CanCanCan – Continuation of CanCan, the authorization Gem for Ruby on Rails. - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/CanCanCommunity/cancancan

<comment><USER2> Kudos on picking up and moving forward an existing Rails plugin gem rather than writing yet another. Too many Rails gems get left in the dust after a few years. CanCan is a great library, and is well-documented!

That being said, I've found (the hard way) that how CanCan declares "abilities" isn't flexible enough. The declarations got out of hand as my app grew larger and the maze of who can do what got more complex.

CanCan tries to reduce complex authorization logic down to a very simple DSL. I applaud the effort, but it falls apart on larger apps.

(I am perfectly willing to admit that I probably just "did it wrong", but in the end, I decided something less clever and more along the lines of "just Ruby" would be more up my alley.)

I've switched over to using the Authority gem [1] for authorization, which doesn't try to be quite so clever. You write your authorization logic in plain ol' Ruby code -- use an `if` or a `case` or look up in the database, or whatever!

The best part of CanCan (IMO) is its ability to load and authorize your resource model in a filter in your controller, removing much of the boilerplate you get with Rails resource controllers. I would hope that functionality could be extracted from CanCan (or CanCanCan) into a separate gem.

In the meantime, I ended up writing my own library called (unimaginatively) "load_and_authorize_resource" [2] to do basically the same thing. Feedback (and PRs) welcome.

[1] [https://github.com/nathanl/authority](https://github.com/nathanl/authority) [2] [https://github.com/seven1m/load_and_authorize_resource](https://github.com/seven1m/load_and_authorize_resource)

<comment><USER3> Haven't heard of authority before, thanks for the link. I've been using Pundit [1] for similar problems; assuming you're aware of both projects, were there any specific issues that caused you to go with authority over Pundit?

[1] [https://github.com/elabs/pundit](https://github.com/elabs/pundit)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's also `authorize`, `pundit` and many more:

[https://www.ruby- toolbox.com/categories/rails_authorization](https://www.ruby- toolbox.com/categories/rails_authorization)

</comment><comment><USER5> Can we still use it outside of rails? We've had success in the past using CanCan in sinatra apps.

</comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for not allowing cancan to die.

</comment><comment><USER7> [Six]([https://github.com/randx/six](https://github.com/randx/six)) is typically my go to library. I really prefer something to just store rules, and six does just that. No fancy dsl, no integration with Rails, etc.

</comment><comment><USER8> A new name might be a better idea. Otherwise the next person will make CanCanCanCan, which is actually a legitimate english sentence.

</comment><comment><USER9> anyone knows why cancan development was stopped?

<comment><USER10> The author, Ryan Bates, has been on hiatus for a while now due to burn out. He seems to have stopped his open source work in addition his Railscasts screencasts.

<comment> why-el And his social media presence. Ryan is great and burn out is a serious matter. Hope he comes back stronger and more inspired.

<comment><USER11> I wouldn't hold my breath. The worst thing you can do after something like that is going back to the old way of working. It's not like you steel yourself by going through such a phase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Caveat: I didn't write this, folks. I just really liked CanCan and was happy to see it be maintained.

<comment><USER12> Here's a blogpost by the new maintainer: [https://mojolingo.com/blog/2014/putting-the-can-in- cancan/](https://mojolingo.com/blog/2014/putting-the-can-in-cancan/)</comment></comment>


Get things done by procrastinating - <AUTHOR> http://doinstead.com/ <comment><USER2> Interesting idea. Btw, the default placeholders for Contact name and email address made me realize immediately that this site is using foundation for css (even without looking at the source) :). I have been playing with the same.

Your landing page though is a little confusing. Ok so we can do more by procrastinating and then immediately you have the pricing table. I have no clue what it means. Yes you have a "how it works" section below but the pricing table needs to be somewhere else in my opinion.

"When people have a big task to do they usually tend to start working on lots of other smaller things."

Not sure if this can be generalized. When I procrastinate, i don't even do the small tasks. Heck, I will keep looking at that little light bulb that needs to be changed but I won't.

<comment><USER3> agree! this is one gigantic confused mess. I applaud the intention behind it but time to go back to the drawing board or at least do a small focus group and get feedback from real live people (excluding those who built this who are obviously too close to it to realize it doesn't accomplish its stated goal).

also, if the service isn't available, wouldn't it be a perfect time to not have the buttons and price points for purchase and instead use a video, prezi or some other form of succinct and lucid presentation to explain what problem you are trying to solve and HOW you're going about that?

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right - the website could be done better

I came up to this idea like two or three days ago and built this page. This is more like a test ballon to figure out if there is any potential.

<comment><USER4> Your test balloon will be misleading.

I have lots of stuff to do, and feel like I'm not doing it as fast as I could. I want to procrastinate less. I'm very much in the market for anything that helps me be more efficient.

But I have no idea what your site does. I'm not saying that to be harsh.

What I'm saying is: your test balloon is in no way indicative of the worthiness of your idea. You could very easily get a false negative, because people who are interested can't figure it out and don't sign up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> After staring at the page for about 5 minutes, I still have no idea what I would possibly be paying for, nor what would happen to my deposit if I didn't "finish" it on time.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Background story:

I'm currently working on a ToDo-App for the iPhone. The problem is, I'm not really working on it. Instead, I created all social media accounts I could potentially need for the app (if I hopefully finish it sometime). In addition to this, I rebuilt my personal website, redid my résumé and a lot of other stuff (like this side project). In fact I was quite productive - but not on the task I should do.

To sum it up: Instead of working on a big task I got a lot of smaller ones done. So to get something done you obviously just need something bigger to procrastinate on. That's what this project is about.

Now I'm really interested in your opinions - do you think this could work?

(PS: English is not my first language - if there are any mistakes on the website please tell me)

<comment><USER6> I like the idea, and I actually think it could work. I wouldn't be very happy paying a fee, but if I paid $100 that's returned to me if I succeed or lost if I fail, without any other fees, I'd be quite tempted.

As a web service though there's no reason for me to use it. Your competition is me giving $100 to a friend I trust. I'm not sure how you'd overcome that.

<comment><USER7> I think they pick the task for you. Leastways, that's what it seemed like from the pitch...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "When people have a big task to do they usually tend to start working on lots of other smaller things."

I usually don't work on anything, even if the big task is actually small. If you have be a procrastinator you might as well go all the way.

<comment><USER9> This. If its a big task, I need to stay focussed and disiplined on not doing the task. Doing small tasks would just distract me from not doing the big task.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure what I would be paying for if I were to pay you.

<comment><USER11> "Go plan a party. That'll be $50."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> The idea is interesting, but I want to understand something: how do you get sure that your customer has finished the task? Do you contact the person, requesting proof that the work is done?

Handling big deposits that you'll have to refund later may bite you with transaction fees and taxes. IANAL/IANAA, but you should look into the laws of your country.

Many people (this depends on what country they live, etc.) are used to using credit cards and not bank accounts on the web, so dealing with deposits may not interest them. Your audience may be different.

As essentially a to-do app without a task list, your customers will primarily be consumers, who may not be used to making $500 deposits.

Don't take my word as gospel, but while it's a good idea to have higher prices, especially for professional and enterprise customers, I'm not sure your example task for the Small plan, "getting your house cleaned", fits in with the $100 deposit. Of course the real "price" is $9.99 and the $100 deposit is just a way of making the user commit to it, but when I read it, it immediately stuck in my mind as _paying someone else $100 for me to clean my own house_.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes - the idea is to ask for a proof

I'm not really happy about having people to deposit money but without that there is no other way to make them actually do the task (at least I did not find one by now but I'm open to suggestions)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I think this is a really cool concept, but it seems to be a mish-mash of two ideas: 1) incentivize users to do a bunch of other tasks by identifying an even more daunting one. 2) help users tackle the biggest thing on their list by adding extra motivation (a time-sensitive security deposit). Personally, I like the latter more - I've tried similar things by adding pointification to my todo list, assigning notably more points to tasks that are the most important, but I think adding actual $$$ and a deadline would be even more motivating. I think the product here needs a bit more clarification, but it's a neat idea! I'd also think it's a good idea to drop the actual price of the tasks, but keep the deposits large - I doubt someone would pay $50 for motivation on a huge task, but they might pay $5 and risk $500.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for your comment

the site actually is mostly about "idea 1" (by using 2) to make people actually do the tasks) but I think switching more towards "idea 2" could actually be more useful

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Awesome, but too many words.

Deposit x dollars, for x days if you don't finish your task on time you don't get your money back.

I don't even think you need to charge for it, since some people won't collect. Some people could like about finishing their task, but so what that's there problem.

</comment><comment><USER15> Oh come on, surely this is just a play on all the wacky web apps people do. (I don't oppose those.)

</comment><comment><USER7> I certainly have experienced the situation that you are describing, where I managed to do tons of D.I.Y. jobs around the house when I really didn't want to call the insurance people because I was sure I'd missed the deadline, but...

I'm not sure I understand why you are requiring a deposit. Is it just to ramp up the "must do this"-ness of the task?

Scenario 1: Your customer wants a huge task so they can avoid it and do lots of other little tasks. - Effective cost: $550 for big task.

Scenario 2: Your customer wants to get good at actually doing tasks. - Effective cost $50 for big task.

Your deposit rewards actually getting tasks done. Is that what you're trying to achieve?

<comment><AUTHOR> I came across this problem, too.

The problem is when there is no penalty for not doing the task there is no incentive to do it at all.

The idea is that the big task could be done in some crazy last minute rush to save the money - with having done a lot of other things before.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I see where your getting at. It's a bit like vow of now's _" zen mind guaranteed or your money isn't refunded"_: [http://vowofnow.com](http://vowofnow.com)

</comment><comment><USER17> I'd pay for something that could really make me stop procrastinating. Unfortunately, I still haven't found anything that works. Your idea won't work with me either. Along the years I've been mastering my skills on "paying for things I will never use", like a gym, for instance. My problem with procrastination is that when I have a productive day, finishing big and hard tasks, I feel like I awarded myself with procrastination credits so I become useless for another extended period of time.

</comment><comment><USER18> At first I was thought it was similar to TaskRabbit where I could just outsource all the work I don't want for a monthly subscription which I would be okay with (not saying I would use it but it would help some people). Once I realized they actually want me to do my own work I was totally turned off...

</comment><comment><USER19> How does this go up on HN front page when no one understands what the hell this thing does

</comment><comment><USER20> Not sure anyone would buy into this since we all pretty much get PAID to procrastinate and this is asking us to PAY to procrastinate. Maybe if you gave away your product this would help increase signups? Wait, what!?!

</comment><comment><USER21> The copy is confusing. I still don't understand what the product does.

<comment><AUTHOR> Maybe the story behind it ( [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6223651](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6223651) ) could help you. If not I can try to explain it differently

<comment><USER21> Thanks. I understand the premise now, but I think the copy needs some work so people will better understand what they're buying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I updated the "How does this work?" question on the page

I hope it is more understandable now. If not just ask.

</comment><comment><USER22> I'll check into this later.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a full proof idea. We should all do it...tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER23> Pro cras tin at ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

</comment><comment><USER23> Please pay here; dot dot dot: WH.gov dot dot com. ;)

</comment><comment><USER23> It's all full proof I tell ya.

</comment><comment><USER23> Full proof I tell ya.

</comment><comment><USER23> It's full proof brothers and sisters and bothers and soysters.

</comment><comment><USER23> Please buy now.

</comment><comment><USER23> Damn full proof. Why don't you believe it?</comment>


Capstone projects and time management - <AUTHOR> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/10/26.html <comment><USER2> Amen!

This has been one of my rallying points for years: in school, you are not taught how to collaborate on a team, or even basic software engineering practices like source control. This is ridiculous because every software developer needs to know this. Even if you become an academic, you should be using source control at the very least!

As it is, you're thrust into the thick of it with your first job.

My only experience during my CS degree with working on a team was interesting because of what it got right and wrong.

It was a project to develop control software for a simulated hardware device. We had a team of 4 collaborating with another team of 4 (working on a different part of the system).

So it was good because it was collaborative and you had to depend on another team. We also had to produce documentation.

But we weren't taught how to collaborate with CVS or anything like that. We sent around compiled binaries by email.

So I support any effort to teach collaboration and common tools as part of the curriculum.

<comment><USER3> I never liked any of the group work I did in school. Sure, the teachers would assign it, but it always ended up with a few people doing most of the work or a project with as many different parts as there were people. It was fine for me to talk about ideas with other students, but when I needed to learn it, I had to go off and work by myself.

<comment><USER4> _it always ended up with a few people doing most of the work..._

This is a common problem with group projects in school. One of the main problems is lack of leadership. The solution: assign a leader.

I had a class consisting of 4 projects, 4 people per group, and each project had a designated leader which rotated. These projects were so much easier to manage, because the leader had some _authority_ given by the teacher. He therefore had the ability to delegate responsibility and people would actually do it. In normal groups, even if a leader emerges, they will often be ignored by less motivated students, because their authority is much more tenuous.

My point: it helps to have an assigned (and verified by the teacher) leader for a group project.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I was in a french high school during my studies and we had about 1 short project a week, 1 middle-term project a month and 1 to 2 long projects a year for the first 3 years. For the next 2 years we had only middle-term projects and 1 big project (end of studies project). It was really interesting for a lot of points :

\- short projects were for 1 to 2 people

\- other projects for 3 to 8 people

\- You had to use version control

\- if your project didn't match the expectations your score is /2

\- expectations with no way to change dates

\- You don't always choose your team

\- working with assholes and had to handle that

\- there were always a "team leader" who took more responsibilities if the team failed

\- some of the projects were corrected by bots using hundreds of test cases and at the first test failing it stops correcting (seriously it was a nightmare, you could have the 1st test failing and the next hundreds working ... anyway you will have the worst score) so you begin to write your own test suite trying to test everything even the unthinkable. ...

I'm not trying to do some marketing, I'm not anymore part of the school and not involved at all in it, just trying to say that all the school don't do bad jobs to prepare you for working in a real world.

</comment><comment><USER6> Can I complain about this article continuing to blur any distinction between "computer science" and "software engineering", or would that just make me sound like a cranky old-timer?

<comment><USER7> This.

"Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes." --Dijkstra

<comment><USER8> That was true when Dijkstra said it, but just as mathematics is increasingly using computers as they go into realms that mere humans can't completely explore without them (and this will only increase over time), computer scientists are increasingly being called upon to _actually program_ more things.

Theorize about a P2P system to your heart's content, but until you've implemented it, you don't understand it well enough to write more than a preliminary (and nearly worthless) paper. And it would be nice if said system wasn't a steaming pile, because those actually take longer to make, you know. Theorize about a computer vision algorithm to your heart's content, but until you _try_ it you're just imagining things. Theorize about how wonderful your robotic control theory is to your heart's content, but until you actually put all the pieces together and see if it actually works you're just dreaming.

Sure, in a world where "Dijkstra's Algorithm" is a genuine breakthrough, you can live without a computer, but that world is disappearing _for many disciplines_ , leaving computer scientists who really do need to program.

(I italicized that because I am aware that there are computer science disciplines that can still get by without computers, like complexity theory. But there are other things that are quite thoroughly computer science that can't do it without computers anymore. Stuff that Dijkstra would never have been able to do in a world where a megahertz was precious.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My undergrad program has been doing this for about 10 years, and I'd say it was an extremely valuable way to bring together the prior 4 years and give you a taste of professional programming. My school certainly isn't Ivy League, but it is a "Tier 1" liberal arts college, according to US News.

Every CS major has to take a software engineering class his or her final year, which consists of learning real-world methods for software development and completing a semester-long group project. It sounds almost exactly like what Joel describes. My group produced a few thousand usable lines of Java code, on a schedule, with documentation, requirements, and the whole nine yards:

<http://egroup.definingterms.com/>

An overview of the course is available online:

<http://cs.calvin.edu/curriculum/cs/262/kvlinden/>

<comment><USER10> I had a similar experience in my undergraduate program (and I graduated over 8 years ago). In second year, everyone has to take a software engineering course that consists of completing a full waterfall model group project. It was complete with interviews with the clients, every scrap of planning documentation, and of course the code itself. Each deliverable was due every 2 weeks and everyone had to work their ass off.

Future courses covered agile methods, version control, bug tracking, database design, and so on.

I actually feel a bit sorry for people who end up going through a program like Joel describes -- but certainly good schools are out there and they're teaching things programmers really need for the real world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Calling my CS department 'trapped in the 1980s' is an insult to the 1980s.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCPL> \- Appeared in: 1966

Having said that, I enjoyed studying theoretical CS at a hardcore-theoretical institution _far_ , _far_ more than I would have had I studied software engineering and learnt how to use test suites and agile and so on. I learnt version control from coding while studying, especially from OSS. I studied usability and had hands-on experience during an internship. I led a project team. My final year project was certainly more than 20 lines long. And yet I also did stuff like ML and BCPL and algorithmic design and complexity and crazy fun stuff like red-black trees and O-notation and quicksort and formal logic and markov chains and SVMs and Bayesian classification and god knows what else it was 2003. If I'd done the software engineering approach, my answer to 'how to implement quicksort' would be 'google', and I'd long since have abandoned 'Subversion 101' for something that actually hurt my brain.

</comment><comment><USER12> _College students in their final year have about 16 years of experience doing short projects and leaving everything until the last minute._

interesting deficit of mainstream educational systems; I wonder what an educational system based on long-term projects would look like + what its effects would be on the students</comment>


Uber drivers to launch legal bid to uncover app's algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/jul/20/uber-drivers-to-launch-legal-bid-to-uncover-apps-algorithm <comment><USER2> \-- under GDPR regulations, which are similar in the UK and the Netherlands...

GDPR is an EU law. What is the "similar" UK version post Brexit?</comment>


Market for zero-day vulnerabilities incentivizes sabotage - <AUTHOR> http://boingboing.net/2012/06/16/market-for-zero-day-vulnerabil.html

<comment><USER2> If you can commit to MS Windows or anything similar and lack scruples why on earth would you be playing for the penny ante on the formal market?

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm somewhat skeptical that this is actually going to be a big / common issue. Introducing vulnerabilities, in such a way that they're both effective and look like an accident when one of your coworkers (or in the case of open source, anyone else) looks at your code, seems like it'd require a pretty advanced skillset. Such a person is probably better off selling that skillset directly and legally by finding vulnerabilities in other peoples' code.

Not to say that it won't happen on a targeted basis, but a legal market for "discovered" vulnerabilities doesn't seem to add much incentive when the act of intentionally introducing them is likely illegal already, and they'd be paid the same regardless.

</comment><comment><USER4> "it also creates an incentive for software engineers to deliberately introduce flaws into the software they're employed to write"

I don't think this potential conflict of interest is unique to software. Any security sensitive industry has to consider the possibility of corrupt employees.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hell, it incentivizes the companies themselves to introduce bugs or fail to fix them in some situations. Think of popular products that are difficult to monetize - plugins, im networks, html rendering engines, mobile applications.

Flaws are so common it's not like anyone thinks twice when a national program is found using a bug in your software.

</comment><comment><USER6> Market for bank robberies incentivizes sabotage.</comment>


The super clicky IBM Model F buckling spring keyboard is coming back - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/ibm-model-f-keyboard-buckling-spring <comment><USER2> Man, I hope nobody in my office likes these things. As if open offices aren't loud enough without every keystroke sounding like a firecracker.</comment>


Jordan's 'I'm back' fax, 20 years later - <AUTHOR> http://espn.go.com/nba/story/_/id/12501628/nba-ja-adande-michael-jordan-1995-comeback-fax

<comment><USER2> I once spoke as part of a presentation on how response rates from faxes was way higher than email. (which was absolutely true at the time). Probably because of the novelty of receiving a fax vs an email, but it was something like 5% response from email and 70% response from fax.

This was a mailing list of paying members of a professional association, btw, not junk mail.

<comment><AUTHOR> My favorite fax story from the last few years (about how Japan still loves using faxes):

[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the- fa...](http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/world/asia/in-japan-the-fax-machine- is-anything-but-a-relic.html)</comment></comment>


The new dot com bubble is here: it's called online advertising (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://thecorrespondent.com/100/the-new-dot-com-bubble-is-here-its-called-online-advertising/ <comment><USER2> Discussion from 6 months ago with the author chiming in (Jesse Frederik, jessefrederik on HN)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21465873)

</comment><comment><USER3> A copy of Scientific Advertising and some thinking are about all that's needed to do the job well.

There are essentially 4 rules for effective advertising:

1) ignore all metrics from online platforms (especially the ones that sell ads)

2) ignore all metrics from ad agencies

3) run tests that make sense*

4) measure in dollars

The hard part is convincing the founder/owner to stop messing with stuff long enough that you can actually measure the results. Also, companies tend to way overspend on ads and data scientists while underspending on skilled advertisers. (They can be forgiven for the latter, there are too few skilled advertisers, and lousy advertisers usually sell themselves as experts.)

*Example: your job is to advertise a business with 20 locations in 2 cities. You want to know if radio ads are better than search ads. So you do the obvious thing: buy radio ads in city A and search ads in city B, then compare sales. If the difference in sales is big enough that managers get defensive and start pointing out why the test wasn't valid, you may have a winner. Run it in both cities and see if it still works.

(Rule of thumb: if nobody is upset with the outcome, the variations were too similar. Run bigger tests.)

<comment><USER4> The problem is that the outcome of some campaigns doesn't reflect in dollars, and still you have a winning campaign.

In fact, probably the most expensive campaigns are used to consolidate market shares, brand positioning and notoriety.

People just seem to forget that advertising existed before the internet, and it worked without the bloat of metrics.

<comment><USER5> How do you define "worked", though? Was each advertising dollar the most effective way for that company to spend that dollar? Or was it just ROI positive?

Most people consider the latter, because it's hard to accept that the spend needs to compete with every other way of spending that money, not with other ad media.

<comment><USER6> Opportunity cost strikes again

<comment><USER3> The opportunity cost of calculating opportunity cost is often higher than the underlying opportunity cost.

Analysis paralysis.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As this is a repost (no offense to OP), I'm going to repost my original comment (thread here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21468505](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21468505)) about this which is still applicable:

Reliably someone comes along every few months to question digital ads. I always come back to analyses of incrementality as the real proof.

Take an audience of X people. Divide them in two. Show ads to your test group, don't show to control. Watch your business grow and gauge the lift between the two audiences.

The companies that know how to advertise at scale do this constantly and can gauge the real effect of their ad dollars. Facebook, Google and others make these tests possible in their platforms, while other software suites such as Impact Altitude and VisualIQ allow you to do this kind of analysis and testing as well.

In the end, most of it proves out to be incremental. There are notable exceptions of course, but when are there not?

<comment><USER8> The thing is I am not sure a large percentage of advertisers are aware of such things and adjust their expectations. Facebook and their ilk encourage you to believe their numbers even though they are mostly phony - I mean how many people do you know that haven't block ads that actually click on them without them making their ui so confusing that you do it by accident?

The market is overhyped

<comment><USER9> I block ads on desktop, but on things like mobile Instagram, there's not much you can do.

To some extent I've learned to stop worrying and love the tracking, and I will with some regularity tap through to story ads I see with genuine interest in the product (generally outdoorsy things). I've not bought anything yet because the websites have failed to convince me the product isn't junk, but that's their problem — Facebook has successfully completed their side of the deal (get eyes on the website).

<comment><USER10> Have you tried DNS-based ad blocking like pi-hole or [https://nextdns.io/](https://nextdns.io/) ?

<comment><USER9> I'm likely different from many hn readers, but the ads really don't bother me all that much, and fussing with technology bothers me quite a lot.

I like my personal devices to Just Work (tm), and configuring dns/setting up raspberry pi's/etc is the antithesis of that.

If I have free time I'll spend it in the shop, kitchen, or outside — absolutely not fussing with technology.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Been realizing how the global pandemic is exposing what a complete and utter disaster advertising supported journalism has become on the web. It's really now a race to the bottom--even the largest media brands basically exist to make you click fake articles. (It's bad even without considering astroturfing comments, entirely fake news sites, etc.)

Newspapers had their yellow journalism days and have always been adverting supported, but it's never been this bad. The internet solved the information availability problem, now we have a huge trustworthiness / curation problem. My hope is a marked return to subscriptions, the way the NYT has done. I just loathe any hybrid where you subscribe and _still_ get ads. I want to leave that crappy model way behind.

<comment><USER12> Of course, bringing a healthy online-subscription model back into the mainstream is definitely ideal for journalism. Even more than that, I do wish there was a quick/easy/safe way to purchase individual articles (or even whole issues could work if needed) for a few bucks. Back in the old days, if you were curious about a hot running story, you just went to the news-stand and bought a copy, not a whole year's subscription then and there.

The ability to participate à la carte would certainly help paying customers like me.

<comment><USER13> One thing which could also help would be a "Netflix for news" given the pain points for payment and economies of scale. The tech scale mixing is beautiful in that way in that big providers and small can both be provided to the end user and revenue apportioned based on usage.

Of course the newspapers have been in need of reform for a long time now on many levels. Not helping is Associated Press recycling of stories across many different papers which leads to trying to compete as distributors instead of content providers. Consolidation of conglomerates seem to have only doubled down on lack of quality.

<comment><USER14> Apple News+ already exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good online advertisement is very effective.

My friend worked in online gaming, similar to Zynga. Their strength wasn't in the games itself, because they mostly ripped off other games. It was in their advertising channel. They had around 10M active users and whenever they had a new game out, they would advertise it to their existing customers, and they would get instant users for their new games. Not 100% conversion, but enough to get traction.

By having their own home-grown advertising network, they didn't have to spend money on Google or Facebook ads, the could just milk their existing channel. I think things like this are pretty effective once you have things up and running, because it's free.

<comment><USER16> I would call this upselling rather than advertising. You can only do that if you have already established a distribution channel to your clients and I would guess a large part of advertising is intended to create such a first channel.

<comment><USER17> This example is more crossselling than upselling. Upselling is when you come for one thing and leave with the bigger thing. Crossselling is more about you having one thing and using that relationship to sell you something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've come to the tentative conclusion that advertising is, in most cases, kind of like money spent on good luck charms. The company wants to spend money on convincing people to buy their product (or service or etc.). Telling them, "there is no good way to do that, you'll have to just make a better product", is never going to be believed. They want to think that they can just spend money, and get money back.

Improving your product also requires money, probably, but in addition it would require good planning, a realistic vision, organizational competence, and a lot of other things that are harder to deliver than just buying ads.

Executive buy ads because it's easy to do, compared to making a better product (or service or etc.). So your ad company doesn't have to deliver better sales, it just has to be at least as good as other people's ad services. Because most executives are not going to promote the guy who says, "there is no easy way to spend money to get higher sales, you're going to have to do it the hard way".

<comment><USER19> As best I can tell some advertising is probably necessary; if customers don't know about your product it genuinely doesn't matter how good it is.

But chances are most of the programmatic ads are a waste.

<comment><USER20> My anecdotal 2 cents: I haven't learned about a single product by targeted advertising in a long long time, if ever. Vast majority, if not all, of targeted ads I've seen are about things I've seen already: I check some product out, maybe even buy it, and the thing follows me the entire internet for days.

<comment><USER18> This happened to me after I replaced my home's air conditioner. Which means, really, I am the LEAST likely person to sell an air conditioner to. Same thing after I bought a car. Nowadays I am always ad-blocking, but from what my wife tells me it's not gotten any better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I've been thinking more and more that when it comes to advertising, trying to squeeze irrational behaviour into a logical system just isnt going to work long term.

Rory Sutherland's "Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life" convinced me that advertising has not changed at all, no matter how much Silicon Valley wants it to. Their delusions WILL come home to roost eventually.

Only ~10% of advertising $ is spent on direct response.

~90% of advertising is brand advertising, with no immediate conversion as a goal. It's about slowly nurturing the creation of a STORY inside the heads of prospective customers.

<comment><USER22> At the start of covid lockdown I realized I needed a new pair of sweatpants. Where was the first place my brain thought to look? The nike store. Why was that? What specific ad or celebrity sponsorship can you trace that back to? Probably something to do with basketball but I honestly do not know. Regardless, I ended up buying a pair from nike.

<comment><USER23> I would have thought to go to Costco. Because of decades of quality experiences and knowing their business model. Or Uniqlo, also based on experiences and knowing they are moderately priced. I've never seen an ad for Uniqlo though.

All of my experiences with Nike are it's either overpriced garbage, or very expensively priced good stuff, but not good enough that it makes it worth the marginal cost over what's at Costco.

<comment><USER3> I bought Adidas...at Costco.

<comment><USER23> I just bought Adidas socks at Costco too, but I would have bought whatever brand they had. I know the Adidas (and Nike) brand products of varying quality for various price points at Walmart versus Costco versus their outlet stores versus their Soho stores in manhattan.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I wonder how close ad markets are to zero sum. In the limited cases where ads are good for an individual firm, being close to zero sum would make ads a drain on the industry. In the article, they talk about how in most experiments, the most of the people who click your ad would have clicked your link anyways without the ad. In a really important footnote they talk about how this is crazy with a hugely important exception: if you don't bid, your competitor will. Like amazon bidding on searches for "walmart."

The effect is obvious and obviously wasteful for brand name searches, but it must extend to other searches as well. I search for "levi's" and your ad isn't going to make me materially more likely to buy jeans, but it will make me more likely to buy them from Levi's. Or, and here's the point, if I just search "jeans," your ad isn't going to make me materially more likely to buy jeans. But you have to bid or else I won't buy _your_ jeans. It strikes me as just as wasteful as Levi's having to bid on the "levi's" search term. The money that was going to go towards the jeans industry still goes there, except that now Google and Facebook get a cut and the jeans industry's margin shrinks a little.

This article does a brilliant job convincing me that most ads aren't incremental for a firm because of selection effects, which convinces me that most ads that _are_ incremental for the firm aren't incremental to the market. It seems so wasteful.

<comment><USER3> If Google didn't show ads, the money would all go to the SEO companies.

<comment><USER24> Regardless, the higher the percent of money sunk into zero sum competition, the more waste there is. That stands for SEO companies and ad companies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Getting so sick of the ads and such online. And every website has an adblocker detector now. You can't just look something up any more and end up on a website where someone wants to help you. You always end up on a website where someone is trying to make bank off of you.

<comment><USER26> The kind of copy Google encourages is at least as big a problem, I'd say.

Do you ever search for something, click a result, and find you have to skip down fifteen paragraphs to get what you wanted?

It's a real problem on the Web these days. Pages with incredibly low information density, on purpose.

Even the simplest piece of information may be buried way, way down a page with no actual content above it, just inane rambling.

This is a real problem for search results on all kinds of topics. You may have seen it yourself, these garbage pages with high search rankings.

How bad a problem is it? Often the entire first page of results is nothing but pages that waste your time on purpose.

(but seriously, imagine the sheer count of person-hours wasted writing and reading this useless fucking crap, making the Web worse on purpose, and it's been going on long enough that I guess... Google just thinks that's fine? Ugh. I swear it's like they just gave up on good search results around '08 or '09 and settled for _whatever_ as long as the pages serve ads and get clicks)

<comment><USER27> >Do you ever search for something, click a result, and find you have to skip down fifteen paragraphs [...] //

Nevermind that, how about when you go to a result and the _quoted_ "keyword" isn't even in the page?

That was probably the straw that broke me and sent me to DDG, I don't think it's better, but I'm over being sent results for whatever their reason is rather than because they are what I'm trying to find.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> > Web-based retailers and Web sites supported by advertising revenue have > proven to be the two most failure-prone types of Internet business, and > there are lessons to be learned from each segment.

[https://money.cnn.com/2000/11/09/technology/overview/](https://money.cnn.com/2000/11/09/technology/overview/)

The year 2000 - how is this a new bubble?

</comment><comment><USER29> I made a simple model using churn, referral, paid ad spend.

In any scenario where

Churn > Referral -> Ads are a trap.

If

Churn < Referral -> Ads are a halfway decent accelerator.

Challenge is you can not really determine if Churn < Referral as long as you run ads.

I wrote about it here if someone is interested [https://email@example.com/ads-are-a- trap-80df01d2...](https://firstname.lastname@example.com/ads-are-a- trap-80df01d2fbaf?source=friends_link&sk=ed2680c921a7bb5a0b147b44a9a14b1e) (free to read medium link, will migrate away from medium soon)

</comment><comment><USER30> I feel like for a long time there has been talk about online advertising collapsing because it is bad or not useful or something else.

Now I expect it will if only due to economic activity, but outside that I personally suspect online advertising continues to be used generally because folks don't see a lot of alternatives. What are they going to do? Radio ads?

The system might suck, but the internet is where folks are, anyone advertising likely needs to go there / try.

</comment><comment><USER3> Running ads is like running a VC fund.

95% of your money is wasted, but if you do it right, that last 5% makes up for it.

<comment><USER31> This makes me very sad because I fear it's true. I want to play around building successful side projects, but to get traction I need to play around with ads. To buy ads with my own money and knowing 95% of it will be wasted is too much of a blocker.

<comment><USER32> I'm a fan of using ads to accelerate growth, but you don't have to. I bet most profitable side projects got there without ads. And you probably shouldn't spend money on ads in the early days, for a bunch of reasons. In general, I'd focus on organic growth channels to start with and only switch to ads when you have that working, you have revenue that's growing, churn isn't too high, etc.

<comment><USER31> I know I don't have to, but I don't know how to get to these organic channels. Tried Instagram audience building, but got bored with it, zero sales. I also can't hire a marketer since they will probably just want to spend $ on ads and the circle closes.

It's not SAAS, but e-commerce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> This is from November 2019 so pre-COVID-19

<comment><USER34> The original Dutch article is a few months older even. This article is great journalism.

<comment><USER3> I dislike ads and ad platforms as much as the next person.

But this isn't good journalism.

"Is online advertising working? We simply don't know"

In study 5 (e-commerce) the answer was clear, and yet ignored.

Is there a bubble? Yes. Are ads magic? No. Do they work? For the right products, yes. Extremely well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >For more than a century, advertising was an art, not a science. Hard data didn't exist. An advertising guru of the Don Draper type proclaimed: "What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons" – and advertisers could only hope it was true.

Man... one of these days I'll poke my eyes out if a read this Don Draper quote again on a online article about advertising...

It's not the quote itself, it's the lack of context when/how/whom behind that quote.

At best that quote can be used in the context: "The shit advertisers say to try to hook a whale (big account)".

Yet journalists use it like it was the wet dream motivates advertisers, that are so delusional and naive to believe it...

</comment><comment><USER35> In house advertising is essentially non existent. Any newspaper would have in house ads printed next to the article. All have given up their autonomy to 3rd party vendors. You wouldn't be able to block in house advertising, but you sure can block all 3rd party skeezy advertising that want nothing but analytics. That largely do nothing better than an ad printed next to an article.

<comment><USER36> > You wouldn't be able to block in house advertising

I think you would? You'd just have to write rules that are specific to each publisher instead of each advertising network.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Fantastic piece, particularly the "Lagrange multipliers"

<comment><USER38> Regarding Lagrange multipliers: I don't know if this is fake or not but it made me laugh when I saw it for the first time:

[https://htbimporter.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/wow_customer...](https://htbimporter.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/wow_customer_support_math.jpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I wonder if the only tangible value in advertisement isn't to increase your revenue by convincing consumers to buy your product, but to decrease your competitors' by convincing consumers they don't exist.

<comment><USER3> A lot of people use Google to find things. A lot of those people click the first search result that matches what they're looking for (low cost, certain feature, prestige, there's no right answer, just right answer for them).

Some of those clicks are for products and services with short buying/lead gen cycles. Once they've clicked, many are only going back if they don't like what they find.

The value of search ads is being the link they clicked. You can buy that click. You can literally insert your website into a demand/supply match. If you don't mess it up after they click, those clicks become transactions. In dollars.

Oil changes are a great example. Some of the people who type "oil change near me" in maps don't really care about the brand. They click the top result, schedule an appointment, and get their oil changed.

If the click was $3 and it took 10 people/bots clicking to set one appointment, that's $30. Now let's say the oil change is $39 so profit is ($39 - oil $7, - filter $3, - labor $5, - ads $30) = -$6 before the cost of skilled advertiser.

Are those ads profitable? It depends. If you can upsell 1/10 on replacing a cabin air filter for 10x cost, then yes.

Every other upsell becomes profit.

Also, at a car dealership you can sell 3-5% a car while they're there for a nice $1700-$3200 profit, which nicely covers the cost of the skilled advertiser.

<comment><USER39> A huge point of the article is that valuing search ads like that is highly susceptible to selection bias.

My point was that the value of an ad is to displace other ads, in other words the measurement you look for isn't how many people click through to your site for an oil change but how many do so instead of the next guy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> [https://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm](https://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm) (2015)

</comment><comment><USER41> Online Advertising margins have been gutted year over year. Demand (people willing to pay for advertising) , today, has fallen to so few players (the largest brands and programmatic) anymore. Users have become so ineffectual to interacting with ads (and effective at blocking them) that measurement has become a black art of approximation, at best.

There is no bubble, as that time passed sometime before 2016.

</comment><comment><USER42> The post is interesting. The only thing that bugs me is that it only covers companies with well established names and/or products.

It would be interesting to know the conclusion for small companies and or startup products. Being on top of a search is so hard, maybe impossible (except if someone knows exactly what it searches, like the company or product name).

</comment><comment><USER43> Maybe the article is written by someone who doesn't actually make a product and sell it online?

Marketing is a 'grey game' of course it's going to full of bad spending.

But far from being 'a bubble' \- the growth is just beginning.

Online ads are relevant overall and they're only going to grow and grow.

</comment><comment><USER44> I guess conditioning over time has enabled consumers to develop resistance to ads, companies have to change things up otherwise they will see no value in online advertising. I will say that it's ironic that often companies buy in to the marketing produced by advertising agencies.

<comment><USER45> Sell your own dog food?

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> It might be a Ponzi-like bubble to a (probably small) extent, there is this feedback cycle:

Online advertising revenue goes up -> companies that plan to sell online ads get more investment and some of it is spent on online advertising -> online advertising revenue goes up.

</comment><comment><USER47> Love they got a online ad revenue graph that ends in 2017 and then just "predict" a dashed line moving where it left off, always up.

despite that we all know it took a nosedive, along most other revenues, in 2020 ;)

</comment><comment><USER48> As this excellent article points out, lots of research shows that most online advertising is a waste of money, due to phenomena such as targeting people who are already looking for the advertised product or service:

> _Picture this. Luigi's Pizzeria hires three teenagers to hand out coupons to > passersby. After a few weeks of flyering, one of the three turns out to be a > marketing genius. Customers keep showing up with coupons distributed by this > particular kid. The other two can't make any sense of it: how does he do it? > When they ask him, he explains: "I stand in the waiting area of the > pizzeria." It's plain to see that junior's no marketing whiz._

Alas, the incentives everywhere are stacked _in favor of wasting money_ :

> _Within the marketing department, TV, print and digital compete with each > other to show who's more important, a dynamic that hardly promotes honest > reporting. The fact that management often has no idea how to interpret the > numbers is not helpful either. The highest numbers win._

> _" Bad methodology makes everyone happy," said David Reiley, who used to > head Yahoo's economics team and is now working for streaming service > Pandora. "It will make the publisher happy. It will make the person who > bought the media happy. It will make the boss of the person who bought the > media happy. It will make the ad agency happy. Everybody can brag that they > had a very successful campaign."_

Moreover, the online advertising complex has evolved mechanisms for 'manufacturing' more demand for online advertising, for example, by relying on zero-sum games like "crowding out" in which _no one wins except the online advertising complex_ :

> _If, for example, BestBuy was the only buyer for "BestBuy" search ads, brand > name advertising would only lead to a mere 2% to 3% additional clicks. More > than nothing, but it is hardly enough to warrant the investment. But there > was one group of advertisers with a valid reason to purchase own brand name > ads. Not that they were any more effective for this group, but because their > competitors were "crowding them out" by buying ads that targeted the brand > owner's name (so you search for "Bestbuy" but a sponsored ad for "Walmart" > tops the list). This can enable Walmart to steal 20% of Bestbuy's organic > search traffic._

In the aggregate, all this wasteful advertising feeds a quarter-trillion- dollar "industry" that seems to add little or no value to anyone, and may in fact subtract significant value from everyone's quality of life. Is it a "bubble?" I don't know. Is it a net negative for everyone else? In my personal experience, the answer is a big YES.</comment>


Countering Trusting Trust - <AUTHOR> http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/01/countering_trus.html

<comment><USER2> That's a cool trick - almost as clever as the trusting trust attack itself. And (thinking of other contemporaneous debates), an excellent example of the advantages of a having diverse set of implementations of the same building blocks.</comment>


Lyrebird – An API to copy the voice of anyone - <AUTHOR> https://lyrebird.ai/demo <comment><USER2> Combined with Face2Face[1] live video impersonation, it is truly time to be very careful verifying videos or even live streams.

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

<comment><USER3> Without a doubt, our concept of personal identity will be completely unreliable within a few generations. Forget about privacy--we will soon have literally no way to verify who we're talking to.

<comment><USER4> Crypto would still work, and this tech isn't going to work face-to-face.

<comment><USER5> Neither will insulate you from a deception which you wish to perpetuate upon yourself, and identifying the latter is a trick that con artists specialize in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Last week on BBC Radio 4 I heard of a woman who was losing her voice through disease (MND maybe?), a similar system was being anticipated and she was saving voice samples to seed it with.

She had been a singer and strongly identified her self with her voice, she wanted to be able to use a speech synthesis system that had her own voice pattern.

Apologies if this was already mentioned, but it seems to be a use others here hadn't considered.

<comment><USER7> I was just thinking that Stephen Hawking would perhaps be interested in using this to replace his current voice synthesizer (feeding in old interviews of him when he could talk). He has said that he has adopted the current voice since he has associated it with his own, but I wonder if he would prefer his old _actual_ voice.

<comment><USER8> I think Hawking is now so firmly tied to that voice that he would probably never switch for public speaking engagements and the like.

I could see him doing such a switch for personal interactions.

<comment><USER9> I recall his biggest qualm with his current synthesized voice is that it did not come with a British accent. :-)

I'm not sure how sentimental he is but he does seem quite tied to that voice since there have been lots of advancements in voice synthesis since he originally got this and yet he's chosen to keep this one.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if he'd accept the same voice, but with a different accent?

Should be just as possible in the present or near future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> While all of these vec2speech type models are impressive, I get the feeling that most of the comments didn't listen to any of the samples. It's still distinctly robotic sounding, probably has quite a bit of garbage output that needs to be filtered manually (as many of these nets often have) and is a far cry from fooling a human.

<comment><USER12> In the first clip, I'd say 80% of the soundbites were obviously robot-like, but one or two of the "Obama" quotes were startlingly clear - "The good news is, that they will offer the technology to anyone" \- I can't hear anything wrong with that in the first clip at all. If they were all that quality I'd say we'd be easily fooled. As a proof of concept this is pretty big.

<comment><USER13> I can definitely hear issues with that phrase. It has quite robotic drop-offs.

Though coming soon: Neural networks to determine whether speech is NN- generated? :P

<comment><USER14> And then the generators train their own generation NN against that :P

<comment><USER15> And you have invented Generative Adversarial Networks. They are the basis of all new ML findings, like pix2pix.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I appreciate the ethics link up there in the menu. Not sure if I noticed it on any other AI startup (or for that matter, any startup). Given how complex the world is becoming due to ever increasing co-dependence with tech, I can see how such pages could become as important as 'pricing' or 'sign up' pages. (The privacy issues with Unroll.me, Uber and a thousand other such services will only accelerate this trend).

Good job, team Lyrebird. My feedback is that while the inclusion of ethics page is great, it could do with more content on your vision and what you will not let your tech be used for. I know others can develop similar tech, but it will be good to read about YOUR ethics.

[Edited for clarity]

<comment><USER17> I agree, it is reassuring to see that the team is thinking about ethical implications.

Judging by the samples from the homepage there are audible artifacts in the recordings resulting from synthesis. I doubt these would pass scrutiny if presented as evidence in court. In some ways forging a voice is like forging a signature, truth can be exposed with enough effort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I love this. The business model is too good to be true.

1\. Open source voice-copying software

2\. At worst, create entire market of voice-fraudsters, at best, very few voice-fraudsters but very high and very real perception of fear of such

3\. Become leading security experts in voice fraud detection

4\. Sell software / time / services to intelligence agencies, governments, law enforcement, news networks

Ethically I'm a bit concerned with (2), but realistically the team is right --- this technology exists, it will certainly be used for good and for bad, and they're positioning themselves as the leading experts.

I'm interested to see which VCs and acquirers line up here. Applying a voice to any phrase seems useful for voice assistants (Amazon Alexa, Google Home) but I don't think that's the $B model.

<comment><USER19> You could charge 99 cents to have Siri talk in your favorite actor's voice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Funny thing is, this is approximately where CIA was with similar technology in closer to 2000. They did some demos for politicians about how they can given anyone's fake their messages. That stuff is golden for propaganda means, and for confusing stuff like military chains of command. Today the CIA probably has worked out all the robotic artifacts already, and their output is really indistinguishable.

<comment><USER21> > Funny thing is, this is approximately where CIA was with similar technology > in closer to 2000

Source?

<comment><USER22> Not OP, but here is one related source: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/national/dotmil/arkin02...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- srv/national/dotmil/arkin020199.htm)

I do not think the technology involved artificially generated voice though, but simply morphing someone's voice into sounding as the target voice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is pretty cool (although, I have no idea what other technologies exist for this kind of thing), but it's definitely not convincing enough to a human listener. This sounds like it might be convincing enough for some programs like "Hey, Siri" but it's not gonna convince your mom. You can listen to the samples on the page linked here and you can immediately tell that Obama and Trump don't sound quite human.

<comment><USER24> Well, the question is, do they just need to throw more computational power / training at this algorithm or is that the peak of their implementation?

This is something Google has been working a lot on [1] and Baidu also recently posted about their results too [2]. We're definitely pretty close to passing the human detectable level.

[1] [https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw- audio...](https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/)

[2] [http://research.baidu.com/deep-voice-production-quality- text...](http://research.baidu.com/deep-voice-production-quality-text-speech- system-constructed-entirely-deep-neural-networks/)

<comment><USER25> Google and Baidu have only demonstrated single speaker TTS. Lyrebird's the first to demonstrate being able to generate arbitrary voices. Since this came out of a research lab, I would guess that the quality would only improve if they are given more compute and data.

<comment><USER26> The Google one is able to generate arbitrary voices based on the recordings used for training. So much so that they made it generate piano music.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is pretty basic at the moment and it's terrifying. Yeah, it has an MS Sam feel to it, but as the tech improves and we know it will, you could use a service like this to put words in someone's mouth. Think about how you could trip up a CEO or a Politician by playing some random clip that they never said. When that gets into the Zeitgeist judgments will be made in the court of public opinion devoid of facts or real evidence. You could destroy democracy or people's lives with technology like this

<comment><USER28> There are human impersonators already. I suppose it's not that easy to fake a visible, high-ranking person for long.

<comment><USER29> Individual impersonators are not the threat. It's the glut of impersonators that will present the real challenge. It would be very helpful to see a study done with these platforms as they mature to determine what percentage of the population is more easily fooled by these.

For example, as an individual with hearing problems, I may not be so easily able to determine a synthesized recording from an actual recording - for a short period of time. With longer recordings it may become more obvious.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is exciting! If you look at historic speeches (ie from American Rhetoric [http://www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html](http://www.americanrhetoric.com/top100speechesall.html)), there are large variations in average characteristics between various styles/contexts (on average, pitch/volume/speed are different for inspirational vs somber speeches, for example). But there are also really large differences in the variation - an inspirational speech may be marked by large swings from quiet, reflective pieces to booming, rousing calls-to-action while a somber speech has fewer swings in delivery.

For the examples given for various intonations from Obama/Trump, some intonations are much more natural than others. It would be interesting to decide how to parametrize a sentence for the intended intonation. (based on word2vec analysis of the words in the sentence, punctuation cues in the sentence, and perhaps a specified category of "emotional delivery").

It would be interesting at the sentence-level, but also at the macro speech- level to include the right "mix" of intonations for a specific context. On a related note, it would be interesting to study the patterns of intonations in successful vs unsuccessful outbound sales calls, for example, to learn how to best simulate a good human sales voice.

</comment><comment><USER31> It's there any copyright protections for a person's voice? If not, David Attenborough and Morgan Freeman will be lead voice actors in my next game project

<comment><USER32> I don't think you can claim that your game was voiced by either of them, but I don't see how using this would be any more infringing than using a tuned synthesizer.

<comment><USER33> He probably won't be able to claim the game is "voiced by", but maybe he can get away with saying it features "voices of"?

<comment><USER31> Actually i wasn't planning on saying either, just having the calm voice of Morgan Freeman tell me i need shoot the zombies or whatever the game will be, and then David explaining with fascination how such a poor shot could have survived this far whenever you miss

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Impressive.

But also enabling the next gen of "Mom, I'm in Mexican jail. Quickly wire me $2,000 so I can get out." scams.

<comment><USER35> Wouldn't you need tons and tons of training data ? Obama, Clinton and Trump are public personalities, so it's easy to have many hours of recording of their voices.

A random relative; not so much.

<comment><USER36> They claim to only need 1 minute of recording. In this age of all the kids sharing everything all the time that shouldn't be too hard to acquire.

<comment><USER29> Even better, targeted attacks against a person to collect their voice could involve contacting them for an opinion survey regarding a product, survey, or political opinion they value. Gleaning something like that from social media profiles is fairly easy.

<comment><USER37> "My voice is my passport. Verify me."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Is this enough to beat voice recognition software?

If you thought fake news was bad before wait until these 'secret' recordings start getting released and reported on.

<comment><USER39> That was one of my first thoughts too [1]. I doubt it currently will do so as it does sound fairly robotic. It does sound closer however than other demos I've heard so i think we're probably on the way.

[1] [https://youtu.be/-zVgWpVXb64?t=41](https://youtu.be/-zVgWpVXb64?t=41)

<comment><USER33> Throw some hard compression on it to get additional distortion, and I feel you could get away with claiming it was a recording done by a low-power bug.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Cooler : [http://www.dtic.upf.edu/~mblaauw/IS2017_NPSS/](http://www.dtic.upf.edu/~mblaauw/IS2017_NPSS/)

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03809](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.03809)

<comment><USER41> This model is quite cool, but also quite a bit different than what lyrebird.ai is doing. NPSS has a lot of extra information in the control inputs about pronunciation and timing (the part-of-phoneme timer feature) - this means that most of the "hard parts" (in my opinion) for naturalness are control inputs to NPSS/WaveNet style models, rather than variables the model must generate globally and consistently as in lyrebird. At generation time NPSS appears to generate each component autoregressively as well, but I am not clear on whether the demo samples do this or if they use "true" values for f0 at least - what forces the model to sing the exact same melody, if many melodies are possible given the underlying audio information?

Also note that NPSS has some amount of post-processing, at least reverb and perhaps other common musical mixing - we don't really know how these samples are generated, and I have a hard time decyphering exactly what inputs are required, and what are generated from the paper alone. However, I really, really, really like NPSS - I just don't think the comparison you are making is valid here.

These features (f0, duration, pronunciation) are some of the most difficult things to learn to model from datasets of speech and text directly, and I am not sure how they got the subset used (I think only f0 and pronunciation/phoneme) for this NPSS model. Giving creators fine-grained control of the performance (as in NPSS) is quite cool, and if these systems can get fast enough I think the possibilities are really exciting. The same things could likely be done with lyrebird as well - there is no real "tech reason" you couldn't add more conditional inputs, with finer grained information/control.

The key part in my mind is deciding what amount of complexity to show to a user, and what amount to try and capture inside the model - some people may want to control (for example) duration and f0 directly for a performance, while others may want to just upload clips to an API and get reasonable results back, with less ability to control each sample (they can still curate themselves for the "best" samples). Lyrebird.ai is handling the latter case, while the former case would require quite a bit more intervention from the average user, almost becoming like an instrument ala the original voder [0]. However, you could potentially have _both_ approaches as a kind of beginner/advanced mode, but advanced mode needs a user interface, and probably near-realtime feedback.

I used to really strongly believe that the audio model was going to be the hard part of "neural" TTS (blame my background in DSP perhaps), but post- WaveNet the game has really changed a lot - conditional audio models are something we are starting to know how to do pretty well.

The text pipeline of most TTS systems is still the craziest part in my mind, check out a "normal" feature extraction of 416 hand-specified features [1]! These extractions can be upwards of 1k features per timestep/frame, and generally require a lot of linguistic knowledge to specify for new languages. It seems (given Alex Graves' demo [2], char2wav [3], tacotron[4]) that we are making progress on learning this information directly from text, which in my mind is a key breakthrough for TTS in languages besides English, where lots of work on English pronunciation has been done already and is generally available.

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsdOej_nC1M](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsdOej_nC1M)

[1] [https://github.com/CSTR- Edinburgh/merlin/blob/master/misc/qu...](https://github.com/CSTR- Edinburgh/merlin/blob/master/misc/questions/questions-radio_dnn_416.hed)

[2] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yX1SYeDHbg&t=38m00s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yX1SYeDHbg&t=38m00s)

[3] [http://josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/](http://josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/)

[4] [https://google.github.io/tacotron/](https://google.github.io/tacotron/)

<comment><USER42> Hi Kyle, I was wondering if the lyrebird github implementation will be open sourced as currently I am hoping to work on improving the current implementation by incorporating prosody into speech synthesis, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Finally, I can have Morgan Freeman narrate my major life events.

Update: Reading changelogs before deployment never sounded better!

<comment><USER5> As a skilled vocal impersonator I read all my comments aloud in the voice of Morgan Freeman before posting them. Ordinary sentiments such as 'these pickles are quite tasty' are suddenly transformed into profound insights on the human condition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I was wondering when CG Sir David Attenborough would get here and start narrating my day to day.

<comment><USER45> Actually, when the sad day comes and he passes away I'd be very comforted to hear his voice on new nature documentaries. I just can't watch them unless he's narrating.

<comment><USER46> I agree. This leads to an interesting question: can the estate of a deceased person sell or license their voice rights for new future performances? I suspect the law has some catching up to do.

<comment><USER5> This is not qualitatively different from existing situations, and will be only a minor legal wrinkle. Estates have been licensing the likeness of dead people for commercial purposes for a good while, now those likenesses are simply more sophisticated.

I'll tell you what will get complicated, copyright holders complaining that their product was used as input for the training algorithm and demanding a slice of any profits because they made the famous individual more famous by casting them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Charles Schwab uses a voice phrase to authenticate you for access to your account, which is already pretty brittle, but I hope this makes them reconsider more urgently.

</comment><comment><USER48> 1\. Is this company new?

2\. Is this better then what Google or Baidu are doing?

3\. I remember reading Adobe has something similar.

4\. Why ( What happened ) that all of a sudden we have 4 company making voice breakthrough tech like these?

5\. What Happen to Voice Acting? Places like Japan where they highly value voice actor. Is Voice even patentable?

<comment><USER49> Specially to point 4, google pushed their wavenet paper a couple months ago. I wouldn't be surprised if some, if not all of these current break throughs are built on that foundation. This sort of application was the first thing that came to my mind after reading the paper.

[https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw- audio...](https://deepmind.com/blog/wavenet-generative-model-raw-audio/)

<comment><USER41> There is an older paper [0] and demo from [1] Alex Graves that inspired a ton of work around handwriting, and then speech. Previous work from Jose Sotelo et. al. (including me) called char2wav [2] is a close neighbor to Graves' approach, though he (Graves) never published the approach for speech so we don't really know. Google's recent Tacotron paper [3] is also a relative to these approaches.

WaveNet certainly changed the game in many ways, but approaches to TTS using RNNs have different roots. WaveNet and friends (incl. DeepVoice and NPSS linked elsewhere in this thread) are largely focused on audio modeling, and generally use something closely related to the "classic" TTS pipeline for text in the frontend. The audio modeling results are stellar, and really blew me away personally - basically changing my perspective on what is possible in audio modeling overnight.

RNN models try to tackle the whole problem (text + audio modeling) at once, though currently (all?) RNN and attention style models need intermediate / high level hints or pretraining from things like vocoder representations or spectrograms, versus WaveNet's approach using the waveform directly. So they are complimentary in many ways, and I am sure we will see people trying to combine them soon - char2wav has this flavor by using SampleRNN, our lab's take on raw waveform generation though we are still working on the fully end- to-end from scratch training, the inference path is truly end-to-end. Though there are still many details to work out as far as output quality, it seems possible that this will be a productive approach (though I am quite biased).

We see similar directions in neural machine translation (NMT) moving from word level representations to word parts or characters directly - one of the big reasons deep learning has come so far, so fast is that a lot of techniques from other subfields can be utilized for new domains, and I think there is a lot more fertile ground for crossover in both directions.

Heiga Zen has a great overview talk about how speech synthesis, as a field, overlaps between different approaches and factorizations [4]. His work on parametric synthesis and TTS generally has laid the foundation for a _lot_ of recent advances, and he was also a co-author on WaveNet!

[0] [https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850](https://arxiv.org/abs/1308.0850)

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yX1SYeDHbg&t=38m0s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yX1SYeDHbg&t=38m0s)

[2] [http://josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/](http://josesotelo.com/speechsynthesis/)

[3] [https://google.github.io/tacotron/](https://google.github.io/tacotron/)

[4] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsrSrYtKkT8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsrSrYtKkT8)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I see a lot of people claiming that certain things will now be untrustworthy.

As if _human_ voice imitators have not existed and could not be paid for prior to this. For $5 you can get Stewie Griffin [0] or Barack Obama [1] to say whatever you want them to say. Any audio-only messages of well known figures should already be considered "compromised" and untrustworthy. Even without the technology to impersonate them.

This should be more concerning for "normal people". It isn't that you can no longer trust an audio-only recording of Obama, but that you may not longer be certain an audio recording is from your best friend. (E: Once the technology improves a bit more of course.)

[0] [https://www.fiverr.com/joe_stevens/talk-like-stewie- griffin-...](https://www.fiverr.com/joe_stevens/talk-like-stewie-griffin-for- you)

[1] [https://www.fiverr.com/celebimpression/do-a-custom-barack- ob...](https://www.fiverr.com/celebimpression/do-a-custom-barack-obama- impersonation)

</comment><comment><USER51> This is awesome. As someone exploring the fictional storytelling space, this seems like it'd have a lot of fun applications in that space as well.

How difficult is it to create/tune voices from parameters rather than training from an audio clip? I build software where people create fictional characters for writing, and having an author "create" voices for each character would be an amazing way to autogenerate audiobooks with their voices, or interact with those characters by voice, or just hear things written from their point of view in their voice for that extra immersion. Having an author upload voice clips of themselves mimicking what they think that character should sound like, but probably would keep traces of their original voice (and feel "fake" to them because they can recognize their own voice), no?

Can't wait to see how this pans out. Signed up for the beta and will definitely be pushing it to its limits when it's ready. :)

</comment><comment><USER52> I wonder how dependent this is on language: can we make Trump speak Chinese using a one minute audio track of him speaking English?

<comment><USER39> I'd imagine you might get close, but it'd probably work best if you can get the person to use all the phonemes that you want to reproduce. That said depending on how good it is, it might slur other phonemes together to approximate it, which would probably work to give it the accent that the speaker would likely have.

<comment><USER53> It all sounded sort of slurry and muffled. Maybe if you're imitating a naturally slurred speaker it would be more effective.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> It sounds like they're training a parametric speech synthesis platform on samples in order to learn the parameters. I wonder if there are are approaches at generating n-phones for concatenative models, or using a hybrid approach.

I built a toy concatenative Donald Trump speech system [1], but I don't have an ML background. I've been taking Andrew Ng's online course in addition to Udacity's deep learning program in an attempt to learn the basics. I'm hoping I can use my dataset to build something backed by ML that sounds better.

Is anyone in the Atlanta area interested in ML? I'd love to chat over coffee or join local ML interest groups.

[1] [http://jungle.horse](http://jungle.horse)

<comment><USER41> I tried similar approaches long ago (~2 years now?) with something related to RNN-RBM and it showed some slight glimmer of promise, and still think there might be some clever ways to combine concatenative methods and deep learning to avoid a lot of the noise issues present in parametric models. Then again, maybe it just needs to train longer - it's always hard to tell. I liked jungle.horse, awesome stuff!

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> This is very exciting to me because it lets RPGs provide spoken dialog for everything (I'm waiting to see if they can do emotions at all convincingly). Even big budget games suffer from "you can call your character anything as long as it's 'Shepherd'" simply because you can't mention the character's name or any other use-content safely.

</comment><comment><USER56> Through the tinny speaker of my mobile phone the Obama in the first sample is almost spot on. Some speed issues with Trump but really impressive.

</comment><comment><USER57> I wonder how accurately this would reproduce dead musicians voices. I've had this idea for about 8 years called the Notorious BIG project. I have about 20 acapellas that I was originally going to manually chop into a song. Neural Nets can pretty much solve this now.

</comment><comment><USER26> Can we get these speeches in audio form now?

[https://medium.com/@samim/obama-rnn-machine-generated- politi...](https://medium.com/@samim/obama-rnn-machine-generated-political- speeches-c8abd18a2ea0)

</comment><comment><USER58> As noted in other comments, all the samples still sound very robotic, so this is probably "just" a method to tune the parameters of an existing voice synthesizer to mimic a real persons voice as much as it allows.

<comment><USER59> That's exactly what it sounds like. The same old mediocre TTS with voices modified to mimic specific well-known voices.

It's impressive for what it is, but a lot of people here seem way too excited. This isn't any kind of breakthrough, and only the shortest hand-picked snippet would fool anyone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The samples all sound a little like Rich Little and Stephen Hawking's love child doing impressions: they won't fool very many people.

But, you can certainly see where this is going and that's the worrisome part.

<comment><USER21> I'm sure it will improve dramatically over the years. This seems to be a problem with all digital voice software, it's never entirely human sounding. Pretty good starting point though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Oh yea. The Troll embedded deep in my soul giggles in glee.

However, the day some shill tries to sell me travel insurance in departed nana's voice would be the day I start signing my voice convos' with a pgp key.

</comment><comment><USER61> This site has a "demo" section featuring only Soundcloud clips. Uses to much the present tense "In a world first, Montreal-based startup Lyrebird today unveiled" and "Record 1 minute [...] and Lyrebird can [..]Use this key to generate anything" but has no actual product or beta version. Adobe had a much more impressive sneak peek of a similar product called VoCo: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I3l4XLZ59iw)

<comment><USER62> To be fair, that demo could have been staged whereas we can be pretty darn sure those aren't Trump's actual words.

<comment><USER61> I agree. My main issue with them is that those clips could have been painstakingly produced using some very far from shipping software with lots of manual tinkering while the copy on the site mostly reads like there's a product out. The part about being far from shipping could also be true about adobe's software, but I think their presented result (assuming it is real) sounded better, and they were more honest about the stage the product is in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Relevant discussion from 17 hours ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14177589](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14177589)

</comment><comment><USER28> We need a new markup language for intonation and emotion.

<comment><USER63> [https://xkcd.com/1709/](https://xkcd.com/1709/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Voice Actors out of business! :D

</comment><comment><USER5> Excellent work. This will find widespread application in the film/tv/music industry and beyond (and we're not that far away from being able to do the same thing for video). Unfortunately it will also be widely abused, but given the near-inevitability of such technological development I'm already reconciled to that :-/

</comment><comment><USER65> Curious choice to name a company & product with a name that sounds like "Liar Bird" when spoken. To me, that looks like they're fully embracing the concept that this can be used for nefarious purposes. If one of their goals is to bring attention that this technology exists and can be misused, the name reinforces that.

<comment><USER66> I guess they've named it that because the lyrebird is an amazing impersonator. The end of this BBC clip blew my mind the first time I saw it. [https://youtu.be/VjE0Kdfos4Y](https://youtu.be/VjE0Kdfos4Y)

But you may have a point, and the ethics section makes it clear that they are indeed very aware of that this may be misused.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> This is impressive. There is now a way for Morgan Freeman and James Earl Jones to be able to narrate movies forever.

</comment><comment><USER68> Related Economist article: [http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/2172112...](http://www.economist.com/news/science-and- technology/21721128-you-took-words-right-out-my-mouth-imitating-peoples- speech-patterns)

</comment><comment><USER69> Sounds great, I was trying something like this in Keras but didn't get very far: [https://github.com/sehugg/kerasspeechcodec](https://github.com/sehugg/kerasspeechcodec)

</comment><comment><USER70> Any ideas on what the underlying technology looks like? Maybe some kind of GAN for audio...

</comment><comment><USER71> The audio feed sounds like they're real and drunk.. so that's impressive

</comment><comment><USER72> 1\. Buy the rights for "Car Talk" re-broadcast. 2\. Record new, current ads using Click and Clack's voices. 3\. If the voices sound a little too "mechanic", pretend it's a joke.

</comment><comment> dyu- This trump version [1] is quite believable. [1] [https://soundcloud.com/user-535691776/trump-6](https://soundcloud.com/user-535691776/trump-6)

</comment><comment><USER73> And just as my bank offers a "login via speaking" option. Lovely.

</comment><comment><USER74> This technology reminded me of 24 (TV series).

The plot of season 2 has Jack Bauer prove a Cyprus recording between a terrorist and high-ranking Middle East officials was forged so the US president would start a war.

</comment><comment><USER75> The President Obama voice sounds decent. But the President Trump and Senator Clinton voices sound like robots. Reminds me of the crappy text to speech program that came with Windows.

</comment><comment><USER76> Coming soon - fake videos of future political candidates saying outrageous things that will derail their campaigns.

Maybe from now on - just learn ASL. Hard to fake a distinctive signing style.

</comment><comment><USER77> it's interesting development but it sounds too robotic, there is zero intonation/punctuation, zero variantions in the voice depending on mood of speaker, etc., in the end extremely robotic and if someone really need to fake someone else voice convincingly it would be still easier to hire professional voice imitator

</comment><comment><USER78> Site doesn't load at all on my machine without some javascript from Cloudflare for Ajax.

I guess this product isn't for me then.

</comment><comment><USER79> Now we can't trust the news anymore. In a year or two we'll never know if recordings are real or not.

</comment><comment><USER53> Now make it say the Navyseal copypasta with Trump's voice, but make him speak slowly and with emphasis.

</comment><comment><USER80> Does anyone know of any free/open source alternatives to this? Is it too new to expect a FOSS library?

</comment><comment><USER81> Trump 6 speaking "... my intonation is always different" sounds very convincingly human.

</comment><comment><USER82> ___"Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear."_ __\-- Edgar Allan Poe

</comment><comment><USER83> So all my voice commands can be recorded and my voice can be replicated. Cool...i guess

</comment><comment><USER84> OMG I want to play with this so bad.

</comment><comment><USER85> If they can pull this off with the API, this is worth millions of dollars on the table.

<comment><USER86> Until someone implements it in a few lines of Tensorflow and posts it on Github.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> Hello. My name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify me.

</comment><comment><USER88> Wow had no idea something like this was possible. Very impressive.

</comment><comment><USER89> It's a matter of time before this can compete with Vocaloid.

</comment><comment><USER90> Does the API get better results with more training data?

</comment><comment><USER91> A bit scary thinking someone could do this with ease.

</comment><comment><USER92> It feels like the future has arrived.

</comment><comment><USER93> Great stuff ! Respect from the 514.

</comment><comment> gator-io So much potential for mischief!!

</comment><comment><USER94> Be right back (Black Mirror)

let's do it.

</comment><comment><USER95> This is fucking terrifying.

</comment><comment><USER96> Scary.

</comment><comment><USER97> RIP Dan Castellaneta.

</comment><comment><USER25> [deleted]

<comment><USER98> They both sound right to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER99> I wonder if you could do this with singing? Feed it acappela Bowie, Sinatra, Elvis songs, then give it new text, and out comes a similar voice and melody.

</comment><comment><USER99> I can't wait for Richard Burton to read me the news.

</comment><comment><USER100> Now people can deny saying things caught on tape. Just show this technology to a jury considering taped evidence, and bring in some experts to testify on how it works.

The samples weren't that convincing to me, but could probably be used to switch a word here and there. That may be enough.

</comment><comment><USER101> Lol, I totally called this.

</comment><comment><USER31> They lost me at "... Consumers are still not lining up to buy EV's"

What the fuck are they talking about?

</comment><comment><USER102> This is how a lot of tech companies make proper text2speech, this was just done using the vast amount of audio that's out there for these people.

Soon Trump will use this to state that things he's said are fake news. God help us all.

<comment><USER62> They claim they only needed one minute of sample audio.

We really need to start requiring that all public announcements (news, press releases, etc) are digitally signed and put into the blockchain.

<comment><USER103> But who would sign it?

<comment><USER62> Trump. We'd need to teach people to assume anything unsigned is fake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER104> I have two domains:

\- legalscreenshot.com

\- legalprintscreen.com

I also developed a concept of "Reality Check" similar to Touring Test (when VR and AI becomes so convincing >50% people won't distinguish it from base reality)... Too bad I'm on the corporate network and my personal website is blocked: [https://genesis.re/wiki](https://genesis.re/wiki)

Aside: do you believe psychedelics should be the part of obligatory astronaut training?</comment>


Ask HN: Rural Entrepreneurs, Consultants, Bloggers - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a ebook, I'd like to release here relatively quickly.  In it I talk about a rural renaissance built around technology and the elimination of geographical barriers.
I'm looking to profile rural entrepreneurs, consultants, or bloggers who have had success.
Does anyone know of anyone that might fit this bill that I should reach out to?  Thanks. <comment><USER2> Define 'rural'. I live outside Raleigh, near a petting zoo (I smell the geese, chickens and llamas when I drive past to go grab something from the dollar store). Is that rural enough? email@example.com if you want to talk.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that will work. I'll get in touch.</comment></comment>