GDPR will pop the adtech bubble - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.harvard.edu/doc/2018/05/12/gdpr/ <comment><USER4> Oddly, I think the article underestimates the size of the change coming. I think one side affect of the surge of IT into advertising, is that it has become easier to measure exactly how well advertising works. By and large, it doesn't, very well.

I am reminded of this, from Paul Graham, about his time at Yahoo: [http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html)

"...The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it. If Yahoo merely extracted the actual value, they'd have made less."

I'm pretty sure that, the more we learn about how well advertising works, the less money people will be willing to pay for it. What's happening to billboards and newspapers right now is probably coming to several other industries soon.

<comment><USER5> > By and large, it doesn't, very well.

I know Twitter isn't known for being the best at advertising, but it was made exceptionally clear to me that online advertising is a massive bunch of lies when I did my GDPR Twitter data export and it included me in a bunch of incorrect, non-sensical and contradictory ad targeting groups.

Twitter claims I:

        * Own a cat, dog and other animal (I don't)
        * Have between $100k- $999k liquid investible assets (I don't)
        * Have a net worth between $1 and $1m (cool - I own *something*)
        * Am highly affluent (/shrug)
        * Am a high spender (okay...)
        * Am a frugal spender  (...but how can I be both a high spender AND frugal)
        * Own a house (I don't)
        * Have multiple families (I don't)

I was very disappointed that the Google and Facebook data exports don't contain this data. Maybe it's for their best.

<comment><USER6> > GDPR Twitter data export and it included me in a bunch of incorrect, non- > sensical and contradictory ad targeting groups.

This is expected. It's not desirable, but it is expected.

The problem is your comparing it to an absolute. I.e. to perfect.

If advertisers had that choice, they would love it. They generally don't. Remarketing is kinda close, but limits the scale.

Rather, the only other scalable options are __far __worse. Think about it. What are the marketers other choices?

The one that should come to mind, and the one they spend most of their money: TV.

With TV you pick up a _huge_ amount of waste. Say you buy a spot on Big Bang because you want people thinking of buying a new iPhone. Not a big stretch, right? At the same time thinking of all the other people they __have __to buy, who watch the ad, and aren 't buying an iPhone. It's waste.

And that waste is _huge_ relative to what you're talking about above.

So you're asking the wrong question here. It's not how good is the targeting in terms of precision/recall. The question is what's better?

The waste here is generally known & its priced accordingly.

> I was very disappointed that the Google and Facebook data exports don't > contain this data.

It's in my Facebook export. Under "Information About You" did you uncheck "Ads"?

That's where the information is contained & it's checked by default.

You can also view it here for both FB & Google, as well as opt of both:

[https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en](https://adssettings.google.com/authenticated?hl=en)

[https://www.facebook.com/about/basics/advertising](https://www.facebook.com/about/basics/advertising)

<comment><USER7> > What are the marketers other choices?

Advertise on a tech site, 80+% will be interested in tech.

Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to target dog owners...

Far better than what, 5% ? This isn't rocket science, we sold everyones integrity for pennies.

> who watch the ad, and aren't buying an iPhone. It's waste.

No, advertisements like that are more about selling the brand than selling iphones. Something TV is probably pretty good for.

<comment><USER6> > Advertise on a dog community site is probably pretty spot on if you want to > target dog owners...

Big brands struggle with UGC. Witness the events of YouTube & brand safety.

But even without that, what you're saying just isn't scalable. What community site can reach even 50% of dog owners -- let alone what a primtetime sitcom or YouTube can reach?

> No, advertisements like that are more about selling the brand than selling > iphones. Something TV is probably pretty good for.

What? Sure, they have campaigns running for awareness, recall, perception.

But you're really saying Apple doesn't _dramatically_ increase its spend when a new phone is released? That's poppycock.

<comment><USER7> Only google et al cares about scalability, everyone else cares about results. Only google needs to sell ads without any knowledge about the product or audience, this scales extremely well but leads to poor results.

> But you're really saying Apple doesn't dramatically increase its spend when > a new phone is released? That's poppycock.

When is the best time to sell the brand? When your flagship is a year old and still costs as much as on launch day and when the competition has surpassed you? Hardly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It won't do much. It'll definitely get rid of some low-value companies but that's about it.

People think that adtech has some incredible insights but 99% of data is terrible. If you check your profile at any major site, you'll quickly find that you're probably in several conflicting segments that have nothing to do with you. Context is still king for any marketer who knows what they're doing, but unfortunately the industry is overwhelmed with subpar talent and politics through layers of agencies that buy buzzwords like "AI" and "data". Barely any adtech companies have a direct link to a person, and any links that did exist are even harder now with adblocking, 3rd party cookie deletion, ephemeral mobile device ids, IP renewals, and other noisy and loose signals.

Interestingly, big companies like Facebook and Google that have user logins and 1st party data connections will actually benefit from the higher industry regulation and are not going to lose any of the data that users willingly give to them. ISPs are another major source of data, along with credit agencies and banks, and now giant ecommerce companies like Walmart and Amazon, all of which have very accurate and exhaustive histories and will see little change from GDPR. Overall it's well-intentioned, and good progress, but what it will do is vastly overstated.

<comment><USER9> What you're describing sounds very much like a bubble that is going to pop...

<comment><USER8> I said that GDPR will not affect much, other than a few companies that add up to a microscopic market share. Where's the bubble?

<comment><USER9> The bubble is those companies, although I guess the original article would argue that their market share is (currently) not microscopic.

<comment><USER10> It's hard to overstate how dominant Facebook and Google are in online ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> One surprising side effect of this might be that the hordes of machine learners and data scientists who used to work for adtech might go to healthcare/bioinformatics where we might get new breakthroughs.

<comment><USER12> They can still use sufficiently anonymized data under GDPR. They also will have data from people who have consented to have their data used. They will also have data from visitors who are not in the Union.

I would not at all be surprised if this is enough for the machine learning and data science people to be effective, especially at very high traffic sites like Facebook and Twitter.

<comment><USER13> I don't believe for a second that they can make the data "sufficiently anonymized". That is extremely hard and pretty much every time "sufficiently anonymized" data gets leaked it turns out it weasn't sufficiently anonymized after all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > tracking people without their knowledge, approval or a court order is just > flat-out wrong.

Requiring them to check an "I agree to be tracked" checkbox and signing an agreement (which has just happened to me yesterday in an EU country in accordance to GDPR) before they can use a product/service is hardly much better. This reminds me of the Android app permission system which requires you to allow an app to do everything it wants (including ridiculous requirements like when a game requires access to your contacts list) or just give up the idea of installing it (as for me I just grant the permissions at the installation time and then block everything redundant with XPrivacy). So I doubt it is going to do much good, a way like the cookie law doesn't really do anything but just introduces useless cookie warning banners.

<comment><USER15> _Requiring them to check an "I agree to be tracked" checkbox and signing an agreement (which has just happened to me yesterday in an EU country in accordance to GDPR) before they can use a product/service is hardly much better._

That's specifically not allowed under the GDPR. Either the information is needed to provide the service (and needed means actually needed, not "my business model depends on it"), in which case they don't need to ask, or the use of the service can't depend on that consent.

(By the way, even if the information is needed, they still need consent to use it in other ways, and the same applies)

See the ICO guidelines on the issue: "If you make consent a precondition of a service, it is unlikely to be the most appropriate lawful basis."

[https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general- da...](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data- protection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/consent/)

<comment><USER14> I have visited a drugstore to buy some vitamins yesterday. They have handled me a touch-screen where I had to check a checkbox (saying that I agree to allow my medicines shopping history to be stored and analyzed to track my health (which I obviously don't want them to do actually)) and an electronic signature tablet with a stylus where I had to put my signature. This was a mandatory condition for continuing using a discount card that gives bonuses when you buy meds. I could opt-out but this would mean I won't be given discounts any more.

<comment><USER15> That's a good question, I don't know if it's valid to offer discounts and such in exchange for consent. It goes against the EU principles ("personal information cannot be conceived as a mere economic asset"), but I'm not sure if the law actually prevents it.

<comment><USER16> One of the criteria for freely given consent is that the customer must be able to revoke it at any time without detriment.

If revoking consent causes a detriment, then it's not freely given, and so that "consent" isn't sufficient to grant the data controller a legal permission to use that data.

Quoting recital 42 from [https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-42/](https://gdpr- info.eu/recitals/no-42/) "[...] Consent should not be regarded as freely given if the data subject has no genuine or free choice or is unable to refuse or withdraw consent without detriment.", so it's quite explicit.

<comment><USER17> I think a minor discount would probably fly (under 15% or so) or atleast defendable to the regulatory bodies.

Bigger discounts would be a problem since that would be more of a detriment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Completely oblivious and ignorant here:

If a company has no official office in Europe, how does this affect them? All advertisement and business focus is say only in the US, is it business as usual? What if an EU citizen decides to sign up?

Are US companies forced to deny customers not par of say an IP block (half assed method I know, but just speaking in general)?

<comment><USER19> As long as you don't target EU customers, you're fine.

<comment><USER20> Do you have any references/citations for this?

Would help me out! I'm trying to put together a one-pager for my team.

<comment><USER19> When the regulation does not apply

Your company is service provider based outside the EU. It provides services to customers outside the EU. Its clients can use its services when they travel to other countries, including within the EU. Provided your company doesn't specifically target its services at individuals in the EU, it is not subject to the rules of the GDPR.

[https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data- protection/refo...](https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/law-topic/data- protection/reform/rules-business-and-organisations/application-regulation/who- does-data-protection-law-apply_en)

IANAL etc

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > _perhaps a $trillion or more has been spent on adtech, and not one brand > known to the world has been made by it_

Google.

<comment><USER22> You can add Alibaba, Baidu and Toutiao to that list. Nearly all of their revenue comes from adtech. Just three platforms used by a billion people. Yahoo was also made possible by adtech, it was / is a brand known to over a billion people.

Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat - they only exist courtesy of their adtech.

Can you imagine how difficult it would be for Twitter to sustain itself with a paid model? There's such an extreme imbalance between the people that post regularly and are power users, vs people that just occasionally consume. The median user that reads a few tweets per day - at best - is never going to pay $60 or $100 per year for that product. Even if you have five million power users on there paying $100 per year, Twitter instantly goes bankrupt, they could never charge enough.

<comment><USER23> Out of the three you listed, only one has actually made money. Snapchat and Twitter have lost incredible amounts.

Also, I think what the article is suggesting is that brands don't typically get built on the back of advertising _initially_. All three of those started without it and added it in later once they were highly entrenched to try to monetize.

I still don't think it was a very good point in the article, though.

<comment><USER24> Twitter has been net income positive each of the last two quarters.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> From one of the references in the article:

 _The Google consent interface greets site visitors with a request to use data to tailor advertising, with equally prominent "no" and "yes" buttons. If a reader declines to be tracked, he or she sees a notice saying the ads will be less relevant and asking to "agree" or go back to the previous page._

<comment><USER26> Adtech is a joke. Even targeted ads are so irrelevant to the point where I don't think most people can tell if they're random or not. Except when the creepiness kicks in, because they show you ads for this one thing you googled a week ago.

Google can't get it right. Their ads suck, and their Youtube suggestions aren't much better. Amazon can't get suggestions right in their own store.

The whole ad industry is a joke. Most people I know do not watch TV anymore, not because of the content, but because of ads. I enjoy reading magazines, but I don't bother anymore because they got full of ads. Now I read books instead. Most Youtubers either have some kind of sponsoring directly in the video, or a Patreon because Youtube ads are clearly awful and ineffective.

I think Patreon and Netflix et al. proves quite nicely that enough people are willing to pay for quality content without ads. For the companies who want to market stuff, I don't have a solution (otherwise I'd be rich), but I do know I'll go to great lengths to avoid seeing your shitty ads.

<comment><USER27> I honestly think this is very, very user dependent. Mainly because if Google's ad tech wasn't working, they wouldn't be making so much money....

You, I, and everyone else on this site don't represent the average user. Personally whenever I Google something out of curiosity as a one-off thing (e.g. "lyrics to Rasputin by Boney M" or "0-60 of a Golf GTI") I switch to in- cognito, just because I've noticed that Google isn't currently tracking stuff like that by IP. This way I don't get recommended Boney M videos in YouTube or adverts for cars I don't actually have an interest in elsewhere. And that's on top of uBlock, Disconnect, Privacy Badger, and a Pi-Hole on my home network. But I work in cyber security and I am in no way a "normal" internet user. Same with TV, I'm a cord-cutter with Plex running on a VPS: meanwhile everybody I know who doesn't work in tech just watches TV normally.

Pretty much everyone on this site saying "advertising doesn't work" is right that it probably isn't as effective for them because they've been taking counter-measures for years, but millions (possibly billions) of normal internet users do click on ads, or have their purchases influenced by ads.

I do agree with Patreon and Netflix, they're fantastic business models. Add Spotify to the mix too: although the renumeration they give to artists is laughable, it's a fantastic platform which has gotten me to actually pay for music for the first time in about a decade.

<comment><USER28> > _I switch to in-cognito, just because I 've noticed that Google isn't > currently tracking stuff like that by IP. This way I don't get recommended > Boney M videos in YouTube or adverts for cars I don't actually have an > interest in elsewhere._

If you go through all that trouble, why don't you simply turn off personalized ads? [https://adssettings.google.com/](https://adssettings.google.com/)

<comment><USER27> I already have. But I like to double up on my privacy controls where possible, just in case. Opening up incognito takes a fraction of a second more, it's become part of my workflow.

<comment><USER29> Yeah, that's definitely the reason why it has become part of the workflow ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> From the article, it looks like the big winners in this will be companies which both run ads and have customer accounts. Google and Facebook, basically. Companies which have no relationship with the customer have no way to ask for permission to use customer data. This is a killer for third-party adtech companies which need that permission.

So the middlemen get cut out, and advertisers deal with Google and Facebook directly.

</comment><comment><USER30> Tracking cookies gave the ability for small advertisers to understand their customers and their other consumption in ways that only the largest marketers could.

The author thinks big brands are everything and can't see how letting smaller players sell to customers could help the economy. He uses an arbitrary standard of privacy to argue on the behalf of the largest household brands. I think he's missing the forest for the trees.

<comment><USER15> Can you flesh that out a bit more? What are those ways?

<comment><USER30> Customer focus groups. Literally paying customers to spend time with staff to learn their habits and thoughts about the advertising. The big brands have the funds and expertise to directly gather enough data to come up with strong predictors of behavior.

<comment><USER15> Focus groups are always made with the consent of the participants, though. You can still use tracking cookies if you also get consent.

<comment><USER30> You use the word "though", but I don't see how your argument doesn't integrate with mine. Can you tell me what I am missing?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> One other fundamental shift that information technology makes to advertising is that digital tools, reviews, and marketplaces somewhat undermine some primary functions of advertising. I no longer care about brand or advertising information when buying commodity products on Amazon; I simply sort by # of reviews * avg score, read a sample of reviews at each star level, and I already have a general picture of the product's quality and consumer satisfaction.

The parts of advertising meant to demonstrate "Hey, we're a quality company that can afford this prestigious advertising slot, therefore the reliability of our products is assured" has been eaten by frictionless digital review platforms. Of course, advertising and branding serve other purposes as well, and will always be some part of the purchasing decision. But social software and AI will likely continue getting better at matching consumers with products over time.

<comment><USER32> I think that is coming back, however, as the whole fake Amazon review scandal continues to play out and demonstrate that anonymous reviews in an open digital marketplace are no replacement for a trusted brand. Not better and not worse, whether it is reviews or brands, at the end of the day its simply another way to gauge 'potential' product quality. Sometimes good brands screw you over with shitty products, sometimes bad manufacturers hire fake reviewers to shill for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I wonder how many "parts" of the Internet are simply going to be inaccessible over the course of the year to individuals residing within the EU as websites take a rudimentary "block all EU traffic" approach as a first swing at preventing their services from being offered to EU residents.

<comment><USER34> Just be sure to marvel at the speed with which they're all simply replaced.

<comment><USER35> Another gold rush? Count me in!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I don't quite share the level of optimism the author seems to have, but I hope he's right. If so, good riddance, just a shame it took this long.

</comment><comment><USER37> Something tells me it will be similar to the fear mongering of cookies policies circa 2014.

Meanwhile as ICO reporting, only on average 50 companies/sites have been investigated and punished, per year.

[https://ico.org.uk/action-weve-taken/cookies/](https://ico.org.uk/action- weve-taken/cookies/)

Most likely with GDPR being so damn popular, they will be overloaded on day one. Heck, I personally have 5 different emailers I never provided my email to, that I just wait for the end of May to report! Do I believe each will be prosecuted and extracted out of $25MM in penalties ? Nope.

</comment><comment><USER38> ...and nothing of value was lost.

</comment><comment><USER39> Although I like the GDPR and would support similar legislation in my country, I honestly don't see the gloom and doom story. The EU market is a small part of the global story, and while this change clearly makes that market harder to enter, the article doesn't make the case that the EU represents a sufficient share of the adtech market to pop a bubble.

In general it's easy to believe negative press about hated entities (for example, see liberal credulity about Trump's vulnerability in the US). I don't see the argument passing the bar for evidende, whether or not I want to believe it.

edit: the argument that adtech stinks is not evidence in support of the article's thesis. crappiness is not a predictor of a bubble, and the author makes no attempt to connect the idea that ad tech stinks (which is stated ad nauseum) with the claim that the GDPR will bring about a global sea change for adtech)

<comment><USER16> EU market is something like 25% of all the global market revenue, both for total industry and for the main international players individually. 25% of total revenue _is_ large enough to adapt instead of avoiding the market, and it would be expected that every multinational player will be compliant, and thus also require their suppliers to be compliant - i.e. Google won't be buying data from a random adtech company if it might be "contaminated" with EU data obtained without proper procedures, the potential financial risk is just too great.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I felt the point that adtech isn't advertising, but direct marketing, deserves to be called out as important.

</comment><comment><USER41> I'll play the devil's advocate and say that I'm actually disappointed by this development. A very long time ago when AdSense was young I was thrilled by the idea that instead of being bombarded by stupid ads designed to cater to morons people (including myself) will be getting relevant ads - ideally, ads about stuff that I am actually willing to buy right now. Kinda like legilimency. Too bad that this will be impossible for a long time to come now.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hmmm...just target it to the content of the site?

Just like targeting search ads to be relevant to the search?

<comment><USER42> There are many sites which are topic agnostic, others which have less text and therefore are more difficult to classify by ad crawlers and target based on topic.

It's also difficult to conceive enough advertisers on the demand side for many niches. In this scenario targeted advertisement would fill in for the lack of demand

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> > I just said greatly simplifies what the GDPR actually utters, in > bureaucratic legalese

You can read and understand the whole thing in about 30m, as a lay-person.

</comment><comment><USER44> Tracking IP address for SAAS companies is important for defending chargeback claims.

For e.g when a customer demands a chargeback through their bank, Stripe notes down the IP address of every transaction. It is important to note this IP address and check if the user created an account using the same IP address. How are SAAS companies to provide sufficient usage proof when it comes to defend chargebacks?

<comment><USER45> You would be allowed to track IP addresses to prevent fraud. This is from Recital 47 of the GDPR:

"The processing of personal data strictly necessary for the purposes of preventing fraud also constitutes a legitimate interest of the data controller concerned."

"Legitimate interest" is one of the legal bases for processing personal data under the new regulation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> For a long time I've been saying that we can do better with online advertising and revenue generation - and that there's a wide open market for the startup providing the solution.

There are a lot of practices that are distasteful that simply don't provide value that overrides their distastefulness.

But quite simply the revenue is there to be had, and nobody is going to venture off in a new direction when you can make easy money doing exactly what everybody else is doing.

The market may shift with GDPR, or it may just shift in europe. Or maybe the market doesn't shift at all, but some company policies change. I think in the end what causes the current incarnation of internet advertising to go away is going to just be a better idea.

</comment><comment><USER47> The real answers here should be in the data, but as an anecdote I experienced something that genuinely impressed me the other day.

I'm in the market for a new mattress, and the other day on a whim I stopped at a mattress store (in real life). After I left the store, within an hour, I looked at a site I commonly look at (a political site), and saw a banner ad for the mattress store company.

In any case, it's hard for me to believe that targeted advertising doesn't work, because without it, I see adds in product categories I will never buy in.

<comment><USER48> On the other hand I'm not in the market for a new mattress but I see advertisement for it everywhere. Might it just be that mattress ads are common this time of the year? A quick check of one of scandinavias more known bed and furniture chains (if ikea does not count...) shows they are having a sale of mattresses right now so if I didn't have ads blocked I would probably have seen some.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Off-topic: A responsive website for Doc Searls would be welcome.

</comment><comment><USER50> I've been anticipating something like an ad-tech bubble pop for years -- most digital ads don't seem to add much by way of tangible value and hijack the decrease to information-acquisition costs that make the Internet a value-add on society.

Oh, I'm not saying no one was ever influenced by digital ads, only that the wholesale adoption appears to be driven less by an understanding of their lift and more by "fear of missing out" by companies.

</comment><comment><USER51> Aside from generating revenue for what are surely wasted impressions, why does the online ad industry constantly show users web ads for things they've already purchased?

Does this not represent conspicuously wasted spend on the part of these advertisers? It's been going on since the DoubleClick days and never ends. How can this industry bill clients with a straight face when their display decisions are made this crudely?

</comment><comment><USER52> This makes me glad I work for a company that makes money selling an actual product, and not just selling people's data to the highest bidder.

</comment><comment><USER53> GDPR may cause a drop in tracking-based ads, but websites can then just increase the number of ad slots for display and content-based ads. So what's changing is that the user is forced to choose between "less ads with tracking" and "more ads , no tracking". That 's not against the GDPR.

So, expect more ad-tech, not less.

</comment><comment><USER54> The second order effects of GDPR could actually be a boon to IT and tech:

      * Accounts Payable analytics (should I pay this ad bill?)
      * More Pay-per-Action (PPA). Less Pay-Per-View (PPV)
      * Standardized pixel tracking managed by Advertisers
      * Bot vs human agent detection (who/what actually viewed this ad?)

</comment><comment><USER55> I work for a large adtech company. It's funny how people think they're tracked. Besides websites like Google and Facebook there is no personal information stored. No emails, no names, no way to figure out who that person actual is. Not sure why everyone is freaked out about personalized ads.

</comment><comment><USER56> I've just published a post about how I prepare my blog and side-project for GDPR:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17063156](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17063156)

</comment><comment><USER57> Surprised the pop up doesn't say "agree to tracking and you'll be shown fewer and more relevant ads" and when they click decline "you will see 2x as many ads, are you sure?". Hardball!

</comment><comment><USER58> Finally!

</comment><comment><USER59> Can anyone from an adtech company shine some light on what work life is right now with the deadline of May 25 approaching? Curious to learn more.

</comment><comment><USER60> The introduction of the article itself reads as an advertisement for shorting "adtech". What stock would you propose that would be?

</comment><comment><USER61> Surreal to see people cheering on an attack on memory itself.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbYXBJOFgeI)

<comment><USER62> That link has nothing to do with this.

Also, GDPR has news, archival, public interest, and free speech exceptions, soooo maybe read the damn thing before posting FUD?

<comment><USER61> It really does. This is how incrementalism works so well. The exceptions[0] you cite are for practical purposes pointless; since you would need to defend your use of them, and the regulations can be incrementally tightened.

The EU def of free speech is absurd anyway, the recent pug owner who got a fine for a dog trick is a harbinger.

GDPR is about compliance. It further normalizes the idea that the gov can regulate memory, all the way down to who visited my property (if I was in the shrinking EU).

[0] [https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general- da...](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data- protection-regulation-gdpr/exemptions/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> > Advertising isn't personal, and doesn't have to be.

Customers are being educated by companies, personal experience and news media why they are seeing the ads they are being shown. Just because advertising doesn't have to be personal, doesn't make that a sufficient argument for not doing it.

> Advertising makes brands.

Certainly brands are useful for trust, but often brand dominance blinds customers from smaller players and solutions. It's a trade-off.

> Advertising carries an economic signal.

Are there no other signals to determine economic strength of a company? Good advertising should project value and tilt perception in their favor.

> Advertising sponsors media, and those paid by media.

Companies study their customers without cookies to learn where better to advertise for them. This isn't new because of cookies. Tracking cookies gave the ability for small advertisers to understand their customers and their other consumption in ways that only the largest marketers could.

> Adtech is built to undermine the brand value of all the media it uses, > because it cares about eyeballs more than media, and it causes negative > associations with brands.

The author keeps making the assumption that strong brands are better than aligning customers with products that fit them well.

> Adtech wants to be personal. That's why it's tracking-based. Though its > enthusiasts call it "interest-based," "relevant" and other harmless-sounding > euphemisms, it relies on tracking people.

The author again is throwing the baby out with the bathwater with no imagination for regulatory controls to limit the scope of access for customer data.

> Adtech spies on people and violates their privacy.

Emotional language, privacy is something that isn't monolithic for all people. There is nuance here.

> Adtech is full of fraud and a vector for malware.

So is the internet at large.

> Adtech incentivizes publications to prioritize "content generation" over > journalism.

And on the other side of the coin, adtech incentivizes growth of smaller outfits to be competitive because it allows advertisers to find their platform. The author failed to mention all of the new media companies that have sprouted up now that they can compete with larger outfits. Customers have never had more choice. Who is to say the bias of a large firm is more advantageous than a smaller firm?

> Intermediators take most of what's spent on adtech. Bob Hoffman does a great > job showing how as little as 3¢ of a dollar spent on adtech actually makes > an "impression. The most generous number I've seen is 12¢.

It's not about brand impressions. It's about conversions.

> Adtech gives fake news a business model, because fake news is easier to > produce than the real kind, and adtech will pay anybody a bounty for hauling > in eyeballs.

This is being worked on right now by the adtech platforms, it has a ton of visibility and public interest.

> Adtech incentivizes hate speech and tribalism by giving both—and the > platforms that host them—a business model too.

Tribalism is not inherently a bad thing. Hate speech is a symptom of hate. Adtech is not making people hate each other. Hate speech is widely decried and has tons of visibility and public interest.

> Adtech relies on misdirection.

Again the author implictly is valuing brand presence over customers finding what they want.

> Compared to advertising, adtech is ugly.

Not ugly == expensive. Is that added cost necessary in helping customers find the right products and services? If not, it's superfluous.

> Adtech has caused the largest boycott in human history.

Which shows that the system can be worked around by users when it is too onerous.

</comment><comment><USER63> _And that's on top of the main problem: tracking people without their knowledge, approval or a court order is just flat-out wrong. The fact that it can be done is no excuse. Nor is the monstrous sum of money made by it._

I use Piwik ([https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo](https://github.com/matomo- org/matomo)) and track visitors without their knowledge or consent, because I need analytics. Piwik is also configured to respect the "Do not track" header, so opting out is as easy as indicating that you don't wish to be tracked.

Is that wrong?

And I use Piwik precisely because it's self-hosted. I know for a fact your data doesn't get sold, because the data never hits any server except mine.

If this seems acceptable, it's also why legislation seems worrisome. There are a lot of corner cases that law tends to overlook. But hopefully the requirements won't be too onerous.

<comment><USER64> I don't see how self-hosting has anything to do with it honestly. This is about tracking people without their consent. It's about preserving rights of individuals. Self hosting is no more or less acceptable than third party hosting. It's not a technical issue.

<comment><USER65> So is your position that website owners should have no visiblity at all on their visitors, and no way of knowing how many people are using it?

<comment><USER66> Website owners can have visibility on their visitors if those visitors explicitly consent to it.

Not sure what is so difficult to understand about this.

<comment><USER24> So if I don't think that Walmart should be able to record me with security cameras while I'm in the store I should have the right to demand that they ask me to sign a waiver before entering the store? Shouldn't it be Walmart's right to do what they want on their property, and my right to decide not to visit Walmart if I don't agree with that. Isn't the converse an infringement of Walmart's rights?

<comment><USER67> GDPR has exemptions for security. Your free to track information for the purposes of blocking vulnerability bots, but only the minimum data required for that purpose... and your visitor's data cannot be used for other applications without their consent.

> Shouldn't it be Walmart's right to do what they want on their property, and > my right to decide not to visit Walmart if I don't agree with that. Isn't > the converse an infringement of Walmart's rights?

No. Property "rights" are secondary to human rights. Like, Walmart can't knowingly sell poison as food just because it's their property...

In your example, Walmart is free to record you on security cameras for security / theft purposes. However, they can't record what you're looking at and reuse that information for targeted advertising without consent - <USER2> is simply not required to do business, so your right not to be profiled wins.

<comment><USER24> > "they can't record what you're looking at and reuse that information for > targeted advertising without consent"

What law prevents them from doing this?

<comment><USER67> The actual Walmart? Nothing. The previous poster used Walmart's security cameras as a strawman argument against GDPR, which I expanded on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> GDPR will help the big guys not hurt. The smaller guys it will be tough implmenting and make it more expensive in terms of expense to revenues.

<comment><USER69> I took ten minutes to implement GDPR on a small ecommerce website: we deleted Google Analytics (HTTP logs and carts tracking is more than enough) and replaced Facebook widgets by a simple link. Newsletter was already opt-in only, we don't sell private data, and user account deletion was already possible.

<comment><USER70> That seems extraordinarily flippant.

I can't imagine giving up Google Analytics for http logs on a content-driven site.

<comment><USER71> Why would you give up on GA? You're already not allowed to store personal data in it according to their TOS so (assuming you're abiding by them) you can just leave it running.

<comment><USER69> By default GA stores IP addresses, so you need to get consent about storing this personal data. There's a flag you can set to tell Google you want no IP addresses in your data collection.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Doc Seals has been proclaiming that the ad tech bubble is going burst every time he appears on the Gillmor Gang. It's gotten to the point where he now sounds like a broken record. I guess he thinks that if he repeats it long enough it'll eventually come true. I'll be looking forward to his follow up appearances where he backtracks and explains why it hasn't.

</comment><comment><USER73> I mention the GDPR briefly in my Google/DoubleClick essay: [http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/04/google-doubleclick- mozi...](http://yuhongbao.blogspot.ca/2018/04/google-doubleclick-mozilla- essay-final.html)

</comment><comment><USER74> This combined with this reality: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran- nuclear-bolton/bolto...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-nuclear- bolton/bolton-us-sanctions-possible-on-european-firms-over-iran-idUSKCN1IE0M9)

Means map makers will be in business soon. Might not be a bad idea to get some potasium iodide.

<comment><USER75> How is this related to GDPR or the adtech bubble?

<comment><USER74> Because it makes doing business with europe illegal. Sanctions are war. GPDR isn't war, but depending on who looks over the laws in europe, giant part of our economy will be illegal to europe also.

<comment><USER62> Or you can just, delete stuff when people ask you to? That's pretty much the only new burden of gdpr, and there are plenty of exceptions you can invoke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> >Since tracking people took off in the late '00s, adtech has grown to become a four-dimensional shell game played by hundreds (or, if you include martech, thousands) of companies, none of which can see the whole mess, or can control the fraud, malware and other forms of bad acting that thrive in the midst of it.

Fraud? Malware? What does this have to do with adtech?

>And that's on top of the main problem: tracking people without their knowledge, approval or a court order is just flat-out wrong. The fact that it can be done is no excuse. Nor is the monstrous sum of money made by it.

What a compelling argument /s. Is it wrong if I sit on my porch and record in a notebook the hair color of different people? Is it wrong if I observe that one of my coworkers has a Harley Davidson sticker on his laptop?

There is no AdTech bubble given that Adtech is a completely viable business model. These laws may shut down third party trackers but Ads are here to stay. If the EU ads were to create regulation such that Ads become an inviable business model they would simply tank their own economy given how many services/ content creators rely on ads.

edit: also I have to laugh since I was downvoted less than 20 seconds after posting. I'll post another statement that will make people mad

Ads are the reason the web is open and the reason poor people have free access to information. An ad free web is a web that only rich people can use.

<comment><USER77> The laws would hopefully stop the tracking of users. IS there a good reason why you can't analyze the page you put your ad in and decide what category on ads will fit, so on tech pages put tech related ads. Tracking me and creating a profile on me should be illegal. Showing ads is perfectly fine

<comment><USER76> > IS there a good reason why you can't analyze the page you put your ad in and > decide what category on ads will fit, so on tech pages put tech related ads.

There isn't and this is what many people do. But that isn't the argument is it? Can you tell me why observing what people do on my website is unethical and why it should be made illegal?

Also can you explain why information that is placed on my server belongs to someone else if I didn't enter into a contract with them specifying that was the case?

If someone has access to your laptop and downloads their photos onto it, who do those photos belong to? Put another way, if someone shows you a photo, who does the memory of that photo belong to?

<comment><USER78> > Also can you explain why information that is placed on my server belongs to > someone

Isn't this more or less the gist of GDPR and "right to be forgotten" laws? That my personal data doesn't automatically "belong" to anyone else just because I entered it onto a server?

> If someone has access to your laptop and downloads their photos onto it, who > do those photos belong to?

Rights to creative works, unlike personal data already has rather well functioning legal frameworks. The author of a creative work doesn't give up any right to the photo without very specific circumstances.

<comment><USER76> >Isn't this more or less the gist of GDPR and "right to be forgotten" laws? That my personal data doesn't automatically "belong" to anyone else just because I entered it onto a server?

Yes the EU invented a new right for its citizens which is the prerogative of the EU because of their bastardized idea of what constitutes privacy. Privacy is a basic human right, that much is obvious. There is no human right however to be forgotten and there is no human right to not be observed when you are in public.

>Rights to creative works, unlike personal data already has rather well functioning legal frameworks. The author of a creative work doesn't give up any right to the photo without very specific circumstances.

The author of a creative work doesn't have the right to force me to delete something from my laptop if I obtained it lawfully.

<comment><USER78> > The author of a creative work doesn't have the right to force me to delete > something from my laptop if I obtained it lawfully.

A valid point - the rights only address the USE of the photos. You can use them privately all you want and would not have to delete them (unless ordered by a court for whatever odd legal reason such as if they were stolen not uploaded).

The difference with personal info is that the lawmakers saw two choices: prevent the use or the keeping of the data. They chose to outlaw the keeping of the data - which is why this law is huge, invasive and clumsy. But it's also the only reason it makes a difference at all imho. I don't trust anyone to keep the personal data of millions of people safe.

<comment><USER16> GDPR is focused _a lot_ on regulating the use of the data. In particular, one of the key aspects is the limitation of processing to a particular use - <USER3> often business will have a reasonable GDPR-approved reason to get and have the data, but (since this was often used to circumvent earlier privacy legislation) now they'll be limited to using that data only for that reason.

For example, if I order pizza, the business (obviously) needs to have my delivery address; however, that obvious reason only applies for the actual delivery, and if they want to use that same address also for, say, direct marketing, then that's a separate use that's not covered and would (generally) need additional opt-in consent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> Despite the propaganda being thrown around on HN, GDPR only affects businesses that have operations in the EU.

</comment><comment><USER80> It's kind of interesting that the company that ads that people think are the most intrusive are from Criteo, a french company, while GDPR do its best to target US companies.

<comment><USER81> > GDPR do its best to target US companies

Citation needed.</comment></comment>


Sign a petition to promote net neutrality. - <AUTHOR> http://cms.fightforthefuture.org/tellfcc/

<comment><USER2> "You won't be able to see this page if the FCC wins"

Why would I sign a petition on a page that is outright lying?</comment>


The £25 logo (too much or too design?) - <AUTHOR> http://creativereview.co.uk/cr-blog/2012/january/what-kind-of-logo-does-25-buy-you

<comment><USER2> That logo is worth about as much as was paid for it. This is the sort of instant logo you get from most sign printing companies anyway.</comment>


Show HN: AI Grant – Non-profit, distributed AI research lab - <AUTHOR> Hi HN,
We have an idea for helping AI research and we'd like to hear your thoughts on it. We want to help get a lot more people working on ML projects they find interesting. If you've been thinking about or working on a side project or have some idea that won't let you go, you're who we want to reach.
Why try to help? Nat and I are passionate about AI. We want to see more Show HNs that use machine learning. We've been rewarded by pursuing our own shower-thoughts and want to remove any barriers from others thinking of doing the same.
Our plan for this is AI Grant (https://aigrant.org/), a non-profit distributed AI research lab. We're issuing grants to the smartest people we can find, doing interesting work that might otherwise not happen, and connecting them to mentors, experts, and each other. We ran our first round this spring, and awarded $50k in grants to 10 projects.
Filling out the form should take less than five minutes. Grantees get:

  - $2,500 in cash.
  - $20k each in Google Compute Engine credits.
  - Q&A with AI experts including Andrej Karpathy (Director of AI at Tesla and previously at OpenAI) and researchers at Google.
  - Access to the network of other grantees
  - 250 Tesla K80 GPU hours from FloydHub.
  - $1k in ScaleAPI data labeling credits.
  - $5k in CrowdFlower data labeling credits.
 This is not an investment in a company, it's a grant to follow your dreams in research. You don't need to be part of any special organization or community to apply. We don't ask for equity. All we ask is that you do your best work, wherever your interest lies.
Please let us know if you have any ideas or suggestions on how we might improve, either on the specifics of AI Grant or the general goal of spreading AI research to everyone smart who wants in.
- Daniel Gross & Nat Friedman.
P.S. I'm a partner at YC. This is Nat's and my side project, not a YC effort. <comment><USER2> IMO what would actually drive AI breakthroughs is to support people on a large time scale so they can quit their applied AI/ NLP/ Computer Vision jobs and focus full time on their moonshot research endeavor. For example, I work in AI, and this is not a useful proposal for me, in particular. But I do have at least a couple crazy AI ideas that might take > a year to develop, and I can imagine nothing better than a grant I could live on for a year and develop the AI. I know I'm not the only one. Someone mentioned a catch-22 with this idea, have to agree.

<comment><USER3> Have you considered academia?

<comment><USER2> Oh God no. The last thing in the world I want is to all of a sudden have to be publishing a ton of marginally useful crap or spend time reviewing others' marginally useful crap being sold as contributions because they have to publish. Or working with students. Why? I already have my big ideas, I have enough education and experience in the field to do stuff on my own, I just need a lot of time to hack on stuff and experiment.

I know I'm not the only one.

<comment><USER4> Precisely this.

And let me use this opportunity to pull out this gem I found once from my quotes file:

      "What one wants is to be able to talk with a diverse club of smart
      people, arrange to do short one-off research projects and
      simulations, publish papers or capture intellectual property
      quickly and easily, and move on to another
      conversation. Quickly. Easily. For a living. Can't do that in
      industry. Can't do that in the Academy. Yet in my experience,
      scientists and engineers all want it. Maybe even a few
      mathematicians and social scientists do, too."

      -- Bill Tozier, Diverse themes observed at GECCO 2006

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> From the application:

> What's your background? In particular anything that would help convince us > that you're actually capable of finishing your project.

> Project description: Describe your project, including: where you got the > idea, how you think others might use it, and how it is new/different/better > than what already exists. This is the main answer we use to judge > applications.

These questions make the grant seem like a Catch-22. The people who are skilled enough at machine learning/deep learning to receive the grant would be able to be employed at any relevant company for their research.

Thanks to modern machine learning/deep learning tooling, the educational bar is much lower for more _creative_ projects (e.g. Show HNs) which would have more _necessity_ for the spare resources. But from the application, that's not the sense I'm getting.

<comment><USER6> > The people who are skilled enough at machine learning/deep learning to > receive the grant would be able to be employed at any relevant company for > their research.

Yes, but maybe some of those people want to work on a side project in their free time. And if you work in deep learning you need some resources to train your models, so any help is welcome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Great idea. I am curious about how you plan to keep in touch with the teams/individuals that do get the grant, and how the "AI Grant Network" works concretely.

My understanding: you get nothing tangible from the grant ("The money is a gift"), no contracts or IP... To me it seems like a bet that the networks effects and the gratefulness of the grantees will pay back somehow. I think this is a smart move because investing in smart individuals is itself smart, although the devil is in the details.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're starting off with a chatroom for grant winners, reviewers and some experts. We have other things planned like Q&A over Hangouts, in-person meetups and more. We'll treat this like a startup: experiment with a few options, talk to our users and see what's most useful.

As for value capture, there's no master plan. Getting to know smart people is enough of a reward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm serving as an advisor to a philanthropist interested in applying AI and ML to scientific and societal challenges - let me know if you'd like to chat!

Tom Kalil [https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom- kalil-a581/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-kalil-a581/)

<comment><USER9> Tom, would you please add your email in HN profile? LinkedIn doesn't allow to connect.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Oh man this is so cool, it is amazing how accessible things are compared to few decades ago!

</comment><comment><USER11> You know, I might have misread what you're offering here when I submitted an application a minute ago, but what I was really hoping was that you would be able to put me in touch with researchers in the field who would answer my emails about whether the research topics I was considering were interesting and promising or not and could help me navigate the academic publication process. The monetary pieces of this grant are largely irrelevant to me.

<comment><USER12> [https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/](https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/) isn't terrible for this kind of thing. There are plenty of pretty good researchers who are looking for something to do (other than complain about NIPS reviews)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Thank you for sharing and running this. I'm super excited this exists and plan on applying.

One of the things I've finding difficult to find in my process is actually mentoring support. You can learn a lot from online resources, but often I have hit walls where I wish I could ask for help and guidance.

It'd be cool to a version of this with more defined mentoring path, especially for those who are new to the space!

<comment><AUTHOR> Great point. We have a chat community which is a start. We'll definitely add more structured mentoring if more people find it useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Applied! This is ridiculously timely as I am quitting my job at the end of this month to take up independent research in general AI.

</comment><comment><USER15> To me I would offer a free "desktop buddy" that was open design, open source, open weights, semi open data(you can volunteer your conversations on a cases by case basis, product/service reviews could be paid contributions) managed by a mutual company or a co-op.

There could be a bounty for find bugs and suggesting features.

Maybe charge $2/mo. It would have a fiduciary duty to you as a user to act as an agent in your best interest. Allow people to contribute to the project using distributed GPUs(with legal contracts to minimize fraud).

Open budget with bidding and open evaluation criteria.

</comment><comment><USER16> Pretty cool. Would apply, but don't have the technical chops just yet (Medical school is intense). Do you think you guys will run this again if it turns out to be fruitful?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Could we apply if we have started doing some work on our idea already? Or should it be a brand new project?

<comment><AUTHOR> Apply either way!

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Cool idea! Thanks for doing this.

</comment><comment><USER19> See the Latently Deep Learning Certificate below. We let anyone who wants to try onboard.

<comment><USER20> It's fine to tell people about your related project, but it's not fine to hijack the thread with comments about it, so please don't.

We detached this comment from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852088](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852088) and marked it off-topic.

<comment><USER19> Someday perhaps YC's efforts at UBI will trickle down to HN, resulting in a fair platform that doesn't extremize inequality. In the meantime, us peons are left to hijack the threads of YC Partners.

<comment><USER21> Every community has a set of rules you need to abide by, it's really not that complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> See also: Latently Deep Learning Certificate

[https://github.com/Latently/DeepLearningCertificate](https://github.com/Latently/DeepLearningCertificate)

Free access to ridiculous amounts of hardware and the opportunity to implement important and hot scientific papers and conduct original research in deep learning.

<comment><USER12> There's a "submit" link - perhaps you should try that?

<comment><USER19> I have submitted it numerous times to no effect. This drove a bunch of traffic so seems to be the way to do it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are 20 top activities to make me be better open-source developers? - <AUTHOR> I was watching a lecture and the speaker suggest if you want to achieve a goal or target write the goal down on the top of a paper and write list of 20 activities (or answers) that will make you better to achieve that goal or target, and make a plan and do them every day to make you better in it.
I could write some answers, but I like to know what are your 20 activities to make a developer be a better open-source developer.
Then What are 20 top activities to make me be better open-source developers? <comment><USER2> To me, trying to change twenty things at once seems like it would make evaluating the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of the individual changes very difficult to measure.

</comment><comment><USER3> Of these top twenty, seven would be to write open source code and another five would be to write documentation.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right~ But I meant daily activities everyday...

<comment><USER3> Oh. Then writing code and writing documentation. And using (using! not just reading!) others' code and docs.</comment></comment></comment>


Moving from Wordpress to Hugo - <AUTHOR> https://www.tibobeijen.nl/2017/01/09/moving-from-wordpress-to-hugo/ <comment><USER2> If you worry about Wordpress and security, and like the idea of having a static site, maybe check out Simply Static ([https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply- static/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/simply-static/)). It's a WP plugin that creates a static copy of your site. Just upload to your server and unzip, and you're done.

<comment><USER3> It is slow: it takes time to create the static output, especially if you have more than a few posts. For infrequently updated sites and blogs this plugin may be an excellent solution as it allows you to access a world of WP themes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If the intention was to learn how to work with servers and experiment with Ansible and Caddy, that's fine. Otherwise hosting a static site on a VPS is just overkill, from the initial setup process for a VPS (ssh config, unattended upgrades, firewall) followed by installing Caddy and using Ansible.

It's easier (and free) to just host it on Github pages or Gitlab pages and use Cloudflare as a proxy.

<comment><USER5> Two other free options I saw in a recent thread here are Netlify and Firebase hosting. Firebase looked particularly attractive as it provides a CDN as well as config driven control of things like redirects, headers, etc.

<comment><USER6> +1 Netlify.

I've really liked it for [https://blog.statusok.com](https://blog.statusok.com) and [https://statusok.com](https://statusok.com)

GitHub webhook deploy flow, one-click SSL, 301 redirects and other rewrite support, CDN seems pretty good.

<comment><USER7> -1 Netlify

I found the netlify was slower than github pages and surge.sh according to google's speed tests.

Netlify also wants complete access to your github account. You either need to make a separate account or give them access to all of your repos.

<comment><USER5> GitHub doesn't offer anything more granular than read/write all repos in their app permissions matrix.

<comment><USER7> I understand that, but that doesn't excuse the fact I have to give them complete access to my repos.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Great post! I started using Hugo instead of WordPress in 2015 and haven't looked back. We grew tired of manually updating sites so we built a CMS (shameless plug). [https://forestry.io/](https://forestry.io/). We're going to be rolling out some interesting things in the coming months.

</comment><comment><USER9> While I'm a big fan of static site generators the reason for me not to use one for blogging is the trouble when you want to have comments without an additional third party service.

<comment><USER10> I too think that and that was one of the reasons I moved to Ghost. But I'm a broke and cheap student who doesn't pay for a VPS or hosting provider currently so I have temporarily (until I join a job in July) moved back to a simple Jekyll website with Discourse for comments.

<comment><USER11> I am confused, I thought for Ghost you have to set up comments yourself as well: [https://www.ghostforbeginners.com/how-to-enable-comments- on-...](https://www.ghostforbeginners.com/how-to-enable-comments-on-a-ghost- blog/)

I have been running Ghost for free on OpenShift but haven't set up comments. I would recommend it but I don't think OpenShift are taking on new accounts for the v2 platform where Ghost is available -- they are transitioning to "next gen" and I haven't checked if they have Ghost on that.

<comment><USER10> Oh, sorry for being unclear. Being a dynamic website, I rolled my own simple comment system (mainly to learn, I eventually replaced it with Discourse).

Thanks for recommending OpenShift. I'll be getting my first paycheck in July and will move to a hosting provider that provides best value.

<comment><USER11> Ah I see, has Discourse improved as a comment system or is it still quite hard to set up?

I was mainly recommending OpenShift because it's free but I don't know if the setup I have now is still available.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Game Closure SDK switches to the Mozilla Public License - <AUTHOR> http://www.gameclosure.com/license.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Context: The Game Closure SDK, a toolkit for developing games in JavaScript that run on the web, iOS, and Android, used to be dual-licensed as the GPL and a proprietary license. The previous license used to require users to display a GC splash screen, among other things. The MPL removes these restrictions.

Disclosure: I used to work at Game Closure.</comment>


The Curse of Being Big on the Internet - <AUTHOR> https://vicki.substack.com/p/the-curse-of-being-big-on-the-internet <comment><USER2> Good article, but I think maybe missed one important point. The internet is based, more than anything, on the idea of "combine all the networks". If there is content in a network, it should be sent out to every other node in every other network that requests it.

Which can be awesome. But, I'm not convinced anymore that it is a good idea. That's a lot like a GOTO, that can go from any spot in the code to any other. Nearly any long-lived adaptive system, finds ways to section off, wall off, separate different parts, and restrict what can pass between them. If two neurons fire together, the connection between them strengthens, gradually, but we don't have all of our neurons wired to all of our other neurons, and I am thinking maybe that's not just because of the difficulties in doing so. Maybe even if you have the ability to connect all the nodes in a large network, you shouldn't.

It's called "viral" when something grows ultra-fast. We don't find the results of viruses to be good, usually. I think maybe viral content is often problematic...because it's viral.</comment>


Early exposure to germs has lasting benefits - <AUTHOR> http://www.nature.com/news/early-exposure-to-germs-has-lasting-benefits-1.10294

<comment><USER2> And this is why I'm in utter disbelief when parents protect their children so much as to not let them play in the dirt and sandboxes and such.

<comment><USER3> I'm wary of what people will start doing to their kids once this passes through the telephone game of science reporting -> MSM -> well-meaning parents following 'cutting-edge' parenting techniques.

<comment><USER4> My friend the professional immunology researcher often expresses her disbelief at how parents try to protect their kids from dirt. Also, Nature isn't really the MSM.

<comment><USER3> I know - the next step is CNN.com (or whatever) "Scientists say you should keep your kids as dirty as possible" then you have, I don't know, parents smearing pig shit over babies or something. You get the idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I knew growing up in a third world country would come in handy for me some day.

</comment><comment><USER6> Its surprising to me this is news.

<comment><USER7> The news is not that it happens, but that they have discovered _how_ it happens - or at least, a possible way, since the experiment was done in mice.</comment></comment>


IncPy: Automatic memoization for Python - <AUTHOR> http://www.stanford.edu/~pgbovine/incpy.html <comment><USER2> There are a few responses here who seem not to have read the article or watched the video (note I didn't read the paper).

This is pretty amazing, and totally different from a memoizing decorator, and anything which could be done at the application level (unless it did deep deep magic; the kind you can't really do in Python).

Firstly, it is fully automatic. You don't need to annotate anything.

Secondly it works on impure functions! (as opposed to pure functions like fib.) It tracks data dependencies through the program, including global variables, external files(!), etc. If they do not change, then it uses a cached value.

Assuming that it works as he explains it in the video, this is properly amazing (and I've a PhD in compilers).

In comparison, a memoization decorator:

\- requires you to annotate functions,

\- can be accidentally put on functions which are not pure, which would lead to bugs and unsafe behaviour,

\- does not (safely) support functions where data in the body of the function changes (such as global variables, external files, etc). Instead, it would only check the arguments.

Anyway, I'm impressed.

<comment><USER3> thanks for such a great summary and 'sales pitch' of my project ;) i couldn't have put it any better.

if you have any further suggestions, please email me personally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> hi everyone ... i'm the creator of IncPy and pleasantly surprised that it ended up on HN :)

anyways, this is still an early-stage research project where i'm the only developer, so i can't make much guarantees about its robustness (i can only test on my own machine with my own research scripts).

that said, though, i am _very interested_ in getting new users and feedback. please email me at the email address listed on the IncPy website if you have any questions. i am more than happy to answer them!

</comment><comment><USER4> I just tried to run Mercurial's test suite with it and it segfaults all over the place, unfortunately. It's too bad -- it seems like it could speed up some Mercurial operations quite a bit.

<comment><USER3> hi stevelosh,

sorry that it didn't work out of the box; as you can tell, it's still a research prototype :)

i'll add the Mercurial test suite to my TODO list of programs to try. in your experience, what kind of Mercurial operations do you think can be sped up by memoization?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Like <http://www.erikyyy.de/compilercache> but for any python program. Very cool.

<comment><USER6> Erm, not really. Compiler cache saves compiled versions of files. When building a large project it notices things that have been built before and looks up the compiled code from a central cache. If you have to do a "make clean" (e.g. some scripts for making Debian packages start this way) you still get fast re-builds.

The linked article is about run-time memoization: rather than caching the compiled version of a function's code, you cache just the output of the function for particular inputs.

<comment><USER5> _"rather than caching the compiled version of a function's code, you cache just the output of the function for particular inputs."_

Think of the function as the compiler and the inputs as your C files. The kinds of things the two are doing are very similar, but incPy's job is much harder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> You could just use a small memoize decorator like this one

      class Memoize:
    	def __init__ (self, f):
    		self.f = f
    		self.mem = {}
    	def __call__ (self, *args, **kwargs):
    		if (args, str(kwargs)) in self.mem:
    			return self.mem[args, str(kwargs)]
    		else:
    			tmp = self.f(*args, **kwargs)
    			self.mem[args, str(kwargs)] = tmp
    			return tmp

<comment><USER8> Not the same at all: IncPy stores the results to disc, so you can rerun your script and it will still have correct cache results for long running functions.

<comment><USER3> great point; the persistence of the IncPy cache is one of the biggest differentiators from an ordinary memoize decorator

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> why not optimize such scenario's at application level?

It is possible to implement a trivial and transparent cache as decorator and apply it to particular bottle neck functions.

0 development effort, 0 running overhead, 0 maintainability issues

<comment><USER2> How could it be less development effort than an automatically memoizing interpreter?

Its hardly transparent if its a decorator.

Maintainance issue: applying it to a functions which isn't pure. Avoiding it adds development overhead.

There are other advantages I outlined in my comment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> What about just make a new def-macro for python? A very simple common lisp- implementation would be something like this:

      (defmacro defmemoize (fn val &body body)
          (with-gensyms (lst hash-code)
          `(let ((,lst (make-hash-table :test #'equal)))
              (defun ,fn ,val
              (let ((,hash-code (list ,@val)))
                  (or
                      (gethash ,hash-code ,lst)
                      (setf (gethash ,hash-code ,lst)
                          ,@body)))))))

In which the standard fibonacci-example would be

      (defmemoize fib (n)
          (if (<= n 2) ; first two = 1
              1
              (+ (fib (1- n))
                 (fib (- n 2)))))

Obviously, it would be something more advanced than this, but it shouldn't have to be much more advanced.

<comment><USER11> I like the _atom_ construct in Clojure - see a functional implementation of memoization, instead of one based on macrology: <http://clojure.org/atoms></comment></comment>


Mechanics of Building a Carpooling Service (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/51-mechanics-of-building-a-carpooling-service-introduction <comment><AUTHOR> OP here. FYI, I put this project off for a bit, but I am working on it again. Happy to get feedback or answer any questions.

ps. always interesting to see the HN traffic effect: [https://imgur.com/yPMgwql](https://imgur.com/yPMgwql)

<comment><USER2> Can you tell me about your server setup if you don't mind? Where did the graphs come from?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, I'm using GCP to host the website. Then, I'm using Docker, K8s, and then a LB sitting in front. The graph is from GCP's CDN that tracks requests per second and CDN hits/misses [1]. It's a pretty sweet setup since all of the heavy lifting is done at the CDN. You could do something similar on the CDN side with AWS using CloudFront.

[1] [https://cloud.google.com/cdn/](https://cloud.google.com/cdn/)

<comment><USER2> Thanks a lot for that. How much does it cost for you for your site?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> ooooh. the text is a transcript. i was going to say, tighter editing would be good, but as a transcript, yeah it works.

it's really good. my only comment is meta. sorry, there is no way i am going to start on a 30-episode series and have you pull an ABC 'Lost' on me. Produce all of them, then launch it all at once.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I 100% agree. I'm thinking something like 3-5 episodes now, and I'll do it over a week. Then if you wanted to follow along you can OR just view it at the end of a week. Makes it way easier to see how it works quickly (or use the demo app / view the code).

<comment><USER3> I hate to point this out, but it's been 10 days from re-launch and you're still on just that first episode from 2017.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> are more episedes of that series available? I can only find the first one and the date's february 2017.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm working on them now. They should be out in about a month.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> geo-special?

<comment><AUTHOR> That's pretty funny. Updated to geospatial, thanks.

<comment><USER3> Curious, how did you do the transcription? Were you actually working from the "transcription", or did you speech2text the audio and do some fixing-up?</comment></comment></comment>


When the IRS 'likes' your Facebook update - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketplace.org/topics/economy/when-irs-likes-your-facebook-update IRS mining your social graphs for hints to decide whether to/not to audit you <comment><USER2> I find the "well then just pay your taxes" answers to be on the same level of "well if you have nothing to hide...".

You can be a honest and tax-paying citizen of society and still get audited. There's always the chance that there _may_ be a mistake somewhere. The US tax code is not simple. Even if you shell out $20-$80 a year to do it via TurboTax, H&R Block, whatever, there's always room for a mistake.

And even if there are no mistakes, simply being told you are being audited would make most people's heart skip a beat.

The article didn't quite cover what approach the IRS is using.. Whether they are taking already flagged people and getting more info via social network profiles, or if they are using social network profiles and using that as a deciding factor on if one should be audited or not.

The former I don't have much of an opinion on. The latter I don't like the sound of one bit.

<comment><USER3> They always audit your tax, no matter what. I just got audited and boom they wanted $63 more. Whatever you paid this year, a few years later they will review again...

<comment><USER4> Most people's taxes are pretty basic and this is likely the typical audit response. The one thing I would have expected though is we want $63 more plus a $100 fine for making a typo.

One thing that always bugs me, is that if the gov. has enough information to know you owed $63 more dollars they had enough information to tell you exactly what you owed up front and you could have skipped doing taxes and paying turbo tax or whoever in the first place.

<comment><USER5> blame intuit for lobbying to prevent the IRS from sending you what they think you owe.

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels- mill...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/03/27/turbotax-maker-funnels-millions-to- lobby-against-easier-tax-returns/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I deal with 3 tax agencies every year. I submit my personal and my business's tax returns to the British HMRC as that's where I live. I deal with my home country's (Hungary) tax agency too for various, boring reasons. And, ultimately, as I tend to do my wife's tax returns as well and she's a citizen of the United States I file taxes with the IRS.

I don't know how else I could put this: the US tax system is absolutely insane. It's several orders of magnitude more complicated than any other I'm familiar with. It's simply ridiculous. It's really, really bad.

<comment><USER7> My father-in-law was pretty high up in the NY State taxing agencies before he retired. When I once asked him why he thought the tax codes in the US were so complicated, he said it was simply because the US likes to use the tax codes to for social engineering and many different people have had their hands at the controls over the years.

<comment><USER5> don't forget all the loopholes that get added along the way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I think all they have to do is litterally like or retweet your post.

Imagine the fear of someone when the IRS likes your post.

You would definately do your taxes right after that because you'd think they knew what you are up to.

</comment><comment><USER9> All that effort to avoid simplifying the tax code so that the tax preparation industry can thrive.

<comment><USER10> That's wholly untrue. Yes, the tax preparation industry has made token donations to efforts to preserve the current tax code.

But I would argue that the failure of tax reform is not so simple. Major tax reform is a massive, massive legislative undertaking. And doing so redefines many of the basic American incentives. Having your say in tax reform is the equivalent of leaving your mark on the next 20-30 years of American society.

Suffice to say, the massive polarization of our Legislature, combined with the hyper-efficacy of Senate obstruction, and finished off with the fact that tax reform is hard to campaign on means that there is no real incentive for our legislators to reform. But sure, a token campaign contribution making up a miniscule fraction of total donations doesn't hurt...

<comment><USER11> > Yes, the tax preparation industry has made token donations to efforts to > preserve the current tax code.

The millions Intuit alone spends annually lobbying to that end are considerably more than anything that could reasonably called a "token".

<comment><USER10> A billion dollars has already been raised in the 2014 _midterms_. A non- presidential year, 6 months before the election, and a billion has already flowed in.

So yes, your millions are a very tiny fraction of the money flowing in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "If you don't want the IRS in your online business, Dyanim suggests ratcheting up the privacy settings on all of your social media accounts. And never posting anything that you wouldn't want the agency to see. You could also try a charm offensive. The IRS has 24,000 Facebook fans and 52,000 Twitter followers."

Isn't it true that "liking" a page on Facebook gives the owner of that page information about your profile? It seems like the two calls to action for this article are contradictory.

<comment><USER13> > Isn't it true that "liking" a page on Facebook gives the owner of that page > information about your profile? It seems like the two calls to action for > this article are contradictory.

No more information than what's already public.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How many people tell the whole truth on facebook? Yay my side business just made the first $300 sale! (but I spent $2k on advertising)

</comment><comment><USER15> We don't want to drive more corporations out of the US, but if the feds actually think they are losing $300 Billion in revenues each year, why not go after the Fortune 100 and their offshore shenanigans rather than 100+ million poor schlubs who _might_ owe a few more bucks here and there. _That_ is the major problem I have with the current tax system - Jane/John Sixpack don't have the "opportunities" that corporations do when it comes to taxes, yet every year around this time we hear hit pieces against the American people like this that we aren't paying our fair share. Nonsense.

</comment><comment><USER16> I am for over complicating the tax code. Let me tell you why.

If we over complicate the tax code as well as complicate doing your taxes, maybe folks will finally get more upset with it.

The more folks get upset, maybe the more outspokeness to change it. The IRS is a huge problem and the loop holes are even a greater problem.

I am all for flat or fair tax at 9-13%. First you might say no, but with a flat tax, you no longer have to worry about filing taxes, but maybe a small slip of paper. Secondly, how much time is spent preparing and filing? Time could be drastically put back into the citizens rather than being taken away with another government task.

<comment><USER17> I don't see how the US Federal Tax Code could get more complicated without just inserting pure gibberish into it.

The thing is, most of the tax code doesn't apply to everyday citizen. The really complicated stuff only applies to a certain number and I'm sure they have well paid people doing their best to avoid those sections.

The easy way to get people riled up about taxes? Remove withholding from paychecks and force people to write that big check every April. Then you'll get an uproar since most people have no idea how much in taxes they pay. But that's likely not the point you're trying to make.

<comment><USER18> That number is already shown on W-2s and copied to the tax return. I guess it's easier to not care about the number than it would be to not care about a check.

One thing that would happen is that a lot more people would come up short at tax time.

<comment><USER17> And yet if you ask people how much they pay taxes they probably don't know.

They may know how much they take home and how much they get back on their return, but the dollar amount they pay in taxes? I would bet most don't know.

<comment><USER18> Oh, I agree with that. I was just pointing out that the information is already pretty available (It isn't actually on the W-2, that's just withholding, but it's a line item on the 1040). To me that at least hints at people not believing they can do much to change it, rather than being completely oblivious.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Slight tangent: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/04/15/d...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/04/15/did- you-just-overpay-or-underpay-your-taxes/)

I wonder if Donald gets audited or not because he admits he doesn't know the accuracy of his return.

</comment><comment><USER17> Could this turn into something interesting if people just started posting fake data into their profiles? Pollute the waters so to speak?

Bonus is that some of your friends and family will wonder if you really did take that expensive trip to Australia.

</comment><comment><USER20> If you don't want the IRS in your online business, I think there's an easier solution: Pay your taxes.

</comment><comment><USER21> This happened in Sweden recently if I recall correctly.

</comment><comment><USER22> _" If Nike is analyzing my information, the worst consequence is that they market stuff to me that I don't want and it's annoying," says Dayanim. "If the government does it, the worst consequence is there could be legal ramifications, whether it's fines, penalties or imprisonment."_

Maybe don't evade your goddamned taxes then.

Seriously, people who not only evade tax, but follow it up by flaunting that fact in public, deserve absolutely no sympathy.

<comment><USER23> Hmm, this sounds like the old "you shouldn't mind surveillance if you've got nothing to hide" argument.

<comment><USER22> Except it's not. This is the "you don't get to complain if you brag about your tax evasion in public and then go to jail" argument.

<comment><USER24> Except that I don't evade taxes, and I don't want the IRS using my online presence to profile me and decide if I fit the profile of a tax evader.

<comment><USER25> The IRS doesn't use your online profile to decide if you're a tax evader. It's simply fearmongering from anti-tax advocates.

The IRS doesn't even have the budget to carry out basic audits in which the bulk of the investigational burden is placed on the taxpayer (by means of responding to auto-generated documentation requests). It certainly doesn't have the budget to invest in a high-tech system that could track multiple social media platforms and somehow connect that to financial spending or tax reporting.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


GrabDuck – try without any registration - <AUTHOR> https://grabduck.com/last <comment><AUTHOR> Only Bookmark with full text search. We change the total's idea of Bookmark.

<comment><USER2> This seems like an interesting idea, but your posts feel like spam and the previous one was flagged. If you keep doing it, your account will probably be banned. This probably qualifies as a "Show HN", and if so people would receive it better. Write an email to 'firstname.lastname@example.com' and ask Dan what to do. I think he'll be helpful and supportive if you approach him first.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment! We are new here, so probably were missing something. What we intended to do was just collect people's opinions about the idea we have worked out. Will try to fix that in next posts - thanks for catching.</comment></comment></comment>