Big tech is testing you - <AUTHOR> https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/02/big-tech-is-testing-you <comment><USER2> The widespread use of these social experiments is deeply concerning to me, and is one of the things that encourages me to avoid much of the web.

UX A/B testing is one thing. It's not wonderful, but at least it's relatively harmless. But the entire idea of experimenting on an unwitting public is rife for abuse, some of which we've already seen. Since corporations (and particularly those in the tech world) are pretty terrible at behaving with restraint and due consideration of the larger effects of their actions, meaningful regulation seems very important here.

In the meantime, I'll continue to try to sidestep these landmines.

<comment><USER3> Particularly in the tech world? I suspect you may have been manipulated successful (everyone is under /attempts/ especially if you are convinced you aren't). I think someone at PR firms are owed bonuses given how common that sentiment is despite lack of facts. Given Deepwater Horizon, Tobbaco Cover Ups, Bhopal and others calling it is silly. I won't dent sins and flaws but it is akin to calling the Seattle WTO riots the worst urban unrest in Western history and getting people to believe it! I can understand how that could happen but reflecting upon it clearly isn't true. It is just most don't go to that second level.

<comment><USER4> It really is ridiculous. If you think you can find many industries whose abuses don't match or exceed those of tech, you're dreaming. Tech's rapid rise, along with its warm and fuzzy image, just make it easy fodder for the especially-ignorant to pay attention to.

That doesn't mean that corporate behavior in the tech world is no cause for concern, but any model (like the GP comment) that considers them to be an especially abusive or dismissive of norms is detached enough from reality that their view of the policy landscape is likely to be horribly warped.

<comment><USER5> "If you think you can find many industries whose abuses don't match or exceed those of tech"

I think this is predicated on the idea that "tech" is one industry among many. But it's not, it's something that is eating the world, that every industry uses. And it's sucking up such an insane amount of capital and resources because of the unreasonable effectiveness of modern manipulation of people. Some writer getting upset is not proof of anything, but the market cap of Google and Facebook is very strong evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> >A shakeup was under way. Astronomy had split off from astrology. Chemistry had become disentangled from alchemy.

This was the only line that caught my attention, but I admittedly stopped reading the article before the story changed from "how to catch a health scammer" 2+ centuries ago.

What if the current big tech is alchemy and astrology time-wise (since we're so early on this whole information curve)?

Though, this seems more like a restaurant that starts serving subpar products. The traffic will go elsewhere after awhile of getting served crap (especially if there's alternatives to measure against), to never return again.

Loyalty in the digital age is about as common as respect (ie. respecting your privacy) online. Its not very solid.

<comment><USER3> I suspect it halfway there and will at best be like statistics in that regard - a source of insight but easy to fool yourself and others accidentally or otherwise.

<comment><USER6> Social engineering to stay relevant seems to contrast having a solid business model, product or service.

Some Kodak moments last longer than others, but its going to be funny if Netflix is the 1st to drop from FAANG.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > people were upset to discover that their emotions had been manipulated. Luca > and Bazerman argue that this response was largely misguided.

> Besides, they say, "advertisers and other groups manipulate consumers' > emotions all the time

How can you be a prof at Harvard and make such a statement to the press?

Well, maybe they did A/B testing and discovered that people don't give a damn. I will certainly mimimize usage of services that do such testing.

<comment><USER3> How can you do that as a Harvard Professor? Easily if with Tenure as it isn't given to people for them to keep their heads down.

He is right, the outrage over "manipulation in tech" is both hysterical and deeply hypocritical. Politicians and advertisers have been doing it for centuries. It is just that when "nerds" and "science" do it. Radio has been used to promote genocide multiple times over centuries and nobody states a need to put the Genie back in the bottle because it is largely in the control of power. Nobody makes the tool a moral outrage that needa categorically banned - they recognize that being a sicko who promotes genocide is the wrong.

<comment><USER7> The quality of the argument is just extremely weak and I would expect more frome someone thinking more than 2 minutes about it. Especially on a topic that didn't have any room in public discussions and policy making yet.

"People get killed every week, so please don't be too hysterical if I kill 1-2 more"

If they wanted to make an argument that we shouldn't accept emotional manipulation from advertising, I have said nothing.

<comment><USER4> That's the point though. The New Yorker (and the memeplex it's a part of) wasn't publishing hysterical articles about advertising's abuse of emotional appeal during the heyday of Madison Avenue, and randomly throwing an extra dimension of targeting by limiting one's concern to when tech does it doesn't make any sense.

It's not enough to say "just because A did it doesn't mean B can" without 1) addressing why the calls for cessation are narrowly targeted at B and 2) understanding why A was never successfully made to stop. 2 can help you understand the pitfalls of what you're trying to do ("manipulating emotions" is a ridiculously ill-defined phrase), and 1 can help you understand whether you're chasing after a red herring instead of what you're actually concerned about.

To use your own framing: perhaps if you'd spent 5 minutes thinking about it instead of 2, you'd realize these dimensions exist and are valid bases for complaint.

<comment><USER5> "wasn't publishing hysterical articles about advertising's abuse of emotional appeal during the heyday of Madison Avenue"

Well, you could ask by analogy why people got so upset about atomic bombs when regular bombs are just as painful to be blown up by. Or maybe modern precision targeted weapons are a better analogy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's pretty obvious Tinder does this based on the very first profile you see when you open the app.

</comment><comment><USER9> Upon opening this link I got a nice little popup from firefox letting me know that it had blocked some social media trackers for me. The snake is just eating its own tail at this point.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am about 1/3 through reading "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" by Shoshana Zuboff and while it is a very long read, I recommend it as good survival reading.

I have never been as concerned about privacy as I am about manipulation and forced social engineering. For the last 30 years , I have spent a lot of time writing books. My joke to friends and family has been that I spend evenings writing because I thought network TV is mostly a waste of time but more importantly subjecting yourself to advertisements is a crazy thing to do. Now I consider careless and thoughtless Internet use to be so much worse.</comment>


Diagramming the Story of a 1-Star Review - <AUTHOR> https://moz.com/blog/diagramming-the-story-of-a-1-star-review <comment><USER2> Sometimes, it all plays out online. This business owner apparently got therapy between these exchanges:

1.0 star rating 4/24/2015 My husband and I have been here 4 times, and most of the times the service was good and in most cases some of the food was quite good, sometimes quite average.

This time I was amazed at how bad the service was. The start was good, but the main courses came before we were finished with the appetizers, which was really rushed. We had no dessert, and had to ask for the check 4 times. The last time we asked, my husband remarked at how he had asked three times already. The waiter retorted that we at least had our coffee! Really rude.

The gnocchi is always good, as was the asparagus and beets. The pork special was really disappointing - just an average sausage.

I now have mixed feelings as to whether or not to return.

Response from business owner before therapy:

4/28/2015 Hi Ma __ __(or is it Sa __ __?),

Let me make your decision easy for you. Judging from your lack of patience and appalling attitude towards children, you're probably not a very happy person. Although we appreciate your past business, for the wellbeing of our other guests, we must ask you to no longer dine at Zo __ __.

Thank you,

Gu __ __

After therapy:

1.0 star rating 5/14/2016 Horrible service and food is not worth it.. Way over price for average food.

Went here bc of the reviews, and it looks like the owner replies to all 1 star reviews with some insulting and outrageous comments... So can't wait to hear from him!

Response from business owner:

5/21/2016 Hi Sy __ __,

Thank you so much for dining at Zo __ __. I apologize that you experienced horrible service while dining and would like to thank you for being so passionate about great food and service.

As you may have noticed in my more recent response, I am no longer committed to responding to reviews with resentment. I've found it much easier and satisfying to love the reviews regardless of their rating and forgive those that decide to be negative.

Thanks again,

Gu __ __</comment>


Google Experiments With Next Generation Image Search - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/27/google-experiments-with-next-generation-image-search/ <comment><AUTHOR> TC's post is a little light on the details but Peter Norvig touched on this in his talk at Startup School (Mona Lisa image search)</comment>


Show HN: Droidmeter.com - I want to help you study the Android App Store - <AUTHOR> https://droidmeter.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I'm Winnie and am excited about data & research. Feel free to leave me questions you would like to have answered or email me directly at email@example.com !

</comment><comment><USER2> Hi,

Seems great.

Do you only track the US market ?

(you should change the position of the logout button, currently just after the search field, like a classic search button :) )

<comment><USER2> strange I think the submission has been flagged for no apparent reason ?

<comment><AUTHOR> :(

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Accessible and valuable data at a cost-effective price point for those interested in, or already involved with, the Android market. Excellent idea, Winnie!

</comment><comment><USER4> This looks really interesting. The Android app ecosystem is pretty messy, making some sense of it would be very useful for my company (www.cabanaapp.com).

</comment><comment><USER5> Looks great. I don't know if this is possible, but it would be awesome if you could pull iOS (and future Windows phone?) data too.

</comment><comment><USER6> I love this idea. I also like the flexible pricing model. What a great initiative!

</comment><comment><USER7> Looks terrific, the Android ecosystem really needs this.</comment>


Promotion via linkedin, what do you think? - <AUTHOR>

Well, today I got the message from linkedin.
Exclusive Invitation to TechPitch.com>>
Hello Jack
We are writing to invite you to join the fast growing business technology community at TechPitch.com ( http://www.techpitch.com ). TechPitch is a unique site that serves as a technology showcase, a multimedia content hub and an interactive community platform built just for the business technology community.
As a member of TechPitch, you can now showcase yourself, join any channel of choice and publish all your content to a focused target audience in a structured and contextual manner like never before!  Please click on this invitation link ( http://www.techpitch.com/?xgi=5rHm7wp ) to join and access the site.
Sincerely,
The TechPitch Team
What do you think such promotion? consider as spamming? <comment><USER2> Sounds like spam to me. Then again I haven't been particularly impressed with LinkedIn in general to date. I'm still waiting to be wowed.</comment>


HDMI 2.0 officially announced - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2013/09/04/hdmi-2-0-official-4k-60fps-32-channel-audio/ <comment><USER2> This race for more pixels is misguided. The change I most want to see is deeper pixels, at least 10bpp, preferably more. I'm getting really tired of all the banding I see on what should be smooth gradient images. If a landscape aspect image is P pixels wide then to display a gray scale gradient, black to white, you need

ceil(log2(P))

bits per pixel. So a "2K" display needs 11 bits, "4K" needs 12, etc. Then each column of pixels gets a distinct value and there is no banding.

So sure, give me a 4K screen. I've seen them and they are sweet, but you MUST also increase the pixel depth at the same time, or there will be artifacts.

And don't get me started on the horrid compression artifacts on basic cable. A crime against quality imagery.

<comment><USER3> Dithering can help a lot when it comes to displaying large smooth gradients in lower bit depths. Obviously it has its downsides, though - for one, you need to actually implement it where smooth gradients are used, and at when it comes to video games this basically never happens and you end up with notable banding instead.

Dithering in the field of video is pretty common, though. But it has a pretty large problem there as well - since dithering is essentially noise, it requires a lot of bitrate to compress efficiently, and if you don't have bitrate to throw at your source, you're most likely going to kill it and just end up introducing banding. Blu-ray is pretty much the main avenue where you have enough bitrate to spare for proper dithering in 8-bit video. Anything less than that, though... well, let's just say that House of Cards on Netflix was suffering from banding a lot.

Banding is actually one of the biggest reasons why anime fansubs these days are generally encoded in 10-bit H.264. Anime tends to have a lot of large and smooth color surfaces and banding was pretty much the hardest thing to avoid with regular 8-bit video - 10-bit on the other hands makes it an almost total non-issue. And for non-10bit displays, it moves the necessary dithering to the playback end, which is obviously a much nicer alternative since you don't have to compress any of that in the video itself. And beyond the gradients, 10-bit H.264 actually gives you better compression quality in general, which just makes it even better.

Now, it obviously comes with the downside of not being supported by hardware decoders anywhere, so you basically will need a decent CPU to decode 10-bit video. For fansubs and the people who make them this isn't that much of an issue though, since the advanced subtitles they use are also generally poorly- supported by hardware players, and this has been the case for a long time.

Next-generation video formats may actually bring higher bit depths to hardware decoders as well, though - H.265/HEVC has a Main 10 Profile intended for consumer applications.

<comment><USER4> >wasting time on HN instead of finishing Chuu2 Sasuga Daiz.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Honest question, does 4K and up really make sense for private use ? I am pretty sure from the distance that you usually watch 1080p content, you wont see a difference to 4K content at all.

Of course for big presentations and conference setups i see the usecase, just not for the consumer mainstream. 4K would also set back game console performance by a huge margin, if they will ever adopt it.

So i am not really convinced that the mainstream will go up to 4K, 8K etc, as it also means that all production costs increase and the benefit for the consumer is marginal.

<comment><USER6> > Honest question, does 4K and up really make sense for private use ?

For big monitors I think it does. Even if 4k doesn't make sense, the increased bandwidth is a win as the previous HDMI spec couldn't drive a 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 monitor at 60hz, and those resolutions definitely make sense to me for computer monitors.

<comment><USER7> > as the previous HDMI spec couldn't drive a 2560x1440 or 2560x1600 monitor at > 60hz

That has been supported by HDMI since 1.3, since around 2006.

2560×1600p75 @ 24bit is about the highest standard resolution you can pump through HDMI 1.3.

<comment><USER6> That's interesting, because most of the high resolution monitors I've seen explicitly say you need to use DL-DVI to drive them at full resolution (for example the 27" Dell Ultrasharps.)

<comment><USER7> Many companies cheap out on the supporting electronics. In particular single- link DVI is electrically compatible with HDMI but is limited to ~1920 x 1200 @ 60Hz. Basically instead of properly implementing HDMI they route a single-link DVI transceiver through an HDMI connector and call it good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm not too impressed honestly.

120 fps is the minimum for me when it comes to playing games. Then again I was used to 120hz monitors on CRTs in the early 2000s with 0 input lag.

I would only ever consider 4k for normal desktop usage but there's no way I would pay anything for 60 fps and we all know 4k monitors will be stupidly expensive for at least 10 years.

<comment><USER9> It always seemed strange that monitors aim for 60fps. That seems like a recipe for input lag. They could aim for 90fps, because when they fail to meet that, at least they'll still achieve 60fps.

Then again, the audience of hardcore gamers who would notice that sort of thing is probably small, so I guess it makes economic sense.

<comment><USER8> This is also why most LCD manufacturers use low quality TN panels. A majority of people just can't tell the difference, don't care enough or they don't care about things like viewing angles.

LCD manufacturers in general are really crooked. They have been accused and found guilty of price fixing on multiple occasions.

They also love to release monitors with high quality panels initially so they get good reviews and swap in garbage panels without letting consumers know and then sell it for the same price as the same model.

<comment><USER10> I'm on the market for a decent monitor. Are there any brands that you /like/, or is it simply a matter of choosing the least terrible?

<comment><USER11> I have an HP LP2475W and a Dell U2412M; generally, among the IPS class, the consensus seems to be that HPs have more outputs and a better UI. Some of them are wide-gamut, however, which turns off a few purchasers. Research as to whether or not wide-gamut is important/detrimental to you.

I'd say go for 24s or a 30; if you have the 27 you'll just wish you had the 30 :-p but definitely go IPS, they are fantastic. I haven't read much about the Korean monitors as they were nonexistent when I researched the market 4-5 years ago.

<comment><USER9> Actually, the Dell U30xx is worse than the U27xx. The color fidelity isn't as good. (This only matters if you calibrate your monitor.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish it had 8K support, given Japan is actually already planning on starting broadcast trials for 8K in roughly two years: [http://www.futureleap.com/2013/03/japan- plans-8k-broadcasts-...](http://www.futureleap.com/2013/03/japan- plans-8k-broadcasts-in-2016-2-years-ahead-of-schedule/)

<comment><USER13> I am glad it does not have 8K support. That would be over-engineering.

"Yeah, this hardware will cost more, but it has to support a bandwidth level that won't be in use anywhere in the world in the next two years."

Seems totally reasonable to have a version in step with the emerging generation, rather than future experiments.

<comment><USER14> > Seems totally reasonable to have a version in step with the emerging > generation, rather than future experiments.

The current MBP retina display, if used on a 27 inch monitor, is more than 4K.

Conveniently, however, it's less than 8K - as is a 32 inch retina monitor.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Anyone know how this compares to displayport? I've always heard (perhaps wrongly) of DP being technically better and patent free, so I wonder why HDMI still gets so much more attention...

<comment><USER16> I've found that the biggest problem with DisplayPort is that even if it is technically superior (unfortunately I'm not qualified to know whether it is or not), active DisplayPort/HDMI/DVI adapters are incredibly expensive.

Since HDMI and DVI came first, this limits the use of DisplayPort; manufacturers are unwilling to create a device that requires a $100 adapter to work with what most people own.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> The failure to redesign the connection form factor is a major disappointment. Racking or repositioning a snug receiver with multiple HDMI inputs and outputs will almost guarantee that one will bend or break. This is especially true for low gauge runs over 50 feet.

<comment><USER18> The obvious positive side of this is that existing cables will support the new spec without being replaced... Says so right there in the doc.

I'd rather stick with the same form factor and cables than replace everything at some insane cost. Not to mention the awkwardness of supporting 2 types of inputs on a receiver/amp/switcher to maintain legacy compatibility.

<comment><USER17> Agreed that it's a positive that existing cables can be used, but a dongle could always be included and thereby have the best of both.

Besides, many people already use port savers (actually run savers) because replacing a bent connector on a 75 foot run is an effective lesson.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Dissapointing that this means we won't see 4k 120 hz screens any time soon, and that most consumer hardware in the next 5 years will have compatability issues with them. I love my pixel density _and_ refresh rate!

<comment><USER20> Probably next DisplayPort version will support them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> As someone who isn't familiar with audio technology: is there any practical use for 32 channels of audio?

<comment><USER22> Having 32 speakers around you, I would imagine. It was probably a case of "since we're standardizing, we might as well future-proof this".

<comment><USER23> accept that they future proofed sound but it doesn't look like they did that with video

<comment><USER24> I'm sure if it was trivial to offer a 100+ Gbps link and do 120Hz 8K video, they would have.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I suspect not, but I can't find any details on whether this new spec provides for more power than the current standard so that low-power devices (Chromecast) don't need a separate power cord.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hmm how will monster cables and the like sell their stuff when the standard makes clear that existing cables can already handle the greatly increased bandwidth? I look forward to the spin!

</comment><comment><USER27> > "dynamic auto lipsync"

Isn't the audio and video _already in_ sync?

<comment><USER28> If you connect your source through an surround processor it helps to be able to delay the audio to match the delay of the TV which may vary depending on TV settings (e.g. Game mode may be lower delay but with less picture processing). I assume this spec allows the TV to inform the surround processor continuously of the current picture delay.

<comment><USER29> Once upon a time I hacked something like that into TVTime ([http://tvtime.sf.net](http://tvtime.sf.net)) that constantly updated a delay effect I'd modified on my SB Live 5.1's emu10k1 DSP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Anyone knows if it includes any specs about closed captions? It's a source of frustration at times with the previous spec.

<comment><USER24> I know "closed captions" are a special thing, but really, shouldn't the rendering device (TV decoder, GPU, software, whatever) be rendering the subtitles instead of the display device? I watch almost everything with subtitles, and can't imagine not being able to adjust subtitles (size/depth) and also enjoy the high-quality rendering my PC can perform.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Any word about power?

</comment><comment><USER32> Fsck 4k. I want holodecks!

<comment><USER33> The closest you'll get to those for a while, is VR like the Oculus Rift, and 4K screens (tiny, phone-size ones) would help that a LOT. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> tl;dr but hopefully they've added a power supply via hdmi as well otherwise things like chromecast will still need a usb for that :D

<comment><USER35> > _tl;dr_

It's five sentences.

HN, as a site for stories that gratify intellectual curiosity, may not be the right site for you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Cool, now I can go repurchase all my cables. At least they're cheap, right?

<comment><USER37> You will need gold plated cables that have resonance crystal around them to reduce polarisation

<comment><USER33> You'll also need to plug them in correctly, as they're one way: plug them in wrong and your video will play in reverse.</comment></comment></comment>


Upgraded Google Glass helps autistic kids "see" emotions - <AUTHOR> https://spectrum.ieee.org/biomedical/bionics/upgraded-google-glass-helps-autistic-kids-see-emotions <comment><USER2> I wonder what effect this will have on our culture long term. It would be unfortunate if Glass' determination ends being seen as the ground truth.

I have noticed a certain phenomenon where people who are bad at something read books about it to compensate, and then having read books on the subjects start considering themselves experts on it and preach to others, closing the loop from descriptive to prescriptive.

Edited: Added second paragraph

<comment><USER3> Only a beginner can teach a beginner. First you struggle. Then you think you know it all. Then you forget what was so hard. Then you master it. And then you realize you know very little.

<comment><USER4> And yet, oddly, sometimes mastery confers the inability to teach something, because most of what you now know, you never learned in association to a structured explanation, only in association to your own trained reflexes.

People who learn a second language understand its grammar from the first stroke, since it's taught along with the language. People who learn a first language _recognize_ its grammar (i.e. they can tell you whether or not something is grammatical) but don't _understand_ it, because they picked the language up "naturally."

Often a master will come to a sophomore student and ask _them_ to explain a concept to the juniors (after checking their explanation for not having any faults the master can find), because a usual master's explanation (presuming the master isn't also a master of education) is far less _useful_ to a junior's understanding than a sophomore's is. The master is aware of nuances that greatly affect the end result, but aren't so relevant at first; while the sophomore is aware mostly of things in the order they've managed to absorb them so far—which likely reflects the order of least-to-most difficult to absorb, and so reflects the things the juniors would be most likely to be struggling with.

<comment><USER5> Is that odd?

I think of teaching something as a separate skill. As you say, teaching is about helping a student where they are. Mastering topic X doesn't convey knowledge of how students A, B, and C each relate to topic X.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It is worth noting that difficulties in recognising emotions in faces are by no means unique to ASD; they also occur in ADHD [1], anxiety disorders [2], schizophrenia [3], and probably other psychiatric/neurodevelopmental disorders as well. So, if this technology has value, its value would be a lot broader than only ASD.

(As an aside, a lot of people tend to have this narrow focus on just ASD to the exclusion of other psychiatric/neurodevelopmental disorders, despite the fact that all these disorders have lots of overlap and rather fuzzily defined boundaries. None of the symptoms of ASD are unique to ASD; they all occur in other conditions also; given that all treatments for ASD are treating symptoms rather than the unknown underlying causes, any therapy for any ASD symptom is very likely to also work for other disorders in which the same symptom is expressed.)

[1] [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Da_Fonseca/public...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David_Da_Fonseca/publication/23134164_Emotion_Understanding_in_Children_with_ADHD/links/542a51de0cf27e39fa8e7dc2.pdf)

[2] [https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Monk2/publi...](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Christopher_Monk2/publication/7573340_Emotion_Recognition_Deficits_in_Pediatric_Anxiety_Disorders_Implications_for_Amygdala_Research/links/57c0a3f908aeb95224d4a508/Emotion- Recognition-Deficits-in-Pediatric-Anxiety-Disorders-Implications-for-Amygdala- Research.pdf)

[3] [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00063...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006322300008477)

<comment><USER7> That makes good sense. ASD is a catch all term for those with certain symptoms that are unexplained by other factors. Schizophrenia and anxiety disorders would be some of those other factors. Not sure about ADHD.

<comment><USER8> There is substantial comorbidity with ASD and ADHD. ADHD occurs in ~4.4% of the general population, but with ASD that goes up to ~45% (the margin of error is massive on the latter)

Some of the symptoms of ADHD, like RSD (rejection sensitive dysphoria), sound very much like ASD traits rather than ADHD traits.

In the future I think we'll find a lot more underlying commonalities of all of these conditions. OCD, GID (gender identity disorder), misophonia, tourettes and more are also strikingly comorbid within ASD.

<comment><USER5> There was a great Philosophy Bites podcast that talked about the high comorbidity of mental disorders. This one, I think: [https://philosophybites.com/2016/01/steven-hyman-on- categori...](https://philosophybites.com/2016/01/steven-hyman-on-categorising- mental-disorders.html)

The point that stuck with me is that, as you say, the high comorbidity is strong evidence that we have a bad model of the situation. Part of that for me is the medicalization of deviance.

As an example, I saw a bit on Twitter from an autism researcher who was sitting in on a young girl getting tested for autism. She was shown an animation of triangles moving around in a way that neurotypicals would anthropomorphize: [https://twitter.com/DrRubySapphire/status/123278780736346112...](https://twitter.com/DrRubySapphire/status/1232787807363461120)

She described how the triangles moved instead of humanizing them. She recognized that they looked like they were playing, but knew that triangles didn't have minds. That was marked as a failure, a sign of sickness. Not because she was wrong, but because she was different from the norm.

I think a lot about the world where we just accept that there are a bunch of different kinds of people and stop trying to fit them all into one mold. Where we make the world work for all of them, not just the "normal" ones (which, historically, seems to mean straight, white, moneyed, neurotypical men of a particular body type).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Such studies, papers and news always makes me cringe. It seems overly engineered with limited usefulness.

Superpower glass … really?

As background I work in public research and have no background in Autism research. Yet, due to a mutual friend, I was lucky to meet Kelly Hunter, and attend one of her workshops (together with several other researchers working on helping autistic children). I knew the Stanford project, mentioned it and got just strange looks: "This does not really solve any of the problems we are facing" It seems detecting facial emotions are not the main problems of the autistic children they are dealing with ...

[https://flutetheatre.co.uk/changing-lives-of-people-with- aut...](https://flutetheatre.co.uk/changing-lives-of-people-with-autism/)

Here's work from a friend on the topic: [https://www.ucl.ac.uk/grand- challenges/sites/grand-challenge...](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/grand- challenges/sites/grand-challenges/files/sensing-interpersonal-synchrony.pdf)

The system itself can just help children with very mild symptoms. One colleague who works on wearable sensing for them mentioned that even head bands and wrist watches cannot be used as children commonly take them off and throw them around.

Kelly also runs a fundraiser right now in case somebody wants to help out. In my personal opinion much more useful than the solution described in the ieee article: [https://www.facebook.com/donate/574661226469627/101582037614...](https://www.facebook.com/donate/574661226469627/10158203761499289/)

<comment><USER10> What's the point of knowing someone is angry if you do not know why he is angry? Detecting emotions doesn't strike me as particularly useful. Manipulating emotions of others on the other hand,...

<comment><USER11> Knowing someone is angry allows you to act accordingly.

If you don't know someone is sad how do you console them?

There's a great comedy on Netflix called Atypical, one of the things the main character deals with in this show is his inability to read peoples emotions.

<comment><USER10> That you think a sad person needs consoling reveals your lack of understanding of the problem. It wouldn't occur to an autistic person to console someone who is sad. The ability to read emotion isn't useful on its own. You also need to know how to react to this emotion. Knowing someone is angry won't help you if you have no idea how to defuse this anger. Social interactions do not make sense for autistic people and need to be learned like a foreign language. It's like writing a computer program. You have to be very precise when telling a computer what to do and the same goes for autistic people. You can't just tell them someone is angry and expect them to know what to do. Or when someone is sad, even if you tell them that they have to console such a person, they'd have no idea what consoling even is and how to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It sounds to me like you could do a lot more to just educate the parents.

You don't get mad and shout at a young child who has decided to put the silverware away. You talk to them about the process of making and serving dinner. He could have been shown that one way to make the silverware more orderly is set the table for everyone while Mom cooks.

That was my response to my then five year old being impatient with dinner not being ready. I taught him he was allowed to set the table to keep himself occupied and help me get dinner ready faster.

He wasn't required to set it. He was empowered to do so if he chose rather than being a pain in the butt for me.

<comment><USER13> The point is that autistic people may not possess a theory of mind. They do not understand or anticipate the desires and intentions of others, and may not be aware that other people even have desires and intentions. You can't explain dinner to them if they are unable to comprehend that you intend to make it and that you desire the space and time to do so efficiently.

<comment><USER14> After having interacted with a person with autism daily for a few years (and parts of their social groups which include others with autism) I wonder if there's any truth to that at all.

It almost seems as the opposite was true where telling of intention and desire is _extremely accurate_, to a scary degree, if it's interpreted through text or speech. But where body language and weird social norms/white lies that are important social queues for me go completely unnoticed.

If people not on the spectrum actually understand others intentions and desires more, and not just have the ability to read it from social queues people on the spectrum don't pick up, what does that say about so many people acting in selfish and mean ways if it benefits them?

<comment><USER12> I'm absolutely not aspie. I sometimes get accused of being such. It's always because I'm saying "The emperor has no clothes!" and people don't like it and want to shut me up and pretend I have no social skills whatsoever (to try to create plausible deniability for their crap).

I spent a lot of time in therapy. I've learned to keep more quiet about things that seem obvious to me because I do at times miss the fact that what is obvious to me is something someone else thinks they are very cleverly hiding or some crap. Like anyone, I have something of a tendency to assume that what is obvious to me is obvious to others.

An awful lot of so-called social skill appears to be knowing what polite lies you are supposed to collude with to make the people around you comfortable. This is actually the root cause of the persistence of a lot of social ills.

If you can't tell someone "Yeah, that's racist/classist/sexist baloney, give me a break" because that's too rude to tolerate, don't be all shocked when the world is overrun with racism, classism, sexism, etc.

Abusive people also count on normalizing their ugly behaviors and on people around them not saying "No, dude, that's not funny at all. Stop that." We have movie scenes where some child is hiding from a visiting aunt and her icky slobbery kisses and tendency to pinch his cheeks hard and the parents giggle about the behavior of the child rather than tell the aunt "Bitch, keep your hands to yourself. No, you don't have a right to do this to my child. They don't like it, so don't do it."

And then we are all mystified at how to stop child molesters. But you can't tell people "Um, yeah. You are actively colluding with child molesters when you do stuff like that."

Because that would be rude. Or something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> On one hand, I really welcome technologies like this that empower people in a huge way. On the other hand, I really dread that in this case it comes from the company that wants to know everything about you.

The example where Google hid a microphone in Nest makes me believe they will do anything to get more information from people. I think it's not beyond Google to use people's handicaps to improve the image of Google Glass. Sorry to put it like that...

</comment><comment><USER16> Alexithymia (this inability to recognise emotion in yourself or others) is common in autistic people, but it's neither sufficient nor required for the diagnosis. (It's not even part of the diagnosis).

I mention this because autistic people often wait a long time for a diagnosis, and part of that is this idea that all autistic people are unable to recognise emotion.

[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092493381...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924933818301779)

</comment><comment><USER17> I imagine that there are nuances to facial expression that might be difficult to extract from an image or video, depending on the parameters to your ML model.

For example, if someone looks into my eyes, furrows their brows, and shakes their head slowly back and forth, this could mean that they are intensely sympathetic with me (when I am talking), or it could mean that they are disgusted with what I have said (when I have stopped talking), or many other things. If you add sound input to your model then maybe it can figure out how to incorporate that dimension into its results.

Very cool though. Maybe you could have something like this to help colorblind people see colors, deaf people see sounds, the possibilities are exciting.

<comment><USER18> I assume there are potential users who can't easily perceive furrowing of brows, but who could infer its context-dependent meaning if it were made more obvious when it's happening.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I've wanted something exactly like this, i can read emotions when iam putting close effort into the activity however it's exhausting to do so, reducing the mental toll on myself and other in social interaction is appreciated. Less meltdowns and misunderstandings would a upgrade. while it sounds too good to be true at this moment i worry that the black box that tells the user the emotion gives no feedback to why it did so, transparently to the user to make a good judgement is essential. this becomes the heading aid to the autistic it will be same problem the hearing impaired deal with then people find issue with the different.

</comment><comment><USER20> The idea is great. I guess i would prefer to use the glasses by Bosch instead, that looks like totally normal glasses and projects an image directly on to the retina. [https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/optical- microsystem...](https://www.bosch-sensortec.com/products/optical- microsystems/smartglasses-light-drive/)

</comment><comment><USER21> Although it may be creepy from the perspective of privacy, for those who are okay with it, I imagine that children struggling with Theory of Mind performance might benefit from recording their everyday experiences, and then later having a trusted therapist offer guiding opinion. Google Glass seems to be amenable to something like that.

</comment><comment><USER22> Sounds great on paper but I highly disagree with the universality of emotions and their represented facial clues. How Emotions Are Made by Lisa Barrett goes into great lengths about this. I think taking this technology into a categorization of emotions is faulty at best and dangerous at worst.

</comment><comment><USER23> I could use this. Never been tested for Aspergers but could never flex that muscle everyone else seems to have where they can "read the room". Wife swears I'm on the spectrum. This would save me from many future difficult situations.

</comment><comment><USER24> Some good info written in annoying marketing press release style. Would be good to get this as a phone app with a headmounted camera, since that's far cheaper than Google Glass + doctor's prescription.

<comment><USER25> > The glasses are not meant to be a permanent prosthesis. The kids do > 20-minute sessions a few times a week in their own homes, and the entire > intervention currently lasts for six weeks. Children are expected to quickly > learn how to detect the emotions of their social partners and then, after > they've gained social confidence, stop using the glasses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Cultural differences will be one of the difficulties for this idea to be successful. Eg, I know that some cultural, they smile when scared. You can see where this might lead to the wrong conclusion.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is awful. Autistic kids don't need to change how they view emotions. Other people need to be more accepting that other people may not care about their emotions as much as they do.

<comment><USER28> If this works effectively I think it's a valuable choice to offer to autistic people - whether they choose to use it or not is totally valid of course. Often what people with disabilities are forced to do is choose an imperfect "accommodation", or choose to not participate in something at all, since it is not an option to instantly convert our society to a more compassionate, understanding, and fair place.

I agree with you that the real thing here is that we should accept all people regardless of how they view/prioritize our emotions and meet each other where we all are. But until we are all in that same agreement, I'm all for tools that provide increased agency/information to people who want to use those tools.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I wonder about the opposite application - using it to read autistic emotional signs. Outbursts have ample build up and signs but they aren't noticed or are misread. Because autistic tells aren't neccessarily the same. I liken the situation to trying to treat a cat like a dog and then wondering why they claw you after wagging its tail - in cats that doesn't mean "happy" it means "back off!". Communication is fundamentally a two way street.

</comment><comment><USER30> Google glasses for the blind are now available for preorder.

[https://www.letsenvision.com/glasses](https://www.letsenvision.com/glasses)

</comment><comment><USER31> This is pretty cool. I didn't really get to do this sorta thing with a speech therapist until I was in middle school. I think it'd be pretty good for young children.

One small worry... I wouldn't want the child to get overdependent on the device. Perhaps it would be good if they only wear it for a certain portion of the day? Not sure.

</comment><comment><USER32> I have a son with Austism, and this is a very interesting project. But why? It is better to teach the reading of body language.

</comment><comment><USER33> Interesting that emojis of faces can be identified but not actual faces. Is this because the emoji is just much simpler to process?

<comment><USER34> Emoji faces look identical while people differ in their facial expressions and how they choose to show them.

<comment><USER33> Sure, but you would think that after seeing your parents' expressions for year's you would start to recognize them eventually too. I'm wondering what makes symbols that much easier to understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> First thing that occurs to me is how easily this can be used/exploited by people with less than great intentions.

</comment><comment><USER36> Now we just need a version for neurotypical people to allow them to see the emotions of the autistic.

See 'double empathy problem'.

</comment><comment><USER37> So instead of kids learning to recognize emotions on the human face, we will teach them to recognize symbols in the glasses that describe these emotions? And this will make them to interact with people better? I don't think this is progress.

</comment><comment><USER38> Seems funny that the symbol for a happy face is a happy face emoji.

</comment><comment><USER39> Autism is also a _sensory_ disorder. Speaking entirely for myself, I would find the additional stimuli distracting at best and unbearable at worst.

</comment><comment><USER40> Oh wow...google glass, that's something I haven't seen in a long time.

</comment><comment><USER41> The implications of this are vast - what more could we accomplish with this kind of technology? I'm so excited to see what's on the horizon. Bravo.

</comment><comment><USER42> Unfortunately it seems that something will need to change within society at large in order for these to be acceptable outside of the home.

<comment><USER43> Outside of tech circles, does anyone care enough to remember? It was a fad for a week.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I want this and I want this now.

</comment><comment><USER45> Is this a claim that computers are better at emotions than some humans? Something does not sit well.

<comment><USER46> this robot can walk better than a disabled human in a wheelchair? something does not sit well.

<comment><USER47> The robot does not sit well.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Disable downvoting? - <AUTHOR>

I feel downvoting is out of hand. People are afraid to make comments that might had value but doesn't match the HN culture. Content should be about quality not conformity. <comment><USER2> > People are afraid to make comments that might had value but doesn't match > the HN culture.

I know this affects me and suppresses my willingness to post. The result is that I keep most of my shitty comments to myself. I behave much worse on other discussion forums.

For example, if I have a countervailing opinion, on other forums often I'll just post it, and the way I'll post it will be designed to make the people that would disagree with them (prototypically, havers of idiotic European political opinions) unhappy by making them witness opinions that they disagree with. I do that with less frequency here -- here, I'll try to make it palatable and relatable in a way that's not totally saturated with spergacious obnoxiousness. I guess most of the reason is just the general expectation of professionalism that's maintained here, not specific fear of negative karma, but that atmosphere is not maintained by upvotes. (In fact, my most-upvoted comments, not that I have many, are almost always pop vacuouity that I think should have been downvoted.)

I think a lot of other people here would post a lot worse, too, without downvotes and without the visible "fade" effect.

Edit: For example, here's a comment of mine that was rightfully downvoted: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867833](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867833) My opinion is right, of course, but it could have been much better presented. And here's a comment where I got downvoted for disagreeing with the thread- local hivemind: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867309](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8867309) So what if I got downvoted! Sometimes that's what you get when you engage with idiots. It's not the end of the world.

</comment><comment><USER3> We certainly agree that HN comments should be of good quality.

What's usually lacking in these discussions about downvotes are specific examples. I'm biased, but it seems to me that's because it's usually pretty easy to see how downvoted comments got there. But you have to wait a while to see the effect. Unfair downvotes happen, but the community usually corrects them after a while. So reacting too quickly to unfair downvotes—other than by giving them a corrective upvote—is always a mistake, as is making the thread worse by complaining about it.

HN's voting system is flawed, but I've yet to hear of any alternative to downvoting that wouldn't, in my view, make the quality problem worse.

<comment><USER4> Two things that might mitigate the effect of unfair downvoting (and reactions to them), such as they are - removing the fade effect from comments until they've reached a threshold of downvotes, and removing visible karma.

Downvoting already seems to do its job affecting the sort order of the threads - people who want to avoid low karma threads can just not scroll down to see them.

<comment><USER3> By visible karma do you mean the point score that one sees beside one's own comments? Taking that away would be a pretty drastic change.

The thing about sort order is that it only applies to root comments, and plenty of downvoteable comments get attached to higher-ranking ones. So it doesn't feel to me like sort order is sufficient.

<comment><USER4> >By visible karma do you mean the point score that one sees beside one's own comments

Yes, not showing it at all, or maybe not showing it immediately. Initially, downvotes don't really provide concrete feedback other than "someone disagreed with this for reasons," since there are no real guidelines for downvoting. But if a comment gets downvoted more than a few times and not corrected by the community, the commenter has likely crossed some line the community in general agrees on.

>The thing about sort order is that it only applies to root comments (...)

Fair enough, but why not sort the entire tree then?

<comment><USER3> > Yes, not showing it at all, or maybe not showing it immediately

Interesting. Will think about that.

> Fair enough, but why not sort the entire tree then?

I might be misunderstanding you, but I don't think you can't do that without giving up threaded comments (i.e. comment trees). That is, if a good comment is at the top and a heavily downvoted comment is its only reply, the latter will be second from the top no matter what we do. No?

<comment><USER4> What I meant is that for any node in the tree, sort the immediate children by karma, and treat each level as a separate sort. You would still keep all of the parent/child relationships, but the order they render in would change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I strongly agree. People often downvote opposite opinions, not bad quality.

</comment><comment><USER6> At this point in time the top ten submissions have 355 comments, 7 of which are grayed out, 1 of which is really grayed out. What makes you think it's out of hand?

</comment><comment><USER7> Or allow anyone to downvote. I personally feel my opinions are oppressed by the downvote overlords. Down with them I say!

</comment><comment><USER8> Yep. I don't comment much any more. And don't forget only certain people get to downvote as it is.

</comment><comment><USER9> I personally don't think downvoting is out of hand.

Then again, I have a script that edits the "fade" effect to still be readable (it changes it to green instead, like new usernames).

It frustrates me that I have to use said script, however.

</comment><comment><USER10> I feel the same way. I find that my comments result in three outcomes- nothing significant, significant uproots or significant down votes. The ones with significant down votes are not any different in quality than the ones with significant uproots... however they are the ones that are less correlated with what I'd call the "HN ideological positions".

I really don't like that heavily downvoted comments are invisible, it's literally silencing the opposition in a way.

Upvotes only lets people surface the stuff they think is really good. The upvote action is inspired by strong agreement or liking of a comment, or respect. Down vote is almost always a negative emotion.</comment>


Square Releases Open Source WebSocket Client for Objective-C - <AUTHOR> http://corner.squareup.com/2012/02/socketrocket-websockets.html

<comment><USER2> Is there any reason to use WebSockets on native apps other than if you want to share one server between native and web?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think it's the same reason you would want to use good old HTTP over raw sockets for a request/response API, even though with a native client you _could_ just invent your own protocol.

If you want bidirectional communication to your app, it's much easier to make a server that uses the WebSocket Protocol (tornado, etc.) instead of rolling your own server and protocol.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Thank god. I have worked extensively with cocoa-websocket and socketio-cocoa and they are a complete mess.

Square has done a lot for iOS open source, with their unit test framework and other libraries and now this.

</comment><comment><USER4> So, following up on the link in another comment on this article [1] to socket.IO-objc [2], one goes through a few forks of cocoa-websocket [3,4,5] to arrive at zimt [6].

Are there reasons to use SocketRocket over these other libraries (either socket.IO-objc, or the various forked lineage of cocoa-websocket/zimt)?

(Also, to ask the question I always have to ask: is there a reason for a new library rather than contributing to one of the existing ones, possibly even helping Unitt support RFC6455?)

[1] <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3563527> [2] <https://github.com/pkyeck/socket.IO-objc> [3] <https://github.com/samlown/cocoa-websocket> [4] <https://github.com/adamjernst/cocoa-websocket> [5] <https://github.com/erichocean/cocoa-websocket> [6] <https://github.com/esad/zimt>

<comment><AUTHOR> Cocoa-websocket doesn't seem to support the latest standard[1]. You can tell because the handshake has key1 and key2 which is protocol 00[2]

Re: socket.IO, I haven't actually used it, so correct me if my assumptions are wrong, but the objc client doesn't seem to use WebSockets as a transport. So I imagine you can get the same bidirectional semantics if by using socket.IO- objc if you want to limit yourself to servers written in node (or have a socket.IO bridge).

However, why not go with standards? Since socket.IO supports websockets, the objc implementation could be backed by SocketRocket easily.

My two biggest complaints against Unitt & cocoa-websocket aside from them not supporting RFC6455 is having CocoaAsyncSocket as a dependency.

I've dug deep into it's implementation, and even had a prototype of SocketRocket that used it (basically went from CocoaAsync to dispatch_io to CFStream), and I'm not too impressed. Also, CocoAsync 2x or 3x more code than the entire WebSocket implementation without it. It also has drastically different codepaths for iOS and Cocoa and it's very difficult to see what's going on. Makes testing more difficult.

The other reason I decided to roll my own is just a learning experience. At first I wanted an excuse to play with new libdispatch io stuff[3].

[1] [https://github.com/samlown/cocoa- websocket/blob/master/WebSo...](https://github.com/samlown/cocoa- websocket/blob/master/WebSocket.m#L33)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket#draft-ietf-hybi- thewe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebSocket#draft-ietf-hybi- thewebsocketprotocol-00)

[3] [http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/libdispatch/libdispat...](http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/libdispatch/libdispatch-187.5/dispatch/io.h)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> We are currently using UnittWebSocketClient in our iOS app to communicate with a Tornado server:

<http://code.google.com/p/unitt/wiki/UnittWebSocketClient>

It has worked well so far, but I'm glad to see more activity in this area.

<comment><AUTHOR> The reason Unitt didn't work for us is that it isn't updated to work with the latest WebSocket protocol. This is an issue, especially since there's finally a standard (RFC 6455)

tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455

Tornado is nice since it implements some of the legacy versions of WebSockets, but there are many servers that will probably deprecate them sooner rather than later.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You guys are constantly pushing out cool stuff, just started using KIF and I really like it. Thanks for open sourcing guys!

</comment><comment><USER7> Great to see this... I've been using libPusher, but it's specific to the Pusher service (which is actually pretty great).

Perhaps libPusher can just start using SocketRocket as a dependency and wrap it in Pusher-specific goodness...

<comment><AUTHOR> This would be cool. We've been experimenting with uses for WebSockets. One of them is mocking push notifications in the simulator. The other is basically implementing a pusher-like service with a pub-sub model.

<comment><USER8> Pusher-like service implementations are very easy, I know, I've built one[1] and there are others[2]!

If you have any questions, feel free to email me.

[1] <https://github.com/danbeaulieu/PushPlay>

[2] <https://github.com/stevegraham/slanger>

<comment><AUTHOR> Rad! Somebody pointed out slanger to me previously, but I was unaware of PushPlay. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I'm using Socket.IO via an Obj-C lib, is there a point to taking a look at this? Should the Socket.IO community look at integrating this as the engine behind the client on Obj-C, or is there little/no benefit?

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm unsure what you mean by "Socket.IO via an Obj-C lib". Could you send a link? It looks like Socket.IO is node (which I don't believe you can use in iOS).

<comment><USER10> Here's a link to a socket.io client library in Obj-C:

<https://github.com/pkyeck/socket.IO-objc>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Does this get around the shitty reverse-proxies mobile providers set up that kill websocket connections?

<comment><AUTHOR> I can't answer this yet. I'd be curious to hear</comment></comment>


New York Times Redesign - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/redesign/ <comment><USER2> It's great to see newspapers trying to improve the reading experience itself (single page stories that aren't broken up into a dozen pages for pageviews, removing distractions etc), since many of the other news websites smother the user in advertisements, popovers and social media buttons to the point where it feels like you have to battle the site just to read the story itself. It remains to be seen how this redesign will feel in practice, but it seems to have all the right intentions.

When it comes to news websites, my current favorite is the design for The Daily Beast.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sorry to go off on a tangent, but: I would love to subscribe to NYT digital editions, but why must the digital edition cost almost as much as the paper edition? Imagine the waste involved (in energy and materials)! Current home delivery rates are $8.75 for paper, and $5.00 for internet. That is simply too much. Bring it down to $1/week and we'll talk.

<comment><USER4> The answer isn't environmentally friendly, but it has solid business logic behind it.

From what I understand, upping their print circulation lets them charge more for print advertisers (which pays more than digital advertisers), so NYT has a strong financial incentive to make the prices for digital/print comparable, in order to try to convince people to get the print version as well, instead of just the digital.

Because all print advertisers know are the circulation numbers -- they have no idea if you're actually opening it up or not, or just sending them all straight to the recycling bin while you read them digitally.

Again, not environmentally friendly. At least it's all recycled though.

<comment><USER5> >Because all print advertisers know are the circulation numbers -- they have no idea if you're actually opening it up or not, or just sending them all straight to the recycling bin while you read them digitally.

Presumably the price of print ads is in some way related to typical response rate? Obviously there is less direct feedback than online, but advertisers aren't flying completely blind and just assuming people see their ads, right?

<comment><USER6> Oh, no. Print advertisers are almost completely unable to gather meaningful statistics. Prices are determined by circulation x a fuzzy notion of impact.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It'd be ... nice? useful? different? ... if I could get the video to play.

 _Edit:_ Well, waddya know, it's downloadable. And in Ogg format ("Ogg data, Skeleton v4.0" per file(1)). So, no, doesn't work in my browser for whatever reason, but I can download and play it locally, which works better for me anyway.

Of the changes, the depagination is probably one of the more useful to me. I've actually written my own CSS to drastically reformat how NY Times pages render (a few screenshots here, among others: [http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1tm4ox/user_site_res...](http://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/1tm4ox/user_site_restyling_multicolumn_vs_fullwidth/))

The side-to-side viewing stuff I've found really annoying on other sites, especially if it's tied in to arrow-key navigation or other stuff. I tend to find myself sliding off the page I want to be on.

</comment><comment> k-mcgrady Not a great start. Clicked subsribe and was brought to a page which said: "New Features. New Navigation. New Experience. Try the redesigned nytimes.com, just $5 for 12 weeks". So I signed up to give it a try and I've still got the old design.

Edit: Just noticed an ad on the main page saying the design is actually coming on Jan 8th.

</comment><comment><USER8> Most of it is good, but the thing that kills it is the inline comments.

When I want to get down and read an article, I want to get down and _read_ the damn thing, not be faced with comments that most often reiterate whatever's in the article anyway.

Keep the comments where they should be – AFTER the article.

<comment><USER4> I wouldn't knock it until you see it. I'll be curious -- and NYT articles generally have curated "Times' Picks" comments that often genuinely add to the articles. Remember, most articles don't even have comments -- only the ones which the NYT deems comment-worthy, and they do put forth editorial efforts at quality control.

<comment><USER9> People who comment on the NYTimes are literate and can use full sentences. But beyond that it's about as useful as any other general-purpose comment board: a whole lot of self-selecting, self-important, in-group tribal bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I really hope this isn't another bandwagoning AJAX infinite scroll implementation. When will people learn those are a bad idea?

</comment><comment><USER11> Crashes iOS 7 Safari and Chrome on an iPhone 4S

<comment><USER12> Isn't quite crash on iOS 7 Safari on iPad Air, but it felt like it would at any moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Text renders oddly on Windows/Chrome (lots of kerning issues)

<comment><USER14> Did you actually find the redesigned site? When I go to nytimes.com, it doesn't look any different than it has for quite a while. The nytimes.com/redesign link itself vaguely reminds me of the Mavericks announcement page that Apple had up before they actually released it.

In any case, nothing looks odd with kerning on Mac/Safari or Firefox.

<comment><AUTHOR> Front page indicates the redesign is coming Jan 8th.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Is this your doing, dnolen? :)

</comment><comment><USER16> The font aliasing is awful</comment>


If an Algorithm Wrote This, How Would You Even Know? - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/opinion/sunday/if-an-algorithm-wrote-this-how-would-you-even-know.html?ref=opinion

<comment><USER2> Is there an algorithm that can (a) point to something and (b) say something about it?

(a) and (b) can be weakened as much as necessary to give an interesting answer.

</comment><comment><USER3> This sentence was not written by an algorithm

<comment><USER4> This sentence was written by an algorithm that humans did not deliberately implement, and do not fully understand.

<comment><USER5> skynet?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I welcome our robot overlords*

*This message was not written or paid for by an algorithm or robot overlord</comment>


Ask HN: Cloudflare not letting me through? - <AUTHOR>

Right now I can only see HN via a proxy. My normal connection has been giving me an error all day - is there anything I can do to fix it. The proxy is not allowing me to use search, even though I have theoretically enabled Javascript, so I can't see if this has been asked already.
Yeah, that didn't work. Try again, perhaps later?
Web server is returning an unknown error
There is an unknown connection issue between CloudFlare and the origin web server. As a result, the web page can not be displayed.
Ray ID: [some hex stuff]
Your IP address: [my IP]
Error reference number: 520
CloudFlare Location: London <comment><USER2> If I had to guess, your IP is banned by HN, and CloudFlare interprets our closing the connection as a connection issue.

Since you've not listed your IP, I can't check, but if you want help, feel free to email me.

<comment><AUTHOR> email sent - thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Contact CloudFlare to make them aware of the problem? London system status seems fine, so if there is indeed a problem, they might not be aware of it ([https://www.cloudflare.com/system-status](https://www.cloudflare.com/system- status)). Try a DNS cache flush and/or use Google's nameservers (188.8.131.52/22.214.171.124) although I'd be surprised if this fixed it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for these ideas, I will try them out. In the meantime I have contacted Cloudflare and await their response.

<comment><USER3> Better yet, email kogir since he graciously offered to help: (nick) at (ycombinator.com) , Nick being his first name it seems.</comment></comment></comment>


Key Elements of a Massively Scalable Startup - <AUTHOR> http://startup-marketing.com/key-elements-of-a-massively-scalable-startup/ <comment><USER2> Interesting ideas. But would be a lot better with some evidence. Take some examples of massively scaled start ups and explain how they conform to the theory.</comment>


A Lincoln High teacher gets all his students to pass the AP Calculus exam - <AUTHOR> http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0103-lopez-yom-teacher-20160201-column.html <comment><USER2> This article is strange. Unless something has changed recently, AP exams do not have a concept of pass or fail. You get a score and colleges can choose to give you college credit based on the score.

I got a 1 on the AP Calculus exam but colleges wanted a 3 or a 4 or a 5 depending on their requirements to give me credit for college calc. So I have no idea what it means to have everybody 'pass'.

I have no doubt he's probably an exceptional teacher. That AP Calculus test was really really hard when I took it a decade ago, but the metrics don't make any sense to me

<comment><USER3> _So I have no idea what it means to have everybody 'pass'._

That reminds me of this:

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

It's interesting to see where the 'pass' bar is in different countries. I've always found the 50% mark, which seems quite popular, to be rather unusual since it implies that someone who 'passed' essentially was correct on only half the material tested (which is then a fraction of the material actually taught), and in any other setting a 50% failure rate would be completely unacceptable.

<comment><USER4> I have had many tests where the material tested is not a strict subset of the material taught, and some problems require creative generalization or insight during the test.

<comment><USER5> I had this too in Mechanical Engineering, especially on exams where you have e.g. an hour and a half to solve 5 problems and more so as you take higher level classes. There would often be room for interpretation in the questions, and part of the problem was to make sure you're making the right assumptions about the system.

I remember one test in particular in a class about heat transfer where one question was essentially "Same problem as the previous question, but now assume <something less simplistic>". My answer was something along the lines of, "Whoops, I already made that assumption in the previous question. Extra points?" The professor was kind enough to grant me a few bonus points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade- point/wp/2016/02/1...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade- point/wp/2016/02/10/this-teenager-is-one-of-12-students-in-the-world-who-aced- the-ap-calculus-exam/)

> Nearly 2.5 million students took a total of almost 4.5 million AP tests > overall last year. Of the test-takers, just 322 obtained every point > possible on an AP test, and perfect scores were logged on 21 of the 36 AP > exams. Here's the breakdown of those perfect scores:

67 in Computer Science A

55 in Spanish Language and Culture

54 in Microeconomics

36 in German Language and Culture

22 in Macroeconomics

16 in Studio Art: Drawing Portfolio

12 in Calculus AB

11 in Calculus BC

11 in Physics C: Mechanics

7 in Japanese Language and Culture

7 in Studio Art: 2-D Design Portfolio

4 in Chemistry

4 in Psychology

4 in Italian Language and Culture

3 in U.S. Government and Politics

2 in French Language and Culture

2 in Physics C: Electricity and Magnetism

2 in Statistics

2 in U.S. History

2 in Studio Art: 3-D Design Portfolio

1 in Latin

\-----

Surprisingly low numbers, considering how many hundreds of students ace their calculus tests in college.

<comment><USER7> I took AP Latin: Vergil in high school. That was one of the hardest classes I've ever had to take because the grammar is so complex (I'm also not surprised Japanese has few perfect scores). I know I didn't get a passing score.

I'm surprised however that Chinese has no perfect scores. I remember some students that had moved from Taiwan or China would take AP Chinese to get free college credits. The grammar of Chinese is so simple compared to Latin or Japanese. And from what I recall, AP Chinese tested Mandarin at a 2nd grade level, and didn't test much or any of the _chengyu_ (成語: Chinese proverbs) of which are difficult because of the shear number to remember.

Perhaps graders could tell they were native speakers, and thus raised the bar? (I took 3rd-year Chinese as a filler class "language requirement" in college and the professor expected high-school level of Chinese while she expected chicken scratch from others for the same grade.)

AP Computer Science seems likely to have a good number of perfect scores. I remember a test reviewer telling me that they often overlooked syntactical errors (unbalanced parentheses) and would allow API calls to incorrectly labeled API functions. (I don't disagree, because CS is more about understanding data structures than it is knowing how to put code on paper without an IDE or reference.)

<comment><USER8> I wouldn't be surprised that a native speaker would do something one way, and a test would insist the 'correct' way is actually pretty awkward and wouldn't be used.

<comment><USER9> This... In Vietnam seeing some (as a 30yr old native English speaker) of the "correct" answers to VN made English homework or tests is interesting to say the least. The questions are so awkward, pretty sure the only reason the students able to deduce the answer is because they have been taught vn-English so it makes sense to them ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is this that unusual? I'm sure there are many teachers out there whose entire classes passed.

I'm pretty sure in high school, my entire class passed. It was unusual for people to fail APs. (My high school only admitted the top 2% scorers on an admission test, so it was biased towards high exam scorers.)

<comment><USER11> Yeah, I'll second that. I know at my high school (a private one) the AP Chem class had all 5s for 10+ years.

<comment><USER12> All 5s on the AP Chem test for 10+ years? Absolutely not possibly. If it happened there would be many news stories about it.

<comment><USER13> I think you underestimate some private schools. At least at mine, high level APs would have only 10ish specially approved students with a professor who'd taught the class forever. Our calc BC professor had supposedly only had 3 non-5s in his decade or two of teaching the course. Besides that, if a professor suspected you wouldn't pass, you would just be asked to not take the exam. Don't think I ever heard of someone actually failing one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> In the 1987, I took the afternoons of my senior year and went to the local community college since we got 3 credits a semester free and paid only $15/credit after that. Students are still doing that here (now its considered dual HS / College credit). AP classes just don't make sense in that context, and I would imagine if a student in a podunk high school on the reservation in the 80's could do that, it must be more common at decent high schools.

<comment><USER15> I went to a Catholic all-boys high school and many of us walked to the Catholic college a few blocks away to earn college credits. I'd say the top quarter of my graduating class started college as Sophomores or better.

From the other end, the Catholic grade school across the street sent some of their 7th and 8th graders to take classes with us at the high school.

This was in the mid-90s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am not sure if such clean-looking, new-looking classes are standard in the US, but it gives me a tad of skepticism... Is this school in an affluent neighborhood?

<comment><USER17> I used to live in the neighborhood (Lincoln Heights). It's a lower income, primarily latino neighborhood of Los Angeles. I've never visited Lincoln High School but it's a public school.

[http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/neighborhood/lincoln-h...](http://maps.latimes.com/neighborhoods/neighborhood/lincoln- heights/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> My son attends LASA in Austin. His calc teacher has a 97% rate for his students scoring a 4 or 5 over 15 years. This includes a few students who didn't take the test.

(My son got a '5' on the BC calc AP.)

</comment><comment><USER19> Side note, FYI some embedded ad redirects me to the scammy "fix your Android" thing full of alerts and vibrating the phone. This has been a nightmare on Android recently, happens more and more even on high profile websites. Time to reconsider Firefox Mobile and put and adblocker I think...

<comment><USER20> Whitelisting JavaScript is an okay solution for those not willing to switch from Chrome just yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The "how" is quite lacking.

<comment><USER22> Seems pretty clear to me:

 _Yom says he keeps getting asked if there 's some secret recipe for getting students to perform at their highest potential.

"This may sound corny, but you really have to love them," Yom says. "You build this trust, and at that point, whatever you ask them to do, they'll go the extra mile. The recipe is love."_

Basically it comes down to soft skills. If people think you care about them they will care about what you want and think and help you achieve things together.

<comment><USER23> Which would explain why new 'systems' like common whatever, pushed from the top down, aren't the best way to improve schools.

Which is like forcing programmers into a forced Agile system....it's better to focus on improving the skills of the programmers.

The guy in _Stand and Deliver_ was similar.

<comment><USER24> Common Core, in theory, isn't a problem - unifying standards across schools has a lot of benefits (easier to design reusable curriculums, perform scientific inquiries, develop software). The problem is when it gets conflated with high-stakes testing, which is a terrible thing.

<comment><USER25> High-stakes testing need not be terrible. You just have to be careful:

1\. High-stakes testing requires exam security. One must assume that the teachers and administrators, if rated on student performance, will assist cheating.

2\. High-stakes testing should be spread out across the year, with the result being a running average that discards the low values. (sickness and other bad luck should not be punished) Instead of a week or two of solid testing, do an hour every other week.

3\. Tests should not come from companies that sell textbooks. This is a conflict of interest. It's not good to have an incentive to use non-standard terminology to give an advantage to schools which purchase the matching book.

4\. If you can't test something, and you don't mandate hours for it, it will be removed from the schedule. Ideally you'd test for everything, but testing some subjects (band, shop) is difficult. The hours must be mandated to protect the untestable subjects.

5\. You get what you test for. (see #4 above) High-quality tests are a must. It shouldn't be practical to cram for a test.

<comment><USER24> You did not talk about the necessity of unlinking the results of high-stakes testing and the funding for schools/teachers/districts. Or at the very least, to not penalize low-income areas for low test scores by stripping their budget, since that will only make the situation worse. If anything, more resources should flow to areas with lower test scores, even though the opposite happens (or they just flow to charter schools, which are not a great idea either).

Look beyond the mechanical aspects of the problem, and consider the ramifications of testing within the education system as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> But how did you come up?

<comment><USER27> We detached this subthread from [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11697262](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11697262) and marked it off-topic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> AP Calc is kinda trivial, anyone taking it should pass ...

<comment><USER29> Last year, 42% didn't: [http://www.totalregistration.net/AP-Exam-Registration- Servic...](http://www.totalregistration.net/AP-Exam-Registration- Service/2015-AP-Exam-Score-Distributions.php)

<comment><USER28> Wow that is surprising.

<comment><USER29> If you're surprised by this, then your mental model of the world isn't correct. Might be time to re-calibrate your expectations if you (like I admittedly did) went to school in a nice neighborhood where 90%+ get a 5 in calc AB.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> There was a movie about this in the 80s

<comment><USER31> Stand and Deliver? Different person, different school.

<comment><USER32> different person, different school, different time, but similar situation: dedicated individuals inspire students to believe circumstances better than where they grow up, and strive for them

oh, and similar communities. I could have gone to Garfield, the high school from Stand and Deliver, but opted for Lincoln, when I grew up in this area

<comment><USER31> Same subject too!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's been awhile but the AP exam for me was nothing but rote memorization. You memorize how to solve n types (10? 15? 20?) of problems and then you grind through the test a) identify what type of problem it is b) apply algorithm to solve.

Furthermore the AP exam environment, IMO, varied by the school giving it. I could have easily stored formulas in my calculator (for the calculator section), I could have easily colluded with classmates, and if my teachers wanted to, they could've easily given me the answers. It was a bit of a joke really. Multiple phones went off during the exam, no penalties were given (which I agree is the right approach, but it does say something about the exam itself).

The prestige of the AP program and the experience of taking a number of AP courses has contributed to my declining respect for our higher education system really.

<comment><USER32> In the framework of 'a) identify what type of problem it is b) apply algorithm to solve', how many freshman college classes (what the AP classes try to emulate) don't work within that framework?

While I believe our primary and higher education systems could use a lot of work, I think the AP program is at least respectable as a stepping stone into higher education, especially for communities where higher education isn't a norm or accessible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I've traveled to Europe and Asia and it's saddening to see what a difference they place on the value of Education/teacher compared to us. NC is ranked 48th in the country and willing to give away almost a billion dollars in federal funding over the right to bully transgender individuals.[1][2] Then we have Texas spending 64-million on a _high school_ stadium.[3]

How did we get into this mess where our culture values sports over education? How can we get out of it?

[1] [http://bigstory.ap.org/article/19cce15048484abcac18c836f8c0b...](http://bigstory.ap.org/article/19cce15048484abcac18c836f8c0b241/north- carolina-governor-leads-lawsuit-over-lgbt-rights)

[2] [http://abc11.com/education/survey-calls-nc-the-worst- state-f...](http://abc11.com/education/survey-calls-nc-the-worst-state-for- teachers/329440/)

[3] [http://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2016/05/11/a-texas- hi...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/maurybrown/2016/05/11/a-texas-high-schools- planned-63-million-football-stadium-thats-an-800-lbs-gorilla/#42731cd33b37)

<comment><USER35> Travel to New York. We spend a fortune on students and teachers. Outcomes vary, and usually have more to do with home situation than money.</comment></comment>


What Really Happened to 15 Million Jobs? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/01/what-really-happened-to-15-million-jobs/70005/1/ <comment><USER2> > One baffling aspect of the current recovery is why U.S. companies continue > to sideline nearly $2 trillion in cash instead of using it to buy equipment > or hire workers.

My understanding is that this is partly due to the tax treatment of profits. It's more profitable for shareholders to have a company with a rising valuation than to receive a dividend.</comment>


Show HN: Jobsuitors, algorithmic job matching - <AUTHOR> http://jobsuitors.com

<comment><USER2> Signing up right now. Curious to see what this offers compared to similar things such as Whitetruffle. Looks beautiful, though! I will give an edit with my thoughts of the entire signup process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that would be awesome! As a side note, this is decidedly still in alpha. Feedback is the most important thing for us right now.

<comment><USER2> I....I REALLY, REALLY, have no idea where this came from...but it has my college filled in as "Epic Bible College" after I loaded my LinkedIn and I cannot change it to the actual college I have attended. I imagine this is it misconstruing "Epicodus", a programming bootcamp I attended. If you could help me out in fixing that it would be wonderful. Right now I'm just letting it be.</comment></comment></comment>


Google, VC firms, consider bid to buy Yahoo - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204485304576646232054116582.html

<comment><USER2> This is a preview article that isn't even 2 paragraphs long and requires subscription to read the whole thing. How did this make the front page?

<comment><AUTHOR> How frustrating. I only posted because I saw the full article - WSJ must detect certain referrers and show the full text if linked from certain sites. Paywalls suck.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's the Reuters version (not behind a paywall): [http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/22/us-google-yahoo- id...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/22/us-google-yahoo- idUSTRE79L18T20111022)

</comment><comment><USER4> Agreed, pure speculation with little chance of getting through regulatory approvals.

Is this what the WSJ publishes to draw in weekend readers who are mostly unfamiliar with the tech space?

</comment><comment><USER5> 0% chance FTC allows Google to buy them.

</comment><comment><USER6> this is linkbait..FTC will not allow Google or Microsoft ot buy Yahoo..in fact both MS and Google have discuss before how they were handcuffed by FTC considerations about this</comment>


An Indian state is using blockchain to collect DNA data of 50M citizens - <AUTHOR> https://qz.com/1244824/andhra-pradesh-is-using-blockchain-to-collect-dna-data-of-50-million-citizens/ <comment><USER2> Like a lot of big blockchain news, this seems like an application that derives no benefit from blockchain and likely adds some drawbacks.

It also mentions that the data will be encrypted (and only accessible to its owner), but some organizations will be able to access aggregate data to do studies... That implies a central authority, which further suggests to me that blockchain doesn't add anything valuable to this application.</comment>