After GDPR, The New York Times cut off ad exchanges and kept growing ad revenue - <AUTHOR> https://digiday.com/media/new-york-times-gdpr-cut-off-ad-exchanges-europe-ad-revenue/ <comment><USER2> I honestly would not be surprised if the difference in effectiveness of targeted vs untargeted advertisement turns out to be none, negligible or even unfavorable to targeted. Sure, NYT is not enough data to be significant, especially when compensating for my confirmation bias, but I would really like to see more sites stop tracking, at least from an ethical standpoint.

<comment><USER3> I would be absolutely astounded if targeted ads did not provide significant long-term advantage to a big player like Google. How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a diet. Are such details of no significance determining what ads to show these people?

Having said that, I'm constantly surprised by how bad Google is at targeted advertising. For example, today when I visit nytimes.com I see an ad from Google _with the ad text in French_. Hey Google, despite my recent visit to Paris _I don 't speak French_ \- maybe your AI experts could analyse my 13 years of Gmail and search history to figure that out!

PS: I'm a Google shareholder, so my confirmation bias is in the other direction :)

<comment><USER4> > How can it be that having intimate knowledge of someone would not allow you > to sell them more stuff? John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up. Mary > is single and goes to the gym every day. Steve just got a promotion and > likes the BMW 3 series. Michael is overweight but has just gone on a diet. > Are such details of no significance determining what ads to show these > people?

It's possible that some combination of efficient markets, semi- inaccurate/incomplete tracking data and chaos theory combines to make it mostly irrelevant.

So Steve just got a promotion and likes the BMW 3 series, but advertising to him is useless because he has already decided to buy a BMW 3 series. Whereas Larry has had the same job for ten years, and the same Ford for ten years, but if you put a luxury car ad in front of him it may get him to take a test drive and actually create a new customer.

The data says Mary is single and goes to the gym every day, but it only thinks she's "single" because she's in a committed long-distance relationship and isn't interested in dating anyone else. And she's a fitness expert who is willing to spend her time researching fitness products, so she already knows everything there is to know about those products, already buys the ones she wants, and advertising them to her isn't going to create any new exposure. Whereas Jane never goes to the gym, so you might actually sell her a gym membership or a piece of fitness equipment because she doesn't already have one or know anything about it yet.

John has a 10th wedding anniversary coming up, but he has also known exactly what he's going to do for years. Whereas he has a third cousin whose wedding is coming up and has no idea what to get, so you should be showing him ads for toasters and flatware rather than jewelry and chocolate.

In general, you may do better to advertise your stuff to the people who aren't already interested in and knowledgeable about it. Which actually looks kind of a lot like random scattershot rather than targeting.

<comment><USER5> Show of hands. How many people have clicked on an ad and bought something directly related to the ad?

I was researching cameras. I saw very little camera ads in my research. After I bought a camera? Ads for the camera I just bought everywhere, for months afterwards. I have not once clicked on a ad and bought something. I maybe clicked on 10 ads in my lifetime and they were 75% stuff I THOUGHT I had no intrest in. I think targeted ads is the biggest con no of our age.

<comment><USER6> Haha, similar. I was shopping around for a Sony mirrorless camera a year ago. Ended up with the model I actually had in mind in the first place (A7S2 for its supreme low light capability), but shit am I hounded on the Internet either for Sony cameras or accessories. And there's no way I know of to get rid of it! And for what its worth even Facebook and Instagram (at least the latter, I only use on my tablet in the app!) showed me camera ads.

This is annoying and, when one thinks about the implication that _everyone and their dog_ knows who you are, scary.

<comment><USER7> Would an ad blocker not get rid of most of it? I rarely see any ads these days with Ghostery running.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is the thing the ad industry really didn't want people to discover: what if the behavioural and personalised targeting wasn't actually worth the cost?

<comment><USER9> I hope that whole industry just dies and the hordes of wasted software engineers can instead be used on something that actually adds value to society.

<comment><USER10> And all the other software developers working on things directly and indirectly funded by that industry should what?

Take up knitting?

<comment><USER11> Say what you want, but sweaters don't spy on people.

<comment><USER12> Then in a decade our new sardonic message board reference will be, "Yes, the software engineering industry cratered. But for a beautiful moment in time, we stopped serving ads."

I don't think the parent commenter disagrees with you about spying. I think they're trying to highlight the fundamental tension of the is-ought problem at play here. Your normative claim is that it's good to limit activity which reduces consumer privacy. The positive conclusion is that to achieve this moral imperative, we'd have to either radically repurpose existing software engineers or radically reduce the industry.

Your point about spying isn't wrong. But I think history shows us that taking away (or reducing) peoples' livelihood while telling them, "well at least you're no longer a moral hazard!" isn't productive. It's too extreme. If you want to actually reduce the negative externalities caused by digital advertising, you can't _realistically_ tell software engineers to take up knitting.

<comment><USER13> As Upton Sinclair so aptly observed " _It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!_ "

There was a thriving core to the software industry that existed well before the ad-fueled web and still exists today. Plain old business websites, line- of-business internal software, desktop apps, embedded and IoT software, etc., none of these things depend on ads. If you can't see that there is plenty of things to do for software developers to do if ads are curtailed, you need to broaden your horizons.

<comment><USER10> The problem isn't _no one_ will find work.

It's that there was a thriving core decades ago that supported a fraction of the people the software industry supports today.

> Plain old business websites, line-of-business internal software, desktop > apps, embedded and IoT software, etc.

All experience a monumental retraction the likes of which our economy has never experienced the moments ads go away.

No industry, let alone some niche in tech, would be unaffected if Google and their ad-revenue driven efforts dried up tomorrow morning.

If you can't see that there is plenty fewer things to do for the economy to do if ads are curtailed, you need to broaden your horizons.

<comment><USER13> > _All experience a monumental retraction the likes of which our economy has > never experienced the moments ads go away._

Such hyperbole; computers are embedded in every aspect of daily life now.

Moreover, even if by some miracle you happened to be correct, propping up the adtech software industry does not justify its negative externalities any more than preserving tobacco jobs justifies the continued sale of cigarettes and subsequent deaths or preserving coal jobs justifies the pollutants produced and its subsequent deaths.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> "The fact that we are no longer offering behavioral targeting options in Europe does not seem to be in the way of what advertisers want to do with us," he said. "The desirability of a brand may be stronger than the targeting capabilities. We have not been impacted from a revenue standpoint, and, on the contrary, our digital advertising business continues to grow nicely."

I wonder if smaller sites could do the same thing or this is only working so well because they're the NYT?

<comment><USER15> It's absolutely working so well because they are NYT. They can get sweet "branding" dollars from advertisers, and with branding nobody cares about return on money spent.

Smaller sites have zero chance to strike a deal with large agencies who are serving large brands. So their only chance to increase ad revenue is to offer targeting, to improve viewability (aka put banners on top), and to hope that they will get enough of retargeting dollars.

EDIT: and once you think of it, people from Europe who are reading NYT is targeting option in itself. Most probably they are affluent, english-speaking, etc. If you are large luxury brand, this is all you need.

<comment><USER16> This comment makes no sense to me. First of all: do you have any source for your first statement that "It's absolutely working so well because they are NYT" other than your gut feeling?

Just because other sites are smaller doesn't mean they can't do it or work together. Smaller sites now also don't do targeted advertising; they just hire Google or any other ad network for that. They could do the same with non- targeted ads.

About your edit: Yes, this is literally how advertising has always worked; you 'target' an entire audience, not an individual. Same for newspapers (on paper), TV, magazines, books, billboards in certain area's...

<comment><USER15> >do you have any source for your first statement that "It's absolutely working so well because they are NYT" other than your gut feeling?

6 year experience working in ad-tech on different projects.

>Just because other sites are smaller doesn't mean they can't do it or work together.

Well, try to get a slice of Procter&Gamble or Volkswagen ad budget being a small guy and not having any targeting.

> they just hire Google or any other ad network for that. They could do the > same with non-targeted ads.

This is not how it works.

If you are a small site, you set a google or any other ad network tag on your site -- right.

After that, when someone visits your site, you initiate a call to these ad networks with user cookie.

If this user is identified as known (say, male, 25-35 y.o., NY, was interested in Hi-Fi equipment) some advertiser may pay a lot to show an ad to this guy. 5$ CPM is not uncommon, and you may even get $10-20 from time to time.

If this user is totally anonymous and there are no advertisers interested in him, good luck getting even $0.5 CPM. Most probably impression will go unmonetized.

>About your edit: Yes, this is literally how advertising has always worked; you 'target' an entire audience, not an individual.

nope. in case of retargeting or even modern prospecting you do target individual, just as in example above.

If good portion of your audience is known to DMP's (Data Management Platform, basically tracking silos, google "Salesforce DMP" for example) and other ad- tech players, you will easily get x5 return on showing ads to them, as compared to anonymous users, all other things equal.

And this is how you make money being a small publisher on the internet these days.

<comment><USER17> Well I don't know much about the whole cyber economy but I don't think smaller sites are somehow entitled to advertising spending.

If you run a website you are going to have to work hard to get Volkswagen to put ads on your site. Explain to them why they should care. The NYT started out small too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wild speculation: What if cutting off the ad exchanges was a dose of quinine for the New York Times?

NYT is a premium venue for people who want to advertise, because its regular readers (especially the ones who don't live in New York) tend to have above- average disposable income. Because of that, the NYT _should_ be able to charge a premium for advertising with them.

But if they opt into the ad exchanges, then they've given ad exchanges a signal they can use to more easily track who is a regular NYT reader. Advertisers could use that to target NYT readers without ever actually advertising on the NYT's website - they can follow them somewhere cheaper, and advertise there instead.

<comment><USER19> I'm not clear how that would work. How does NYT enabling ad exchanges enable advertisers to target NYT readers or the NYT website?

<comment><USER20> > How does NYT enabling ad exchanges enable advertisers to target NYT readers > or the NYT website?

tl;dr: My understanding is that an advertiser can use ads on the NYT to profile its audience, then use that profile to target the _same_ audience on _cheaper_ sites.

I can't find the link now, but I've read that this practice is killing the economics that drive the production of quality content. Quality content is expensive but it attracts a higher-value audience, and sites make it with the expectation they can pay for it by charging more for ads shown to that audience. However, that audience also consumes low-quality content, and smart advertisers realized they can get more bang for their buck by running "research ads" to profile the high-quality site's audience, but then target that same audience on low-quality sites.

So ad targeting discourages the production of quality content, and encourages clickbait and memes in its place.

<comment><USER19> This used to be possible but every reputable publisher and exchange doesn't allow it anymore, mostly for this reason.

<comment><USER18> I thought part of the problem with the ad exchanges was that they're very hard to police, so what they officially don't allow has limited bearing on what actually happens.

<comment><USER19> Typically an ad will go through multiple vendors (dsp, exchange, ssp, ssp, etc) and then to the publisher. One of these will catch it, and if not a publisher as big as NYT has tools in place to catch it.

But yes things can slip through, but its mostly unapproved creative (gambling, etc) rather than code which is easy to catch.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I have long been bothered by the superficiality of advertising. At this point I have gotten the impression that much of advertising is the art of fooling oneselves first about the source of success and then fooling others. As long as there is a success and they are advertising it is stop self reflection and claim victory.

Annoy persistent customers with ads? It means it is driving retention and not that they had to get milk and knew you were an immediate better option than the alternatives.

Not receive as many sales during a recession when people cut back and you are forced to cut back on ads? Cutting ads brought this and not!

Clearly it has some impact given the derth of businesses without any but it is so entangled that it stinks of being driven by self-serving superstition more than concrete impacts. I would guess abstractly modeling awareness and desirability as separate concepts for one. No matter how much you advertise people will not want an air freshener that dispenses Ebola in their living room.

I know my own biases towards an annoying outgroup, that I am not equipped to derive a more logically rigorous and complete proof (let alone actionable and doing adequate in the field never mind better) but it feels as if the whole field should use way more mathematical rigor and self reflection.

</comment><comment><USER22> I can't be the only one who thinks behavioral targeting is a bit creepy?

This has happened to me at least 3-4 times in the last 2 years: I go to a supermarket or a store that I have never been to, I do shopping and come back home. After a few hours, I pick up my phone to check Email/Facebook, only to find myself staring at an advert for a product that's sitting in my fridge.

I mean, come on... The first time this happened I thought it was a funny coincidence, but it has happened with products that I did not bring home either. I can't be the only one?

And this is my point precisely as to why behavioral ads suck. They make you realize just how much companies are spying on you and using your data to feed you crap. Would I really want to have any part in this kind of an endeavor? Let's be real here.

<comment><USER23> I bought a Casper mattress around a year ago and the websites I visit are _still_ full of ads for mattresses. How many mattresses do they think I need, anyway!?

<comment><USER24> Funny you mention them, because I've only ever heard of Casper in podcasts, one of the few remaining non-targeted digital ad slots.

Unless "listens to X podcast" counts as targeting, but that's no different from "reads X magazine" in offline media. No creepy tracking required.

<comment><USER20> > Unless "listens to X podcast" counts as targeting

It doesn't, except to the adtech targeters who want to muddy the water.

Ad targeting in this context means individualized targeting based on individualize tracking and data collection, full stop.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> It's amazing how so many people who no knowledge of online advertising post so confidently in these threads. Since I have a lot of experience with targeted ads, it makes me trust the comments on topics I'm not an expert on less.

<comment><USER20> > It's amazing how so many people who no knowledge of online advertising post > so confidently in these threads. Since I have a lot of experience with > targeted ads...

Since you seem to work in adtech or advertising, that famous Upton Sinclair quote probably legitimately applies to you ("It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!").

That's the big problem here. The people with the most knowledge of adtech are likely biased and untrustworthy due to their economic interests, but the people who lack that bias also have less knowledge.

What needs to happen is that you and other adtech people should volunteer to be interviewed by some deep investigative journalism piece by a place like the NY Times or ProPublica. They could take your knowledge, filter out some of the self interest, and educate the rest of us.

<comment><USER26> > Since you seem to work in adtech or advertising, that famous Upton Sinclair > quote probably legitimately applies to you ("It is difficult to get a man to > understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding > it!").

It seems worth commenting that you could make the same argument about not listening to doctors for medical advice. In this context, it just seems like you're making an appeal against authority.

<comment><USER20> > It seems worth commenting that you could make the same argument about not > listening to doctors for medical advice. In this context, it just seems like > you're making an appeal against authority.

You could, but mainly against things like billing practices and perhaps the necessity of certain procedures where there might be a conflict of interest.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm no advertising expert, but I have seen a number of stories over the years of companies being disillusioned by the promise of targeted ads. One common thread I've noticed is that most people don't have a targeted product and a targeted message. Most products generally have broad appeal and a lot of ad campaigns work by changing the general perception of a product.

Advertising in the New York Times in general is already targeted in some fashion (you know the basic demographic of New York Times readers), and if you want to advertise laundry detergent there's not a lot to gain from knowing a person's exact age and the gender of all his siblings siblings and the top keyword searches he made on Pornhub. Logically speaking, it seems for targeted advertising to be worth it, you'd need an unusually high response to advertising among a very narrow selection of people who can be identified as such, and that these people don't have an obvious place where they can be found.

In the case of the New York Times, that means you have a product whose message is going to be wasted on the majority of the population; who can only be communicated with through a general interest publisher like the New York Times, but not a website or conference dedicated to that thing; but who can none the less be easily identified through invasive and secretive tracking data, but not through what news stories they're viewing; who will be very responsive to advertising (so not people who are domain experts in a particular hobby or career and will choose a product by intentionally seeking information on that product and rationally weigh their alternatives); and who are a large enough group that it's even worth putting together an advertising campaign.

And how responsive are people to ads even on a base level anyway? Award- winning campaigns like "You Got Milk" had massive impact on culture and awareness, but didn't drive sales.

With so many hurdles, targeted advertising seems like something that provides only marginal and diminishing returns. Newspapers seem like just about the worst place to benefit from violating user privacy. It's like trying to sell Linux dev ops software by asking a top 40 radio station to play ads for it after specific songs.

</comment><comment><USER28> They are dancing around the issue avoiding to state the revenue that they had from EU targeted advertising. This is NYtimes, they attract american advertising and are primarily targeted at americans. They don't even rely on advertising anymore, they have subscribers. Their story is not very telling for everyone else. Anecdotally, since switching to contextual ads in may my adsense revenue has fallen by ~50% : [https://i.imgur.com/Ec5LwZg.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/Ec5LwZg.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER29> This does not surprise me. A few things that I know about the ad business:

\- There are a lot of players in the market

\- Most of them oversell their ability to actually target effectively; I actually know some sales people in this space. Bla bla, machine learning, bla bla bla algorithms, bla bla bla smoke and mirrors.

\- Especially the smaller players tend to not have usable profiles on the vast majority of users for reasons of not having existed long enough or not having enough customers to have actually captured enough relevant data.

\- Any new ad company has to fake it for quite some time until they actually have enough data. And with GDPR, that data is now a lot harder to come by legally.

\- Some of ad companies are fraudulent in the sense that they overcharge their customers for clicks that never happened. E.g. bot traffic is a big revenue driver for ad providers and most of them conveniently can't tell the difference between a bot and a user they supposedly profiled.

So, what just happened is that the NYT cut off most of the worst offenders in this space and ended up with better quality ad providers with better conversions (even without profiling).

Profiling is actually only needed if you have lots of ads competing for the same space. If you reduce the number of ads, the need for profiling goes away. Also, you compensate for bad profiling this way since more (random) people will see your ad. So previously under-performing ads might actually benefit from being shown to random people as opposed to some silly algorithm that uses bad/incomplete profile data to take the wrong decisions.

So what the NYT figured out is that they are better served by a small number of high value ads shown to random people than a great many low quality ads from low quality providers targeted to a handful of their users.

Targeting still has a place in this market but it needs to be consensual; which is going to be a tough sell to end users.

</comment><comment><USER30> What I found most interesting about the 'block Europe' movement among news sites: If the news sites favor their own revenue over the peoples right for privacy, what are my expectations towards the information they serve?

I mean, if most news sites are getting their biggest revenue via online targeting, who am I expecting to report abusive behavior among ad networks?

<comment><USER31> You're right! News outlets consistently choosing to favor their own revenues over a basic human right to private is _very_ surprising.

Perhaps they made a choice that looks the same from the outside, but could perhaps be very different from the inside? GDPR implementation is rarely as cheap, straightforward, or easy as some of its adherents might have you think. It can be a large, difficult, expensive undertaking. It may be worth bearing in mind that not every journalistic outlet has a sizable, disciplined, competent technical organization or the financial wherewithal to acquire one rapidly. These days, running a newspaper is famously a poor business.

Might it be possible that organizations, faced with a choice between an easy way to cut some costs and a potentially non-trivial investment for marginal return, might in some circumstances opt for the former?

Again, you're absolutely right that this looks like a crass choice between naked greed and basic human rights. It's just possible that it might be more.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The likely process at play here is cutting out the middle man from ad placement.

Before GDPR, a company would have likely contacted an ad agency to target the population that reads the NYT. Ads would then be sold to a pool of websites that included the NYT. After GDPR, this is no longer possible as the individual websites have stopped sharing targeting information with the ad agency. The only solution available to the same company is then to buy directly from the NYT (and maybe a few other big websites) rather than "syndicate" the ads through the agency.

It would be interesting to know how ad placements changed pre/post GDPR and how the ad revenue distribution shifted across different websites.

<comment><USER33> Cutting out the middlemen and their asinine trackers might also help reduce the number of third-party scripts and random HTTP requests on the page. This will make the page load faster, especially on mobile. Which is known to help increase revenue.

<comment><USER6> > This will make the page load faster, especially on mobile. Which is known to > help increase revenue.

Most ad loaders actually run async these days, cutting out middlemen/trackers doesn't help you for time-to-first-readable-content. Biggest culprit there are expensive assets like dozens of different fonts/variation combos, pre-roll video ads and uncompressed images.

<comment><USER33> Ad-infested pages often feel sluggish even after all the readable content has loaded. It feels like the page hasn't finished loading yet.

After all, it takes CPU, RAM, and bandwidth to run scripts and load images in the background. The difference is especially noticeable on mobile, and it's even worse when the scripts trigger redraws or mess with the scrolling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Reading this makes me happy as I'm currently working on a service [0] (not available yet) to allow sites to do this. The goal is to facilitate and make ad selling/scheduling easy while having websites/etc. serve the ads themselves, ensuring no tracking (by my service) is possible.

A lot of people are already doing direct sales via mail and then work out a way to get paid somehow, which can be cumbersome. Hoping to make that easier, while also improving the bad, intrusive behaviour around ads.

[0] [https://www.adsfromsource.com](https://www.adsfromsource.com)

</comment><comment><USER35> I toyed around for awhile with an idea I called Gadfly. Basically it's an idea for complete opt in advertising. It would have a dashboard for setting up what ads I want to see. So I could put in friends birthdays, things they like, and around that time get relevant ads of things to buy that they may like. Or I could say that I need a new laptop, and while I browse see relevant ads for what I want. I was hoping to make ads work for me, as I do understand 1 big reason for marketing, letting me know things that I want are available.

<comment><USER36> While that idea would never work (who is going to bother with that faff rather than just googling laptops?) it does also show why Google can make so much money from ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> This is not terribly surprising. Ad exchanges work because network effects allow for improving small content providers increased effectiveness in selling their space. If you are a large content producer you have enough people seeking to advertise.

However, I have concerns about the economic efficiency (broadly speaking), as well as the dynamic optimality of advertising (though, admittedly, this is a second order concern to me!).

</comment><comment><USER38> Here's an interesting 2nd order effect:

I switched off most of the stuff I could after GDPR went into force, so at first glance it seemed that I started getting trash.

That was until I saw a banner with a unappealing gray background with a fragment of a poem.

It was an ad. For a poem. This one specifically: [https://thelastwhy.ca/poems/2009/7/12/age-of- asininity.html?...](https://thelastwhy.ca/poems/2009/7/12/age-of- asininity.html?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI18aJkubq3wIVCQvgCh3UeQIdEAEYASAAEgLJ0PD_BwE)

No way in hell I would discover such a thing had my ads been targeted and personalised, since those usually are reactive, so they show e.g. stuff you recently bought(meaning: been searching for recently).

</comment><comment><USER39> *in Europe. American readers, it seems, are still subject to targeted advertising.

</comment><comment><USER40> Isn't this an example of regulations helping established players? Sure, the NYT is able to direct sell ads, but an upstart publisher can't. That doesn't necessarily mean that GDPR's pros don't outweigh the cons, but "The New York Times can direct sell ads" isn't exactly evidence of "Anyone can avoid GDPR having an impact on ad revenue"

</comment><comment><USER41> For premium publishers such as the NY Times, I'm not surprised there isn't a drop off in revenue when targeted ads were dropped.

They are pretty much all high value visitors (from an economic perspective).

</comment><comment><USER42> Building a quality brand with a quality audience and finding advertisers who believe in you generates more revenue than participating in an exchange that treats ad impressions as a commodity. Go figure.

</comment><comment><USER43> Why would any premium website even agree to ads that track users? Exchanges can tag NYT's customers, and then sell the same audience, but on other, cheaper properties.

</comment><comment><USER44> Ad revenue is growing because the economy ( both in the US and europe ) has been improving, Trump news boost and because the NYTimes/et al has strong- armed tech companies into giving them preferential treatment. The NYTimes and other large news companies have been taking market share from smaller companies like Vox as they push tech companies to drive traffic to themselves over smaller players. Whether it is a temporary bump or has legs, we will have to see. Not sure what GDPR has to do with anything since the ad revenues had been growing before GDPR.

</comment><comment><USER45> I work in adtech. This has nothing to do with how effective targeting is, and a single site does not reflect the entire industry when they're all competing for the same pool of ad dollars.

There is a massive drop in EU programmatic advertising because of GDPR. Most EU advertisers now buy a few large campaigns with coarse targeting instead, and sites with the biggest reach like NYT will get more money but there's less money in the overall market.

This is another case of regulation benefiting the bigger players (advertisers and publishers). EDIT: curious what downvotes are disagreeing with here.

<comment><USER46> I don't understand. What stands in the way of a small niche website for, say, dog owners to sell ad space for dog related products without having some kind of data hoarding ad tech behind it?

<comment><USER45> Because advertisers don't want to deal with a bunch of smaller sites. That's why ad networks and exchanges exist, so you can buy a single impression for the right user wherever they are across the web.

Take away the fine-grained targeting and you end up with big blind campaigns running on a few large sites with the biggest reach. This is the way TV and radio work, wasteful and expensive but great for the channels that get them.

<comment><USER47> Why can't middlemen still exist, just without the individual targeting? Can't sites still self-report their categories (so that, say, a dog grooming site would say they should get dog ads)?

<comment><USER45> They can and they do, that's what ad networks are. There are plenty of ways to group sites by category and readership without individual targeting but middlemen add percentage costs to the ad spend which the industry has been slowly pushing out.

The bigger issue is that fine-grained targeting is still wanted so if you remove 3rd-party tracking then advertisers will go towards the biggest sites that can supply it via their own 1st-party tracking. Even then it's still hard to work with many vendors so even more of the money is now going to Google and Facebook who can just do it all with better data than anyone else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> « It's the eeeend of the woooorld »

</comment><comment><USER49> With other words GDPR does not make ad based companies less profitable. Amazing, thank you EU!

</comment><comment><USER50> Why is the New York times...key words being New York even paying any attention to the GDPR?

I don't get why so many US based websites are concerned about an EU law.

<comment><USER6> > I don't get why so many US based websites are concerned about an EU law.

Given that they likely have paying EU customers for subscription, they operate in the EU area. Which means they _can_ be subjected to GDPR. Enforcement would be difficult, of course, but not impossible (think of seizing credit-card payments or bank transfers for sales proceedings of printed NYT in Europe).

And GDPR violation fines can be massive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Typical modern-day "journalism".

"A scramble to implement GDPR, last-minute scramble to inplement GDPR when it arrived in May" vs "it won't be a scramble in the US, as companies will have until 2020 to prepare".

These companies similarly had two years to prepare. And I'm glad they took the hit for not doing so. I'm also glad they're discovering that selling private info left and right isn't the only way to earn money with ads.

</comment><comment><USER52> Meanwhile, NYT experiments with predicting readers' emotional state and using that information to target ad placement...

[https://digiday.com/media/project-feels-usa-today-espn- new-y...](https://digiday.com/media/project-feels-usa-today-espn-new-york- times-targeting-ads-mood/)

NYT is deeply hypocritical when it comes to digital advertising.

<comment><USER53> Yup. uBlock Origin blocks 20 requests, and PrivacyBadger blocks another 7 requests...I wouldn't visit nytimes.com without those installed.</comment></comment>


A Forth haiku is an attempt to mix math, art and Forth - <AUTHOR> http://forthsalon.appspot.com/

<comment><USER2> This is awesome and really shows off the beautiful compactness of Forth.

It took me a moment to figure out what to actually do. Basically you just write a little program that produces three floating-point values from 0.0 to 1.0, and these are used as the R, G, and B channels of each pixel in the output. For example, an all-red image is:

        1 0 0

And a blue-cyan-magenta rectangle is:

        x y 1

You get the x and y of the current pixel with the "x" and "y" words, and you get the current time with the "t" word in order to make animations. Here's one that continually oscillates between black and white:

        : r 5 ;
        : sin' sin 1 + 2 / ;
        : t' t r * sin' ;
        t' t' t'

(You can change the value of "r" to make it oscillate faster or slower.)

Looking at the glossary[1] and cannibalising other examples is really helpful.

[1]: [http://forthsalon.appspot.com/word- list](http://forthsalon.appspot.com/word-list)

<comment><USER3> You can put a 4th value on the stack, and it's interpreted as the alpha value.

<comment><USER2> Cool. Unfortunately I saw all these things on the "about" page _after_ I had figured out how to use it through trial and error. That's what I get for not paying attention!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> See also IBNIZ, a livecoding environment with a language inspired by (and even more terse than) FORTH.

[http://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/12/ibniz-hardcore- au...](http://countercomplex.blogspot.com/2011/12/ibniz-hardcore-audiovisual- virtual.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> [http://forthsalon.appspot.com/haiku- view/ahBzfmZvcnRoc2Fsb24...](http://forthsalon.appspot.com/haiku- view/ahBzfmZvcnRoc2Fsb24taHJkchILEgVIYWlrdRiAgICAstmWCgw)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wondered if the Forth code was being transpiled into JS or GLSL. Inspecting the source reveals it is JS, which seems sensible since it has stacks.

That made me wonder, how hard would it be to turn Forth code into imperative GLSL? Seems like a fun exercise and would allow huge canvases.

</comment><comment><USER7> I seem to remember something similar but used a C like language.

<comment><USER3> [http://shadertoy.com/](http://shadertoy.com/) uses GLSL (or whatever its WebGL equivalent is). Is that what you're thinking of?

(The language is syntactically similar to C, but quite different from it in some respects, as it compiles to code that runs directly on the GPU. GPUs have a very different execution model from a CPU - though they have been moving closer together and I guess that trend will continue. On the plus side, the performance can be excellent, provided your PC has a decent GPU.)</comment></comment>


Judge Rules Milwaukee Flouted U.S. Constitution in Response to Pokemon Go Craze - <AUTHOR> http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/judge-rules-milwaukee-wisconsin-flouted-us-constitution-response-pokemon-go-craze-1023069 <comment><USER2> Funny how for the longest time now, cities and counties take more and more money from public parks citing their underuse... then when they get used, they cry out legally to stop the use.

Part of the costs of a park is cleaning up after people, its already in the budget. So is the landscaping. So is the coverage for wear and tear in general.

Its also funny to see the difference. National Park Service embraces Pokemon Go and enjoyed the increased park traffic. Austin embraced it and stores all over downtown and even government buildings had specials for Pokemon GO'ers (some public art museums here gave like 50% off admission if you were Pokemon hunting)

And the fact that so many normally sedentary people were getting up and going out and doing shit and getting exercise .. and people still went out of their way to be dicks about it... I don't get it.

Aside from Niantic's handling of the game, its PR and its issues, the pokemon GO craze was probably one of the most positive, healthy things to go viral in a very long time in the US...

<comment><USER3> > And the fact that so many normally sedentary people were getting up and > going out and doing shit and getting exercise

A minor nit, but Pokemon go did not increase activity levels for most players.

[http://www.nhs.uk/news/2016/12December/Pages/Pok%C3%A9mon- no...](http://www.nhs.uk/news/2016/12December/Pages/Pok%C3%A9mon-no-go-games- exercise-effects-short-lived-in-most-players.aspx)

[http://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6270](http://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6270)

<comment><USER4> It just increased general phone usage by ~16% per day. Daily path length stayed the same. (Source: study on 2800 phone users that played Pokemon GO. Data collected for at least 4 weeks having the first gaming session in the middle. Data was collected through an app that monitors your phone usage, no self-reported data. Will be presented at MobileHCI '17)

<comment><USER5> Too small a sample size for physical activity (fine for HCI, though) and was probably orchestrated after the hype of it. Does this paper live in those parameters?

<comment><USER4> Initial sample size was 21k users but we've reduced it to the people that filled some questionnaire regarding demographics and personality traits. To which parameters are you referring?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> Paul-ish This seems like a place where industry self-regulation could be helpful. It could be helpful if there were an organization that would keep track of blacklisted areas (eg whitehouse lawn) and release them for all to the public, and developers in particular, for easy consumption. There would need to be some procedure for adding or removing regions from the database, eg a written request from a relevant government official acting in their capacity as an official.

I think we would see less heavy handed actions if there was a lighter touch option available.

<comment><USER2> Or... we place the blame on being in bad places where the blame belongs.

If I throw $10,000 over the white house fence and you jump the fence to get to it, its still YOUR problem and YOU are the one at fault for being where you arent supposed to be.

Place the blame on the people who disregard the rules, the game isnt responsible because it placed something there.

This would be like... "Hey, you shot a deer in the middle of the street downtown during deer season, i guess its not your fault that you were hunting deer in the middle of the street, there was a deer here afterall..."

<comment><USER6> > If I throw $10,000 over the white house fence and you jump the fence to get > to it, its still YOUR problem and YOU are the one at fault for being where > you arent supposed to be.

Actually, I'm fairly sure throwing objects over the White House fence without some authority is _also_ illegal, so in your example _both_ parties would legally be at fault.

<comment><USER7> Somehow, I don't think normal rules apply to people who have enough spare money so that can they toss $10,000 just to see what you will do.

<comment><USER7> Interesting how this went through up and downvotes.

Yet no one telling me why I am wrong.

There are so many ways to dodge rules with money. One could be a diplomat and immune, claim it was a campaign donation to get the favor and therefor lenience of the incumbent, use the rest of the money to hire suberb lawyers to drag the case out forever, Since its the presidents lawn a presidential pardon might help or of any of the other ways were having a ton of wealth simply provides more options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> If this interests you, you might like this talk about virtual worlds and their consequences, from someone who actually has deep experience with the subject: [https://vimeo.com/208372546](https://vimeo.com/208372546)

</comment><comment><USER9> Wow, that is an extremely thoughtful judge.

<comment><USER10> Federal judges tend to be incredibly competent and intelligent. It's not an elected position like it is for most state judges.</comment></comment>


How to work on cool stuff - <AUTHOR> http://www.planeterlang.org/en/planet/article/How_to_work_on_cool_stuff/

<comment><USER2> I really love hearing advice from people who just "took the risk" and quit their job. It's one thing to take a risk, but what I want to know is how they could actually DO it and still, you know, pay the mortgage and pay for food and such.

Is it just that they accumulate massive savings for just this purpose, or what?

<comment><USER3> As a single person, $5,000 is 3 months of leisure. That's hardly unatainable.

<comment><USER4> he mentioned having a mortgage. Assuming a 300,000 house, 30 year mortgage at 5.7% or so, that's gotta be at least $2300. $5000, won't last more than 1.5 months in that situation.

<comment><USER3> My dad's mortgage payment is less than my rent payment. But I suppose if you assume living in an overpriced California suburb, then yes, it is hard to do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Two anecdotes ≠ general rule.

<comment><USER6> I was thinking the same until I got to the end of the post:

>Don't worry about building the next Google or making lots of money, because you'll probably fail. But the lessons you learn and the connections you make will be worth it.

The general spirit of the piece is good.

<comment><USER7> +1

<comment><USER8> FYI: If you want to upvote, just do it. Comments that add value to the discussion seem to be received much more warmly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Anyone know if Vimagi got acquired by Facebook, or did Yariv just create a Vimagi facebook app?</comment>


I'm a Judge and I Think Criminal Court Is Horrifying - <AUTHOR> https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/08/11/i-m-a-judge-and-i-think-criminal-court-is-horrifying <comment><USER2> Several years ago, I was arrested on a hacking charge and got to see first hand the appalling nature of our legal system in criminal courts.

Normally, after your arrest, you have to have a hearing within 24-48 hours, but if they arrest you on a Friday as they did me, they are allowed to detain you for an extra day because it's the weekend. I'm sure this is a tactic used often to frighten and goad people. My hearing was exactly as the judge in this article describes. There were lots of minor, non violent offenders in the court room with me, most minorities, and many couldn't speak English well at all. The judge would openly mock them and condescend. One man obviously had no idea what he was even pleading to because his English was so poor.

Once I got to higher court for my actual sentencing, it was no different. The judge didn't even read my case and the clerk forgot to have it presented and available for the judge to review. My lawyer had to give him her own copy which he briefly skimmed without adjournment. I later discovered that the prosecuting attorney was good friends with the plaintiff and the investigating FBI officer assigned to my case.

The courts in America are a joke, the legal system is in bad need of an overhaul. I couldn't believe the level of incompetence, racism, bias and prejudice existed there.

<comment><USER3> I went to court in New Jersey in a wealthiest white suburb and what I saw seemed perfectly fine. There was a man there who, a rather sad case really, was in an accident that gave him brain damage and caused him to behave strangely. His wife had a restraining order against him and apparently he had broken into the house in the middle of the night to give his son a birthday present, then gone to sleep on the couch. It took around half an hour for the judge to patiently explain to him what was going on ascertain bail and all that jazz. He was very patient. I think the key thing about the article was that this is a courthouse in the Bronx. The way we treat the poor in this country is absolutely atrocious. We give them substandard educational facilities, poor infrastructure, treat them like garbage in the justice system, then perpetuate the myth that successful people in America deserve to be successful and that if you're poor it's because there's something wrong with you and must not have tried hard enough or been smart enough.

<comment><USER4> I wonder if someone could get all the court transcripts from these jurisdictions and do sentiment analysis on them and correlate against the average house prices in the courts' area.

<comment><USER5> If someone does do this, I'd be very interested in reading the outcome. Sounds like a fantastic idea. There's a few people who I've seen post on HN before that are familiar with filing FOIA requests. If the dataset can be acquired and released, I'm pretty sure there's enough people on HN who might be willing to work together in the open to write the analysis.

<comment><USER6> Admittedly, I didn't read the article. That said, I'm very familiar w/ the FOIA process and have a legal team setup to send them out; if the volume isn't huge then the cost isn't tremendous.

If you could provide more specific information to me on what would be beneficial/useful to FOIA, I'd be more than happy to take a look, and likely send them -- and put them up on a public Github repo with a license that makes the data useful.

Email me -- arthur [at] dantonio [dot] co [no M].

<comment><USER7> I would be willing to donate (a small amount) for these expenses. If it comes together, please put me in any mailing lists or message me directly.

<comment><USER8> Ditto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The criminal justice system can be jarring, even to those of us who are lawyers. I was a clerk for a judge in Philadelphia, and saw a ton of criminal convictions - usually drug cases - come up on appeal. Two things stuck out: (1) we jail a lot of people for stupid things; (2) there are a lot of bad people in these communities.[1]

I'd see someone appealing a sentence for selling some OxyContin and think, "geez, what a waste of money to put this guy in prison." But he's got a rap sheet a mile long - theft, robbery, assault, etc.

The treatment of the criminally-accused in this country is deplorable. But it's also the product of a society that got fed up with skyrocketing crime a few decades ago and responded in a harsh and heartless manner. Crime is a lot lower today than it was in the 1990s, but even in the safest American cities murder rates are 5 times higher than big cities in Europe that aren't even considered that safe (like Berlin). And crime is heavily concentrated in poor places like the Bronx.

And the usual canard - for profit prisons - isn't even applicable here. Private prisons are illegal in New York. This isn't lobbying at work, this is purely a product of the democratic will reacting to devilish social issues. That's what makes it so hard to fix.

[1] I was also living in downtown Baltimore during the post-Freddie Gray unrest. I was disappointed to see the acquittals. At the same time, if I were in those cops' shoes, I'm not sure if have the moral strength to be any different. Society needs a certain amount of order to function. In much of Baltimore, that order doesn't exist. Gangs are in charge and the law-abiding people of those neighborhoods are the biggest victims of that.

<comment><USER10> Just because it is a public prison doesn't mean there aren't people making money to lock people up. There is prison labor, there is money handling (it costs money to send money to prisoners), there is the commissary, there are phone calls that cost $5 for 15 minutes. At every step of the way, the system beats down and exploits the most vulnerable in society. And they do profit. There are people doing time for petty theft simply because they can't pay the fees to get out of jail. [1]

[1] [http://www.npr.org/2016/05/05/476844416/colorado-springs- agr...](http://www.npr.org/2016/05/05/476844416/colorado-springs-agrees-to- stop-jailing-people-too-poor-to-pay-court-fines)

<comment><USER11> Back in college I used to do odd programming jobs for local companies to make ends meet. (It was basically contracting, but I was too young to know that at the time.)

Anyway, one of the jobs I did back then was to move a Paradox db to Access. (Yes, this was a LOOOOONNNNGGGGG time ago.) It was for a company that provided goods to jails around the state for the commissaries, as well as providing food for the inmates meals. I recall doing double takes at the prices that they were charging for some of the things they were "selling". A simple small bag of Cheetos would be marked up 5 or 6 hundred percent. Sanitary goods might be marked up a thousand percent. The list went on and on. It was crazy. And it was, most likely, VERY good money for that firm.

I don't know if they have gotten rid of those firms, but that is one place where A LOT of money was being made at the time. The more prisoners there were, the more money that company would make. Because the prisoners would buy these goods from the commissaries at ENORMOUS markups.

Not only that, but I always thought there was a HUGE potential externality built into that business. I mean, this is just speculation, but let's suppose companies like this supply prisons as well as jails. Well you could have a prisoner that is allowed to buy Cheetos and Snickers bars and sit around and get obese for his 30 year term. Only at year 20 he comes down with diabetes, or heart disease. (Not surprising.) And the tax payer is actually stuck with the bill for the medical care for the last 10 years, even though those companies made all the money off of selling the prisoner the Cheetos that contributed to the heart disease.

That job really was eye-opening for me.

<comment><USER12> What should the markup be? What you say sounds very high indeed, but there is a certain markup that will be required. Why? Operating a commissary in a prison is more complex than a local convenience store

(I'm making some assumptions here) each bag of Cheetos needs to be individually inspected to make sure that nothing is being smuggled into the prison. This would go for every item being sold into the prison.

It would be interesting to see what would happen if there was competition in selling into prisons, but my guess is you'd end up with some kind of split duopoly at best where things would be about the same as they are now. The reason is that no one can just establish a new business, which is the most important thing for creating competition.

<comment><USER13> >Operating a commissary in a prison is more complex than a local convenience store

Why so? Here they just got a few pallets of normal grocery store stuff and mostly used inmate labor to run it.

Really simple and costs essentially nothing to operate, especially since they don't have to be open every day.

The only complexity comes from potentially transporting the inmates to the commissary, but that's not a particularly efficient way to do it when you can just give inmates paper "menus" where they can just fill in their orders and have them brought to their cell blocks.

<comment><USER12> The reason (the only reasonable one o can come up with) is the added cost of inspection before selling them.

I don't disagree that the mark up mentioned in the post was extreme, but I don't have a good idea of what it would be otherwise.

Based on my having visited places with high tariffs, or a difficult place to deliver things (top of a mountain) you definitely see large markups. Not 6x, but 2x-3x isn't uncommon.

<comment><USER14> > the added cost of inspection before selling them.

I wouldn't expect the supplier to bear this cost; it's the jailers who are doing the inspecting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And I hear from family and friends about how we 'coddle' people in the system too much, and we're not 'tough' enough.

A large number of our people seem to think if we're sufficiently cruel and inhuman to people accused of breaking the law, then people will magically stop getting suspected of breaking the law. It's more than a little horrifying seeing people's eyes light up when they talk about how our cops aren't afraid to kill people and how merciless our prisons are.

This horrifying system is a symptom of our cruelty, and any move to make this more humane (or less of an atrocity) will face stiff resistance from people who get off on seeing people get punished.

I don't know what I can do, or what anyone can do.

<comment><USER16> I'd like to see a move away from sentencing being regarded as punishment. It should be more along the lines of a person needing to be withdrawn from society for a time because they cannot behave themselves. I.e. it should be about protecting society from them.

<comment><USER17> That removal from society _is_ punishing. Confinement and institutionalization are harsh things to do to a person.

<comment><USER18> I agree with you: deprivation of a person's liberty is, in itself, a harsh punishment, even without taking into account the details of their incarceration.

However, reasons matter. If policy dictates the purpose is to punish, then that justifies longer sentences "to make sure they are sufficiently punished" and to be ill-treated because "they are here to be punished".

If policy dictates the purpose is to act as a deterrent to other crimes, then sentences are not justified as any longer than required to serve that purpose. That can be empirically observed, and I believe it has been studied and shown there is a strong scope insensitivity to the magnitude of punishments. This is even more pronounced in criminals, who are disproportionately more likely to have lower-than-average general intelligence or impulse control issues.

If policy dictates the purpose is to keep the criminal out of society until they are ready to rejoin it, then incarceration should be optimised for preparing them to return to society, and they should not be kept imprisoned any longer when they are ready. How to judge whether this has been accomplished is difficult, but the effectiveness of the methods can be empirically observed, principally by recidivism rates.

Note that the purpose of "punishment" is the only reason of these that cannot be empirically observed. It can justify just about any mistreatment, and doesn't, as far as I can tell, have any firm ethical justification except for the religious or pseudo-religious.

So even if it seems like a minor question, deciding the purpose of the criminal justice system is of the utmost importance and has wide-ranging policy implications.

<comment><USER17> Neither GP or I expressed a great deal of nuance, but _I 'd like to see a move away from sentencing being regarded as punishment._ calls for a reply. It should absolutely be regarded as a punishment. It's just that we are damn fools if that's all we use it for.

<comment><USER16> I see a very big difference in imposing a sentence as punishment and imposing a sentence as protecting society from the offender.

Withdrawing a person from society is certainly punishment, but that should not be the point.

<comment><USER17> Yeah, I said _Neither GP or I expressed a great deal of nuance_ because I didn't expect much disagreement. It's just the phrase you used is an unfortunate way to express the thought, because we should always keep in mind the harsh part of it, and it sort of sets it aside.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I had a friend who ended up with a drug related charge. When bailing them out, the bondsman, who was a conservative, ex cop, hardened and huge, told me how my friend was lucky to get the judge they got.

There were three judges in that court and one was known to be particularly rough. A defendant (drug charges, heroin) was asking for bail to be set, had secured a bed in a locked down rehab facility and the judge denied his bond. The bondsman said he had never seen someone leave the courtroom so broken.

Here is a case where a man acknowledges his crime, says he will do his time but wants more than anything to get clean. And securing a bed in a lock down rehab facility, besides being expensive, is not easy. Here is a case where the state had every interest in sending the man to rehab, even to save the cost of housing them in a jail, but the system doesn't care. The DA, the judge, don't care. Bail denied because the man had missed a hearing due to being in another jail after being picked up on the street with dope.

The bondsman said he sees this kind of thing every day. It was the rule, not the exception. People are just cycled in and out of the system. The addict will get locked up, released and locked up again.

</comment><comment><USER19> I've observed the criminal justice system at work in Texas a few times. A murder case, some misdemeanors, a few felonies. I've seen it from arrest to prison life.

It is a dark and deeply depressing thing. There is little compassion for victims, the accused, the convicted. I could write a thousand words but it pains me to think about it.

I pray I never get falsely accused of a crime and I'm so glad I'm not black. If all the boring white folk who couldn't fathom finding themselves so much as suspected of a crime had to go through the criminal justice system as the average YBM the system would be massively overhauled yesterday.

Most of the boring white folk I know think everyone in jail is a cold blooded psychopath who works out all day and dreams of stabbing people... "hardened criminal".

The system is just full of unlucky humans. God knows I did shit in my youth I could still be in prison for. The extremely violent type are actually quite rare.

<comment><USER20> My observation is that most criminals fall into a category that would be solved with "impulse control" pills and/or better mental health treatment. The big difference I have observed, independent of race, wealth, etc. is that people who have criminal records tend to "go off" while others do not. Otherwise it may as well be the same person.

<comment><USER21> I believe that if we can understand what make them tick, we can fix them.

Though that also comes with it the horrifying possibility of dystopian societal control.

<comment><USER22> "we" vs "them"...

I am always surprised when I (very often though) hear/read "normal" people, generally meaning good, who think that there are two separate kinds of individuals, the "we" and the "them"; who cannot fathom that all of "us" may slide slowly or fall suddenly into the "them" category.

<comment><USER21> Just to be clear, I thought everyone has a capacity for murder and other crimes.

Fixing 'them' may also involves fixing 'us' since crimes also occur in the context of our social environment. Think of prosecutors and the police. They are driven by incentive and cognitive bias to commit gross miscarriage of justice and get away with it.

In order to do that, you have to know humanity on an uncomfortably and dangerous deep level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I never understood the concept of "plea bargain" in the USA that comes up in the article. Either somebody is guilty and should be convicted by a judge or they are not guilty and should have the chance for a fair trial. I can see that there are situations where they can be useful but they seem to be the norm instead of being used in certain, limited situations. Scaring somebody into pleading guilty for a lesser sentence is simply unfair and in my eyes undemocratic.

<comment><USER24> What I never got isn't how plea bargains are treated differently than bribing a witness. You're paying the witness (defendant) in the form of a lesser punishment to possibly commit PERJURY by admitting to doing something they didn't in a court of law. Just because the bribe isn't with currency doesn't mean it's not a bribe. And even ignoring that fact, it's still perjury. How is that legal?

And before someone says it's similar to pleading not guilty when you are guilty, AFAIK, a plea bargain is different; It's an admission of guilt, not a declaration of guilt. Declaration != admission.

<comment><USER25> In my younger days, I was offered a plea bargain to plead _nolo contendre_ (no contest, as in "I do not contest the charge nor do I admit guilt") to a lesser charge in exchange for: probation, adjudication withheld (no conviction on my record) and, once probation was served, record expungement.

I got the impression it was because the state's attorney felt I would best learn my lesson with that outcome than the otherwise mandatory sentence for the crime with which I was originally charged — non-violent, mind you; it was a bounced check. Yes, really.

So in _some_ cases, plea bargaining is a "way out" of otherwise too-harsh sentencing. Yes, _the sentencing guidelines should be overhauled_ , but in today's legislative climate, the path of least resistance is simply to allow the prosecution the flexibility to charge a defendant with a lesser crime.

<comment><USER26> The prosecution already has the flexibility to decline to prosecute. They shouldn't prosecute anyone who doesn't deserve to be punished. In theory, it's an important check on the legal system, but in practice, it turns out attorneys like being employed, so they make work for themselves.

<comment><USER27> I guess here the point was that here we had someone who deserved to be punished. But a slap on the wrist was a more appropriate punishment than putting the person in jail - and at the same time, not prosecuting wasn't appropriate either.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I have some family friends, and their son recently got arrested for a felony drug dealing charge at the end of his spring semester at college. From what I understand, the police built this whole sting to catch the guy at his school mailbox when he got his shipment from whatever Silk Road's current successor is. Anyway, he confessed everything and now he's just waiting around, unable to get a job because interviewers invariably ask why he stopped school. Apparently having a job really helps in these cases.

Anyway, they remarked one day on the phone, "we've never dealt with criminal Court, and we don't know anything about it, except the lawyer doesn't sound very optimistic. The only hope we have is because the system is so racist that being middle class and white might actually save us."

They also said something about how the police were pushing some angle about using Tor. I'm very concerned about that: I can just picture the ghost story that the prosecutors are going to tell some septuagenarian judge about this special internet for terrorists and arms dealers.

</comment><comment><USER29> _I was shocked at the casual racism emanating from the bench. The judge explained a "stay away" order to a Hispanic defendant by saying that if the complainant calls and invites you over for "rice and beans," you cannot go. She lectured some defendants that most young men "with names like yours" have lengthy criminal records by the time they reach a certain age._

Thereby instantly disqualifying herself from the privilege of serving on the bench. Ample grounds for impeachment, by any reasonable standard.

<comment><USER30> Just to give you an idea of how difficult it is to actually impeach a judge, only fifteen(15) Federal judges have been successfully impeached in the entire history of the United States.[1]

1\. [http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/judges_impeachments...](http://www.fjc.gov/history/home.nsf/page/judges_impeachments.html)

<comment><USER31> Shouldn't have to be so drastic as impeachment; it would be enough that judges and other staff are watched and their performance reviewed. This judge clearly should get a stern warning that racism will not be tolerated. Repeat offenders should simply be fired. They are employees that have superiors after all.

<comment><USER32> Nope, federal judges are not "employees that have superiors" they are civil officers of the united states whose appointments are approved by the Senate. Impeachment is the only way to 'fire' a federal judge. I suppose the plus side of this is that the government can't fire them for political reasons or because they don't like their judgements. Without impeachment anyway. A federal judge does not have a 'superior'.

<comment><USER31> Thanks for that explanation. Sounds completely broken if only 15 were ever impeached (assuming a lot more than 15 were likely bad apples). Even a short clip of obvious racism _should_ result in impeachment as you can't be fit to serve as a judge if you don't consider everyone equal.

Judges should be hard to replace (see e.g Turkey right now) - but peer review based bonuses or some kind of measure to get rid of bad behavior seems like a reasonable compromise.

<comment><USER33> Uh, I think you have a deep misunderstanding of how the Government is meant to work here. The Judicial is a branch of Government on-par with Legislative and Executive that is intentionally meant to be sovereign from public influence except for limited checks and balances by the other branches. Opinions like yours are the exact reason why.

The idea that anyone who ever utters anything that could possibly be interpreted as being slightly racist should be burned at the stake is just one political fad among many others that have came and went over the years. As well as the Gestapo-like idea that anybody who offers any resistance to the idea that anybody deemed to be racist must be burnt at the stake should also be burnt at the stake. And the primary reason why judges cannot be removed easily is to protect them from political fads exactly like that. If you deem that your favorite fad is "special" somehow, then the next one will be as well, and the next one too, and that protection becomes worthless.

And that quoted statement is not obvious racism. It was condescending and insulting, but not racist, except in the most mild sense. Actually racist would be "I am sentencing you to an extra 5 years because you are Hispanic, and Hispanics cannot control their impulses".

<comment><USER32> Not obvious racism? Are we talking about this:

> She lectured some defendants that most young men "with names like yours" > have lengthy criminal records by the time they reach a certain age.

I think that's pretty obvious racism. By "with names like yours", we agree she means Latinos, right? I think it's racist to say in court that most Latinos have lengthy criminal records, and the judge probably knows it or they wouldn't have used the (totally transparent and pro forma) euphemism "with names like yours."

<comment><USER34> _By "with names like yours", we agree she means Latinos, right?_

Well, no. When I read the article the first time, I presumed she was talking about Black non-Hispanic Americans with Africanized names. Re-reading, I see that this wasn't stated either, but I still read "some defendants" as contrasting rather amplifying the previous use of "a Hispanic defendant". It's possible you are right, but it's far from "pretty obvious".

The Bronx is sufficiently multicultural that I'm sure there are groups I've scarcely heard of who have widely held prejudices against groups that I'd never even guess. I think you, and I, and probably everyone who wasn't in that courtroom are reading things into the account based on our own preconceptions. Racism is one explanation, and likely at least partially present, but I don't think there is any way to know how from this short account how much of a role it plays.

For example, what race do you picture the "racist" judge as? Would it alter your verdict of racism if she herself was Black, or Asian, or Hispanic, or Jewish? What about the court officers laughing at the "young man" with his pants around his ankles? I don't know, but I wouldn't be startled if both the humiliators and humiliated belt-less defendant were all of African origin, or Spanish speaking, or both.

And what about the "85-pound drug addict who was arrested because she was in a park after hours" or the "pale, slight, and visibly anxious" woman there for a protective order? Is there any reason to presume that judge's lack of sympathy for either of these two was because race? As the old joke goes, does it count as racial prejudice you hate all minorities equally?

So no, it's not "obvious racism", unless we start by assuming that racism is the only reason that one person would mistreat another. I mean, doesn't proof of "racism" at least require showing that the judge treats members of one race better than those of another? Is there any evidence of this in the story? If not, why do we call it "racism" rather than "prejudice", or just "hate"?

<comment><USER29> _Would it alter your verdict of racism if she herself was Black, or Asian, or Hispanic, or Jewish?_

Not at all.

 _I mean, doesn 't proof of "racism" at least require showing that the judge treats members of one race better than those of another? Is there any evidence of this in the story? If not, why do we call it "racism" rather than "prejudice", or just "hate"?_

Whether she's certifiably "racist" or not is a red herring. The point is that she's obviously _biased_ against defendants based on family origin and language background (and incredibly condescending, to boot). Which are both attributes manifestly incompatible with her job description.

<comment><USER34>
      >> Would it alter your verdict of racism if she herself
      >> was Black, or Asian, or Hispanic, or Jewish?
      >
      > Not at all.

Could you walk me through that? I don't see how an accusation of "racism" can have meaning unless we care about the races of the parties involved. For example, if I were to declare that it is obvious that the judge acts they way she does because she is "sexist", wouldn't you want to know the sexes of the judge and the defendants before deciding whether the accusation is true? And at least one example of how the judge treated a male differently than a female? Perhaps you feel that "racism" and "prejudice" are synonyms at this point, and that it's pedantic to differentiate them?

      > Whether she's certifiably "racist" or not is a red herring.

Yes, and if it's a red herring --- a false clue designed to distract and mislead the reader --- why should we let the accusation stand just because the subject has other shortcomings? How does this improve the situation for future defendants?

Sure, the judge probably holds racial prejudices, and these probably influence some of her behavior in the courtroom. But I'd wager though that there are many other factors involved, and one of them (economic prejudice, overwork and burn-out, ignorance and stupidity, simple lack of compassion) is playing a larger role, and that a correct diagnosis is the first step to improvement. I'm not excusing the judge's behavior, I'm claiming that putting false blame on racism is a distraction from the real issues (whatever they might be).

Edit: Here's a couple other articles about the author, Judge Shelley Chapman:

[http://hlrecord.org/2014/02/feminists-take-on- debt/](http://hlrecord.org/2014/02/feminists-take-on-debt/)

[http://mashable.com/2016/02/09/bronx-girls-explorers- trial](http://mashable.com/2016/02/09/bronx-girls-explorers-trial)

These don't contradict anything anyone here has said, but may offer additional insight into her views.

<comment><USER35> > I were to declare that it is obvious that the judge acts they way she does > because she is "sexist", wouldn't you want to know the sexes of the judge > and the defendants before deciding whether the accusation is true?

Defendants? Yes. Judge? No. The sex of the actor is irrelevant in determining whether their actions demonstrate systematic bias against a particular sex in their judicial decisions.

(There are situations where the sex of the judge might be interesting in discussing the sexism once it was established, but not in determining if it exists.)

Similarly, with "racism", _mutatis mutandis_.

<comment><USER34> I carefully avoided saying that it wouldn't be sexism if the sexes were the same. At least, I tried to, although perhaps I edited badly. I started out with a longer example including reference to the US Census's definition of Hispanic as an ethnicity rather than a race and including North African's as White, but decided it was too confusing and ended up "wouldn't you want to know".

 _(There are situations where the sex of the judge might be interesting in discussing the sexism once it was established, but not in determining if it exists.)_

Yes, and not only for discussing, but to have any reasonable chance of working toward a solution. I think the "fix" almost certainly depends on the cause of the prejudice, which I think almost certainly depends on the sexes of the parties.

 _Similarly, with "racism", mutatis mutandis._

But that's the question, right? What stays the same, and what changes? And in this case, do you think that "racism" is a helpful diagnosis?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> >Even I, as a bankruptcy judge, know that the point of bail is supposed to be simply to ensure that a person will return to court.

That is the point of posting bail, but that is not the standard of granting a defendant the right to post bail/bond.

The standard is more along the lines of: a) is the defendant a flight risk; and b) does the defendant present a danger to the community.

As to b) it is not simply enough that the charges are non-violent, which seemed to shock this Judge. For example, DUI while not a violent crime generally one eligible for bail/bond by default, may not be granted if, say, it is the 3rd or 4th DUI. Or if say the defendant was already out on bail/bond and picked up a new charge, a Judge may revoke the bail/bond on the 1st crime. I'm not claiming this is always how it works and the decisions are always just, but I just want to give a little more perspective.

As to the shock of the state of the courthouse, only a Federal Judge would find that shocking. Don't get me wrong it's a pleasure to practice in a gorgeous Federal Courthouse, complete with grand marble accents, but I'm of the opinion those types of luxuries are a waste of tax payer dollars.

<comment><USER9> My friend gave me a tour of the Supreme Court the other day. Apparently, each quadrant of the building is made with marble sources from the corresponding regions of the US, and the marble in the main courtroom is Italian. My first reaction was that that this building would never get built today.

But I don't think that's necessarily a good thing. I think it's necessary symbolism. The rule of law works because we collectively agree to abide by the rulings of people who don't even have guns. Which is really incredible if you think about it: only in an advanced civilized society like ours can a tiny octogenarian woman like Justice Ginsberg wield the kind of power she does. The fancy marble edifices are part of how we express that collective commitment.

<comment><USER36> That is one gorgeous building. I have been twice and done official tours, I imagine a private tour is quite special.

I have practiced in both Federal and Court courthouses in Florida, and have been fortunate enough to do the same pro hac vice in a few States. I have seen plenty of Nice County Courts (Palm Beach County is like a mirror image to a Federal Courthouse, though the rooms themselves are not comparable) and some very poor ones too, but I have never seen a poor Federal Courthouse, though they likely exist too.

I guess part of my post is just imagining a NY Federal Judge's reaction entering a poor County Courthouse. While your position on necessary symbolism is well received (and I agree), I also think if, say, Bankruptcy Courts were removed from the Federal Courthouse and placed in County Courthouses (even poor ones) it would have little if any impact on the authority and function of that institution. Certainly I wouldn't extend that suggestion to the SCOTUS, though I would probably be intimidated by the bench no matter where they sat.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> There's a new HBO series called "The Night Of" that portrays the New York justice system this way.

Trailer: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=556N5vojtp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=556N5vojtp0)

<comment><USER38> Yes, excellent series. Very eye-opening. Recommended. I can't speak to its accuracy, but I have no trouble believing it's a fair portrayal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> >Once the court officers caught their breath from laughing, they barked at him, "Where is your belt?" Of course, it was taken from him in the lockup, he said.

I don't like to watch crime/legal drama and even I know this. How does someone who work in the legal system _as a day job_ not notice this?

<comment><USER34> The writer's implication is that officers of the court knew in advance that his belt had been taken from him, and simply enjoyed humiliating people who they consider beneath them. It's akin to arresting someone for getting blood on your uniform after you beat them: [http://www.npr.org/2014/09/12/348010247/in-ferguson-mo- befor...](http://www.npr.org/2014/09/12/348010247/in-ferguson-mo-before- michael-brown-there-was-henry-davis).

What background are you from that allows you to presume ignorance is more likely than malice? Are you perhaps from a more civilized country where those in power don't use petty humiliation to assert their superiority? Or were you employing some sort of subtle trolling humor that flies over the heads of us Americans?

<comment><USER39> I completely missed the implication that it was out of malice. My naive self wasn't able to, and still can't, imagine an officer of the court deriving pleasure from humiliating someone like that. I would be so screwed if I ever end up on the wrong end of the American criminal justice system.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> We need a better accountability system for judges. Even for those judges who are elected, the public is usually not meaningfully informed about the judge's performance.

<comment><USER41> It would be cool to live stream every courtroom in the US continually. Then we can visit and watch any court we wanted and actually make some meaningful comparisons that aren't based on hersay.

<comment><USER27> I don't really know for sure, of course, but I'd guess that almost all of these live streams would be _incredibly_ boring. A few then would be interesting. But wouldn't it require changes to laws in many places? I understand that currently you can't even take photographs in courtroom in many jurisdictions?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Great, where is the follow up with the judge in chambers? Don't judges talk to each other? Standards and mores are upheld by peers not by individuals.

<comment><USER43> I was hoping to read about that at the end of the article too. Or, it would have been nice if the author suggested something actionable we average citizens can do to improve the situation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> After reading this article, I have to wonder if the criminal court system is under funded and overworked. I think America's core institutions have been under decay for some time now.

</comment><comment><USER45> An actual criminal attorney in NYC did a far better job of deconstructing this judicial tourist's article than I can: [http://blog.simplejustice.us/2016/08/13/the-dilettante- judge...](http://blog.simplejustice.us/2016/08/13/the-dilettante-judge/)

<comment><USER32> As far as I can tell, the point of view of that 'deconstruction' is "Yeah, criminal court is totally fucked up, but we're used to it, what you think you're better than us because it's still shocking to you? fuck you elitist!"

I'm sure lawyers and judges look up and down at each other with elitism, and they can take that up among themselves or whatever. But this "too cynical to be outraged at a really fucked up system" stuff helps nobody, and is just it's own kind of pretentiousness, directed at the rest of us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> i must say, though i was in people's court once trying to get my security deposit back from my landlady, which is by definition the lowest level court in the land, i too have many apprehensions about the "fairness" of the judicial system in america. that's not to say that my 1 incident should be representative of the entire judicial system, as i still believe that there are lots of excellent examples of upstanding individuals, probably more so than bad ones, but the judicial system is powered by people and their interpretation of the law, and though with some checks and balances, people having unconscious biases and tend to work these around the system, just like her example of guns and butter, no one's going to penalize that judge for this and she knows it.

my particular case was in quincy, mass, i remember the faces of the judge, deputy, and clerk that waited to put my case towards the very end after about 10 cases and all other people had left, behind closed doors, seemed i didnt understand much about the system back then, but this was an arbitration, under the guise of a court order to reappear for an appeal. the landlady, a chinese national, had lost the claim originally and had ninety days to appeal, she appealed after 138 days, and the court ordered me to show up with an official court summons. in looking back, i should not have showed up, i had no need to show up, this was over a measely 700-900 usd if i recall correctly. and the way the judge, clerk, and deputy nodded their heads in contempt of me as i spoke my case was so planned and orchestrated that in my mind i decided that this was useless and to go ahead and tear up the check that she was asked to pay me for my security deposit after the first decision which i hadnt even cashed because it was never about the money.

if these are the shenanigans in the lowest of courts, i wonder what things are like in the upper courts. my lesson from that day was 2 fold, try your best never to go the legal route, and the american system, although perfect in many ways, still cannot provide perfect justice.

</comment><comment><USER47> Some of the modern courthouses reduce the courthouse violence problem with a "triple entrance" system, one for all the court personal, a second for defendants briefly released from county jail, and a third for public witnesses and spectators. You dont have the hallway encounters between the three parties you had in older facilities.

</comment><comment><USER48> In Los Angeles it's quite a bit more professional. When I served on a jury in a criminal case the judge was very professional.

<comment><USER49> Very few cases make it to trial. At least 90% accept a plea bargain. What you saw was not most defendants' experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> And then you have politicians like Martin O'Malley using the system to further their careers at others expense.

[https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon- on...](https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on-baltimore- s-anguish)

</comment><comment><USER51> A judge holding the court in contempt basically. And since the judge is part of the court, the court is holding the court in contempt.

Perhaps we need judged for judges.

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder if that has something to do with the different level of 'leniency' which is accorded in bankruptcy cases versus criminal cases.

My gut tells me that white-collar transgressions will always be punished less often (and less severely) than outright blue collar crime.

It sounds like the bankrupcy judge who wrote the article is surprised by the fact that the justice system actually punishes people for doing bad stuff.

Maybe it's not the criminal justice system which is harsh - Maybe it's her who is too lenient with her own cases...

Or maybe both need some recalibration.

<comment><USER53> Perhaps you should read the article again. It is quite clear that she is dismayed by the blatantly pro-prosecution behaviour, guilty-until-proven- innocent bail hearings and plea bargaining, and the racially coloured nature of discourse. At no point is sentencing even discussed, and no punishment is dispensed (these are first appearances), so your contention is completely unsupported.

<comment><USER52> I agree with every fact you make here, but I don't see how that disproves my statement. I didn't mention anything about sentencing - I used the term 'leniency' in a general way; as the tendency to view defendants as innocent.

Also, I'm not saying that the criminal courts are doing it right - I'm saying that maybe we have two extremes and the ideal justice system operates somewhere in the middle.

I can't stand that self-righteous legal crap about 'guilty-until-proven- innocent' \- In my books, if you can't prove something mathematically, it's not proof - In effect, you can never really prove anything in a legal context - In reality, everything is always judged "on the balance of probability".

<comment><USER53> Well, despite your view that considering those accused as innocent is lenient, the burden of proof falling on the accuser is in fact a core tenet of common law justice (and supported by the 5th, 6th and 8th amendments to the Constitution). And if someone accused you of wrongdoing you would see the value in that.

Humouring your dislike of such judicial proofs, it is reasonable to view the system of justice as a series of ever more precise and expensive diagnostic tests. At all stages there is a desire to finalise the proceeding to reduce the bill for enforcing the law, with the dual goals of (A) not letting too many innocents be shafted or (B) too many guilty walk.

Many would argue that the current system is broken. I doubt the fix is just fair trials, because most of the defendants are indeed guilty. It is related to lack of opportunity, a predilection for jailing people for minor offences rather than rehabilitating them, and systemic racism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's heartening to read so many thoughtful posts about our justice system. Gives me some small hope for the future. :)

</comment><comment><USER55> This is what bothers me so much about the Trump campaign. Even though he'll probably lose, he's helped legitimize the kind of speech and attitude this judge demonstrates.

I'm hoping there's a strong enough backlash that this kind of speech and attitude gets called out more often. I hope the long-term effect is not to make this judge's behavior even more accepted.

<comment><USER56> What this article describes is much worse than anything Trump has done in his campaign. It's one thing to engage in "hateful" speech on a podium to get people to like you, and an entirely different thing to do so in official government capacity, directed at specific individuals, right at the moment when they are most vulnerable.

Trump is distasteful, maybe even dangerous, but this judge and the officers of the court are absolutely despicable.

<comment><USER57> That's true in a very technical sense that Trump is only spouting speech at this point. (And of course technically correct is the best kind.)

But it's worth pointing out that in his speech, Trump is promising extra- judicial murder of family members of terrorists and torture of suspected terrorists if he's made commander-in-chief. Were he able to actually implement these, it would actually be worse.

<comment><USER58> Is that significantly different from the current status quo? Drone strikes and Gitmo are functionally equivalent to the worst of Trump's remarks.

<comment><USER57> Trump's words are no different than the reality of what's been done by the past 2~3 presidents. The important difference now is that the torture, etc., is a _campaign promise_ rather than something the administration was ashamed of.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Is organic growth even possible anymore for social apps? - <AUTHOR> Starting to wonder if social networks and apps now always need a significant marketing budget to get off the ground. Finding it impossible to raise basic awareness for Roomvine (http://get.roomvine.com) with our limited budget.
We have tried social media marketing but that doesn't really get eyeballs unless you pay per impression. We have tried using student volunteers on campuses but even that rarely converts into downloads.
Seems that people who can get their new app in the hands of users either need to have the money or have a reasonable personal network in the segment they're targeting (in our case, university students).
Open to ideas, feedback and suggestions (or even help?) if you have any.
#HopingForSilverBullet <comment><USER2> Get some stickers & t-shirts, give them to highscool & college aged kids. Not sure how you are going to compete in areas where FireChat and other very similar platforms already have mindshare, but being on your sticker game is how I've seen Yelp, Zumiez and others build their brands, and it'd definitely be way more effective for you than either of those giants, since if you see a Roomvine sticker your gonna know there is another user of it there.

What is your revenue model? How do you plan to trounce all the other messaging apps, from Whatsapp, Signal, Facebook (direct competitor), etc?

</comment><comment><USER3> My analogy would be you're trying to make a better Clash Of Clans.

Even if your app is much better than the competition you need to convince people to switch in droves or you're going nowhere.

I guess my answer is yes : you need a significant marketing budget. But even with that there's no guarantee of success.</comment>


HGST gets closer to shipping 10TB HDD - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/article/hgst-gets-closer-to-shipping-10tb-hdd/

<comment><USER2> The 8 TB HDDs available now take a full _15 hours_ or so for a linear scan at max speed. God help you if you ever need to rebuild a RAID array made of them; the risk of an additional failure in say a RAID5 or RAID6 configuration is just too high.

We're nearing the point at which the throughput relative to the capacity and the risk of failure or corruption makes further capacity less and less useful, unless you're doing some pretty sophisticated replication, validation, & caching.

<comment><USER3> _the risk of an additional failure in say a RAID5 or RAID6 configuration is just too high._

Two disk failures in the same array within 15 hours is very rare.

<comment><USER4> Unless the root cause is something to do with the array - flakey controller, or power supply.

<comment><USER5> these kinds of problems may cause the array to fail, but won't necessarily lose data, right? If you have a ZFS pool and a faulty controller causes the pool to fail, ie. "losing" three disks in a raidz2 vdev, my guess is that you would just replace the faulty card and reimport the pool and chances are things would be OK... no?

<comment><USER6> ZFS can mostly handle that. It will try to recover any data it can, and rebuild whatever it can. Due to how paranoid ZFS is designed, it will survive edge cases like this much better, which is also why I like deploying it here even at home.

And if it can't recover it? You can prove it by failed checksum check. This is why, in my opinion, ZFS is so much better than all other file systems: if it fails, you can prove it instead of just sorta vaguely questioning everything because you can't tell but you suspect it, and it slowly drives you insane.

Once you try ZFS, you never go back.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, hard drives are getting complicated!

You have to write 256MB to change a single bit?

And you have various zones, and you have to keep track of where data is written, because it's not written in order, and can be on any zone?

You would need some sort of battery backed scratch/cache area to pull this off, so that you don't have to write very often, otherwise I can't imagine performance will be very good.

<comment> ryan-c Having maybe 16 to 64 GB of flash storage (for writeback cache) would probably make a significant difference here. I think over the next five to ten years tiered storage will probably go mainstream.

<comment><USER8> Tiered storage is already here. If you're using block storage in the cloud those guys are already do all sorts of optimizations (for their costs) that include tiering. And on your own desktop / own server side you can do this today on Linux with bcache or dm-cache. Works great for databases.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Before people make too many comments about the complexity and speed of these drives, it is important to realise that these drives are designed for append- mostly archival of data.

</comment><comment><USER10> Yev from Backblaze here -> gimme gimme gimme gimme!

</comment><comment><USER8> We spent a bit of time talking about about these "shingled drives" at the LSF/MM summit earlier in the week in Boston. Storage is becoming a more fascinating topic with so many technologies (SSDs, shingled disk, non-volatile memory) and so new open source solutions (Ceph, Luster).

</comment><comment><USER11> One of the problem with these HDDs is that you still have the same number of spindles. These spindles now need to cover a lot more data, and they were already `challenged`

</comment><comment><USER12> Yup, RAID is being replaced by object storage for large scale systems. Last week, HGST acquired object storage startup Amplidata...</comment>