Whose Water Is it Anyway? - <AUTHOR> http://tehelka.com/whose-water-is-it-anyway/?singlepage=1

<comment><USER2> The question that the author asks is great from a theoretical standpoint but more money provides better access to resources, natural or otherwise, regardless of geographical location. It is true in the African continent as well in North America.

The more interesting take that is almost never discussed in the main-stream media is the high cost associated with providing access to clean water in the Middle East & its implications in the next few decades for the region, and for less prosperous nations that lack capital & resources to secure access to basic human necessities.

For example, UAE & Qatar have among the highest per capita consumption of water in the world, and they would probably top the charts if you discount the vast no. of migrant workers that consume relatively few resources but swell up the population statistics. All this clean water is sourced from the sea, desalinated in energy-intensive plants, which take multiple years to build. When I was living in Qatar, fuel was less expensive than water, partly because Qatar (& UAE) have high oil/gas reserves but mainly because they have to expend a lot of resources to build desalination plants, often licensing technology & building materials from western nations. They can probably scale up water production relatively quickly in the coming few years to keep up with increasing water consumption, however other nations, including India, probably might not be that lucky in securing access to clean water for its citizens at an affordable cost.

</comment><comment><USER3> Water rights are going to be the defining political issue of our time, and the fundamental challenge of our generation. No resource is more necessary and less replaceable. Our reaction to this challenge is going to define our political and social institutions. We will either meet that challenge, or let the usual petty squabbling and infighting and opportunism get in the way and the fallout will either kill or enslave huge swaths of the population.

<comment><USER4> This seems obviously false to me for several reasons. Are you being serious? Perhaps I'm ignorant and you can enlighten me, but I think the water rights situation in the United States is pretty clear-cut.

<comment><USER3> The water rights situation in the U.S. is a total disaster. You have California, Nevada, Arizona, etc, fighting over ever more overstrained output from the Colorado river. Even in wet places like Florida you're having to dig deeper and deeper to hit water (1,000+ feet in some cases). Aquifers in the western midwest are threatened by fracking.

And in the midst of potential scarcity, the law is a total mess. Basically, you can do whatever the hell you want with groundwater as long as you can pump it out, even if it decreases the water table for people around you.

The reaction to this is that some people now see the potential for profit. There are forces that want to privatize water resources, taking water from the places that still have it to water lawns in fucking Scottsdale and Phoenix (which shouldn't even exist). That's where the "slavery" part comes in.

<comment><USER4> We have a federal government to resolve conflicts between the states. Maybe the federal government isn't very effective, but that makes it a problem with the way government is structured, not so much about water. Once ownership is settled, it's pretty clear what rights an owner has over that water vs. a non- owner.

The law being a mess is a common problem with the current government, again not so much about water, water is just becoming one of the many things it sucks at managing.

What percent of the US GDP do you think the government would need in addition to what it already takes in so that over the next couple of decades it can create and maintain desalination and other technology to get rid of the scarcity issues?

I don't see the connection from privatization --> slavery, but I agree things would be easier if people would just move where the water is (or where it's easy to get water to). It's not unprecedented for the US government at some level to force people to move.

I still don't see why water problems (generalizing from water rights) is the thing that is poised to one day become the definitive issue and challenge of our time. Maybe it will help spur a rejection of democratic processes or something, but then the defining issue would more likely be told as eliminating the currently most prevalent forms of government. What's your time frame on "our time" anyway? People born in generation X, Y, and Z? "Our time" isn't even half over yet. Speculating about what might be the definitive issue that people 50+ years from now look back on these previous and upcoming decades, there are a lot of things that seem more likely to be the issue than "water rights".

<comment><USER3> > We have a federal government to resolve conflicts between the states.

Water law is unfortunately mostly a state issue, and the federal government has been loathe to get involved in mediating water disputes.

> Once ownership is settled, it's pretty clear what rights an owner has over > that water vs. a non-owner.

Coming up with a clear allocation of rights ("all water now belongs to Bob") doesn't mean its easy to come up with a good allocation of rights.

> The law being a mess is a common problem with the current government, again > not so much about water, water is just becoming one of the many things it > sucks at managing.

I didn't say the challenges were unsolvable, I said that the usual political infighting will get in the way of us solving them.

> What percent of the US GDP do you think the government would need in > addition to what it already takes in so that over the next couple of decades > it can create and maintain desalination and other technology to get rid of > the scarcity issues?

That's an entirely theoretical question. We've hit such political gridlock that we can't even maintain the infrastructure we have, much less build new infrastructure.

> I don't see the connection from privatization --> slavery

Controlling a fundamental resource is a great way to enslave people.

> Speculating about what might be the definitive issue that people 50+ years > from now look back on these previous and upcoming decades, there are a lot > of things that seem more likely to be the issue than "water rights".

50 years really isn't that long (Lisp is 55 years old, UNIX is 43 years old). It's not like we can't even fathom what the world will look like 50 years from now--it won't look all that different from today. Sitting here now, knowing what we know, it's hard to think of any other issue that's going to be as pressing in the next 50 years. Especially considering that some of the other pressing issues (like climate change, alternative energy) are going to put pressures on freshwater resources first. We're not going to run out of oil in 50 years, we're not going to get hit by a meteoroid, etc, etc, but it's very possible that the Ogallala will dry up devastating American food production.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand why water is such a scarce resource: the price of water will never increase past the cost of desalinizing seawater with energy from, say, solar panels.

<comment><USER6> Desalinization is extremely expensive to the point that we can't yet rely on salt water.

The water crisis affects developing nations who can and will be taken advantage of (referred to here as slavery). As the article explains, as water continues to be a scarce resource there becomes more and more power in controlling it.

I think wars over oil are bad but the ethical questions around water are significantly more fundamental.</comment></comment>


Comcast Is Threatening to Cut Off Customers Who Use Tor - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/comcast-threatening-cut-off-customers-092817979.html <comment><USER2> I know it's popular in tech circles these days to hate on Comcast, and I'm not saying they don't deserve the hate or that they wouldn't do something like this, but I'm not buying this one just yet. This is all supposedly statements by 2 telephone support people.

The actual source article seems to be confusing running a connection to Tor and the Tor browser with running a Tor relay node or exit node. Prohibiting the Tor browser would be a bad move on the part of any ISP who isn't part of a police state, but none of their document suggest that they're doing that. I can understand them prohibiting running a Tor node on your residential internet connection though. Almost all residential ISPs officially prohibit running servers, though it usually isn't enforced as long as you aren't pushing too much traffic. A Tor node can easily fall on those lines. I think even the Tor project doesn't recommend running nodes on your home connection rather than actual servers with server-class connections.

<comment><USER3> Thank you for this. This may be a stupid question, but how would your ISP know you were actively running a Tor (non-node) connection?

Obviously I need to read up on all the back-end tech but I would assume that if it was easy to identify someone using Tor, it would no longer provide the anonymity / security because it would clearly identify outliers.

It makes sense to ban someone running a node off their Comcast connection (not because it's logical but because of their high traffic / server banning track record) but for Comcast to detect a browsing session? Seems odd.

<comment><USER4> Using DPI or even just flow analysis (sizes, port numbers, destination addresses, protocol (TCP/UDP) bits, and timings of packets), it should be possible to distinguish between encrypted TOR and other encrypted protocols with ease.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sounds like a great way to cancel your Comcast service when they just won't let you go: [http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/jul/17/...](http://www.theguardian.com/technology/shortcuts/2014/jul/17/comcast- customer-services-call-ryan-block)

</comment><comment><USER6> Where I live, comcast is pretty much the ONLY broadband provider. There are lots of places like this.

These are the risks of a monopoly on broadband internet access.

(Did you go send your comments to the FCC saying to treat ISP's like common carriers yet?

1) Go to [http://fcc.gov/comments](http://fcc.gov/comments) 2) Click on Proceeding 14-28 3) Say "I want internet service providers classified as common carriers." )

</comment><comment><USER7> > Comcast Is Threatening To Cut Off Customers Who Use Tor, The Web Browser For > Criminals

Uh, it's not "The Web Browser For Criminals". It's for people who want anonymity. And being slightly pedantic, Tor is also not a web browser. Tor Browser is.

<comment><USER8> I find it hilarious that they pitch Tor as for criminals, despite the US military being the largest backer (and source) of the Tor project.

<comment><USER9> [insert typical libertarian talking points about government being criminals]

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is how it begins. First they come for TOR, then they come for VPNs. Eventually, they come for your SSL certs.

<comment><USER11> Done, done and done. Well, not necessarily in that order. Living in Iran sometimes feels like living in the future. Unfortunately it's a slightly dystopian future.

<comment><USER10> It's also like the past. It blows my mind that the dystopian future we read about is always the UK - and that so much dystopian fiction comes out of Britain as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> AT&T U-Verse admitted to actively disrupting my connection whenever I used torrents.

<comment><USER13> Was it based on connecting with the wrong tracker or identifying torrent traffic?

<comment><USER12> As far as I could tell it was by identifying the type of traffic.

I was primarily torrenting various linux distros, and I tried a wide variety of them on various clients and systems. It was fairly consistent behavior, even if I torrented a 'buntu distro on my phone and throttled it to a few KBps my TV's Netflix would stutter, degrade, and ultimately drop out entirely within a few minutes. If I stopped the torrent the connection would resume normally a few minutes later.

One thing that really bothered me, though, was that every time I experienced this problem I could go to speedtest.net and run their tool and get consistently good results every time. Even when the rest of the internet was bollocks. It makes me wonder if they intentionally toss speed test traffic into one of their "fast lanes" to trick people into thinking they're getting faster speeds than what they're actually getting.

<comment><USER14> I've always thought this myself, what prevents them from doing so?

<comment><USER12> Apparently, nothing. After I had narrowed the issue down to torrents, I called AT&T and confronted them with the evidence. On the phone with me they directly said "we do that to prevent illegal activity over our service lines."

No amount of "torrenting is not illegal" worked, and I didn't really expect it to. They don't care about the legality, they only use it as an excuse to keep customers from getting the full usage of the service they pay for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> dj-wonk The source article is more detailed and worth reading: [http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/09/13/comcast-declares-war- to...](http://www.deepdotweb.com/2014/09/13/comcast-declares-war-tor/)

</comment><comment><USER15> The title of this posting is wholly inaccurate. Comcast is DENYING that any threat to cut off Tor users occurred. They deny most points in the article on DeepDotWebm including all alleged evidence, and have flatly stated that customers can use Tor all they want.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I got lucky. I went with Century Link when I found out the D-Mark is about 50 yards from my house and haven't looked back.

Dropped my bill by about $40/month and the customer service is a bit more. . .reliable than Comcast.

</comment><comment><USER16> I use TOR and I would really like to get a call from comcast so that I can inform Comcast I am using a Navy funded project.

</comment><comment><USER17> Comcast denies this.

<comment> mark-r I don't know much about how TOR works, but could you use it over a VPN so that it's outside of Comcast's network before connecting to TOR? Surely they'd never ban VPN.

<comment><USER18> > Surely they'd never ban VPN.

Wait until all file-sharing is done through VPNs. Or maybe they'll require people to pay for a "business" plan to use such a "business" feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Could someone take these guys to court and force them to rebrand themselves as a SISP (Some Internet Services Provider) ?

</comment><comment><USER20> 1\. Be comcast

2\. How do I get the NSA off my back as much as possible?

3\. Oh lets threaten to cut off customers service because of Tor! that will totally work (comcast logic)

4\. ....NSA still on our backs guys what do I do?

5\. Ban Tor

6\. Make NSA happy = TWC merger will happen

7\. NSA still not happy

8\. Spend millions on trying to kill net neutrality because the survival of comcast/ twc/ NBC universal depends on it</comment>


Apple's new data center is visible (at last) from space - <AUTHOR> http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2011/06/01/apples-new-data-center-is-visible-at-last-from-space/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fortunebrainstormtech+%28Fortune+Brainstorm+Tech%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Sometimes I can't believe how fanboyish Apple fanboys are.

Hacker news about a Google maps update now showing a large Apple data center!? Come on...</comment>


Algorithmic decision making and the cost of fairness (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.08230 <comment><USER2> I just saw another article[1] on a study using the same data set. It concluded that the COMPAS algorithm is no more accurate than random people given the task on Mechanical Turk.

Those researchers also designed a simple predictive model using only two factors as inputs: age and number of previous convictions. By comparison, COMPAS uses more than a hundred. To me, it doesn't sound like those extra factors end up contributing much.

[1]: [https://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/217349...](https://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21734986-short-answer-two-are-about-same-are-programs-better)

<comment><USER3> That is a very poorly formed study precisely because systems like the Mechanical Turk actually work surprisingly well. This is a common theme in the 'wisdom of the masses.' If you ask a single person how many beans are in a jar, you're going to get an answer that's generally very wrong. Yet ask 100 people and average their answer and you tend to get an answer that's oddly _extremely_ close to the correct answer. As the number of people _independently_ asked approaches infinity, the error approaches 0.

So when you ask ' _x_ ' people to independently judge something, let alone something that is multiple choice with a correct answer, you're going to get answers that are far more accurate than a single individual would give you. So looking at the average answer of 'x' people, comparing it to an AI system, and arguing that they're relatively close so _individual_ people are relatively close to the AI is completely fallacious.

\---

As a tangential aside, there's another quirk to the wisdom of the masses. When you let the people communicate and try to intelligently organize and use expertise to come to answer, this effect disappears and the final answer again tends to be very wrong. Kind of an interesting perspective on the current zeitgeist of society and work.

=== _EDIT_ ===

The authors were obviously aware of the wisdom of the masses. Quoting the paper itself:

 _To determine whether there is "wisdom in the crowd" (7) (in our case, a small crowd of 20 per subset), participant responses were pooled within each subset using a majority rules criterion. This crowd-based approach yields a prediction accuracy of 67.0%. A one-sided t test reveals that COMPAS is not significantly better than the crowd (P = 0.85)._

That's a quite silly p-value and on top of that I'm not sure how they claim their system actually controls for the wisdom of the masses.

<comment><USER4> > As the number of people independently asked approaches infinity, the error > approaches 0.

Only if people are an _unbiased estimator_!!

<comment><USER3> You'd think so, but that's not correct. This is not a straight forward result of probability with a filter of complexity. It works regardless of bias, though obviously if everybody was biased in the exact same way then that would cause things to break down - which is perhaps the reason that the coordination results in a worse result than independent averages.

For another example of it consider things like the television show, 'Who wants to be a millionaire?' It's a quiz show where one of the choices is for the participant to ask the audience. And the audience tends to do absurdly well on even the most esoteric questions, though independently they are certainly far from trivia experts. But very few are randomly guessing - their own experiences and biases leads them to entirely different conclusions. Yet somehow it produces the correct result time and again.

It's a strange phenomena and one that has to be constantly guarded against in anything involving sampling of people. This is a text book example of a study that gets destroyed by it.

<comment><USER5> >>> As the number of people independently asked approaches infinity, the error approaches 0.

>> Only if people are an unbiased estimator!!

> You'd think so, but that's not correct.

Either you're misinterpreting the technical term "unbiased estimator" here, or you are aware of some research that I would like to read.

In context, "unbiased" means that if you pick people at random and ask for their estimates, then on average the too-high estimates cancel out the too-low estimates (i.e. there is not a bias in one direction or another).

But people as a whole have poor understanding of many things. One common one that appears in social science research and is often replicated is that people grossly overestimate the size of the homosexual population in the US (the "wisdom of the crowds" often estimates it around 20% whereas best available polling data suggests 3-5%). Here's just one source for this phenomenon

[http://news.gallup.com/poll/183383/americans-greatly- overest...](http://news.gallup.com/poll/183383/americans-greatly-overestimate- percent-gay-lesbian.aspx)

"Wisdom of the crowds" is occasionally reliable, but it should not be assumed to be reliable for any particular problem without verification. It often fails terribly even on problems that are not very esoteric.

Edit: changed phrasing of final paragraph

<comment><USER3> As mentioned, there is a difference between bias and uniform bias. In the US the media, politics, social media, and even miseducation _(e.g. in my deviance class we focused on Kinsey 's 10%, yet oddly enough never contrasted that against contemporary results)_ have heavily and uniformly biased the population on sexuality leading people to _vastly_ overestimate the number of homo/bi/trans individuals.

Where it works phenomenally well is in areas where biases have not been directly instilled into people. This does not mean people are unbiased, however. Again the knowledge of trivia is a good example since while the crowds can generally do phenomenally well even at very esoteric questions where biases would lead them to individually come to very different conclusions, yet they will invariably fail to answer ostensibly trivial questions like 'What is the capital of Australia?' You'll get Sydney, it's not. You'd likely get a similar result for things like the capital of Pennsylvania.

In a way I view the wisdom of the masses as analogous to machine learning systems. They do an oddly good job of providing extremely precise answers to a wide array of questions even when trained with models that do not directly represent the 'questions'. Yet you can also break the systems, at times comically, with certain types of queries designed to do precisely that.

And as was the case with machine learning for quite some time, I think people remain reluctant to utilize it due to the black box nature of it. The implication of your comment is that the wisdom of the masses is little more than incorrect answers canceling out on average leaving nothing but a survey of experts. Yet I think there's no evidence for this (even if it may be a perfectly logical 'kneejerk' reaction) as it works even on things where _nobody_ is an expert, and if this were the case then we ostensibly should be able to get comparable answers from coordination - yet coordination causes the entire system to collapse.

<comment><USER5> > As mentioned, there is a difference between bias and uniform bias.

You are simply mistaken in your interpretation of the technical term "unbiased estimator". This has a specific meaning in statistics, and is required for the convergence property you specified earlier. From wikipedia [0]

"In statistics, the bias (or bias function) of an estimator is the difference between this estimator's expected value and the true value of the parameter being estimated."

In lay terms, this means that the estimator process "ask lots of people and average the result" is unbiased only if all the too-high errors, in aggregate, cancel out the too-low errors.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_of_an_estimator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_of_an_estimator)

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure if we're now going in circles or if you failed to read what I just wrote. Repeating it:

 _" The implication of your comment is that the wisdom of the masses is little more than incorrect answers canceling out on average leaving nothing but a survey of experts. Yet I think there's no evidence for this (even if it may be a perfectly logical 'kneejerk' reaction) as it works even on things where nobody is an expert, and if this were the case then we ostensibly should be able to get comparable answers from coordination - yet coordination causes the entire system to collapse. ... _"

I'm not sure if you even realize all the assumptions you're making. You are assuming, for instance, that 'guesses' are regularly distributed. That assumption may be correct in some cases - I expect in many it is not. Alternatively there is the possibility is for you to claim that you're referring not to the individuals in question as the estimators, but the entire group. In that case you've spent a lot of time saying nothing as it boils down to "people are only correct if they're correct."

<comment><USER4> Sorry but you're mathematically wrong. The "wisdom of the crowds" does not work on things were everybody is wrong in the same way. For example if you ask a lot of people to estimate income inequality _you get the wrong answer_ because everybody underestimates it.

[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/economic- inequali...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/economic-inequality- it-s-far-worse-than-you-think/)

The "wisdom of the crowds" is pseudo-nonsense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It seems like the problem is that any data that works statistically will not be fair to individuals who are intuitively exceptions to the general trend. It sounds like algorithms relying on statistics are pretty much guaranteed to fail the fairness test. It's the wrong tool for this problem I think.

There are so many factors in morality that I think individually, case by case judgments are likely the best option. Racial / class bias seems to be just as present in these algorithms, so lets at least allow for human intervention rather than forcing ourselves to be constrained by an inherently unfair system. Yes, humans are flawed too, but perhpas we should be spending more time trying to adjust / account for those in different ways.

Note: Bias in sentencing/convictions is a huge problem that should absolutely be worked on. I'm only claiming that these approaches are inherently flawed, not that what we have now is anywhere close to good enough.

<comment><USER7> > There are so many factors in morality that I think individually, case by > case judgments are likely the best option.

What are the inputs to "case by case judgments" except Bayesian priors and observations about a specific case? Your brain isn't doing anything a computer model can't in principle do. My point isn't that any particular bail pricing model is acceptable. Instead, I'm arguing that a desire to escape "statistics" by giving up on models and punting to the brain is futile, since the brain is just going to use its own statistical model whether the owner of that brain is aware of it or not --- it _must_ , since statistics is baked into the structure of knowledge, and the brain has no private source of truth.

There is no accessible realm of knowledge about the real world somehow exempt from statistics, since we never have complete knowledge, and statistics models our uncertainty.

<comment><USER8> While I agree with your general point, artificial neural networks and biological neural networks are sufficiently different that it's not really fair to compare them just because they happen to have the same name. A biological neuron does a lot more than computing some affine transformation of its inputs.

Also, humans draw from an absurdly complex pool of inputs, usually called "common knowledge", that so far has given us a hard time when trying to replicate it in computer systems. So while in principle there is, imho, nothing stopping a statistical method to produce decisions at least as good as a human could, in practice this might not be the case.

<comment><USER9> To expand on your point to further strengthen your original argument, these models are trained on a smaller subset of observables and ideas we consider when we decide policy. Even then, the comparison between a matrix and a human brain is poor.

Another issue I have is that we don't know is whether statistical bias exists in the metrics they train on, something they discuss in the paper. We already know for example blacks are arrested and convicted harsher than whites for some of the similar crimes[0]. The paper just says that COMPAS predicts likelihood of violent crime, not whether that means they'll be arrested of crime. Moreover while Table 1 talks about a prediction regarding violent crime, Figure 2 talks about recidivism with regards to _all crime_ , so which is it? It still seems nebulous to me what COMPAS actually is for.

I'd have to read it deeper than I have, but not sure how I feel about the paper.

[0] [http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2016/feb/...](http://www.politifact.com/truth-o- meter/statements/2016/feb/26/hillary-clinton/hillary-clinton-says-blacks-more- likely-be-arreste/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Assume that you are insurance company with access to customers social media profiles.

You find out that if customer has a friend who posts pictures of fast motorcycles that increases the probability of customer making $100,000 claim in the future to 2% from previous 1%. Is it fair to double their insurance payment to make up for the increase in expected value even if the number of false positives is huge? General efficiency increases and customers can save money if they select their friends better. This might be how Chinese social scoring system might work in the future. Society as a whole optimizes itself.

What if instead of the insurance claim, the risk is homicide or rape. Should algorithmic judge take that into account when weighing the evidence?

Personally I think unconstrained algorithm in criminal cases is ethically wrong. Justice should be individualized or it's not justice.

In some other cases it might be justifiable.

<comment><USER11> Don't they do precisely that, across a whole bunch of data? Not "friends on facebook" but location, habits, age, etc.

<comment><USER10> Yes. That's the idea when managing insurance risk.

The question is if there are variables that should be excluded because optimizing trough them has harmful effects to the society and it's unfair. Smoking or alcohol use are noncontroversial variables. The quality of your friends, your political leanings are controversial.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So in sum: "analyzing data from Broward County, we find that optimizing for public safety yields stark racial disparities; conversely, satisfying past fairness definitions means releasing more high-risk defendants, adversely affecting public safety."

In other words, black defendants actually are more dangerous to release and there is no magic algorithm that bypasses this fact.

<comment><USER13> On a topic like this it's important I think to address the elephant in the room. I don't think this implies a genetic issue! I'm not an expert but from what I know this shouldn't lead _me_ to the conclusion that "black Americans are predisposed to violence" and, if you know approximately the same things I do, I think that's probably fair for you too!

<comment><USER14> I don't think anyone here on HN thinks that it implies a genetic issue, but rather an issue caused by generations of discrimination and failed attempts to stop the cycle of poverty and crime that plagues many of these communities.

<comment><USER15> I am 100% certain, based on 5 years of observation, that there is a significant portion of users on this site who absolutely believe that racial disparities are genetic and immutable.

<comment><USER16> I would be amazed if most important physical, mental, or social characteristics had zero underlying biological or genetic drivers, or if they were completely driven by underlying biology. Even small underlying differences can be amplified through compounding effects over a lifetime of decisions, through culture, etc.

(The easy ones are male/female; racial differences are far less.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Statistics tell you something significant about a group, but little of significance about an individual. Statistical measures should not be used to make decisions about individuals. Other names for doing so are: "Sacrificing the one for the many" or "Presumption of guilt."

</comment><comment><USER18> I've only had a chance to skim this, so maybe I misunderstood.

That being said, the authors' point seems to be right there in the introduction - "it's not fair to hold all individuals to the same standard, irrespective of race."

In other words, the broader community should tolerate laxer pre-trial sentencing standards applied to people of race A, precisely because they commit more crime than people of race B?

Pretty odd concept of "fairness" if you ask me.

Also interesting that explicitly adjusting for race does not affect recidivism predictions by the COMPAS model. In other words, as it stands, the model is not inadvertently discriminating on the basis of race. I wonder if the same testing has been applied to sentencing decisions.

<comment><USER19> re: COMPAS

> As noted above, a major criticism of COMPAS is that the rate of false > positives is higher among blacks than whites [2].

Policing in America is racist. So anything that takes arrests into account (prior arrests, recidivism, etc.) will be in error as well.

The line you quoted misses a lot of context - the 'standard' is an algorithmic risk score with a single threshold. The paper mentions why having different treatment by race might have legal problems (e.g 14th amendment). So this standard is what we're stuck with. The paper asserts that it isn't fair.

<comment><USER20> >Policing in America is racist.

Citation needed. Cops visit black neighborhoods more, sure. But they do that because they commit vastly more crime. Which is the cause and which the effect?

It's also a lot more complicated than that. People throw out studies that blacks are more likely to be caught for drug crimes. But they are less likely to be caught for more serious crimes. Possibly because they trust police less and are less likely to volunteer as witnesses. E.g. [https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-underpolicing-of-black- amer...](https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-underpolicing-of-black- america-1422049080)

<comment><USER21> When you make judgements about individuals based on their race and not their individual actions you're being racist. It's as simple as that. This is what the paper is looking at.

You can argue for being racist if you want but you can't say "it's not racist, because 'racist' is a word with bad connotations and I think what they do is good" without being called out on it.

<comment><USER20> >When you make judgements about individuals based on their race

No one is doing that. The algorithm does not take race into account. It's just an assertion that it uses other factors as a proxy for race. I've not seen this proven anywhere.

And indeed, if it were true, you would have to admit that blacks are more likely to be criminals. Even after controlling for all relevant variables. Which goes against the standard narrative that it's just socioeconomic status or whatever.

>you can't say "it's not racist, because 'racist' is a word with bad connotations and I think what they do is good" without being called out on it.

It isn't racist. And the word racist is becoming almost meaningless because how often you overuse it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> There is no cost of fairness here. They're playing percentages. I'd rather have an algorithm make predictions than a human judge/prosecutor. If a certain group of people are disposed towards recidivism or not showing up for trial, it doesn't matter how much they've suffered in the past. That's a policy decision to reach out to them.

</comment><comment><USER23> If justice was truly blind (which is what I would consider fair) then the number of defendants incorrectly classified as dangerous would depend on the likelihood of all the groups they're part of committing dangerous crimes.

You want it fair based on race ? Ok, don't input race. Everything else stays the same. Why this complexity ?

<comment><USER24> So this idea seems intuitive at first but turns out to be one of the worst things to treat unfairness.

There are several reasons for this from both technical and legal perspective.

It is incredibly easy to find statistically significant correlations given just a few (more than 7) different views of the data. In general these ml models are not working with less than hundreds or thousands.

If the model learned this suppose racial bias, once, you deleting this column is not going to stop it from learning it again, and I believe some research showed that it actually can make the unfairness more severe.

from a legal standpoint a company that may or may not be infringing on rights could just say, oh we can't be because we don't have these fields in our data: which makes it harder to monitor and audit wrong doing.

most of the methods that I am familiar try to ease the effects of the learned biases as a post-processing step for the model.

<comment><USER25> >>It is incredibly easy to find statistically significant correlations given just a few (more than 7) different views of the data. In general these ml models are not working with less than hundreds or thousands.

I would be interested in seeing examples. So far in this thread the arguments were along the lines of: "but then the algorithms punishes poor neighborhood instead of race" but you shouldn't have address in the data either as (I hope) nobody is ok on punishing people for living in bad neighborhood. We should only include data we would like to see in the explanation of the sentencing.

"You are not getting parole because you live in a poor neighborhood" is unfair while most people would be ok with:

"You are not getting parole because you willingly associated with people who committed crime".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Bernhard Scholkopf explored this at the hour mark in his 2017 ICML keynote. [https://vimeo.com/238274659](https://vimeo.com/238274659)

Was interesting, and worth a look.

</comment><comment><USER27> This hits home in Iowa. They just started using it to determine bail. [https://businessrecord.com/Content/Law-Government/Law- Govern...](https://businessrecord.com/Content/Law-Government/Law- Government/Article/Polk-County-courts-begin-using-pretrial-risk- assessments-/164/788/80952)

</comment><comment><USER28> Personal two cents: the actual maximally "fair" and maximally safe strategy is not to release anyone on bail. True positives are 100%, and false negatives are 0%.

Beyond that, I agree with nabla9:

> I think unconstrained algorithm in criminal cases is ethically wrong. > Justice should be individualized or it's not justice.

</comment><comment><USER29> Imprisoning people without trial, for predicted future crimes, is what's unfair. Letting an algorithm make the prediction instead of a judge only punctuates the injustice.

What is a "fair" criteria to base this decision on? Is it fair to throw someone in jail because they are young, or they got layed off, or they don't have friends or family? How is any of that better than jailing them for their skin color?

These are exactly the things that justice is supposed to be blind to.

I'm rooting for the algorithms here, simply because they make the inherent injustice of pre-trial detention harder to ignore. We can convince ourselves that this injustice is somehow corrected by the presumed wisdom and compassion of a human judge. But by formalizing the logic, we have to acknowledge that we are literally throwing people in jail for plainly unfair reasons.

<comment><USER7> Is there any circumstance in which you would support detention before trial? If not, would you oppose the detention of a serial killer caught in the act? If you do support pre-trial detention in some cases, how do you distinguish these cases from those cases for which pre-trial detention is unjustified? Could such a decision scheme be "fair" in principle? What would make it fair?

<comment><USER29> I think detention before trial is always unfair in principle, but likely unavoidable in practice. I would like to see the issue acknowledged and taken more seriously, but it's a tricky problem and I have no easy solutions to offer. Practical mitigations may be the best we can do, which I'll grant may be expensive, non-trivial to implement, and allow more criminals to roam free. Here are some vague ideas off the cuff:

* Base decisions only on things that would be relevant in a trial, like evidence and criminal history.

* Nobody should be detained just because they haven't paid bail money. If we decide that someone can be released, it should be immediate and unconditional. The court should charge no more than they can immediately collect.

* Make detention as pleasant and convenient as possible for the accused. We should have facilities specifically for this purpose that are more like hotels than prisons, at least in principle.

* Eliminate any trial delays that aren't strictly necessary, i.e. due to congestion or beurocracy.

If a serial killer is caught in the act, there would presumably be enough evidence available at the bail hearing to justify detention.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Getting rid of algorithms means replacing them with humans. And humans are _far_ worse.

Humans are terribly biased. Racial bias isn't even anywhere near the strongest bias we have. Unattractive people get sentences twice as long as attractive people. Judges give far harsher sentences before lunch, when they are hungriest. Socially awkward people seem to be pretty strongly discriminated against. Studies have found people discriminate by politics even more than race. Job interviews have actually been shown to degrade performance over just judging resumes. Before statistics and credit ratings, getting a good loan required being an old friend of the banker.

It's not just that humans are unfair. We are objectively terrible. Very simple statistical algorithms beat human "experts" in almost every domain they get tried on. As early as the 1920s, a statistician came up with a formula that was better at predicting recidivism than a group of 3 prison psychologists.

Simple linear regression has predicted the success of medical treatments better than doctors, diagnosed psychoticism better than trained psychiatrists, predicted academic success much better than admissions officers, predicted loan risk better than bank officers, etc, etc. To say nothing of modern machine learning methods on modern computers. It's insane we allow humans to continue doing these tasks at all.

But there has been huge resistance to algorithms in every domain. From people who stand to lose their jobs and be put to shame by them of course. But also even outsiders tend to reject algorithms. And overly trust humans. Psychologists have actually studied this. They call it a bias labelled "Algorithm Aversion". [http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WPAF201410-Algort...](http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/risk/library/WPAF201410-AlgorthimAversion- Dietvorst-Simmons-Massey.pdf) The study showed that humans were willing to forgive the mistakes of humans far more than those of algorithms, even when the algorithm made far fewer of them.

This is why they aren't everywhere already. The last thing we need is fear mongering like this. As shown, humans are far worse. If an algorithm shouldn't do it, then a human certainly should not.

A big part of the case these people make is a reference to a propublica study that found a slight bias against race in an algorithm once. Yet that study wasn't peer reviewed. The findings weren't statistically significant. [https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying....](https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/propublica_is_lying.html)

Also, A.I. 'Bias' Doesn't Mean What Journalists Say it Means: [https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/29/a-i-bias-doesnt-mean- what...](https://jacobitemag.com/2017/08/29/a-i-bias-doesnt-mean-what- journalists-want-you-to-think-it-means/)

<comment><USER7> It depends on your objective function, doesn't it? Computer models definitely do better than humans on the _ostensible_ objective function --- predicting recidivism --- but computer models don't have decades of exposure to subtle social cues that signal to humans that the real objective function is one subtly different from the one that a naive understanding of the system would suggest.

That's really the beautiful thing about our shift toward algorithms: we'll no longer be able to rely on these subtle social pressures. If we want to optimize a specific function, we need to put _that function_ in the open, where everyone can see it. Then, as the linked article demonstrates, we can compare the idealized and actually-desired functions and perform a real cost- benefit analysis.</comment></comment>


On the dark history of intelligence as domination - <AUTHOR> https://aeon.co/essays/on-the-dark-history-of-intelligence-as-domination <comment><USER2> Best quote:

"Natural stupidity, rather than artificial intelligence, remains the greatest risk".</comment>


Fund-my-project: Earn grants/funding for your project - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/sakofchit/fund-my-project <comment><USER2> Where can I find the opposite: join a community of funders, which already has the filtering and application process figured out? There are a lot of us who'd love to help others get started, but you don't want to have thousands of different applications, all with slightly different requirements.

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree! I'd love to put a platform like this together but since I lack connections I would probably have a hard time finding funders that would use it.

<comment><USER3> Don't let that stop you. Cold contacting + a good Show HN would be enough to kickstart it. It will just be work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Someone suggested that there should be a place that documents a list of grants + deadlines in my last post, so I've gone ahead and put together a list of grants, crowdfunding platforms, and other resources that can help you get off the ground with no upfront costs!

If you know of other grants or resources, please feel free to create a pull request :)

<comment><USER4> Love the quick turnaround. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the idea! Seems like a lot of people are finding it useful :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> n-exploit You should add Gitcoin.co - they fund open source projects through distribution of cryptocurrencies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will add soon

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Depending on how much 'project' we're leaning, this misses the rather large pool of funds that is SBIR. Not easy, or fast, but can put some oomph behind a project.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah you're right. 'project' is subjective :). This is just a start for now, but I'm open to PR's that includes other types of funding

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesome initiative! I like the idea of combining non-VC resources for the very start of the project. Thanks for sharing!

</comment><comment><USER7> Im a college aged kid working on several projects, whats the best way to format a request/application like this

<comment><AUTHOR> I think most grants have their own form that you have to fill out so it would depend on the grant/funder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes +1 for that ! Every little bit helps & I hope this grows</comment>


Hardware Naughty or Nice – 2014 Edition - <AUTHOR> http://www.bitsofcents.com/post/105463681766/hardware-naughty-or-nice-2014-edition

<comment><USER2> No Coin or Tile?</comment>


Show HN: JamPad - <AUTHOR> http://jampad.chaoscollective.org/?draw <comment><USER2> Jampad?? That's UK slang for a certain sanitary towel.

<comment><AUTHOR> haha. thanks for the tip :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like the pen drop effect. It might be worth detecting the browser as when I read the "put your finger on the screen" my hand actually moved to my laptop screen. Then I realized it was probably for a mobile device and laughed as I used the mouse.

<comment><USER4> I did the same thing because my laptop at home is a swivel tablet, but I'm at work and using a regular laptop. Definitely will try this out at home though I like the simplicity of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Very nice! Reminds me of an early version FiftyThree's Paper! (<http://www.fiftythree.com/paper>)

</comment><comment><USER6> Quick bug report: X and Y are about 20% too high in mobile safari. Also crashes mobile safari frequently.

Otherwise, fun. I like the pen drop effect.

<comment><AUTHOR> tested on an iPhone and iPad with mobile safari and I'm not getting that. Curious to hear what your setup was.

<comment><USER6> Sorry, you're right. Mobile safari is fine.

Embedded UIWebViews have the problems I mentioned. Probably not much you can do about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Very cute - any plans of open-sourcing?

<comment><AUTHOR> we'd love to!

The only thing is that we've been open sourcing all of our projects recently (because people ask, and we love open source ourselves), but then no one seems to truly care for it.

We're beginning to wonder if not open sourcing a project actually makes it _more_ accessible since there is greater incentive to maintain it and potentially offer it as a platform. thoughts?

all-in-all the code's not that complex. more a matter of planning, principle, and investment. It took 2 professional dev/designers working on it for about a week (came together in a day, then spent a few days tweaking it to run faster and work on lots of screen sizes and devices). How do we recoup that cost? Or is it just good vibes and press? :)</comment></comment>


The Anti-Hero of CSS Layout – "display:table" (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://colintoh.com/blog/display-table-anti-hero <comment><USER2> It is fascinating how a perfectly sensible rule-of-thumb "you shouldn't use html tables for something which is not semantically a table" gradually morphed into various superstitions like "you shouldn't use html tables" or "you shouldn't use tables for layout" or even "you shouldn't use tables".

I don't think people have a hard time understanding that you shouldn't use the
-element for something which is not a quote. But html tables had a more troubled history because for a long time html tables were the only way to achieve certain layout effects, which was not supported by pure CSS in mainstream browsers, because they didn't implement "display:table".

This article is well-intentioned but I think it also contains some language which muddies a pretty simple concept. Eg. it states _CSS Table has a key differentiation over HTML Table. It can choose not to be a table by just adjusting its CSS properties. Something that HTML Table is incapable of._ The sentence seem to confuse semantics with presentation, which is what got us into this mess in the first place.

<comment><USER3> On the other hand, there are cases where HTML Tables put great challanges to user experience.

First to come to mind: A table with many rows displayed on a tiny mobile screen. The most common solution is to let the table overflow horizontally. There are other complex solutions, most of them fall in the _CSS-Hack_ category.

In this case, to have a _CSS table_ that can be something else on a tiny screen (via media queries) may lead to a successful UX solution.

<comment><USER2> But you don't choose between HTML tables and CSS tables - they are independent concerns, HTML is semantics, CSS is presentation. HTML table elements just have display:table as the _default_ style (in the default browser style sheet). You can override this in a style sheet as with any other style. And conversely, you can apply display:table to any element regardless of HTML semantics.

It is true older browsers had partially hardcoded presentation so you couldn't always override the default CSS of certain elements (table elments and form controls were especially notorious for hardcoded presentation). But I believe this is not an issue in modern browsers.

<comment><USER4> > But I believe this is not an issue in modern browsers.

I think the last browser that saw widespread use in any market with that issue was NN4. In some markets, Opera [some version; 7?] with the same issue will have been a problem much later than NN4. Really, this is to say: this hasn't been a concern for well over a decade at this point even with fairly generous browser support matrices.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For what it's worth, the author mentioned that CSS Flexbox would also work, but the market share of IE 9 was too high at the time for him to use. That was 2014, and now the market share of IE (especially IE 9) is drastically lower.

[https://www.w3counter.com/trends](https://www.w3counter.com/trends)

[http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox](http://caniuse.com/#feat=flexbox)

<comment><USER6> depending on your audience, most of the time you still can't use flexbox today due to ie9/10.

it's really something that after all these years, in 2017, microsoft browsers still find a way to hold back web features.

<comment><USER7> What audience is that? Who are these people relevant to? Microsoft isn't holding back anything, they can't force these people to update their software. If everyone keeps supporting them, they never will have a reason to update.

<comment><USER8> Government is one such audience. The K-12 system is another.

<comment><USER7> Is that _really_ true? You'd think that the government has security provisions that requires software updates.

As for K-12, is that really a _requirement_ in some places, or is it just the case that some clients just happen to not be updated?

<comment><USER4> IE9 gets security updates on Vista SP2.

More generally IE9 and IE10 are both still supported by Microsoft (for Vista SP2, Server 2008 SP, Server 2008 IA64; and for Server 2012, and Embedded 8 Standard), so it seems entirely plausible Microsoft would sell security updates for other OSes to clients willing to pay for them; they definitely do that for some clients (some still get security updates for XP!).

<comment><USER9> These outdated OSes have a tiny market share, and more importantly, an organization that prevents sw installation doesn't use outdated OSes. Others can install Firefox even on XP. Old Androids and IPhones are a bigger issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The anti-table hysteria has vexed me for years. From a purely practical POV tables were simply the only way to achieve things in a broad browser base until only the last few years.

But what really drove me nuts was when that hysteria extended to things that were clearly tabular. I remember trying to copy paste a list of transactions from the Morgan Stanley site and it just didn't work. Confused why I looked at the source and the "table" was in fact just a series of divs with a lot of CSS to make it look like a table. A table could be copied and pasted into a Google spreadsheet trivially. Instead I had to manually reenter the data.

I feel like a lot of this could have been prevent d had we simply created HTML elements called <grid> years ago.

</comment><comment> c-smile The only problem with display:table is that it still requires additional markup to organize elements in tables. Consider this definition list:

Term1

Term1 defintion

Term2

Term2 defintion

and the task of organizing it into two columns table: dt's in first column and dd's in second. Impossible either with display:table & co. or with display flex.

At the same time in Sciter[1] I can define that layout as

       dl {
          flow: row(dt,dd);
       }

\- replace dt/dd pairs in table rows. The table will have two columns. Pure styling without changes of markup semantic and structure.

[1] CSS: Flow property and Flex units in Sciter: [https://sciter.com/docs/flex-flow/flex- layout.htm](https://sciter.com/docs/flex-flow/flex-layout.htm)

<comment><USER2> CSS only needs additional elements in case you need to apply structures which is not already present in the HTML. To layout something as a grid you need two levels of grouping: what delimits a cell and what delimits a row. Free-from dt/dd sequences does not contain this information, since there may be multiple dt per dd and vice versa. If dt/dd could only appear in pairs (like in your example) you could say there is an implicit structure, but this is not necessarily the case.

<comment> c-smile > you need two levels of grouping

Not necessarily.

I can define

       form { flow:row(label, input select textarea); }

to have typical form's two columns layout with all s go to first column and input, select and textarea go to second. All non-matching elements are replaced as if they span full rows (like
 in tables).

People at trying to simulate these things by using float and clear. Ugly, non- reliable, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> table-layout is another CSS property that I think too often goes unmentioned when talking about table based layouts; the default value (auto) is essentially "do something the spec isn't even going to try and define because implementations be crazy because they're essentially reverse-engineered copies of IE6's behaviour which is itself a reverse-engineered copy of NN4's behaviour".

The other value the property can take, fixed, makes table layout way more predictable: with no width properties defined, an n column table will result in each column having an equal width. If you define a width on some columns, it will split the remaining space between the remaining columns. This is far more often what you actually want when laying out non-tabular data using display: table as a make-shift grid layout system.

</comment><comment><USER11> I never understood why people think the "holy grail layout" is a sticky footer. Do they really have pages with so little content that it's an issue?

I have decided for me at least that a fixed footer and header is what I consider my "holy grail layout" with just a center with no columns. Lately I've been trying to play with css grid to port over my previous layouts, but without much luck so far.

<comment><USER2> The _point_ of a footer is that it is at the bottom of the canvas regardless of the size of other content. If it is not at the bottom of the canvas, then you get something else at the bottom - like a colored box of unknown dimensions. Which means the footer is not the footer anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm still waiting for "display:div" to roll out.

<comment><USER13> It's called `display: block` - in sake of consistency :)

<comment> c-smile `display:block` does not define layout model of element content so I suspect it is not an intent of the author.

This

       div { display:block }
       div > * { display:block; }

is closer but still far from ideal: e.g. it will force all tables to lose their display:table; or lists to lose display:list-item;

As far as I understand author is looking for

       div { flow:vertical; }

But that's available only in Sciter.

<comment><USER2> I'm not sure I understand what you are trying to achieve differently from regular display:block?

<comment> c-smile Consider following markup:

         some text
         <foo>first</foo><bar>second</bar>

There is no way in CSS at the moment to define __content __flow of the div above. The only possible way is to define `display` on its children.

Say, you want that div to replace content vertically as if all children are blocks and text runs are wrapped into anonymous paragraphs:

some text

         <block.foo>first</block>
         <block.bar>second</block>

That's impossible in modern CSS without redefining `display` in children. But usually you cannot blindly say

       div > * { display:block;}

What if some child uses `display:flex` ?

Problem is that `display` defines how element is replaced __among its siblings __. But not how its children are laid out.

At some point it was a proposal to add `display-model` css property. So you can have

       div { display: block; display-model:flex | table | etc }

Without it we have ugly semi-solution of combinatorial explosion:

       div { display: flex; }
       div { display: inline-flex; }
       div { display: table }
       div { display: inline-table; }
       div { display: grid; }
       div { display: inline-grid; }
       ...

<comment><USER2> Ah OK, I agree this would be useful. I think a newer CSS proposal factors the display property into separate values to declare element flow and element content flow independently.

<comment> c-smile "a newer CSS proposal"

This is of 2002: [http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD- css3-box-20021024/#L706](http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-css3-box-20021024/#L706)

15 years ago, Carl!

<comment><USER2> Yeah, that draft was abandoned though, but some of the ideas have been incorporated in the CSS3 display model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hmm, I usually only want "display: table" for... tables.

<comment><USER15> You missed the point. The CSS table display was created to decouple this particular layout behaviour from the
 element. The reasons for that are clearly laid out in the examples. All of this was impossible to accomplish before flexbox.</comment></comment>


How I lost my $50,000 Twitter username - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2014/01/29/lost-50000-twitter-username/

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7141532](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7141532)

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, my bad :-/

<comment><AUTHOR> ...how did it not warn me that the link had been posted already, same story, different source?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> How shocking: GoDaddy was partially responsible.

</comment><comment><USER4> Not so sure I would've succumbed to the attacker. What are our rights here as a user? Could we call the police on it?</comment>


The TSA Must Go (2016) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.simplejustice.us/2016/07/02/the-tsa-must-go/ <comment><USER2> According to [https://www.transtats.bts.gov/](https://www.transtats.bts.gov/), there were 719 million airline passengers last year. The average human lifespan is 79 years.

Assuming each passenger wastes an hour being molested and arriving overearly due to uncertainty about how long the molestation could take, this means _the TSA effectively kills over one thousand people every year_.

<comment><USER3> It's actually worse than that. Since 9/11 and the birth of the TSA, a number of people who need to travel a moderate distance (say, a drive of a few hours) have chosen to drive when they might have chosen to fly before. Air travel is statistically safer per mile travelled than driving. I don't have the link handy, but it has been calculated that this change in travel habits has resulted in an increase of driving fatalities of over a thousand a year. More people have actually died in traffic fatalities due to the TSA than died on 9/11.

<comment><USER4> I've been on Amtrak long distance routes a few times over the past five years. Every single time, I have met someone at one of my meals who has said they choose train travel specifically to avoid all the security hassle. And then are always on the older end of the age spectrum. Sure, this is anecdotal, but I think it hints at an unease by older folks about the whole screening process and so they completely avoid it when they have the travel time to spare.

<comment><USER2> IMHO the dining car skews towards older people, as they're more likely to have booked rooms. My sample size is 2 (trips _and_ meals).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It isn't like we never had security at Airports before. Is your issue with the current implementation or the fact its a government agency instead of private contractors?

Since the rash of hijackings in the 70s its never been possible to simply walk onto an airplane without some security screening.</comment>


The Contradiction That Is Ayn Rand - <AUTHOR> http://www.petemccormack.com/blog/?p=6711 <comment><USER2> FYI, non-contradiction is not uniquely Rand's idea and is the _metaphysical_ principle behind Aristotelian logic. Don't throw out the baby with the bath water in your hatred of Ayn Rand.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you hate using but are forced to use? - <AUTHOR>

I'd like to discover niches where people are stuck using software or services that they hate, but where there aren't viable alternatives.
What are you forced to use but absolutely hate using? If there are viable alternatives, what barriers are there to switching?
I'm less interested in hearing generic "I hate Microsoft, but have to use it for work" statements.
I'm more interested in hearing "I work in [industry] and have to use [bad software]. It sucks because [reasons]. We haven't switched to [alternative] because of [more reasons]." <comment><USER2> So, I wonder if you're thinking of starting a business based on one of these "I hate using" stories. If you are, I'd advise caution entering a market you don't actually understand personally. Yes, we all make software that eventually grows to do things we don't use ourselves (I use functionality that touches less than 10% of our total codebase on a daily basis, and never hit more than 20% of it, for example), but without understanding the core problem set of your target audience, I'm not sure you can build effective software to solve those problems.

When I worked in scientific computing, one of the founders of the company I worked for had done doctoral work in the areas the software was covering, and the company hired domain experts, who also happened to know a bit about software development, whenever they moved into new fields.

This is the reason I've never gone into medical billing, despite the fact that I _know_ the medical billing software industry is a mess, and also an incredibly lucrative market. I know it is a mess, because my sister owns a medical billing firm, and I've seen the software her company uses. But, without spending a few months working in the field, I wouldn't be effective at solving those problems. If I ever did decide to start a company in that field, I think I'd need to spend some time in the trenches of that particular field.

Likewise, I suspect if you do find yourself a lucrative and currently poorly served market niche to focus on, you will need to also find a few companies to work closely with, so you actually understand the problems and how they can be solved. Also, keep in mind that the harder existing software is to use, the more training existing users will have had to know how to use it. Don't underestimate how hard it is to convert someone from using "complicated but familiar" solutions to using "easy but new" solutions.

Not seeking to rain on the "I hate X" parade, just pointing out that if you aren't scratching your own itch, to some degree, you have a lot of work to do just to begin to understand the problem domain.

<comment><USER3> Thank you, very good post. Echoes my own thoughts.

It is a response that I have frequently entertained in my mind to entrepreneurial cheerleaders (and even sometimes PG's statements, insofar as they relate to solving truly niche commercial software problems, although I don't think he intentionally suggests that you can do it without the experience by any means).

But yes, I'm in telecom and I see outside consultants and vendors who are basically general IT in their orientation show up all the time and think that they can create better OSS/BSS (operational support/billing support systems) solutions, switch provisioning and monitoring software, and workflow/process management in the highly bureaucratised and rather regulated carrier space (i.e. Local Number Portability).

Then I see them get fired a few months later because they just haven't the foggiest earthly clue what minefield they stepped into. They would have benefitted from hiring at least one omnicurious person who has actually worked for a competitive carrier first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Linux. It's arguably one of the best unix clones ever and it is extremely stable. Still, I feel that another clone of macro kernel unix was a missed opportunity. Plan 9 and it's ilk (and QnX) seem much more the direction to go in for many reasons, most of them having to do with modularization, upgrading your operating system (even the kernel) without rebooting and user land device drivers.

Still, to make a living plan 9 and QnX are niches, plan 9 is very much an experimental os, and QnX is mostly relegated to being a real-time embedded systems os. If you've worked with either one of them for any length of time though you really will begin to appreciate that there are other possibilities that are worth researching.

Linus and Andrew Tanenbaum had this out a long time ago, and it seems that Linux 'won' by acclamation but I'm not so sure that wasn't simply pigheadedness instead of sound engineering reasons.

</comment><comment><USER5> Some of my clients use Windows Server 2008 on remote colocated blade servers. It sucks because it's difficult to manage, it constantly raises useless authorization dialogs and it's terribly inefficient at even the simplest operations like copying files. To make things worse many operations have to be done using DRAC controllers and a broken IE interface over a slow network. Linux is a viable alternative and some are moving to it slowly but in many cases historic developers and programs are tied to Windows.

</comment><comment><USER6> I work in market research and have to use SPSS. It sucks because the old versions would crash for no good reason and the new versions are slow. The output is ugly as hell. I haven't switched to R, StatXP, Stata because I'm lazy, we have a huge number of old surveys in SPSS format and a whole lot of scripts and macro written.

Oh and the copy protection sucks. Seriously, if I want to pirate your software, I will download a crack.

</comment><comment><USER7> My mouse. I would love to control OSX entirely by keyboard. I tried the framing systems on linux but it just wasn't for me.

<comment><USER8> Word. That itch inspired my current Big Scratch.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Xilinx ISE. Admittedly I only used it for a college course ~1.5 years ago, and then only whatever version they made freely downloadable, but it was ridiculously buggy and user-unfriendly compared to any other development tool I've tried.</comment>


Show HN: Ripple – a proximity based method to spread information - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
I've been working on a concept called Ripple. It allows users to create content and send it to people geographically near them. If these folks find the content engaging or relevant, they can pass on the content to more people near them. Information on Ripple travels so long and so far as the content is found relevant or engaging.
So far, Ripple has been attracted an audience made up mostly of photographers, artists, and bloggers who are looking to expose their work to a large audience.
We're excited about the potential for Ripple to be the go-to platform for people looking to expose their views and work with people near them and around the world, and as a great way to allow for local updates on events and other information.
Take a look for yourselves! http://getRipple.io
iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ripple-explore-your-world/id946792245?mt=8 Android:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.KefiLabs.Ripple <comment><USER2> Saw you at Node School at the Moz offices a couple of months ago. Good concept, great attitude, and solid execution. Hoping you make it man.

</comment><comment><USER3> Posts without URLs get penalized, so you'd be better off posting this with a URL, then adding your text as a first comment to the new thread. Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> ah,

Thank you sir.</comment></comment>


California Governor Vetoes Bill to Stop Drones from Flying Over Private Property - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/09/10/california_gov_jerry_brown_vetoes_bill_to_stop_drones_from_flying_over_private.html <comment><USER2> I'm not American but I'm happy with this news, laws like this pass and spread from state to state, country to country, so this is a Win for all.

<comment><USER3> +1 the scope of the bill was too general. Address the known issues rather than a blanket that will need later amendment.</comment></comment>


Google Wave: The eternal conference call  - <AUTHOR> http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2009/10/the_eternal_con.php#

<comment><USER2> Communication is hard. Neither voicemail nor E-Mail made it much easier. Nor will Wave. So far, so obvious.

What I don't get is this author's hatred for conference calls. I only experienced them as a very focused thing. Sort of like a meeting. Neither any more or less annoying. If you know what you want to do and what you can accomplish not really annoying.

Also: Telephone's not dead and still useful, especially for time critical stuff. If you need something right now writing an E-Mail won't help. Neither will Wave.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone ever migrate a large app from AWS to Heroku? - <AUTHOR>

We have a fairly extensive platform.  Two Rails web apps (UI) and three more API Rails apps all talking to a central postgres database.  It is all running on AWS.  My challenge though is that we don't have a dedicated DevOps resource and it is a huge challenge to get all the supporting infrastructure working well for dealing with monitoring, logging, exceptions, deployments etc.  It seems like this stuff would be easier just running on Heroku and using a small handful of plugins rather than trying to manage it all ourselves with open source stuff we need to set up (Graylog, Sensu etc).  I hear about people going from Heroku to AWS because of cost, but I wonder if anyone goes the other direction for ease of use? <comment><USER2> I am sure plenty of people go to Heroku from AWS and vice-versa of course. But don't underestimate the amount of work it is to switch either, you already have a working, running solution today. You maybe better off taking a week or so of time and just automating your AWS infrastructure using either OpsWorks or Ansible etc. Then deploy something like the ELK stack for the monitoring and logging to make that easier and be done with it. I am not saying any of this is trivial, but once you do it you will not have changes every day. My bet is it would take you a week or more to move, and it would probably take a week or so to automate most of your "issues" today. But at least with AWS today you know how your app is performing and acting etc.

If I was in your position, I'd probably try to automate the pain points first, then move as a last resort. Unless there are other reasons for wanting to move. But either way, just don't underestimate the work to move.

<comment><USER3> +1. We weren't on AWS, but we had co-located rack space and we moved our main rails app that has been in development for 4 years over to Heroku. It took much much much longer than anyone expected. Like we thought it was a 4 man weeks of work, turned out it was a few man months of work.

Most of the work we had to do centered around data. The rails app it self pretty much worked. We had to change a few things moving from mySQL to Postgres. We depended on a gem that apparently was only tested against mySQL and when we moved to Postgres had to scramble pretty hard to get stuff fixed. How am I going to get this legacy Domino/Lotus Notes system and AS400 to talk to this postgres database or am I going to build APIs around it, etc were harder to solve.

We moved to Heroku because we didn't have the time or skills to do devops well. Heroku has dramatically reduced the amount of time we spend around devops to the point that most months it approaches 0. We also have been using New Relic, which I don't think we would have installed without Heroku. This tool is amazing and has allowed us to respond to trends much better.

Our move to a more SOA infrastructure drove us to Heroku, and for us it was totally worth the switch. If you, or anyone, has specific questions feel free to reach out: firstname.lastname@example.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Disclosure: I work at Heroku.

Yes, there are people who move from AWS to Heroku. The decision to choose Heroku over AWS can be multifaceted, but usually comes down to a couple things: development experience and operations experience. Heroku strives to make the process of developing and launching an app extremely simple yet incredibly powerful. Providing a toolchain that simplifies the configuration of production-ready app execution environments enables developers to focus on what they're awesome at - developing great apps. And not having to become an expert on provisioning, scaling, and maintaining individual pieces of infrastructure can eliminate or reduce the necessity for dedicated DevOps.

Is Heroku the right choice for every app? No. However, Heroku hosts everything from small exploratory apps to sites like Upworthy and Urban Dictionary, so is likely worth your consideration. If you're interested in talking a bit more offline you can reach me at theandym at heroku dot com.

</comment><comment><USER5> Before you explore Heroku much further, I would recommend doing some cost analysis and see what it would cost you versus hiring some part time or full time DevOps help.

Even if you find that it costs you twice as much to hire a DevOps person, it will be worth it. You should try to avoid the cost (and the impact to productivity) that a Heroku migration would bring if you can.

</comment><comment><USER6> I personally haven't come across someone moving from AWS to Heroku.

Also, are you using elastic beanstalk to manage your app or just regular ec2 instances? Using beanstalk should simplify most of the tasks for you.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Anyone? [crickets] Maybe that is a no!?! :-)</comment>


Programmer productivity tips you can try right now - <AUTHOR> http://blog.luismartinho.com/3-programmer-productivity-tips-you-can-try-ri

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the tips. As always, Mark Twain's words are golden.</comment>


Mathics: A free, light-weight alternative to Mathematica - <AUTHOR> https://mathics.github.io/ <comment><USER2> If you're looking for a mature alternative, Maxima CAS ([http://maxima.sourceforge.net/](http://maxima.sourceforge.net/)) is worth looking into. It doesn't aim for syntax compatibility with Mathematica as this does, but it is quite usable and fast.

<comment><USER3> Also [http://www.sympy.org/](http://www.sympy.org/)

<comment><USER4> Sympy is so simple and intuitive to use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Sage / Sagecloud is quite popular in academics in the Czech Republic.

<comment><USER6> Yes bug Sage is weird. It's a sewed together giant of multiple parts, and the seams are quite apparent. It's also hard to install and get started with.

<comment><USER7> This is not true anymore. In Windows it might be, but on Mac and Linux it's very straightforward.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Examples are here: [https://mathics.angusgriffith.com/doc/manual/examples/curve-...](https://mathics.angusgriffith.com/doc/manual/examples/curve- sketching/)

Having spent time learning the syntax of Mathematica, this seems like a nice interface to SymPy.

</comment><comment><USER9> Genuine question - what is the use of all these versus something like R or Pandas that is actually usable in production as well.

What is missing in R/Pandas that makes people choose other pieces of software that does something very similar? Commercial versions of software probably has an edge in support/performance/libraries...Or (as with Simulink ) provides a very specific piece of functionality or integration.

But what is the general use case? Even Mathworks has acknowledged the need to integrate with the huge R community out there - [http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/05/22/why-would-a- mathematica-u...](http://blog.wolfram.com/2013/05/22/why-would-a-mathematica- user-care-about-r/)

<comment><USER10> The value of Mathematica is pretty straightforward. The language it provides is nothing special, but the scientific and mathematic routines, along with the symbolic support, put it in a class by itself- no open source package I've seen does root finding and other similar processes as effectively.

The symbolic stuff is pretty cool too. Years ago I wrote "pyml" which made all the Mathematica features available in Python via a C language bridge. Whereas in scipy/numpy you can find the eigenvectors of a numeric array (a matrix of floats), in Mathematica, you can find the eigenvectors of a symbolic array (a matrix containing terms like x-1, y-5, etc).

<comment><USER11> And yet Mathematica is not nearly as effective as math when done by pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician.

The value of maths is 1) it's "open-source", 2) it's free to use, 3) if you want to switch from one module to another (say, number theory to category theory) you are able to do so using the same tools (pencil, paper, and a trained mathematician), and so long as the two "modules" are inter-operable it flows so beautifully. If they are not, then you get to try to figure out ways to make them so.

That, imho, is why I think all these open source packages keep popping up. Math itself is the ultimate "open source". And in doing math one is not limited to command line interface, left-to-right, line-by-line tools. Compare the experience of writing out a derivative in LaTeX vs on paper. LaTeX is an exercise in causing pain and frustration to oneself. On paper, it feels as though you're writing music.

<comment><USER12> you are describing a very limited view of what it means to do mathematics. and no, all of mathematics is not open source. much of it is locked behind institutional barriers.

also, i don't understand this fervent attitude that something must be free and open source to be useful. a lot of open source software is complete trash. there is a reason why people pay to use tools like matlab, labview, and mathematica. it is because their value exceeds their cost.

<comment><USER10> i believe the phrase is "software is only free if your time is worthless". There are plenty of counterexamples to this (where there is free software that greatly increases the productivity of the user, without a great deal of time spent moving up the learning curve).

In the case of Mathematica there is a ton that is "locked away behind institution barriers". Mathematica contains millions of lines of code dedicated to implementing clever algorithms for making their root finder and other things work really, really well. but those are all internal source code lines within the company.

I've seen this play out across multiple industries. A good example is SAS and R. There are certain parts of FDA new drug applications that require, specifically, the SAS implementation of a statistical routine, and you can't use R because it doesn't implement the routine in a bit-identical manner. However, a spokesperson from SAS once said, "You'd never fly in an airplane designed by open source software" to which Boeing responded "we use open source software to design our airplanes"

<comment><USER13> I'm replying a little late and I'm not sure if you'll see it, but do you have a source for that quote? That's amazing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is sympy ever going to be able to do symbolic Padé approximation? That's the only thing keeping me from dumping Mathematica.

</comment><comment><USER15> Another option is octave.

[https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/](https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/)

I've only used it a bit, but when I did it was adequate. Not sure how this compares to Mathics overall in terms of functionality, footprint though.

<comment><USER16> Are you thinking of Matlab?

<comment><USER15> Gah. Yes. Regrets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> The idea of Mathics is great - open-source, in-the-browser Mathematica clone - unfortunately the implementation is still sorely lacking. Last time I tried it (admittedly fairly long ago), even simple stuff just didn't work: [https://github.com/mathics/Mathics/issues/260](https://github.com/mathics/Mathics/issues/260)

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for posting this, just for our awareness.

The interface would be a lot easier to use if it had an integrated help system (help function?) and tab completion.

<comment><USER18> The web interface does have inbuilt docs. Code introspection and tab completion are coming as part of the new interface (in progress) see [https://github.com/mathics/IMathics](https://github.com/mathics/IMathics)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Mathics was abandoned a few years ago when the author got a job working on ... Take a guess as to what

<comment><USER20> GitHub shows significant activity in 2015, 2016:

[https://github.com/mathics/Mathics/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/mathics/Mathics/graphs/contributors)

It looks like sn6uv (Angus Griffith "a Mathematician and Programmer from Sydney Australia") has picked up the baton ...

<comment><USER18> That's right. Mathics is still maintained. There are currently two of us working on it. The last release was v0.9 in March this year.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Or you could just use the real thing for free at [https://www.open.wolframcloud.com/](https://www.open.wolframcloud.com/)

<comment><USER22> Or even run it for free on a Raspberry Pi (or under a Pi emulation on a PC, albeit slowly).

<comment><USER19> Huh. Can you share links to documentation ofnthis strategy?

<comment><USER22> Sorry for the delay - I don't usually check for replies here: [http://linux- mitterteich.de/fileadmin/datafile/papers/2013/q...](http://linux- mitterteich.de/fileadmin/datafile/papers/2013/qemu_raspiemu_lug_18_sep_2013.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Mathematica is a very complex piece of software. As an ex-physicist there's no way I would trust this completely unknown open source alternative.

<comment><USER14> You shouldn't trust Mathematica either. It has had bugs in the past [0].

Also it didn't have a proper "undo" feature until a year or so ago, which is pretty embarrassing.

[0] [http://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf](http://www.ams.org/notices/201410/rnoti-p1249.pdf)

<comment><USER23> My point was "this piece of software surely has more bugs than Mathematica". What's your point? That because they both have a non-zero number of bugs we should be equally suspicious of both?

<comment><USER14> > My point was "this piece of software surely has more bugs than Mathematica".

It sounded like your point was "I trust Mathematica, but not this open-source CAS". Otherwise you would have just said "I don't trust CASs".</comment></comment></comment></comment>


New algorithm cracks graph problem - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencenews.org/article/new-algorithm-cracks-graph-problem <comment><USER2> Very exciting news if it holds! Can someone discuss how close the quasi- polynomial complexity is to P - that seems to be the really interesting detail that gets covered less.</comment>


Show HN: Public Obelisk Server for the Community - <AUTHOR> http://blog.coinkite.com/post/97397052686/public-obelisk-server-for-the-community

<comment><USER2> Just want to say that implementing a client for a binary protocol like Obelisk clears the head after too many JSON and wishy-washy web protocols.

Fixed-width binary fields, framed as 0MQ message frames/messages. Relaxing.</comment>


What is behind the name duckduckgo - <AUTHOR> http://www.altvirtual.com/tech-news/duckduckgo-a-new-way-to-search-the-web.html No seriously is it because most of the good domains are in the hands of cyber-squatters <comment><USER2> Expected this to be entertaining or informative. Instead it's just a shameless plug for the site and its founder. Lame, duck.

<comment><USER3> For the record, I had nothing to do with the writing or submission of this article. And I've never heard of the site.

<comment><USER2> No worries. Wasn't pointing the finger at you. Just thought the article was kind of pointless. It's good that you clarified, though - thanks.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Review our startup, PubliciTweet - <AUTHOR> http://publicitweet.com

<comment><USER2> First off, great design and layout, very clean and pretty too. It compliments twitter well. However, it's not clear to me what the service does. The first feature listed on the 'what you get page' says: PubliciTweet is a social media marketing tool that helps you leverage those followers with unique campaigns and tools to track your success.

This works more as an opening tagline and might be better suited to the homepage. From the homepage, I get the idea that PubliciTweet is a service where I can queue a series of tweets at various intervals . PubliciTweet then tracks and graphs which tweets by measuring clickthroughs perhaps. When I click 'learn more' - I don't learn actually learn any more. Maybe an in depth description could go here explaining the guts of it or a video demo.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I've been wanting to do a video demo. That's probably one of the upcoming changes to the site. I agree that the 'learn more' page is probably too wordy as well. Hoped that the bullet points would help clearly define what the service does..but will add more clarity on the home page.

<comment><USER2> Just to be clear, I think the 'learn more' page is not wordy enough. I think you should elaborate more on what the service does. There is more info on the home page than the 'learn more' page.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, thanks for clarifying. I often shy away from providing too much verbosity in terms of text. Sometimes I think people's eyes glaze over quickly. Good to know you would like to find out more about the service and are willing to read about it. Can definitely expand the learn more section.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> "Direct message all Twitter followers"

I already hate you for that. Don't advise your clients to do that.

<comment><AUTHOR> What's the deal with so many people hating DMs on Twitter? We provide the option to send DMs to groups of followers. Our hope is that Twitter will end up being a place where companies that provide valuable content (via DM or otherwise) have lots of followers and ones which don't...do not. No harm done if a spammer with few followers sends mass DMs. It really comes back to inflating follower #s which needs to go away if Twitter is to become a true tool for communication.

The bottom line is that you have the option of not following people you feel send you unwanted messages.

Let me know if I'm way off base or missing something here.

Thanks for the feedback though.

<comment><USER3> I think in most cases I would consider it an abuse of my trust if a company I followed would send me marketing related DMs. Following on Twitter is _NOT_ an invitation to send me DMs. It means - "ok, I am reasonably interested to let your blurts flickr across my screen, and perhaps by chance I'll catch something interesting now or then". If I want more, I can subscribe to a newlsetter or something.

DMs are extremely intrusive, as they also trigger a notification email. They should be reserved for stuff that needs to be private, or is urgent. Both doesn't apply to marketing blurps.

Why the hate - because DMs multiply the cost of following somebody by a lot. Whereas initially it is just one click "oh heck, why not", it ends up being a hassle of a LOT more clicks and wasted brain cycles.

Edit: why I said "don't advise your clients to do that" - my most likely reaction would be to unfollow that user, and I think many feel the same. Of course perhaps marketing will find that it is still worth it (just as newsletters work, even though everybody hates them).

<comment><AUTHOR> Valid points. One of our main goals is to curb spam usage. Just to let you know some of the ways we plan on doing that.

1) We'll be introducing a pay model which should weed out the majority of spammers (CTR won't be high enough).

2) A free version will be limiting enough that it won't be worthwhile for spammers.

3) We have an artificial limit placed on "groups" so you can only DM N (500 atm) followers at a time.

If you have other ideas we'd love to hear them. We wouldn't post a site intended for spam on HN :).

In addition to that, I think Twitter should employ more robust emails (or just buy out Topify) that let's you easily block or unfollow users directly from the DM email.

Thanks for clarifying your original post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Setup OAuth, ClickPass, Google Friendconnect, OpenID, or some other registration method.

<http://apiwiki.twitter.com/OAuth-FAQ>

I run a Twitter tool that started out using Direct Messages, but found that CTR in DM's are horrible. I had to switch to public status updates with @username.

<comment><AUTHOR> We use OAuth to link Twitter accounts. Our OAuth implementation was done before Twitter added "login with Twitter".

OpenID isn't yet widely adopted (not enough for us to really support it --- chicken and egg anyone?).

I do like the simplicity of 'login with Twitter' but haven't seen any evidence yet that our sign up page has many bounces.

We have 96% of users that link at least one Twitter account to their PubliciTweet account. Which was quite a surprise to us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You can save traffic if you compress your images better. You could probably optimize them for better results, but even a plain "optipng -o7 *.png" for the frontpage stripped away about 180 Kilobytes.

Also comsider using JPEG for some images, it might be much smaller. Using a small palette and no transparency is the key for small PNG.

<comment><AUTHOR> Site optimization took a back seat so we could launch it early. I'm generally a stickler about sprites and whatnot - none of which are used on the site. JS and css is combo'ed and minified but that's all.

optipng would be an easy fix though and will try to do that for the next release.

Thanks for the feedback.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Maybe you could add support for other social networks? I mean when a company thinks about going social, they'd probably want to establish a presence on multiple networks. Maybe they want to target the facebook demographic instead of the twitter demographic?

<comment><AUTHOR> Adding in Facebook is probably next. Though, I think it will take a little while for us to really iron out the kinks with campaigns on Twitter. Thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I had asked once before but we've added a handful of features and didn't get a lot of response last time.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd prefer a tweet message than a DM from a corporate that wants my money.

<comment><AUTHOR> One issue with the public timeline is that you can't really get metrics for which follower did what. When sending a DM campaign you can see which follower referred the most clicks.

That being said, you can send it to your public timeline or to a group of followers. It's up to the company to decide which one works better and that's part of what the analytics are for.

The target company is one who has special promotions and giveaways and has followers who value their offers.

<comment><USER7> Can't you just provide a unique shortened URL within each tweet sent (or a hashtag) and track if it was RT'ed (when and by who) or the individual link clicked? You can have an opt-in/opt-out on the linked page too.

<comment><AUTHOR> We do provide a unique shortened url per tweet/dm. For the public timeline it's more difficult to track the "referal".

We have thought about putting in a beacon of some sort. An issue with that is that a beacon (like #zs8) is one of the first things to be removed from a RT if it's not a valid hashtag. A url, however, is rarely removed from a RT since it's pertinent to the message.

We're still thinking about how to track RTs from the timeline. The new retweet API will most likely help and make timeline campaigns more valuable.

An "opt out" page on our site is a good idea. One issue is we don't do an interstitial on which to display that link. Have to figure out a good way to make that visible. Thanks.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps interesting in that context is that Twitter seems to have started to track clicks for users of the web site. (Clicks go through a referral page so Twitter can count them).

I don't recall them announcing anything about what they want to do with it, but it seems like it could become part of a commercial offering.

Unfortunately it only works for users on the web site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yea, if the majority of traffic was from the website then we could possibly track clicks based on the referer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> <http://www.howtousetwitterformarketingandpr.com/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Long domain, short content. Any reasons why not to use Twitter for marketing?</comment></comment>


SlickMap CSS — A Visual Sitemapping Tool for Web Developers - <AUTHOR> http://astuteo.com/slickmap/ <comment><USER2> How about an XSL to generate this view from your sitemap.xml?

</comment><comment><USER3> The next step will be in creating a PHP script that auto generate this map by parsing the site pages. It would be great.</comment>