A/A testing - <AUTHOR> http://jvns.ca/blog/2015/02/06/a-a-testing/ <comment><USER2> You might be interested in the statistical technique called "bootstrapping": [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_(statistics)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootstrapping_\(statistics\))

The "A/A" method described is not a terribly robust way to estimate variance, but the basic idea of using subsamples to estimate variance is what bootstrapping does more systematically.

<comment><USER3> Yes bootstrapping should be introduced far sooner. Most of the variables we are interested in, say revenue per session, are in no way normally distributed, thus violating the assumptions of classical two-sampled t-tests. Bootstrapping, and MC methods, provide a better solution than parametric tests.

<comment><USER4> Most classical tests don't require the variable to be normally distributed, they require the _test statistic_ to be. I.e., you don't need revenue/session to be normal, you need sum(revenue_per_session) to be normal. As long as you don't have any long tails and your variables are IID, that will happen: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem)

More interestingly, things like revenue/visitor have a known probability distribution. It's not normal, but it is known. You can use a LOT fewer samples if you use a parametric test (either Bayesian or SPRT) based on the correct distribution.

If you use bootstrapping instead, you'll a) give up all your finite-sample guarantees and b) wind up using a LOT more samples than you need.

<comment><USER5> But how useful is comparing sum(revenue_per_session) when you want to test significance of one batch to the other? Aren't you then just comparing 2 values and seeing which is greater?

If you compare the 2 batches of revenue/session distributions using a monte- carlo simulation you can calculate the probability that one is significantly different than the other. This generalizes beyond the 2 sample t-test because those underlying distributions are non-normal.

Please let me know if I'm thinking of this correctly (or not)

<comment><USER4> Ok, to test one relative to the other, you might test W=sum(revenue_per_session_A - revenue_per_session_B). Interpret the subtraction as a vector op. (Adjust a bit if you want to do a Welch test.) Assuming the CLT holds this statistic is normally distributed. Assuming the null hypothesis holds, it has mean 0.

Thus, you can do all your normal Stats 101 tests on it.

 _If you compare the 2 batches of revenue /session distributions using a monte-carlo simulation you can calculate the probability that one is significantly different than the other._

A frequentist test (which includes most bootstrap methods) can never tell you this. Frequentist statistics doesn't even acknowledge this as a legitimate question to ask.

Now I agree, if you can use the exact distribution of revenues directly in the test, you can get answers even before you have enough samples for the CLT to apply. But if you use a nonparametric method like bootstrap, you'll need to use up a lot of samples unnecessarily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I really love how this very clearly _visualises_ the need for statistical significance. To me, a novice, the A/A/B chart is wildly more illustrative of a point than the an A/B chart based of the same sample data with some significance number next to it. I understand from some of the comments here that there's all kinds of ways in which this A/A/B thing is subpar. But, if the chance of someone misinterpreting a chart decreases more than the chance of the chart itself being misleading, then isn't it a big win?

I'm really nerd sniped here. Is there any branch of statistics that focuses on human understanding? For example, there's all kinds of blogs and stories out there about how doctors routinely make wrong choices because they don't understand statistics well enough. Is there any serious body of knowledge that explores ways of getting these doctors to make these mistakes less frequently, without having to send them to sites with titles like "An Intuitive Explanation of Eliezer Yudkowsky's Intuitive Explanation of Bayes' Theorem"?

<comment><USER7> I have no idea. But I will chime in with one factoid I've heard a few times. If you say things like "the false positive rate is 9%", people's intuitions lead them astray, but if you say things like "9/100 healthy people are labeled as sick by this test", then intuitions work much better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Another cool way to cover your bases is to run monte carlo simulations.

At my previous employer, we open sourced a command line utility that we used to validate our statistical models if anyone's interested: [https://github.com/monetate/monte-carlo- simulator](https://github.com/monetate/monte-carlo-simulator)

</comment><comment><USER9> A/A tests (also known as Null tests) are useful to validate that users are assigned to the control and experiment groups without bias.

Offline resampling methods, like bootstrapping, are better if you're looking to robustly estimate the variance of the experiment.

<comment><USER10> Yes, a Null test really should be the first test you run if you're looking to get into A/B testing.

You should also run an ongoing A/A test across your site or app to have confidence your bucketing, data pipeline, stats tests and effect on metrics is working as expected over time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Bootstrapping is a simple-to-explain and extremely powerful statistical method that is essentially the equivalent of an A/A/A/A/A/A/.../B/B/B/B/B/B/... test in OP's terminology.

What is especially powerful about bootstrapping is that it does n't make any simplifying assumptions about the underlying distribution, unlike other methods to obtain confidence intervals.

</comment><comment><USER12> Your example shows that simple statistical tests aren't always that simple. Especially when talking about small effects.

What you really want are confidence intervals which show what would be a significant change. You can calculate that from your A-data and from your B-data. If they overlap you probably aren't quite there yet.

Comparing A/A vs. B or A/A/...A/A vs. B/B/...B/B is a poor man's approach to visualize the distribution of the mean values.

Things get further complicated when doing a lot of tests. If you do hundreds of A/B-Tests and a handful show a weakly significant result that may actually be a statistical fluke. The likelyhood that a wrong seemingly significant result is present when doing hundreds of tests can actually be pretty high. You should rerun these tests with fresh data and check for consistency, which in itself is some kind of A/A/B/B-test.

</comment><comment><USER13> A/A testing is a waste of precious testing time [https://plus.google.com/105925791633746539648/posts/EhFuZ6Fh...](https://plus.google.com/105925791633746539648/posts/EhFuZ6FhFSX)

<comment><USER14> Although the link to which you have referred to here does say A/A testing is a waste of time, the OP article said the headline was a bit of a misnomer - they're actually referring to A/A/B testing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> _and tells you how long you'll need to run your experiment for to see statistical significance._

I always thought that statistical significance isn't something that should be tried to achieve, but merely a performance indicator how good the experiment was. Isn't it odd to try to "achieve significance over time"?

Shouldn't it be: "Your experiment requires 5,000 visitors and after that we'll check if the result was significant enough to not be merely due to random chance"?

Could someone with more statistical understanding elaborate this a bit?

<comment><USER16> _> Shouldn't it be: "Your experiment requires 5,000 visitors and after that we'll check if the result was significant enough to not be merely due to random chance"?_

That's basically what is happening with the tool, I think. It is asking for how many users per day you get in order to approximate the sample size for x days, then it's asking how much power you want. Power is the likelihood of detecting a difference if there is one. It also asks what confidence level you want. All of those together give you an approximate answer to the amount of time, assuming # of users/day is roughly constant.

<comment><USER3> There are 4 inputs needed to estimate sample size for a test: power, confidence level, expected difference, and variance. You need all 4 before you run any test. You use the A/A test to estimate variance. Power is the probability of detecting an x% difference when one really exists. Typically you see .8 or .9. Confidence level is the probability of detecting a difference when one really does not exist, typically .05. The 4th item is the expected difference of the test. If you want to detect a 1% difference, you will need more sample than if you want to detect a 5% difference.

You have to know all 4 before you do a test. A test is designed specifically to detect a certain difference. You cannot launch a test without knowing that as part of your hypothesis.

<comment><USER16> Yep, that's a more precise version of what I was saying w.r.t. estimating sample size. I think the tool makes some assumption about variance, but the other 3 are things you supply. Note that I wasn't saying anything about the A/A test article, just the sample size estimator that's linked to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Please see the papers here: [http://www.exp- platform.com/Pages/default.aspx](http://www.exp- platform.com/Pages/default.aspx)

These are from the team that built amazon's weblab. The foundation of large scale web experimentation.

To be working in this field and not be familiar with this work, eg. the concept of A/A testing, is like deciding to build jet engines without having heard the idea of a bypass ratio.

<comment><USER17> That's an excellent link! Wasn't aware of it, despite heavy involvement in analytics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> A box plot is another - I think better - way to represent the variance in a control group A. See [http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/screensh...](http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/screenshots/9061/original.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER19> Interesting stats hack definitely. I love the point the other comments are making: Learn more about simulation and bootstrapping. It'll still require a little probability but all of the results will make a ton of sense.

<comment><USER17> But, but, but... Optimizely?

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> How would this be different from simply increasing the size of the control group? Or subdivide the control into N groups of sufficient size in order to more effectively visualize the variation?

<comment><USER21> If you just have one big control, this still does not tell about variance inside the control. You can subdivide the control in N groups, but I think you quickly increase the noise to signal ratio.

A control group split into two is a good compromise, and intuitive to reason about, like the author points.

<comment><USER20> But statistically, they're exactly equivalent. I guess I don't get the advantage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Huh.

A quick and dirty way to avoid having to do much of any stats. Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's like a reverse of Simpson's paradox

</comment><comment><USER24> seriously? how is this any more accurate than pure "hunch" or eyeballing?</comment>


2048 Golf - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/payloadbay/status/448870618893545472 Get the lowest score. It's incredibly hard :D a friend got right now 124. Oo <comment><USER2> 100 points

Board:

_______

2482

4848

2484

4842

</comment><comment><USER2> 124</comment>


The Ukrainian Hacker Who Became the FBI's Best Weapon - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/2016/05/maksym-igor-popov-fbi/ <comment><USER2> I see two interesting lessons here: FBI agents working in cyber-crime really seem to have a tendency to leave for the private sector under a cloud, don't they? And it's intriguing that once VMWare knew some source code was leaking, all of a sudden they are able to find and patch a bunch of major vulnerabilities. (If I were a VMWare customer, I do not think I would be happy about this revelation.)</comment>


New tool helps researchers see Alzheimer's early damage - <AUTHOR> https://nuadox.com/post/618046040973688832/tool-alzheimers-early-damage <comment><USER2> This content is directly plagiarized from

[https://news.yale.edu/2020/05/13/new-imaging-tool-helps- rese...](https://news.yale.edu/2020/05/13/new-imaging-tool-helps-researchers- see-extent-alzheimers-early-damage)

with the true author credit (Bill Hathaway) stripped out and replaced.</comment>


A faster instant domain search - <AUTHOR> http://domize.com/

<comment><USER2> Great UI. Really takes advantage of the blurring of the line between perception of responsiveness and perception of actual speed. I don't think it's that much faster in real terms than instantdomainsearch, but it _feels_ like it's way speedier.

<comment><USER3> It is a great UI, but I would suggest having the site turn off my browser's autocomplete so the results are not obscured.

<comment><USER4> Yeah, the input needs autocomplete="off" adding to it, otherwise you can't quite see what you're doing

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really need something like this, and I think they've nailed the UX... but it appears to use GoDaddy to do the whois. I don't have any personal experience but a quick google search will back me up when I assert they are notorious for not being trustworthy with your whois queries. A site like this that I felt like I could trust would be a daily destination for me.

<comment><USER6> It's way too fast for whois. They're probably using the COM/NET/ORG Zone files in a nicely indexed db. I'd be interested to know more about the back end - they get points for responsiveness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I guess instant isn't fast enough now? Wow, tough crowd of users! =)

<comment><USER8> Still buggy pogo.com showed up as free and it's not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The way it shows the shorter / trimmed variants of what you type is interesting but not, I feel, particularly useful. It has a nice UI though and does seem very fast! It also only does com, net and org, whereas ajaxwhois, for example, does biz, us, info and ca.

Two alternatives:

<http://www.ajaxwhois.com/> <http://www.instantdomainsearch.com/>

A "sort of" alternative (requires a click but comes up with better results for word mixes): <http://www.bustaname.com/>

I'd rather like to see one that can also do .co.uk, just being a Brit and all :) I have a few customers who would use such a thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> There's also <http://domainzomg.com/>

</comment><comment><USER2> Bug report: typing a ' leads to a JS error. Yay, quotes.

</comment><comment><USER11> Needs better colors; I can barely see existing domains list. Cool stuff!

</comment><comment><USER12> dupe: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=177270>

</comment><comment><USER13> kind of like... squurl.com as well

</comment><comment><USER14> Fantastic!

</comment><comment><USER15> simple but cool ;)</comment>


Speculation Attacks Using the Return Stack Buffer - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.07940 <comment><USER2> > Importantly, none of the known defenses including Retpoline and Intel's > microcode patches stop all SpectreRSB attacks.

Wow, I had assumed that retpoline was a heavy hammer that we could use to squash this class of bugs until new hardware designs arrive.

<comment><USER3> It's even worse than that, from section 10 (Concluding Remarks)

…In the long run, we believe that these patches are ad hoc and that new attack vectors will continue to emerge. Current systems are fundamentally insecure un- less speculation is disabled. However, we believe that it is possible to design future generations of CPUs that re- tain speculation but also close speculative leakage chan- nels, for example by keeping speculative data in separate CPU structures than committed data.

<comment><USER4> I'm surprised they think they can close speculative leaks with more hardware. I'm no expert but I can imagine side channels based on timing (for example, if you can force a speculative path to do X amount of work if some secret bit is 0 and Y amount of work if it is 1, and the amounts of work differ), and I don't see an easy way to close those kinds of side channels by separating the CPU structures.

Of course some of those side channels are issues in sensitive code regardless of speculative execution... but there seems to be an interesting place where the two overlap. How do you fix that?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> How are such cache-timing attacks an issue in statically-compiled chunks of code, given that there is good isolation between the kernel and separate processes? If the malicious code sequence is JIT-generated, then we would be able to leak data from the address space of the host process, but otherwise, leaking data from our own address space seems pointless?

<comment><USER6> Not my area of expertise, but based on what I've read, Linux maps part of kernel space into userspace memory in order to reduce the overhead of context switches. Spectre puts all of that memory at risk of being read, even though it is protected memory.

<comment><USER7> > Linux maps part of kernel space into userspace memory...

Kind of. Linux, like every x86 kernel, puts some kernel memory in the userspace page tables. But it's marked with a bit saying "no userspace access". Meltdown-affected CPUs don't do a very good job of respecting that bit.

> ...in order to reduce the overhead of context switches.

It's done because it's required. When a system call happens, for example, the CPU starts executing kernel code. That code _must_ be mapped in memory.

<comment><USER8> Where can I read more about this? Specifically, which parts of memory are mapped in?

<comment><USER7> Linux, in arch/x86/mm/pti.c

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Its not going to be fixed until the cache participates in the roll back mechanism. After this you still have good old fashioned timing attacks but this can be fixed with a new set of instructions to ensure blocks of code take a minimum amount of time.

<comment><USER10> That wouldn't be enough, either.

Core A and V are cache-coherant. Attacker sets up the cache in core A such that its state will be affected based on the victim's speculation on core V. A speculative write on V to a line that is present in A produces a state change that is visible to A.

There's no way you're going to see speculation rollback across cores.</comment></comment>


Google Opens Up Its EPUB Archive: Download 1 Million Books for Free - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> Any particularly interesting books someone wants to point out?

</comment><comment><USER3> You've not linked to anything.

<comment><USER4> I think the relevant announcement is at [http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/download-over- million...](http://booksearch.blogspot.com/2009/08/download-over-million- public-domain.html) .</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any InfoSec conferences in Europe worth attending? - <AUTHOR> Most of the more famous infosec conferences seem to be in the US. Does anyone have experience with good conferences in Europe, apart from CCC? <comment><USER2> Depending on your interests, Troopers and hardwear.io. BruCon maybe.</comment>


Ask HN: Please create a YouTube-red-style micropayments startup - <AUTHOR> As more people use adblockers and publishers are losing their ad income, it becomes obvious that there should exist an alternative monetization system. I believe that it will appear within the next several months, and it will be a huge and profitable startup.
The biggest problem with micropayment systems is that a user has to make a conscious decision to pay every time he wants to read an article or watch a video. And the biggest problem with websites having payed subscriptions is that a person has have to manage multilple payed subscriptions, also usually subscribing to one website isn't worth it.
I think, the solution is to create a universal yourube-red-syle micropayments system:
Users can pay for a $10/month subscription, that gives them access to premium content on multiple websites. Then this money is shared between the websites the user is subscribed to, in proportion to the amount of time they spend on them.
Some features it needs to have:
- It should be possible to use this system to get access to the content behind the paywall, or just to the ad-free version of the website. Maybe there also needs to be a 3rd option, where money is shared between all the websites the person is visiting, as a donation.
-  It should be possible to share revenue between the platform and content creators, for example a platform like medium should be able to take 10-20% of revenue, and give the rest to the authors.
- It should be convenient to join this network, and it should be easy to get access to the  premium/ad-free version of the website, ideally in one click.
What are your thoughts? What problems could this system face? Do you know anyone working on it? <comment><USER2> We are working on a similar system to the one you described here: [https://www.coinetize.com](https://www.coinetize.com) \- though we are going for individual payments for articles/photos/digital content rather than a subscription system. The site does enable payments to any linked website.

I've heard the 'decision fatigue' argument but I don't see evidence that it would lead people to stop browsing and making payments. Also, how much of this is just getting people using a system? If you are charging 10 cents for an article, how much mental effort do people really use up making a decision whether or not to read?

There's been a lot of conjecture over pay-for content over the past few years, much of which has already been proven wrong - e.g. it was speculated that people simply wouldn't be prepared to pay for content at all - and now we see many online editorials are monetized. In my view its simply perceptions that need to change - and because ads become ever more annoying and problematic, I think this is a change that's inevitable.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> One problem that I see with it:

Publishers would not have control over pricing, any website will get the same proportion of money per visitor. If proportion of revenue depends on the time a person spends on the website then situation is better(people spend more time on sites with higher quality content, so such websites would get a higher percentage of revenue), but maybe there's a better solution.

In any case, even with that problem, I'm sure a lot of people would be happy to join it, it's much better than not having a system at all.

Maybe it is be possible to create some pricing tiers though?</comment>


Why Quirky Failed - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bolt-blog/the-real-reason-why-quirky-failed-c362b3a3abd7?_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_YFF-CV_7thd-dZ70Nb56eXFBYUosOvLnErGRHdymfITh2DHLBOMX7copUioz_wULBqhkmCh5FW7LjaZ3Pc35F4439Fg&_hsmi=22330702 <comment><USER2> > Visionary founder with the perfect background...

> Disrupting the incredibly horrible experience of inventing a physical > product...

> Top-tier investors...

> Board of directors stacked...

> Crazy high community engagement...

> ...an exceptional team of engineers, designers, marketers...

> So if everything was so good, how did the company spend $180M of investors' > money, sell very little product, replace the founder/CEO, layoff nearly the > entire company, and file for bankruptcy?

How about, just for one second, that we pretend that all of these characteristics don't necessarily prescribe a successful outcome?

<comment><USER3> I had the same reaction when I read that passage. By the end of the piece, though, I thought it was pretty clear that the author is trying to make the point that the "right characteristics" aren't what matters; what matters is knowing your customers and running a learning organization that, week after week, gets better and better at serving their needs. From later in the article:

>"Quirky never iterated on its products ... instead Quirky re-focused its energy on coffee makers and pet feeders and 50 other things. Lack of product focus had a nasty side-effect. When you look across the Quirky product line, you're left with one fundamental feeling: confusion."

>"Many things can go right for a company but at the end of the day you must do one thing really well: sell a product that delights your customers."

With that said, I think he could have set up the "nailed nearly everything" passage to make it clearer that he was in on the joke, saving his readers a few groans in the process.

<comment><USER4> That's the thing. These are basics. If an exceptional team couldn't figure it out, maybe they weren't exactly an exceptional team...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is one of those stories where I initially go "wait, quirky failed?" and then I think of the Quirky Eggminder that I purchased and realize, "yea, that product really did make me a sad and angry customer."

For those who don't know, the eggminder was a wifi enabled egg carton paired with a smartphone app that tells you how many eggs you currently have, how old each egg is, and notifies you when you need more eggs. For a guy who eats eggs two-to-three days a week and isn't quite sure how many are left in the carton when he's at the grocery store, it was pretty nice.

Unfortunately, if you've ever put batteries in the refrigerator (think of that NYTimes review of the Model S), you would know they don't function very well at low temperatures. The egg minder runs out of batteries within a week, at which point it becomes a glorified and overpriced egg carton.

One glaring flaw made the product useless. Today I've learned that was true of most of their products.

<comment><USER6> The obvious solution is to start building fridges with power outlets inside the cooling area.

<comment><USER7> You're not thinking future-proof enough! Each shelf needs to have NFC coils embedded throughout. With just outlets, you'll run out as soon as you have an Eggminder, a Milkminder, and a Sixpackminder

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think the sad thing is I never even knew Quirky existed. I'm not hard core into the invention/maker scene but I've been on this site for almost 6 years as a participant and never heard of it. I think the article raised some excellent points though. I think that the ideas that stuck should have been spun off as their own company to iterate and improve things.

<comment><USER9> Same situation here. Quirky is "right up my alley" and somehow I never heard of it until it was shutting down.

Don't know if this is a regional issue (I'm in San Diego) or what.

<comment><USER10> There was a Quirky mid-aisle display at Wal-Marts for a while. I also see their organization stuff at Marshalls/HomeGoods on an irregular basis. Quirky made Wink, the home automation product line, which has a permanent endcap in most Home Depot and Target stores. As the article mentions, the lack of strong branding was one of their problems; it's easy to see their various products throughout a store and not realize they're all from the same company.

[http://i.imgur.com/8lExkKy.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/8lExkKy.jpg)

<comment><USER11> I also didn't know anything about them until hearing about the shutdown but now that you mention it I have seen the "Wink" stuff in Home Depot and probably elsewhere. However that was negative signaling for me, since Home Depot is not a name that I _trust_ for tech but just a place I go if there isn't time to order something. With Nest products however it was because I had heard of them long before seeing them in Home Depot that my reaction was neutral-positive for retail stores carrying them. I don't expect my jaded 20-something outlook to represents most shoppers but it would've been cool to know about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> With all due respect to the author, Quirky failed because they didnt care about their community and users. It was a predatory business, like Davison and other companies that prey on the ignorance of their customers. Quirky failed because a business that exploits their users cannot succeed long term in an interconnectred world.

</comment><comment><USER13> I posted this in another thread about them ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10217582](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10217582)), but it bears repeating:

If the customer service experience was anything like what it was pre-pivot, I'm not surprised they failed. When they were going out of business/pivoting, I ordered a bunch of their inventory at a large discount. One week after the "expected arrival date" (and 14 days after my order), surprised that my order hadn't arrived, I emailed them asking for a tracking number. They told me that it was waiting for the carrier to pick up the order and that I would get a tracking number that day. Every two days, repeat the same thing. Promises, no tracking number. Finally, 5 weeks after the order was completed, I received a tracking number. Terrible experience, for what amounted to a bunch of (fun) junk.

</comment><comment><USER14> Why quirky failed, kickstarter. It was an awesome idea, but kickstarter handles the long tail, shards and distributes the workload, and is universal. That is why Quirky failed.

<comment><USER15> I think the Kickstarter model also massively de-risked the process by introducing a pre-order model that gave you a sense of the potential revenue ahead of time before you went an invested $100k on tooling.

<comment><USER12> Quirky also derisked the process and took preorders.

<comment><USER15> Did they have any pre-order threshold for when a product would go into production?

<comment><USER16> Or a pre-order threshold below which they conclude the product has below average market potential and isn't worth investing any more time and money on actually getting it to market?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't understand how you can say this...

>> Quirky nailed nearly everything

and then say this...

>> It may sound harsh but at nearly every step of the way, the loftiness of Quirky's ambitions far outpaced the laws of physics.

So they nailed nearly everything, but the fundamental goals they set were impractical and unattainable?

<comment><USER18> Yet all the people their lofty ambitions convinced to invest, be on the board and advise also missed this problem with the fundamental goals.

<comment><USER17> Yeah perhaps he is just indulging in the benefits of hindsight.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I met Ben Kaufman at TED, when he was working on Kluster. It didn't impress me then and Quirky never really impressed me either.

Kluster itself was, well, a cluster* at TED. They didn't really have a good idea or execution, and his team was... well, more interested in taking in the sights than slamming to get the project done (with one exception, but that guy was going to be leaving the company). It felt like an extended college party rather than a company.

Sure, Kaufman started and sold Mophie. Not sure that puts him in 'visionary founder' territory, and raising $180m doesn't prove anything beyond your ability to raise money. That's a useful skill but clearly not enough.

Now, I don't know Kaufman personally, and only interacted with him at TED, so it's possible he's actually a visionary. And all startups come with uncertainty and risk; maybe this wasn't an execution problem, maybe the entire idea was never going to work, and it took someone trying it to find out. Because let's be honest, nothing guarantees a startup is going to work. That's sort of the essence of startups.

We see those ingredients adding up to a win all the time because of survivorship bias. So maybe it's good we see Quirky fail and talk about it, to remind ourselves that there are no guarantees when you're doing something brand new.

<comment><USER20> I saw Ben (I think it was Ben) speak at the Solidworks conference in San Diego, about 4 years ago. I was familiar with Quirky before his big talk, (I'm an industrial designer) but walking away from the talk I was thinking, "This is fucking brilliant. They set up a system to get free ideas, gauge interest, receive feedback, iterate a product, and have a batch of initial customers ready to buy something once its developed. They're outsourcing a decent amount of work to the customers, and the customers are happy to get small royalty checks."

They told the story of the kid that led that power strip's development through Quirky, and how it paid for his college - but it was easy to see that most customers or contributors or Quirks or whatever they called them would not be making big money by choosing a new product's name or color or whatever.

As everyone else has pointed out, they got halfway to successful with a bunch of products. Their connected products had people excited about them, and many could have turned into legitimate businesses or product lines. But when you're making a new product every week,( 50+ a year) from concept thru development to production, your focus and execution will stray.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> For those interested, here's their sale motion ( [https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5k5SQee7k5pT0hrMTNqVC0ybFU...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5k5SQee7k5pT0hrMTNqVC0ybFU/view?usp=sharing) ).

09/22/2015 | #17 | Motion to Approve (Debtors' Motion for Entry of (i) an Order (A) Approving Bidding Procedures and Bid Protections in Connection with the Sale of Certain Assets Related to the Wink Business, (B) Approving Procedures for Assumption and Assignment of Executory Contracts, (C) Approving the Form and Manner of Notice, and (D) Scheduling an Auction and a Sale Hearing, and (ii) an Order Authorizing and Approving the Sale of Certain Assets Related to the Wink Business)filed by Jeffrey L. Cohen on behalf of Quirky, Inc.. (Cohen, Jeffrey) (Entered: 09/22/2015)

</comment><comment><USER22> > Quirky's product line looks like a random page in Skymall

Ha, this mirrors a comment from an original HN discussion of Quirky:

> It reminds me of those catalogs in the seat-backs of airplanes that I end up > reading when I get bored. Lots of stuff -- but nothing really struck me as > being all that valuable or novel. Kitsch.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1609917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1609917)

</comment><comment><USER23> The idea of crowd-sourced invention is cool, but they should have kept their products going with crowd-sourced iteration, rather than just abandoning them for the next thing. Or, maybe they could have sold their earlier products off to third parties to continue developing once they'd established product-market fit. I definitely think there's something there, it just needs to be executed better.

</comment><comment><USER24> This may sound like a very shallow comment, but what happens to the Wink stuff? I just bought one of the GE Wink light kits & the Wink hub is a "Quirky" product. It's already been a little buggy, but I figured it'd improve over time. Does GE pick up development/support work going forward?

<comment><USER10> Wink Inc is up for sale separately from the rest of the Quirky business. There are already offers on the table, and their press releases thus far have said they don't anticipate any interruption to that part of the business -- the team's still in place, maintaining the services and working on improvements. There are so many "Works with Wink" products on the shelves -- not just GE, but Cree, Leviton, Lutron, Chamberlain, etc -- that I'm sure that brand will land a home with a future.

<comment><USER25> I'd be surprised if Google, Apple, or Microsoft didn't pick Wink up.

<comment><USER26> Google picked up Revolv via Nest[0], so I'd be surprised if they were bidding. Apple seems like a long shot to me, given their existing projects with TV and Homekit and the fact that they don't seem interested in making home automation devices. Microsoft could be interesting--they seem to lack substance in this space.

[0] [http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/24/7061557/nest-acquires- rev...](http://www.theverge.com/2014/10/24/7061557/nest-acquires-revolv-in-a- bid-to-control-your-entire-smart-home)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> 'burns through mountain of cash without real business" or some other such garbage'

The writer then goes on to say that they have no real business, they are just cranking out half baked products that are never improved.

There is nothing special about quirky shutting down, it happens to many businesses. If they are bad, or poorly executed they run out of cash and shut down.

The main take away from this is do one thing, and do it well, you can't make up for mediocrity by bundling it together with other mediocre products.

</comment><comment><USER28> I agree very much with this article. Kaufman is a very cool, stand-up guy; everyone I met at Quirky was smart and nimble and on board with the vision. The products ranged from naïf (hence "Quirky") to straight up brilliant. It makes sense to me that they simply took on too much, and should have focused and iterated on their better products.

<comment><USER12> Better products wouldnt have helped. Customers dont know something is better until after they buy. They certainly had a branding issue by focusing on their products instead of on their users.

If they asked themselves before making every decision, "how will this help our users invent better products and bring them to market, they may have survived. Instead they asked themselves, " what can we do to make more money."

Their core product was their community, they never seemed to get that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> How much of their $$$ did they spend on Wink and related stuff? I'd love to see the economics of that one product. I'll bet it was a major driver of their problems! I experienced poor software, many support related calls required and then a recall because of a broken software update process!

</comment><comment><USER30> Super helpful article as I think through some of my own inventions and pursuits.

A friend had mentioned Quirky to me as a potential avenue, and I looked into it about 6 months ago. It looked...cute...kind of like an Etsy and one of those infomercials on TV for the Inventors Helpline or whatever it was. The first impression wasn't straight out excitement, and the second impression surely didn't help.

Personally I didn't like the terms of how they wanted to do business. It reminded me a lot of record contracts and rights management, who gets a cut of what, and while I completely understand it's a valid business model, it's not my preferred modus operandi. As in, I prefer independence, even if it means sacrifices in expedience, funding, or even simple encouragement. Quirky offered an avenue that could be helpful to a certain population, of which I was a member, but I still didn't sign up.

Regarding iteration - or more to the point - lack thereof - I almost can't believe it. Every single music project I create and work on goes through versions. Usually I start with drums (even if I have a melody in mind I need the tempo to work with), then add a bassline or keys, then a guitar, then more as needed. While I'd absolutely love to create a piece of hardware that functions perfectly in Version 1.0, I'm too skeptical / influenced by Murphy's Laws that things will take some experimentation. Knowing "nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious" helps, but user feedback should be a real priority!

</comment><comment><USER31> Another question, apart from the money it raised how much profit did the make annually? Is there a place to get these numbers? Also, shouldn't the quarterly/annual sales numbers be telling them things where not going well? Were the books cooked or just an oversight? There are just so many questions. It is nice to raise money but that is just not enough...

</comment><comment><USER32> > It usually reads something like "venture backed company burns through > mountain of cash without real business" or some other such garbage.

...

> The 6 year journey of the company was a balancing act between an > extraordinarily bold vision and a fundamentally broken business model.

Wait, didn't you say earlier that "without real business" was garbage?

</comment><comment><USER33> Anyone knows what happens with the money users earned as "influence"? My guess it is gone but could find no references about this no where..

</comment><comment><USER31> This is very sad they failed.</comment>


Groceries: which lane is the fastest? - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mrmeyer.com/?p=4646

<comment><USER2> Fastest doesn't always matter in a grocery check-out lane. Look for the cashier who appears to be a Mom. She's the one who won't crush the bread or put the big jar of spaghetti sauce on top of the egg carton at the last minute.

Besides, the better item to optimize when grocery shopping is the actual shopping experience. While you may spend five minutes in a check-out line, you may spend an hour or more shopping. Nicking a minute out of the check-out experience is irrelevant if you just wasted five minutes zig-zagging through the store for multiple items (traveling salesman problem) or if you made a couple calls back home to find out if you were out of ____ or needed ____, a time issue that is magnified if you forgot something and need to return to the store before your normal (optimized) shopping trip.

<comment><USER3> I wouldn't optimize for the mom. Instead I'd look for anybody who didn't look like a fresh-faced teenager. Since I enjoy living near a grocery store that has reasonable prices, I also tend to recognize the workers. The ones who seem the most senior usually can work the till faster.

You're right about it not really being worth it for optimizing your waiting time. If there is only one checkout and it's some lady with 50 items and she's struggling with a checkbook, other cashiers will usually open up if you make eye contact with a free employee.

You'd save the most time by planning your shopping in advance. Make a list, and categorize it by food type. If you know your store layout, some time spent thinking about the order of you visit can pay off quite well. Plus, it helps reign in impulse purchases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've found that paying attention to the type people in the line matters as much as the number of items and the payment type.

It sounds silly but I learned this from Apu on the Simpsons:

"Season 5: "Homer and Apu" Original airdate in N.A.: 10-Feb-94

Apu and Marge wait at the back of the long line in the express lane.

Apu: Mrs. Simpson, the express line is the fastest line not always.

That old man up front, he is starved for attention. He will talk the cashier's head off.

Abe: {Ah, there's an interesting story behind this nickel. In 1957, I remember it was, I got up in the morning and made myself a piece of toast. I set the toaster to three—medium brown.}—Then he tied an onion to his belt

Apu: Let's go to…that line.

Marge: But that's the longest.

Apu: Yes, but look: all pathetic single men. Only cash, no chitchat.

Marge smiles approvingly as the line moves much faster."

<comment><USER5> It's also important to size up the cashier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _From my observations, the fastest cash transaction will outpace the fastest credit transaction by a wide margin_

Nearly every modern point of sale self-swipe card terminal will allow you to swipe, insert pin, and sign electronically before the cashier can finish scanning your items. The only step left once that has completed is to approve the transaction total with the push of a button. I wish more people were aware of this, and then card transactions would be faster.

<comment><USER7> I'm not sure I've ever seen one that lets you sign before the cashier is done scanning. Wouldn't that defeat the whole premise of signing "I agree to pay the amount above in full"?

You can do everything up to that point - 'what type of card is this', etc... And many places are going signature-free below a certain transaction size, so I suppose all interactions can be handled in those cases before the 'total' key is hit.

<comment><USER3> In my experience, you can get as far as needing to hit "I agree to pay" and scribbling on the touch screen.

Entering in/scanning your customer loyalty number and pulling out your credit card and scanning it (and pressing credit/debit) is what I've been able to "preload".

One other neat thing I've noticed is that at my Costco gas station, I can pull the pump out and select my gas type while simultaneously scanning my costco + credit card. I usually try to time myself with the person in front of/behind me to see if I can start my pump faster than them. I usually win :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've largely given up trying to optimize my shopping time, but I do find the subject interesting. I'd be interested in seeing the effect of the (to me intuitively superior) one line, many cashiers setup, like at Fry's. I realize supermarkets make a boatload of cash from the geegaws sold in line that you hounded your parents into buying you as a kid, but I can't help but think that the many lines/many cashiers setup is less an optimal setup and more an artifact of some Lionel Hutz type who sold the cabal of Evil Grocery Barons a bag of magic beans in the 1960's.

As usual, I am too lazy to go look it up for myself. Back to hacking.

<comment><USER9> One queue minimizes the average wait time - it's the fairest and fastest system. Any CS person should know this, it's pretty basic.

Say we have 100 people and 10 servers. Everyone takes 1 minute to process, except one guy who needs 10 minutes.

With 10 queues and the long taking guy ahead of 9 other people he's blocking all those for 10 minutes. Total processing time 19 minutes. With 1 queue and the long taking guy first (blocking 1 counter for 10 minutes) total processing time is 11 Minutes.

Another way to look at it is that with one queue, everyone gets the minimum possible wait time. In the many queues case you get that only occasionally. You could optimize the many queues so they're just as efficient as the one single queue but you'd have to know everyone's processing time in advance - impossible in a real world setting.

<comment><USER10> One queue adds an overhead for the time it takes for the person at the front of the queue to notice a cashier is free and walk to that cashier. I have watched this system in action at the Post Office, Rail stations, and one supermarket and this overhead can be significant. One supermarket actually employs somebody at the head of the queue just to tell them which cashier to go to and when.

jfb - It also doesn't have any negative effect on "the geegaws sold in line" as they just put the "geegaw" displays along the side of the one queue. In fact it is better for the store in that respect as they can show more variety.

The best way I can think of to get rid of this overhead is to have a rule where each cashier has a queue depth 2 that is fed from a single queue. But how would you get people to stick to just 2 people? And it would be very annoying to be just behind a slow person.

In theory people should naturaly start moving forward when they notice that somebody is finishing up but at least in the Rail station and Post office the counter staff have a tendency to shut their counter without warning or start processing some other task before they are ready to serve the next person.

<comment><USER11> _One queue adds an overhead for the time it takes for the person at the front of the queue to notice a cashier is free and walk to that cashier. I have watched this system in action at the Post Office, Rail stations, and one supermarket and this overhead can be significant. One supermarket actually employs somebody at the head of the queue just to tell them which cashier to go to and when._

Whole Foods in NYC has solved this problem by having one queue, but when you get towards the front, there are five separate, color-coded lines. At the front of the queue is a giant television that shows a bar of color for each lane. When a register opens up, the number for that register slides into the color bar for the next person in the sequence, and a voice announces "Register 12". It's fairly efficient at keeping the queue moving as well as managing people's psychological need for multiple lines. It also prevents cashiers from wasting time, because as soon as a transaction is finished, their register is automatically assigned to the next person in the queue. The only "wasted" time is the time walking from queue to register, and pleasantries.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here's something a bit unorthodox. I worked for 7 years in the grocery industry, and still shop at the same store I worked at years ago.

At Wegmans at least, in the Northeast US, always pick the longest line. The one with the most customers.

Why? Visible long lines are bad for business. Front-end (checkout) managers hate long lines. As soon as they see them, they start bringing in more people to start running more registers, and then pull people from the back of the longest lines to these newly-opened registers.

This doesn't work so well if there aren't any long lines to begin with, but during the weekends and holidays, I always pick the longest line, and I always get moved to a line-less checkout lane. Never fails.

<comment><USER13> At the Wegmans I remember, the manager would pick people from the front of the line to move them to the newly opened registers (to keep things fair).

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The slowest lane is the one you are in.

<comment><USER15> and this also applies even if you change lanes...

<comment><USER16> Especially when driving and late for work...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We have (optional) self-checkout here, and there are some weird non- linearities in that situation I've observed.

1) Around 1/3 transactions still require staff intervention of some kind. This might be credit card approval, weight overrides, or just dumb customers. If your transaction is one that needs it then the time it will take is much less predicable than in a normal check-out

2) As people become more familiar with them, they are using them for larger and larger loads. That means people are bringing shopping trolleys in, and bagging themselves, which is slow and creates traffic flow problems.

<comment><USER18> Stop and Shop in New England has a scanner gun you pickup when you enter the store for self-checkout. You scan items before you put them in your basket and when you get to the self-checkout, you've already scanned your items. Helps situation 2 not take forever.

<comment><USER19> Except all the stores I've been to no one trusts the customer so when you do self checkout not only do you have to scan each item but you have to make sure you put each item in the bag area so it can feel the weight. God forbid you want to take a bag out and put it in your cart before you pay as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I've thought about this a lot, too. The conclusion I've come to is that it's a lot like the stock market-- the greatest rewards go to those who focus on a currently undervalued variable. Just as buying stocks primarily based on P/E is useless in this day and age, so is counting the number of people in a line. Looking at how much is in their carts is a bit better, but far too many people do that, too.

My solution is to focus almost entirely on how competent and quick the cashier appears to be. If and when most other people do that as well, I'll look for another undervalued variable.

</comment><comment><USER21> According to Apu (The Simpsons) it's the line with the most single men in it. "... Only cash, no chitchat." <http://www.snpp.com/episodes/1F10.html>

</comment><comment><USER22> I just want to give a nod to the work and writing that Dan Meyer makes available on his blog. If you want to get a glimpse of the future of secondary math education, this is the place to look.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is the calculation I use and it seems to work out more often then not:

Observe the lanes, every person is assigned 1 point, elderly (60+) +1, buggies over 70% full get +1, smokers get +1, welfare recipients +2. Add up the totals and the line with the smallest sum is usually the fastest. Obviously you can't always tell who is on welfare or who the smokers are, but the obvious ones are usually the ones that take the most time anyway.

</comment><comment><USER24> The biggest factor for speed is the competency of the cashier. Many cashiers are tired and slow and don't care much about their jobs, you need to get in the line with the energetic smiling cashier who is moving things along.

Also, the self checkout lines can be incredibly fast or incredibly slow. If there is a problem you have to wait for a cashier to come fix it, and if the person in front of you gets confused it can take forever.

</comment><comment><USER25> Instead of picking the fastest lane, it would in principle be faster to distribute all your items across all the lanes. That way, you minimize the time from you are first in line until you are checked out.

Consider the problem of optimizing the response time of a set of servers. Load balancing - keeping the hardware busy - will keep the request queues at roughly equal and therefore minimize the maximum queue length. That ensures that the hardware is as busy as possible, but you can improve on that.

When a new request arrives, you can either add all of that request to _one_ queue, or you can split it into pieces and distribute those across all the queues. Distributing the request, assuming perfect load balancing, means the latency for that request will be _k_ \+ 1/ _n_ instead of _k + 1_ , where _k_ is the length of the queue.

In other words: Parallelizing gets you a _substantial_ improvement in response time without additional hardware, and without making the code run any faster. I didn't realize the implications of this until recently.

<comment><USER26> In the case of groceries wouldn't you only be as fast as the slowest line?

Your comment only applies if all lines are equal, which they almost never are. So you can't assume perfect load balancing under this circumstance.

I think the best store queueing system is to have one main queue that distributes customers to the first available cashier. People with larger loads take longer, but this has little effect on the main queue.

<comment><USER27> > In the case of groceries wouldn't you only be as fast as the slowest line?

That's a pretty good summary of Amdahl's law. Even a computer with an infinite number of processors can't run a program faster than it takes to run the slowest sequential part.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> My cousin (econ major) and I (stats major) kicked around an idea for dynamic grocery pricing based on line length. We never got any data ("kicked around" the idea, remember), so we didn't even get to the point of realizing the y-intercept wouldn't be zero.

Something will happen there, though. Lines = deadweight loss, and deadweight loss = room for improvement.

<comment><USER29>
        >  Lines = deadweight loss, and deadweight loss = room for improvement.

Do you mean deadweight loss for the grocery store, or for the customer? Relatedly, does the grocery store care about deadweight loss for the customer?

If every grocery store in town has the same expected line length, then the entire cost of line length is borne by the consumer---since the line lengths are in equilibrium, none of the stores feel economic pressure to reduce their line length, and the line length is a fixed cost of food shopping (unless latency becomes comparable with the length of time a store is open during the day, in which case it's actually limiting the number of customers they can process per day, but I find this highly unlikely).

Granted, a store might try to differentiate itself by reducing its average line length, but there are many other (perhaps more important) factors that go into a consumer's choice regarding grocery stores, e.g., Wal-Mart mega-food- store competes on prices, Whole Foods competes on its customers' self- satisfaction (I kid, I love Whole Foods).

Intuitively, it feels like grocery store line length is in the noise when considering the decision process for most consumers, especially since I can get zero line length at almost any store by going during off-hours. If it's in the noise, there's no selection pressure to improve it.

<comment><USER30> I meant for the customer, and while I agree that grocery stores don't care about deadweight loss for their customers, I think they _could_.

I think the chief reason line length is considered noise rather than signal is because it's so unpredictable. When it's known, people do a great deal to minimize their time spent in line. They go to the store at off hours; they switch lines once they're standing in them. I know my local Taco Bell gets a lot more business from me because of their speedy response time, vs. the teriyaki place next door that I like more, but takes forever. And my college's bookstore has had a great deal of success with putting live camera feeds of their lines (or lack thereof) on their website.

But with grocery stores, I couldn't really tell you which of the two grocery stores in my area would have a longer line. They're _about_ the same, and that's close enough.

So you'd need a pretty big delta for line length to become a differentiating factor between stores. The current system of a cashier scanning items individually probably won't see drastic efficiency improvements without drastic changes, so...drastic changes are needed.

After a certain point, changes in "line length" become "presence or absence of a line at all." As jonnathanson says below, electronic scan-as-you-buy is probably the future there(Smith's, in answer to my cousin's email inquiry, mentioned they were testing a portable bar code scanner). I'm under the impression that grocery stores have pretty cruddy margins, so maybe I shouldn't read that much into "in testing." If anyone out there is dying for a startup idea, I think this one is worth a look. (Before you say it, I'm working on another project, and my cousin left for grad school.)

Since few things are more self-satisfying than sailing out of a store without waiting in line, maybe Whole Foods will be the first? ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I also factor in age of customers in line when I pick which line to go to; as I assume older people move through checkout much slower.

<comment><USER32> In one Simpsons episode, Apu tells Marge to avoid the line with the old guy ("Grampa" Abraham Simpson) and that the fastest line is the one of the single guys.

<comment><USER33> Apu is giving Marge contradictory advice.

The old guy ("Grampa" Abraham Simpson) is in fact also a single guy.

<comment><USER32> Apu may have specified younger single depressed guys. I couldn't find the video clip anywhere still available to get the actual quote, so I'm going from memory.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I was a bit dissappointed to not see any discussion of the confidence interval on a predicted checkout time. I see so much variation in how long people take to figure out which pocket contains their wallets, how they're paying, etc. that I have trouble coming up with a good time estimate.

</comment><comment><USER35> Here's the trick I've successfully used during peak hours. All things being equal, pick the longest line next to a closed lane, wait for the closed one to open (supermarkets will usually open additional lines when they think they are getting longer), and then quickly switch.

<comment><USER36> It's expected that you let the person who's been waiting the longest move there. That's why you'll hear the new cashier say "I can help the next person in line." I consider hopping over from the back of a line to be very rude.

<comment><USER37> I've also seen clueless managers at some stores (cough cough TARGET) take the people in the back of the lines and redirect them to the newly opening lanes. Pisses me off to no end when I'm the guy that's been waiting the longest and grandma in front of me pulls out her checkbook....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> I long for the days when grocery lines are unnecessary, self-checkout lines are unnecessary, and you can just scan-to-buy items as you go. Enforcement might be an issue, though. Heh.

<comment><USER39> Safeway experimented with that here (UK) about fifteen years ago. I used it. It worked, but I don't think it saved that much time, since shoppers are much slower at doing the scanning.

For enforcement they used sampling: at payment time, you were sometimes required to have your items scanned by a cashier anyway. The theory was that the more reliable you showed yourself to be, the less likely you were to be selected.

I haven't seen back to the store that they trialled it in recently, but I guess that it didn't work for some reason since it has not become widespread.

<comment><USER38> Interesting. I wonder if this kind of system will make a comeback as RFIDs, QR codes, digital payment systems, and smartphones get more ubiquitous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> If there's one thing I've learnt, is that once you pick a lane, stick with it (goes for driving too).

<comment><USER20> That sounds a bit like people who buy stock in a company and then, after the company deteriorates, stubbornly refuse to sell until they "get their money back".

 _The next line is open, but I've already invested 10 minutes waiting in this one and switching will mean it was time wasted!_

<comment><USER41> See: sunk cost fallacy</comment></comment></comment>


9/11 Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline - <AUTHOR> https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0304375419898334 <comment><USER2> I'm not a 9-11 truther, but am interested in conspiracy theories and studied the ones around 9-11 at length. Many are of course nonsense or simply poorly informed, but there were many sincere inquirers who raised troubling questions about everything from forensic incongruities to the bizarre chain of unlikely coincidences in the official narrative. I mostly turned away from the subject after the NIST reports emerged, though I was interested to note that some people were still researching the topic and expected to learn more from time to time as computational and informational capabilities improved, just as we have learned more about many historical events, such as the eruption of Vesuvius.

On a preliminary read, this seems a thoughtful and cogently argued review of the literature. However I don't agree with all of the author's conclusions by any means, notably his allegation that Osama bin Laden was killed in late 2001; if so, military and political strategists have constructed a very elaborate narrative of failure to cover up their success eg [https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/S%20Prt%20111-3...](https://www.foreign.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/S%20Prt%20111-35%20Tora%20Bora%20Revisited%20How%20We%20Failed%20to%20Get%20Bin%20Laden%20and%20Why%20it%20Matters%20Today.pdf)

While doubting some of the assertions, I agree with the author's general contention that academic inquiry has failed by allowing 9-11 to be investigated as a purely criminal enterprise while accepting some well-known and flaws and widely-acknowledged lacunae therein (eg the exact nature of the US-Saudi relationship in relation to these matters). A historic and strategic reassessment is long overdue.

It's also possible that the publication of a paper like this might arise out of other states' desire to strategically distance themselves from or redefine their relationships with the US, and what they know or believe about the events of 9-11 could be secondary to the desire to change their own national conversation on the topic.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> There's some crazy pictures here showing WTC towers pulverizing in mid-air rather than "collapsing"</comment>


Spotify made a tiny change to its logo – see if you've even noticed yet - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/spotify-changes-logo-color-to-brighter-shade-of-green-2015-6

<comment><USER2> I like that new logo, looks more clean and flat

Edit: seems they havn't released a desktop app icon update yet, or i just havn't received it yet.</comment>


Running a small company using outsourced IT services - <AUTHOR> http://www.thestandard.com/news/2008/03/26/running-company-using-outsourced-it-services

<comment><USER2> Running a decentralized workforce in the 90s was not viable for most people for obvious reasons. Today, tools are better, and more widely available, but more importantly the overall demographic of the technical workforce has improved by orders of magnitude. This is the foundation of why outsourcing is able to be an attractive (and more importantly viable) solution.

In the 1990s finding competent well rounded developers was throwing darts at a board. With the advent of modern frameworks and standards, and the increase in global capacity for technology development, outsourcing now makes a lot of sense, for a lot of people.

(article should have mentioned online collaboration specifically as well).

</comment><comment> ten-seven I wish my former employer was willing outsource services. While the customer base grew from two to twenty, the staff size trippled, the IT staff eventually doubled.

It takes strategy and vision to outsource and manage the IT house. But, you've got to hold on to somebody to run the outsourced IT shop and hold them to your standards and keep them on your strategic course. An IT project manager of sorts.

And while it takes money (expense instead of payroll and training), be prepared to spend it. IT isn't something you try to afford, it's something you can't afford not to do right.

If you find yourself working in an IT shop where every smart solution (keeping to the strategy) is too expensive, look around and consider getting out. They're on the path to bungle it.

</comment><comment><USER3> I still find it is a double-edged sword. It totally depends on the company you hire. Plus, the time-zone differences with, say, working with folks in India vs. working with folks in Canada is important. It all boils down to competency, execution, and communication. In some cases, it has worked very well for me. In others, it has been horribly bad. It's still a gamble today, as far as I'm concerned.</comment>


Russia's Plan to Crack Tor Crumbles - T-A http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-22/russia-s-plan-to-crack-tor-crumbles <comment><AUTHOR> Massive Tor fan here but trying to think about this subject from a bad guy point of view...

Sometimes I think Russia is probably less likely to have the capability to have long term success at a technical method of attacking/blocking a tool such as Tor, then it would have at an attack on the people who maintain it. Ultimately most of it is still maintained by a relatively small group of [awesome!] people. From my experience of training NGOs/journalists etc there is a global increase in such clever methods of disruption being used by bad adversaries.

A sophisticated "gloves off" human intelligence operation to disrupt, deny and delegitimise the small group responsible for it would probably be a more cost effective and successful operation - and would probably play into Russia's strengths. I realise that some in UK and elsewhere have done this to some extent but I think Russia would probably capable of taking these efforts much, much further.

<comment><USER2> Noob here.

Upon reading the original bounty, which stated the purpose was "to study the possibility of obtaining technical information on users and users' equipment of Tor anonymous network..." Could it be possible that Russia's intentions with Tor are purely ethical? Perhaps verifying it's integrity or seeing with their own eyes the benefits before investing?

<comment><AUTHOR> Really really doubt it. I would lean much more towards the Russian government wanting to be able to demask Tor users.

<comment><USER2> You're probably right. After thinking about it, why would Russia even bother unless it was to obtain something they didn't already have.

So the next question is, why abandon the efforts?

<comment><USER3> One thing to keep in mind when reading about government efforts to attack security software is that one part of the government may not have access to, or even know about, the capabilities of another part of the government. Or even capabilities of people within the same agency!

<comment><AUTHOR> One hand not talking to the other = Every government ever... :)

<comment><USER2> Duly noted! It all makes sense now. :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New Essential Phone 2 Smartphone, Gem Colorshift Material from Android's Founder - <AUTHOR> https://reportagram.net/news/1282-new-essential-phone-2-smartphone-with-gem-colorshift-material-from-android-co-founder.html <comment><AUTHOR> The gadget looks very interesting, I have already seen something similar among the Chinese, but it is of a slightly different size. I hope this device will be the first step towards phones with a high-resolution screen and a diagonal of 3-4.5 inches. I want a phone that is convenient to use with one hand and which can do the same as any other modern phone.</comment>


Securing your IT infrastructure by securing your team [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://kernsec.org/files/lss2015/giant-bags-of-mostly-water.pdf

<comment><AUTHOR> While the title is "Giant bags of mostly water", the subtitle is better for understanding what you are going to read.

An interesting quote is "The most unprotected system on your network is your sysadmin's workstation."

Which is too true and an rather embarrassing for the admins way to get into the network.</comment>