Why Advertising Works, Even When You Think It Doesn't - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/08/why-good-advertising-works-even-when-you-think-it-doesnt/244252/ <comment><USER3> Madison ave ad exec here. They're talking about a specific kind of advertising, what we would call "brand awareness" advertising. The objective is, as they say, not to get you to do anything, but rather to shift your perception (implicitly or explicitly) about a product or brand. Alone, it doesn't do much of anything. Matched with direct-response, promotions, events, point-of-sale, etc ... it can be powerful. But this is a tool for mass market consumer packaged goods and the like, not your niche startup.

Since they have the picture of the Old Spice guy in the header, that's a perfect example to use. Those ridiculous commercials were not meant to send you running out to buy deodorant. Amongst other problems with that, deodorant is what we call a "low consideration" market - as in, you just don't really think about it. You came up with your go-to brand, then you just stuck with it because of inertia. You can't convince someone of the functional benefits of one brand versus another because they're all exactly the same thing.

Those Old Spice spots are meant to have a multi-year effect on your perception of the brand. How many of you remember that Old Spice used to be thought of as an old man sailor deodorant? They wanted to move away from that perception, and in a decade, no one will remember anything except how funky and hip they are.

I wrote about this campaign when it broke in July of 2010 here: [http://www.joshklein.net/is-old-spices-viral-campaign-a- fail...](http://www.joshklein.net/is-old-spices-viral-campaign-a-failure-or- success)

As an interesting anecdote, Tide has 70% of the detergent market despite literally being exactly the same box of chemicals as any other detergent. Except their box is a different color, and they advertised for 50 years so that your mother would tell you which brand to use when you went to college.

EDIT: It's worth mentioning that this kind of advertising is getting harder because of something you need to achieve called "share of voice". There used to be 4 TV stations that the whole country watched, so you could spend enough money to blast your message into the head of every American. This is obviously not how the world works anymore - you simply can't reach everyone, and even if you could, there's almost always a better way to segment your audience and only speak to the people who care. That's why I work in digital advertising, and think the TV/Print people don't have great long term prospects for their industry.

<comment><USER4> Out of curiosity, as a Madison ave ad exec, what do you get out of HN? Are you technical? Are you here for business or pleasure? What does the HN crowd need to learn about advertising?

<comment><USER5> Advertising could be considered hacking the brain. ;)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Apparently, seeing an attractive person look at an object automatically makes you like it more [[http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/subconscious- sta...](http://meteuphoric.wordpress.com/2009/09/06/subconscious-stalking/)]. I guess this is part of the reason ads tend to feature good-looking people.

This makes me want to avoid looking at ads as much as possible -- we are vulnerable to manipulation in ways which are completely impossible to defend against.

</comment><comment><USER7> Also see: source stripping, where we remember 'facts' without remembering their source.

Slightly OT: I used to think all ads were stupid, and the industry run by morons. Then at some point I thought that at least some of the ads seemed clever. At that moment, I realized that I'd shifted, and become a target demographic. The ads before weren't clueless, they just weren't aimed at me.

<comment><USER8> This particular quote isn't about advertising, but its something Steve Jobs said that reminded me of your post.

"When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth."

<comment><USER9> _The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want._

No, the networks are in business to create desire. As a rule, people generally want what their peers want, so the chief goal of advertising is to create the impression that everyone wants the product. The very act of putting it in a prominent place is the first step, since everyone seeing it knows that everyone else is also seeing it.

<comment><USER9> In response to the anonymous downvoters, it's quite clear that in a competitive market, settling for giving the people what they want is inadequate. You have to make them want what you're selling. As someone pointed out above, many consumer goods are essentially identical and are distinguished chiefly by their marketing efforts. And even with Apple's own products, one might wonder whether the _exact same product_ introduced by say, Dell or HP, would've been as successful.

Contrary to popular belief, the market isn't a simple system of people with inherent needs meeting those with products, but a complex web of collective psychology driven by a combination of the social network and mass media.

<comment><USER10> To put it in a slightly hyperbolic yet entirely honest way: I want Apple (or brand of your choice) to make decisions for me; to tell me what I want and what I want more; to assure me my decisions are unequivocally right and indeed, mine. In this my desire for desires is validated, encouraged and fulfilled.

We need to go deeper.

It just works™

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It is precisely for this reason that I'm largely confused by Internet advertising payments. A lot of companies only want to pay out based on the number of clicks an ad gets. If what this article says is true (and I've come to this conclusion myself before), then the direct clicks as soon as someone sees an ad on a web page is largely irrelevant. What should matter are the impressions over time, allowing that product or service to grow in the consumer's mind.

<comment><USER3> Two points:

1 - TV ads are more interruptive; to ignore them, you have to leave the room or change the channel. Most people just deal with sitting through them. On a website, you can easily ignore the ad. There are plenty of exceptions in digital advertising - pre-roll for web video, page takeovers, and other stuff that is unbelievably annoying, since your expectation as a web user is to not be interrupted.

2 - It depends on the key performance indicator for the campaign. Certainly, direct response campaigns want to measure clicks (or purchases/actions - <USER2> closest you can get to the sale, the better). But there are awareness-style campaigns on the web, and those advertisers pay by impression, not clicks. The problem is that with networks, you don't know the quality of the place your ad is running, so an impression is worthless. You'll only pay directly to a publisher you know is at a certain level of quality.

At a past company, I saw our media buyers put in ads at $170 CPM (cost per thousand impressions) for a particularly relevant publisher audience. The advertiser was in financial services, and the publication was uber-niche and uber-influential.

<comment><USER12> _There are plenty of exceptions in digital advertising - pre-roll for web video, page takeovers, and other stuff that is unbelievably annoying, since your expectation as a web user is to not be interrupted._

I don't know if I'm unique, but every single time I'm presented with a pre- roll ad, I close the tab I started the video in. 100% of the time. I always wonder if stats on that type of thing are collected and given to the "right" people. (I'm 90% sure they are not, but I thought I'd ask, since you're an expert.)

<comment><USER3> Yes, those kinds of stats are collected. Ad networks, servers, and exchanges are some of those places that physics phds go when they don't go to Wall Street or, heaven forbid, academia. We're not at that level, but we do have a whole analytics department filled with statisticians.

No, you are not the norm; video pre-roll is a particularly strongly performing media type at the moment. It does radically depend on the audience & creative, of course. But if you're looking at the rates of a publisher, pre-roll is going to be one of the higher ones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> If all the dollars spent on these sorts of advertisements end up causing me to spend more dollars on those brands and products, is that a net gain or loss for me? What about for society as a whole?

If it's a loss for me, what can I do to defend against it?

<comment><USER3> Relevant reading: "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Cialdini.

If you only ever read one book on this stuff, this is the book to read. It is framed around the 6 core psychological principles advertisers leverage, with half the chapter on how to utilize the principle, and half the chapter on how to defend yourself against manipulation of the principle.

But more directly to your question; I think it depends. Was the product you just learned about a pharmaceutical drug that will help improve your quality of life, but that your doctor has never heard of because he left medical school 25 years ago and isn't tapped into current events in this particular field?

It's very possible (and I think, correct) to think of advertising as a net- negative to society. But it does serve the vital function of informing people about things they should know about. It solves problems of information asymmetry.

The startup deadpool is filled with companies that were awesome but nobody knew about.

<comment><USER14> How is advertising a net-negative to society? Advertising funds many things which are too expensive to produce by themselves: newspapers, tv, movies, etc. You may not _like_ it but it makes possible many things which would otherwise be infeasible.

<comment><USER3> Some would argue those things you mention are themselves net-negatives. We're getting into the realm of philosophy, and I don't want to foist mine upon you. But to explain my comment: some would argue that mass market advertising is focused on the creation of desire, and that happiness is achieved through minimizing your desires. Or more literally, advertising is about making you unhappy with what you already have so you buy stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The only "fact" in this article, the amount of money spent on TV ads, was never supported (read citation). Even if that number is valid, it still doesn't prove that advertising works. The only thing this proves is that advertisers can sell - advertisements to companies.

If I were to argue that advertising works, I'd argue that it affects social proof; no one drives a Mercedes Benz because it is a functionally superior car. In the American market, products aren't purchased on their functionality, but on the social class they put you in. (Would argue a similar argument for non-luxury items, but it'd tl;dr.)

<comment><USER16> If advertising didn't work, than the companies blowing millions and billions on it would be in a million/billion-dollar sized hole vs. their competition, and they would be promptly outcompeted, or cut off their own spending. That they are not is rather strong evidence that yes, it does work, inasmuch as a dollar in ad spending can bring in substantially more than a dollar in revenue.

(No, it is not a sufficient counter argument to say that they just spend because everyone else does; if advertising really didn't work there would no forces holding it up, and a lot of forces pushing it down. If you flipped a switch and made it not work somehow right now, advertising would be gone within a handful of years, if not faster.)

<comment><USER17> What if it's not a binary (advertising works/ doesn't work)? In my view, part of Google's success is they allowed advertisers (as well as self serve businesses) to better measure the ROI from the advertising. In other words, for direct response campaigns, the best option pre-AdWords was through TV. But Adwords really let's you measure your ROI with a granularity not possible with mailers/tv ads.

So direct response campaigns existed before google b/c there was some value holding it up; Google just came along and revolutionized it. That's part of their power from the advertisers POV -- metrics.

Large, nationwide branding campaigns have been effective b/c the entry cost to run one means they are only feasible to large corporations. And those corps have the resources to run the market surveys that are really necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of a campaign. Smaller ad budgets just can't do the followup efficacy measurements.

I definitely think both direct and branding based advertising works. I wonder if Facebook's play will be to revolutionize large branding campaigns, while google focused on the direct response (CPC v CPM, at its core).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Advertising absolutely affects me.

But the thing is, it does it both ways.

Old Spice was mentioned here. They came up with interesting, catchy new commercials. That immediately endeared me to their product.

Other commercials are often (at best) noise or (at worst) insulting of their own customers. I can't count how many times I've seen what was supposed to be a funny commercial, and the idiot in the commercial used the product. Your customers are idiots? Really!? I have never yet bought one of those products.

Not that I bought Old Spice, because I like my current solution. But I did seriously consider it.

</comment><comment><USER19> Ads didn't use to affect me, I use adblock and I rarely watch TV. But lately it seems they find all kind of new ways to send you ads, and I start to remember ads more. My personal policy has always been the same, if I need something, and there's more than one choice, if I recall ever seeing an ad about one company I'll always, always go for the other one. It seems like a natural thing to do, and I bet I'm not alone in that.

The other day I went to buy a lamp and the store had tons of one particular brand that advertises all the time. Of course I went right by those and bought another name I had never heard about, and it turned out to work just fine, and cost less.

So I guess that's why companies that advertise always puzzled me. I mean what's the point? Everyone gets annoyed at watching ads, so why would you want your brand name to be associated with annoying?

I guess I just don't get it.

<comment><USER20> I, like you, actively repel the effects of advertising (though I have no doubt that some of it still influences me to an extent). However, if advertising really didn't work, then all products in supermarkets would come in colorless boxes, you'd walk to a touchscreen kiosk and specify your caloric and nutritive needs, preferred foods, organic/vegetarian/vegan/etc. requirements, and the kiosk would produce a list of items that met those requirements, along with prices and an objective evaluation of product quality.

How I wish that were the case! Meal planning and product discovery would be _easy_. Instead, I eat basically the same things over and over, since as a bootstrapping entrepreneur, I can't afford to throw away much food in the name of exploration. If we could get rid of the patent system that killed Modista (<http://k9ventures.com/blog/2011/04/27/modista/>), and replace advertising with information, I think my life would be a lot more awesome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> > U.S. companies would not invest $70 billion (yes, that's the size of TV's ad > market) in something they thought didn't work.

Advertisers sell advertising first, products second. It's not implausible to think they are better at the one that pays their checks.

</comment><comment><USER22> Advertising does work, but it also has other issues being overlooked. For instance, all Geico commercials featuring the Cave Men have made me hate listening to Royksopp. I don't believe that's an effect Geico or Royksopp could have anticipated. Be ready for the affects good or bad if you're the 3rd party in one of these 'viral' ads.

<comment><USER23> Whenever a catchy "indie" tune hits the top of Spotify, I wonder just how long it has before it becomes a VW commercial or the ending credits of The Hills.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Did anyone else notice that this article is a pretty poor puff piece? I mean, don't get me wrong, the points it made are pretty much correct, but it just did a terrible job doing so.

Through-out the piece, the key evidence that advertising works was an anecdote that a friend of the author could remember two adverts.

And then, at the very end, almost as if realising "oops I forgot to actually back up any of this with facts" he adds _"Access to data that proves their point."_ Oh well that's good to know, I guess that's settled then.

He could have written it in a "this is what they are trying to do" way, or if he really wanted this "I can show you that it works" then he should have actually proven it, not suggested it and then waved his hand in the air muttering "see I told you" under his breath.

</comment><comment><USER25> Head on, apply directly to the forehead.

Head on, apply directly to the forehead.

Head on, apply directly to the forehead.

Unfortunately that little nugget is stuck in my head for life, but I've never bought the product (nor do I know anyone who will admit to having bought it), so in that sense did the ad really "work"?

<comment><USER26> I still get pissed off every time I see homeopathic products (i.e. water sold as "medicine") in the pharmacy, like that "Head on" stuff. It's worse for some things like allergy eye drops where the homeopathic part may be written in tiny print on the package.

If I just wanted to flush my eyes out with water, I'd do that at home for a fraction of the cost. When my allergies act up, I need eye drops with actual medicine in them. And that's when I'm the least able to see well enough to avoid bottles with tiny print.

But Wal-Mart still stocks that crap in their pharmacy. Ugh. Shouldn't they limit it to medicine?

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Related: "Ten-Year-Olds Can See Through Advertisers' Tactics"

<http://web.hbr.org/email/archive/dailystat.php?date=083111>

<comment><USER28> My six-year-old just informed me that the fruit loops ads are full of it. She said that "they said they taste good, and they DO NOT. They are lying."

My work is done here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Advertising works in a same way that Nigerian scam works. Because there are minority of people that give money to Nigerian scam.

<comment><USER30> > Because there are MAJORITY of people that give money to well advertised > products

FTFY :p

<comment><USER29> My point that I try to make is that "Advertising works" is nonsense statement (that statement is attempt to advertise itself), and proof given in article therefore also nonsense, Advertising is not true and false kind of thing. (works or doesn't work) Nature of advertising is like tricks . it can be revealed in some moment in time. so advertising must adapt. and it wont work in 100% of cases and all the time.(Proof: go look at advertisments in 50s and look them today, notice any difference?) so it is not 1 or 0 like in computers , but is in scales and dynamic.</comment></comment></comment>


Protesters Gather At Google; 600 Employees Sign Petition, Organizers Claim - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.sfweekly.com/thesnitch/2010/08/google_protest_net_neutrality.php <comment><USER2> The internet does not need 'saving' by a bunch of people chanting outside Google with picket signs and petitions.

If the internet were as fragile as the neutrality-activists thought, it would have never gotten where it is today. Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL would have won.

And the neut-advocates very worst nightmare scenarios -- rampant blocking and throttling by the last-mile incumbents -- would quickly provoke a necessary next-step emergence of new competitors and route-around technologies.

That is, _if_ the nightmare scenarios ever happened. Which they won't, because even in a local duopoly, being known as the option which gives you less of the internet will be profit-destroying.

The alternative neut-advocates offer -- the FCC riding in as a white knight with new rules to save us -- is a dangerous child's fantasy. Any rulemaking by the feds will involve backroom deals between companies large enough to send lawyers to DC -- just like the Google-Verizon talks, hosted by the FCC!

Any rulemaking by the feds will generate stacks of hard-to-interpret regulations that inconvenience everyone -- but hinder novel services and upstarts that are hard-to-classify the most, so the giant incumbents won't mind them so much.

That is, neutrality rules would freeze into slow-changing, confusingly- enforced law a currently-fashionable, romanticized notion of the internet that manages to make big companies and the political establishment comfortable.

It only 'saves' the internet in the same way you could 'save' a wild animal by putting it in a cage. Don't let the FCC neuter my internet!

<comment><USER3> Why would the law be complex? You only need one simple line of law stating:

We find this principle to be self evident, that all internet traffic is to be treated as equal.

That is it. No complex case law, no little print, no arcane law language.

"Any rulemaking by the feds will involve backroom deals between companies large enough to send lawyers to DC "

Are you saying that you are scared of big companies, therefore what we should do is surrender and let, possibly one of the most defining aspect of the internet, be done with by the big guys, who have suitcases and suits?

You might say you are being pragmatic and that is the reality, but only if the "bunch of people" keep silent and let the big guys get on without noise, you know, a bit like the "bunch of people" did with the War in Iraq. The corporations might have the money, but the "bunch of people" still have the political system and the power to set the debate. No politician would like to loose his job, and if some do then they will think twice in face of vocal public pressure.

As for your other points they are a matter of speculation. I would need to employ my imagination. I am sure there are many smart people on here who might be able to get around the internet prioritization with some code, who have all sort of programming abilities to overcome any technology obstacle. Maybe even if such tiered system would come to pass, some clever guy would come with some code which would make the ISP think that a certain site should be prioritized. The vast majority of people however might perhaps have to live with the reality of the way things are. In China for example, some people might use route-around technologies, but, the vast majority live with a censored internet.

As for AOL and all the rest, the internet, at least in popularity, is hardly even 20 years old, if we take the year that it took off to be 1995 when people started hearing about it in vast numbers. So AOL is really a baby learning how to crawl in the grand scheme of things. Only very recently, if not only now, has the internet become a serious medium with vast power of empowerment and, we must assume, vast powers of control.

So you can hardly compare the past to the future. You hardly can say well even if we live in a dictatorship someone will still write a pamphlet although he might be imprisoned for it.

You can argue about the substance of the matter. Dismissing the entire debate as something childish however and entirely misguided without providing any reasons but rhetoric is hardly reasonable.

I might be wrong, I might be very wrong, but personally I think we should fight and if in the end we lose, then we do so with dignity, not in 40 years or so tell our children of that thing called the internet and then feel sad of how all the baddies turned it into a one way communication platform.

<comment><USER2> Your proposed 1-line law is a good example of the romantic, childlike, wishcraft-dominated thinking about this issue that I'm criticizing.

That wording is neither enactable by any federal body, nor enforceable by federal prosecutors, without a ton more detail.

And, its simpleminded application would prohibit services I'd actually like to buy. I would prefer an ISP which privileged web browsing and VOIP over BitTorrent and bulk email/video/software downloads. I would like it if traffic that attempts to compromise my privacy or exploit unpatched software on my home network was blocked by default.

In fact, I run a traffic-shaping router/firewall for these and other purposes, including preferencing my own traffic over that of neighbors and visitors who use my guest wifi node. Would that make me a net-neutrality-scofflaw? Oh, I hope so.

I have the technical acumen to do this myself, but if my ISP wants to implement similar policies the next few hops up, that also provides me with positive value. And of course most customers can't set this up for themselves, so they can only get positive value from having an expert -- like their ISP -- enact upstream preferencing and blocking for them.

Why make providing a service some people will prefer a federal crime?

We've made it almost 20 years without FCC rules to protect the internet. The internet is faster and freer each year, without any help from the FCC. (Thankfully, the FCC can keep busy fining broadcasters for dirty words.)

It is not true that "we must assume... vast powers of control" are about to spring some trap. We can wait until actual harms are demonstrated -- if ever. We can wait even further, until such harms persist after enough time for competitors to adapt, before freezing into federal law starry-eyed notions of how the network should work.

Network neutrality regulations: YAGNI.

<comment><USER4> I agree with you to a certain extent. However, I think that there is still some scope for useful regulations of established standards. For example http(s) should not have any limits put upon it. I would be happy with just that. The FCC will always be behind the times, but they can still offer some security in what would now be clearly unjust to tamper with.

<comment><USER5> >For example http(s) should not have any limits put upon it.

Entry of specifics into statute is not helpful - a lot of work was needed to alter laws (in UK) which included prescription of snail-mailing various forms or information so that the laws could be used with fax, then with email.

Hence, the specific protocol should not be used to limit only as an example (admittedly this was probably your thinking too) - "there shall be no prejudice held against network traffic sent using end-to-end encryption regardless of origin except in the following cases ..." or some such. The specific encryption can be mentioned in headers or in associated rules or in a definitions section.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is absolutely awful. I've never read anything more factually incorrect.

"Free Press is concerned that Google's deal with Verizon to secure special internet privileges on its broadband will lead to other internet providers brokering deals with major companies. First Verizon and Google strike a deal, then AT&T and Microsoft have a deal ... here comes Comcast who cuts a deal with Yahoo"

There was no "deal". It is only proposal. And it would grant no special privileges to either party.

That being said, it is good people are beginning to reorganize in favor of net neutrality and hopefully will make their views known to their Congresspeople.

<comment><USER7> "It is only proposal". You make it sound like a proposal, in this case, is much better than a deal. Believe me, it's not. What Google is proposing is ridiculous and goes against everything we worked for in the last 20 years.

<comment><USER2> Who is the 'we' in your statement?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It would be amusing if this was one big Machiavellian plan by Google to rile up internet users to put more pressure on for net neutrality...

<comment><USER9> Oh if only that were the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> If there was half as much outcry over the Obama administration and Congress doing nothing on net neutrality, Google would never have needed to compromise in the first place.

<comment><USER11> Since the telecoms own congress we're probably better off without any new legislation. Companies like Google standing up and fighting on our behalf would have been the best possible solution but that didn't work out. I think the FCC is the last best hope. Reclassify broadband so the FCC can regulate properly. I'm sure the FCC is partly owned by the telecoms too but at least it's an appointed position and there's an effective term limit on FCC leadership due to Presidential elections. It's probably the only hope.

<comment><USER12> The telecoms own Congress because most ordinary citizens never call or e-mail their reps and make their voices heard. A politician's goal is votes; they'll listen to telecom lobbyists because that gets them money which they can use to buy votes. But that's an indirect, inefficient process: they'd much rather have some idea of what it'd take to get your vote directly.

When the bailout was up for a vote, there was a massive letter-writing campaign, and it was defeated. The first time. Then we got distracted, it came up for a vote again, and it passed. Imagine what we could accomplish if all of the American populace was able to divert as much attention to influencing Washington as a professional lobbyist is. In other words, what if we all wrote our senators all day long instead of playing Farmville all day long?

Come to think of it, that might be an interesting hack. "Congressville". Instead of managing a virtual farm, you manage a virtual legislature by planting, growing and harvesting legislature. And you "play" with real letters to your real representatives.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> A few questions. What gets classified as Wired and wireless? Suppose I use fiber to my wifi router is the wording twisted enough to count it as wireless? If that can be treated as wired, then don't you think even 10 years down the line most of our data will flow through fiber? Coz at Office, Home, Hotels, Airports etc. we would be using fiber till the wifi router...

Is the rate of growth of wireless bandwidth so much higher than the rate of growth of fiber bandwidth that we will switch to a very wireless centric internet?? Or will we use fiber till the wifi router in the future?

</comment><comment><USER14> I wonder if Google's protest-base is similar to the WalMart's ones in still using their products? I'd wager so.

<comment><USER15> I boycott Wal-Mart. But I still use Google. Not yet comparable.

That said I'd be slightly tempted to go protest outside Google's Santa Monica office (the one near me).

<comment><USER14> I'm saying I bet that the percent of WalMart protestors who still shop there is probably pretty similar to the percent of Google protestors who still use gApps.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I would prefer a ribbon campaign across the web. Too many startups and small businesses are in jeopardy. I don't understand why all VCs are so quiet about this. Perhaps they are scared of future black lists from the telcos?

<comment><USER17> > Too many startups and small businesses are in jeopardy.

No they're not.

<comment><USER16> If Google/Verizon get their way any new (or existing but not participating) major competitor can be throttled to oblivion.

<comment><USER17> > any new (or existing but not participating) major competitor can be > throttled to oblivion

No they can't.

<comment><USER16> How do you know? Google and Verizon didn't pass a law, they made a mutually beneficial agreement. And the telcos have been saying they want to tax successful business running on their pipes for years.

Note I wrote "can be", not "will be." This looks like a slippery slope for fair use and content independence.Perhaps the EU and/or other big groups outside Washington/USA can stop the telcos/ISPs.

You assert your opinion without giving an explanation and without taking into account things will change (for good or bad.)

<comment><USER17> > they made a mutually beneficial agreement

No they didn't make any agreement. They made a proposal. Google has been advocating pure net neutrality on landline and wireless for the last 10 years. They've been rejected by the FCC, the telcos and the governement. After 10 years of getting nowhere, they are trying to get net neutrality on landline at least because right now there are no laws at all protecting net neutrality, wireless or not. No one has pushed as hard as Google for pure net neutrality, but after 10 years, Google needed to get real and face reality, no laws are going to get passed on pure/absolute net neutraliy, so they went for this proposal instead. Call them evil if you want...

> You assert your opinion without giving an explanation

So do you.

<comment><USER16>
      >> they made a mutually beneficial agreement
      > No they didn't make any agreement.

Oh, come on, don't play the words. You know I meant they agreed on a compromise that is mutually beneficial so they started pushing a joint proposal.

The context is very relevant: Verizon and Google are selling android phones at an unprecedented scale (save iPhones.) Google _was_ the #1 lobbyist of Net Neutrality and Verizon is the second largest telco, lobbying against. Googles "facts" press release was signed by a former MCI attorney (Verizon subsidiary.)

I seriously doubt the telcos will stop at this. Just one example, why would Google care to defend against P2P throttling? (Say, P2P video like Skype calls, the same kind of competitor they are already throttling or blocking.)

<comment><USER17> > You know I meant they agreed on a compromise that is mutually beneficial

In what way not having net neutrality on wireless is beneficial to Google?

> why would Google care to defend against P2P throttling?

They do care on landline, on wireless there is not much they can do. They tried hard for the last 10 years but failed as nobody supported them (FCC, telcos and gov). So they are trying to at least get net neutrality on landline. Again, after ten years of battling for net neutrality, what do we have today? Nothing, not a single law to defend it. Google realized that it was not going to happen after lobying for it for years, so they at least are trying to get it on landline while putting wireless on hold (temporarily as the proposal says).

What have you done to defend net neutrality?

<comment><USER16> Ad hominem, I'm not going to bother to answer that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> One good thing about this - its nice to see that this generation can put down their tweeters and actually try to make something happen!

</comment><comment><USER19> <http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/>

<comment><USER20> First PG post to ever reach -2?

<comment><USER21> [http://searchyc.com/user/pg?only=comments&sort=by_points...](http://searchyc.com/user/pg?only=comments&sort=by_points_r)

<comment><USER19> Looks like they have some kind of bug. There are comments there with 0 points that could never have had 0 points.

<comment><USER22> Those comments were cached when comment scores were turned off 10 months ago. It's strange that they haven't been updated since then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I'm horrified that the anti-regulation for anti-regulation's sake view point is the top thread currently.

</comment><comment><USER24> Predictions for 2011:

\- Apple releases iWeb, a google search clone, signs deal with Verizon to make iWeb the mandatory search engine for all Verizon ISP users.

\- Apple sells 25M Verizon 4G iPads for $99 each with 2 year service contract ($20 per month)

\- Apple announces record profits from search advertising.

* Google's core search business is easily cloned in 2 years. How to get market share? A deal with large ISPs. Most of Google's profits come from search advertising, and Apple now has a cutting edge mobile ad platform which is stronger than Google's. It's time to act. Search is not hard anymore.

Suppose Apple did this deal with Verizon and possibly Comcast. Google's share of search advertising would fall significantly.

Google's floundering with Android (try a device before you dispute this) has emboldened Apple to act fast to hit Google where it hurts, right in the core search business. As Apple moves to the cloud and Google builds devices, Apple and Google are converging rapidly into competitors.

<comment><USER25> What does it mean to be the default search engine for an ISP? Google transcends deals like that now.

<comment><USER24> If an ISP had a deal with Bing, it could simply map all search traffic intended for Google to Bing...

google.com?q=snookie => bing.com?q=snookie

Bing could offer the ISP a percentage of ad revenue, and if users didn't complain then (without net neutrality) there'd be nothing to stop it.

(I'd guess that most HN users wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Google and Bing results if the styling were identical and they didn't notice the domain name)

<comment><USER2> You don't need new net-neutrality rules to prevent such shenanigans; existing laws against fraud, trading on another's trademark, and monopolistic tying are plenty.

And even the hoi polloi loves themselves their 'Google'; it wouldn't take much to generate a consumer backlash against such a practice.

To the extent an ISP's heavy promotion or nudging might encourage people to try another search engine they might like as much or more than Google, that's a good thing. We need more search competition; a new entrant ought to be able to buy enough attention to get a fair look.

<comment><USER24> I agree, which is why I oppose net neutrality.

The example I used may be contrived, however I think the essence is true that an ISP could meddle with Google's traffic and send search traffic to a competitor.

<comment><USER23> Wait, these ominous predictions you cite are the reasons you are AGAINST net neutrality?

The variety of opinions and reasonings for the positions that people take in this debate are beyond me. Completely freakin beyond me.

<comment><USER24> My point is that I don't think it would be ominous for most users, which is why it should not be prohibited by law.

Of course I'd prefer not to have it, and I'd probably pay my ISP extra for a "neutral" net access plan, but I don't have a problem with ISPs trying creative packaging/pricing by capturing revenue via non-neutral business deals.

Maybe Comcast would offer 50GB for $30/month if it was getting 30% of the ad revenue Google gets from consumer broadband ad clicks.

Thought experiment: How much would you have to be paid to give up your right to vote for one year? How much to give up your ability to use Google search?

<comment><USER23> A Google competitor would be nice. How hard would it be to really replicate the ease of something like Google's hosted apps. Could users rent their own access to it? Could they use DDG safely, along with their own servers for hosting their mail, voice, etc.

But I don't want those services to be tiered. It enables Google and Verizon to negotiate for that streaming video/audio/voice space, if they decide it's not part of the "public internet".

<comment><USER24> note: I don't think the hosted apps would not be targeted, only search traffic.

It could become very ugly, and net neutrality is definitely the simplest and cleanest approach, but there might be a win for consumers with less neutrality too.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Structured Procrastination (1995) - <AUTHOR> http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/ <comment><USER2> My personal warning sign that I'm off track is whenever I feel the urge to _research_ a new to-do list tool.

<comment><USER3> Same here, except my urge goes as far as _writing_ to-do list tools (but obviously never actually getting to the point of having something usable). I guess it's easier to blame current solutions for not having {insert essential feature I just came up with that would finally turn me into a productive individual} than actually working with what I have and focusing on what needs to be done.

I wonder if there is some kind of all-encompassing solution (software-based or whatever) that actually manages to conduct you into a so-called "flow state" in some way. I've tried automating things like blocking websites, turning the computer off at certain times and so on, but it always either feels too constraining (which just makes me disable everything after some time) or too "manual" (which I never have the discipline to maintain). And ultimately, it doesn't really make me want to do the task any more than I would otherwise.

<comment><USER4> Discipline is the solution.

I'm not being facetious, the bottleneck to individual human productivity is usually the human. Over-planning and focusing on tangential problems are frequently just rationalizing away procrastination... "maybe this mountain of work will take less effort with a better organization system" \- probably not.

These days I prefer using org-mode for notes, MoSCoW for triaging, and Omnifocus for execution. It took months to become proficient, but now getting in the zone is effortless.

<comment><USER5> > _I 'm not being facetious, the bottleneck to individual human productivity > is usually the human._

This too, is my realization, after a lot of introspection (and observing other people).

Sadly, I never learned discipline. Given the anxiety issues I'm struggling with since late-teen/early-adulthood, I can see that my average performance is about 10% of my peak performance.

I hear discipline is trainable, but I wasn't able to find something I could execute as an adult. I wish there was a training regimen with benefits that transfer to the rest of one's life (and not just making someone better at executing the training tasks).

<comment><USER4> Every adult has some discipline, what we often lack is _practice_. Discipline is not a binary skill, there are levels - at minimum, most adults know not to impulsively buy candy when checking out at a store. Leveling up is just a matter of exercising discipline to ignore greater impulses.

Start by calibrating yourself. Where do you already have discipline? Going to work every day at the same time? Paying bills as soon as they arrive? Or maybe something harder, like cooking healthy meals every other day, going to the gym, or practicing an instrument?

Understand your level, then find something just a little harder. Ideally, it should be a recurring task which you recognize requires discipline (ie something you want to have done, but don't look forward to doing). Find that task, then do it. Keep doing it until you can effortlessly climb over that mental barrier. Then, continue doing it while challenging yourself with something harder.

As someone with ADD, it took a _long_ time for me to become disciplined. I started out by going to the gym every other day, eventually working up to climbing mountains, learning instruments, and becoming one of the most organized people at work (while still being ADD).

It's not easy. Of course not, discipline is the skill of doing hard things despite the difficulty. But if you're looking for "a training regimen with benefits that transfer to the rest of one's life" \- this is it. Discipline is a higher-order skill that transfers to learning or doing everything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> As a person that grew up with standard western schooling, video games, and sports, and to some extent simply because I'm _human_ , I'm trained to have these well-defines lines of when I accomplish something, which set off the reward centres of my brain. I have attempted to exploit this in regards to my to-do-lists to increase my productivity:

\- The to-do-list is no longer just there to make sure I remember to do things - it is its own reward for doing things. Often I will add something to my to do list when I am already about to start it - and need no reminder - _just_ so I can check it off when I'm done. Occasionally I have even added something _after_ I've finished doing it, just for the psychological reward.

\- I break things down into smaller parts to make it seem like a larger number of accomplishments than it otherwise would be. For example, today I need to make two similar online purchases - I could have easily put "Buy A and B" as one item, but instead I put "Buy A" and "Buy B". Of course, one has to draw the line somewhere, or we would end up with "get out of bed" "walk towards the door" "open the door" on our lists, and checking off tasks would mean nothing. Use your judgement.

\- I put "Work on my coding project" on there, even tho I'll be unlikely to have much time for it. This means, in order to avoid having a single outstanding item at the end of the day, I will at least do _some_ work on it, keeping it fresh in my mind, keeping me in the habit, and inching me towards completing it - and preventing me from outright procrastinating it until tomorrow. Even if it's five minutes work.

These are of course silly psychological tricks that _directly_ accomplish nothing, made even stranger by the fact that I'm using them on _myself_. Of course, one could say the same about drugs, but nobody would argue that caffeine or amphetamine never give you a genuine boost just because you don't strictly need them. And, I feel that it works.

Now here's the challenge - stop the structured procrastination of writing this comment and go do the things on my to-do-list.

Hmm... should I add "write a comment about to-do-lists" to my to do list...?

<comment><USER7> Insightful for sure. I should start using this exact same method, but my problem is to fragment activities in smaller ones, which I find hard and sometimes even too much time consuming.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I've realized that I spend most of time focusing on the second most important task I need to accomplish at any given moment. And since most of my work has been handed to me by other people, most of them think I'm amazingly efficient and end up exceedingly happy with the timeliness of my work, all but the one who is currently waiting for their high priority request.

<comment><USER9> I've found that the secret to this is to find someone who's the sort of obnoxious person who always has a "high priority" dumb request, and to make sure you're helpful enough that you'll always get that request, which you can safely ignore for the rest of the day knowing that you'll draw their ire but the fact that you solved it at all means they'll keep coming back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Bookmarked to complete reading later.

<comment><USER11> ditto

....

Well, to be completely honest, I meant to, but then got stuck on what would be the best place for it.

...

XD

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is an terrifyingly accurate description of what seeems to be my actual workflow.

<comment><USER13> It is both terrifying and comical at the same time.

This made it click for me about why the most productive times I have are also the busiest ones. I thought it was due to "inertia". That is, if you don't stop rolling, it'll be easier to roll. This theory has been contradicted by the fact that it still really is quite easy to stop rolling very shortly after busy times pass.

I had noticed this effect before, but only now after reading about it I'm completely aware of it. I wonder how that came to be part of the human psychology.

<comment><USER14> > I thought it was due to "inertia". That is, if you don't stop rolling, it'll > be easier to roll.

This is a very common idea, and also potentially somewhat dangerous. A lot of people chase the inertia with ever increasing workloads and burn out. I have come close to that multiple times.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Previous discussion:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10151481](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10151481)

</comment><comment><USER16> I think the minimalist approach could be a companion to this style behavior augmentation.

Rather than adding things that _could be_ done, I only add tasks that _have to be_ done. Overtime, my "bandwidth" for tasks I don't like doing become much greater and, in some cases, I begin to enjoy them.

Adding accountability around the tasks helps a lot (in my experience) as well. I frequently use my guilt as a way to motivate me.

Ex:

      - If you don't write these tests, your co-worker will assume you don't know how.

      - If you don't clean your room, your guests will think you're a slob.

Admittedly, it leads to sort of a masochist style of thinking; however, that's my brain by nature.

</comment><comment><USER17> I now just use the todo app in my phone to keep tasks deferred.

The important difference is I don't let it get longer than 10 items.

</comment><comment><USER18> related: trying to trade bitcoin made me structure my activities a lot more. I hated trading, but it put negative pressure on itself leading to better use of time.

</comment><comment><USER19> I live by structured procrastination. My most productive day this month was the 16th—the day before my taxes were due.</comment>


Why mobile web is slow? - <AUTHOR> http://www.codenameone.com/blog/why-mobile-web-is-slow

<comment><USER2> Light-grey text on a white background is difficult to read.</comment>


SQLite As The MP3 Of Data - <AUTHOR> http://blog.gobansaor.com/2009/03/14/sqlite-as-the-mp3-of-data/ <comment><USER2> > Having access to that code allows me to tightly integrate it with Excel, so > much so, that I can use Excel functions (built-in functions, VBA user- > defined functions and 3rd party add-in functions) directly from SQLite's > SQL; and vice-versa, access SQL functionality via Excel "formula" calls.

This sounds really cool and is available here: <http://blog.gobansaor.com/projects/xlite/>

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't really work with SQLite too much (I mainly work with mySQL and in- memory-structures, like hashes), but here are a few observations that kept me from using it:

1\. It uses a lot of IO unnecessarily. (Actually, necessarily, due to their motto, but 99% odf developers aren't aware that this is not necessary) SQLite- based applications often make my hard-drive sqeak like it's on a last spin - SQLite does A LOT of hdd activity (Chrome, Firefox, Adwords editor are notorious for that). It's SQLites motto - 100% consistency first! journal everything!.. but... that's my HDD and I don't want it to be dead because SQLite thinks it's great idea to write every byte it receives to insure me against 0.01% chance of data loss.

2\. Head-to-head runs of mySQL vs SQLite in real-world applications - well, SQLite loses badly.. and I mean badly. I use a lot of hash-style databases (i.e. id-value storage, 2 columns only) in some of my tests SQLite lost with 10 times worse performance against mySQL (again, if they didn't try to record everything, like mySQL does with MyISAM - they would've got the chance).

That being said - in-memory SQLite tables are very performant! Very! But... almost nobody uses that. As a result - Chrome/Firefox downloads phising update and my HDD lights like a christmas tree (download Filemon from SysInternals and watch how much Chrome or other SQLite-based engine uses your HDD for simple data that MUST be in-memory... or at least used by in-memory cache, like in MySQL... so your users' HDDs will eventually die because of this). I know it's none of developers troubles to think about the fact that their software unnecessarily uses much IO and leads to early hard drive replacement, but still, that's a big reason why I avoid using SQLite.

I mean, there are a lot of in-memory structures that can (and should) be used, but once the developer sees how convinient SQLite is, he jumps right on it. I mean.. 99% of times SQLite should be used like this - load data from disk to :memory: table (i.e. replicate it to memory), work with :memory: and eventually dump it to drive (like once in a couple of minutes) and dump on "Save" command. But instead every popular program uses disk-based tables. Why? Because it's a lazy way. Who wants to add in-memory pre-caching when you can just open a table from disk in less commands?

It's sad to see the current state of programming. Coming from an area where I had to write programs that would fit into 64KILObytes of memory and 3.5MHZ (that's 1000 times slower than modern single-core processor) - (ZX Spectrum)... and we've had whole huge games in that, working in real-time, with color graphics and almost unlimited galaxies (Elite)... it's just sad to see how the available resources are used these days. People had to use a lot of tricks to make things work with acceptable speeds... And now? I mean it's 3GHZ and gigabytes of data, yet I have to wait 10 seconds for Word (or Firefox) to start up?

My main points are: 1) SQLite is convinient; 2) Disk-based SQLite (which is used by 99% or more pieces of software) is nowhere near the possible performance of in-memory; 3) disk-based SQLite is putting a heck of a load on HDD (fire up FileMon during your Chrome session and be amazed); 4) SQLite is nowhere near one-fits-almost-all solution, like mp3 is; 5) even so it will gain more popularity because it's convenient for developers.

I have MySQL table with 72billion denormalized items (72million rows) and it's in realtime application... and it performs! I can't even imagine what would SQLite be like with that kind of data.

Still, please note that I'm not saying SQLite is bad, I'm saying the default route almost all devleopers take with it has some serious issues and yet nobody seems to care.

<comment><USER4> I second the IO issue - it's alarming to have the HDD always churning when I have Chrome open. Assuming SQLite is the culprit, that's a good reason to think twice about embedding it into an application.

<comment><USER3> BTW, if you turn off phishing protection - that lowers HDD usage significantly.

(But, reasonably enough, by "turning off phishing protection" you have be more attentive to what you're doing online)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Did I miss something obvious?

How does one configure Excel to use SQLite?

<comment><USER6> <http://blog.gobansaor.com/projects/xlite/>

I've used sqlite from MS Access, using sqlite ODBC driver; just for fun though, havent done anything useful with it yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Can someone refresh my memory of how SQLite handles concurrency? Doesn't it block on writes or something?

For a long time I've thought a spiritual successor to Access, Filemaker, etc. based on SQLite would be a great idea.

<comment><USER8> By default it does deferred transactions (exclusive lock is only acquired when you need to commit), but if you use insert/update/delete outside a transaction, each statement is it's own transaction.

Locking is database-wide, although IIRC there's some branch that can do table- level locking.

<comment><USER9> As far as I know, SQLite's version of "table-level locking" is to put each table in a different database file and ATTACH them all to one database connection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> To be analogous to MP3, it would need:

        - Enabled distribution by overcoming bandwidth issues
        - Has been superseded by superior technology,
            but the majority think it's good enough already
        - Is seen as "open" even though it's proprietary
        - Because of the above, has become a defacto standard

How many of the above does SQLite fit?

</comment><comment><USER11> This actually might be good for a problem I ran into today. I'm distributing some source code with a large data file, one that we would like to store in a SQL database for ease of use. However, we don't know that the user machines will have MySQL installed. Would it make sense to use SQLLite in this instance? It sounds like you don't have to install it.

<comment><USER5> You do need to "install" SQLite, but not in the traditional sense. Most likely all you need to do is include a library that knows how to read and write to SQLite files. Worst case, you'll need to ship your code with a small static binary and call out to that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Yeah, SQLite is as lossy as MP3 :)

FWIW, I've lost some of my mails at least twice in Apple Mail due to corrupt SQLite files, but that maybe due to OS X's crazy fsync implementation.

</comment><comment><USER13> different tools for different tasks. as far as setup time goes, sqlite wins by a long shot.</comment>


Why I Stopped Watching the News - <AUTHOR> http://simplyahmazing.github.io/reflection/2015/01/10/dont-watch-the-news.html

<comment><USER2> The news can be really annoying and upsetting at times (Almost click-baity). They like to pump you full of fear with the "teases" so you pay attention (10 things in your kitchen that might kill you! Watch the news, we'll tell you what they are).

Bruce Scheiner said it best in a podcast: I'm paraphrasing: generally if its news, you don't have to worry about it because its uncommon, thats why its news.

I'm happier not paying much attention to it as well. That being said if you live in democracy its kinda important to at least pay some attention to what is going on so you can make informed voting decisions.

If you can find a local source of news, the information is more actionable and usefull. In boston the public radio does an interview/local news radio show [1] that runs 3 hours daily. Its kind of funny too which helps. And we have a news magazine called Chronicle [2]which documents interesting stuff going on in the area.

[1][http://wgbhnews.org/](http://wgbhnews.org/) [2][http://www.wcvb.com/chronicle](http://www.wcvb.com/chronicle)

</comment><comment><USER3> I was reading earlier about the wikipedia page for "The Society of Spectacle" and this might be relevant here:

> The Society of the Spectacle is a critique of contemporary consumer culture > and commodity fetishism. Before the term "globalization" was popularized, > Debord was arguing about issues such as class alienation, cultural > homogenization, and the mass media.

Also:

> "The spectacle is not a collection of images," Debord writes, "rather, it is > a social relationship between people that is mediated by images."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle)

</comment><comment><USER4> There are some good newscasts out there that aren't predicated on emotional manipulation. May I suggest the PBS NewsHour, or Sky News?

</comment><comment><USER5> Do you know how to figure out if someone does not own a TV? Don't worry, they'll let you know as soon as they can.

<comment><USER6> It can be inferred from my default excuse: "I don't watch TV."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Good article.

This is why I quit watching the main networks and only get news from infowars.com.</comment>


Ask HN: Are there any open-source alternatives for Tumblr? - <AUTHOR> Hello<p>I'm looking for an open-source project that would match the feature set provided by Tumblr (custom user profiles, posting media, sharing posts from other people). I've heard about Diaspora and Mastodon, but I'm wondering if there is something more closer to how Tumblr works. <comment><USER2> If you have views already designed, i can get you on our beta. upload your screens and our a.i. will building your product for you. [https://crane.ai/](https://crane.ai/)</comment>


Four hurdles to jump after starting a business - <AUTHOR> http://www.16thletter.com/2008/02/13/four-hurdles-to-jump-after-starting-a-business/

<comment><USER2> Those struck me as the four steps you take before you reach your first hurdle.

The hurdles I though the author would note are: Defining a market, building _something_ to address that market, generating revenue from that _something_ and reducing costs/increasing revenue to create sustainable profit from the business.

</comment><comment><USER3> Well written narratively but not very potent (or relevant to the HN audience generally).

The Cliff Notes version: You need to tell people you're starting a business, believe that it will work out, be prepared unexpected things will happen, and bear in mind there are ups and downs.</comment>


Can Fracking Be Cleaned Up? - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/news/428076/can-fracking-be-cleaned-up/?p1=A3 <comment><USER2> The rule of any headline that asks a question: the answer is always no.

In this case, this greatly saddens me. Why haven't we banned fracking? We don't need the natural gas, but we need the groundwater its destroying.</comment>


There Is No Such Thing As Email Overload - <AUTHOR> http://www.stangeek.com/there-is-no-such-thing-as-email-overload <comment><USER3> >or you are in the process of doing something so important that it requires 100% of your attention (this never happens for more than 10 minutes),

Never worked at something, then realized that 3 hours had gone by? Never happens? Then you are bad at whatever it is you do.

Anyway if it is so important to get your answer within 10 minutes, you should have the cutesy to show up in person and discuss the matter. Email isn't meant to be instant.

Sending an email is a request for the recipients time and frankly you have no right to expect people to give you what it is you request just because you request it.

What an unnecessarily arrogant blogpost.

<comment><USER4> "Email isn't meant to be instant."

Exactly. If something isn't urgent, send an email. If it's somewhat time- sensitive, send an instant message. If it's super urgent, go talk in person. And please have the courtesy to know which is which.

Whenever you expect an immediate response, you're saying "this is more important that whatever you're doing." Saying that when it's not true shows that you don't respect that person's time.

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right about email not being the correct medium for instant response, and the 10 minutes SLA I mention in the blog post is provocative. But as much as I respect other people's time, I've had enough of people pretending to be doing something so clever / urgent / important that they can't allocate a few minutes here and then to read their emails. If you don't want to be accountable for answering correspondance you're being sent, then don't communicate your email address.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> My issue with reading emails as tehy come in is that it breaks my flow when I'm developing.

As Jeff Atwod stated here : [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/the- multi-tasking-m...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/09/the-multi- tasking-myth.html)

There is no such thing as multitasking, so the average 1 min to read a mail is actually much more of a loss in terms of productivity, and more importantly comfort in doing what you do.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi, I fully agree there is no such thing as multi tasking.

My workflow is purely linear! I'm just saying that if, in general, you're not able to split big problems into smaller ones, which are manageable in 10 minutes spans, then you should probably rethink the problem again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"doing something so important that it requires 100% of your attention (this never happens for more than 10 minutes)"_

The author is clearly not a developer.

I like to check my e-mail twice a day. And then just close the program. Keeps you focused (more than 10 minutes).

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

Interesting remarks. I am a developer. Probably a bad one from reading your comments. My point of view is that every problem, however complex it is, can be split into more simple problems which need no more than 10 minutes of attention at a time (when I say attention it's really 100% of your brain - <USER2> chatting, no twitter etc.).

I develop in rails with cucumber for use case designing. So for instance my workflow would be: \- write a cucumber test (if you spend more than 10 minutes on a single test, it's clearly too complicated or not granular enough) \- check emails (if any), answer (I'm amazed at someone here saying he needs 1h+ to answer a single email. Sure this can happen, but less than 1% of the time.) \- watch the cucumber test fail and write the corresponding feature (again if more than 10 minutes, then you clearly don't know how this works) \- check emails (if any), answer \- write ruby on rails code to make the test's step work \- rince & repeat

I have to add I'm not just a developer - I'm a startup founder. So I'm doing more than developing. And checking my emails only twice a day would mean I'd miss many opportunities...

<comment><USER6> _"Probably a bad one from reading your comments."_ Well if it works for you, don't change. I will be the last one to call you a bad developer. But in my experience e-mails can be very distractive because people ask for a solution, not just a simple reply.

 _"checking my emails only twice a day would mean I'd miss many opportunities"_ I'm hearing this a lot, but it's it's a false assumption. Real opportunities can wait 4 hours (do you also check your e-mail when you sleep?). It's just that you think you will miss something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> "You can afford to spend 30 seconds every 10 minutes to deal with emails."

As others have mentioned, this would destroy programmer productivity and flow.

It seems the author is picturing a scenario where you can just read an email and fire off an answer. In my case, an email may require an hour of research or a day of work to answer. If I'm already working on something, just having the new task mentally on my stack is going to distract me from my current task and thus delay me getting to the new one. Or else I'll switch to the new one and completely lose my place in the current one.

Infrequent email checking is much better for my productivity.</comment>


University Innovation and the Professor's Privilege - <AUTHOR> http://www.nber.org/digest/may16/w22057.html <comment><USER2> The idea that people respond to incentives is completely unsurprising, except, apparently, to people at the top of government/academia. If the university receives a substantial portion of the rights to my work, I'm going to do less work, particularly if the university isn't required to contribute to my work after I launch my firm.

The natural experiment that arose here reminds me of VC firms- firms like YC (or Entrepreneur First in the UK) offer exceptionally good deals to the firms that they fund under the belief that doing so helps the firms succeed, and in so doing, helps the VC firms realise a greater return on their asset. Other VC firms, in comparison (particularly smaller/local firms) seem to impose more onerous terms on the firms that they fund, labouring under the belief that in so doing, the firms will make more money, when (IMO) the firms are reducing the incentive of the founding team to work as hard as they would have otherwise.

I suspect, but do not have any references to show, that providing equity grants to employees, or providing more generous funding to a company, would produce a similar, albeit positive, change in innovation & productivity.</comment>


Best Black Friday – Cyber Monday Special VPN Deals - <AUTHOR> http://www.bestvpnservice.com/blog/best-black-friday-cyber-monday-special-vpn-deals/ <comment><USER2> for some reason I don't trust your site, the use of "best" is too scammy.

<comment><AUTHOR> It might, but we are 100% legit.how would actually scam you? The providers we list and promote have a huge following. Check if you ever get the time.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Medical Research Summarizer – Complex research as simple summaries - <AUTHOR> http://summarizer.hdphealth.com <comment><USER2> We've built a system that allows us to translate difficult to read research abstracts and convert them into 4 to 8 bullet point descriptions that are readable by the common person.

It's like Blinkist, but for complex research.

Our backend consists of a ton of med school students, PhD's, and researchers.

I myself had an autoimmune disorder for 10 years, well I still have it, but I've been in remission for the last 2 years. Making sense of the research out there is a tall order without an organic chemistry background. When I was first diagnosed, I ended up spending hours trying to read research I barely understood, but that was relative child's play for a PhD to clarify.

It's called Ulcerative colitis and has no known cure. Some of the most intriguing research that I'd wish I had been cognizant of and had a way to read is this article(Http://bit.ly/fodmapfree) on FODMAPS (Fermentable Oligosaccharides, Disaccharides, Monosaccharides, and Polyols Saccharrides) and their impact on those with Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

Had I known, I would have experimented with something like it to see outcomes. Keep in mind, there's no such thing as an FDA approved diet.

<comment><USER3> Do you not worry that people who are not researchers, who are providing essentially the "TL;DR" of a disease, will provide incomplete or potentially misleading advice?

<comment><USER4> In addition to what rf1331 said, to what extent is hdphealth liable for a case where e.g. someone reads that treatment X is beneficial for their case, but in fact someone got the facts slightly wrong and it made their case much worse?

<comment><USER2> [https://www.hdphealth.com/2016/02/16/the-research-on- biopsie...](https://www.hdphealth.com/2016/02/16/the-research-on-biopsies-in- ulcerative-colitis-patients/)

Notice the disclaimer at the bottom.

As well, we link to the research article itself in every scenario.

At some point we should try to add a "Share with your doctor" button.

Thanks for the feedback.

<comment><USER5> I think a niche certainly exists for your product...

If you could manage to land an ad in _AARP-The Magazine_ for instance, I think you'd be pleasantly surprised at the response...that demographic is of an age where many common ailments begin to show up...

I'd caution you to give the idea of adding a "Share with your doctor" option very careful thought before implementing it...

Some physicians don't mind patients that attempt to research their ailments online prior to an appointment...others dread seeing patients arrive with printouts from the internet...

This is anecdotal from my wife's side of the family, which includes 2 physicians, a dentist, and a physical therapist...

Having said that, times are changing...

Good luck!

<comment><USER2> Thanks. We've had an overwhelming response even from just the tech community submitting articles on all sorts of things ranging from hypopharangeal cancer and beyond.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is generally an awesome idea. The value add is really a jumping off point that can equip you with enough understanding to begin to read about the issue overall.

An additional glossary for terms most important to that research area would also be helpful.

<comment><USER2> Adding that to our to do list. good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting!

Random thought: If this catches on in a big way, have you thought of how the system will deal with the fundamentally political nature of some areas of medical research? Real effort is going into trying to subvert this process at the source, so why not the summary?

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll deal with that if it really catches on, but if that happens I'd say it's a better problem to have than no one wanting it at all :)

If you have any ideas we'd love to hear them though!

<comment><USER7> Citation graph analysis might be useful, but I'd have to think about it a bit.

I suspect you can make a nearly risk free bet that if there is a significant amount of money being made that depends on the results of a contentious issue in the existing science, there are deep problems in the related literature.

<comment><USER8> How about CRISPR? There is a tremendous controversy right now over who should get recognized (Nobel? Patents?) for CRISPR's invention

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks interesting. I'm curious about the ways a user can visualize the summarized information.

Is it just via paragraphs (like in the one example on your site), bullet points or some other manner? Does each paragraph equal one sentence or do you look for hard-to-understand terms and only summarize those?

On a side note, if any readers know of all the best/varied ways to summarize information ('manually', not via algorithms), I'd be very interested in seeing examples, particularly of news articles and research.

<comment><AUTHOR> Essentially we get individuals with medical expertise to make an abstract that is readable by every day people. Some of these you'll read "the common carotid artery" but in laymen's terms is "blood vessel in the neck", we make this new research more accessible to the every day person

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'll be interested to see how this works - I submitted something, and I'll post my thoughts when I get your summary.

One question: How do you deal with paper links that go to non-open access publications? Have you paid for the usual journal subscription bundles? Relying on crowdsourcing?

<comment><AUTHOR> We'll either purchase it or look for someone with access :) The crowdsourcing certainly helps!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Where is the privacy policy?

Information about diseases people search for is valuable to a lot of third parties.

<comment><USER2> Definitely need to add that.

At the moment, we do not make that information public externally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Really interesting idea!

Are the summaries entirely free? If so, what's in it for the summarizers?

<comment><USER2> We pay them.

We get great SEO value out of publishing the long tail of summarized research.

<comment><USER13> What is the pay?

<comment><USER2> $5/summary.

It ends up being about $15-$25/hr.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Interesting. Did you guys pivot from helping people find clinical trials?

<comment><AUTHOR> The clinical trial recruitment is actually the business model behind this. We're using this as a way to attract patients to our brand.</comment></comment>


I Wish I Could Clone Myself - <AUTHOR> http://www.monfx.com/online-entrepreneurship/i-wish-i-could-clone-myself/

<comment><AUTHOR> If anyone has any advice on prioritizing their work, I would seriously appreciate it!

</comment><comment><USER2> i'm not sure cloning yourself in this case would be the answer. then you'd have MORE ideas, not more solutions.

i'd consider cloning your friends.

second to that i'd gather them, choose the idea by concensus that everyone wants most to work on, and complete that project. use money from that to fund teams to build all the other ideas.</comment>


Ghost: Just a Blogging Platform - <AUTHOR> http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform

<comment><USER2> IIRC, Ghost was a (unrealistic) vision of what a minimalist branch from WP would be like. It was unrealistic because trying to maintain some compatibility with WP's ecosystem is probably something you can't do just somewhat, like pregnancy.

So not having WP compatibility makes it less of an initial attraction to established bloggers...OTOH, we definitely need a good, minimal self-hosting blogging solution between Wordpress and Jekyll. Hopefully the next generation of bloggers will realize that even WP is more than they need, just as many modern WP sites eschewed Drupal (qz.com, for example, and several major traditional news websites)</comment>


Firefox – tons of tools for web developers - <AUTHOR> http://hacks.mozilla.org/2011/11/firefox-tons-of-tools-for-web-developers/ <comment><USER2> Our team has basically abandoned Firefox in favor of Chrome. Our team consists of front-end, HTML/JS/CSS types as well as server-side devs. I'm surprised, but every member of the team independently has punted on Firefox. For some, it was the extensions. For others, it was the RAM consumption.

With the new release schedule, it seems every time I would open FF with a new version to pull, some extension no longer works. It's purely anecdotal, but it was enough to annoy the bejeezus out of us that we simply switched over to Chrome.

<comment><USER3> if you use [add-on compatibility reporter]([https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/add-on-compat...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/add-on-compatibility-reporter/)) then you can tell firefox to use 'incompatible' extensions anyway. most of the time they work just fine.

<comment><USER2> Good to know, thank you.

Of course, there's the potential incompatibility of the incompatibility reporter, but I digress.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have found the Chrome dev tools to be much better usability-wise than anything Firebug had to offer. I also find it suspicious that Firebug is so heavy in terms of performance & memory, compared to the always-enabled chrome dev tools.

Anyway it's good to see Mozilla is investing in this area by integrating tools right in the browser. Keep it up!

<comment><USER5> I generally agree. The primary thing I find myself going back to Firebug for is debugging ajax calls, since I get the fully expandable request / response info inline along with console output. Chromium can show that an ajax call was made inline, but the link goes to the Network tab, and unfortunately doesn't auto-select the referenced call.

<comment><USER6> Holy crap, I think Chrome can do that, too.

I upvoted you because I agreed; AJAX was what I went back to Firefox for.

However, a different comment in this thread mentioned the Chrome Developer Tools preferences (a little gears icon in the bottom right corner), which I'd never noticed before.

Sure enough, clicking it revealed the options 1) Log XMLHttpRequests and 2)Preserve log upon navigation. Checking those (which were unchecked by default) gave a HUGE amount of info on the AJAX calls that I just tested.

Maybe it's not what you're talking about, but it was a big find for me.

<comment><USER5> That's exactly what I was referring to.

You can set it to add a line to the log when ajax calls are made, and fortunately a trace for where they are made from, but you have to go to the Network tab and click on the actual request to see the details. Clicking the link within the console output provides will take you to the tab, but not the request.

It's close - but not quite there. I prefer having it all in one place, but just having the link lead to the actual Request on the Network tab would be great.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting/worrying comment at the end about the future of Firebug alleging there is only one developer working on it and Mozilla have all but abandoned it. Anyone able to confirm/deny/comment on the matter?

<comment><USER8> Was it a Mozilla project in the first place? I thought it was just a very popular third-party addon?

<comment><USER9> Though it wasn't a Mozilla project, it was written by Joe Hewitt, one of the original Firefox creators.

<comment><USER8> Thank you!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> It's a shame there's no good in-browser HTML validator (for any browser, so far as I can tell). HTML Validator used to be perfect, but Firefox started changing too rapidly for it to work consistently, and the current version only works on Windows (!).

Does anyone know of a browser/plugin combination that validates pages automatically (preferably configurable to run only on localhost)? The original HTML Validator was perfect, with a small icon in the bottom right of the screen indicating valid or invalid. Total Validator is OK, but it's not in- page, so that (for example) it's very difficult to validate pages behind a login wall.

<comment><USER11> I'm in the same boat as you. My computer at work is a Mac, and I was unable to use the HTML Validator plugin. The solution is to go to the plugin's forums - [http://www.htmlpedia.org/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=11&sid=e9...](http://www.htmlpedia.org/phpBB/viewforum.php?f=11&sid=e9e977bdf5cf2f4614809ffb6833fbcb). One of the guys there has been really good in taking the origin plugin and compiling it for other operating systems.

<comment><USER10> Hmm... It doesn't seem to work. I left off a closing li tag and it didn't complain. C'est dommage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Using Dragonfly in Opera makes my life pretty darn easy. It would be very difficult to convince me to switch to either FF or Chrome at this point.

<comment><USER13> I'm intrigued by Dragonfly. Why do you like it better than what is available in Chrome? Basically, what are its selling points?

<comment><USER12> Unfortunately, I am totally unfamiliar with any of the alternatives to Dragonfly. And the selling points would read like the feature list of any debugger. All I can really say is that with Dragonfly, I don't mind working with JavaScript anymore -- it is tightly integrated with the browser and does its job well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow, the CSS Reloader add-on is awesome! This could've save me a couple of hours if I had it earlier.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/css-reloader/>

<comment><USER15> I've been using LiveReload+Guard for this on Rails projects. It'll reload CSS as soon as the file changes on disk without any keypress required. If necessary it'll reload the whole page. It's very handy.

There's a 2.x version that's a standalone OS X app and handles compiling a bunch of things like LESS, Sass, etc. but I haven't used it.

1.x <https://github.com/mockko/livereload> 2.x <http://livereload.com>

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Somewhat related, LiveReload (<http://livereload.com/>) has made the biggest impact in the way I develop recently.

It feels a lot like the way notch developed with hot swapping during Lundum Dare.

</comment><comment><USER17> It's not Firefox-specific, but if inspecting and modifying HTTP requests/responses is what you want to do you should try Charles ( <http://www.charlesproxy.com/> ).

</comment><comment><USER18> So will the new Dev. Tools replace the functionality of Firebug or not?

<comment><USER19> I'm not sure that anyone has a definative answer to that question right now. The new tools are interesting because they do things in a different way, but there is a lot they don't do, so we're supporting both.

It's possible that one day Firebug will be totally superceeded. It's possible that both tools will have separate audiences for some time. It's possible that the new native tools will be a total flop (although I have a vested interest in making sure that doesn't happen!)

<comment><USER8> Bringing the new functionality into Firefox, where it can be more exhaustively slimmed down and the primary team is responsible for it makes sense to me.

Heck, if the basic functionality is there then Firebug can be written to take advantage of those APIs, which would be a win all round.

<comment><USER18> Regarding #2: Yeah, that would be really great. Could also lead to less memory consumed

<comment><USER20> I am hard working to fix all Firebug memory leaks (and did fix some of them recently). What I really need is a simple scenario showing that Firebug leaks. That helps me a lot!

Any input is appreciated, please post here: <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/firebug>

Honza

<comment><USER21> How am I to tell whether leaks are from Firefox or Firebug? What I know is that after a full day developing Firefox will use 800MB of RAM, and the only way to get rid of that is to close the entire process. I use Firebug heavily and I know that _something_ is leaking somewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> A bunch of these simply don't work in later releases of Firefox

<comment><USER23> They all appear compatible in Firefox 8.x, can you be more specific?

edit: why have i been down voted, i took the time, and specifically checked :/

<comment><USER24> It wasn't me but... Don't overthink a single downvote: the up and down arrows are awfully close, and it's easy to misclick, particularly on a tablet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The only thing I open Firefox for anymore is SQLite Manager. What really made me fall in love with Chrome developer tools is using them to write Chrome extensions.

</comment><comment><USER26> if you were to install all of those plugins/add-ons simultaneously your computer would grind to a halt from RAM usage.

<comment><USER27> I would be surprised if that were the case.

I made a clean Firefox profile and installed and enabled everything in the selection except the Firebug addons and the HTML validator, which does not support Linux. That is, 47 extensions in total. The machine is an old box from 2004 with an AMD64 3000+ processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM, running Debian Sid 64bit. In this old box, with all 47 extensions enabled, Firefox starts in less than 5 seconds and takes about 175 MB of memory.

But even if installing 47 extensions brought Firefox to a halt, why would you need to install all of them? This is simply a collection of recommended extensions, not a set that no developer can do without.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> For fun I messed around with Firefox 8 with Firebug. Crashed in less than 5 min. Lot of work is still ahead...

Chrome has Firefox beat</comment>


Show HN: Apple Watch apps that you can download now - <AUTHOR> http://www.appwatchlist.com

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea here is, these are apps that will have a watch app on day one. I expect Apple is going to drop iOS 8.2 next week, so these apps will already be on your phone, with the watch binary, waiting for the day the watch jumps on your wrist.

I have a few duplicates just for filler. If you have any suggestions, feel free to submit them or let me know here.

<comment><USER2> AFAIK Apple is not accepting apps with Watch binaries? (You still need to use the beta version of Xcode to create Watch Apps & Apple does not review apps built with beta versions of Xcode)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: As SDEs, how do you find new projects to do on your team? - <AUTHOR> I have recently joined a team of scientists where my job is to help them do their work efficiently. There's a lot of inefficiencies in what they do, but also a ton of external dependency. I am having a hard time wrapping my head around everything and struggling to understand what projects/solutions to come up with to solve their long term problems. Should I start with automating small redundant tasks? I fear that I will miss out the bigger picture that way. Do I be patient and let the ideas  come to me naturally? I feel like the other SDEs on the team already have sort of "taken" the "big" obvious projects. I'm worried that I'll be unable to have my own impactful project and will be left doing small tasks. <comment><USER2> You need to figure out what will have the biggest impact on the short (<1 month) and long term (6+months).

Start by taking to your customers to understand their pain. Most likely they will be able to articulate short term pain points, but by knowing their process you can figure out the vision for the long term.

</comment><comment><USER3> It takes time. The more experience you have with the project you're working on the more ideas you will have to either apply to the project itself or create a new project to help support it.</comment>


Drones will cause an upheaval of society like we haven't seen in 700 years - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/185945/drones-are-about-to-upheave-society-in-a-way-we-havent-seen-in-700-years/

<comment><USER2> There's an interesting Mexican science fiction film that explores some of the future described in this piece: [http://alexrivera.com/project/sleep- dealer/](http://alexrivera.com/project/sleep-dealer/)

Some discussion of those themes: [http://fpif.org/science_fiction_from_below/](http://fpif.org/science_fiction_from_below/)

I found it flawed, but brilliant. It deserved more attention than it got.

<comment><AUTHOR> Also, Elysium, kind of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Guns (and crossbows), capitalism, sailboats and printing presses all did the same thing. Democratized personal power and autonomy. I'd say the printing press did more to defeat tyranny than the gun.

We should be worried about the "right to keep and bear technology". Its in the same group of things. If this gets locked away by multinationals and "rights management" schemes, we're in trouble. Drones or not.</comment>


Building Secure Node.js Applications - <AUTHOR> http://blog.safaribooksonline.com/2014/03/12/building-secure-node-js-applications/

<comment><USER2> One thing I started to use in Express is Helmet[1] (written by the author of the article).

Also I started going through Troy Hunt's course on Pluralsight which is a real eye-opener.[2]

[1]: [https://github.com/evilpacket/helmet](https://github.com/evilpacket/helmet) [2]: [http://www.troyhunt.com/2013/08/its-time-to-hack-yourself- fi...](http://www.troyhunt.com/2013/08/its-time-to-hack-yourself-first- with.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nothing here is Node specific. I don't mean that as an attack on the article, just an observation - keeping careful track of where your 3rd-party dependencies are coming from and running tests are good ideas for any application, particularly one open to a network.

<comment><USER4> The node specific things are the actual tools he points to that help with that, which I thought were pretty neat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> First step, don't use JavaScript or derivative technologies. Oh wait, you can't avoid using Javascript. I guess it's that, or we don't make any money, we use Javascript. I wonder how Amazon avoided using Javascript for so long. Oh yeah, 10,000 engineers and military cooperation. Good luck on making a "secure" site that conforms to any standard of the last 10 years!

<comment><USER6> How does Amazon use the military? I don't understand.

<comment><USER7> I think he refers to the contract they have to build a cloud for the CIA.</comment></comment></comment>


GopherCon 2015 CFP Now Open - <AUTHOR> http://cfp.gophercon.com/events/gc15

<comment><USER2> And here I was hoping a gopher:// resurgence was taking place.

<comment><USER3> My hopes were also dashed. Bring back gopher!

<comment><USER4> As someone too young to have used gopher://, I'd like to take your comment half-seriously: from a user POV, how is it different than, say, HTTP ? (I believe it occupies more or less the same domain)

<comment><USER3> It was pretty much a document search system. It was really useful at the time when I was at university as a number of universities and organisations had gopher servers with information not available on the then fledgling world wide web. It was in no way comparable with the web or http. My comment was more nostalgic than anything!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gophers: If you plan on presenting via some sort of deck of slides, perhaps you could try to present, capture and share via this thing I made: [http://presentio.us/view/p1tcHs](http://presentio.us/view/p1tcHs)

edit: "SlideDeck" is not a word and need not be CamelCased...

<comment><USER6> Just checked out the website, awesome idea! Hope to see this catch on with tech talks.

<comment><USER5> Please forward to anyone giving a talk! Also, I'd love for professors/educators to start using it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's not clear from that page, but Gophercon "is the inaugural event for an annual conference devoted exclusively to the Go programming language."

[http://gophercon.com/about/](http://gophercon.com/about/)

EDIT: The page is now more descriptive :).

<comment><AUTHOR> I suppose I should make that more clear. Thanks.</comment></comment>