite sad, really) instead of being able to order it online and download it.

HBO doesn't want to allow you to watch a show you like (love?) and you can do it illegally - I say DO IT if you want - sooner or later, they'll either sue everybody or understand that they need to give their potential customers the products they want, when they want, which will actually save them money and make them richer.

And the author, actors are getting paid the same amount regardless - <USER2> network pockets most of the profit, anyway (that's why I hope the current direct artist -> consumer trend is the future).

</comment><comment><USER13> Firstly, I think the point would have been better made without the 'I'm being FORCED to pirate it' argument. :)

HBO is allowed to sell their content how they like, if it is costing them money then so be it. They will eventually adapt or fade away, and I don't think illegalling obtaining their content is going to convince them that putting stuff online faster is the way to go.

</comment><comment><USER14> What an entitled, spoiled view. He's not being "forced" to pirate it, he just think it costs too much.</comment>


A.I. vs. M.D. - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/ai-versus-md?currentPage=all <comment><USER2> I read the book Complications by Atul Gawande a while back and it touched on this issue. He mentioned how a computer was more accurate at detecting heart attacks than an experience doctor. He also talked about how if the computer is better than the doctor at reading things like these, it really doesn't make much sense for the doctor to have to evaluate/approve the results. Kind of reminds me of James Simons' thought process on quantitative trading at RenTech.

Sorry about the lack of technical knowledge into the CS stuff, first post here and I haven't really put in the time to learn about CS and AI yet.

<comment><USER3> > Sorry about the lack of technical knowledge into the CS stuff, first post > here and I haven't really put in the time to learn about CS and AI yet.

No need to apologize, you made an interesting and relevant comment. The fact that you feel the need to apologize is more telling of the culture you perceive in this site than of your lack of knowledge in any area.

<comment><USER2> I posted this comment about 15 minutes after I discovered Hacker News. Wasn't sure on the culture here compared to places like reddit. It seems to be similar to the more specialized subreddits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I recommend reading "Do machines actually beat doctors?" by Dr. Luke Oakden- Rayner, who is both a radiology doctor and deep learning researcher.

[https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/do- compute...](https://lukeoakdenrayner.wordpress.com/2016/11/27/do-computers- already-outperform-doctors/)

<comment><USER5> Hey, thanks for liking the article. I was just looking at my blog stats and they had a bit of spike when you wrote this.

I'm just getting down to writing some posts about the big question the New Yorker article introduces, but doesn't really make any real progress with: will machines actually replace doctors.

Hope you enjoy them :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13976357](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13976357)

</comment><comment><USER7> A few decades from now, 30 - 50 years at most, doctors and patients, will look back at us and wonder, why we were _not_ using algorithms to assist with diagnosis already.

<comment><USER8> As with many things - fear that the AI will be wrong (no matter how less frequently this happens than with doctors) and a desire for a _human_ to blame if there is a mistake. If a doctor makes a misdiagnosis and kills the patient as a result it is less bad than if an AI makes a misdiagnosis and kills the patient as a result. It's the one thing I don't understand about most of society.

Same with self driving cars. Self driving cars could be proven to be 100,000% safer than human drivers - but until it is legally mandated people will prefer humans behind the wheel because "what if the self driving car runs a red light and kills someone?" ignoring the hundreds and thousands of humans who run red lights and kill people.

 _> why we were not using algorithms to assist with diagnosis already._

On the bright side - we increasingly are! I think it's more an issue with budgeting and legal issues that it isn't as widespread.

<comment><USER9> Apples and oranges. We do have driving assistance, fully autonomous vehicles are entirely different. Low hanging fruits are being picked, not wanting a software to call the shots every time is a valid stand imo.

<comment><USER10> I think aviation is a good analogy.

Most of the automation in a modern airliner, for example, isn't there to make the plane "fly itself" from point A to point B -- it's there to do things machines are good at in order to reduce the workload of the human crew, so they have more time/energy to focus on the things humans are good at.

Flight plans, for example, are still decided on by humans, even if a programmed computer carries out many aspects of the plan once decided upon. Same for en-route deviation from the prior plan in order to either avoid bad weather or reach good weather (where "weather" is kind of a broad term, and includes things like winds which would help/hinder an airliner). Although "autoland" is a feature, it's not something that's used every time and can be moderately complex to set up, since a bunch of factors have to be decided/input by a human. And of course the final decision to land or go around is made by a human.

Which drives home the fact that automation, in aviation, is a _partnership_ between humans and machines, with humans benefiting and being more productive from offloading some work.

A lot of fields should be looking at that as a model.

<comment><USER11> And yet there are cases where humans interfering with the automation caused a crash.

<comment><USER10> Yes, humans refusing to trust or work with the automation can cause a disaster. That's not an argument for going fully automated or fully human, it's an argument for developing better cooperation between the humans and the automation.

<comment><USER12> And in many cases it has been poor UI design preventing the humans from recognising or understanding what the machine is telling them, particularly when they are under the extreme stress of an undiagnosed emergency situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Hopefully more companies are doing this.

My research thesis is in this area, hoping for a nice career doing modelling to predict illness. I'd like to have a nice paying job doing something that actually help people instead of just only making somebody more richer.

Also it doesn't matter if the AI gets wrong, the algorithm gives say 80% accuracy and it tells you base on your genetic make up if you should take the surgery route or chemotherapy route.

1\. It's to assist the doctor. Also perhaps it can be cheaper to diagnose than a doctor. If say the algorithm says with 80% chance you have cancer, then you should go to your doctor and have it check. If it says no, then don't go. You have another tool to evaluate your health keeping in mind that it's a tool and aid, not a replacement for doctor.

The only concerns are genetic discrimination which GINA law addresses. And medical algorithm usually err on the side of false positive. So it rather get it wrong in saying you have cancer than saying you don't have cancer and in reality you do.

Any body know of any companies that does this please send them my way. ^__^

<comment><USER14> I am doing this, full-time for almost three years soon. The company is at [http://dochuddle.com/](http://dochuddle.com/)

So here is the warning: Medical startups are hard, really hard. \- It is difficult to apply research on 32x32 cat icons on 15megapixel xrays. \- It is difficult to get data without year-long contract efforts \- It is very difficult/expensive, if not impossible, to use cloud resources due to HIPAA and localization rules so you need to build your own on-premise GPU grids like we did \- It is difficult doing most medical things in the USA unless you are on the revenue side (e.g., collections, increasing yield, etc.) -- we got so many raw deal partnership offers in the US that we went overseas to trail our product.

The entire medical system in the US is corrupt from the ground up, geared to maximize revenue with minimal lawsuit risk. Patient care rarely enters the conversation internally. I thought financial services was bad (my past career), but at least the metrics were all agreed upon by everyone. In medicine, everyone has an agenda, often diametrically opposed to other parties.

<comment><USER15> Keep in mind that TuringNYC did not even MENTION the main issue that trips up most startups...

ie - they are unfamiliar with how to secure, (and KEEP), FDA approval for their products. It actually comes as a surprise to many of them that they even NEED FDA Approval. Then they are further shocked by how invasive the process is, and how long it can take. And don't even get me started about the look on their faces when they realize that, despite all of that, you're still held CRIMINALLY accountable for any bugs in your software. (Stay away from anything that might injure anyone if you are unsure of the ability of your process to reliably prevent bugs. Things like RTP are no-go areas for all but the most meticulous medical software developers.)

Don't get into medical software unless you have an extremely long, and very well funded, runway. This is not an industry where 2 guys in a garage can innovate and side-step the regulations. And whatever you do, stay away from anything that could actually harm the patient if it is wrong.

<comment><USER14> Very good point @bilbo0s and thank you for bringing this up. I didn't mention it as we focused on a non-clinical diagnostic (thus not subject to FDA), decided to entirely avoid the US market (focus on more less risk averse economies open to innovation and aligned via ACO-style systems.)

FDA is definitely the biggest hurdle of them all. I'd shudder if we had to deal with that 600 pound gorilla.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> if you give a flying (sic) about solving medical issues, and actually know a thing or 7 about curing disease, check out Kaggle's competitions. The cervical cancer competition is of particular interest.

If you happen to disagree, step away from your doubt for a sec and listen: we can, and will cure these diseases with AI. That's the whole point. We imbue our intelligence into a machine and voila, the machine does what we ask it to do with greater expediency and more acumen than an individual can do alone. We don't garden with machines and say" wow, this took fifteen thousand people to build, should we use it so we can do other stuff instead?".

Nope. We say, thank you John Deere, I'll take 2. While we are at it, let's look a little deeper and think about how civilization functions in general. Is that not what we do? We connect, we decide to work together, and next thing you know, we improve our quality of life: otherwise known as a corporation (or conglomerate if you wannanother version, ya heard?).

So, is AI good for medicine, yes: it is.

Here's a free thought to prove my point. Using my intellect today I deduced that anxiety is absurdity masked as truth. Imbue that into some AI, you'll heal the minds of the world, ok?

Peas in the ground, head in the air, thoughts with the 1. -Love

</comment><comment><USER17> I think it's really useful to see the MD's view of such changes here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/61sgfw/ai_versus_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/61sgfw/ai_versus_md/). Obviously not necessarily representative of how all MDs think but it's interesting to see some fears/concerns they have.

</comment><comment><USER18> Automating diagnosis goes too far. Deep learning will largely be used for decision support; i.e. surfacing and indicating possible diagnoses for a medical professional to choose from.

Most machine-learning companies have misunderstood the role of radiologists. Their first job is not diagnosis. It is to find the right domain, the right view of the data, from which to formulate a diagnosis. So the problem is to map from one set of parameters, say, how an X-ray is taken, to another more promising set of parameters for the same X-ray, to get the view they need. It's not just see an image, find a tumor.

</comment><comment><USER19> I have read about khosla paper pretty much covered [http://www.khoslaventures.com/20-percent-doctor-included- spe...](http://www.khoslaventures.com/20-percent-doctor-included-speculations- and-musings-of-a-technology-optimist)

</comment><comment><USER20> Is there any data openly available for developing this kind of system?

<comment><USER21> Kaggle has a few datasets, including I believe mammographs and proteomes if you want to do breast cancer specifically.

If you're not in it for the money, or if just fame is enough, I'd suggest to go upriver: individual diagnostic data is rare because of medical privacy and market forces, but there is boundless open data in, for example genomics and proteomics. If you search for [bioinformatics competition], you should find a nice selection of opportunities with good data availability and clearly defined objectives. ML is slowly revolutionising this field, although it's a good idea to pay attention to what happened before–there were some seriously smart people working on these problems for a long time, and they found some rather ways to extract the most value from data with the tools available at the time.</comment></comment>


Takeaways from YC's Demo Day pitches from an alumni turned investor - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@stefanobernardi/takeaways-from-ycs-demo-day-pitches-from-an-alumni-turned-investor-292af1c03540#.8ekh6fz5k <comment><USER2> That would be an "alumnus".</comment>


Verizon to kill grandfathered unlimited data plans for 4G/LTE upgrades - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2012/5/16/3024472/verizon-kills-unlimited-data-lte-upgrades

<comment><AUTHOR> Submitted this because I feel very strongly about data caps/throttling, whether for broadband or home networks.

However, I also have always disliked the phone contracting system in general, because it serves only to make it harder to switch networks, thus reducing competition in the market.

Given that the only reason I stay on Verizon is that I have an unlimited data plan with a 4G phone, if that goes away, I'll just switch to a GSM network off-contract, and get all the benefits of using a GSM phone, plus the flexibility of having no contract.

I'd prefer to hold on to the unlimited data, but I bet I'm not alone in saying that unlimited data is the very last thing keeping me tied to Verizon - <USER2> wonder if there are enough of us that this may actually hurt them.</comment>