What Will Apple Buy with Its $51 Billion? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2010/11/what-will-apple-buy-with-its-51-billion/65950/

<comment><USER2> I doubt Apple should spend any significant fraction of $51 billion on the next CEO. That kind of money won't attract many people with something to prove.

Purchasing a media catalog would make sense given their increasing use of access to content as a major way of differentiating their products and Steve Jobs history in the media industry.

Edit: They could always pay a dividend.

</comment><comment><USER2> With $51 billion, they could buy Major League Baseball...or a majority stake in Disney at current market cap.

</comment><comment><USER3> Must they buy something with their $51 Billion?</comment>


Ask HN: Document-Oriented Version Controlled Database - <AUTHOR>

I would like a database that is document-oriented (think MongoDB) and performs version control on the documents (think Git). Anyone know of one?<p>If not, any one interested in designing/architecting/implementing one? <comment> johnx123-up Probably, Mongoid::Versioning?</comment>


Meet Li-Fi, the LED-based alternative to household Wi-Fi - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/02/features/the-lightbulb-moment?page=all

<comment><USER2> Very cool, but:

 _"We exploit three dimensions," he explains. "Time, frequency and space. No one has ever done this before."_

That's simply not true: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple-input_multiple- output></comment>


Dictater: Replacement for OS X's built-in speech services - <AUTHOR> http://nosrac.github.io/Dictater/ <comment><USER2> Wow. This is definitely not a _replacement_ as described, it is built _on top of_ and is utterly dependent on OS X's built-in speech services.

It does add some cool use cases, but far from "replacing" Apple speech services, they are all built using Apple Speech services... for example, enumerateSubstringsInRange:options:... has some deep mojo, handing sentence enumeration in many dozens of languages including ones where such enumeration is non-trival. The magic here is not in any way done by the author, who is just calling APIs given to him by Apple, APIs that encapsulate a tremendous amount of knowledge, while patting himself on the back here for his "replacement for OS X built-in speech services."

And Apple doesn't even appear in the credits file.

To say it is a replacement while standing on the shoulders of Apple speech technology, is amazingly disingenuous.

And... to top it off, this is the weirdest way of open sourcing a Cocoa project I've ever seen: put it on github without an Xcode project file? What? Is the idea to claim credit for it being open source, while making it hard for most people to build the project?

/rant

<comment><USER3> Hey Natch, this is the author of Dictater. Thanks for the criticism, I'd like to address a few points:

1) You're right it's not a replacement for the backend speech service. It IS a replacement for Apple's front-end speech service which is what I intended to mean. I should probably clarify this. I'll also update the credits file.

2) I'll add the Xcode project file immediately. This was an oversight.

Feel free to add an issue to the Github page if you have any other suggestions.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Users are improving Boreal, the Hacker News client - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@boreal/users-are-improving-boreal-the-hacker-news-client-aa2f3c7f5fc7

<comment><USER2> Boreal makes reading Hacker News enjoyable. I was always frustrated with the lack of a responsive design on the HN site and never found a satisfying alternative for browsing the site other than using an RSS feed. With Boreal, I can trim my Feedly feed of HN and use this app which actually has me checking into HN more often as well as replying/commenting. Hats off to the dev team.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks guys for your awesome reception. As always all feedback is welcome ;)

</comment><comment><USER3> Lovely app, enjoying it a lot! Deserves a lot</comment>


Launch HN: Memfault (YC W19) – Crashlytics for Firmware - <AUTHOR> Hi everyone!
We're Chris, François, and Tyler, founders of Memfault (https://memfault.com). Memfault helps firmware teams find and fix issues before customers start calling (or worse, tweeting!) by providing a small <3kB SDK to include in the firmware and a web dashboard to manage releases, monitor devices, and view crashes. In the software world, Crashlytics, Sentry, and other error monitoring systems have been offering similar solutions for years. Memfault is the first such solution for firmware.
Embedded devices today are very different from ones built 10 years ago. Then, a device would run a small piece of firmware in a while() loop, capture input, compute some logic, write to a small 7-segment display, and that was about it.
Today, new products have a wireless connection to the internet, a bright 320x320 full color LCD, a high quality microphone and speaker for Alexa integration, and sometimes even run machine learning or computer vision algorithms on device! Building hardware products in 2019 is a significant software project, it requires software tools.
The three of us met at Pebble in 2013, where we shipped 4 watches together. Chris and Tyler went on to work at Fitbit, while François went to Oculus. Each time, we found ourselves building all of our tools from scratch which slowed us down tremendously. Imagine having to build a log collection solution every time you want to build a new web app!
As a result of the effort required to build them, the tools available to firmware engineers are not up to the task. For example, the state of the art in debugging requires connecting a physical debugger to your board. To investigate an error report from the field, customers must be contacted, devices shipped back, and enclosures disassembled. By the time this is all done, flash logs have rolled over, variables have reset, and developers are left scraping together raw data from flash to debug the issue. It can take weeks to get to the bottom of an issue that would be root caused in minutes with reasonable tools.
We've long wanted to show people what Memfault can do without the hurdle of integrating our SDK into their code. Today, we are launching a zero code, try-it-at-your-desk version of our tool available at https://memfault.com (click on the "Try Memfault" button"). In about 5 minutes, you should be able to connect a ARM Cortex-M based development board and upload an error report using a GDB script. If you do not have a board, you'll be able to interact with an example error report.
We could go in at length about the implementations (ask us questions in the comments!). One thing we're especially proud of is the "Globals & Statics" tab which lets you query the state of any static or global variable in your system. To get this to work, we cross compiled libdwarf to wasm via emscripten and used it to implement parts of an in-browser debugger which can be used to look up values for a known symbol given an elf file and a Memfault core file.
We'd love to hear what you think, and find out what other tools you've found helpful in this space. Looking forward to the discussion! <comment><USER3> 1\. Any concerns about privacy? Even if Memfault is one-way (as you mentioned in a different comment), that doesn't mean that important user information is not exposed. Battery SOC and last-seen stats aren't completely harmless.

2\. Maybe this will be clearer when you release docs on the SDK - do you provide interfaces for normal logging in addition to just crash logging? _Ideally_ , firmware applications should never crash, but unexpected logic states or invalid user input happen all the time.

3\. How are you expecting licensing to work? Per device? Monthly subscription fee? Flat fee software purchase?

4\. Are your libraries ASIL or FDA certified to allow use in the automotive or medical industries? What are the reliability/safety implications of wrapping your main binary in Memfault's monitoring interface?

<comment><AUTHOR> > Any concerns about privacy? Even if Memfault is one-way (as you mentioned in > a different comment), that doesn't mean that important user information is > not exposed. Battery SOC and last-seen stats aren't completely harmless.

Yes - some of the data is sensitive. We encrypt the data, use an aggressive expiry policy (2 weeks by default), and work with our customers to limit PII. Memfault does not know who the end user of the device is.

> Maybe this will be clearer when you release docs on the SDK - do you provide > interfaces for normal logging in addition to just crash logging? Ideally, > firmware applications should never crash, but unexpected logic states or > invalid user input happen all the time.

Currently, we provide APIs for data logging ('telemetry') and error logging. Note that errors do not have to be crashes. You can send Memfault a trace for user defined issues (e.g. "bluetooth failed to connect") or even no issue at all.

> How are you expecting licensing to work? Per device? Monthly subscription > fee? Flat fee software purchase?

It's a monthly subscription fee (not per device).

> Are your libraries ASIL or FDA certified to allow use in the automotive or > medical industries? What are the reliability/safety implications of wrapping > your main binary in Memfault's monitoring interface?

We are not currently certified, but this is something we know we'll have to do. Our error reporting only runs when an error is encountered, not during normal operation. Our telemetry collection can run on a timer, and a bug in our code there could impact your device.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi! I write firmware professionally and this looks pretty amazing. I've already signed up to play with the tool and submitted a demo request :)

That being said, the thing I'm most interested in here is how to integrate Memfault with my codebase, and that's the only thing I can't figure out! Your docs pages are quite pretty, but don't include the interesting bits! Clicking thought into the demo doesn't really help.

Any chance you'd consider publishing that to the site?

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the kind words, and looking forward to the demo! You are right, our documentation leaves a lot to be desired. We are working on it!

You can find some of the more interesting bits at [https://github.com/memfault/memfault-firmware- sdk](https://github.com/memfault/memfault-firmware-sdk), which is our public facing firmware SDK. This gives a rough idea at the steps necessary to implement the coredump features of Memfault.

<comment><USER4> Great, thanks!

(Before digging into the SDK to see if this exists), is there any chance you'd support some form of "custom transport"? In the system I'm working on the micro is only connected to the network via a single board computer through which I'd need to shim the Memfault connection.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, we can accommodate a custom transport. In a way, this is just a general application of what we do for the BLE transport: break up data structures into fixed sized packets, send them over the link, reassemble on the other side.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Congratulations! We rebuilt our diagnostics and firmware updating tools multiple times over the years for Lockitron, it was a massive pain each time.

How do you handle log caching and retrieval for offline devices (i.e Bluetooth)?

<comment><AUTHOR> We have SDKs for iOS, Androids, and other gateway devices to push logs up to the cloud over bluetooth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This looka great and like it solves a big real problem people have. Congrats on doing this!

How do you deal with security? IoT devices are infamous and having one with a debugger open to the world terrifies me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Currently, Memfault is one-way so it is not quite like having JTAG access to your device from the cloud.

But it still needs to be secure, and we typically encrypt all data going from the device to the cloud (some devices, sadly, do not have the ability to do the encryption).

Edit: removed double negative.

<comment><USER3> How can it be one-way if you can push new releases to the device?

<comment><USER5> Rather than "pushing" releases and data to each device, the devices query for the URL to the latest firmware (if any).

<comment><USER8> This still isn't one-way, what protocol parsers are you implementing in firmware to do this?

<comment><USER5> It's up to the firmware or customer architecture to decide that. Many companies in the industry use an S3 bucket to publish firmware binaries to their devices, and these binaries are read by hubs, mobile applications, connected linux boxes, and yes, sometimes firmware devices themselves. Memfault provides a couple of layers on top of S3, allowing the customer to group devices into cohorts and do staged roll-outs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Add experimentation, canarying, rollbacks and monitoring (any metrics relevant) and you have a winner.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hah! Thanks for the suggestions. We're determined to do all of those over time.

<comment><USER9> It is an area i am somewhat working on and very experienced in, and would be happy to provide anectodes and ideas any time.

email@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Edit: emailing you now.

That would be great! Send me an email: francois at memfault. I'd be thrilled to chat (or grab a coffee if you're in the bay).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What data warehouse or other analytics system are you storing the data in?

<comment><AUTHOR> We took a page from Heap's book and ultimately store the data in Postgres databases.

<comment><USER10> That's probably a good idea to get to a usable product. You may want to investigate a proper data warehouse if your workload primarily consists of large scans and aggregations, such as if you offer a user-facing dashboard which can generate arbitrary queries.

Does your data have a fixed structure, or can customers send essentially whatever they want and you have to deal with it by e.g. storing a JSON blob in each event?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have recommendations for data warehousing? Our data does have a fixed structure at the moment.

<comment><USER10> BigQuery and Snowflake are the two managed services I'd recommend today if you'd like good performance and cost-effective storage. They both separate compute from storage so that your cold data isn't sitting on expensive SSDs like your Postgres instances are probably using.

They're both also significantly faster than Postgres at large scans and aggregations.

Snowflake is the most interesting to me because they offer a semi-structured data type called VARIANT which efficiently encodes semi-structured data in a column-wise format while losing only a tiny bit of performance compared to a fixed schema. This could let your customers send semi-structured or variable size data (like arrays or maps with arbitrary keys) and still keep your dashboards fast.

If you'd like to chat more, I just requested to connect with you on LinkedIn.

<comment><USER11> BigQuery is /terrific/, for in-house analytics. It would very likely not be appropriate for backing a SaaS, at $5 per terabyte scanned.

I would suggest the OP is just fine with Postgres for awhile. They can shard it when needed.

Then eventually they can either get more sophisticated with Postgres sharding, or move to something like TiDB, clickhouse, or another event store.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ha, I've been waiting to see this pop up on HN after seeing all the blog posts on /r/embedded.

Best of luck with the launch!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Hope you've enjoyed reading Interrupt, let me know if there's a topic you'd like us to write about.

<comment><USER12> The bootloader and linker script pieces were both quite good, I thought.

Would love one on bootloader/firmware updates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> One of those "obvious in retrospect" ideas. The IoT startup I worked at probably would have used this.

</comment><comment><USER14> I did browse the site, but couldn't find in what way exactly the mechanism telemetry/faults get passed from microcontroller to their backend.

For the last products I have touched, this would probably be the toughest part- abstracting/reimplementing whatever mechanism the device is already using to communicate with something that may have internet access (USB, UART, Bluetooth, LoRa) and tying in that end (mobile/desktop/connected device).

<comment><AUTHOR> The connectivity story is indeed one of the major complications.

Here's a high level overview on how we deal with it: let's say you have a device connected via UART to a Linux box with WiFi.

1\. When an error occurs, the Memfault library collects all the needed information and saves a packed error_report_t in a circular buffer in non- volatile storage (say, flash).

2\. When connectivity is available, your code calls our SDK and says "hey, can you give us N bytes of data to send". If Memfault has data in the circular buffer, it returns a chunk of N bytes. Otherwise it returns false.

3\. You use your transport to send the N bytes packet to the Linux system.

4\. Your code on the Linux box calls the Memfault Gateway SDK to tell it you've received N bytes of Memfault code.

5\. The Memfault Gateway SDK recombines packets into error_report_t and HTTP POST-s them to our backend.

Does that make sense? Happy to talk about it in more details.

<comment><USER14> Makes perfect sense. I would assume you also have to re-implement the routines writing the registers/memory to the non-volatile device, as you can't rely on peripheral registers being consistent. Ideally the host should have independent access to the said volatile memory, but that's getting close to implementing a debugger on host which uses JTAG/SWD to inspect the state of MCU after a crash.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Any plans to support x86 CPUs?

<comment><USER16> I'm curious as well why you'd be using x86 processors in embedded devices. Care to share?

<comment><USER17> (Also not the parent) I've seen this in robotics; a lot of code in that space has been tested for a long time on x86 computers [^1], and only more recently been looked at on ARM.

I think this is also common in industrial embedded systems, since I periodically see ads to buy hardware for them [^2]. I'm not entirely sure why :).

[^1]: [http://wiki.ros.org/Robots/TurtleBot/Robot%20Setup](http://wiki.ros.org/Robots/TurtleBot/Robot%20Setup) [^2]: [https://www.logicsupply.com/computers/nuc/](https://www.logicsupply.com/computers/nuc/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > In the software world, Crashlytics, Sentry, and other error monitoring > systems have been offering similar solutions for years. Memfault is the > first such solution for firmware.

Just curious, why can't Sentry be used in a firmware? (I don't do firmware dev)

<comment><AUTHOR> There are a few concepts that do not map neatly:

1\. For firmware, each user is on their own hardware. Rather than a session you need to track a device and the state thereof. Devices exist for a longer period of time than sessions do, and you need to have a concept of "device history".

2\. Sentry assumes backtraces can be generated on the client side, which is impractical for firwmare

3\. Our focus on embedded allows us to run some more specific analysis. For example we automatically detect if your MPU (memory protection unit) is misconfigured on an ARM chip.

<comment><USER19> I built a translator service between my devices and Sentry to take the memory dump and a known symbol file to rebuild the context serverside and send it back to Sentry. I only used this during development and early testing, but it was super useful.

At one point I thought about building this out more, so I'm glad to see someone is taking this on more seriously.

<comment><USER5> We are taking it very seriously ;)

Happy to hear that an you thought to build this translation service even for early development! It's usually an after thought at the companies we've talked to, and an expensive one too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Do you have any plans to support embedded Linux IoT devices? Or are you strictly focussing on tiny devices running without an OS or with a RTOS ?

<comment><AUTHOR> We plan to support embedded Linux in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Any plans on adding Qualcomm (Bluetooth) chips?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you mean the CSR family? We don't currently support the XAP architecture, but it is technically doable and we would do it with the right partner. Get in touch if you want to chat!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Are you hiring?

<comment><AUTHOR> We've just about hired everybody we need for the time being, but we're open to meeting folks who would bring a lot to the team. Send me a note! francois - <USER2> - memfault</comment></comment>


How many millions are in a trillion? - <AUTHOR> http://econ4u.org/blog/index.php/2009/05/01/poll-how-many-millions-are-in-a-trillion/

<comment><USER3> splains why the bailout is not freaking everyone out

</comment><comment><USER4> Are you somewhat happy to know that you are in the "elite", the top 21% of people who actually understand the world a bit ? Or are you sad at the rest ? They have no clue. Or they are plain wrong and don't even know it. I wonder if that metric could be applied to other topics like religion, government spending, ...

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> <http://xkcd.com/558/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Part of the problem is trillion sounds just like billion. Your brain hears it and thinks "way bigger than a million", and stops calculating right there. I imagine most people would tell you a "zillion" is a million millions, though.

<comment><USER6> You've probably heard it, but there was a joke floating around before the last election: the secretary of defense goes to see the President and says Sir, there's been an unfortunate terrorist attack in South America. 5 Brazilian soldiers died. The President thinks about it and says, That's a real tragedy. And, ah...how many is a brazillion, again?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I saw some political polling a couple years ago-- people can't really conceptualize numbers this large. A slight majority of the poll actually thought a million dollars was more than a billion. People have a handle on the size of a million bucks because that amount occurs in regular life-- the price of a luxury home, etc. I think one of the reasons there isn't much outrage at the US government's $1.8 trillion deficit this year is that it is so large it doesn't have any meaning.

<comment><USER8> Yes. Stating the deficit per capita might put it in a better perspective for most people (e.g. me).

<comment><USER9> I think better to report the numbers per US household instead of per capita to give a realistic idea of your share. There are roughly 100 Million US households so for the $3.5 Trillion budget = 3.5 X 10^12/10^8 = $35,000/household That is a number I can understand

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just Wolfram-it [http://www51.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000000000000%2F10000...](http://www51.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=1000000000000%2F1000000)

<comment><USER11> You bring up a good point:

You can't easily make a verb out of their company name. There's no "Just Google it"...

Fail: "Just Wolfram it..." or "Just Wolfram-Alpha it"

A small point, maybe, but I wonder how much better they could have done with a better, less egotistical name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Depends what country you're from.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales>

Personally I'm in the Long scale camp. It makes far more sense. That's why I was confused to not see the 'correct' answer listed :)

For example in the Short scale, their logic is: billion= 1,000 ^ (1 + 2). So for example TRIllion, the tri is pretty unintuitive. It has 3+(3 * TRI) zeros.

In the Long scale, the logic is trillion=1,000,000^TRI or 6 * TRI zeros.

I had no idea the UK had 'officially' abandoned the Long scale in 1970s, while the rest of Europe still officially uses it. I'm sure I was taught Long scale. Shame.

<comment><USER13> I always thought of it as a language-specific thing, with English speaking countries using short scale, and other European countries using long scale (I always thought that the French "billion" being equivalent to the English "trillion" was basically just an issue of translation). I never realized it's quite that complicated and inconsistent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've nerver understanded why exactly english metric system, date formating, and naming of big numbers is so inconsistent.

When you write date, you have to natural way - from the the least significant bit:) to the most, and the other way around.

And Americans use month/day/year. Perfectly intuitive :)

Likewise - in long scale system there is simple rule - next name for big number is 10^3 times bigger.

Indian system is also consistent, but mixing this is just crazy.

And don't get me started about inches, feets etc.

Still, I shouldn't complain - in my language there are three possible words for most of the nouns - for example: 1 jablko, 2-4 jablka, 5-21 jablek, 22-24 jablka, 25-31 jablek, 32-34 jablka, etc :)

Of course then you have to conjugate every noun by apropriate case (one of 7).

That's becouse old Polish had Singular, Plural and SomethingInBetweenWhichICantFindEnglishWordFor.

So - embrace our diversity - scientist will use 10^n anyway.

<comment><USER15> I have a theory that the linguistic complexity of all languages and cultures (which I'd include things like measurements in) is a constant.

It's truly a beautiful theory, because "linguistic complexity" is virtually undefinable, so I can just define it such that my theory is true-by-tautology. Hooray!

However, it is true that all languages and cultures have historical quirks, irregular verbs, odd calendars, etc. Complaining about a specific one is just standing in a glass house and throwing stones. By the only metric that really matters, the people using m/d/y are almost never confused about it, which is why it is stable in the language and doesn't get replaced, so... what more can you reasonably ask for?

Local optima happen. _shrug_

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> That's what you get for not using the metric system.

<comment><USER16> As you realized in your post a little later, it has nothing to do with the metric system, and if anything in this the US is more "metric" if you will, then the EU.

<comment><USER13> And the original article has nothing to do with the difference between short scale and long scale.

Not being used to thinking in terms of multiples of 10 (or 1000) for all measurements might have a fair bit to do with it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've heard the idea bandied about that we should just drop the ambiguous names (w.r.t., the whole long/short scale thing) and start using scientific notation.

It is much more obvious that 10^12/10^6 = 10^6

<comment><USER18> Why is it much more obvious? I would probably understand if I knew how you went about solving the problem. I am quite curious as to your thought process!

My thought process involved these components:

1\. Remembering heuristics for proportions. 2\. Remembering that Million -> billion -> trillion 3\. Knowing that 1000 million = 1 billion 4\. Knowing that 1000 billion = 1 trillion 5\. Knowing that 1000 * 1000 = 1 million

<comment><USER17> Dividing numbers with exponents is simple - you just subtract.

A^B / A^C = A^(B-C)

This is an obvious result of the rules of arithmetic. To use a concrete example: A^3/A^2 = A because A^3 is A x A x A divided by A^2 is A x A, then the two A's on the bottom cancel out with two of the A's on the top - <USER2> only one A on the top.

<comment><USER18> You didn't read my post. For what it's worth, I know how to divide with exponents. I'm curious why you think converting to exponents in the first place is so much more obvious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What a trillion dollars looks like:

[http://www.zee.me/blog/2009/03/what-does-one-trillion- dollar...](http://www.zee.me/blog/2009/03/what-does-one-trillion-dollars-look- like/)

<comment><USER20> Thank you for this awesome, insightful contribution to the conversation... not.

Edit: seriously, do we upvote people for posting reddit-like links to vaguely related non-information now?

<comment><USER21> The graphic has done the rounds in many, many places, but it did generate 46 points and 35 comments here a few months back without an ad redditum comment.

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=511285>

<comment><USER22> Still doesn't make it relevant to this discussion, though.

<comment><USER22> Can the person who downvoted this, explain why it _is_ relevant? Thanks.

<comment><USER23> People are downvoting you because you are doing nothing to add to the conversation. Why not try to formulate your comments into a more meaningful discussion?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Perl 6 for Mere Mortals - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/Ovid/perl-6-for-mere-mortals

<comment><USER2> This talk does a good job of showing how Perl 6 lets you gradually enhance your programs using features like types, subtypes, and multimethods. Here's a functional, memoized version of fib that uses those three features:

      subset NonNegativeInt of Int where * >= 0;

      proto fib (|) is cached returns NonNegativeInt {*}
      multi fib (0) { 0 }
      multi fib (1) { 1 }
      multi fib (NonNegativeInt $n) { fib($n - 1) + fib($n - 2) }

      say fib(100)</comment>


Oauth2 API gateway in 825 lines of code (with LDAP) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ezy/enterpise-api-gateway <comment><USER2> "825 lines of code" is a bit misleading, when you look at the whole kitchen sink of dependencies in that package.json.

I mean, if we ignore dependencies, then I could claim "OAuth2 API gateway in 1 line of code" and that would be a pointless claim.

<comment><AUTHOR> Everything is contextual but the repo is 825 without modules. 825 lines by 2020's standards isn't the same as 825 in 2010. If we're getting into that level of purism, then you're not a real a developer unless you're writing uncompiled binary straight into the kernel ;)</comment></comment>


A controversial company using DNA to sketch the faces of criminals - <AUTHOR> https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02545-5 <comment><USER2> Examples from the company website if anyone is interested:

[https://snapshot.parabon-nanolabs.com/examples](https://snapshot.parabon- nanolabs.com/examples) (TV/Media volunteers)

[https://snapshot.parabon-nanolabs.com/posters](https://snapshot.parabon- nanolabs.com/posters) (Actual cases from the looks of it)

These seems to be for the most part on the same level as some good police sketches, what surprised me is that the few renders where they showed a tooth gap that matched the photo quite well, the seem also to be pretty good at predicting some facial features like the nose but overall fail quite poorly at eyebrows (i'm not sure if it's because of the neutral expression or the algo itself).

Dystopian indeed but if these examples are actually representative I'm almost astounded by the resutls.

<comment><USER3> Surely the company website is only going to put up photos where their predictions closely match reality. You don't get to see all their failures.

<comment><USER2> While I don't disagree quite a few of their predictions didn't match that well so it's hard to tell how much selection bias there is because we don't know how many uses they have, the posters seem to be all the cases they worked that allowed the photos to be released, some of the media ones weren't that close either.

<comment><USER4> Marketing department smart enough to make the advertisong material pique the interest of the target market, rather than have them, and you, think "they've obviously selected the best possible results".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is the slippery slope that privacy advocates have sometimes been characterized as 'paranoid' for pointing out - "The database is just for ____ crimes!": national security, terrorism, heinous sexual assaults, child exploitation etc. But there is almost no world in which we do not slowly and methodically expand the scope of 'bad enough' crimes that the data gets used for. In this case, it slid from sexual assault to just plain assault, but there is rarely a line like this that gets kept firm.

<comment><USER6> As if "just plain assault" is somehow better than "sexual assault".

<comment><USER7> It depends a bit on where you are.

In England sexual assault requires deliberate physical contact; the contact has to be sexual; and there has to be no consent or belief of consent. Common assault doesn't require any of that, and you can be convicted of assault without physically touching the victim.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> To what extent do genes encode the facial features that make them distinctly recognizable to us? Is there a way to say it as a "%"?

I can certainly see how your basic head size/shape and position of nose/mouth/eyes, etc is baked in there somehow.

But I'd love to know, the fundamentals of why you look like your parents, what is that? Certain (75%?) placement of facial features locked in by genes, so of course you look like them, but then the last 25% up to developmental noise? (Example -- fingerprints, almost completely determined by developmental noise, right?)

<comment><USER9> Identical twins, sharing the same DNA, look _rather_ identical but not _truly_ identical. Even when raised apart.

I am skeptical of reconstructing faces from DNA using current knowledge and technology though. It seems _theoretically_ feasible, but I wouldn't bet on this company being able to do it well.

<comment><USER10> Developmental noise will be dominated by fetal development, not life after birth.

<comment><USER9> Maybe so, but fathers can look a great deal like sons and they only share something like half their code and don't share a womb at all. Identical twins share their code and look _even more_ alike.

I think later life matters like obesity probably make a bigger difference. Being fat or gaunt can dramatically change somebody's appearance. Grooming habits as well. Spies deliberately adopting disguises can make themselves look quite different by modifying these sort of things.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is an art project from 2013 doing the same thing:

[http://deweyhagborg.com/projects/stranger- visions](http://deweyhagborg.com/projects/stranger-visions)

</comment><comment><USER12> Imagine when people who don't know any better start plugging this into facial- recognition cameras, and arrest based on the chaining of two flawed/imperfect algorithms. Not if, but when.

</comment><comment><USER13> I particularly like how it can predict hair styles. Not only how a barber would do dreads but also how they would color it and how they happened to brush their hair on a given day. Very impressive!

</comment><comment><USER14> Would be interesting to put a confidence "interval" on the predicted face. Perhaps show a range of faces that are consistent with the model. That might help to alleviate some concerns.

</comment><comment><USER15> Related, and touched on only briefly in the article. DNA to face technology is also being sought after in other countries...

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10617-y](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-10617-y)

[https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/business/china-dna- uighur...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/business/china-dna-uighurs- xinjiang.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> How dd they get the DNA for the people they are showing?</comment>


Cable news - <AUTHOR> http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/10/cable-news.html <comment><AUTHOR> see DanielBMarkham's comment from yesterday regarding Facebook's trending news: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12700183](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12700183)</comment>


Show HN: Swift extension to give Dictionaries support for map - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/yuchi/b6d751272cf4cb2b841f

<comment><AUTHOR> I have to say, Swift is a lot of fun… compared to Objective-C.</comment>


Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust? - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/12/is-facebook-a-brand-the-you-ca.html <comment><USER2> "kids to Facebook, blithely assuming that they are free from the roaming eyes of some sexual predator."

Here's where I stopped caring about what he had to say. It's the first point he jumps to: "Think of the kids". And then he goes on to equate a site changing its privacy settings to Perrier giving people cancer and Tylenol killing people.

Hello sensationalism.

<comment><USER3> While I read past the "think of the kids" argument, I was disappointed analogy of the locksmith. The locksmith didn't unlock the doors while you were sleeping. To follow the analogy, there would have been something over the lock requiring you to either allow the locksmith to unlock the door or to keep the locking mechanism functioning as is.

<comment><USER4> Given that facebook reset my application blocklist, application privacy settings, and some other settings after I told it not to, I find the locksmith analogy to be accurate. In fact it would be as if the locksmith offered to unlock all my doors and windows and unlocked them after I told him not to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So he's basically saying (loudly) that facebook changed the default privacy settings to be more permissive, which is true. On the other hand, when facebook changed the default privacy settings, they put a giant-ass unmistakable pop-up message telling you about this and literally did not let you access the rest of the site until you had read about it. And the old privacy settings are still available.

I trust facebook not to give away more information than I tell them to, because when they got burned for that before they reacted well and learned from their mistakes. They're certainly encouraging people to open up, and I'm a bit wary of that, but they're a far cry from jumping the shark.

<comment><USER6> True. But that popup was pretty confusing. It took me a while to grok it, and even then I wasn't exactly sure what my settings were going to be after clicking Done. When I went to check out the new feature of "what my page looks like to most people" (whatever that means), I was very surprised to see that my fan pages showed up.

And apparently people who hadn't tweaked their default privacy settings before (which is probably most people), had the "Everyone" option selected by default. I'm not saying Facebook was intentionally doing something shady, but my reaction was, "Wow, a lot of people are going to be tricked by this."

<comment><USER7> My thoughts exactly. What _wasn't_ properly communicated by the tool, even to someone who was paying attention, was that my profile picture and my name are now public. AND that I _cannot_ change that.

Not explaining this clearly, especially to people like me who had their profile pic privacy set to "Friends only" before, is what I would consider a breach of trust.

<comment><USER8> [http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=se...](http://www.facebook.com/settings/?tab=privacy&section=search)

Took me five seconds to find that. Privacy Settings >> Search. How is that hard?

<http://www.facebook.com/privacy/?view=photos>

Another five seconds. Privacy Settings >> Profile >> Photos.

<comment><USER9> Not disputing what you're saying, but... one thing I'd like to see -- which I _thought_ was available before, but maybe not -- is the ability to set my _current_ profile photo as viewable by 'Everyone' (so anyone can find me in a search listing and have a reasonable chance knowing it's actually me based on my profile pic, and not just someone with the same name), but set the contents of my Profile Pictures _album_ to 'Friends Only'.

For now I've set it to 'Friends of Friends' as a hopefully-reasonable compromise, figuring that most of the people I meet are via introductions from friends, and the fact that my (full) name is surprisingly pretty unique.

<comment><USER8> I think that if you set your profile picture album to Friends Only, that still displays your profile picture to other people. I have mine on display for others, but you can't click though to see others.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I stopped reading when the spectre of pedophilia was brought up. I expect more from oreilly.com. [i work at facebook, but these opinions are mine]

<comment><USER11> I guess I'm confused why it seems Facebook wants to compete with Twitter in this regard. I don't think fb users have asked for the option to publish their information more privately, so why is it a priority? It feels more to me like fb is moving more toward "make something we can sell" than "make something people want."

<comment><USER8> I'm confused why people think Facebook is trying to compete with Twitter. It's simply moving in a similar direction, and taking a few of Twitter's ideas that work for its social graph.

Does anybody remember Facebook's original feed, which was the first controversial invention of theirs? Even back then they were working on categorizing and indexing everybody's social goings-on. The fact that Twitter does something similar doesn't make Facebook a competitor. I use both Twitter and Facebook's public search, and Facebook's has a much different feel about it than Twitter's does.

 _It feels more to me like fb is moving more toward "make something we can sell" than "make something people want."_

I don't like the "make something people want" meme. It's too bend-over for me to approve of. But Facebook's not making something they can sell. Public search isn't any more profitable than what they're already doing, which has put them in the green. Rather, they're focusing on making what _they_ want. I'm certain their motives are more selfish than money: From the beginning, Mark and kin's focus has been on studying the patterns of how people interact, and Facebook's design has consistently reflected that. They're not doing that for money, they're doing it because that's what their goal is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wrote a, failed, game for Facebook, but was really surprised what information the FaceBook API would give you on your visitors once they approved your app.

No matter the intent of the changes are. The article implied that they wanted people to share more information, but I think that just stopping the API from giving applications free rain is a good start.

</comment><comment><USER13> _To put a bow around this one, the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation), not exactly a bastion of radicalism, concluded after comparing Facebook's new privacy settings with the privacy settings that they replaced:_

This sentence is strange. The EFF exists to promote online civil liberties, including online privacy. That they would come down on the side of more privacy is not surprising.

Note I have no problems with their conclusions; my problem is with how the author tried to frame them.

</comment><comment><USER9> The timing on this article is somewhat notable -- for me, anyway. A few days ago I received an email regarding a user survey for Facebook. I was curious (and motivated: I do use Facebook a lot, and wouldn't mind helping to improve it), so I clicked through.

The survey included some free-form text boxes with open-ended questions, and and one of my answers suggested that FB needs to do more to promote its brand as something people should trust, and take actions that make that trust deserved. I noted that I still do not really trust FB, and that lack of trust curtails my use in ways that probably cause me to get less utility out of the service than I could otherwise.

</comment><comment><USER14> Part of the problem is that Facebook isn't really a brand yet. They are still trying to define how the site is going to make money. Dragging the customer kicking and screaming usually doesn't do it. Sounds like those guys should learn some card games so they understand the value of a good finesse.</comment>


The Obsolescence of Advertising in the Information Age (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.yalelawjournal.org/article/the-obsolescence-of-advertising-in-the-information-age <comment><USER3> Oh, that's a hardline position. It's a good argument for taxing advertising. In a society that's spent out, with a low savings rate, advertising just moves demand around. It doesn't generate it.

(One could write an article about the Web titled "The obsolescence of information in the advertising age." Cover the decline of actual info provided on web sites, vs. the giant sucking sound of the onboarding funnel. You know, the sites which have nothing but stock photos and a form for entering in your email address.)

<comment><USER4> > _advertising just moves demand around. It doesn 't generate it_

I've seen ads for products I would have never bought, because I never knew they existed, and wound up better for it.

<comment><USER5> > _I've seen ads for products I would have never bought, because I never knew > they existed, and wound up better for it._

Such as?

I can't recall myself purchasing anything [just] because of an ad, or knowing anyone else who did, or even seeing an ad for something I was interested in.

Everything that I've spent money on, has been discovered through manual search, word of mouth (on online forums), voluntarily subscribed newsletters/feeds (like a favorite developer announcing a new game or app) or random recommendations algorithms (like these clips of Mortal Engines and Ultimate Chicken Horse that I just saw on YouTube, or featured spots on the App Store, Steam, iTunes etc.) which I guess may count as a form of advertisement but they show me what a product is actually like.

<comment><USER6> Oh really? How much of your time has been spent on what brand of salt is in your pantry right now? What informs your type of shampoo in your bathroom? How much weight would you say your friends or colleagues experience with a car brand has influenced the decision you made to purchase one auto manufacturer's model over another? Advertising works and if it didn't it wouldn't exist. While I do understand and am with you on your philosophy of making an informed decision, so much of our impulses as we purchase the things required to live daily are influenced by ads whether we're aware of them or not.

<comment><USER7> >salt

cheapest one available from nearby stores

> shampoo

tested many brands, found one that works well for me.

>car brand

Absolutely none, unless they are car maniac.

> While I do understand and am with you on your philosophy of making an > informed decision, so much of our impulses as we purchase the things > required to live daily are influenced by ads whether we're aware of them or > not.

I do not dispute that, but isn't this paper arguing that ads aren't fulfilling their informative purpose(the only reason they were allowed to get so prevalent)?

to quote the paper

>In the information age, the only remaining nonredundant use of most forms of advertising is persuasion. To the extent that enforcers wish to return to the mid-twentieth-century view that persuasive advertising is fundamentally manipulative, they may now do so without concern that prohibiting advertising might deprive consumers of the information they need to make purchase decisions

<comment><USER8> _Absolutely none, unless they are car maniac._

That simply isn't true. Other than those extremely cash-constrained choice of car is a very personal thing, as much as style of clothing.

 _the only remaining nonredundant use of most forms of advertising is persuasion_

Ads are obsolete where brands are obsolete in a world where everything is made in the same factory in China and merely gets a different sticker on the case. Basically any electronics now for example.

<comment><USER9> About car buying: I think you missed his point. (Or else I'm missing your point.) He's not saying that his choice of car as not personal, he's saying (as would I) that the kind of car your "friends or colleagues" buy has nothing to do with the kind of car he (or I) buys.

Speaking for myself, I bought cars based on what I valued, which was often different from what friends and colleagues valued--which is exactly the meaning of "personal."

<comment><USER8> _the kind of car your "friends or colleagues" buy has nothing to do with the kind of car he (or I) buys._

I get what you're saying but lots of people _do_ do that. Certain demographics flock to BMWs for example. Within a pretty narrow range you could guess a BMW driver's occupation, and you would almost certainly be correct about their personality. Another demographic loves their Subarus. Or Porsche, classic choice of the male midlife crisis.

But pretty much everyone who can afford to, buys a car that they feel reflects their lifestyle or the lifestyle they aspire to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> >> The view of advertising as fundamentally manipulative succumbed in the 1970s to the view that prevails today: that advertising does no more than convey useful product information to consumers.

There is a line by Jude Law in 'The New Pope' about harvard being ossified and in decline. The above line is exactly that. They are working on a dated understanding of advertising. Advertising today includes a vast array of activities. The above statement only applies to old fashioned billboard-type ads, which are basically meaningless in the modern context. Those online reviews that are making "ads" less influential? Those ARE modern advertisement. They are purchased. That great review on YouTube, also purchased. Those white ear bud designed to be seen across a busy street? Part of an advertising campaign. That music crafted to be that little bit louder when played. Advertising.

>>Persuasive advertising should be subject to per se condemnation because advertising is, like price fixing, harmful to consumers in all cases, requiring no case-specific inquiry to determine net effects. Persuasive advertising makes consumers willing to pay more for the advertised product for reasons that, because of the principle of innovation primacy, must be assumed to involve no gain in consumer welfare.

Lol. That is the entire fashion industry. Fashion advertising is about adding perceived value to otherwise identical products. "Consumer welfare" is also an outdated concept. Anti-features are deliberately engineered to weaken products. The goal of a producer is not to increase 'consumer welfare'. It is to SELL product. If that means damaging the consumer with a product designed to fall apart, then so be it. The advertising is there to convince the consumer to re-purchase the nearly identical product by attaching perceived value. Modern advertising even convinces consumers to throw away perfectly functional products by creating false perceptions of inadequacy or danger. The above line in effect condemns modern consumerism. Good luck with that fight.

<comment><USER11> > "Consumer welfare" is also an outdated concept. Anti-features are > deliberately engineered to weaken products. The goal of a producer is not to > increase 'consumer welfare'. It is to SELL product. If that means damaging > the consumer with a product designed to fall apart, then so be it. The > advertising is there to convince the consumer to re-purchase the nearly > identical product by attaching perceived value. Modern advertising even > convinces consumers to throw away perfectly functional products by creating > false perceptions of inadequacy or danger.

So basically, "modern" advertising is as beneficial as a viral infection, so it really ought to be criminalized or regulated into nonexistence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Tobacco gives an interesting case study on advertising.

In many developed nations all tobacco advertising and marketing is banned. I would argue that this is actually good for the tobacco companies: they save billions of dollars a year and no new competitor to them can emerge, as it would have no way of telling smokers it exists.

This example makes me think that advertising of mass market consumer goods is like nuclear weapons: if your competitors are doing it, you'd be too scared of losing market share not to do it too. But in aggregate, all that really happens is that consumer prices are higher, and the ad industry gets rich.

But actually, if none of the companies advertise, consumers still find what they need through retailers, word of mouth, or simply continuing to buy what they already buy.

<comment><USER13> _> But actually, if none of the companies advertise, consumers still find what they need through retailers_

I don't know how it works in the UK but in USA, advertising also happens _inside the retailers ' locations_:

\- endcaps displays of products via promotional payments are a form of advertising [0][1]. A related concept is "slotting fees"

\- instant tear off coupons on the aisle shelves is a form of advertising

\- workers giving out free food samples (e.g. blue uniform contractors at Costco) is advertising

\- informational videos mounted on displays in the aisles is advertising

 _> , word of mouth,_

The _first_ person in the word of mouth chain was often a recipient of advertising.

 _> or simply continuing to buy what they already buy._

But a lot of consumers don't want to always buy what they already buy. They want to buy new and improved products. In my case, I saw an advertisement for _Oatly_ in a magazine which is a new brand of non-dairy milk. I used to use soy milk which didn't taste great but it was better than drinking black coffee. The new oatmeal-based milk tastes much better and I would have never found it by going to the same regular retail grocery store I normally shopped at. I had to go out of my way to find a different retailer that carried it.

Although 99% of advertising is terrible and irrelevant, it sometimes exposes me to new products that make me happier.

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

[1] [http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/retail/raleys.php](http://www.cockeyed.com/citizen/retail/raleys.php)

<comment><USER14> I think the 'Armitage Shanks' Advertising principle applies here - I similarly drink a brand of Swedish Oat Milk - i even pay extra for the Barrista version (added chalk for whiteness) because i saw people in my hipster coffee house making it with _that very brand_ so when I saw the brand in the local supermarket i swapped away from soya.

They did not need to 'advertise' in the traditional sense - they just needed to logo-ise their packaging in a recogniseable way.

Armitage Shanks for those not of a certain age in the UK is a brand of toilet bowl manufacturer - they simply put the name of their company visibly on the bowl of every toilet I used for probably 30 years. I doubt they ever spent a penny (!) on billboards.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article could be better, particularly for kentucky college.

Their article attempts to pigeon hole advertising down to one function, informing existence and facts of a product. There's a lot to argue against (modelling behaviour, ads as art, ads as culture, line between art and ads, short term v long term memory), it's quite reductive but I'll pose this question instead of a laundry list of counter arguments.

Take a teenager learning to skateboard, he is destined for many hard knocks and scrapes. He sees Nike shoes in his price range that are physically okay and some Adidas shoes that have more padding. He buys the Nike's because he wants to live the dream of athletic achievement that he saw in many Nike ads. Every time he falls over he is still in the spirit of winning, shoes equipped.

Is that manipulation of his preferences for good skateboarding shoes, the ad making him impulsive and changing his desires and making him buy a worse product?

Or is the ad informing him he can buy access to a spirit that will accompany him on his self selected journey and help his own desires and achieve his goals?

<comment><USER16> >Is that manipulation of his preferences for good skateboarding shoes, the ad making him impulsive and changing his desires and making him buy a worse product?

In your example, yes.

>Or is the ad informing him he can buy access to a spirit that will accompany him on his self selected journey and help his own desires?

No.

One shoe is better for its purpose, the other has stronger associations with positive ideas and feelings.

The quality of the shoe you buy is the necessary determinant of how well it will perform.

Conversely, the brand you buy from is not necessary to having certain thoughts, feelings, dreams, aspirations, etc.

The notion that buying X product with Y association in some way supports Y is exactly the deception. Flowery language about buying access/hope/a way of life is romanticizing the deception.

<comment><USER17> >The quality of the shoe you buy is the necessary determinant of how well it will perform.

Is that really true if the mind is what makes it so?

Product advertising convinces you that you can do a thing, so you succeed. Emotions are much more powerful than rational thought and in the case of the shoe, can be a catalyst for a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Performance is almost never purely mechanical with products that interface directly with the human body.

<comment><USER16> Yes, it's necessarily so. The quality of the shoe determines how well the _shoe_ performs.

Whether the customer performs better based on the (sub)conscious influence of the brand on the shoe is a different question entirely. But it's not one that anyone in these comments has provided the faintest whiff of evidence for.

So far, we've had romanticized assertions about emotional impacts nobody has measured.

The real question is whether this advertising process produces any _unique_ benefits vs. a more product information based process. People found motivation and inspiration in things before the rise of modern branding. IMO, the presumption should be that sources of ephemeral emotional inspiration could be replaced without requiring the attention-hijacking form of advertising.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > The vast amount of product information available to consumers through online > search renders most advertising obsolete as a tool for conveying product > information. Advertising remains useful to firms only as a tool for > persuading consumers to purchase advertised products.

This contradicts my own experience. I have discovered products I ended up buying many times through advertising. I often use ads, e.g. Amazon's product pages, as a starting point to learn about a product.

To some extent advertising works on me, as a learning channel as well as a sales channel. I'm a weirdo in several ways but doubt this is one of them.

<comment><USER19> Indeed.

Also, I find it odd that all the ads I see on Facebook are for scammy products - never big brands for things I actually buy.

FWIW I work in Advertising/Marketing.

<comment><USER20> Advertising online is extremely expensive, for big brands with small margins they likely wouldn't make money. It only makes sense for "scams" that make more money per sale then the ads cost, or startups that are willing to loose money per item for exposure and growth.

Big brands from what I've seen also try and build a following via content marketing. This has more upfront cost but no cost per view.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This mirrors the idealism of the early internet:

"Oh we'll have so much good information at our fingertips!"

Reality:

A torrent of misinformation drowning out the actually good information.

<comment><USER22> Try searching anything fitness or nutrition for example .

<comment><USER23> SEO being broken does not mean that advertising as a whole is broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Indeed. When the excuse of "discoverability" or "providing information" is stripped away, advertising is purely and simply unethical. It's manipulation, often on an immensely massive, immensely sophisticated way. Our mammal brains stand no chance.

</comment><comment><USER17> The paper uses the word 'information' throughout as some kind of agnostic store of pure facts, as if you could break down any product into a black and white description of its fundamental reality and/or benefits.

I spent several years at a respected branding firm whose primary methodology boiled down to '16 ways to poke the lizard brain.' Even if your mind mistakenly believes that it makes rational choices, there's a section of that methodology that knows just how to appeal to you.

Someone said it better than me - human psychology can't handle how good we've become at manipulating it. Advertising is the primary driver behind this, but it only exists because reality unfolds through an array of complex sensory inputs that are mostly made up of subconscious impulses.

<comment><USER25> "human psychology can't handle how good we've become at manipulating it."

I'm curious if you think there's any way we can fix this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wish advertising would be pull not push, I feel we're closing on to the 2rd episode of Black Mirror where the protagonist isn't allowed to close their eyes during an ad on TV.

<comment><USER27> Yes. All people who defend advertising as "providing useful information to customers" are missing the point. I also think they are completely wrong, but even assuming the advertising would magically restrict itself to providing true, non-misleading, and useful facts, there is still one issue I have with it...

I didn't consent to it.

Imagine someone following you on the street, screaming random true facts at you. I would hate it and wish to be left alone. And if someone would defend this practice saying "but, you know, true facts are useful; actully once in a few years I hear a fact that is somehow useful to me", I would be like, yeah, okay, whatever, good for you, but leave me out of it.

I prefer not be distracted. Screaming at me on the street is not okay. Sending me spam is not okay. (Please don't explain me how one person in a million might find spam useful. My point is: I don't.) Pushing advertising everywhere is not okay. You will keep doing it anyway (both the spammers and the advertisers) because there is money in it for you, I get it. I still do not consent. No, I don't care that in your opinion, it is actually good for me. In my opinion, it is not, and I prefer my own opinion about my preferences over your adsplaining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> High-quality advertising is _more_ important in the information age, not less. I still buy magazines every month, in large part because of the advertising. Skimming through the ads gives me a quick overview of trends in the market, but it also provides a sense of which companies are serious players. A single advert might just be a pack of lies, but multiple full-page adverts every month for several years is a costly signal that the company is playing the long game. Such a large investment in advertising is only viable if you're selling a lot of product and you're confident in the quality of your product; if you're selling vast quantities of total crap, word gets out very quickly and you don't stay around for long.

Targeted ads and online reviews don't provide this signalling value, precisely because they're relatively cheap and efficient from the seller's perspective. Any two-bit operator can cheaply buy a bunch of five star reviews on Amazon, then relaunch under a new brand name when the real one star reviews start flooding in. If I see a lot of targeted ads from the same company, they might be engaging in a hugely expensive media blitz or I might have been identified by their algorithm as a total sucker. Untargeted mass advertising tells me that a) the company is heavily invested in their product and b) all my peers are seeing the same adverts.

</comment><comment><USER29> This is a very good argument and many people (myself included) have independently come to the same conclusion that advertising adds very little value for the customer but takes away a lot of value by distracting them away from better alternatives.

Then there is the problem that big companies get bulk discounts for advertising and show up higher in the listings (in spite of paying less per- ad); this gives them unfair competitive advantage.

Most small projects these days understand how difficult it is to compete for attention and convey information. This is mostly because big corporations and startups backed by big VC funds have monopolized the media.

Technology has progressed greatly in the past few years but most people don't know it yet. Technological progress has been hidden away, drowned out in noise.

For example, there are some very interesting and radical things happening in the blockchain space but these projects are not visible because they cannot get any attention. Instead, what all people know about blockchain are the scammy mainstream projects - These mainstream projects are in fact discrediting the entire industry and hiding real progress. But it's the same thing with startups; that's why there hasn't been any major new unicorn since WhatsApp.

</comment><comment><USER30> YouTube Premium has been worth every penny for me. I also use an ad blocker online and Spotify premium. The only ads I see are outdoors and on Instagram/Twitter.

<comment><USER31> ublock origin crushes YouTube ads.

<comment><USER32> It certainly does, and I never turn off UBO, but I still pay for Youtube Premium because I'm glad the possibility exists.

The whole system will be an eternal war between ad pushers and ad blockers, until we provide a third way, and I think the 'free with ads, pay a subscription to take ads off' is a fair solution to the issue of 'How do websites get paid for their services without relying on selling user-data and bombarding us with ads, while also keeping their website accessible for most'.

I'm sure there are other, but choosing the 'don't pay and don't watch' when they at least try to provide a solution to get out of ads is counter- productive in the long term.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> The entire premise of this article seems naive at a level I find hard to understand.

Advertising can never be obsolete. Among other things it does these useful things:

\- Informs or reminds customers of potential solutions to problems they have, may encounter in the future, or of benefits they need or desire.

\- Informs customers of improvements.

\- Build's brand awareness that a source of a product type stands behind the product's benefits with resources and their reputation on the line.

\- At its best, does this in a way that is informative, entertaining and/or uplifting even to non-customers.

The problems of advertising to me all seem preventable and unnecessary at least at the individual companies' level.

Show respect for all viewers, customers or not, and your brand is going to build a great reputation: No cluttered ugly, psychologically manipulative, advertising. Nothing that mucked up people's lives with more dreck.

Keeping advertising constructive for everyone is a brand enhancing opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER34> The second sentence makes an error. "Advertising remains useful to firms only as a tool for persuading consumers to purchase advertised products." is not true at all. Only ~10% of advertising dollars are spent on Direct Response advertising.

~90% of the ~$500B/year spent globally on advertising is Brand advertising.

</comment><comment><USER35> >The vast amount of product information available to consumers through online search renders most advertising obsolete as a tool for conveying product informatio

First line is untrue. Beyond computer parts there's generally very little I can find in the way of differentiating information for just about anything. Just recently I was shopping for power tools on home depot and it really came down to trusting price as in indicator of quality.

But it isn't entirely home depot's fault, although in order to make the UIs simple enough to be written once and minimally managed they have to genericize product information substantially, but the real issue is that the average consumer is too ignorant and/or lazy to care.

For a long time I assumed all modern consumer power tools were Chinese junk. Then I watched AvE tear down some tools and describe differences in design, materials, and tooling that you can't find anywhere.

When you optimize away every penny and design for the broadest, laziest, and/or dumbest common denominator, you cripple the capable among us and all of society is worse off for it.

</comment><comment><USER36> In _The New Industrial State_ , Galbraith identified advertising as the engine that kept the system running by persuading people they needed more things than they would have in the absence of advertising. I think the rest of the analysis quickly stopped being true in the 90s by this fact of advertising persists.

</comment><comment> awinter-py > Today, consumers can get more product information by reading "add to cart" > pages on Amazon, or online product reviews on any number of platforms, than > they can get from viewing advertisements

Not sure review sites are neutral information either, but cool scotus history.

In 2020 ad-supported platforms are the channels through which the product information is made available to consumers; that's not a but-for argument (something else would spring up in their absence), but the separation between ads & product info isn't as total as the article wants to make it.

Banning ads wouldn't make the information environment any less hostile.

<comment><USER25> If you banned ads in such a way as to stop the economically powerful funding disinformation it would.

How do you fund the google replacement if you're not allowed to sell adverts? You'd have to charge people who want to use the search engine. How do you fund your magazine or news site? You'd have to charge the viewer.

In a world where you have to actually _pay the cost_ for all this stuff everyone would be much more discriminating on what they bought.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> The problem with this entire piece is, it's based off the premise that consumers:

A) have unlimited time and memory to research every decision they make and store all that information

and

B) will make rational decisions based on said information

Both are so obviously wrong it makes me wonder if the author has ulterior motives.

Being published under the brand of _Yale Law Journal_ gives the words more authority than they deserve.

The author clearly doesn't understand how modern search engines nor modern advertising work. The positioning of the information you see on Google (SEO) _is_ advertising.

</comment><comment><USER38> The linked abstract offers online searches as an alternative to low- information persuasive advertising, and yet it is difficult to find trustworthy information on many subjects on the web. It's filled to the brim with attempts to persuade and exploit.

I personally think that simple algorithms for searching web content have been undermined so badly by malicious/exploitative content that curated search or web directories are needed for it to continue living up to its potential as a medium in terms of social value.

</comment><comment><USER39> The author should skip ahead to the punchline - the obsolescence of human beings in the information age.

Most people in USA and Europe consume more than they produce and there is no reversing of this trend - the average IQ is 100 and we can pretty much automate most things we can train a 100 IQ person to do and at the same time we can't train them into not acting like self destructive idiots, so, we've got a bit of a problem :)

<comment><USER40> We can't automate as much as you think.

And no the average US person produces more than any other country and spends slightly less of their budget. Here is a visualization:

[https://howmuch.net/articles/breakdown-average-american- spen...](https://howmuch.net/articles/breakdown-average-american-spending)

<comment><USER39> Most people living in the USA are idiots compared to most people who read/comment on HackerNews.

Similarly, most people consume more than they produce. Because non-idiots are so amazing, they enable idiots to have an amazing lifestyle in developed countries.

This is patently obvious by the fact that these countries have borders - <USER2> borders are there to protect idiots, not neuro-surgeons, from immigrants destroying their cushy government-sponsored way of life.

Neuro-surgeons would only benefit from open borders and abolishment of minimum wage laws - they'd each immediately hire a dozen servants, which is what already happens in countries like India.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> >> Advertising remains useful to firms only as a tool for persuading consumers to purchase advertised products.

Wow, didn't realize this was NOT the only use of advertising (the other stated intent was provide consumers information, according to article).

</comment><comment><USER42> Man, some people really think they're entitled to dictate how the world must be.

The argument that easy access to product information online eliminates any consumer benefit of advertising misses a key point.

 _I only do research online for products that I care deeply about._

I am never going to bother to seek out information online to figure out what kind of laundry detergent to buy. It's just way, way down on my priority list. So I'm perfectly happy to passively consume the advertising and let that shape my decisions, for the 20 seconds of thought I give this topic as I walk through that aisle in the grocery store.

What information does advertising convey to me, as a rational consumer?

1) How successful the company is [inferred from how much money they seem to be spending on advertising].

2) What characteristics they think matter the most - price? Stain removal? Efficiency? Sometimes a company will emphasize something I don't care about - which lets me know I'm probably not the target market for their product, and I should look elsewhere.

3) Whether they have any new products I haven't tried.

I once tried a detergent brand I had never heard of - Persil - because I saw a TV ad for it. Probably somewhere out there there's a laundry detergent enthusiast forum that already knew about it, and they have strong opinions about Persil, and debate whether it was reformulated in 2016, or whether's it's really the same in the US vs. Germany. I don't know, because I don't care! But I liked the smell and I'd buy it again.

Conversely, advertising for cars is totally ineffective on me, because I'm a car nut and I know about every model coming out 2 years before they would ever be advertised in any medium. But, there are plenty of people in the world who think about cars in the same way I think about laundry detergent - and might go to the Honda dealer and check out a minivan because of the ad they saw that showed it had a built-in vacuum cleaner in the trunk.

I've mentioned on HN before that I bought a Casper mattress largely because of the incessant ads for it on my favorite podcasts, which I heard long before I actually needed one. Without those ads, when the time came, I probably would've just driven to the mattress store and tried out what they had in stock. It never would've occurred to me to search the web to see if someone had revolutionized the mattress business - this was a chore, I wanted it over as soon as possible, and I didn't want to spend my mental energy doing research on fucking _mattresses_.

But because of the ads, I knew that there was an established company that had come up with what they claimed was a better product in this space. I checked out a few reviews to make sure people actually liked the mattress - then I ordered one, it showed up in 3 days, and I love it! Thanks, advertising.

<comment><USER43> > and I didn't want to spend my mental energy doing research on fucking > mattresses

Ironically it should be reverse: you send a lot of time on the mattress, it directly affects quality of your sleep and consequently health and quality of life.

<comment><USER44> Does it? Humans sleep on a wide variety of surfaces, from bamboo mats to memory foam, and if sleep quality is taken to be "does not wake up" then observably mattresses don't really affect the quality of sleep in general.

Are you sure "mattresses are important for your health" isn't largely a product of advertising? That would be ironic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> It's an interesting argument but it's tautological. Advertising features (or branding) is a form of disseminating information. If it's true that consumers know everything about every single product, then advertising would cease to exist. You simply can't say that every single business in the world is in efficiently spending ad dollars right now.

Consumers especially don't have access to all product information. You literally can not compare a good chunk of products because I do is gated or not shared on purpose.

\- I've only read the abstract so far, will edit if skimming other sections provides answers.

<comment><USER46> Right, advertising is a form of disseminating information, but the issue is that there are limited resources to process all this information in the world. What ads do is forcibly take my attention and direct my resources towards processing their content without my permission. Sure, I can look away but I need to exert effort (even if it is the slightest bit). Processing what they want to tell me makes me more informed about their product (as opposed to their competitors) which, if their ad wasn't terrible, will make me less uncertain about it. This easily makes a number of people more likely to buy it since it will feel familiar, thus making this company better off even if their competitor had a better, but at first more unfamiliar product.

<comment><USER45> Do you equally dislike everything in the header, right rail, left rail, and footer on every single webpage? Does processing the top bar of hn take away from your pool of mental resources?

I don't want to be a dick but this argument lacks weight. Does your brain work less effectively when it's cloudy, since it takes mental resources to see clouds rather than clear sky?

<comment><USER16> All the things you reference serve a purpose for the user. There's a whole field about how to design them, etc.

Ads are not designed or deployed to serve the user. Are you seriously saying the average ad you see is optimized to provide you useful information? When did you last see a Tide commercial cite the studies that showed it cleans the best?

Ads are designed, bought, placed and engineered to interrupt your thought process and direct it elsewhere, then present information that's optimized to make you remember and select that product. Sometimes (in proportion, rarely) that information happens to be useful, but it was still presented in via psychosocial dark patterns.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tough, Cheap, and Real: Detroit - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalgeographic.com/taking-back-detroit/see-detroit.html <comment><USER3> I've lived in Detroit my whole life, in both the suburbs and the city. If you take the time to read the stories and literature of Detroit from 1915-Today, you'd find that Detroit was the original Silicon Valley at the turn of the 20th century - we owned mechanical engineering and industrial operation engineering/mass production.

Today, in summary - Detroit has a long way to go to be considered at the same level as a Chicago or Boston, from a domestic/international reputation standpoint. And that's ok! Those cities have their own problems, and we have the opportunity here to re-build a city using 21st century urban planning and engineering knowledge. But Gilbert and Ilitch can only take it so far.

Would be nice to see some Fortune 500 companies relocating to Detroit. It's all about having a downtown where the 20-somethings meet their spouse and have families. SF/LA/SEA/CHI/NYC/BOS/DC have that down pretty well. Is there room for Detroit? Maybe. There's still 4+ million people here in Metro Detroit, so there's a blank entertainment canvas that the two billionaires have been constructing.

Cool to see Rocket Fiber deploying FTTH Downtown, Midtown, and Woodbridge/Eastern Market.

One little dirty secret - the levels of arsenic and heavy metals in the soil on ground they've torn down buildings is like nothing you've ever seen (75-100 years ago they didn't quite grasp that some chemicals shouldn't be used in building materials). It's toxic. Kim Worthy (city prosecutor) has a small project looking at the crime rates and lead exposure.

The old Fisher Body Plant had cyanide (yes, cyanide) baths for metal plating. Yeah.

<comment><USER4> Fellow near-native here, long gone though: We weren't the Silicon Valley of anything, because "Silicon Valley of" wasn't a meme yet. We were the Motor City, man. Silicon Valley is just the Motor City of computers.

Now it's another frozen cog in the Rust Belt. The Bay would do well to remember that: prosperity, and property values, do not always increase.

<comment><USER5> Fair points, but you are comparing apples and oranges in many ways.

The Bay Area as a geographic location outside of industry-related trends is objectively considered much more desirable to a larger percentage of individuals. You have _amazing_ weather mostly year round, great food, interesting culture, many activities to do in neighboring areas (Tahoe, wine country, etc.), much closer to asian countries, etc. I get that there are reasons to live in Michigan (I grew up in Chicago), but the above reasons combined with the limited buildable land strike me as not really being a competition at all.

I feel like there are many more reasons to want to live in the Bay Area, and those reasons coupled with the very real limitations on housing will keep positive pressure on prices for quite some time even if the tech industry were to eventually tank.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, about the lack of water in California... (I get that a vast majority of it is used for agriculture and can be re-diverted for personal consumption, but that is going to cause some serious upheaval for the local populace/economies in CA.

<comment><USER5> That's the main worry I have in terms of long-term impact on home values. If the Bay Area turns into a complete desert, that would be problematic.

But that's really the big environmental disaster I can think of. If there was an earthquake that didn't level the entire Bay, I actually think that wouldn't do much other than cause people to say "oh, people are scared, I'll bet prices will be down, I should buy now!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This makes Detroit sound a lot like a Peace Corps for millenials—a place for young people with tons of energy to make a corner of the world better.

I think it says something about the relative lack of opportunity in the US today that people are moving to Detroit to do this. People want meaningful work that they can devote a portion of their lives to, and that's increasingly hard to find in the normal workplace.

It makes me sad to think that twenty-somethings have to move across the country to a forsaken, blighted city to find something they feel has meaning, but I'm happy that they have.

It will be interesting to see if Detroit can build on that wave of energy into a sustainable metropolis. Energetic twenty-somethings are great, but they aren't enough. You need a whole lifecycle of people, and that means parents. Until Detroit addresses crime and education problems, it's no place to raise a family.

<comment><USER7> Well, twentysomethings become parents sooner or later, most of the time.

<comment><USER8> At which point they move to the suburbs. My wife and I live in downtown Baltimore. At one point we seriously considered renting a house and moving her mom and teenage brother from the west coast. But the school/safety situation was just a deal-breaker. We've got a nice little bubble for a few blocks in each direction from where we live, but beyond that it's just miles of abysmal schools and gang violence. Twenty-somethings will put up with that. Parents will not.

<comment><USER9> "We've got a nice little bubble for a few blocks in each direction from where we live, but beyond that it's just miles of abysmal schools and gang violence"

So, you're in Canton then?

<comment><USER10> Canton, Fells, Fed Hill, Actual Downtown, Bolton Hill/Mt. Vernon, Pigtown, Hampden, I could keep going.

Baltimore is a checkerboard. Turn down the wrong street and you're fucked. Canton is no exception.

<comment><USER9> Yeah. I was trying to think of anywhere in Baltimore that gave a 2-mile buffer, and Canton was the best I could come up with.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Detroit fascinates me for some reason. That a major city could disintegrate so thoroughly is sobering. But we should not lose sight of the fact that this nacent, yet-to-be-proven-viable recovery is only happening because $18 _billion_ of incompetence, negligence, misdeeds and corruption by at least five decades of municipal governance is just being wiped out. And if they continue to run the city the way they have, it will happen again.

</comment><comment><USER12> These articles always crack me up. This sounds great on paper, but the city is still messed up (and probably irreparable in my lifetime).

The article is talking about Downtown Detroit (as in 3-4 square miles). Detroit itself is a MUCH larger city... 130+ square miles. Not to mention... you only have 600k residents living in those 130 square miles. Focusing on 1% of the area (for the white and rich) is not going to help the rest catch up.

<comment><USER3> At some point you have to cut your losses and tell those people to relocate or pay for services outside the footprint the city is able to serve. Or let those residents incorporate into a new city and break Detroit up into 6 or 7 new city municipalities and have the State reboot it.

It hasn't come to that yet since the bankruptcy case has closed, but without the state of Michigan serving as a financial backstop, I am generally skeptical that Detroit City Council can manage a pool of money without going bankrupt. By the way, keep an eye on the pension funding levels for city employees, that is the next shoe to drop.

Downtown has to thrive and be a destination so Detroit can be a place for companies to relocate so that it can compete with other cities throughout the country for talent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Accelerator in Detroit funded in part by Dan Gilbert (Quicken Loans) [http://bizdom.com/](http://bizdom.com/)

Detroit is cheap though downtown vacancy rate is very low. Finding a cheap apartment downtown would be challenging. Though would of course be much cheaper than SF/Bay Area

</comment><comment><USER14> Why do we think cheap rent is such a factor in making a tech city? Innovating and inventing new tech is expensive. Everyone in the chain knows this, Founders, VC, tech workers. You pay them well (or in the case of Founders sacrifice alot) but, it's worth it in the end because the gains from that initial work are so large.

What makes a great tech city is access to a large pool of highly trained people. SF has this, LA (in theory) has this, Austin, NYC and other places in the US has this. Tech cities also should be places people want to go. Weather is a huge consideration. Detroit is cold. SF and LA are warm. I don't care that my rent is $500/mo if I'm freezing. I'll gladly pay $2,500 for the same place for 75F degree sunny weather year round.

Culture is another big aspect. When I'm not working, I want to find interesting things to do, places to visit, food to eat, people to interact with. I think this is why NYC would be a decent startup city despite it's terrible weather.

Density has a role to play that we don't fully understand. Austin would be a great example that checks all the boxes (and has a low cost of living to boot) but, hasn't exactly exploded as far as startups are concerned. Miami too as it has actually tropical weather and beaches.

Detroit is lacking is so many areas. Density is going to be a problem. Weather is a huge problem; most of the country is warmer and more temperate than Detroit (which is also on the lake so added windchill factor). Detroit is blighted which means unless you are 22 and like warehouse parties or some young hipster and enjoy the early stages of gentrification, Detroit isn't for you. Also, who wants to raise kids in Detroit? Lead in the soil? No thanks, I'd pay the extra money to live someone where my kid's IQ isn't stunted irreversibly.

My question is why are people _still_ in Detroit? If you are going to try to make a new startup city, why not try Miami or Orlando or Austin or Dallas or San Diego? Why freeze your ass off, just so you can brag about it later? What is the city council going to do that's so freeing to your ability to write software?

<comment><USER15> I still do not understand people who care so much about weather. We're not talking about moving to the Gobi Desert or, I don't know, the South Sandwich Islands.

Besides, even if you do care about weather, I would pick Detroit over Florida or Texas any day. Cold in the winter is normal; 100 degrees in the summer sucks.

<comment><USER16> It gets colder in Detroit than it does on the South Sandwich Islands...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Autoplay audio, nope.

<comment><USER18> Seriously, who thought that was a good idea? Novel isn't the same as worthwhile.

<comment><USER19> In this context it's a good idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Love to see Rand Paul's ideas on economic free zone applied to Detroit.

<comment><USER21> Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has proposed that the Feds allow 50,000 additional visas for highly skilled immigrants if they're willing to live in Detroit for five years.

Priority would be given to graduates of Michigan universities. Despite widespread support from both parties in the state the Obama administration has yet to rule on the request.

[http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20140123/NEWS/140129933...](http://www.crainsdetroit.com/article/20140123/NEWS/140129933/snyder- seeks-50000-work-visas-to-lure-immigrants-to-detroit)

<comment><USER22> This would require a constitutional amendment. We have free movement in America. It's not the Soviet Union.

<comment><USER23> > This would require a constitutional amendment.

No, it probably wouldn't.

> We have free movement in America.

On a constitutional level, that's not necessarily true of immigrants. The states generally can't impose such limits on immigrants because regulating immigration is Constitutionally a reserved federal power, so it would be a Supremacy Clause issue. The feds, however, almost certainly can impose place- of-residency restrictions on immigrants without a Constitutional amendment.

<comment><USER22> That's not how it would work. The feds clearly won't even impose "are you here legally in the first place" restrictions. Bush and Obama have made that perfectly clear.

Anyway, the whole idea stinks of shit like the propaganda line "jobs americans won't do." You really think Americans are some sort of idiots that couldn't make use of the land and infrastructure in Detroit given proper reforms? Apparently we're too dumb and need some foreigners to lead the way.

<comment><USER23> > That's not how it would work.

How politically things are likely to work is a different question from what is Constitutionally required.

EDIT: also,

> The feds clearly won't even impose "are you here legally in the first place" > restrictions. Bush and Obama have made that perfectly clear.

George W. Bush's administration engaged in some of the most extreme uses of every federal power available (and more)over immigrants since WWII in the wake of 9/11.

They may not have used that power where you want them to, but that's a different issue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm surprised that Google Fiber hasn't made a bid to move into Detroit - <USER2> seems like the issues they have with digging up yards and such would be minimal.

<comment><USER25> It's really spread out, and broke. Grand Rapids and Ann Arbor both tried to get Fiber when they were having their contest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Should have a warning: Starts playing loud noise when entering page.</comment>