Ask HN: I don't get this privacy awareness outburst, can anyone please explain? - <AUTHOR>

Really, I don't get it. For a few months now everybody on HN, reddit, slashdot, stackoverflow or any other god-damn hacker hangout is talking about how everybody is ripping us off off our privacy. Facebook has been crucified already, maybe they will target google as here on HN I can see people moving to DDG just for the privacy (and not for the excellent programmer friendly results it gives). Every morning I log into HN and see a new article from someone's blog which tells how everyone and their uncle can attain more privacy. We have had privacy scanners and fixers we have had intense discussions on this topic.
I read all of this, understand most of it but I could never comprehend the idea of "privacy" online. I always assumed that whatever I put on the internet would be public now or in the future. Come to think of it, I put most of the stuff on internet just so a large mass of the world population can see me. My blog, my twitter, my facebook account all are there just so people who want to find me (or someone like me) can find me easily.
Google knows where do I live from my IP, so what? Facebook knows who I am friends with, so what? All this stuff was put up there just to make it public. If I don't want anything to be found I won't put it on the internet. It's not like they would steal my identity by knowing whom do I friend on the internet or what TV shows I like to watch. Nor would it harm me if webmasters know what word I searched to get to there website. All they want to know is what makes people want to come to there website. Where is the harm in it?
Maybe most of the people here would develop a deep seeded hatred for this post (maybe for me), but I just need to ask this question. Everyone I like from Cory Doctrow to the HN community wants to talk about something which I don't get. I know its a matter of principle to most of you. But I even can't understand that principle. So can you please explain all the privacy awareness outburst to me (without,preferably, flaming me)? <comment><USER3> We all have a vague, intuitive sense of what the appropriate degree of publicness and privateness is in a given situation. Although vague, our sense of privateness is incredibly fine-grained and what is perfectly normal in one context can be a massive violation in another, almost identical context. While some of us geeks might think of "public" and "private" in a binary, cryptographic sort of way, most people have a much more nuanced approach.

Consider for example the difference in privateness between two people sitting on a quiet park bench and two people sitting on a bus seat. They are both obviously public places, but there is a subtle but significant difference in our expectations of privacy. In one context, eavesdropping is perfectly normal (within certain bounds), in another it is quite sinister.

On the internet, these intuitions are frequently confounded. Someone who assumed that their facebook feed was fairly private discovers youropenbook. User 927 assumed that his search terms were just noise in the crowd until AOL published them all. Countless iPhone users didn't know that their photos contained their exact geographic location until 4chan had a go at ruining their life.

The problem isn't the level of privateness or publicness of a particular service, it's not even particularly about leaks or breaches; it's about people being completely unable to judge the level of privateness of anything digital. I expect most people simply would not use a 100% public medium for their private communications, so the "if it's on the internet, it's public" mantra isn't a great deal of use. I think this is one of the reasons why Twitter has been so successful - it provides a platform that implicitly communicates its privacy or lack thereof. Twitter's simplicity makes it easy to understand and integrate into your existing model of social appropriateness.

I think we come back to a very old and very simple principle of interface design - don't surprise the user. We should be trying wherever possible to design systems that are as private in practice as they would seem to be intuitively. Users don't read much of anything, so we need to think about other ways of communicating "publicness" and "privateness" in our software. We need to recognise that designing social spaces is not a primarily technical problem. Small differences in architecture, interface and even general ambience can create enormous differences in how a platform is used. This stuff is really hard and really easy to completely cock up and I think we need to think much harder about it. Nod to PG here - HN is IMO a great example of a subtly, intelligently designed social platform.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is what you are looking for: Danah Boyd's SXSW keynote: <http://www.danah.org/papers/talks/2010/SXSW2010.html>

It's important to realize that "privacy" actually means "control over how your personal information is presented and revealed". Because having a magazine photographer with a telephoto lens take a naked picture of you and post it on the web sends a different message than posting that picture yourself, which in turn sends a different message than mailing that picture directly to a younger member of the opposite sex. Even if the pixels are exactly the same.

This is about the important social meanings encoded in the way you present something: Steven Pinker on "indirect speech as a window onto social relationships":

<http://fora.tv/2007/10/15/Steven_Pinker_Games_People_Play>

It's a bit abstract and academic, but this is HN, right?

</comment><comment><USER5> One problem is that not everything people put on the web is intended to be public for everyone in the world to look at. Especially Facebook is seen as (and used to be) a way to communicate with people you know, not to be stalked by people you don't. It's a mix of broken implicit promises and false (but absolutely natural) expectations.

Another, perhaps bigger problem that you seem to have completely missed is that Facebook, Google & Co. don't just collect information about what you _put_ online, but also about what you _do_ online, and can correlate it to a frightening and potentially harmful degree:

"Dear Rick,

By analyzing your search and websurfing profile we are able to offer you products that are tailored to your personal interests. Included is your personalized catalog: "Kingsize anal dildoes".

Christmas is near, and you still haven't found the right presents for some of your family friends and colleagues? No problem! Just send us the name and address of the person you want to surprise with a special present and for only $5 you get a personalized gift catalog tailored to that person's interests!

42 of your acquaintances have already asked us about special presents for you."

</comment><comment><USER6> In some respects you are right. However most people have, to date, assumed some level of privacy. The issues can probably be summarised as:

1) Lots of people using these services assume only friends can see/access their data. They don't realise that much of their stuff is actually visible to a much wider audience, or if it wasn't before, it is now, due to privacy policy changes. This problem is exacerbated by extremely complex and lengthy privacy options.

2) It's not just about what you are putting out there, it's what others are putting out there about you. Whilst you might be happy for a friend to post a picture of you puking at the prom, or smoking a fat reefer, and to have that image accessible by only your friends, you probably wouldn't be so happy for your prospective employer to see it, and would, I imagine, be pretty hacked off if an image like this became accessible through some privacy change.

</comment><comment><USER7> There are different levels and types of privacy, and people believed they had certain types of privacy, while understanding they didn't have others.

For example, I fully get that Google has my IP address and search queries. But I fully expect that you do NOT have that information. Likewise for my email on gmail. If Google were to take my old emails and post them on a public site I'd be upset.

Likewise, I'd be upset if Google went around my neighborhood gathering wifi data. Unencrypted or encrypted (which given their computing power, they could likely break, given the state of current implementations) I'd not be happy -- it breaks the unwritten assumption I have about what data is private.

And the relationship with advertisers is another issue. This is more an issue that I have finite time to deal with things and the last thing I need is for Facebook giving my name and email address to thousands of advertisers. And companies like Apple probably even have your credit card info. You probably don't want them giving that info away to advertisers either.

And lastly, there is also a component, at least in the US, of fear of intrusion by the government. If for some reason, the government wants to start auditing supporters of gay marriage, they could use the Patriot Act to narrow down the real name of email@example.com. The less info Yahoo and other sites have on you, the more difficult this becomes.

The fundamental question is why give up your privacy? What are you getting out of it? What do you potentially have to lose? Not today, tomorrow, but what about in ten years? There's very little upside to losing privacy, but _potentially_ huge downside.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's not about privacy. It's about trust.

People aren't upset that their data is publicly shared.

They are upset because they understood that it would remain private.

Tell everyone my favorite color and I don't care.

Tell everyone I have an STD after you promised me that you wouldn't, and we've got a problem.

It's that simple.

<comment><USER9> I agree, Ed.

I'd also argue the it's not really about geeks being upset that their own privacy is being violated. It's about other people's privacy. A huge percentage of normals don't understand the difference between a desktop app and what's inside a web browser. That ignorance can put them in very awkward if not dangerous positions. Here's why I've been part of the privacy propaganda mob on HN (without the flaming)

1\. My niece and my geek friend. She's a very sweet, naive 15 year old girl who is the daughter of a conservative pastor. She loves to post pictures of her and her friends going to the beach, and camp, looking cute and goofing off. For the brief month that I tried Facebook out seriously, I had my niece posting pictures of herself in a bathing suit as well as geek friends posting comments like "MySql sucks dog cock" on my wall. Those online "friendships" needed to remain separate and in different circles of friends. And, I certainly don't want the "suck dog cock" friend ogling my niece in a bathing suit. I needed to have those relationships compartmentalized and kept private. Even had I figured out how to maintain that separation, Facebook could change that at will. I opted out, but my family still doesn't understand why.

2\. My mother. She's now 74 and she bought her first laptop last year. She's on "the Facebook" because her grandkids are on Facebook. There is no way to easily explain how to maintain private/public information on Facebook. While she wants a tool to share status updates about medical conditions with friends/family, she doesn't want those broadcast to the world.

3\. Rafael. I work with Rafael at my hospital. He worked in a 3rd world country as an agricultural minister before he got a visa to work in the US. After he got his green card, he packed up, moved to the US and changed careers to work in the health care field. He's been homesick so he's been catching up with old friends via Facebook. He went to a university 20 years ago with very communist leanings, and he's been talking to his friends/intellectuals about the political situation in that country. He personally knows several journalists who have been killed because of what they've written in the press about government corruption and drug cartels. He was shocked when I told him that his wall posts/conversations with his friends on Facebook were publicly searchable.

4\. Alan. A former coworker of mine is a nurse, and he has issues. For a while, our hospital administration was in a tail spin about missing narcotics. Alan didn't show up for work one day, and I haven't seen him since. Another friend said that he was friends with Alan on Facebook, and several weeks prior, Alan had posted a status update on Facebook: "Vicodin, Valium and Vodka... the Holy Trinity".

I think you're right, Ed. It's about trust. But, for me it's not just that Facebook is changing their privacy policy. I, as a geek, know that anything I do online is inherently public. I use online tools with open eyes. Many Normals intuit wrongly that they are having private conversations when they interact with friends in a dark room via a laptop. That wrong belief can cause no end of problems for people.

That's why I'm on the privacy propaganda bandwagon.

<comment><USER10> What's weird is that it would be pretty easy for FB to make it easier to keep your stuff in the circles you'd like to keep it in.

They have deliberately chosen not to do so, and I don't really understand why. There's no advantage to them in making it hard, and significant risk. All that's needed to bring them total disaster is one good nationally publicized horror story. The groundwork for that story is being laid now.

I just don't the the upside of their choices. They could get away with selling anonymized data to advertisers. They could get away with letting marketers target you as long as they didn't sell your identity along with it. That's all stuff people will tolerate.

But why make your information public by default? What's the real gain there? I see a reason they might think it's of use if they think really shallowly, but sure they've put more than 10 seconds of thought into their core business.

FB can't go public while they maintain this approach. The investors would raise havoc over the risk it poses to the company. And rightfully so.

One good sensationalized story. That's all it takes at this point.

<comment><USER11> _But why make your information public by default? What's the real gain there?_

The more public data there is, the stronger the network effects can be? There are a bunch of decently supportable practical and principled reasons for this.

Since there are going to be leaks anyway, reducing the expectation of privacy is in their interest.

Getting more data searchable and public means people are more likely to consume more facebook time/data (alluded to above).

In the medium term, privacy for things people put on the internet is dead, and spending a lot of effort fighting a rearguard action seems pointless if you've already accepted where this is going. I think this is actually where most of this is coming from: Zuckerberg, Schmidt, and others _have_ spent a lot of time thinking about privacy and the implications of a basically open internet (largely unused SSL, DNSSec, public key crypto), and they understand that the battle for keeping things private was lost more than ten years ago. We could have all been using encrypted-by-default everything by now, but the fact that we're not, and the fact that there's no movement on the horizon to do encrypted-everything, means that we're just not going to be able to put the privacy genie back in the bottle.

<comment><USER10> There's all sorts of private content available to approved people via the internet that's not available to the public.

Entire organizations use it as such.

The idea that everything on the internet must be public simply ignores reality and is shallow thinking.

<comment><USER11> _There's all sorts of private content available to approved people via the internet that's not available to the public._

It's not how much oil _hasn't_ leaked that concerns people.

<comment> loup-vaillant If I surrender data to a big corporate server like Facebook, Amazon, or Google, even when they promise you privacy, I'd better assume it's public. There, privacy _is_ dead, and information _will_ leak. I think everyone on this thread will agree with that.

Now don't forget that the internet is not limited to the web of cloud computerized big servers. E-mail, file sharing and social networking are not that, for instance. They are decentralized by nature. They do not require Gmail or Mega Upload or Facebook. Such services can't last. They are a fad that will fade…

…If we do things right. We just need ubiquitous, easy to use personal internet servers. They are technically and economically possible right now. We have cheap hardware, and cheap software. We just need to wrap that up together, and massively sell them.

With a suitable propaganda about privacy and independence on the internet, the dream of a mostly decentralized internet may come true in less than 3 decades. And at that point, privacy on the internet won't be a problem any more.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It doesn't matter until you're denied a loan application or a job interview because of what is out there about you.

<comment><USER13> This is something people have been saying since long before facebook when myspace was the undisputed king of social networks. As early as my freshman year of highschool nearly 8 years ago teachers and administration were telling us to be careful what we put on the internets and the myspace because our prospective colleges and jobs would be looking at them.

I hate to generalize and single out a group, but of the people I know I feel like the only people who didn't understand that facebook had very little privacy were the older parents and family and such who all joined after they saw all their kids doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> It's currently a trend like any other trend. There's a huge amount of the public (specifically the younger generations) both content to follow and eager to conform and fit in. It's my guess that a huge amount of people are doing that. Of course, the whole privacy debate started because of what was viewed as an actual issue that was uncovered. While you may have the common sense to think what you post online might not remain private, many people do not understand that. When Facebook made a conscious decision to make privacy options essentially off by default, a lot of people had a problem with that. They felt tricked that they didn't have a say in the matter.

As any other popular topic, it's going to have a long wind because any blogger or news outlet wanting a little extra attention is going to rewrite posts, come up with new accusations, and highly publicize every development.

I'm for privacy, not because I expect it, but because I prefer to control what other people can learn about me. The real issues with privacy are situations like an abusive ex-husband being able to relocate his wife due to a privacy breach or a private matter publicized.

I hate those posts too, I'm tired of them but it's not going to go away and the best you can do is ignore. When this issue is over, there will be another equally unreasonable issue making headlines.

</comment><comment><USER15> When you become a member of some website, you look it over, you weigh the advantages and disadvantages, and maybe after reading their various policies (ok, probably the majority of the people doesn't read them) you decide to sign up.

You do that with the website as it is at that moment.

If at a later date the website owners decide to use the data that you gave them under your previous image of that website in new, creative and unexpected ways they are effectively breaking the unwritten contract between their users and themselves.

This will usually cause a backlash, but only in a small portion of the userbase because most sites are too small to get significant mainstream press coverage.

When sites like facebook get involved in this sort of thing the media will latch on to it immediately because of the potential audience for the information. This will then piss off more people that otherwise would not even have realized something has changed and so on.

It's a side-effect of the network effects that facebook profited from when they established themselves, I don't think it is possible to have the one without the other.

</comment><comment><USER16> As I see it i's just part of the elastic bouncing between extremes.

Just 10-15 years ago privacy was a huge issue between parents and their children. People assumed -any- personal information made their kids targets for predators (which isn't necessarily untrue, but that's another discussion).

That view morphed into people blindly shouting personal details of their lives at the Internet.

The natural trend is to become more privacy aware. As more people use the Internet those people are more concerned with who see their content (my addition to the examples is Daughter: O_O I'm pregnant. Mom: WHAT). Sure, people argue to only post what you want everyone to know; however, Facebook is artificially stretching the concept of privacy from blind shouting into radical openness.

This artificial manipulation in one direction causes the opposite side to recoil (perhaps violently) in an attempt to maintain a sort of homeostasis.

That and people don't like having some faceless corporation take control from them.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's probably to late to care anyway. Google probably has your searches of the last 10 or so years, your email, it knows the places you have been, your parents, your friends, the pages you visit every day, the kinds of porn you like, what disgusts you, what you really like, what you buy, how much money you can dispose of, and so on.

I don't like that. I probably would give that information only to some of my best friends, and maybe not even all of it. I don't intimately know google enough to trust it with all that data, google is not my friend. The only thing I know about google is that they make cool online webapps, and that they have a great search engine, but that does not make them my friend, so they don't have my trust. That's why I try not to give it too much info about me. The same holds true for facebook, and every other online service I give info about me.

But this is just me, and what I think is probably not what the majority thinks.

<comment> loup-vaillant When you are right about something, people tend to eventually share your point of view. Don't give up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> People don't comprehend how insecure the Internet is. They take for granted that their information will remain private unless they explicitly wish to share it publicly. This may be naive, but ideally this is how things ought to be.

The reason these issues have been at the forefront lately is that mainstream media has picked up the story. Facebook has, to use a cliche, reached critical mass. Everyone and their dog has a Facebook profile, so when something involves Facebook, even if it's a slightly more technical topic than usual, people are interested and want to understand.

Combined with other coincidental events, like Google being compromised by Chinese hackers, and people start thinking about it.

</comment><comment><USER19> I disagree that it is just about "trust", as someone above asserts, although that is a big part of it. Many people indeed are upset mainly about the violation of trust rather than the underlying privacy issues. (The intrusions are not advertised, explained clearly, and the amount of interconnectedness is quite beyond most people's understanding.)

However, one component of all this I find distasteful is the more or less explicit coercion into revealing private information to use a service which, in some cases, is perceivedly or _de facto_ necessary for one's livelyhood, social life or whatever. In particular because the offline equivalents or predecessors never needed such. You can argue that a teen does not _need_ to use a virtual (no pun intended) monopoly like Facebook, or that no-one really _needs_ to use unencrypted e-mail but that is just not realistic.

The (soon-to-be) ubiquity of the WWW or internet in general means that it cannot for long be allowed to go so radically against people's privacy expectations (some countries already offer better protection than others). The solutions may well be created by the private sector - say, making HTTPS and encryption for e-mail or equivalent the defaults.

 _Disclaimer: For this and other reasons I have avoided Facebook, MySpace et al., do not exclusively use Google's services, handle my own e-mail and so on. I am under no illusion that I am particularly secured against a concentrated effort, but I am satisfied I have limited my exposure somewhat._

</comment><comment><USER20> You're right, there is no problem with privacy. At least, for me & you.

That's because we know that our facebook data went from private to public a long time ago, and we have modified our behaviour accordingly.

However, you should also therefore know that not everyone in our social network understands the implications of these default changes.

So, the geeks are upset on behalf of the non-geeks they know and love.

And they should be. If you don't think so, I challenge you to question 5 of your less techie friends and family on this issue. You will be amazed at how few of them (a) understand what the hell you're on about, and (b) care.

</comment><comment><USER21> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physician%E2%80%93patient_privi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physician%E2%80%93patient_privilege)

</comment><comment><USER22> Out of curiosity: when did you start your Facebook account, at what age (approximately), and were you in school at the time?

<comment><AUTHOR> I started facebook when I got into freshmen college, which was this year. I mainly started to use it as people like to share assignments on there fb accounts(we are not emailed our assignments)

<comment><USER22> Right. Here's my experience. While I obviously don't speak for everyone -- steveklabnik is an obvious example of someone who would disagree despite his seniority on the site -- I'd like to think I'm not the only one thinking along these lines.

I created my Facebook account in late 2005, in my first semester of university. (This was a couple of months after Facebook was first opened up to non-American schools, including ours. My user ID was #1714 in our network.) You might know the history. Only secondary and post-secondary students were allowed to register, and _by default_ your profile was only visible to people in your school. I seem to recall allowing friendships between people in post- secondary and secondary networks was a big deal. There was no newsfeed and there was no API.

It was a very walled garden, but for better or for worse, it was walled reasonably tightly. Bugs were definitely there, but they were usually bugs, not deliberate action. At the time, Myspace was king, and Facebook was definitely presented as a less cluttered, more closed, more elitist, safer, cleaner version of that. You felt like what happened on Facebook would stay on Facebook, and people behaved accordingly. It's sort of like email -- you might realize that it's pretty trivial to eavesdrop, but few people who do realize that will write emails as if everyone could read them. It's more like a real conversation if you don't. There _was_ no sense that whatever we put on Facebook would be public, now or in the future. This was a campus conversation: people might eavesdrop occasionally, but the walls don't have ears or eyes.

Then Facebook realized they want to make money and started to slowly turn up the heat on the frog cauldron. You've likely followed the story -- opening up to registration for everyone, loosening defaults, Beacon, applications, 'likes', instant personalization. All along, it started feeling a bit less like a dorm common area where you might chat with friends and more like the internet, where you have to watch what you say. Less like a BBS and more like a job application.

Should we have realized Facebook would eventually become what it is now? Probably, but we were eighteen and enthusiastic and idealistic and more than a little bit stupid. To be honest, I don't think even Zuckerberg knew in 2005 what he would do with Facebook in 2010, and we implicitly hoped it wouldn't change _that_ much.

Now, I understand why Facebook is doing this. I mostly stay on top of the developments. I started gradually removing the personal of information from my profile a while back. (When signing up, I gave a fake birthday, left gender blank, etc. Still, there is room for feeling betrayed when you realize that no, you simply can't stop people from seeing your profile picture at 200 px wide. That doesn't leave a lot of room for optimism as to what will happen to walls and status updates in a year or two.) At this point, my profile is nothing I wouldn't want or care about the internet at large seeing -- and that's a lot less than it once was. The most recent thing to go were 'likes'; I don't like being described by foreign keys in a database, not to that degree. Call me picky.

I'm not even outraged. By now, I've come to expect Facebook to fuck up when implementing new things, to change defaults on me without notice, to open me up to the internet. I conduct myself accordingly. That's probably not the reaction they are hoping for.

Still, there is a sense of sadness. I _care_ , because Facebook of yore was _better_ for us. It didn't make money, but that doesn't change the end user experience. I miss having complete control of everything I trust Facebook with. I miss being able to put "post-beat-power-puff-dance-punk-youthloud- romantic-garage-pop extravaganza" as my favourite music without some dumb script trying to make sense of it. I miss the four whimsically named groups I belong to that were unceremoniously removed from my profile in a not-so-subtle attempt to get me to 'like' things instead. I miss being able to name my hometown as Trójmiasto, rather than having to name one of the cities belonging to the metropolitan area known by an informal name because Facebook wants a link to a database of all municipalities on earth. I miss what I once had.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> How much of this is perpetuated by 'echo chamber' I wonder?

<comment><USER24> As someone who can be described as a Gen X'er, I have the same position now, as I did when I first saw Myspace and Facebook - I don't want to be part of it. The lack of privacy is a huge problem, and the worrying part is that it seems that the younger generation has a much lower threshold than others. I guess they are not old enough to have fully experienced or thought about the potential risks.

I take great care in how I present myself on the web. I have blogs and share photos online, but only on personal sites that I have full control of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> The bottom line is, other people don't have the attitude you do about online privacy. That explains it all.

And maybe they didn't think about it, or they trusted it, and they just woke up and realized how much dirt there is to put together on them. They weren't consciously deciding that online = open.

They're realizing that these free "tools" aren't tools at all; they are big, nasty companies. And their user data is the product.

Nobody likes waking up and realizing they're a product.

Also, trends come in waves. The 'privacy' thing comes in waves. The 'openness' thing comes in waves. Everything in life is a pendulum, from boom & bust economies to the level of religious fundamentalism.

Nobody seems to put that all together, but these waves of trends are largely BS, almost totally ineffective, nothing will happen, and it will disappear, only to reappear again in a year or two when the next big co. sells its user data without warning.

<comment><USER26> I don't think the author has the attitude he says he does. No-one truly can stand by the statement that everything they put online they expected to be public at some point.

So, your banking is online, your email is online. Clearly you expect some things to not be public. The question is about where that line is and whether someone moves it without your say so.

People would indeed freak at Google and banks if they revealed what they promised they wouldn't. And that is the issue with facebook, they told people they wouldn't share this stuff and so people used facebook to tell their close friends stuff and facebook moved the line, repeatedly.

<comment><USER27> You're not putting your banking online—you're accessing a private service on an individual computer using a cryptographically-secure protocol. That's basically no different than having a direct hard line to the company's servers; there's no "Internet" involved, and therefore no "public" involved.

Email is public. It is hugely vulnerable to MITM attacks at every step of the process, not in the least by the postmasters of Alice and Bob's companies or ISPs, both or which are subject to police search as well as social engineering under the guise of police search. Unless you create a secure channel _over_ email, you should always treat everything you say in an email as if, well, it was posted on your facebook wall. No sending email to your human trafficking buddies, in other words.

<comment><USER28> I'm late to replying to this, but your response is the reason why many geeks don't get the problem here. None of what you just said makes any sense to my sister or my wife's aunt, both heavy Facebook users. "Cryptographically- secure", "MITM", and "social engineering" are meaningless phrases to them.

They hear the word "email", and they think, "the Internet version of the letter I used to stick in a mailbox", and they make assumptions about the level of privacy their communications enjoy. They log on to Facebook, see a list of updates from people they know, and immediately have a feeling of close-knit community; it simply doesn't occur to many Facebook users that something like YourOpenBook could possibly exist.

You and I understand and appreciate the subtleties of online communication. They don't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> As promised I am back with a longer post explaining what I learned from this thread of interesting discussions (after studying and taking a 6 hour sleep). First of all I thank again all the people who explained things so well and enabled me to infer things which otherwise I would have overlooked.

In my first year of engineering I took a course in communication skills. Our second lesson was titled "Barrier to communication" in which we studies what type of inter, intra and organisational barriers are there to communication. I read whatever was written here with an open mind I tried to infer what went wrong in terms of those intra-personal barriers. I found myself guilty on 4 counts of barriers. Let me list them all out.

1)Wrong Assumptions: As I had stated in my original post, I always assumed that internet == public. To me posting something on the internet was like posting it on the bulletin board of the classroom or college. Thus, when all this concern over privacy started I had incongruent thoughts from the privacy aware people.

2)Varied Perceptions: Due to my wrong assumptions, I perceived whatever I read in a very wrong way. It felt like people were suddenly and randomly picking up on something to argue about and hate. This was not so. People had different notions of what to keep to certain circles and what to make entirely public. Thus this barrier further confused me.

3)Differing Backgrounds: Now this is perhaps the most strong and significant barrier that I had. I failed to understand that most of the people who are writing such essays do not have the same cultural background as me. Most of these people were from a developed country and there is certain culture of independentness there. People have different circles of people who are oblivious to each other. But this is not true for me. I grew up in a liberal Indian family. Now a "liberal" Indian family knows everything about each other. And I am not talking just about my nucleus of mother father and sister. I am talking about relations till first cousins. I meet these people every few weeks and they know all about me. Thus everyone in my FB stream knew something or the other about each other and had a actually posted keeping in my that those people would be seeing all this stuff.

4)Impervious categories: I must be ashamed of my self that I fell for this trap, a trap which I like to avoid like a disease. I didn't come in to this discussion with an open mind, I only responded to notions which were congruent with mine. This way I was not able to get to grips to all these thing before.

When I posted this question I had decided keep my mind open and try to understand what happened here. I think I got to grips with most of the problems people have been talking about. Here is a list of what people claim to be the problem with them

1)They do not have total control over there data. So they cannot separate things among groups.

2)Sites like FB violated there trust when they made things public. I read some history and found that when the site was started people joined up so they can share things in private, but now that is very hard to maintain.

This is all I have learned from this brief discussion here. And I again thank you for explaining this to me.

</comment><comment><USER29> Facebook's biggest demographic is 30 something women with kids. They are _unknowingly_ putting pictures of their kids in public. Young bachelors don't understand the outrage, but one day you will.

<comment><USER20> A citation on this pretty please?

<comment><USER12> His remark might not be 100% accurate, but it's pretty damn close:

[http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/02/fastest-growing- dem...](http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/02/fastest-growing-demographic- on-facebook-women-over-55/)

The majority of facebook users are women 26-44: no word on their maternal status though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> First of all I thank all of you to post such a nice explanation (without flaming me). I don't have much time to put all my thoughts but I must tell you I have realized that the confusion I had was due to my differing background and some wrong inferences of the topic at hand itself simple barriers to communication which led to this catastrophic failiure of communication. I always assumed online means public and that was a wrong assumption.I will elaborate this as soon as I can.

</comment><comment><USER30> I remember an IT guy telling me that the extent of privacy when sending an email is roughly equivalent to talking loudly on a public streetcorner. Hyperbole I hope, but everyone assumes that email is private - <USER2> maybe, but realistically I doubt it. The only thing truly private is the inside of your head. Tin foil hat aside, the problem the OP misunderestimates is the boundaries of marketing. Every ad agency would love to have realtime data of your BP and heartrate when viewing their commercial, and if they could, without your knowledge, they certainly would. Of course no one would sign an opt-in clause.

<comment><USER12> _Hyperbole I hope_

You can stop hoping. The great majority of email is sent in plain text (SMTP) and as the datagrams are routed from machine to another, they're open to interception, and in fact, are routinely logged.

SSL/TLS are cryptographic extension that attempt to secure messages in a socket communication, and by extension, application layer protocols such as SMTP.

<comment><USER30> Is it really that easy to hack emails without getting caught? Judging by the Sarah Palin hacker, the risk if caught seems pretty high.

<comment><USER31> It's not even about hacking emails. Some people have legitimate access to the information and abuse this by simple snooping or eavesdropping.

Back in the early 2000s a friend of mine worked for a large consultancy in Canada and often had to work on equipment in the Bell/Sympatico (largest ISP in Canada at the time) data centers.

While he was there, he said the network techs would routinely snoop the traffic of the customers at the router level to see what web pages they were looking at, and grep'ed mailboxes on the servers looking for funny/dirty pictures or private information (credentials for porn sites were a big one)...

I'm sure this isn't a common thing, but you can bet it happens..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> hey zuckerberg..... LURK MORE

</comment><comment><USER33> People like complaining and crucifying. For many years, Microsoft was the obvious target, but the last couple of years they've become ever harder to fault on principle (they still produce bad software), so the pitchfork mobs need a new bad guy. Someone started drumming about privacy at the right time, and the mob latched on. That's about all there is to it.</comment>


Pharma Paid Physicians $6.5B in 2014 – Looking into the Open Payments Dataset - <AUTHOR> http://www.troyshu.com/blog/2016/01/15/pharma-paid-physicians-6-5b-in-2014-looking-into-the-open-payments-dataset/ <comment><USER2> My favorite tidbit about pharma payments to physicians comes from Ben Goldacre's book, Bad Pharma. Based on a survey, most physicians think that the money doctors receive from pharma definitely affects their prescribing choices, HOWEVER, that only applies to other doctors. Each doctor is convinced that they are perfectly unbiased and that they can receive money without having their opinion swayed, but other doctors are not as strong willed.

<comment><USER3> I wonder how that works, mentally. Most doctors are, I suppose, reasonably intelligent, so I guess that most of them who take bribe-money would prescribe drugs that are from _a different brand_ , just to avoid any suspicion.

(If pharma companies can deduce which brands are prescribed by which doctors, then perhaps there lies a problem we can easily solve.)

<comment><USER4> Yes, pharma companies can tell what brands a specific doctor prescribes. Pharmacies sell Rx information to companies like IMS who sell it to pharma companies or pharma companies pay the pharmacies themselves for the information.

<comment><USER3> Ugh, this is really sick.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> In Brazil the industry is forbidden from giving money directly to physicians, so the bribe comes in the form of expenses paid to a cardiology congress at some tropical paradise. They also sponsor talks and things like that.

Orthopedists often take off-the-books kickbacks from physiotherapy clinics they recommend, Dermatologists take kickbacks from handling pharmacies for custom "hydrating lotions", and so on.

The worst case is the field of orthopedic prosthesis: it is controlled by a mob, the same gangsters control other surgical materials like the stents used for coronary angioplasty. A congressional committee investigated the issue and indicted 10 people from 16 companies:

      * Empresas Oscar Iskin
      * Totalmedic
      * Life X
      * Orcime
      * IOL
      * Brumed
      * Strehl
      * Intelimed
      * Prohosp
      * Tellus Rio Comércio e Importação e Exportação Ltda
      * Elfa Produtos Hospitalares
      * Atma Produtos Hospitalares
      * Osteocare Serviços Médicos, Locação e Representação Ltda
      * Signus do Brasil Comércio de Materiais Hospitalares Ltda
      * Biotronik Comercial Médica Ltda
      * Biomet
      * Intraview

Like many other countries in South America, crime goes more or less unpunished.

</comment><comment><USER6> Here is a blog post by a psychiatrist looking at one of the dynamics involved in this: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/17/pharma- virumque/](http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/02/17/pharma-virumque/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Great perspective from someone on the ground, thanks for sharing!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Shameless plug for a series of blog posts that I wrote in 2014 about this dataset. The aim was to demonstrate how to analyze data with Spark and Python, but probably the most interesting two sections turned out to be Outlier analysis ([http://blog.caseystella.com/pyspark-openpayments-analysis- pa...](http://blog.caseystella.com/pyspark-openpayments-analysis-part-4.html)) and Benford's Law analysis ([http://blog.caseystella.com/pyspark-openpayments- analysis-pa...](http://blog.caseystella.com/pyspark-openpayments-analysis- part-5.html))

<comment><AUTHOR> Super fascinating analysis! I'm a complete newb/just starting to explore all things Spark, what kind of set-up have you found works best? Did you just run Spark locally for your analysis?

<comment><USER7> Hey, sorry, got busy yesterday and forgot to respond to this.

Well, I work for a Hadoop distribution, so I may have some biases showing through in my setup. I like to use spark in conjunction with Hadoop; I've never actually used it stand-alone before, honestly. For relational data, I'll ingest into Hive as that allows me to pivot to the right tool for the kind of analysis that I need to do whether it be simple SQL via Hive, something more suited for Pig via HCatalog or Spark via SparkSQL. I'll often do my analysis on a Hortonworks Sandbox for small data like this.

For larger data and a more professional setting, I like to do prototyping/ad hoc investigation/etc in python with pyspark inside of jupyter. Generally that transitions either to Java or just plain python (depending on the degree to which it's difficult to transition).

Anyway, hope that helps! Happy to answer any other questions you might have too. :)

<comment><AUTHOR> No worries! Gotcha, that is indeed very helpful! I appreciate it, will be in touch if I have more questions in the future :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> See whether your doctor has received drug company money - [https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/](https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/)

<comment><USER9> > See whether your doctor has received drug company money - > [https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/](https://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/)

This is a decent site, but it has a tendency to overstate the significance of some of the 'payments'.

First, it doesn't seem to be properly distinguishing between multiple doctors in a given private practice. That's a hard problem, and I don't fault them for it, but then it's a bit misleading to attribute a payment to a particular doctor's name when it could very well be a gift accepted by someone else in the same practice.

It's also including transfer of money that's associated with conferences. Physicians are required to perform continuing education in order to keep their skills up-to-date (which is a good thing!). Because of this, pharmaceutical companies have a _really strong incentive_ to get themselves financially integrated into this process - and they've succeeded. This is certainly an unfortunate aspect of the medical field, but it's not really something that's possible to avoid, particularly in certain specialties. Personally, I'd rather have a physician who's up-to-date in their knowledge and practice than one who's not. It'd be great if this process were easily separable from pharmaceutical money, but in fields like oncology and psychiatry, it's near impossible.

The descriptions are a bit misleading too. For example, the tooltip for 'Food & Beverage' gives as an example, 'a salesperson asks a doctor if they can talk about a drug over a meal... and the salesperson pays for the meal'. This also includes gifts that are _sent_ to the physicians (e.g., they send the office for the practice a bottle of wine, which was signed for by the receptionist, etc.).

Granted, if you see that your physician received $50,000 in payments for the very drug he/she wants to prescribe you, yes, that's definitely something to ask him/her about. But the data on this site, as it stands, is a lot less indicting than it first seems - it's really best used as a conversation starter between you and your physician rather than a condemnation of individual physicians or even the industry at large.

<comment><USER10> Precisely.

Anecdotal, I know, however I have a family member that shows up on the site. His number is low—less than a couple of hundred dollars—but I asked him about it when I first heard of the site from Last Week Tonight. His response was that they were medical device manufacturers taking his team out for meals to discuss devices they were either already using regularly or were in the process of trialing. I can't imagine anyone can find fault in such a thing.

<comment><USER4> I think the problem is that the current system lands somewhere in the "gray zone". The money doesn't appear to have an influencing effect, but we also don't know at what level it would start. I think a lot of people think it's uncomfortably close to "coercive".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Pharma is a drop in the bucket friends. The major source of healthcare cost escalation is hospitals. Then doctors, then devices. Pharma's a scapegoat down at the bottom of the barrel with a mere 10% of the pie, about the same as hospital non-physician staff.

<comment><USER12> That isn't what this article is about

<comment><USER11> Yes, yes it is. From the article

> a product of the Sunshine Act, part of the Affordable Care Act.

> Why does this database exist? Basically because of the incentives created by > industry being able to pay doctors to work on things that will ultimately > help industry–like new drugs or medical devices. The hope is that more > transparency will reduce any harmful influence that industry could have on > medical research, education, and clinical decision making.

The idea that the major source of graft in medicine is Pharma is a red herring the other actors keep flogging so no one asks who's really skimming.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The third graph pretty much says it all; research, licensing fees, consulting and speaking engagements (mostly training pharma staff from what I understand) make up almost all of the payments.

Glad to see that the data is so boring.

[https://plot.ly/~troyshu/14.embed](https://plot.ly/~troyshu/14.embed)

<comment><USER4> I would agree that most of the spending is pretty innocuous or at least on the low-end of "inappropriate".

That said, speaker engagements are a bit of a hot button in the industry right now. Speaker engagements are when pharma pays a physician to speak to other physicians. They typically present material that is authored by the pharmaceutical company. The doctor that presents tend to be pretty high profile and leaders in their field of study.

GSK has decided they will not be doing speaker engagements any longer due to the appearance of using money to influence clinical decisions. They're getting a decent amount of flak from other companies about it (i.e. "it will only hurt them"), but we'll see how it goes. It might cause a change in the industry. GSK will now have their own employees present the material (will it be as effective as a outside physician doing it?).

<comment><USER14> The pharma-sponsored presentation is a time-honored tradition. Usually held at an upscale restaurant in the evening, the well-paid speaker goes through "the drill" about the product. Slides (and their great graphics) provided by the manufacturer of course.

Years ago being a drug company speaker was a pretty good gig. The presenter was expected to more or less stick to the script, but back then there was a fair amount of leeway and speakers often made the subject more lively by inserting anecdotes or clinical "pearls" from their own experience. Sadly that's no longer allowed to happen.

In the 90's and early 00's intermittent I was a speaker for several pharma companies. Besides the pay it was a lot of fun interacting with colleagues, and getting to be the "expert" on the drug. There were other benefits too, paid travel to speaker and consultant meetings at venues I'd never be able to afford to frequent on my own.

But those days are gone forever. In the current environment the pharma companies don't even hand out ballpoint pens anymore, let alone put speakers up at 5-star resorts.

Haven't worked for any of the firms for nearly 15 years. It's a very different thing now. Once in a great while I'll still attend a dinner presentation, but mostly it's a waste of time.

The drug companies have become virtually paranoid about incurring regulatory or public scorn. Speakers are strictly constrained to say only what's FDA approved, the same info provided in the package insert which I can easily read on my own (and most of the time I already have read it). Why bother going over it again?

So I suspect if companies are terminating speaker programs it's because attendance has fallen off even when "high profile leaders" are presenting. Kind of a shame to see traditions fade away, but the message is clear, "drug dinners" and other ways to market pharmaceuticals will soon be relegated to the dustbin of history.

<comment><USER4> _The drug companies have become virtually paranoid about incurring regulatory or public scorn._

Thanks for sharing your experience. I'm only familiar with how it is today and yes, companies are absolutely paranoid about following the rules (which is a good thing). Not that surprising considering some of the monster fines these companies have paid.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Are there any similar open dataset but for retail? Want to know user behavior, which products are popular, items bought together and so on.

</comment><comment><USER16> If anyone is currently conducting medical or scientific research and would like to be part of a new beta for a platform that should make your lives easier let me know.

My email is lane (at) myire dot com

</comment><comment><USER17> The author's implication that the majority of these payments are shady or illegitimate is bizarre. I don't know much about it, but performing research, paying for hospital space, and paying licensing fees to doctors who have invented novel devices all seem like healthy aspects of a medical system working as it should. Perhaps I'm being naive?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey etrautmann! Author here, thanks for reading! I agree with you, most payments do seem to be for legitimate purposes (sorry if it seemed like I implied otherwise). But I believe that some types of payments--e.g. industry paying for research--creates incentives with potential negative effects--e.g. on the quality of research; whether these incentives _actually_ do result in negative effects is another question that others have done research on.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My friend had a cyst on the eyelid. His eye doctor changed 3 antibiotics for a period of 3 months. Didn't work. Finally he insisted the doctor to surgically drain it. That worked and it should have been done in the first place. The doctor should have known it. The whole medical system in the US is organized crime.

<comment><USER19> Obviously. This one doctor erring on the conservative side and not immediately taking a sharp instrument to your friend's eyelid proves that all doctors are corrupt and/or stupid, and the whole system is a scam.

Or _maybe_ doctors generally know what they're doing and can, on average, perform their profession better than a random guy on the internet.

<comment><USER18> I'm convinced it's a scam based on my own experiences in U.S.A and the third world. I got a throat infection in India. I went to the pharmacy, took antibiotics for $2. It's done. If that happens in the US, I'm forced to first visit the doctor, pay $250. Then pay some $30 for the antibiotic and even before that have to pay the insurance company hundreds of dollars anticipating these things. Another recent one is spine issue. I paid $4 for orthopedic consultation and $50 for MRI. Check what it costs in US. I have several such experiences. So I'm not a "random guy on the internet". I know what I'm talking about.

<comment><USER20> It's a scam, but not because you didn't get your preferred treatment first time but because you're required to pay ridiculous amounts for the service in the first place.

(The equivalent experience in England&Wales would be free, apart from $10 prescription charge for each prescription, which is waivable for quite a lot of categories of people with low income)

<comment><USER21> No prescription charges in Scotland or Northern Ireland:

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12928485](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-12928485)

<comment><USER20> True, good point.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook Employees Are Reportedly Deleting Controversial Internal Messages - <AUTHOR> http://fortune.com/2018/03/31/facebook-employees-are-reportedly-deleting-controversial-internal-messages/ <comment><USER2> It's always amusing to me how people in tech want to have very private lives where they control their public image very carefully while building tools and networks which take away that ability from others.

From the Facebook engineers doing this while working on facial recognition to Peter Thiel going after Gawker while funding Palantir, this seems like a near universal double standard in tech today.

<comment><USER3> I really wish the media would distinctly separate media companies from technology companies. Facebook is not a technology company. They are a media company. They make money from eyeballs on advertising no differently than CNN or FoxNews. Google claims to be a diverse technology company but they make almost all their money, despite their various products and investments, from data micro auctions that populate paid listings and advertising on their search engine. Amazon is a general retail company.

In this vain almost every company in business is a technology company. Almost every company has software developers and writes software products. I work at a bank as a software developer to further the business of the bank. Wisely, my employer clearly claims to be a bank and not a technology company.

Examples of technology companies are companies that sell technology as their end product like NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, Apple, Micron, and so forth.

<comment><USER4> Why do you think they should be classified as a media company? Is it to apply the relevant regulations?

In my eyes, Facebook is a company of software and hardware engineers. They produce software as a service. That sure sounds like a tech company.

If regulations are what you're after, new ones should be created for their specific business.

<comment><USER5> >"They produce software as a service."

No Salesforce, Box, Slack, Zendesk - these are examples of SaaS companies. Customer pay for those services, the service is the product being sold. With FB the user is the product being sold.

<comment><USER4> Who is the "user" product being sold to? A business, right? And how do they buy the product? Thru a web browser, right? How is that not SAAS?

<comment><USER5> >"Who is the "user" product being sold to? A business, right?"

Yes and you just illustrated my point. Advertisers aren't buying software from FB they're buying access to FB users.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> When FB employees said that these freewheeling discussion boards were a core part of Facebook's organizational focus, I could believe it. But now that they've faced the reality that _everyone else_ lives with — that there's is no such thing as a permanent perfect safe space — these discussion boards are now useless?

Leaks, when they happen, are only harmful to the employees if FB doesn't pledge to stand behind employees. Zuck didn't fire Boz, so why should other FB employees fear if FB was so committed to free expression as a core principle?

A company's values aren't proven when they exist in a safe space. It's only when values operate in the real world — withstanding public scrutiny and even outrage — that we can know the company's principles.

<comment><USER7> The public and the media are out for blood, and will gleefully ignore the context of discussions in order to publicly hang someone on a single quote.

Under that threat, real discussion and debate is not possible, so I think it's wise of employees to censor themselves.

<comment><USER8> This captures my feelings exactly. Even on this forum where I used to feel people would look at scenarios through a neutral lens, I see the dumbest, most outrageous conspiracy theories being upvoted to the top purely because they paint FB in a negative light. If I worked at FB I would definitely be keeping a low profile, lest some tinfoil hat nutjob got a hold of my comments, snipped a few words, and presented them in a negative light to the public completely out of context.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > "someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools"

I can't believe how terribly the media is spinning this. _Obviously_ it's not Facebook's fault or responsibility if that happens. I mean, should we just shut down the internet and have spies listen to every phone conversation and reading every (paper) letter sent, just so that we can be _sure_ that there won't be any criminals using any communication tools? Live in a totalitarian distopia? Thanks, I'll take my dose of "terrorism" in exchange for freedom from tyranny.

<comment><USER10> No, the point was that there was a "damn the consequences" attitude on the growth team because of some higher calling that more connections equals more revenue equals the ability to build great products.

For goodness sake, at one point they partnered with media companies to automatically share every article you read with your friends. Absurd.

<comment><USER11> Yeah sure, it wasn't just a soundbyte, explicitly picked because completely devoid of context it would offend everyone. There's something to hate for everyone in that line. Privacy advocates hate it, leftists hate it, rightists hate it, all for different reasons that mostly wouldn't apply to the post as a whole. Well, except the privacy argument.

The actual message of that post SHOULD be expressed as "we believe the advantages of having people interacting on social fora outweigh the problems" ...

a) is obviously true

b) is very, very different from the statement that was picked and spread

And, I might add, we are switching into a political climate where people can no longer safely express themselves for fear of the consequences of offending the "majority" opinion. (between quotes because ... well because Trump got elected. Even if that view is really majority it isn't majority by much, obviously)

What baffles me is that progressives actually seem to think that doing these attacks will further their cause. It is blindingly obvious that all these progressive efforts destroy what we stand for:

fake news, and making online fora censor themselves

anti-racism and especially the constant doxxing (and worse) instead of protecting and engaging people with these racist opinions (yes, protecting. really)

and the repression of economic reality. The news about it, the facts ...

I don't understand how any of these are progressive. And yet, the democratic party is at the core of all these efforts, and many progressives I know participate in them. The net effect of them is almost fascist.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> But are they really being deleted?

<comment><USER13> They probably just _archived_ them. To delete you need to click on the hamburger, click on the ellipsis in the drop down, enter your password, receive a one time code via text message, scan a QR code spray and stare up directly into the CCTV camera for 10 seconds for retinal confirmation.

<comment><USER14> Then they go into "disabled" mode, and if you use the internet within the next 90 days they are reinstated. "For your convenience."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is it just me, or could this (deleting internal messages) get them in serious trouble if lawsuits come as a result of the latest troubles?

Or are they just "deleting" them like they do everything else?

<comment> concrete-faucet Serious trouble like jail, hundreds of thousands in fines against you personally, being labeled a rogue employee and treated as the whipping boy, paying for your own defense out of your own pocket?

Yes, it might be a bit serious. When the first lawsuit was filed, a lot of stuff went under legal hold. Ask the legal department if it is ok to delete. If they say yes, it's their neck on the line, not yours. CYA CYA CYA.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Given the general attitude toward Edward Snowden in the Valley, I can't help thinking that a lot of these FBers who are so upset that their dirty laundry is being publicly aired were perfectly fine with Snowden doing the same with state secrets.

</comment><comment><USER17> I can't load the fortune page in chrome, I get too many redirects. I get the same thing in anon mode. I see its still listed on the fortune site. It's got some kind of redirect loop in it, I just tried in firefox.

<comment><USER18> I had the same problem in chrome. Clearing cookies fixed it :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> They should be careful not to obstruct justice. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is sad. It used to be the case at the university that you could say things with your real name, especially on internal forums. That was useful. This really helped with making carefully thought out judgements and getting the feel of what a bigger community thought on a certain subject.

That's over and done with, and ended with a similar event. People deleting their internal posts, or even demanding useful internal fora being taken down entirely. Problem is that there are a number of controversial/racist ... but fact ... well, facts (and of course some of these fora contained cartoons from the 80s that are ... more than a little bit sexist, for example. In some cases posted by what are now important professors or administrators). And you simply cannot risk "being seen" saying them. Especially not have a published source for something like that with your name prominently next to it.

Now we're supposed to point out papers that point out the problematic facts and expect people to read them (and then finding that you can't say anything about them). We have a few anonymous forums, and a few private forums. Even there, you have the problem that some people might use these statements against you outside of these forums, but at least it can't be some random student, or worse an outside journalist (that's worse because firstly outside journalists, frankly, almost always don't know what they're talking about, and their works are widely read and can even affect the university as a whole). We actually dedicate 2-3 lessons to warning students about racial sensitivities, to push them to check their work and make sure it doesn't point out racial, or god forbid, cultural, differences.

But the sometimes violent opposition to facts are the truly bad parts. Facts that don't fit (this year's flavor of) the social justice narrative can destroy careers. In some cases literally statements from particularly "caring" students made a few years back come back to bite them now (one instance was a (long) comment made a few years back about "white trash" middle Americans being victims of capitalism. Now these people are perceived to have elected trump ... they're still poor and need help, but now they're evil)

Hell, someone got reprimanded for saying people with black skin really are more difficult to see at night. He meant, of course, in the context of getting a neural net to do it automatically (and let's be fair here: they are).

And we have a problem: there are massive differences in performance between white and black students, and we both must ... and can't ... discuss that. That difference, especially that one is not going away no matter what we do, and everyone in that meeting knows that everyone is just going to blame us (and we're already letting some people cheat more than a bit). Privately I've checked, assuming the name points to the religion, you can classify people into their religions based on their grades 96% correctly. So there's big differences in academic achievement "based on religion" (I would say attitudes finding their origin in religions influence academic outcomes more than a little bit).

Let me just say it here: different races ... are different. Different cultures ... are different. Unfortunately not just in skin color.

</comment><comment><USER20> There's a pretty good movie called The Circle from 2017 with Tom Hanks and Emma Watson that stylized really well what's happening now with FB. (The funniest part was Doga!)

<comment><USER21> the movie has a 16% on rotten tomatoes. is it really worth watching or do you just find the specific topic interesting?

<comment><USER20> I thought it was quite good. It shows a Facebook-like company that goes to the extreme of getting people to make their lives completely public, and I don't want to give it away, but then shows the dangers of that.</comment></comment></comment>


American kids are 70% more likely to die before adulthood vs. other rich nations - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/health-care/2018/1/8/16863656/childhood-mortality-united-states <comment><USER2> The correct approach to this is to sort the causes of death by number of incidents and then look at those causes with the highest number of incidents that also have an anomalously high incident rate. This article studiously avoided that and was obviously an exercise in narrative construction.

The leading causes of child death in the US are somewhat uniquely American things like automobile accidents (Americans children spend much more time in cars) and drowning (the prevalence of swimming pools in many parts of the US is a well-known major risk factor for younger children). These things are endemic to the American landscape but few people are calling for a dramatic reduction in driving or swimming pools, even though these are among the most effective things you could do. Except for the first year of birth, where medical causes of death dominate, the rest of childhood is dominated by unintentional injury. Even during the peak years for homicide (the 20s), unintentional injuries still dominate the statistics.

The "teenagers 82 times more likely to die from gun homicide" is a meaningless number. The suicide _rate_ in the US is average -- that they sometimes use guns as opposed to whatever they do in countries with higher rates of suicide and fewer guns is largely immaterial. The criminal activity that accounts for most gun homicide _is_ a problem but it is also extremely concentrated in a few areas where the murder rate from _all_ causes is anomalously high. The number of children that die merely from proximity to guns (accidents in the home, stray bullets during gang warfare, etc) is below the noise floor of many other causes. Guns per se, and there are at least as many guns as people in the US, have little to do with it.

The "Congress isn't funding kids health insurance" is disingenuous. Whether or not the funding changes are a good idea, for most analysts this has more to do with which bucket money comes from than whether or not there is access to healthcare. And in terms of child mortality, programs called out like CHIP have almost zero statistical impact generally, so it is unclear why they are relevant to the headline.

And as others have pointed out, infant mortality statistics (first year of birth) are not easy to compare across countries due to widely varying local standards. In a few parts of the US, such as the poor rural areas, the child mortality rates are legitimately quite high and geographically you are a long distance from good medical care. (I grew up in these areas -- there might be one doctor for all the communities spread across a wide geographic area, in large part because there is not a population dense enough to support more than that.) Not sure what to do about that though.

In short, this is uninformative clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like the numbers are around 70/10,000 vs 50/10,000? I'm assuming they used the percentage for the clicks.

It doesn't look like the author accounted for reporting differences, which can have a huge impact. For example, U.S. babies born significantly pre-term (e.g. 20 weeks) who do not survive are counted as infant deaths, whereas in most other countries they're counted as stillbirths and don't affect infant mortality stats. Also the US has higher rates of infertility treatment-related deaths because such treatments result in twins and triplets with lower rates of survival.

<comment><USER4> The whole thing is lacking necessary context. For instance, the stat on gun deaths _sounds_ shocking, but this article doesn't tell me whether gun violence is a major cause of death in American teenagers, or whether it's 0.00084% of American teen deaths and 0.00001% everywhere else.

<comment><USER5> I agree. The gun commentary triggered my skepticism, but this is what really pushed me over the edge:

> And US teenagers are twice as likely to die in car accidents than their > peers abroad.

As of 2013, the average driver in the UK drove 7,900 miles[1]. The average driver in the US drives 16,550 miles[2].

It should be no surprise that people who drive twice as much die twice as often while driving.

As for guns - I'm interested in figuring out what the actual per capita and absolute numbers are, but don't have time to dig that up at the moment; I know from experience that it's very difficult to find and verify information about "gun deaths" in the US. In the past I've found that anti-gun groups have lumped in people as old as 24 as "children", while pro-gun groups have excluded justifiable homicides including those occurring during law enforcement activities. I may come back to this, if anyone is interested and I have the time.

1: [http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-28546589](http://www.bbc.com/news/uk- england-28546589)

2: [https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm](https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar8.htm)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Whilst I'm sure there are a lot of guns in the US, this metric sounds a little skewed:

"America has 4.4 percent of the world's population, but almost half of the civilian-owned guns around the world"

Surely any country where guns are legal to own will have a higher percentage of civilian-owned guns than it's population, because "the world's population" includes countries where guns are illegal.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah. The article _clearly_ has a slant. It's not terribly surprising to find that a country with gun rights baked into its constitution has way more guns than countries who lack such rights.

<comment><USER5> It's about as surprising that there are more homicides using firearms in the US than countries with far fewer civilian-owned arms as it would be to find out that there are more salt-water drownings in Florida than there are in Utah.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> [https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr65/nvsr65_04.pdf](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr65/nvsr65_04.pdf)

This CDC report may help breakdown the US situation. PDF page 41, table 10. The linking CDC page summarized things as:

Children aged 1-4 years

        Accidents (unintentional injuries)
        Congenital malformations, deformations and chromosomal abnormalities
        Assault (Homicide)

Children aged 5-14 years

        Accidents (unintentional injuries)
        Cancer
        Intentional self-harm (suicide)

For unintentional injuries, it's notable that motor vehicle deaths are as heavily represented for 1-24 years of age as firearms are. Also worth noting is that studying firearm deaths is heavily hampered or outlawed by a certain national party because truth is an inconvenience.

</comment><comment><USER8> The article is confusing because it fails to differentiate between _infant_ mortality rate (before 1) and _childhood_ mortality rate (defined in the cited paper as 1-19). The article purports to be about childhood mortality but the only graph shown is of infant mortality.

From the linked paper abstract: "From 2001 to 2010 the risk of death in the US was 76 percent greater for infants and 57 percent greater for children ages 1–19."

So the numbers as presented in this article are kind of misleading but it still looks quite bad for the US. Lack of decent healthcare access remains an issue for a huge fraction of the population.

</comment><comment><USER9> Over the years I have come to understand that comparing USA with other countries for healthcare etc is comparing apple's to oranges. As the variance from state to state in the USA is too wide. Here is an interesting stat [http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa/teen-death- rate](http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/usa/teen-death-rate)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Note: I edited the title slightly to get it to fit within HN's 80 char limit while retaining the original's meaning.

This article does a good job of underscoring the need for healthcare reform here in the U.S. I first encountered these stats when we had our first child. Maternal death is also a lot higher here for a variety of reasons[0].

[0] [https://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants- du...](https://www.npr.org/2017/05/12/527806002/focus-on-infants-during- childbirth-leaves-u-s-moms-in-danger)

<comment><USER10> Could you elaborate on what you mean by "healthcare reform," please? We just had healthcare reform and my access to healthcare went down and the price more than doubled. I can't even imagine how brutal a so-called single-payer system would be for Americans. Also, I don't see how one questionable correlation makes your case--for example, maybe we need Tort Reform so that people stop suing doctors? Or maybe we need to increase the number of people attending medical school and graduate more doctors? Or maybe we get the blood-sucking insurance companies to do something besides make billions of dollars?

<comment><AUTHOR> > "My access to healthcare went down and the price more than doubled"

That, to me, is a good signal that we need reform. The fact that people with good insurance in the US find it more affordable to buy a round-trip ticket to Japan and pay cash for medical services is another good signal.

I don't think anyone can look at the US health system objectively and say that it functions well, unless you define "well" in a very narrow way, such as "Provides high profit margins to certain groups."

I'm not saying I have the answers, but change needs to happen.

<comment><USER5> I _think_ what ataturk was saying is that it's not enough to say that we need "reform". Reform can absolutely have a negative impact.

My own health insurance rates have gone up quite a bit, as have my deductibles and copays. My raw healthcare costs have also gone up, and it's gotten much more difficult to figure out how much things are going to cost before agreeing to pay for them.

Summer before last I was living in Charlottesville, VA and working a job that did not include benefits. My wife and I are in our early 30s and have two young children; none of us have any significant long-term medical issues. The most basic "bronze" plan available that exempted us from the ACA fine was $1,400 / month. I did the math and saw that the break-even point for me where insurance would actually save me money was somewhere around $35k / year in healthcare costs. Since then, more insurers have pulled out of Virginia and marketplace rates there are the highest in the country.

What we had prior to the ACA was objectively less efficient than most of the developed world. What we had from 2014-2017 was _much worse_ than it was before, though, for anyone except perhaps those whose coverage was highly subsidized. It's yet to be seen what will happen now with the repeal of the individual mandate, but I expect things will get worse yet. It's a positive financial thing for me and my family if we have to go back out the marketplace to be able to buy plans that don't meet the government minimums, but from a system perspective it'll just increase the mean level of risk for those that are actively insured and drive up premiums.

I think the way forward for my family if we're not under and employer plan is to save the money that would have in the past been used to pay insurance premiums, and to purchase catastrophic coverage that doesn't kick in until those savings are depleted. I would welcome an expansion of tax-advantage healthcare savings accounts - particularly if it were possible to manage that money in a longer-term investment like a 401k plan. After all, the plan is not to _need_ to spend a ton of money on healthcare when we're young.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Whatsapp is down - <AUTHOR>

<comment><AUTHOR> It's been almost an hour for me now. SREs on vacation after the sale? :)

Update: No activity on [https://twitter.com/wa_status](https://twitter.com/wa_status). Best way of following it: [https://twitter.com/search?q=whatsapp%20down](https://twitter.com/search?q=whatsapp%20down)

</comment><comment><USER2> All Hail Zukerberg!! :D

</comment><comment><USER3> yes down for me too

</comment><comment><USER4> in brazil too.

</comment><comment><USER5> down in london too - ukranians have attacked???</comment>


Reddit totally changes Google results for "Carl Herold". Remarkable SEO - <AUTHOR> http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/cltyt/update_reddit_you_are_awesome_thank_you/

<comment><AUTHOR> Previously: [http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ckcjc/reddit_can_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/ckcjc/reddit_can_you_please_help_me_for_five_years_i/)

Google search: [http://www.google.com/search?&q=carl+herold&btni=745](http://www.google.com/search?&q=carl+herold&btni=745)

His website: www.highercomputingforeveryone.com

</comment><comment><USER2> It's not that remarkable...Google has provisions for breaking news style content, and as it sees traffic, searches, and ctr increasing for certain urls, it bumps it up in the SERPs...as things reach up the SERPs and especially when things make it into the trending topics, aggregators and autoblogs starting scraping the content and hosting it themselves.

SEO 101</comment>


The Lean Startup Frenzy - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/12/the-lean-startup-frenzy <comment><USER2> The problem with Lean Startup is the same as the problem with Agile, which is that they are born from extremely smart people with great ideas, but inevitably as they become popular a massive cargo cult grows around them. Eventually there is so much noise and misinformation from bandwagon hoppers that even using the official term (Lean or Agile) becomes a bozo bit.

It's been that way with Agile for awhile, and I'm starting to feel that way about Lean Startup as well. When someone talks too much about Lean Startup I start to think they read a lot but don't have much experience actually executing.

The bottom line is that building startups requires adaptability and awareness at all junctures. There's no cookbook for success. Instead you must have a keen sense of what's working, what's not, and an intuition for pursuing promising ideas. Lean Startup strikes me as some useful lessons Ries learned the hard way, but nothing substantial enough to guide a whole generation of entrepreneurs, and certainly nothing that will save any entrepreneur from his own school of hard knocks.

<comment><USER3> Some people make products. Some people teach others how to run a company, how to make a product, how to make a profitable small business.

For the latter group of people, their words is the product.

<comment><USER4> So what you are saying is that "those who can't do, teach?" No offence but I think people are right to be somewhat skeptical of consultants with little practical experience and no proven track record. Not to say there isn't value there sometimes, but there is a lot of smoke and mirrors and snake oil too. People are smart to be skeptical of so-called "teachers".

<comment><USER5> To be fair on Eric Ries, he can and he did before he taught.

It actually looks like most of the people that teach entrepreneurship via blogs and books are entrepreneurs themselves, with successes that speak for themselves.

<comment><USER3> I am by no mean questioning Eric Ries. I read his blog posts pre-Lean Startup days and his engineering methods fit with me.

I think it was accidental for him to do the Lean Startup (something along the line of him being pushed by other to "hey, why don't you write more about this?")

He definitely has the experience already. 1 failed startup. 1 successful (not sure how far, but up to the reader to decide the range of success) company.

If he chose to venture out to public-speaking business, it's up to him to diversify his value.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> From the article: "Eric Ries greatest venture may be the Lean Startup movement itself."

The top ranked review of his book on Amazon seems fairly dubious about the value of the book:

[http://www.amazon.com/review/R3287ICLQ9STI3/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt...](http://www.amazon.com/review/R3287ICLQ9STI3/ref=cm_cr_dp_cmt?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B004J4XGN6&nodeID=133140011)

I have a weakness for business books and am tempted to buy it anyway, but I'm still not convinced; I'm trying to cut back on books that don't actually leave me with anything.

<comment><USER7> I bought Ries book and made it most of the way through.

The problem here is that the Agile/Lean startup field is still in its infancy. The ideas are just now congealing.

That's good news because it means the field is wide open -- there are going to be a lot of cool new developments. But it's also bad news because every book you get is going to be hit-and-miss: a few good ideas, a few ideas that sound wacky, and a lot of noise. Agile is like that. It's a collection of best practices around iterative and incremental technology development. That's why it drives some folks nuts: different people can give you different answers and in the end it's all about custom tailoring and results-oriented process. What we're seeing now is this agile/best-practices idea extended to the startup world. That's a good thing! There's really good stuff in there. But it's going to evolve over many years, and just like Agile in the end you're not going to end up with a recipe book as much as a place to start, a lot of good material to absorb, and some guiding principles. It'll probably be something like the learn-do-adapt process we see in Scrum (Obligatory plug: just blogged about this the other day and posted about it on HN. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3404085>)

So I like the Lean Startup idea. I'm just not sure what it is yet. I don't think anybody is.

<comment><USER6> I'm fairly convinced that there is some good stuff behind 'lean startups', and that it's not just a fad.

What I'm a bit more skeptical of is how much of it can actually be distilled into practical advice, and how much of it would fit just fine in a one page summary.

Here's another way of looking at it, for fans of the book:

What concrete things did you do after having read it that you might have overlooked previously? Let's measure something:-)

<comment><USER7> Here's one for you. Last year I tried an experiment where I developed a new website or app every two weeks. At the end of two weeks, I switched and started on something new.

"Normally," you're supposed to spend years on one idea, slogging away. I said "screw that" and decided I try an iterative shotgun approach. I put out a lot of things, talked about them all, and then let each one of them compete for my attention. hn-books was one of these ideas (<http://hn-books.com>)

This was extreme iterative behavior, and I don't know anybody that recommends it. But I had a really good experience doing this and plan on starting back up in January. I found it's a better experience learning about the entire process of business model creation over and over again than just doing it one time and trying to get it perfect. If I were at YC, I'd probably pick up on a lot of that through social contacts with all the other folks, but on my own I found that iteration on something real and tangible was really the best way to learn.

EDIT: My comment seems very ironic considering that a couple of the other comments on this thread are basically along the lines of "it's really smart people and theory, but nothing that practical" In fact, in this experiment found it to be extremely practical.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> There are tons of business books these days and I felt that most of them have become a "Self-Help Business" books as opposed to understanding/textbook-y kind of books.

I have no problem at all with "Self-Help Business" type of books. But authors, could you please reduce the number of pages to the very essentials?

Can "Lean Startup" book be reduced to 100-150 pages instead of 338 pages?

Can "The Checklist Manifesto" book be reduced to 80-100 pages?

What's the essentials of your words? I don't need reams of "here's a story to convince you more". These are called "Use-Cases" or "Business-Cases". Separate them to another book, or put them in your website as a pay/free PDF download PER business-cases (or bundle them, whichever).

Those "stories that try to convince the theory works" sound too fluffy when the author cherry-pick a specific event/case that match with the point they're trying to deliver.

<comment><USER5> The huge problem with taking out all the stories is that the book becomes quicker to read, but much drier and less memorable.

Stories make things stick in the reader's mind, as well as providing additional angles to explain complicated concepts by example.

As a simple example, I could explain that you shouldn't call for help when you don't need it, because people will start to ignore you and then you won't get the help when you do need it... or I could tell you the story of the boy who cried wolf. Which one do you think you'll remember in a year?

Stories are powerful stuff.

<comment><USER3> I hear you and agree to what you said given the context (complicated concepts, etc).

But somehow I doubt these books (Lean Startups, Checklist Manifesto, Agile) are complicated concepts. Derivatives and HFT might be considered complicated concepts.

Quicker to read but if it is to the point (especially bullet points) might lead to quicker to remember.

I've seen many bloggers claimed they read a 350 pages book in 2 sessions, 1 session, a flight to Chicago (5 hours?) and claiming that they "get it" is a bit questionable. Perhaps they know where the points are and skip the irrelevant parts? If that's the case, why not make the book slimmer? :D

But, it is what it is: there's probably a demand from society expecting their money to be worth.

I'm asking for a separation of the theory and the application. Start the book with the theory first and finish it with the application (business-case, use- case) to avoid intermingling the concept and the examples.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For the past year+ I have heard people talk about lean, read articles about lean, and generally felt that I had an idea of how to run lean - and we were doing it. We ran surveys to ask our customers for feedback, and tried to only build things that we had validated they wanted. That seemed lean.

Several weeks ago, one of our investors, a three-time successful entrepreneur (his last company is doing close to $50MM in revenue this year) told me that his current endeavor was failing and he couldn't figure out why. After reading Lean Startup, he realized he had been lucky three times in a row, succeeding despite himself. He encouraged me and my team to read the actual book.

Long story short, @dasil003 is right, the problem with the explosion of Lean is that everyone writes tidbits about it and most people read those tidbits and think they're being "lean", but most, including myself, were misinformed about how to actually be lean. Not to mention, applying the true principles of lean is _not easy_. In fact, it's quite painful. But doing it half-ass leads to potentially even worse decision making than just operating a hunch-based business.

Earlier this week, after taking a step back and identifying our true core metrics, we launched a real lean dashboard with cohort testing and deep analytics into the health of our company. We have already run one successful cohort of 3 variations on a feature that we thought might help improve engagement, most of it was a relative smokescreen. All three implementations were nearly the same, but only one actually had a noticeable impact. Previously, we would have built one of them, seen that people used it (but not necessarily known the impact it had to company health) and would have moved onto the next feature. There would have been a 2 out of 3 chance that it was an unsuccessful implementation. And in those 2 out of 3 cases, even though maintaining that worthless feature would take ongoing resources, we would have kept it because it appeared people were using it, even though the impact to metrics that matter was close to zero.

It's safe to assume that the majority of our features have worked at a fraction of what they could have. Without identifying the true metrics that are going to make your company great, without real cohort testing, and without trying things in _literally_ the lowest resource way possible, you are wasting massive amounts of energy and money. I can already tell that we are going to learn more about our product and business in the next 3-4 months than the whole previous 2 years.

Talking about Lean is a fad. I believe truly being Lean can change the way people build startups.

</comment><comment><USER9> Steve Blank said in Four Steps something to the effect that he is simply articulating the steps that most successful startups have always followed.

</comment><comment><USER10> I could have sworn that 37 Signals did this 'first' in that they popularized the idea of 'lean' or iterative product design around a SaaS model in 2004ish. It is the whole philosophy around the birth of Rails as I remember it. If you go way back into their blog archives it is likely there:

<http://37signals.com/svn>

I will give them 'first' because they built a framework around the idea of building fast and cheap.

Because startups are hot (again) and trendy (again) people are just looking for 'the right way' to do it. The real secret is that it is really hard work and knowing that you don't know everything while holding true to your vision.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many of the ideas in Lean Startup are not new at all. And Eric Ries even admit to this!

Paul Graham wrote many of them on his essays[1] (one example: _Launching Too Early_ , from 18 Mistakes[2], is rephrased as _iterate_ on Lean Startup), and so did 37 Signals (the core of the MVP concept is outlined on _Half, not half assed_ [3]).

Lean (which is usually placed along with Agile methodologies) and startups' synergies were mentioned 4 years ago by infoQ (the same site where the article on this post is from)[4], which also made the connection between the works of pg, Jessica Livingstone and 37 Signals.

The metric and funnel anayslis (an important piece of the measure part of the build/measure/learn loop) come from 500 Startups head Dave McClure's recurring presentation _Startup Metrics 4 Pirates_ (which nowadays borrows from Lean Startup ubiquitous language).

The Lean Startup does bring some new ideas to the table (innovation accounting for instance), but the most important part is that it outlines some really overlooked ideas (like using cohorts[6] as a way out of the Vanity Metrics[7] pit).

[1] <http://paulgraham.com/articles.html>

[2] <http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html>

[3] [http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Half_Not_Half_Assed.ph...](http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch05_Half_Not_Half_Assed.php)

[4] <http://www.infoq.com/news/2007/02/agile-startups>

[5] [http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for- pir...](http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates- brazil-nov-2011)

[6] [http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/11/are-you-building-the- right-...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/11/are-you-building-the-right- product/)

[7] <http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/30/vanity-metrics/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _is Lean Startup just a fad or does it generate real value for venture capitalists and founders?_

Why hello, False Dichotomy! I haven't seen you in so long. Must be the US presidential run that's been keeping you so busy.</comment>