VR Is STILL a Stupid Idea - <AUTHOR> http://www.alexstjohn.com/WP/2016/10/15/vr-still-stupid-idea/ <comment><USER2> I think that there is overoptimism in VR right now where the technology is going to progress slower than people think, there will be more difficult roadblocks than people think, and the best practices around VR software will take a while to develop. It will happen, it's just not going to be easy.

This article strikes me as saying something akin to "Cellular phones are a stupid idea and will never take off. They're heavy, the size of a brick, and you can only use them in the few areas where there are towers nearby." Well yeah, if we were perpetually stuck in 1985 sure, but fortunately we're not.

I'd argue that the current generation of VR (Rift/Vive/Gear/PS4/etc) is already multiple orders of magnitude more successful than past attempts, and, to continue the cell phone analogy, we're essentially in 1985 right now.

<comment><USER3> Did you not read the article? The points he makes are not due to technological or environmental constraints. It's about what people actually are interested in and capable of doing.

Pretty much everybody wants to be able to use a phone on the go. However, if cellphones made 90% of people nauseous after a short time just from walking around with them, they wouldn't be that popular.

<comment><USER2> I did read the article, and yes, his points are largely due to technological and environmental constraints. He presents a combination of current and past VR tech (with a healthy dose of strawman mixed in) and uses that to make the claim that VR will never work. It's not going to live up to the current hype, but you can say that about almost everything.

Nausea from VR is not some sort of intrinsic property, it's due to a number of physical factors, many of which can be solved technically by better hardware or by the design of VR experiences. It's not going to be easy, but it's not an intractable problem.

The difference between the VR we have now and the VR we had in the past is that now there is momentum towards moving the technology forward. You have multiple companies competing to develop hardware. You have many developers working on VR experiences and learning what does and does not work. You actually have people buying these things and using that software.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> That is an informative perspective that many people who haven't been following VR for as long could benefit from.

However, I think I have some even more beneficial context. One of the biggest problems with society is the fact that people just cannot distinguish between merit and popularity. They don't know that they are two separate things.

Also, I will go further and say that relates to the capital-oriented nature of society, so people often cannot distinguish between something that just currently fails to make lots of money and something that doesn't have merit.

Nearly every major innovation goes through years where it doesn't quite live up to the hype, isn't particularly affordable, and/or just isn't fashionable or popular. That doesn't mean they weren't great ideas.

Actually the best ideas are often the ones that face the most technical, economic, and social challenges. But eventually we look back and recognize how advantageous the transformation was. And the armies of non-historically- informed detractors look silly in hindsight.

</comment><comment><USER5> VR is fast approaching the hype-cycle "Trough of Disillusionment" as well as the chasm of "Crossing the Chasm". Expect to see a whole lot more doom-saying over the next couple of years.

What will happen is the same story that plays out with every breakthrough technology. Now that we have the early implementations in consumer's hands, everyone will expect everything and a pony immediately if not sooner. But, the reality will be that there are still a lot of very difficult problems to overcome that will still take years to sort out. So, the general consensus will overestimate in the short term and underestimate in the long term by large margins. In the end, VR will make a very large difference in a whole lot of people's lives. But, it won't deliver <insert-magical-fantasy-situation- here> on any predictable timeline. So, people will say it turned out "OK, I guess".

</comment><comment><USER6> > Way back in 1995 ... New head tracking technology and high resolution LCD > displays had made it possible to make light weight VR glasses affordable to > the masses

I found this line really funny when two of the critics that I often see with the current generation is the price and that the resolution is still not enough.

</comment><comment><USER7> "If you can't simulate inertia, you're not delivering VR, you're delivering nausea!"

This seems to be the main thing. There's a basic user need that's effectively impossible to deliver short of a SEGA AS-1 type machine... which is too big/spendy for home entertainment.

<comment><USER8> Don't room scale VR systems, like the Vive, avoid this problem? They (usually) avoid having any artificial movement at all, mapping you walking around in your room 1:1 to walking in the virtual environment.

<comment><USER3> ...which is one reason why VR won't live up to the hype.

You won't be _piloting_ the Millennium Falcon, you will be sitting in the back room, playing Holo-Chess against Chewbacca.

That may be interesting enough to some people, but it's not going to "change the world".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> >but the truth is that VR has been tried and failed repeatedly over the last two decades.

Maybe it's not VR as most think of it, but the problem has existed for even longer when considering 3D movies in the 1950s.

Since then the same cycle of new technology, hype, sizzle, and obsolescence seems to play out whenever there is a new invention. VR is not like other technologies once written off that became ubiquitous, instead it replays itself with each generation before they discover that it's terrible and not enjoyable.

This article is one of the best explanations out there why it will never succeed with permanence.

</comment><comment><USER10> To me the real growth in the next few years will be in augmented reality more than in VR. At the same time I think pro vr and anti vr are both taking extreme positions on where VR is heading.

</comment><comment><USER11> I can't say if these points are all right or all wrong, but it certainly made me think. The idea of inertia and nausea really resonated with me.

</comment><comment><USER12> "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home."

Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

Just needs more time...

<comment><USER13> You could use this same quote for anything.

"This revolutionary new toaster that prints memes/tweets on your toast in the morning will soon be found in every household"

"That's stupid, no it won't"

"Well, Ken Olsen said 'There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home' so this toaster is gonna really take off'"

Many (most?) ideas fail. I'm not convinced that the fact that Ken Olsen failed to anticipate the PC revolution has any bearing on VR's success. Yes, sometimes people fail to predict success, but just as often people succeed in predicting failure.</comment></comment>


JQuery plugin to arrange images using knapsack algorithm - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/heroic/Rucksack

<comment><USER2> Great idea! However, the term "knapsack algorithm" is quite misleading.

There is the "knapsack problem", but there are various different algorithms to solve it. Which of those has been used? Why this and not another algorithm? All those questions are concealed behind the squishy term "knapsack algoritm".

<comment><USER3> We have used Knapsack 0-1 algorithm, since in our case images had different widths but the same height, we wanted to fit in as many images as possible so that they fit in the best way possible. We gave value 1 to each image and weight equal to width and use the total width of container of images as the maximum weight allowed.

<comment><USER4> Knapsack 0-1 is a (special case) _problem_ , not an algorithm.

<comment><USER3> Well as far as my knowledge goes, any sequence of steps to solve a problem is an algorithm(some are simple algorithms and some are complex). In our case we couldn't use fractional knapsack since we couldn't break images.

<comment><USER4> Yes, the steps used to solve the problem are indeed the algorithm... But the question stands: what algorithm did you use?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whipped up a quick example, it seems to re-order the images in a way to fit the most it can on each row given the width constraints and the width of each image - <http://jsfiddle.net/vXbCY/>

<comment><USER6> Thanks! Mind if I include this on the github link?

<comment><USER5> go for it :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I wish there was a quick link to an example.

<comment><USER8> <https://github.com/heroic/Rucksack/issues/1>

<comment><USER6> Hi! I am the author of the plugin. Thanks for the issue. Creating an example for you guys right away :)

<comment><USER8> Too slow. Pull request submitted :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> what is the "knapsack algorithm" ?

I understand how arranging images may be a "knapsack problem" but I can't pinpoint what _the algorithm_ is supposed to be.

<comment><USER3> Plugin co-author: I have answered it in the above comments, see if that suffices.

<comment><USER10> No, it doesn't suffice. You are using an undescribed and unspecified algorithm to solve a specific instance of the Knapsack Problem.

To the best of my knowledge there is no such thing as "The Knapsack Algorithm." (Except in the (now broken) Knapsack Public Key Encryption system)

The only references I've found in a quick search either incorrectly use the term "Knapsack Algorithm" when they actually mean "Knapsack Problem," or they simply refer to the obvious depth-first recursive search.

So the question remains - what algorithm are you using? Depth-first search? Dynamic programming? Greedy algorithm with heuristics and early cut-off? Simulated Annealing? Hill-Climbing? All of these can be used to find good solutions to an instance of the Knapsack Problem.

The auxiliary question: Given that the Knapsack Problem has been shown to be NP-Complete, what will your code do when given a hard instance?

<comment><USER3> We are using Dynamic programming and you are correct, knapsack is a problem but since the most common solution(and widely used) is using DP, we sometimes intermittently use the term Knapsack algorithm with DP algorithm to solve Knapsack problem.

<comment><USER10> Right, that makes sense. Thank you.

What would happen if I encoded a large integer factorization instance into a Knapsack Problem and called your system?

<comment><USER11> Given that it's a jquery plugin, you'd probably get a "script on this page is running slowly" message.

<comment><USER2> This answer completely misses the point. Of course the algorithm could run "forever", thus triggering browser timeouts.

But it could as well terminate early, providing a suboptimal but fast solution.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I believe this is similar to the layout used for G+ photos and Flickr's new justified view. Am I right?

We adapted the script below for <http://current.openphoto.me/photo/list> \--- curious to check this out as well.

[http://www.techbits.de/2011/10/25/building-a-google-plus- ins...](http://www.techbits.de/2011/10/25/building-a-google-plus-inspired- image-gallery/)

<comment><USER12> It's similar but not the same.

The Google+ and Google Image Search will resize and crop the image by width to fit a specified row, greedily optimizing for the maximum number of images per row.

Interesting you bring up [1] because I used a variation of that technique in my own site [2].

You can greatly simplify things if you resize all the images on the backend to the same width, then all you have to do is crop in the frontend to the minimum height in a row.

The trade off is the distortion happens by height rather than width, so you could end up cutting off someones head in a photo-gallery.

My patchwork solution now is to approximate the cropping that would be done in the rule of 3rds with a certain offset (so we lose dead space at the top).

A better technique would be to dynamically determine where a face was in the picture, and center on that. This plugin might help but you'd be better off passing that information from the backend. [3]

[1] [http://www.techbits.de/2011/10/25/building-a-google-plus- ins...](http://www.techbits.de/2011/10/25/building-a-google-plus-inspired- image-gallery/)

[2] <http://www.picociti.com>

[3] <http://facedetection.jaysalvat.com/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Aren't most (all?) knapsack solvers greedy?

That doesn't seem like a good idea just to arrange some images (battery killer?).

</comment><comment><USER3> Plugin co-author here: One more possible extension of this algo would be to use value of each image equal to the weight of each image. This would ensure best fit and would be one more way to make things look beautiful and arranged.

</comment><comment><USER14> Pretty interesting stuff. Have you heard of the Isotope jQuery library? It does something similar.

How is the performance on this one?

<comment><USER6> The isotope library is based on the masonry library, which will not work like rucksack to arrange items that have random width.</comment></comment>


What are the odds that you exist? - <AUTHOR> http://visual.ly/what-are-odds

<comment><USER2> _You know, the most amazing thing happened to me tonight. I was coming here, on the way to the lecture, and I came in through the parking lot. And you won't believe what happened. I saw a car with the license plate ARW 357. Can you imagine? Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight? Amazing!_

      -- Richard Feynman

</comment><comment><USER3> I just asked irb to generate me a random string of decimals, and it gave me "95307035382862516268483317510515387284259666415834482486542336". Jesus, the odds of that happening are like a gazillion to one!

<comment><USER4> It's a miracle!

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The probability that something happens, in a vacuum, is pretty meaningless. It's just a number that changes based on evidence you have. For example, if you knew nothing at all about the universe, the probability that the sun would go up tomorrow could be extremely low. The probability of the sun going up tomorrow given our knowledge of the world is much more meaningful.

A perfect example of how this is significant is the very first assumption: while your dad may have met 20,000 women, the probability that he would date and then marry your mother given his qualities and preferences in women is most likely much higher than 1/20,000.

Another example: let's say we have a loaded die. If we don't know anything about it, the probability of getting a 6 is 1/6. If we know it's loaded, the probability is something else. Which value is correct? If it's the latter, then wouldn't the probability of your being born really be something like the probability of your being born given a bunch of environmental factors and the like?

Basically, the number presented here is mostly devoid of value. That said, the visualization is very good and gets its point across both succinctly and clearly.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have always looked at this sort of stuff from a Bayesian probability point of view. What is the probability I exist? 1.0, 100% because I am bothering to ask the question, and the probability of my existence given my existence is 1.

Now comes the nasty part. What is the probability of your existence given my existence? Most of that info graphic does not come into question, as anything that went into making me can be assumed true. So it is higher then zero, but it is certainly not bigger then the initial 1 in 400 quadrillion number.

</comment><comment><USER7> Doing probability backwards like this is not useful and leads to fallacious conclusions and magical thinking. How is this any different from people running around misapplying quantum terminology for feel-good conclusions?

</comment><comment><USER8> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle>

</comment><comment><USER9> The odds that I exist, per my definition ("cogito ergo sum"), are 100%. It's a cute idea, but it doesn't really make sense. It's like asking, what are the odds that this pile of sand is structured exactly the way it is now?

</comment><comment><USER10> Wait until they discover `uuidgen`

Minds will be blown.

</comment><comment><USER11> On the other hand, there are theories that the universe is literally infinite ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse#Tegmark.27s_classifi...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse#Tegmark.27s_classification)), in which case the probability that you exist is 1. Actually, an infinite number of copies of you.

</comment><comment><USER12> While this is technically true, it's one _hell_ of a selection bias. Clearly, my ancestors all existed and got together. If they didn't, I wouldn't be reading that poster. So, I don't really see the point of it...

</comment><comment><USER13> What is the possibility that ANY OF US exist AT ALL?

I think it's fair to believe that we are the only intelligent beings in all the universe.

What are the odds that some form of life evolved the same way we did over billions of years to form something as complicated as human beings? Probably Zero.

I guess the odds would have to be the same that there are also beings FAR MORE intelligent than us as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> Great way to show such large numbers using a visualization. The problem with large numbers is that it's usually hard to relate to them at all - which this graphic overcomes to a large degree.

</comment><comment><USER15> Please. Excuse me while I estimate the probability that all the hair follicles on my arm would be arranged in the way that they are now. Life is just so full of miracles.

</comment><comment><USER16> The first line says that he meets 10,000 women, then the next line says there's a 1 in 2000 chance that he has kids with a woman he meets... that means he had 5 wives?

<comment><USER13> No, I think it shows that there's a chance he'll have kids with a woman he never meets... somehow.

Shouldn't there be a 1 in 1 chance that he'll have his kids with a woman he meets?

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well, you sort of have to consider that you already exist (or you wouldn't be reading that chart).

P(I exist|I already exist) = 1

</comment><comment><USER18> nice chart for a T-shirt, but what is the meaning of calculating probability of events that already happended. their probability is always 100%.

</comment><comment><USER19> Why am I here?

</comment><comment><USER20> Love it.

Another question someone asked me once was:

1) if 99% of a molecule is space

2) if 99% of a molecules atoms are space

3) if 99% of an atom's sub atomic particles are space

4) if 99% of quarks are space..

We exist?

Or are we just the energy exerted in the forces between tiny bits of matter?

:)

</comment><comment><USER21> I guess I am lucky!

</comment><comment><USER22> This is neat, but the odds that I exist are 1 in 1 since this is the only possible permutation of the universe.

Go ahead, prove it isn't.</comment>


The wealthiest dozen Americans own more than the bottom half - <AUTHOR> http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/12/the-wealthiest-dozen-americans-own-more-than-the-bottom-half.html <comment><USER2> Power law in action? Too bad I'm on the long tail (at least currently).

<comment><USER3> More like systematic class warfare in action.</comment></comment>


Mental-health information 'sold to advertisers' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49578500 <comment><USER2> I can't separate what actually happened from the sensationalizing in the article.

It says the websites had Google cookies and others. OK, anybody using Google Analytics has Google cookies. Anyone using FB plugins has FB cookies. Yes, websites certainly have a lot of cookies these days, and the information inferred by use of these can be in a generic fashion to target and rank ads. That's worthy of scrutiny -- but this isn't what the article is about. What is the evidence of "mental health" being treated in some scary specific way?

The only substantial thing in the article supporting the headline is one charge that a site sent quiz answers to Player.qualifo.com -- which appears to be an unregistered domain.

OK, so what information was sold? When did money change hands? Is there any hard evidence that mental health information was "sold to advertisers", as is claimed in the headline? Or is this just bullshit they made up to get clicks?

For that matter, even if you wanted to do some evil psychographic ad thing, why would anyone sell that info to advertisers? What are they gonna do with it? Like, why hand them the literal data, when you could allow them to just bid on ads that may be targeted/ranked using your painstakingly collected psychographic data (a la Cambridge Analytica)? Why sell cow when you can sell the milk?

The fearmongering and disinformation around adtech and privacy numbs us to legitimately scary things being done that should be covered more.

Makes me think of this Blake Ross rant: [https://medium.com/@blakeross/don-t- outsource-your-thinking-...](https://medium.com/@blakeross/don-t-outsource- your-thinking-ad825a9b4653)

<comment><USER3> > It says the websites had Google cookies and others. OK, anybody using Google > Analytics has Google cookies. Anyone using FB plugins has FB cookies.

It's not that complicated: certain websites, dealing in certain kinds of sensitive information, may be legally required to seek explicit user consent _before_ even using Google Analytics or Facebook Plugins.

Yes, Google Analytics use is damn near ubiquitous right now. That does not mean it is unambiguously OK to slap it on ever website under the sun.

> What is the evidence of "mental health" being treated in some scary specific > way?

No evidence is required. The law is clear. That someone subject to GDPR regulations has the information that they were seeking information related to depression transmitted to google and facebook in the form of a Google Analytics and Facebook scripts on page, without their explicit consent to that, is _in and of itself_ a violation of the law.

<comment><USER4> I'm not sure it's clear that generic page analytics necessarily means that ones presence on certain pages is any more sensitive than Google maps knowing that you zoomed in on a depression clinic. I can understand this is easy with third party analytics on specific-subject pages, but the waters may appear muddier on web server logs, dns lookups/caches, browser history, search results etc where generic approaches may only be illegal depending on what's visited or looked up. What if the analytics scripts promised not to collect URL or page content (not saying that's the case here)?

If not already clarified somewhere (pardon my ignorance on the bodies/law involved), I think these common cases should be listed as clearly illegal not in canon, but as a helper to these services. Keeping a list containing things like "it's illegal for sites remotely related to health to use third party analytics of any kind sans prior consent" (or "it's illegal for sites remotely related to health to let the URL or content of the page be known to third parties sans prior consent") could help.

I too struggled w/ some of the sensationalizing in the article, because I read:

> Sensitive personal information about mental health is routinely being traded > to advertisers around the web

as a bold headline, only to read:

> This was problematic because sensitive information could be broadcast to all > of those bidding, PI said

I couldn't really tell what was really being sold routinely, personal info or ad space. And I couldn't separate what "could be broadcast" vs what was.

<comment><USER3> > I couldn't really tell what was really being sold routinely, personal info > or ad space

It's the same thing.

Look, the website deals in mental health information, right? And health information is part of a class of information that's protected under the GDPR. Under that protection, explicit user consent is required before that info can be shared with anyone.

When the website invokes the Google ad APIs, that results in Google learning that this user, who they build an identity around via tracking cookies, is reading a website with information about a health condition. Google isn't the website the user visited, it's a third-party the website just informed without explicitly asking for the user's permission. That violates the GDPR. The website makes money off of informing Google about this. That's "selling user health information" to an advertiser — Google.

Google turns around to its ad bid network and solicits bids to show an ad to google push_id abcdefghihk123, who is visiting a website about mental health. That, again, is a GDPR violation, because disclosing information about a pseudonym ID still counts under the GDPR (and the info can be de-anonymize easily by aggregation networks). That, again, is Google selling personal info to advertisers.

What it boils down to is you're thinking about this is all wrong; the way Google sells ads, _there's no difference between selling personal info and selling ad space_ because you're always bidding to show an individual you're given data about an ad. The bids are based on how much the person's profile matches the bidder's interests, and anything new learned about the person that can be gleaned from the current website visit is added to that profile. Advertisers are literally being told "here: this person with id 12345 and these characteristics matching your target profile is currently reading about depression. How much to show them an ad?" The bid request data they're given in turn is enough to identify the user in any number of data aggregation services — most of which require "share and share alike" participation — so the bidder looks up the bid request data and discovers probable email address, location, income, marital status, interests, etc, and in return tells the aggregation service "this user is currently visiting doihavedepression.com". Again, GDPR violation.

That's the nature of modern online advertising. You're never bidding to just show N ads on site Y. There is no such thing, in using Google's advertising system, as selling an ad space on your site to Google that isn't also a sale of personal information to Google and by Google to the advertisers bidding to fill that spot. As such there are entire classes of websites that probably should not be showing Google ads.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have a rather specific condition that I've seen YouTube advertisements for the drugs for, despite not even searching for the details of it except through an anonymizer. I've always wondered what the cost per click for an advertisement for a $100,000/yr drugs is.

<comment><USER6> That's so messed up. What do you think of advertisements for drugs in general? Have they been helpful finding treatment for your condition ? They are illegal where i'm from i believe (i've never seen one myself except in the us).

Btw, this reminds of this absolutely hilarious story i think i first heard of here on HN: [https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation- pranking...](https://ghostinfluence.com/the-ultimate-retaliation-pranking-my- roommate-with-targeted-facebook-ads/)

<comment><USER7> There's basically some segment of the population who will demand $SOME_DRUG_THEY_SAW_ADS_FOR and will change doctors repeatedly until they can get a prescription for it, even if there are better alternatives that were recommended by the previous doctors. Eliminating direct advertisement won't completely avoid that since there will always be blogs full of crazy nonsense or whatever, but I don't think there's any reason that consumers should be getting targeted for ads for things they can't even legally buy.

<comment><USER8> It's illegal to do that in the UK and therefore we have no (major) issues like you describe.

One of those regulations that is a net good to society.

Interesting video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic_FpRG7Z_k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ic_FpRG7Z_k)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One of the team behind this research posted an interesting walk-through of the traffic from one of the worst offenders: [https://twitter.com/Bendineliot/status/1169259912184115206](https://twitter.com/Bendineliot/status/1169259912184115206)

</comment><comment><USER10> Personally, it really sucks to get ads targeted at my mental health diagnoses.

<comment><USER11> Ads are not targeted at your diagnosis - that is absurd. Ads are targeted at your browsing habits, which may reflect your diagnosis. One is illegal, one is legal. If we want to have an open discussion about advertising making claims like that only hurt privacy advocates.

<comment><USER12> It's absurd that you think advertisers can't generate this information:

1\. Get addresses of mental care clinics and offices.

2\. Geofence addresses

3\. Correlate devices that visited geofence addresses (using LiveRamp data) with devices that saw your ads on Mental Health sites.

4\. Bonus, look at the path on the pages to figure out what disease they were viewing when your ad was displayed if you weren't already targeting specific page content.

<comment><USER13> How would they access location data unless authorised by the user?

("absurd" is a strange word to use; it might be nicer to educate without condescension).

<comment><USER12> Sorry, I used "absurd" to echo the condescension of the parent comment. Which you didn't respond to....

Location data is so easily available that is largely a commodity now, sources include GPS from "always on" apps like the Weather Network but also apps that are collecting this data without your permission. Apple and Google are constantly kicking apps that do this out of the store.

Also tricks like "local wifi" devices are being used, Apple just reduced apps ability to sniff networks for this reason. There is another response that lists some other data sources, your cell phone company being the worst offender for many reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This kind of thing makes me want to start a small independent ISP that automatically blocks trackers, a la Pi-Hole, unless the customer specifically opts in for them. Though, I'm not sure if there are legal hurdles in the US for doing this.

<comment><USER15> An ISP won't really cut it these days, since more and more internet use, particularly in developing countries, is mobile. You need to start a small independent _mobile carrier_.

<comment><USER16> Someone needs to call John Legere and get T-Mobile working on this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> When I read things like this, any quams I have about using ad/tracking blockers melt away.

</comment><comment><USER18> Companies have practices for opioid abuse surveillance and prevention that highlight how available this data is. Example

[https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/public- sector/solution...](https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/public- sector/solutions/solving-the-countrys-opioid-crisis.html)

They use insurer datasets to model at-risk populations, especially populations with high costs, to identify intervention opportunities. I saw one model where they could identify all pregnant women in a state with 98% accuracy and score them for risk of opioid dependency.

You can layer that type of data with online advertising from vendors like Google and identify opportunities to target behavior factors that combined with medical risk factors present opportunities. For example, a blue collar worker with back pain treated opioid treatment has a baseline risk of abuse. If her address changes or behaviors like online gambling happen, that increases the risk of abuse.

Similar tech has been developed to combat extremist behavior.

[http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2019/04/18/can-online-ads- hel...](http://chicagopolicyreview.org/2019/04/18/can-online-ads-help-prevent- violent-extremism/)

In short, your health data is not meaningfully private.

</comment><comment><USER19> Unfortunately, if you have the clout and money and a facile excuse, you can also get data on patients straight from the NHS itself.

'Revealed: Google AI has access to huge haul of NHS patient data' \- [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2086454-revealed- google...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2086454-revealed-google-ai- has-access-to-huge-haul-of-nhs-patient-data/)

'Data deadlines loom large for the NHS' \- [https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k1215](https://www.bmj.com/content/360/bmj.k1215)

</comment><comment><USER20> this is exactly why i view surveillance and advertising as attacks on my personal autonomy. advertisers will use anything and everything against me, whether or not i ever consented to anyone knowing or using any of my information.

if i'm surveilled, anything i do can be monetized and that monetization directly and seriously harms me and exposes me to risk that i did not opt into. if an advertiser knows that i am mentally ill on the basis of my search queries or other data which they illegitimately procure without my consent and against my active objections, they can target me for exploitation with an arsenal of dirty psychological tricks designed to get me to buy their products. if i am like most people, in the long run, they will win because i will buy at least one product which they have forced onto me.

in other words, if i am forced against my will to view a targeted advertisements, it is an inexcusable and unprovoked attack on my right to refrain from economic activity that i do not wish to undertake. it is an attempt at coercion using weaponized persuasion. it is not an attempt in good faith to improve my life or to help me.

this remains true whether that advertisement targets an area where people are explicitly exceptionally vulnerable, such as in the case of mental health, or something more mundane, like my love of fast cars and nice wine. however, in the case of mental health, it may be such that the act of targeting someone with a relevant advertisement genuinely makes their condition worse. so, as we all knew all along, these advertisements are actively, maliciously, and viciously harming people for the sake of a few clicks.

the bottom line here is that advertisers and advertiser-enablers are long overdue for their comeuppance. i'd support a ban on targeted advertisements, but that won't happen legislatively. GDPR and similar laws are a start, but they don't go nearly far enough to punish transgressors. i'd be more satisfied with criminal liability for advertisements exploiting protected classes of PII, but we'll see how things evolve.

</comment><comment><USER21> Oh awesome. So does that mean we can finally do away with the gigantic money sink that is HIPAA? Because if we're gonna have our health information leaked, then there's no reason to keep up this charade.

<comment><USER22> I get the feeling these are just general websites with mental health information, articles and little tests, but not actual health providers. If it's just a directory and not your health insurance company or doctor, they don't fall under HIPAA. HIPAA only applies to the US. EU laws and the GDPR, which this article are discussing, are very different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Always use a VPN and incognito mode when accessing any sites for which your interest has value to others that could harm you.

It's not surprising at all that web sites covering medical issues are also tracking interest in those issues, correlating them with identities, and selling them to third parties, perhaps including life and health insurance companies, potential employers, etc.

</comment><comment><USER24> > And many used Hotjar, a company that provides software that allows > everything users type or click on to be logged and played back.

Er, what?

<comment><USER25> It even records the mouse movements, generate hotmaps, etc. You have to do extra efforts to filter out certain input fields, like passwords or credit card details.

[https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en- us/articles/115012439167-How-t...](https://help.hotjar.com/hc/en- us/articles/115012439167-How-to-Manually-Suppress-Specific-Elements-and- Images)

<comment><USER26> IBM had something like this once, forget the name, something like TeaLeaf. We were forced to use it in our mobile apps until it became obvious it was terribly broken.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I worked for a major DSP / advertising platform and I was asked to setup a campaign to advertise some particular drug to bi-polar people in a manner that would specifically target that population.

I declined to do so and I was later fired. They were within their rights to fire me and I was within my rights to decline. That is all.

</comment><comment><USER28> We need to start thinking ahead about who is going to run the federal agencies and "tobacco truth" type organizations funded by the billions of damages from the inevitable settlements, to avoid regulatory capture.

</comment><comment><USER29> The question that should be asked is what technology companies bought that information and was that info sold to human resources departments?

</comment><comment><USER30> Show HN: A boat for servers to keep your tech company on international waters post-digital civil rights.

<comment><USER31> Patent US7525207B2 - Water-based data center (Google LLC)

[https://patents.google.com/patent/US7525207B2/en](https://patents.google.com/patent/US7525207B2/en)

Google's [...] floating data centers off US coasts (2013)

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/google- se...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/google-secret- floating-data-centers-california-maine)

<comment><USER32> Why waste money on floating the servers when you can sink them?

Microsoft is already piloting it:

[https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-44368813)

<comment><USER33> Passive cooling with no rent costs is hard to beat. Just gotta get to the bottom of the ocean first.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> As much as I value privacy and think America needs a new constitutional amendment enshrining it in our rights, this title is clickbait and the entire article is designed to whip you into a panic. Here's the crux:

"Privacy International (PI) investigated more than 100 mental health websites in France, Germany and the UK.

It found many shared user data with third parties, including advertisers and large technology companies."

Yes. Mental health websites use third-party ads just like everyone else. Case closed.

They're not "selling mental-health information" as if they're violating HIPAA or something. They're just ordinary websites with ads and other tracking cookies.

This is more of the silly kind of half-truths that were used to put cookie warnings on nearly every site on the internet. Don't fall for it.

<comment><USER3> > They're not "selling mental-health information" as if they're violating > HIPAA or something. They're just ordinary websites with ads and other > tracking cookies

> This is more of the silly kind of half-truths that were used to put cookie > warnings on nearly every site on the internet. Don't fall for it.

I'd suggest instead that your post is the kind of "silly half-truth" that people shouldn't fall for.

As the article points out (and which you neglected to mention):

> And in the case of particularly sensitive data, such as health information, > this consent must be explicit.

> But the PI investigation found many cookies were installed on people's > devices before any consent had been given.

Contrary to your "it's just an ordinary website, and ordinary websites use cookies, nothing to see here" narrative, these are websites that specialize in giving health advice. The knowledge that a person is seeking advice and tests for indicators re: depression is _absolutely_ sensitive health information (insurance companies and potential employers would happily weaponize that information given half a chance), and the law therefore required _explicit consent_ before using those cookies _and forwarding those depression indicator survey answers to third-party marketing data-aggregation affiliates_ , which these websites did not seek.

This is a clear-cut violation.

<comment><USER35> Indeed.

I'd also add that:

> _half-truths that were used to put cookie warnings on nearly every site on > the internet_

The half-truth here is that half-truths were used. Cookie warnings are "this site spies on you" warnings (you don't need them if you only use cookies for making the site work), which were introduced as a strong suggestion for the industry to get its act together. It didn't, so now we have GDPR.</comment></comment></comment>


Two Addicting iPhone Apps - <AUTHOR>

Hi, I am currently 15 and have two iPhone games published in the Apple App Store. Rocket-Dodge was my first app, created when I was 13. Then, Butcher Chop was published three months later. Due to my lazy attitude evoked by my early teenage years, I have only just began to try to gain advice and publicity involving my two programs. Please download the two apps and comment your thoughts. Thanks!<p>https://itunes.apple.com/us/artist/abby-apps/id515860706 <comment><USER2> I suggest changing the title to something like "Show HN: My iPhone Apps I created when I was 13" and describe a bit more what it was like to develop them and what you're trying to accomplish by showing them to HN.</comment>


Back in Time: My Advice for the 21 Year-Old Me - <AUTHOR> http://jjacobs22.tumblr.com/post/2170914388/back-in-time-my-advice-for-the-21-year-old-me

<comment><USER2> The problem with time travel is paradox. If you go back in time and tell your younger self to change things, -this- you doesn't exist any more.

So you tell that younger you to just pick an idea and go with it, instead of waiting for the perfect idea. You know, the one that started you on the road to success. He runs with it, fails, and the rest of his life follows from the lessons he learned from that failure. Perhaps that lesson is that he's not fit to be an entrepreneur, and he goes on to be a wage-slave the rest of his life.

Don't mess with success. It's dangerous enough to try to correct failure, but changing things in the chain that led to your success is incredibly foolhardy.

</comment><comment><USER3> My advice to 21 year old me would be easy: don't blow off that Microsoft interview in 1982 because you don't want to move to the Seattle area.</comment>


Stanford Researchers Launch Free TV Service to Improve Live Streaming Using AI - <AUTHOR> https://thestreamable.com/guides/live-tv-streaming/news/exclusive-stanford-researchers-launch-free-streaming-service-to-improve-video-streaming-algorithms <comment><USER2> Hi folks -- study PI here. Happy to answer any questions.

We're working on a paper for submission to a research conference soon, so every viewer gives us helpful data for the system to learn in-situ and improve its performance over different kinds of Internet connections and congestion situations. (We are randomizing connections to get either our in-development algorithm or a bunch of competing ABR and congestion-control schemes so we can properly evaluate, so if you get a stall or bad quality...... we'll blame that.)

All the source code is at [https://github.com/StanfordSNR/puffer](https://github.com/StanfordSNR/puffer) and is or will be released with an open-source license. The study is led by my doctoral student Francis Yan, along with Sadjad Fouladi, Hudson Ayers, Chenzhi Zhu, and my colleague Philip Levis. The goal is to train video-streaming algorithms (bitrate selection and congestion control) online, continually, in situ, to minimize stalls and deliver the best picture quality across a diverse range of real-world Internet connections and users. This is from some of the same people who brought you Salsify (functional video compression for lower- latency real-time video: [https://snr.stanford.edu/salsify](https://snr.stanford.edu/salsify)), Lepton (distributed/parallel JPEG compression: [https://github.com/dropbox/lepton](https://github.com/dropbox/lepton)), Mosh (functional terminal emulation for mobility: [https://mosh.org](https://mosh.org)), Remy (machine learning for congestion control; [http://mit.edu/remy](http://mit.edu/remy)), and the Pantheon of Congestion Control ([https://pantheon.stanford.edu](https://pantheon.stanford.edu)).

There are some unusual details of the Puffer system to make experimentation easier (and, we hope, performance better): the ABR algorithm is server-side, and video is streamed continuously over a WebSocket and the client gives asynchronous feedback, instead of using DASH HTTP request/replies. The tcp_info struct (including the delivery rate estimate) from the congestion- control layer is plumbed through to the ABR, and to the neural network that tries to predict "how long will it take to send a video chunk of length y," so it's weakly cross-layer. The "transmission-time predictor" is probabilistic instead of simply producing a point estimate. We encode with libx264 and then measure the SSIM of every encoded chunk to calculate a reward for each possible stream (instead of making the assumption that more bitrate is better -- the correlation is not so good when you consider different times in the same video). And we encode 10 variants of each channel, so more than typical. And everything is done at 60 fps. Of course some of these details mean these algorithms are not going to be deployed any time soon on a production CDN or streaming service, but the hope is to demonstrate the value of some of the ideas in an academic setting for future commercial deployment. The use of WebSockets, MSE, and Opus is why this doesn't work on Safari or on iOS.

FAQ here: [https://puffer.stanford.edu/faq/](https://puffer.stanford.edu/faq/)

Also I'm happy we were able to make some of the Grafana monitoring public: [https://puffer.stanford.edu/monitoring](https://puffer.stanford.edu/monitoring)

<comment><USER3> My apologies that this question is likely tangential to the main objective of the research, but will this project be open sourcing the signal acquisition, transcoding, and delivery portion of its research as well?

This part of this project alone is good enough to improve, dare I claim disrupt, enormous monied interests in the global media landscape.

If this whole thing is legal (500 simultaneous peers), and can be reduced to a docker image and some rabbit ears, you could probably improve the lives of millions (60?) of Americans that do not have access to local stations.

Also, the claim of "not going to be deployed any time soon on a production CDN or streaming service", I would like to make a friendly wager that you are mistaken. I won't even demand favorable odds because of my disadvantaged intellect. This is impressive and valuable work.

My applause.

<comment><USER2> Thank you for your kind words! The students worked really hard to get all those details right. And yes, all that stuff is at the GitHub repo ([https://github.com/StanfordSNR/puffer](https://github.com/StanfordSNR/puffer)).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Streaming it in another browser window as a part of my Mechanical Turk HIT assignment as I type, and I have to say -- I'm blown away by the incredible picture quality and buffer-free performance.

Puffer team has done a great job.

As a sidenote, I just realized how annoying cable TV ads are. The content to advertising ratio on cable is insanely bad. This 'Puffer' experience just validated my decision to stay away from cable TV.

<comment><USER5> Switching channel takes less than a quarter of a second, this is pretty impressive.

<comment><USER6> Indeed - it's very well done.

I think what makes it so smooth is something quite simple. Its letting the previous stream run while it buffers the new one and switches you over?

<comment><USER7> That would still make you wait for the switch. Switching channels on digital TV is slow due to key frames - you need to wait until one full Intra-frame of the new channel has been decoded. Here client can simply request Intra-frame on demand and receive one immediately.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Anyone with legal knowledge about how services like this and [https://www.locast.org/](https://www.locast.org/) are able to operate?

It doesn't seem significantly different to me than the aereo tv situation.

Very cool project!

<comment><AUTHOR> In the case of Locast, part of the Aereo ruling was that it was a for profit service. Locast is able to do this because they are not charging the end user.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is very impressive. FYI: Delaying the buffer spinner, not showing it unless buffering has been (let's say) >300ms for instance, makes the switching feel a lot faster. If you could also get rid of the black between switching out the media source buffer, they would feel instant.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm going to be experimenting with the source code, I really need some good basis for live streaming TV over the internet (OTT). Unrelated, but important for me, TV stations in my country (Serbia), forbid rebroadcasting but they are available OTA, with a DVB-T2 receiver and an aerial/antenna. However, some cable providers cannot show the programs, and if they do show them, they have negotiated special licenses for that. How do I make a case that by being OTA Free, and not DRM'd, I, by not changing the contents of the broadcast, should be allowed to rebroadcast to people for no financial gain to myself or the TV stations (other than the ads the TV stations put inside of the broadcast content) (all to serve as an experiment)?

</comment><comment><USER10> This is a pretty cool idea

Note, you still have to deal with TV ads and there is no scrubbing. I wonder if you could make your own client to this and get DVR functionality? Actually since they are just grabbing over-the-air signals, I wonder if there is a SDR project for this.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is actually faster at channel switching than my home fiber TV service.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's quite nice, but it's definitely going to get a DRM layer and geoblocking applied to it at some stage.

<comment><USER13> More likely they'll never expand beyond 500 "experimental" accounts and shut it down once their research is finished. I don't intend this as a criticism of the researchers; the more academic and experimental you make something look the less likely you will be threatened/sued into compliance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The quality and speed is incredible

</comment><comment><USER12> Edit: bitrate and resolution varies - I've seen bitrates as high as 20 megabit/s.

</comment><comment><USER15> Is closed captioning supported?

</comment><comment><USER16> wondering what the odds are they get a takedown from the NFL during the super bowl or preemptively won't show CBS during that time period?</comment>


Little Bobby Tables comes to life for real, in Poland - <AUTHOR> https://prod.ceidg.gov.pl/CEIDG/ceidg.public.ui/SearchDetails.aspx?Id=e82735cd-bc2b-4ac0-8bac-a1dc54d8c013

<comment><USER2> I don't know any polish, but this seems to be the name of his company rather than his actual name, which would be just 'Dariusz Jakubowski'. I concluded this because the entry that contains the bobby tables reference is called 'Firma', which means 'Company', and the website seems to be a registry of polish companies too (at least that's what I got out of it with Google Translate :D)

<comment><USER3> You're absolutely right. And the guy is a software developer (kind of obvious)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The xkcd this is referring to:

[http://xkcd.com/327/](http://xkcd.com/327/)</comment>