The One Product You Should Buy Online: Eyeglasses - <AUTHOR> https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-one-product-you-should-buy-online_us_598e1777e4b0ed1f464c0aac <comment><USER2> Part of the reason eyeglasses are so expensive is "vision insurance", which is not insurance at all. By definition, insurance is the spread of risk of a high-cost, low-probability event over a large population so that no individual has to pay a huge sum if the event occurs. For instance, eye insurance would have a small premium that would pay out if an eye injury occured that required very expensive medical care. However, modern "vision insurance"

1\. won't pay if you injure your eye

2\. doesn't spread any risk over a population

Instead of reducing risk, vision insurance simply spreads a known cost over a period of time. If each customer would pay $240 / yr on eyeglasses, it allows them to instead pay $20 / mo. That is not insurance -- that's a payment plan!

So, why does it exist and why does it increase price? Very simply, vision insurance can be provided by a company to its employees and deducted as an expense. This allows the employee to avoid paying personal income tax on wages, which would happen if the $240 were provided directly to the worker. Thus, it is cheaper for the company to provide vision insurance than to increase wages to provide $240 in after-tax take home pay.

Because the money tied up with vision insurance can not be used for anything _other_ than glasses (e.g. you can't cash out a vision plan and spend the money on video games or travel), there is no incentive for the end customer to spend less on glasses. They will want to spend as much as possible while still remaining below the maximum budget from the plan. As a result, this distorts the normal financial incentives in a marketplace.

As a result of the favorable tax position and lack of cost incentives, vision insurance inflates the price of eyeglasses and exploits a de facto subsidy from the taxpayer to the eyeglass company. This increases the profits of the eyeglass company (owned by Luxottica) at the expense of the consumer (and to the detriment of anyone who buys their glasses out of their own pocket)

<comment><USER3> This is also why it makes absolutely not sense to expect 'health insurance' to cover pre-existing conditions - it's not insurance if you know you already need it when you buy it!

(I think people should be able to get good quality affordable medical care for health conditions they already have! Just saying it doesn't make any sense to expect literal 'insurance' to cover it.)

<comment><USER4> >This is also why it makes absolutely not sense to expect 'health insurance' to cover pre-existing conditions - it's not insurance if you know you already need it when you buy it!

Eh, not really. If I'm in remission from cancer, I'm not actually sick right now, but I've got a pre-existing condition because the cancer might recur. If I've got hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, I don't necessarily need any medical treatment now, but I'm at elevated risk of developing atrial fibrillation or suffering a stroke in the future.

The way health insurers treat "pre-existing conditions" is mostly about improving the profitability of their risk pools rather than protecting themselves from people who buy insurance after the fact. They use a plausible- sounding pretext to avoid having to insure people who might actually claim on their policy. It's one thing to exclude a specific chronic condition from coverage, but it's quite another to refuse to insure people altogether simply because they've had health issues in the past.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/09...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp- dyn/content/article/2009/09/18/AR2009091803501.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Most near-sighted developers would benefit from single vision readers with a focal length and PD (~3mm less than binocular distance PD) customized for the distance of their desktop monitor, laptop or tablet. Now that a complete pair of glasses can be obtained online for $20-$60, there is little risk in trying "computer glasses" and seeing how your eyes feel.

Some optometrists add +1.00 to your distance prescription to obtain your computer prescription. Some perform a separate eye test at laptop/monitor distance. There's also a calculator here: [http://computerglassesrx.com](http://computerglassesrx.com)

If you wear contacts for hours at the computer, you can try cheap drugstore reading (plus) glasses over your contacts, close to the +value from above calculator. Once you know what strength works for you, buy better quality readers from sites like readers.com, peepers.com, etc. Or make custom ones with your near PD and preferred frame at Zenni, EyeBuyDirect, etc.

This iOS app can help with PD measurement, remember to hold the phone at the same distance as your laptop/monitor: PD Meter | Pupil Distance Measure by GlassifyMe by GlassifyMe [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pd-meter-pupil- distance-meas...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pd-meter-pupil-distance- measure-by-glassifyme/id1041586910?mt=8)

<comment><USER5> Are you saying that, using this app, I can get a prescription and order glasses online with it?

And are you also saying that a lower dioptri prescription for starting a foot away from computer monitors is more healthy than with eg full correction contact lenses?

<comment><USER6> Every optometrist I've spoken to recommends using reading glasses (usually around +1) when using computers or when reading, even with properly corrected contact lenses.

Personally I use multifocal contacts (the concentric kind), which help a lot with near vision, but I still use reading glasses.

<comment><USER7> I've successfully used computer glasses (CG) for a couple years now (age 60, nearsighted, for a monitor 2 feet away). Before that I tried reading glasses, but found their focal length to be impossibly too close for computing (no more than 12 inches).

My opthmologist came up with my CG prescription by dividing my distance prescription in half. It works well from 18 inches out to 3 feet, or so.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Went to the opthamologist this year cause I could tell my vision was worsening.

After all was said and done they ushered me into their eyeglasses store which was physically connected to their office. A nice friendly man told me the frames start at 299 and go up from there.

I said thanks man with this eye exam I can barely open my eyes so I'll come back.

Got two pairs of awesome glasses from Zenni for $55 total.

I've read this is online movement is destroying the career of optometrists. Also the eyeglasses scam also seems to be connected to Luxottica which is a well known sunglasses scam also. I will continue to buy from Zenni

<comment><USER9> A coworker once worked as a technician at a chain optometrist's office. He swears the frames from Zenni and other online retailers are substandard and will fall apart, but my experience has been otherwise. He gave me one of his old frames (never worn by him beyond initial fitting) to save me money on a visit once, they were Ralph Lauren or something like that and he claimed retail cost was over $500 before lenses. They lasted all of six months before they literally fell apart on my face. I found a replacement of the same model in a different color on eBay used for $50. After cleaning them and swapping my lenses over, I got another three months before they failed as well.

The ones I have now were $70, are more attractive, more comfortable, and so far have lasted over a year. I did get them at the optometrist but they were on clearance and were only a few dollars more than if I'd gotten the same ones online at Zenni.

<comment><USER10> > _A coworker once worked as a technician at a chain optometrist 's office. He > swears the frames from Zenni and other online retailers are substandard and > will fall apart, but my experience has been otherwise._

BS, the expensive and the inexpensive ones are all made with the same techniques in the same factories across brands.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some expensive frames include a license fee for the designer's brand name. Some indie-designer expensive frames use more expensive metal, acetate, hinges, rivets, etc. But they usually limit distribution to brick & mortar opticians, so there's a sizable retail markup.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is only true if your prescription is run of the mill and fairly weak. Anything above 5 diopter off, or with barrel corrections, astigmatism, etc and you should go to an actual optometrist.

Zenni and the like use terrible materials with bad abbe numbers leading to chromatic abberation. They push 'thin' but what thing really means is high refractive index and generally low abbe number. Even their 'normal' lens material has a bad abbe number.

So, get your frames online cheap. Then take them to your actual optometrist and get lenses made of good materials put in.

<comment><AUTHOR> There is _wide variation_ in the supply chain of online eyeglass retailers.

EyeBuyDirect and FramesDirect are partly-owned by the world's largest lens manufacturer Essilor (soon to merge with Luxottica), so their lenses are very similar if not identical to those sold by local opticians.

I've bought -6 sphere -2 cylinder from EyeBuyDirect. Their default fitting height for optical center did not work for my face size (easily verified by moving the frame up and down to find the clearest spot). Once I had the correct measurement, they remade the glasses which worked perfectly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I had trouble reading the whole article on mobile; screen-eating ads and forced scrolling to the bottom.

But what I read just reads like a lengthy ad.

Also, "only"? I know it's HuffPo, but come on. How about electronics? Where am I going to find a few 74-series logic chips in person? How about materials like PTFE? None of my local plastics stores carry it.

Sorry, am I sounding like an ass? I feel like that was sort of an ass-y thing to write. But these 'submarine' pieces really bug me.

<comment><USER9> > _" I had trouble reading the whole article on mobile"_

I had trouble reading it _period_. It was overflowing with superfluous flowery prose, in other words[1], it was too wordsmith-y for its own good. It's a HuffPost piece about the advantages of buying glasses online in 2017, it doesn't have to sound like a tabloid magazine article from 1896 to draw in the modern reader.

[1] It was at a point early in the article where the author felt the need to say "in other words" and provide a dumbed down version of his previous sentence that I decided to stop reading for my own sanity. Next time, leave the thesaurus on the shelf please.

<comment><USER13> Not only that, but his "synonyms" weren't really. A nose isn't a proboscis, and "bespectacled avoidance" isn't avoidance of wearing glasses, it's an avoidance that _is, itself_ wearing glasses. Absurd.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> My boyfriend bought his last pair of glasses from go-optic.com, and the experience has been a good one. First time online buy as well.

Some caveats:

* We picked the frames from a physical store first and didn't buy there. Sort of dodgy of us, but their prices were insane.

* We tried to do the pupil measurement on our own, but every time we tried, we got a different number. So he went to a optical shop to have the measurement done. The shop did it for free and we were taking advantage of the brick and mortar presence.

So yes, appears to be completely doable but I don't think we would have been happy with the final product had we not had access to a local shop.

<comment><USER15> For pupillary distance, optometrist typically do it for an extra 5$, but an easy way to do it is to hold a ruler with clear mm marks on it beside your head level with your eyes and have somebody take a picture, then measure the distance with a compass.

<comment><USER14> We tried this, watched all the how-to videos, etc. I just couldn't take a reproducible measurement. We tried maybe 6-8 measurement attempts, and the results were all different.

At this point, I gave up. Of course I was doing something wrong. Without a repeated measurement I didn't have confidence to base an expensive purchase on my work.

<comment><USER15> Three factors play in:

\- where the subject is looking. Make sure they are looking at leat 4 or 5 meters out, not at you taking the picture! Your pupils get slightly closer and further depending where you look

\- where the ruler is. Make sure it is at the same level as your eyes, in terms of distance from the back/front of your head. Make sure the ruler is as close to 90 degrees to the nose as possible, as parallel to the eyes as possible

\- make sure the camera is as parallel to the ruler as possible

Also I find printing out one of the pic (just b&w on a regular laser printer) can be easier to measure, as opposed to do it on a screen.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Do these online places include prescription lenses in their low quotes, because that's where the bulk of the cost is in most cases.

I picked up glasses at Costo in 2016 and the cost was $237 which included an exam. Here's the break down:

\- $49 eye exam

\- $39 for the frames

\- $149 for the prescription lenses

\- $0 hard case and a microfiber cloth (it comes as a bonus)

I paid a premium for the lenses because they are of the light weight material that's also scratch resistent and turn into sunglasses when exposed to UV light. The transition lens coating alone was like $49 but since I go outside a lot it's totally worth it.

<comment><USER17> Yes. I recently bought frames from Zenni and paid $30 total, including an upcharge for an oleophobic AR coating (something I have not seen available offline).

These were 1.50 index cr-39 which is fine for my light prescription. But higher index lenses are only a few dollars more.

<comment><USER16> That seems incredibly cheap (in a good way). Almost too good to be true but I'll definitely look into that for my next pair.

I can't find my receipt so I don't know my exact prescription but I know it's single vision and I'm near sighted.

I'm not sure if I'd consider my prescription light, but I was eligible for the super thin lenses if that says anything.

<comment><USER18> On the other hand, it's just a piece of plastic machined in an automated process. Exactly the type of thing that has become nearly free in the modern age.

<comment><AUTHOR> _> become nearly free in the modern age_

.. and/or insanely profitable if you can vertically consolidate the supply chain and exclude/delay competitors from your closed ecosystem, e.g. Apple and Luxottica.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Similar to buying eyeglasses online is buying lenses online. If you like nerding out on materials and optics, this can be kind've interesting.

First, get familiar with your lens choices.

      Drivers
      Readers

      Single Vision
      Progressives
      Bifocals

      Clear
      Tinted
      Transitions

      Materials
        Trivex (I'm a big fan of Trivex).
        Polycarbonate
        Your prescription must fit in the material's range

[http://www.eyeglasslensdirect.com/](http://www.eyeglasslensdirect.com/)

I have Trivex single vision readers and tinted Trivex single vision drivers. I'm near sighted and I told my optometrist to give me a reader prescription set for laptop distance. I've also settled on a frame, Flexon 623.

I imagine I could spend a ton on personalized prescriptions but my normal prescription is insanely good. I'm lucky. Personalized prescriptions (free form, ...) are great for people with difficult prescriptions but unnecessary for the common case.

<comment><AUTHOR> Trivex is great and 1.60 is a close second in trade-off between optical quality, thinness and impact resistance. For lenses stronger than -5 diopters, a smaller frame eye width (< 45mm) will minimize lens edge thickness, [http://www.youngeroptics.com/pdf/trilogy/Trilogy_Monograph.p...](http://www.youngeroptics.com/pdf/trilogy/Trilogy_Monograph.pdf)

Zenni (China lab) has Trivex lenses for $20/pair.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I dont buy the theory that Optometery is such an expensive profession. Opticians here in the UK do well (definitely in the richer cohort of society) and you can get two pairs of glasses for under £100. In fact some of the bigger chains offer free tests and two pairs for £69.

None of this is NHS subsidised as far as I know (you can get free glasses on the NHS but it only applies to children and adults with certain medical conditions or low income).

</comment><comment><USER21> I find buying glasses online less convenient than going to the brick and mortar shop. I need to see an optometrist anyways so while I am there I can try on glasses I like and buy everything on the spot.

I buy glasses once every 3 years to update prescription. The extra cost therefore is approximately 50 bucks a year (assuming I pay 300 at shop versus 50 online).

If I need an extra pair (which I have not needed) then I can consider buying online.

</comment><comment><USER22> Personally I like buying my glasses in real life from higher end stores because the stores offered me years of free repairs and adjustments on-demand, and even given discounts on recurring appointments and purchases.

I used to only buy glasses from wal-mart or other cheap alternatives and went through 2-3 pairs a year (I am clumsy and my lenses are thick, a tough combination for durability). Customer service aside, I found the larger pricetag has had a huge psychological impact on me not being negligent to the item... funny how that changes if i perceive something as 'disposable'. I'm not proud of that fact, or of the prices I've paid in the last 8 years; but I've only had two pairs of glasses in that time -- a huge improvement from when I was a child/teen. In fact, the last pair I owned are still intact but I simply wanted a new design.

I will probably give online glasses shopping another time when this current pair is exhausted. Which could be a while, and i anticipate huge advancement in visualization capability by then!

<comment><USER23> Costco has cheapness and customer service.

<comment><USER22> I've never been to Costco. I didn't realize they had eyewear. I'll make sure to remember that when/if I revisit membership consideration(usually the cost of membership isn't worth it for me as a single person with no kids or family to support).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't wear glasses but I can recommend this store [https://www.aliexpress.com/store/201163](https://www.aliexpress.com/store/201163)

Have ordered a few pairs for family and they are all happy with them. I didn't tell them how cheap they were though.

<comment><USER25> > I didn't tell them how cheap they were though.

They know. If they were to charge more another Chinese competitor would step in, and customers would be less likely to give them a try because of the risk that is part of the AliExpress experience. It's just how the AliExpress economy works.

<comment><USER26> He means didn't tell the family and friends that they were cheap, not the shop. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I don't know if there are options on this but when I bought a couple of $99 pairs from Warby Parker, the frames were fine but the lenses were of substantially lower quality. I'm talking about how only the middle area of the lens is clear, whereas what seems like 70% of the remaining area is suboptimal.

<comment><AUTHOR> High minus sphere or non-zero cylinder? Polycarbonate lens?

<comment><USER27> Are those options for Warby Parker? Or do you mean are those options I purchased for my optometrist-bought lenses? I probably spent $200 on lenses alone so no doubt they're better than what Warby Parker provides. It's just that WP doesn't seem to have other options besides standard and progressive. And the standard WB lenses give me a headache after awhile so the price savings is marginal for me.

FWIW I'm also super nearsighted so I might be an edge case

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have a strong prescription (first number = sphere, second number = cylinder), then all lenses (except expensive freeform lenses) will be distorted away from the optical center, see slide #21 onwards: [http://idaho.aoa.org/Documents/ID/CongressPara2013/Customize...](http://idaho.aoa.org/Documents/ID/CongressPara2013/Customized- single-vision-ABO.pdf)

If the WP lenses give you a headache, most likely the PD or fitting height (vertical location of optical center) is wrong, so you are looking through the distorted part of the lens. Even a few mm offset can cause this. Have you tried moving the frames up/down and side-to-side to see if the vision gets clearer when looking at distant text? Do this with each eye separately, then both eyes together.

Take the WP frame to a local optican and pay them a few bucks to tell you (a) the actual fitting height on the WP lens, (b) the correct fitting height (pupil location) for that frame on your face. Then email WP and ask them to remake the glasses with the correct fitting height. If they won't do that, try EyeBuyDirect, who will.

<comment><USER27> Yeah I'm sure the WP frames have lost a bit of their fit, even if I had fitted them properly to begin with. I guess my main complaint was that my traditional (again, admittedly more expensive) pair has much less distortion from the center. In fact, I hardly see any from when the glasses are offset to any reasonable degree. The WP lenses have noticeable distortion in a much larger area.

I think the value tradeoff — $95 vs $300+ - is probably right. To be sure, I like the WP service, just wished there were ways to get better quality lenses even if it meant $100 more, though that would probably dilute the service for its core user base

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting that there's such a big difference. Do you know the make/model/material of your traditional lens, and whether they were freeform? If so, $200 is a good price. If not, would be good to know which non-digital lenses have low distortion with high prescriptions.

One of the highest quality (freeform) single vision lenses is Zeiss Individual. Costs about $300 online and $500+ offline, without frames. Very beneficial to high prescriptions.

I've not used Warby Parker so can't comment on their distortion level for high prescriptions. Did compare 39dollarglasses and Eyebuydirect, there was much more distortion with 39DG. Both provide 100% refund, no questions asked.

Essilor Eyezen lenses are digtially surfaced (low distortion), but have a small plus segment at the bottom of the lens, like a mini-progressive. They are available from EyeBuyDirect for about $100.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Aside from the glaringly false assertion that they are the _one_ thing you should buy online, I'm not even sold on the idea that they're an item that you should buy online.

Call me a snob or whatever, but I like two things: high quality and local. Some optometrists in Chicago are among the few remaining locally owned and operated businesses. And there are several here who put an emphasis on selling hand-crafted Japanese frames. As a local business, they're also up for negotiations, so I was able to get some truly great non-Luxottica frames from cool people in my own community for about a 20% premium over a cheaper online alternative.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds like a great local business, care to share the name? In my city, the cheapest lenses from a reputable optician (in Chinatown) are priced 300% more than online, but are ready in a few days vs few weeks for online.

Some independent boutiques are priced for a high-end market segment who don't have insurance that mandates Luxottica frames or specific lenses. Such independents don't compete with Costco, Walmart, Lenscrafters or online pricing.

<comment><USER28> These were both good options near me. To your point, I know that you cannot walk out of any of these boutiques for anything less than $150 a frame, but they also try to only sell the hand made german/japanese frames, which cost a lot everywhere, as you might imagine.

[http://www.labrabbit.com/](http://www.labrabbit.com/)

[http://dvoptical.com/](http://dvoptical.com/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 100%. Eyewear is one of the biggest rackets on Earth next to furniture, clothing and (most) luxury autos. Build a frame for $2, slap a Gucci logo on it, sell it through eye centers _that you own_ for $700, then sell an "insurance plan" _that you own_ to "reduce" that price to $450 or so.

Meanwhile, that same pair can be had on Amazon for $160 or for $60 (with lenses!) for a similarly-constructed set of frames on Zenni or Coastal.

I've been advocating HARD for people to ditch their optos and buy glasses through Zenni. People get blown away when I tell them how cheap their glasses are!

Source: family works for a major optical manufacurer

</comment><comment><USER30> It's great that there are now cheap, online options for glasses.

However, I'm getting sick of friends who got their glasses from Warby Parker telling me that I'm a fool for buying frames from Luxottica-owned Oliver Peoples.

Some of us are willing to pay the extra money for "just a piece of plastic with a name slapped on" because we can tell the difference - it _is_ possible for designer frames to be subtly more attractive or constructed a bit better.

But again, that said, if you don't care or can't afford it, the cheaper options are great, and I wish they had been available when I was younger.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oliver Peoples, like Oakley and Ray-Ban, was a Luxottica acquisition that was once independently successful, so it's more than a clothing fashion label attached to a generic frame. However, like many big company acquisitions, the best and brightest talent leave to start a new company and the parent company has its own approach to supply chain management.

 _Barton Perreira_ and _Salt Optics_ are independent lines from California, with some roots in Oliver Peoples.

Prodesign is an independent line from Denmark. A few of their models have features like screwless hinges and flexible frames that cost two to three times more from designers like Mykita. Modo from NYC is also a solid mid-range independent line, frames made in Japan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Weird. That's one of the products I'd rather buy from a proper optician.

Hell I bought my non-prescription shades from an optician. Not interested in name brands but I do like a solid product

</comment><comment><USER32> I've bought reading glasses (the only ones I need) from the 99-cent store for years now. There's some QC variation, so I always test each pair on some reading material before buying.

Certainly custom-fitted glasses _can_ be excellent, but I've had less trouble with the dollar store glasses, all in all, than with my former $300 custom- fitted ones. And I don't worry if they're misplaced, since I always have several spares cached around the apartment.

</comment><comment><USER33> I've had some bad experiences with Eye Buy Direct.

But the thing that really scared me was that after a few months of wearing their glasses, my vision would start to go blurry for a few seconds at a time, and I would feel intense tingling in my eyes.

My eye doctor told me that the glasses were putting excess strain on my eyes, and I was glad I did not have any diseases.

At least for my prescription, I do need a more exact fitting.

<comment><AUTHOR> Many eye doctors (not opticians!) will be glad to verify the accuracy of your glasses. For first time online purchases, ask your doctor to verify, tell you exactly what (if anything) is not correct, then request a free re-make with the correct fitting parameters.

If you have access to a skilled, craftsman local optician and can financially afford to support them with local purchases, please do so. Such opticians are rare and valuable, if only to have a reference point when comparing cheaper providers. Consumers will benefit by rejecting low-quality glasses both offline and online. We need quantitative quality tests for new glasses, regardless of origin, instead of waiting weeks or months to check for possible side effects.

If you are rolling the dice at a chain store, learn how to do your own fitting. It takes a few hours and will serve you for a lifetime of glasses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> I buy mine from Warby Parker. I don't get rock-bottom prices, but the frames I got were good quality, their in-store experience is great, and they've good customer service.

Plus, I can try before I buy...which I value a lot (I don't want to guess at how glasses fit/look)

</comment><comment><USER35> Last time I priced out Eyeglasses from Zenni, Warby Parker etc, they came out to be within a percent or so of Costco. It took a bit to figure out all the measurements so I was comparing like for like (thickness of lense, etc), and I do have a strong prescription so YMMV.

</comment><comment> mark-r My last few eyeglasses have come from Walmart. They know how to avoid the monopolist's prices, ironically. I got a pair of their cheapest frames, which were the ones I would have wanted anyway, with basic plastic lenses and no coatings. Total price I believe was $30.

</comment><comment><USER36> Any issues with the optical center position, or pupillary distance, when ordering online?

I had a new pair of glasses (for distance), and was struggling to focus quickly (vs old glasses). The issue was the optical center, which was 3mm too high. Wearing them lower was the short-term fix.

<comment><AUTHOR> If you know how to measure the vertical offset (fitting height / segment height) of the optical center from the bottom of the lens edge, or can get someone to measure that for you, EyeBuyDirect (and probably other sites that have remake policies) will exchange a new pair with your custom height. You need the first pair to try on frame and do the measurement. For subsequent orders of the same frame, you can specify fitting height in "Special Instructions" for your prescription.

If self-measuring with a mirror, ensure the temples and nose pads have been fully adjusted _before_ taking the pupil location measurement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> quote from the article: "Even using precise measurements, which we'll get to in a second, your new virtually-bought glasses can turn out to be uncomfortably tight, annoyingly loose or simply ill-fitting, regardless of the stated measurements"

Which was my experience. Apparently I have an extra wide head, so even the widest frames didn't fit right. Since I only need the glasses for seeing details, it is not that big of a problem, but I spent a lot of time measuring my head and eyes to get a bad result.

Maybe Apple will build a 3D head modeling software into the IphoneX and revolutionize glasses! a new app idea!

In the meantime, I just increased font size on my monitor!

<comment><AUTHOR> The best way to determine fit is with a physical frame as a starting point. Even 1mm can make a difference. If you don't want to visit a local store to try on frames, you can buy cheap (non-stylish) frames on eBay for less than $10. Once you find a few frames that fit, use those _frame measurements_ as search criteria. Frame eye width + bridge width should be ~= PD, otherwise lens will not be centered and one lens edge will be thicker than the other.

Warby Parker has physical stores where you can try on frames and they are happy for you to purchase from them online. They have an app that uses the iPhone X to measure your head, but Apple limits the camera depth resolution, so it's not much more useful than sending a photo to a good optician.

When you said the widest frames "did not fit right" and you got "a bad result", what exactly do you mean: poor vision from the glasses, slid down your nose, temples too tight/short/long, did not look good? With the current trend in oversized glasses, there are more wide frames available than narrow ones. Online frame sizes can be confusing because of "base curves", so two frames that say 55-20-140 can have different widths. EyeBuyDirect and Zenni (and likely others) provide actual frame widths, although these are sometimes off by a few mm. Frames with nose pads are easier to adjust.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > No matter how fashionable – or not – we consider ourselves, we all try to > avoid wearing the same outfit every day.

It's not so frequent that an article loses me at the first sentence.

</comment><comment><USER39> I bought some at eyebuydirect, not high in quality, but pretty cheap. Especially for sunglasses for the beach, etc.

</comment><comment><USER40> > _No matter how fashionable – or not – we consider ourselves, we all try to > avoid wearing the same outfit every day. We regularly change our shirts, our > pants, our suits, our jackets, our shoes, our hats, even our belts._

What an introduction!?! Is this true?

I wear the exact same outfit every day. I own one belt, one coat, and zero hat. I have a small selection of shoes but they all serve a different purpose. It would be extremely difficult for me to wear a different outfit every month, let alone _every day_.

<comment><USER41> Yes, most people deliberately avoid wearing the same outfit twice in a short period of time. Motivation may very, my reasoning is I don't want people to think I don't do laundry often

<comment><USER42> But it's the opposite. Since I have just a couple sets of outfits, I have to do laundry often. If I'd have shitload of clothes, I might get away with doing laundry once a month.</comment></comment></comment>


Europe's Famed Bog Bodies Are Starting to Reveal Their Secrets - <AUTHOR> http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/europe-bog-bodies-reveal-secrets-180962770/?no-ist <comment><USER2> Neat video of Clark photographing them for Nat. Geographic. He slowly and interactively builds the lighting scheme as he goes along. [https://youtu.be/vCxJ8-Rpv4o?t=350](https://youtu.be/vCxJ8-Rpv4o?t=350)</comment>


Google seeks to limit 'right to be forgotten' by claiming it's journalistic - <AUTHOR> https://www.cjr.org/innovations/google-journalistic-right-to-be-forgotten-by-claiming-its-journalistic.php <comment><USER2> Seems pretty journalistic to me. This "right to be forgotten" seems incredibly dangerous to me. Should we give Trump the right for his bankruptcies to be forgotten? Do we give child molesters the right for their crimes to be forgotten? Why should people have the right to have things they don't like wiped from the historical record?

EDIT: I should point out, I do understand the other side. People shouldn't be punished forever for a crime they've already paid their ostensible debt for. However, I think this is a pretty nuanced issue, and a universal 'right to be forgotten' or a blanket "everything about everyone is accessible forever" is probably not the right solution.

<comment><USER3> _Should we give Trump the right for his bankruptcies to be forgotten?_

Removed from google != removed from public record. If google has become our only source of information we are pretty much screwed. If Trump were to have his bankruptcies "forgotten" by google then journalists would still report when relevant since he is a celebrity/(sigh)politician, and any entities considering doing business with him or anyone should be doing proper due diligence.

Google CANNOT become our only source of truth.

Edit: grammar.

Edit 2: My point is about the perception of Google as the only relevance source of information for society. Not a value judgement on the concept of a "right to be forgotten" from any source or surfacer of information.

<comment><USER4> Google cannot become our _only_ source of truth, but should we eliminate it as _a_ source of truth?

What about other search engines? Social media shares? What happens when a journalist publishes an article based on offline investigation, does the right to be forgotten still apply? Search engines need to fight libelous SEO attacks, but this is a deeply unsettling over-reaction.

Let's drop the Orwellian phrasing and call it what it is: "Right to hide the past". Forget the truth, security through obscurity.

Knowledge is power, and search engines are the map.

edit:

And hopefully it's obvious the issue of search results is separate from consumer data mining/ad profiling.

<comment><USER5> The right to be forgotten is meant to protect individuals' privacy. You sound as if you believe that a world in which all knowledge was public forever would be a better world. I disagree with this and think that we have to weigh it with individual privacy and safety. Not to mention the fact that these search engines are not 100% accurate, so it would be beneficial at least to allow people to remove inaccurate sources.

Embarrassing / reputation-affecting knowledge being available to the public forever is not the same as truth being available. Especially now that we see how engines like Youtube go out of their way to offer extreme and provocative information, we should not leave it to search engines to be unregulated sources of information about individuals. Search engines will not tell your employers that you work diligently everyday but they will show an offensive tweet of yours from 2007 if that's what gets clicks and reactions.

<comment><USER4> Address the problem, not the symptoms. The problem is at the platform level, so regulate platforms like Facebook. Search engines simply search what they scrape.

* If someone feels consequences of an offensive 2007 tweet, just delete it. Platforms should be required to make it easy to delete content.

* If someone is scared of saying controversial things, avoid platforms that require real identities. There are plenty of anonymous platforms.

* Uphold social media to the same standards of traditional media, requiring truth and propagation of redactions and corrections. Libel and slander are well-established concepts.

* Demand discretion from friends. In college, my group had a strict "no-camera" rule when it came to embarrassing or unlawful shenanigans. My parent's generation had the same rule.

Hiding search results does _not_ address the problem. If someone posts a photoshop of "Eric driving drunk" on Twitter, I want that post promptly removed... the search results are just a symptom.

<comment><USER6> So someone posted a real photo of 'Eric driving drunk' to the web. Eric did not approve of that in any way and wants it gone. The someone could not care less. What is the solution in your model?

<comment><USER7> Search engines only show what's posted by other people, so while they're a convenient target, they aren't the actual bad actor.

Our legal system tends to attack actual bad actors, not convenient targets. Unless the Internet is involved. The way RTBF and DMCA work, search engines bear 100% of the cost, and people don't ever go after the actual bad actors.

By the way, in the US, if Tabloid X publishes Eric's photo, that's 100% legal thanks to the First Amendment, as long as the _photographer_ agrees. Eric has no part. Attacking search engines on behalf of Eric, in the US, not so cool. Europe doesn't have free speech, so, no problem.

<comment><USER8> > Europe doesn't have free speech, so, no problem.

Europe definitely has free speech (all the countries I know of anyway, Europe has a lot of different countries). There is just a different definition of what exactly is free speech and what is something else (some racist things are not considered free speech).

<comment><USER7> RTBF is Europe-wide, you have courts that make precedents like that which are Europe-wide even though Europe has a lot of different countries.

And sure, I'm sure you'd call what you have free speech. But that's not the way the US defines it.

<comment><USER8> > RTBF is Europe-wide

Nope it's not, it's an EU law and EU !== Europe. Europe has 51 countries while the EU only has 28. Just like Mexico is not in the US, a ton of European countries are not in the EU.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I see a lot of people claim that this is just about having information at the top of a search result, and I agree that's better than outright censorship.

But, I still take some small amount of umbrage with people claiming that nothing is being erased, just people's ability to find it. I think that's a very blurry line to draw - the idea the it's OK for information to exist somewhere in the void, but making it _too easy to access_ is not OK.

The intent behind rules like this is to make it much harder for people to access information. If Google isn't the Internet, and delisting won't suppress speech, then what value is the law? If Google is the Internet, and delisting from their site will hide information from the public, then how is this not censorship?

There's no point in getting myself delisted from Google unless I expect that this will prevent most people from being able to find my information. People search names on Google because they _want_ that information. The only way I can see for GDPR to stay effective or valuable in hiding me from those people is if it becomes a blanket ban on indexing or curation in general.

<comment><USER10> I agree with this. I am surprised that rather than trying to define itself as journalistic, Google isn't trying to present itself as an archivist (I am unaware if this has any legal meaning).

I wonder what would happen if an explicitly archival service like the Wayback Machine got itself a state of the art search algorithm and became widely used in casual search. Would it also be required to delist?

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I see here a few comments criticizing the right to be forgotten, but I pose a question a bit differently.

Let us assume somebody commits a crime. He goes to jail, he pays for it, as society deems necessary.

A local newspaper reported it and now every time you google their name such an article pops up. This makes every person they might do business with to withdraw.

It seems to me the debt to society has been paid by going to jail, and yet they keep paying by having the news of their mistake be very prominent.

What is the right course of action, in this case?

Note that the difference between traditional newspapers is their general availability. Now the entire history is just a few clicks away, whereas with paper you need to go look for it specifically to find it, so it's a LOT less damaging.

What does HN think about this?

<comment><USER12> It sounds like the actual problem is

>This makes every person they might do business with to withdraw.

Hiding information from people sounds like a bandaid to the issue of people being overly judgemental. Maybe we need to be more accepting to rehabilitation.

<comment><USER13> Maybe instead of relying on humans to suddently act differently than they ever have in thousands of years, we could just remove the stupid link.

I mean, listen to yourself. Rather than an easy, technical solution, for a very limited and well defined problem, you're proposing we instead just wait until the billions upon billions of people on earth suddenly wise up, hit nirvana, sing Kum ba yah, and _be less judgemental_? So that, what, a giant, wealthy corporation isn't mildly bothered?

<comment><USER14> But there is no law that is crafted for this "very limited and well defined problem". "Right to be forgotten" goes much further than that. I can tentatively agree that for your proposed situation, it's unfair enough to former felons that it may require government intervention. Unfortunately, there's just no legislation that is focused and limited in scope in this regard; instead, the move is to broader, looser and vaguer laws like the GDPR.

If we have to consider the reality of the situation for felons, we must also face the reality that they don't really seem to be the _end_ goal, but just a story to placate worries about overregulation and censorship.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The bbc publishes a monthly list of urls removed by google. It is pretty instructive: [http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/83c19e58-e131-47...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/internet/entries/83c19e58-e131-47c9-ae7f-82d914974940)

</comment><comment><USER16> > 'right to be forgotten'

I really think that hiding facts is a mistake. Yes someone made a bad mistake why is it their right to have it removed from the internet? Now if there are factually wrong then absolutely they should have the ability to have it removed.

Things can legally be removed from a person's record like crimes committed by minors but if someone's life was impacted are we going to remove the victims' story for the sake of the offenders?

Imagine going to the library to read the old news papers and have excerpts redacted and cut out. To me that is what people are trying to do.

This is changing our history like the horrible biographies of the 19th and early 20th century where the hero of the biography was perfect and a superhero due to moral perfectionism, but now it is seeked after by individual's regardless to their poor choices and actions.

<comment><USER11> A search engine != the internet.

It should not be removed from the internet, but it should be removed from google. It's not the same thing as dealing with paper newspaper. One you have to go an explicitly look for the information and browse through them to get it (and still it can escape your gaze). With google you just need to type name and surname, and everything is at your fingertips.

<comment><USER17> But how is it ok or reasonable to say "you are allowed to see this, but we're going to make laws to make it arbitrarily hard to do".

Either it's removing public information (censorship), or it's this bizarre stop-gap to allow people to conceal information while pretending they aren't deleting it. There's not reasonable or principled system here. Just a dangerous stop-gap measure where it seems like people are trying to delete (censor) information under the guise of individual freedom ("we're just making it harder").

I don't really buy into the middle-ground presented by this measure.

<comment><USER18> Agreed. Further along those lines, how does one reconcile the fact that Google still powers search for a number of other entities (including some libraries, academic institutions, etc)?

The "right to be forgotten", in that case, becomes the "right to erase history."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In a similar case, Russia's Evgeny Prigozhin kept suing Russian newspapers to try to remove articles from the Internet about his corruption of the Russian state.

[https://meduza.io/en/feature/2016/06/13/evgeny-prigozhin- s-r...](https://meduza.io/en/feature/2016/06/13/evgeny-prigozhin-s-right-to- be-forgotten)

</comment><comment><USER12> "Right to be forgotten" just sounds so ridiculous to me, how did this become a thing? Are people going to want to burn the history books at their local library next because it contains some information they don't like reminding people of?

<comment><USER20> > Are people going to want to burn the history books at their local library > next because it contains some information they don't like reminding people > of?

Nope, they want to burn the card catalog. Still wrong of course, but many people think that because people can't be trusted to act reasonably on historical, factual information they see about someone, they should legislate instead. Laws become the answer to everyone's problems, education or accepting the bad with the good in an age of transparency are just not options sadly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Okay this quote at the top of the article irked me.

> Google has argued that it should be protected under an exception for > journalism because it provides access to journalistic content. Even as a > legal sleight of hand, the argument is quite a departure from Google's > customary efforts to present itself as a disinterested arbiter of > information, a position that has become more untenable with time

Google was _forced_ to become an arbiter of information by the very law in question. The EU could have set up a court system where you would sue the government and lawyer would argue against you why the information was in fact in the public interest and a judge would then decide the case. They didn't do this probally because it would be a expensive and leave the government getting blamed when decisions are inevitably wrong/unpopular. Instead they forced Google to do this in a shout of confidence that Google would act in the public interest and not simply in the interest of resolving cases as quickly as cheaply as possible. It is easy to imagine a alternative world with a diffrent dominiat search engine that would allow information like corruption, histories of abuse and neglect to be hidden from the public.

</comment><comment><USER22> These "right to be forgotten" laws are already being abused:

* German murderers sue for Wikipedia to remove their names from the page about their victim. [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html?_r=0](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/us/13wiki.html?_r=0)

* Russian oligarch sues Google and Yandex for linking to investigation about investigations of him and his businesses. [https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/putins-personal-chef-sue...](https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/putins-personal-chef-sues-yandex-and-google-over-search-result-links-53105)

* A doctor sues to remove negative patient reviews. [https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/10833894/Polit...](https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/google/10833894/Politician-paedophile-and-GP-claim-right-to-be-forgotten.html)

These laws will tip the balance of information away from the people and towards the wealthy who will have the means to conduct extensive background checks/research.

<comment><USER23> The first one has little to do with the now implemented "right to be forgotten". It's claims were based on long existing german personality law and was actually struck down by the highest german court BGH in 2012 in favor of freedom of information.

[http://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/kriminalitaet/klage-...](http://www.faz.net/aktuell/gesellschaft/kriminalitaet/klage- wegen-namensnennung-sedlmayr-moerder-scheitert-vor-dem- bundesgerichtshof-11744093.html)

[https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/BGH-weist-Klage- von-...](https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/BGH-weist-Klage-von-Sedlmayr- Moerder-gegen-Internet-Artikel-ab-1570800.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I think part of the solution here is going to need to be social. We need to move beyond the Gawker-like era where if there's an awkward photo of you out there suddenly there's perpetual mass shaming about it. As we grow to know more info about each other we need an increase in societal maturity.

<comment><USER25> We need a "right to be forgiven" instead that would be a social thing, not something a corporation or the government can control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am usually a advocate for privacy and right to be forgotten but in this case I am with Google. The criminals can easily erase their conviction and start 'scamming' victims again. Remember a time when I was looking for apartment and I Googled the name of the owner only to find news articles about how he had built 2 apartments inside one, even though they had no fire escape.

<comment><USER27> Criminals can not erase their conviction. At best they will be able to wipe out your ability to find out about that conviction. If you want to know stuff like that you'll have to do a background check and not everybody gets to do background checks on everybody else for no particular reason. And that's a good thing.

<comment><USER28> According to what gressquel posted, they _were_ doing a background check for a particular reason. If you meant "if you want to know stuff like that you'll have to do a background check _that costs money_ ," then the "no particular reason" threshold for running a check depends strongly on the checker's financial resources.

Whatever balance between right to privacy and right to knowledge is struck, it should have uniform effects. The law shouldn't make it harder for a potential tenant to check the background of an apartment complex owner than for the owner to check the background of a potential tenant, even though in most cases the owner will have more money.

<comment><USER27> A google search is not a background check.

<comment><USER21> Obviously not, the point is if you are poor and want to know if someone has a history of scamming people do you want to not eat this week and be a formal background check, or run a quick google search and not worry about where to find food. They are diffrent products but they are used for the same purpose many times.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> When I was a child, I committed a crime.

They waited until just after my 18th birthday to charge me, and according to UK law that means that my name etc. could be published. Most of the articles get the details subtly wrong, and insinuate that I did much worse than what actually occurred.

I believe, if I wanted to, I could exercise my right to be forgotten. But what's the point? Google is not the only search engine out there, and there is absolutely no way I could get _every_ search engine to comply. Anyone who really wants to dig up my past would still be able to.

Despite the fact that, in theory, the right to be forgotten would benefit me greatly, I think it needs to go. It's a complete waste of resources because it can never be effectively enforced.

Ultimately, I've come to terms with the fact that my history isn't too much of a bad thing. If someone doesn't want to do business with me because of it, then I've just filtered out someone with superficial prejudices.

<comment><USER30> Most people would agree that what you do as a child shouldn't be held against you as an adult, provided you've learned from your mistake. I'd say that what happened to you is a perversion of justice.

You've paired your sense of helplessness with a need for divine perfection to reason away the purpose behind the right to be forgotten.

There are people who have been faced with injustice, who haven't succumbed to letting it affect them forever. There are people who have paid their debt to society and shouldn't have that perpetually held against them.

> Despite the fact that, in theory, the right to be forgotten would benefit me > greatly, I think it needs to go. It's a complete waste of resources because > it can never be effectively enforced.

There is no law that is completely, effectively enforced. Laws against murder aren't effectively enforced, murder still happens all of the time. However, laws allow public action to be taken and give recourse to victims.

> no way I could get every search engine to comply

There are a handful of search engines people use. If Google alone complied, that would probably eliminate 90% of anyone who would ever search for you online.

> Ultimately, I've come to terms with the fact that my history isn't too much > of a bad thing. If someone doesn't want to do business with me because of > it, then I've just filtered out someone with superficial prejudices.

In a way, you have the privilege of being able to filter out opportunities. A few words in someone's history can effectively bar them from being hired or finding a place to live, leaving them with little to no opportunity. About a week ago, there was a post by an HN member about such a situation [1].

In the end, bills need to be paid and people need to eat. If someone has dependents, like the guy above [1], they will suffer.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16708224](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16708224)

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I think Google should consider how human-error prône we are and how society suffers because of it. Everyone is slowly becoming dehumanized towards others by errors and I've witnessed first hand how errors of others will ruin a person; if they're not clever enough to conquer the situation. Google should put more resources into improving Human Resources and Law before getting all uptight about removing what could be an error for a person but is impossible to prove; with the lacking resources of today. Most cases are hearsay of others and where a minoriy suffering by errors of the majority; the minority has no real evidence to work it out. A person will likely crumble in bad situations, unless educated in law and defense.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd rather live in a society that is capable of forgetting, accepting that people can change and thus don't condemn others for their past. If we eliminate skeletons in our wardrobes, any little speckle on one's past will be devastating.

</comment><comment><USER33> In the early days of Google they had a press conference. I don't recall the specifics- probably about when they announced having indexed 1B pages on the web. There was concern about privacy. To make a point, a reporter started reading some of the personal things she had learned about said Google CEO(s) from their search engine.

Those pages (sorry) were not available in Google the following day.

So, yeah. They know how important it is personally. First hand.

</comment><comment><USER34> I don't really have an opinion on the 'right to be forgotten' here, but it surprises me to say the least, how everything is justified by being 'journalistic', as if there's something intrinsically good about that. As if there are ordinary people, who, of course, must behave appropriately, respect privacy and others' feelings — and are actually legally enforced to do so. And then there are 'journalists', who can do whatever they want, harass anybody, and it's all good and well and the 'freedom of speech' — not they only can do so, but it's actually moral. Spy on everyone, spread lies and disinformation, take your photos without your consent, tell everyone your secrets, wash your dirty clothes of 20 years old on public — even if these dirty clothes are not actually your fault and haunt all your life you as it is. Just… come on.

</comment><comment><USER35> Europe wrote the law in such a way that Google effectively has to act like a court, even though that's obviously problematic, and it has no interest in doing so.

Sure, this seems a bit dubious, but they weren't exactly given a lot of guidance for handle these requests. I suspect they'd actually appreciate court rulings clarifying things.

</comment><comment><USER36> Journalistic? Like an "editor of content"? That's something that will backfire.

There is no escaping that google is the author and editor of an algorithm and that it chooses to remove things from the index for a variety of reasons, so I don't think it's unfair to have laws that try to regulate the list of exclusion.

</comment><comment><USER37> So this is a right for Google to not show unflattering results but not about a publishers right to publish unfavorable content?

Is this not blaming the card catalog for the content of a book?

If the information is true, than how can we argue it should be hidden? If it is false, then that's a libel case against the publisher of the false information — not the indexer.

If someone wants to be forgotten, they should be addressing the publisher, not the indexer.

The precedent of removing factual information from discovery is a dangerous one. It would seem like existing libel laws ought to cover cases where false information persists. Should a newspaper delete old content just because "people change?" That's just crazy.

</comment><comment><USER20> I look forward to the day when data can be distributed and become signed/immutable but still indexed. At least then we'll be forced to deal with educating people on how to react to information instead of restricting/de- indexing it. For some it will be unfortunate that they can't put blinders on people like they could back when humans curated content retroactively, and for others it can give them comfort that those in power lose that same ability (especially wrt themselves) compared to those not in power.

</comment><comment><USER38> The "right to be forgotten" is always going to be fraught. We are talking of a balance between competing rights of freedom of speech and privacy, and usually such finely balanced decisions are what the judicial system is for.

But large platforms like Google and Facebook have become like "countries" in themselves. People are earning their livelihoods, finding their friends and loved ones, even committing crimes using these platforms. I think these companies are being forced to build due process procedures so people have recourse, not just for right to be forgotten, but also for other cases. And this is being compounded by the use of AI algorithms which work in mysterious ways even to their creators - an impersonal algorithm making decisions which may destroy someone's life, or make someone a millionaire.

I wonder for example if the recent youtube attack could have been avoided if the shooter had an independent forum where she could ask for explanation and perhaps challenge the change in the ads policy which hurt her livelihood. Nothing justifies violence, but we can learn lessons for the future.

We normally do not ask corporations to do such things, but for these mega- internet giants maybe the normal rules are not enough. Perhaps as a start, these companies should setup an ombudsman who can be approached when normal corporate avenues fail.

</comment><comment><USER39> It seems strange to me that a New York based journalism institution didn't use the plaintiffs real names. On what basis do you suppose they decided to honor EU/English law?

<comment><USER40> On the basis that the information simply isn't available, it doesn't appear in any court publications. eg a recent UK Supreme Court case was: 'R (on the application of HC) (Appellant) v Secretary of State for Work and Pensions and others (Respondents)'

HC here has her name witheld (R is 'Regina', ie the Crown). Exactly the same thing happens in the US; eg in Roe v Wade, 'Roe' (a Jane Doe plaintiff) didn't have her identity revealed until she herself told the press who she was afterwards; the papers still use the pseudonym to describe it.

If the identity is known by other means the US press has been known to publish - eg in [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PJS_v_News_Group_Newspapers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PJS_v_News_Group_Newspapers), it was a celebrity case and the story had been shopped round various papers, with the result that US tabloids got the story and knew it would sell copies. In this case there's no likely source for a leak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I find it strange that the beef is with Google and not with the sites Google points at. Even if Google removes these search results, the articles are out there, probably linked from some other articles on the same newspaper's site, etc. This belief that removing from Google somehow makes it go away is odd.

<comment><USER42> Google index means life or death for many companies. If you can not be found on Google you basically don't exist.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> > _England's Information Commissioner dismissed Google's argument and said > that journalism presupposes a process that includes human editorial > decision-making, something that Google's very algorithmic service does not > do._

A side issue (not relevant to the mentioned court case, which deals with long- ago crime convictions): Google News incorporates some human editorial decision-making -- the whitelisting of domains. At some point courts will have to make more difficult/less binary decisions about what constitutes human editorial decision-making, which in modern times almost always involves a mechanical algorithmic process. I guess we've run into this before when deciding if bloggers enjoyed the same protections as traditional news institutions.

</comment><comment><USER43> > In its defense, Google has argued that it should be protected under an > exception for journalism because it provides access to journalistic content

This is like saying a grocery store should be exempt because it sells newspapers

<comment><USER44> >This is like saying a grocery store should be exempt because it sells newspapers

well, yes. or are you saying a grocery store should have to read every article in every newspaper they sell to ensure it doesn't contain information that legally should be forgotten?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> If the information exists in public domain and especially reported by news agencies then why should this information be deleted. Why should it only apply to Google and not other news agencies? EU should have more claroty on the law and make Google delete it only if it applies to the entire internet.

Right to be forgotten should only apply to information provided by user wanting to be forgotten. For all other cases, we should ask the court to allow it to be forgotten from internet and not just google.

</comment><comment><USER46> I think for Google to be able to claim their search result are journalistic is a little like them having the cake and eating it. They are already claiming they are not responsible for the content they are distributing (because fake news and all...), but they also claim that that content should be protected.

</comment><comment><USER47> It's curious how the company that dedicated itself to "do no evil" to gain traction, has done evil and is seeking limits on this thing, yet in this community still jumps up and down on Microsoft every time it can, yet (agreed given it's past), hasn't shown the same level of social evil GOOG and FB have.

</comment><comment><USER48> Permanence of data in an imperfect world where authority is interested in punishment and oppression is dangerous.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm glad the First Amendment keeps this nonsense from happening in the US.

<comment><USER50> Oh yes [1] how glad we all are. Also the fourth amendment which prevents the Patriot Act from happening. So glad of that one! Also, you may grab a read about the rest of the world. 'Free speech' is basically the norm.

[1] [https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/when-silence- isnt-g...](https://law.yale.edu/mfia/case-disclosed/when-silence-isnt-golden- how-gag-orders-can-evade-first-amendment-protections)

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> Good. The right to be forgotten is bullshit. That's not to say people don't need to learn to be a little more flexible, tolerant, and human about things people have done in the past, but deleting people's pasts is not the answer. Don't judge until you've walked someone's shoes (unless they're in the business of being public, then judge them but the right to be forgotten doesn't apply in remotely the same way in that case), howabout?

</comment><comment><USER52> The right to be forgotten is very strange to me. We all have that right already, it's called oblivion and it's inevitable.

</comment><comment><USER53> In the midst of all this, one concrete action you can take is to give your kids common names that are hard to Google.

</comment><comment><USER54> Disappointing to hear this with the "do no evil" ethos of Google.

Organizing all of the world's information is a great goal, but blurring the boundaries between personal, private information is another thing.

If Google is journalistic:

\- Does Google know the difference between journalism and opinion/editorial content?

\- Can standards of external journalistic integrity be applied to Google?

The majority of content online is OpEd and not subjective.

<comment><USER55> Here's a report from Google with some stats about what was requested and what was removed:

[https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H4MKNwf5MgeztG7OnJRnl3ym3gI...](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1H4MKNwf5MgeztG7OnJRnl3ym3gIT3HUK/view)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> eventually we just need to accept that a much greater depth of history is index searchable and adjust our actions, attitudes & judgments accordingly. Enshrining the old ways in rigid laws and bureaucracy is not going to work.

</comment><comment><USER57> What the fuck. There is nothing journalistic about their compulsive instinct to archive everything (and to spend _a lot_ of money on enabling not just crawling the web, but rather.. pretty much everything.)

This would be like like giving some average reddit.com/datahoarder/ person a right to be forgotten, except that particular person happened have to crawl pretty much the entire world and probably knows enough to get 90% of the global population to get fired, if it wanted to.

</comment><comment><USER58> I also declare myself a journalist. Thus I will keep records on everyone!</comment>


My GPT-3 Blog Got 26 Thousand Visitors in 2 Weeks - <AUTHOR> https://liamp.substack.com/p/my-gpt-3-blog-got-26-thousand-visitors <comment><USER2> Link to the HN thread referenced in the article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23893817)

Pour one out for the bottom comment that actually noticed it was written by GPT-3.</comment>


Go, don't collect my garbage - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/go-dont-collect-my-garbage/ <comment><USER2> If you make something that is performance critical, and in particular if it's concurrent, the normal rule is you avoid allocating on the heap at all. Use object preallocated data (just operate on massive lists), or use pools of data etc.

Any language/runtime will support just allocating a large blob of data and then playing with it with code that looks like C. Effectively once you want to write perf sensitive code in a garbage collectied language you have to _stop_ writing idiomatic code for that language.

That can mean using data orientation (SoA for example is a very non-idiomatic thing to do in most C-like languages and especially OO ones). Not using heap allocation at all for any length of time is definitely non-idiomatic in Java/C#/Python/js etc., but that's what you need to do if you want any kind of performance.

There are two truths here: 1) Any language can be as fast as C and 2) When they are as fast as C, they also look like C regardless what it was to begin with.

<comment><USER3> I came into the comments to say basically what you said here. Trying to avoid GC? Preallocate!

For context, I'm a game developer working in Unity. We do basically all of our dev in C#, which is a language I love. But because it's garbage collected, and you can see performance hits when the GC runs. In VR dev especially (targeting 90 FPS) this is unacceptable.

So we profile, look to see where we're allocating _anything_ onto the heap and figure out a way to cache it or re-implement it in a way that makes no garbage. We recently shipped a mobile VR experience and one of the best parts was being able to profile my gameplay code and seeing the '0B's next to its allocations every frame.

I understand that this may not work for everyone, and I fully believe that CloudFlare's got some talented engineers on the team, but there are ways to think about and structure programs in a C-like fashion so that you're more cognizant of the memory you are allocating and using from the heap.

<comment><USER4> can you even do that? In Java you can't allocate any List like data strucutre (LinkedList, ArrayList, arrays (Maps of course)) on the heap. Escape analysis might do it, but there is no way to force it.

per my knowledge this is not even possible in C#, I mean you can drop to c way easier there or use (stackalloc) (same as Unsafe usages in Java) But I doubt that is not a good idea?

<comment><USER3> So, I'm not sure what the situation is with Java, but I suspect there might be some confusion in what you're reading.

In C#, anything instantiated as part of a class goes onto the heap. Value types that are _declared and used only within the function_ are allocated onto the stack. For example:

      public class Example
      {
          public int a;  // Allocated onto the heap when Example is instanced
          public int b;  // Allocated onto the heap when Example is instanced
          public int c;  // Allocated onto the heap when Example is instanced

          public void CycleValues()
          {
              int temp = a;  // Allocated onto the stack when function is called
              a = b;  // a, b, and c are already allocated
              b = c;
              c = temp;
              // temp goes away when the function finishes executing
          }

          public int SumPositiveValues()
          {
              List<int> positiveList = new List();  // Not a value type: allocates onto the heap
              if (a > 0)
                  valueList.Add(a);
              if (b > 0)
                  valueList.Add(b);
              if (c > 0)
                  valueList.Add(c);

              int sum = 0;  // Allocated onto the stack
              foreach (int i in valueList)
              {
                  sum += i;
              }
              return sum;
              // sum goes away when the function finishes executing
              // positiveList was allocated onto the heap, so it persists (although inaccessible) until garbage collection
          }
      }

In the example above, space on the heap is allocated when you create a new Example(). Calling CycleValues() doesn't allocate anything new onto the heap, so it isn't creating any garbage. Calling SumPositiveValues() creates a new List(), which, not being a value type, is allocated onto the heap. When the function finishes, that memory isn't automatically freed; it creates garbage. Optimising for heap performance relies a lot on removing New calls to classes when it is possible and makes sense to do so.

<comment><USER4> well thats what I meant. Basically I'm not a game dev, but keeping simple values on the stack is most often not a problem. However it's insane how many Lists, Arrays I need and I'm a web developer. So I guess a Game Dev even needs more of these (Inventory, Stats, Chat, whatever)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, but the big key is to keep things instantiated only once (where reasonable). So, if I'm making an RTS, I keep only one list of selected units, and it persists even if I have no units selected. No reallocation or losing the reference means nothing is getting garbage collected.

There are bigger convos to be had about data architecture here, but now's neither time nor place for it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Whenever I see GC, I immediately think of _tradeoffs_. One can optimize a GC algorithm (or GC configuration setting) to work well for one type of workload. Likewise, one can always create a pathological workload for any GC configuration because GC has unavoidable tradeoff between cpu time and memory footprint.

Therefore, I read his article with the intent of placing his findings in the "taxonomy" of GC tradeoffs.

In that vein, I noticed that his benchmarks and graphs do not include measurements for _memory footprint_. Instead, it has _throughput statistics_ such as "ops/sec" or "sign/second".

I think I see why working memory size isn't emphasized. He's testing a crypto algorithm _" ECDSA-P256 Sign"_. I'm not familiar with it but I assume we can think of it as a typical hash function[1] that doesn't require unpredictable dynamic allocation of memory as the algorithm processes the bytes of input. (A typical hash function uses the same fixed amount of memory whether hashing 1 kilobyte or 1 terabyte.)

If his synthetic benchmark to play with GOGC was using a different type of workload... such as a text parser that stressed the GC with thousands of different sized memory objects, we'd see memory footprint as part of the analysis.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signatu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic_Curve_Digital_Signature_Algorithm)

<comment><USER6> It's not just a fixed-length hash, but it does computations on the curve points, which are represented by big.Int's, that take a variable size and are likely to end up on the heap.

Also, Go crypto makes a heavy use of interface that also make stuff escape to the heap. Of such things are a bottleneck, it might be worthwhile to "un- interface" them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This doesn't read like a "GC is slow" problem to me, more like a "GC doesn't cope well in the face of a highly concurrent allocation workload". That's pretty bad though. As soon as you go down the rabbit hole of tweaking knobs to cajole GC into doing what you expect, darkness lies beyond..

<comment><USER8> > _in the face of a highly concurrent allocation workload_

Isn't this "highly concurrent" the main selling point of Go?

<comment><USER9> The original PR line taken by Go team was that langauges like Java "communicate by sharing" whereas in Go you would "share by communicating". It wasn't so much about Green vs Native threading as it was about the _core semantics_ of Goroutines and Channels. This original PR also had annoying (to people such as myself) aspect of poopooing Java in context of concurrency (of all things).

As it happens [lol] facts asserted themselves and (at least some in) Go community saw the reason as to _why_ "communicating by sharing" paradigm ever got traction. _" It's performance, stupid"_, to paraphrase Slick Willy, not because other language designers were thoughtless. So now it is "idiomatic" to see Go code using both paradigms (locking & passing channels). The original matra was quietly dropped along "systems programming PL" bit somewhere along the line.

This OP type of article, in an interesting way, continues this pattern of "let's do it this [obvious] way" in face of dealing with concurrency. No less an authority than Cliff Click has asserted that lock-free type algorithms pretty much _require_ a GC.

Concurrency and memory management seem to be zero-sum games. Root cause is clearly Physics, and not the mechanism devised to deal with the physical realities.

<comment><USER6> Channels pass ownership of allocated objects, they don't perform copies or allocations themselves (once you've allocated the channel and the objects you want to pass).

I don't think the article says anything about concurrent allocations; in fact, the various signers don't need to share anything (mutable) to sign the requests they get.

<comment><USER9> > Channels pass ownership of allocated objects, they don't perform copies or > allocations themselves (once you've allocated the channel and the objects > you want to pass).

And? Did I say they did?

> I don't think the article says anything about concurrent allocations

No it doesn't. Point was that it is not a general purpose approach. GCs are.

<comment><USER6> I've just searched for the word "channel" in the article: zero results.

The "original mantra" is "Channels orchestrate, locks serialize" and hasn't been dropped by anyone.

<comment><USER9> 2010: [https://blog.golang.org/share-memory-by- communicating](https://blog.golang.org/share-memory-by-communicating)

There is nothing wrong with that approach. It does put a ceiling on performance, however.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The Go team were very proud of their garbage collector that "virtually eliminates" (IIRC) GC pauses. I guess it does that at the cost of severe program slowdown in cases like this? It's all about trade-offs, and I don't trust people who think there's only one thing to optimise for.

<comment><USER11> While the Go GC is definitely no slouch when it comes to engineering, the messaging around it has not been entirely forthright: [https://blog.plan99.net/modern-garbage- collection-911ef4f8bd...](https://blog.plan99.net/modern-garbage- collection-911ef4f8bd8e)

<comment><USER12> This blog is more of a rant. Official blog announcements and marketing material are not the place to delve deeply into technical tradeoffs of designing GC. He compares it with Java which is rather ironic considering I have not seen Java official announcements talking about things not done. It would like saying 'We have not been able to deliver value types, module story is still half done, and we couldn't write an official http cient in whole development cycle in Java 9' in release announcement of Java 9.

Also there is no data provided to show how bad is Go's GC compare to Java

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> As anybody who has done high-performance, low-latency Java and had to deal with writing GC-less Java code, this is no surprise at all. In the Java world we at least had ways around it with things like sun.misc.unsafe, avoiding language features that allocate, pooling, etc. While some of those things can be done in Go, I don't know if all the techniques are possible. Without them, I'm not sure Go can really compete in the arena.

<comment><USER14> Exactly right re: Java. You could just use Rust, and get automatic memory management without GC.

<comment><USER15> One does not simply "just use Rust".

<comment><USER11> Here, allow me to help: [https://www.rust-lang.org/en- US/install.html](https://www.rust-lang.org/en-US/install.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This kind of tuning ends up being required for all languages that use garbage collection. The more you use it in production, the more you're doing meta programming with environment variables, command-line options and your allocation profiles. The problem is not so much some performance reduction, it's that the performance reduction is often variable and unexpected, as it is in this blog post.

</comment><comment><USER16> Can anyone explain to me why he got better performance with GC turned on (and optimised) rather than off?

<comment><USER17> Judicious garbage collection reuses memory you have already allocated, and for which there may already be entries in caches, page tables, garbage collector metadata, and whatnot.

If you never garbage collect, the runtime has to repeatedly allocate new memory from the operating system, and all this additional metadata has to be juggled. If allocating new memory is a system call, that has costs. If you get lots of page faults because you keep using new pages, that has costs as well.

<comment><USER18> It sounds like instead of turning off GC, the algorithm was changed to an "automatic" allocation/deallocation scheme that's closer to what you might see with manual memory management in a C like world. I wonder if the Go runtime has any optimizations to turn things into stack/static allocations in that scenario.

<comment><USER17> I'm not a Go expert, but my understanding of the blog was that the algorithm or any other aspect of the code was not changed. Only the garbage collection frequency.

<comment><USER18> My comment was in reply to the parent's:

        > If you never garbage collect, the runtime has to repeatedly allocate new memory from the operating system ...

<comment><USER17> Yeah, that was me. I still don't understand what you're saying. Who is changing what algorithm in what component?

If you tell the Go runtime not to garbage collect but keep allocating memory, that memory has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is the operating system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> FWIW, I think this mostly shows that the GOGC defaults will surprise you when your program keeps a small amount of live data but allocates quickly and is CPU bound. By default, it's trying to keep allocated heap size under 2x live data. If you have a tiny crypto bench program that keeps very little live data around, it won't take many allocations to trigger a GC. So the same code benchmarked here would trigger fewer GCs in the context of a program that had more data live. For example, it would have gone faster if the author had allocated a 100MB []byte in a global variable.

If your program is far from exhausting the RAM but is fully utilizing the CPU, you might want it to save CPU by using more RAM, equivalent to increasing GOGC here. The rub is that it's hard for the runtime ever be sure what the humans want without your input: maybe this specific Go program is a little utility that you'd really like to use no more RAM than must to avoid interference with more important procs. Or maybe it's supposed to be the only large process on the machine, and should use a large chunk of all available RAM. Or it's in between, if there are five or six servers (or instances of a service) sharing a box. You can imagine heuristic controls that override GOGC in corner cases (e.g., assume it's always OK to use 1% of system memory), or even a separate knob for max RAM use you could use in place of GOGC. But the Go folks tend to want to keep things simple, so right now you sometimes have to play with GOGC values to get the behavior you want.

</comment><comment><USER20> If any Cloudflare engineers are here, why is Rust not chosen as main language for such use cases?

<comment><USER21> I like Rust too but it's a newer language and the Cloudflare team has a history of using Go since it's targeted pretty squarely at their kind of work. In the case of doing benchmarks, it's especially unhelpful to make that suggestion since the point of a benchmark is to learn where the limits are rather than an invitation to port everything to a different language to avoid a problem which might remain theoretical forever.

<comment><USER22> I don't think they're trying to suggest using rust, just curious why Cloudflare chose a language with a GC for workloads that apparently do not play well with GC.

"We already used Go" is a totally valid reason. "It's rare (or as you say potentially never an issue) that we actually need to avoid GC" is another.

<comment><USER21> "why is Rust not chosen as main language" seemed like an unnecessarily accusatory way to express that idea, especially given that language choices are usually driven by a number of factors rather than a single benchmark.

I've seen a lot of advocacy over the years like that which has seemed to inspire more backlash than adoption. I generally prefer something constructive in the tradition of showing a better way to do something — i.e. in this case, perhaps show a Rust crypto library which delivers better performance so people could judge whether that kind of thing is enough of a draw to be worth migrating or, in the case of Rust, taking advantage of its embedding characteristics.

<comment><USER20> First of all, I am not advocating using Rust, I am asking why they didn't choose language without GC and good performance for given use case.

        "why is Rust not chosen as main language" seemed like an unnecessarily accusatory way to express that idea, especially given that language choices are usually driven by a number of factors rather than a single benchmark.

do not cut the context, I said "why is Rust not chosen as main language ---> for such use cases? <\---". By use case I meant writing performant code without GC

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I would love to see an in-depth analysis why Go's GC behaves this way for this specific benchmark in the first place. Just playing around with different values for `GOGC` seems like guess-work and could just paper over the underlying real issue. I know this probably requires to read the GC's source code, but that would've been certainly been very educational.

</comment><comment><USER24> I'm curious about this.

Go has a history of doing the simplest thing that covers the majority of cases, inherited from Plan 9. For one thing, although I don't know its current GC story, its original collector was very simple.

I wonder what would happen if you transplanted a recent collector from Java, where the strategy is to optimize the crap out of anything that moves, into Go?

Obviously, it wouldn't be as fast as not allocating, or at least not collecting, in hot code, but what would be the actual penalty?

On the other hand, what about, say, Pony and its per-thread collectors?

<comment><USER14> From a recent talk on the latest JDK GC, it seems to require even more tuning parameters than before. So the best performance achievable may be higher, but with more manual work. Which is along the same trade-off curve, with malloc/free on one end, and a very simple GC on the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Using the SetGCPercent option with a large value is dangerous, it may cause a program never get GCed before virtual memory is exploited. And when this happens, Go programs will become very very slow.

The current official Go runtime performs very very poorly when virtual memory is involved. It may make the while OS non-interactive so that you must restart your computer.

A SetGCMemoryThreshold(maxMemory int) opition is better for many programs.

<comment><USER19> Definitely agree option of a memory limit would be handy in a lot of cases. Sometimes a box exists to run one service and you know you want like 75% of the box's RAM (leaving some for cache, other procs, etc.). Other times, like this, you don't want GOGC=100's frequent collections but also don't want the risk of an explosion if live data increases.

Just adding some heuristics to override GOGC's behavior in extreme cases could help, e.g. assume by default OK to use 1% of system RAM and not OK to use >75% of it regardless of live data. I'm not sure we can realistically hope to get that--adds complexity, folks dislike arbitrary thresholds, and any change will break users who have optimized around current behavior. It might be you could approximate the desired behavior for reasonably well-behaved programs from a third-party package using runtime methods and a timer, but that's a drag.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Tuning is part of the job if you need high performance. It can take many forms from code optimization, build flags, platform configurations, to even hardware tweeks. Most people hate this kinda stuff but some of us think it's fun.

</comment><comment><USER27> Graph complaint: the orange and blue lines arent labeled which is which.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is a good illustration that Go isn't as simple as its proponents like to praise[1]. When you face complex engineering challenges, you need tools with a certain amount of complexity.

[1] especially when comparing to Java when it comes to GC customization.

<comment><USER29> Funny what different people get from these things.

I was most impressed that he managed to get very close to perfect scalability by twiddling the one knob on offer.

Java GC customisation is an art. This analysis was entirely mechanical. If the author wasn't just lucky i.e. that this is sufficient for a large number of workload profiles, then that's very good news.

<comment><USER30> The main problem is that it isn't a very good knob for this use case, as "ratio of freshly allocated data to live data remaining" is only incidental to the goal of the person writing the program. Therefore you'd expect to have to retune it due to unrelated changes, like if you allocated a big chunk of static memory to hold results.

I expect Go's current behaviour is right for memory-intensive programs, where "limit the wasted memory as a ratio of the actual working set" is a reasonable high-level goal. For a CPU intensive program you might have preferred a "max x% CPU overhead" knob, but just a minimum memory size would work, as this is mostly an artifact of the very small memory usage of benchmark program.

Java's G1 has "max pause delay" as their preferred knob, but Go has stuck that knob on low since around version 1.6, which is a good choice for what is essentially a language for network services.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> This is why we will still have C for times to come.

<comment><USER32> If you can't figure out how to tune 1 documented option in Go to fix this issue caused by this one specific use case (which he did figure it out and it was resolved).. Then you're probably not using C either.

<comment><USER31> _" Then you're probably not using C either."_

In fact, I do - daily. I'm not stating that this exact issue is the key reason, but because C is very simple with not much of an abstraction layer between software and hardware, where most such (unexpected) performance issues arises. Yes, it might be a single flag to makes things run normal, but it might also take 1 week in production to find such "magic" bugs.</comment></comment></comment>


Webfont Drama – March 2016 Edition - <AUTHOR> https://martinwolf.org/blog/2016/03/webfont-drama-march-2016-edition <comment><USER2> I used to love webfonts and removed all of them earlier this year.

Probably I'll change my mind again. And again. And again.</comment>