Scientists have lost their jobs after NIH probe into foreign ties - <AUTHOR> https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/fifty-four-scientists-have-lost-their-jobs-result-nih-probe-foreign-ties <comment><USER2> As an American that has received his fair share of indoctrination and with no deep love for a lot of China's domestic as well as foreign policy, I am curious about a few things, sincerely:

1\. Are these as egregious as we are led to believe? 2\. Are these really a sign of deep foreign influence? 3\. Can it be that these are actually just minor oversights of a large number of individuals without needing to jump to the worst conclusion of these scientists being spies (as one other comment has already asserted)?

I am not trying to water down what may be a serious case of foreign influence, but if this is something common and/or easy to fall into, it's possible this is an overreaction and may cause harm to the research community. The article is worded in a way that doesn't clarify if the focus was only on Chinese influence or if this was broadly designed to capture any foreign influence.

I ask these questions to broaden the discussion because oftentimes research and academic centers can have overly broad requests on disclosure which can be very invasive and, truth be told, if everyone answered fully and clearly, a lot of people would probably be excluded, and that begs the question if these are essential or not in my humble opinion.

To be clear, I am very much for limiting foreign influence on domestic policy, whether it's via research or otherwise, but I think it bears practicing greater skepticism when something may just be a proxy for "action" rather than sincere positive results.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, from the article:

"Lauer also presented data on the nature of the violations that NIH has uncovered. Some 70% (133) of the researchers had failed to disclose to NIH the receipt of a foreign grant, and 54% had failed to disclose participation in a foreign talent program. In contrast, Lauer said, only 9% hid ties to a foreign company, and only 4% had an undisclosed foreign patent. Some 5% of cases involved a violation of NIH's peer-review system."

So sounds like ~90% of the 189 violations maybe just not checking a box. It's not clear to me what the violations were for the 54 people who were fired.

From where I sit, science espionage from China certainly sounds plausible (And should be dealt with), but ginning up negligible issues to get rid of the wrong kind of people is a completely plausible move from the current administration.

<comment> the-dude Enforcement might deter ( is this proper English? ).

<comment><USER4> It seems technically valid (maybe?) but it's pretty hard to parse. You should at least add another word or two to indicate what it would deter.

<comment><USER5> Slightly ambiguous because I think the GP actually meant something like "enforcement may decline (to penalize or press charges)" which is definitely true and likely the case if 90% of these are paperwork errors.

There are definitely paperwork errors I can imagine, but it's difficult to imagine it being as simple a mistake as not checking the box that says "you have a job". More likely would be a grant office not being fully aware of a professors' funding sources or miscategorizing their funding in such a way that the grant office person helping with the paperwork marked it wrong and the professor didn't check carefully.

That I would consider to be an "honest mistake" that gets corrected by moving money around and a strongly worried letter.

Other stories I've heard go as far as two married professors who took their grant money and used it instead to move to an island resort for three months or something like that and didn't actually do the project at all. That was definitely a crime, but largely only because it involved the federal government. If they'd gotten a grant from a private company and didn't do what they promised it would likely be a civil lawsuit unless it rose to the level of actual illegal fraud.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Most everyone here is missing the point. The real problem is that NIH funding is limited and competitive, and the NIH needs to prioritize funding labs that don't already have enough money. I'm not discounting that some people involved in this process may be motivated by completely different reasons, but having a complete picture of existing funding sources when distributing grants makes sense regardless of the geopolitical context.

<comment><USER7> > NIH needs to prioritize funding labs that don't already have enough money

So then why the focus on _foreign_ grants? From the article:

> [Of the scientists who were fired/resigned] Some 70% (133) of the > researchers had failed to disclose to NIH the receipt of a foreign grant, > and 54% had failed to disclose participation in a foreign talent program. In > contrast, Lauer said, only 9% hid ties to a foreign company, and only 4% had > an undisclosed foreign patent. Some 5% of cases involved a violation of > NIH's peer-review system.

<comment><USER6> Well, there certainly may be other motivations at play, but it's also easier to keep foreign grants secret. The NIH, NSF, and American Cancer Society all make their awards public and searchable (I assume it's true for any organization with serious money or federal funding but those are the only ones I have come across). That said I also don't know if the federal funding agencies actually check outside of their own organization whether someone failed to mention a grant on an application.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is kind of off-topic since the issue was these scientists lying about their ties to a foreign government. I wanted to address how people think there's no IP theft here.

Although results and information about the research are often published to the public, experimental setup and some technical details are usually not included in the publication. Just because a paper on the research will eventually be available to the public doesn't mean the technology can be easily replicated. The concern here is that the real hard work that comes from months of trial and error is being stolen to competing nations that would take advantage of the theft to claim the author of such technology. Not to mention the tech is funded by American taxpayer dollars and developed by scientists who spent years and months on it. There's a recent incident on a Chinese Scientist lying about his affiliation with the Chinese Military and have been sending proprietary lab information to China.

See: [https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/11/alleged- chinese...](https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2020/06/11/alleged-chinese-spy- arrested-at-lax-arrested-for-stealing-research-from-uc-san-francisco/)

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't understand. What is the danger that this poses? Is it that the American government is funding science that only benefits China somehow? How?

<comment><USER10> I dont see any problem either from a public health perspective. I suspect what they are trying to go after is chinese institutions scooping US researchers through IP theft. I have heard this is a particular problem in medical research because everything is so commercially oriented. By comparison, i don't believe NNSA grants prevent researchers from receiving funding from elsewhere, and those grants are focused on nuclear technologies.

<comment><USER11> But NIH is all published - how can you IP steal? Maybe you get it a year ahead of time I guess?

<comment><USER12> If you scoop another researcher then you get the publication. Then the first thing you can do is ruin someone's year by publishing the fruits of their hard work before they do. They are screwed and you take the novel direction over.

But for real IP, in the US if you publish something you get a year to patent it. In many other places you have to patent it before you publish. So if you get their info before they have published it yet you can file the patent first.

<comment><USER13> > But for real IP, in the US if you publish something you get a year to patent > it. In many other places you have to patent it before you publish. So if you > get their info before they have published it yet you can file the patent > first.

The US used to be first-to-invent but now its also first-to-file like in the EU countries.

<comment><USER12> It certainly seems like a risky situation to get into. I'm sure lawyers would probably always advise you to file first anyway. For one thing you aren't a lawyer so the way you wrote up your publication may only cover an extremely narrow aspect of your invention.

But once you publish the invention, others should not be able to patent the idea anymore as there is prior art (your publication) and patents are required to be novel. This leaves you as the only person who can patent it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I can see that this could be a case of accidentally not checking a box, but at the same time, lack of knowledge or a mistake is not an excuse for breaking the law. I do firmly believe that China has infiltrated our research institutions and actively funneling that back to China. We should do more to guard against that, and if this is the necessary first step, then maybe its enforcement will lead to better oversight in the future by the institutions. It's really the institutions that must shoulder some of the blame for not also conducting their due diligence.

</comment><comment><USER15> For those who are wondering what harm this could cause to western countries, I think it's an interesting point: Researcher's spiking interesting results in public but funneling them home.

</comment><comment><USER16> Supposing they were spying, what's the edge that China gets since NIH research gets published publicly anyway?

<comment><USER17> They can influence the direction and conclusions of the research. Undermining the science altogether. Leading to bad policy and harming the NIH's and science's public reputation as a whole.

Not unlike what Coca-Cola has been doing to nutrition science.[]

[] [https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-coca-cola-disguised- its...](https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/how-coca-cola-disguised-its- influence-science-about-sugar-and-health)

<comment><USER18> The same argument can be used to say that researchers shouldn't receive money from USA, because this will influence the direction of their research conclusions and undermine the science altogether. If you don't know, a major contributor to science in the US is the DoD, and we know that the DoD has a mandate to act against perceived "enemies" of the American government.

<comment><USER19> You're knowingly misrepresenting the issue, over and over again:

The issue isn't that these scientists received money from a foreign government. It's that they failed to report it.

<comment><USER20> Because they thought they'd be fired for having links to foreign countries? Or because they're spies?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It a shame this is happening. Surprisingly the new Space Force show on Netflix is remarkably topical. There's an episode where a political disagreement is encountered between America and the PRC. The chief scientist at space force (whose character is basically "science good, military bad") argues that a simple conversation with the PRC science team should clear things up, because "science is a fraternity that knows no borders." It goes FUBAR when the PRC science team turn out to be just as political as their bureaucratic counterparts.

Ideally science would be a borderless fraternity/sorority... I wonder how bureaucrats and politicians manage to override scientist's own values as such to indoctrinate them with patriotism?

<comment><USER21> Scientists are vulnerable to nationalist sentiments same as anyone else.

"Of course the people don't want war. But (...) all you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger."

— Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> S __t happens when politics meddles with sciences.

<comment><USER23> > politics meddles with sciences.

referring to chinese ip-stealing?

<comment><USER24> Probably he meant US stealing IP from Europe , especially Germany.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> An external perspective from a non-American; I think curbing any kind of foreign influence is a good thing based on China related news in my own country. Also I think a large part of criticism of these actions are generated by people thinking such actions are racist and hence just wrong and no matter what, unjustifiable. That kind of weak thinking is just not acceptable when China has been openly hostile on so many fronts...

<comment><USER18> I don't see this kind of hostility. China is a commercial competitor. The US is trying to transform commercial competition into a racist war. I think this is despicable.

<comment><USER26> Many in the US see China as much more than a commercial competitor, but as an ideological and existential threat.

<comment><USER27> Many in the US are brainwashed by the American media empire.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> So basically we see the reemergence of the communist scare, a sick and demented policy that criminalized professionals who were perceived to be "collaborating" with an "enemy" foreign country. This makes me disgusted.

<comment><USER28> There do seem to be some strong indicators there might be a push in that direction. The rising levels of fear mongering directed at others has me a tad concerned.

At the very least, I think people should be aware this may be happening.

<comment><USER18> And this is specially sickening when it is directed at scientists, an area where it always necessary to collaborate across the world. To be very clear, if the Chinese are investing billions of dollars in research I want to collaborate with them, it has nothing to do with my nationality.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Its good to see that American tax dollars are no longer being used to help a country trying to undermine America.

</comment><comment><USER30> It'd be interesting to see what research these spies were stealing or influencing.

<comment><USER2> I think it's early to assume that these were spies. I am sure that is one of the narratives about this, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> "Lauer also presented data on the nature of the violations that NIH has uncovered. Some 70% (133) of the researchers had failed to disclose to NIH the receipt of a foreign grant, and 54% had failed to disclose participation in a foreign talent program. In contrast, Lauer said, only 9% hid ties to a foreign company, and only 4% had an undisclosed foreign patent."

Based on this, many foreign researchers that cooperates with the United Stated, and there are several thousands of them, should be severely punished in his/her country of origin. Most researchers in foreign countries cooperate with American research organizations that transfer technology to US the industry. Just for an example, my home country exchanges information about the Amazon with American institutions, and much of that information is passed on to pharmaceutical companies operating around the world. This is a despicable action that targets China in a way that is racist and hypocrite.

<comment><USER25> My comment might be reported as flame bait but I have to say this. Imagine the Secret Of the Universe™, is discovered. I'm just saying I'd much rather live in a world where such a secret is entrusted into American hands rather than Chinese ones. My point being, do not be careless in applying ideals and ideologies to peoples (or governments in this case) that do not deserve them

<comment><USER27> "My point being, do not be careless in applying ideals and ideologies to peoples (or governments in this case) that do not deserve them"

You're literally doing that but for the US. The families of countless people killed by the US in its illegal wars over just the past several decades would disagree with you, if they haven't been wiped out themselves. Same goes for the countless people that starved to death from US sanctions because their government refused to bow to the US empire.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> The real question is whether they are going after similar offenses when the source of funding in is some other country...?

There was a controversy not long ago about Saudi funding. Some very mediocre Saudi universities were entering the top rankings for research because they paid a lot of well known professors to have affiliate positions at those universities. This suddenly caused a crazy boost in rankings.

Now I doubt those researchers failed to disclose their affiliation/funding (the whole point of the scheme was for them to openly be affiliated). But if they had, would the US government go after them?

> Even more surprising, though, was that a little-known university in Saudi > Arabia, King Abdulaziz University, or KAU, ranked seventh in the world in > mathematics — despite the fact that it didn't have a doctorate program in > math until two years ago.

[https://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/05/citations- sale/](https://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/05/citations-sale/)

[http://blogs.nature.com/houseofwisdom/2012/01/are-saudi- univ...](http://blogs.nature.com/houseofwisdom/2012/01/are-saudi-universities- buying-their-way-into-top-charts.html)

<comment><USER32> Well, from the first sentence it says 7% were from other countries:

> In 93% of those cases, the hidden funding came from a Chinese institution.

54 * 0.07 = 3.78 non-Chinese scientists

(I'm guessing the 93% has been rounded)

Edit: nevermind the number 54 was total termination, the 93% was 175/189 of "Scientists NIH contacted institution" where Chinese [https://acd.od.nih.gov/documents/presentations/06122020Forei...](https://acd.od.nih.gov/documents/presentations/06122020ForeignInfluences.pdf)</comment></comment>


What is the best way to solve an Objective-C namespace collision? - <AUTHOR> http://stackoverflow.com/q/178434/347353 <comment><USER2> This situation is most commonly encountered on iOS, with ad networks and SBJson.

As the developer behind one of the ad network SDKs included in countless iOS apps, I struggled finding a good solution to this problem. Spoiler: there isn't one.

The good news is, while there were often collisions on SBJson; pretty much all versions of the version are compatible. For a while, we would compile our static library without the SBJson objects, and ship the library and SBJson separately.

Recently we decided to create our own fork of SBJson, and switch to using our own prefix, which allowed us to embed it in our library, and not worry about what other libraries were doing.

Note: another tricky gotcha with static libraries for iOS: There is a bug in the linker, in that it will not import Objective-C categories from `.o` files unless there is another another symbol that is recognized, such as a class of C function. This has caused crashers and much headache.

<comment><USER3> Namespaces don't really solve that problem, do they?. Your options are to either fork SBJson and give it its own namespace/prefix, or require SBJson as an external dependency and lets your users provide their own version of the framework.

<comment><USER4> I prefer if SBJSON is an external dependency, since there's less chance that I need to modify external projects my own projects make use of. The downside of course is that not all external projects might use the same version of SBJSON, so method names could have changed, could be missing, etc... So it falls to the developer to provide patches to external libraries if they use an outdated version of a library like SBJSON.

Still, this is for me the preferred approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not sure how well this works, but Nimbus (iOS framework) lets you embed itself in your own static library with a custom prefix via preprocessor macros. It would helpful if more libraries provide this feature.

<http://wiki.nimbuskit.info/Nimbus-Namespacing>

<comment><USER6> This file seems to do the trick. Using macros to override class names. [https://github.com/jverkoey/nimbus/blob/master/src/core/src/...](https://github.com/jverkoey/nimbus/blob/master/src/core/src/NimbusCore%2BNamespace.h)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm getting more confused. Using #if... requires recompilation, doesn't it? So how can a library use them?

Now that I think about it, I see that I don't have any idea how 'dylib's work... I should look them up.

<comment><USER5> If you are building your own static library and would like to distribute Nimbus with it, this feature allows you to add a prefix to all Nimbus classes without having you to manually rename them. This lets users of your static lib free to include Nimbus with their project without triggering a name conflict with the one included with your lib.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A month ago, Kyle Sluder proposed a namespacing system for Objective-C[1]. There has been a lively discussion both in the comments and on the objc- language mailing list[2].

1: [http://www.optshiftk.com/2012/04/draft-proposal-for- namespac...](http://www.optshiftk.com/2012/04/draft-proposal-for-namespaces- in-objective-c/)

2: [http://lists.apple.com/archives/objc- language/2012/Apr/msg00...](http://lists.apple.com/archives/objc- language/2012/Apr/msg00000.html)

<comment><USER8> This is interesting, but doing it all at the compiler and language level seems like overkill. ObjC is a dynamic language, so the important thing is to have namespacing support in the _runtime_. If the _user_ of a framework or bundle can specify a (reified) namespace to load a bundle's classes/protocols/etc and the runtime and language support A.B.C style class and protocol names, that might be enough to solve name collision problems. The framework/bundle _author_ need not then bother to find a suitable globally unique name. This would certainly be enough to solve the original poster's problem.

I'm not sure I've thought through all issues with the above approach, but the whole @namespace thing seems gross overkill to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> As ugly as C++ namespace mangling is, it does seem preferable to the kind of hacks it takes to solve this problem.

On the other hand, with a carefully chosen three letter prefix these kinds of collisions should be pretty rare in practice.

<comment><USER10> Java/C# solve this problem, yet in those languages it's possible for one compiler's code to link with another.

Namespace mangling and more importantly a lack of standard for it are not required to implement namespaces.

In Obj-C it really wouldn't be that difficult to make an @namespace directive that just prepended the namespace to the class.

      @namespace com.apple.foo
      @interface Bar : NSObject
      @end

Could be semantically equivalent to

      @interface com_apple_foo_Bar
      @end

<comment><USER9> If you're running in a virtual machine you have a lot more flexibility to solve these kinds of problems, of course.

I wouldn't mind seeing explicit namespace support in Obj-C although I can't say I've run into any namespace clashes in my own code yet.

<comment><USER11> > If you're running in a virtual machine you have a lot more flexibility to > solve these kinds of problems, of course.

Why so? Since the late 70's every language that supports modules has already solved this problem, and many of them have native code compilers.

<comment><USER9> In a vm you can do dynamic loading and bytecode manipulation tricks that are much harder to do in native code. Look at all the crazy AOP stuff people have done on the JVM.

<comment><USER11> You can do the same in native code, it just a bit harder to do.

That is how you do cool demoscene stuff in 4096K or less, with lots of self rewriting code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Funny how Apple still relies on language without any form of namespace support for their system.

Prefixes are not a solution as they have no ways to avoid collisions.

So much for supporting large scale development with Objective-C.

<comment><USER12> > _Funny how Apple still relies on language without any form of namespace > support for their system._

Yeah, very funny, especially since they don't have any other pragmatic reasons to use it, ie. it being a more dynamic OO C than C++ while retaining full C power, them having huge API libraries for it over 25 years of NeXT/OS X development, etc etc.

> _Prefixes are not a solution as they have no ways to avoid collisions._

It's not like you use lots of third party libs (if any at all) in OS X.

> _So much for supporting large scale development with Objective-C._

Yeah, I mean they have just those tiny projects in it, like iPhoto, Final Cut Pro, Pages, Numbers, the whole Cocoa and Cocoa Touch stack, etc.

But we need more support for large scale development, because there are many many teams of 100s of programmers that also want to write 20 million lines Objective-C programs.

And C is even worse, you just have small projects like the Linux kernel written in it, due to the severe issue of lack of namespaces.

/s

<comment><USER11> > It's not like you use lots of third party libs (if any at all) in OS X.

Yeah, that only works if you don't use any third party stuff.

> Yeah, I mean they have just those tiny projects in it, like iPhoto, Final > Cut Pro, Pages, Numbers, the whole Cocoa and Cocoa Touch stack, etc.

There are all internal Apple projects, as such the company can decide which prefixes to use. If they happen to clash with some third party small company, bad luck for the external company.

> But we need more support for large scale development, because there are many > many teams of 100s of programmers that also want to write 20 million lines > Objective-C programs.

Well, most projects I work on professionally, are the typical enterprise projects with 100+ developers, scattered across the globe.

> And C is even worse, you just have small projects like the Linux kernel > written in it, due to the severe issue of lack of namespaces.

While you're being sarcastic here, let me tell you that Linux kernel works, because everyone that wants to add code to the kernel is obliged to follow certain conventions.

You cannot have that with third party code that you don't control.

Specially if it is delivered as commercial closed source libraries, which is quite common in the enterprise world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Despite the accepted answer saying to use bundle unloading, please don't. It may be supported in theory but in practice unloading a bundle leaves all kinds of opportunities for stale pointers and crashing.

</comment><comment><USER14> As much flak as Java gets, at least they got namespaces right. Python got better, but it's still not what I would call great.

<comment><USER10> At first glance yes, but as always with Java when you dig under the hood you see tight coupling to bad ideas from the early 90s. Given the OO/Java mantra of decoupling I'm not sure why the namespace is a consequence of the filepath they seem far too tightly integrated.

<comment><USER15> Agreed - C# fixed this, though (by default it maps to the directory structure, but you can change this). Scala encourages Java-style packages but lets you put them wherever you want.

<comment><USER16> I find that an irritating pain with scala, actually. I move a file from one directory to another, then spend ten minutes trying to figure out why lift still can't find the class, before the facepalm moment where I realise I didn't change the package declaration _in_ the file.

<comment><USER15> I agree that it's actually sort of stupid to allow it--I used the word choice I did intentionally, because C# 'fixed' it (its strong IDE support makes having files in different places pretty much impossible unless you want it to happen), but Scala isn't so lucky. At least I get it when I use IntelliJ, which doesn't even tell me before updating the package declaration. :)

I use Play or a home-rolled solution based on vertx, though. so I don't have to worry so much about finding them.

<comment><USER16> I hate magic package names; I'd far rather be using wicket, but I wanted good comet integration for this particular project.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Pure CSS: The "Back to the Future" logo - <AUTHOR> http://code.garron.us/css/BTTF_logo/

<comment><USER2> For clarity's sake I would probably refrain from calling it "pure" as long as the -webkit- is necessary.

</comment><comment><USER3> The page cheats a bit: the font contains "TO THE" as a single char "&" instead of composing the words from 5 letters.

<comment><USER4> Is that why it requires js, and looks like "Back < & Future" if js is disabled?

<comment><USER5> NoScript doesn't just block JavaScript. See [http://hackademix.net/2010/03/24/why-noscript-blocks-web- fon...](http://hackademix.net/2010/03/24/why-noscript-blocks-web-fonts/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Holy shit, I know this kid. Lucas is also the #11 speed cuber in the world. Very cool guy over all.

So the point of this logo, if anyone is curious, is that Stanford regularly holds an annual social dance (meaning waltz, swing, cha-cha, etc. but with no particular concern for traditional form) called "Big Dance." Lucas really wanted the theme to be "Big Dance to the Future," but sadly, "Pride and PrejuDance" won instead.

<comment><AUTHOR> I also know Lucas, and at a recent event watched him restore a cube blindfolded - most impressive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why were fonts originally not embedded in websites? Licensing, security, support?

<comment><USER8> Licensing. When you use a font in a PDF, the receiver of the PDF doesn't easily get the ability to re-use the font. When you embed it in a website, you're giving everyone on the Internet a workable copy of the font. Fonts are expensive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, it's more interesting then the Acid test. But the fact it only runs 100% in Safari raise some "hack" flags.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't hack per see, but uses css features (gradients) which isn't standarized yet, and therefore uses vendor-prefixes in the css.

It should be somewhat simple to add the Firefox versions of the css directives to add support for Firefox.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Strange, it does not render properly on Safari/iPad

</comment><comment><USER11> Looks great in Chrome 5.0.342.9 beta. Not so much in FF 3.6.3. (Both on Ubuntu 9.04)</comment>


Poverty warps the brain - <AUTHOR> http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/11/poverty_and_the_brain.php <comment><USER2> Sigh. As usual they forgot to distinguish which is the cause and which the effect.

How do they know that the poor linguistic function is not the cause of the poverty, rather then (as they assume) the effect?

<comment><USER3> That would require a group of humans that are non trivially genetically different.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Do you agree with pg (how to do philosophy) - <AUTHOR> > Philosophy is as young now as math was in 1500. There is a lot more to discover.<p>http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html <comment><USER2> I read the article and frankly it's a pretty garbage take on philosophy.

It's an even more garbage take on where modern or even post modern philosophy has taken us in terms of understanding. He seems to think philosophy ended with Wittgenstein (apparently even ended with Wittgenstein's first book).

It makes me think immediately of how Maciej obviously felt about PG sharing his thoughts in his Hackers and Painters essay that made Idlewords write this response[1]. The ideas and concerns in the philosophy article merit much the same response.

If you're looking for a good introduction of where philosophy since Wittgenstein might take you and why it's still one of humanities best tools I recommend the podcast 'Philosophise This'[2]

[1][https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm](https://idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm) [2][http://philosophizethis.org/](http://philosophizethis.org/)

<comment><AUTHOR> My take on it was that philosophy could be more discovered after analytical and both continental. Why? My take on it was that because artificial intelligence is rising (never ever in history) the ratio between wisdom (philosphical) and intelligence will accelerate towards zero or small amount. Stupid isn't it? (Pg just made me think)</comment></comment>


The coming retail apocalypse: some axioms - <AUTHOR> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/12/the-coming-retail-apocalypse-s.html <comment><USER3> This might be relevant:

In Scott Adams' The Dilbert Future (1997), he introduced the word confusopoly. The word is a portmanteau of confusion and monopoly (or rather oligopoly), defining it as "a group of companies with similar products who intentionally confuse customers instead of competing on price". Examples of industries in which confusopolies exist (according to Adams) include telephone service, insurance, mortgage loans, banking, and financial services. [from wiki]

The central idea is that if companies made it easy to compare their products, then those companies would be forced in to a detrimental competition on price. So instead, if each company offers a slightly different package, with different feautres and prices, then simple comparison doesn't exist.

<comment><USER4> This is still the spirit of collusion, and is prone to defectors. There should be large incentives for one company to leave the cartel, make a simple service, and sell it at the same price of their competitors. They would save money by reducing their own internal complexity, and would gain money by winning over customers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I worked on a mortgage search engine start up for a couple years. Mortgages are a wonderful example of how well intentional pricing complexity can succeed. Mortgage companies supply money - the most perfect commodity around. In order to avoid a pricing race to the bottom, the mortgage shopping process has become one of the most confusing possible. Obtaining an accurate price quote involves filling out a several page application which most people can't do accurately without the help of a broker. Pricing is a combination of interest rate and fees which can range into the tens of thousands of dollars. Fees are calculated in multiple steps and include certain closing costs which are only known weeks into the process - often when it's too late to switch mortgage brokers and still make your contractually-agreed close date. In the small surveys I've done, more than half of mortgage applicants only learned the total amount they'd be charged the day they close the mortgage. And many were surprised to learn of unanticipated charges amounting to >$1,000 above what they expected.

This strategy was very successful in extracting differential payments from consumers. Prior to some recent regulatory reforms, the most successful 5% of mortgage shoppers negotiated fees of $6,000 on a $200k mortgage. The least successful 5% were charged fees of $18,000. These are borrowers with equivalent financial circumstances and credit rating.

Much of this is due to the complexity of mortgages. So I'm dubious that this sort of apocalypse will prove true for all types of products. But I do expect to see it increasingly in categories where there is high product complexity, the product isn't easily compared based on technical specifications, brand reputation isn't important, and/or there is little value in cultivating customer loyalty (for example, I may purchase a couch once every 15 years).

<comment><USER6> I think that has already come to an end, at least for simple residential mortgages. When I refinanced my home mortgage a few months ago I just filled out a short form on Zillow.com and it gave me instant price quotes. Then I picked the cheapest one, filled out a longer form, and closed a few weeks later with total fees of about ~$600.

With the tools and information available now only a fool would get stuck with $6000 on fees (unless they're intentionally paying points to knock down the interest rate).

<comment><USER5> I hate to say this, but you likely paid a higher origination fee than $600. It just wasn't due at close - instead it was baked into your mortgage payment every month in the form of a slightly higher interest rate. At the end of the day, brokers and bank branches want to earn a few thousand for "originating a mortgage." This is fancy way of saying retailing a mortgage. Although they often take less - maybe $900 - for a refinance. You can find out how much you were charged by looking through your mortgage paperwork. The bulk of the mortgage broker or bank branch retail mark up comes from something that is usually labeled "origination fee."

That said, thanks to recent reforms, an individual brokerage can no longer charge two borrowers will different commissions for the same mortgage. However, two different brokers can each charge very different fees. Quicken Loans, one of the largest mortgage originators out there, is notorious for charging much higher commissions than nearly anyone else. And thanks to the difficulty of comparison shopping, they're still successful in obtaining premium prices... even in the age of Zillow and Google.

<comment><USER6> No, I know all about origination fees. My interest rate was rock bottom, the absolute best available on a refinance of that type at the time. And based on what I've seen, comparison shopping is no longer difficult at all. If suckers are voluntarily paying higher prices then it isn't because of difficulty.

<comment><USER5> What's easy for you may be quite difficult for others. I'm not sure the Hacker News community should ever be considered the middle of the bell curve. To wit: prior to the financial crisis, one of the largest mortgage search engines conducted a large randomized survey of home owners. A little under 40% did not know if they had a fixed or adjustable rate mortgage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Airline ticket pricing is not a good general example: The airlines get away with arcane pricing in part because they have successfully outlawed arbitrage by prohibiting the resale or transfer of tickets away from the original buyer, in the name of "security".

I'm dubious that this practice is going to work so well for, say, socks. There is no law against trading socks on the secondary market.

<comment><USER7> Hm, though to argue against myself for a minute, it occurs to me that my unhappiness with e.g. Amazon Kindle books might be poetically summarized as "Kindle is like buying books from an airline's sales department." Non- refundable, non-tradable, locked to me.

So maybe there's more mileage in the idea of "airlinification" than I initially thought. Though Amazon gets away with it (to the extent that they do) mainly because their "convenience" argument is pretty strong for virtual goods: You don't have to warehouse the books, tote them around, re-buy them if your house burns down, etc. These selling points do not apply so well to airline tickets (though airlines will certainly try to sell you on the awesome convenience of non-tradable non-refundable e-tickets), let alone my metaphorical socks.

Still, though. More and more things can be virtualized or time-shared. It is not at all hard to imagine carshares like Zipcar going the way of airline pricing, for example. Yikes.

<comment><USER8> Rental car companies already use airline-like pricing schemes, with a mandatory minimum rental period of 24 hours. One of Zipcar's selling points is that their pricing scheme is simpler and more granular. If Zipcar changed their pricing scheme, they'd become just another rental car company in the minds of their customers.

I suspect that there will always be people who prefer the more straightforward style of pricing. After all, knowing exactly how much you're going to pay and knowing you won't be paying for any unnecessary hours counts as a feature for a lot of people. It's like buying a Linode. It might not be the cheapest option for all use cases, but it gives you peace of mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The problem with this article is that it only seems to present options for intelligent selling agents. Where pricing inequality exists, so too does a market for equally intelligent buying agents.

Personalised pricing, complex pricing structures (to prevent comparison) and other newer retail tricks can be overcome fairly easily. For example, proxying purchases through intermediate parties that have access to pricing closer to the point of equilibrium. Or grouping buyers together to starve an industry or supplier of cash flow until pricing requirements are met.

This is a game theory exercise where both buying _and_ selling agents are involved. It is unwise to assume that sellers will have the upper hand. As many cost comparison websites have shown, a market also exists amongst buyers to force prices down to a level of equilibrium.

<comment><USER10> I agree that buyer have power too but there is disparity in resources on the buying side where the buyers are at the retail level. The "easily overcome" tricks require that consumers join the intermediate groups that a buying and otherwise participate in more complex transactions in order to defeat them. This can establish a different equilibrium that is better for consumers but it still involves an extra cost in one form or another. The intermediary takes their cut too (even a co-op would have overhead to address).

<comment><USER9> Agreed -- although the profit margins available to intermediaries will be very small. Buyers and sellers have a mutual interest in squeezing the intermediaries as much as possible. Thankfully the costs of operating an intermediary on the Internet are small.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Variable retail pricing is a multi-billion dollar industry, the mechanisms are just a wee bit different than revenue management in the airlines. Examples include variable pricing by region, outlet, and season. Other examples are sales, coupons, and rebates. You can _trivially_ pay five different prices on the same day for bitwise identical copies of the same Chinese sock if you want to.

A wrinkle for the retail apocalypse: wonder why X/Y/Z is closing but you can find a bank branch and cell phone shop within one block of any arbitrary location in a middle class neighborhood in an American city? Answer: lucrative backends to their retail transactions. (Starbucks is essentially the same, in that siting is less about selling coffee and more about selling _habitual coffee consumption_.)

<comment><USER12> Thanks -- I was just going to come here to post this.

It's one of the things that WalMart makes their money on. They grow traffic to their stores with huge discounts on visible necessities like toilet paper, competitive grocery prices, etc.

But when I look at their prices for less common items, their audacity is sometimes staggering. I remember once being unable to find a cheap surge protector for less than $30, and thinking, "I wonder if that's by design. I came here for milk and a car battery -- they know I'm not going somewhere else for my 'in-between' items."

I seem to remember a discussion on HN once around the legality of variable pricing -- it seems a fascinating topic and I'd love to read a writeup on the process, and especially the software that WalMart or any other large chain has for pricing their goods.

<comment><USER13> Why would variable pricing be a legal issue?

<comment><USER14> I imagine it would be a legal issue depending on how it is discriminated.

I don't know particular US laws, but I imagine it would be a legal issue for me to have a separate "for whites" price and "for blacks" price where there were significant differences.

<comment><USER15> In a way this already exists. For "most whites" (who happen to live in Europe and the USA) prices are quite higher compared to what they are for "most yellows" (who happen to live in continental Asia). One can spin this as being racist if one's so included, although a quite odd kind of racism when we take into account the usual usage of the word.

<comment><USER15> I see I'm being down voted for the above comment. I guess it's being interpreted as racist? If so, I apologize, it wasn't my intention, quite the opposite. I'm white, yes, but I live in Brazil, where goods, specially electronic ones, cost 2 to 3 times what they do in the USA, and virtual ones, such as ebooks, which could be cheap, are usually region locked out of our reach. So, I meant the quotes as ironic, as my intention was to criticize companies for doing these price games. As for Asians, I have the utmost respect for them and their achievements, to the point of following Eastern religions (I'm a Shintoist and a Buddhist), so it would never, ever, cross my mind to even come near attacking them. Lastly, although somewhat I'm articulate in English, it's a second language for me, and one I learned by myself through books, not by attending classes, my native one being Portuguese, so it can also be the case that the way I expressed myself didn't come out as I intended (expressing sarcasm properly is way more difficult than writing in a straightforward way). So, if that also came into play, please let me apologize again!

And, if it'd be possible for someone to, taking into account the above, point me what exactly I did wrong in the original comment, so that I can avoid such mistakes in the future, please do so, as being a non-native speaker there's no other way for me to know other than asking someone who is. I'd love to read it, and be sure I'll start applying the lesson immediately!

Thanks!

<comment><USER16> In addition to what tptacek said, viewing pricing through the race lens is grossly oversimplifying the state of the world. Copyright protection laws, cost of living, and other local market conditions are probably much more important than race when firm X decides its pricing tiers.

<comment><USER13> So, you disagree with him. Better to say why than to downmod to express the sentiment. On the other hand, people are hair-trigger here about race, and for somewhat decent reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Data point:

Last month I had to choose an ISP in Spain. The experience was painful. Every company has only "special offers" in the front page and I had to dig to the very deepest of their webs to find the real numbers and, even then, cut through a lot of BS, intentional poor phrasing, and all kind of misleading statements.

The provider I chose was not better than the rest. The real price was striked- out and a lower price, only valid for exceptional circumstances presented as the norm.

On the phone it's worse. They consistently scam people.

I spent several hours hating all them. But that's a recurring expense of forty euros a month, plus a hundred up front. If this scheme was imposed for small purchases, no way. Either I would choose a simpler retailer, even if more expensive, or wouldn't buy at all.

<comment><USER18> Same thing happens in the US. Time Warner Cable's web site was offering internet access for the "special offer" of $29.99 a month for the first year. I actually had to call them up on the phone to find out what the normal rate would be after one year -- it was nowhere to be found on their web site. Same type of thing happens with cell phone contracts. Are people really stupid enough to buy a monthly recurring service without knowing what it will cost after the first year? Apparently, the people selling these services think so.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > * I have, like most people, had the frustrating experience of trying to work > out whether my mobile phone contract or the airline flight I'm been booking > is actually the cheapest one that meets my needs,*

UK mobile phone contract pricing is very frustrating. Free market should mean customers shop around to get the best deal. Providers thwart that by including lock-ins of various forms (contract lengths, cost of new phones, making it tricky to keep the same number, making it tricky to move a phone to a different network.) and by having a bewildering array of different contract types.

> _If you earn 50% more than average you can expect your grocery prices to > begin creeping up, because your suppliers can infer what's in your wallet_

Or maybe the retailer wants your custom, and thus offers you cheaper prices to secure it. Poorer people spend less money and generate more cost per visit, thus are not as attractive. Retailers don't want to exclude those customers, but do want to get more cash out of them.

<comment><USER20> My grocery prices consistently creep up with my income. The retailers accomplish this by presenting me with a trade off between price and quality/convenience. In other words, they extract more money from my by giving me more value in return. I don't see why that can't continue to work. If they start fucking around with weird pricing schemes instead, that destroys the tradeoff and with it my incentive to continue giving them more money.

<comment><USER19> Ah, okay. So they're offering you cheaper prices, but on more expensive items?

<comment><USER20> No, I mean that I tend to buy those more expensive items more often now, because they offer additional quality or convenience which is now worthwhile to me. I also tend to shop at more expensive stores, since they tend to have better stuff and be closer to me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> This has been predicted before. However, human ingenuity will prevent it from propagating to its logical conclusion.

Have you tried to compare prices of mattresses? One way mattress sellers prevent price comparison is by identifying mattresses with unique names. They may have the same brand, or even specifications.

In addition, we are now seeing a steady growth of private label offerings by retailers. Initially these are in the low priced/budget segments, but increasingly the retailers are moving into mid-range products, where margins are higher, and effectively pushing out branded goods, where margins are driven down by price competition.

<comment><USER9> The development of websites that group together different brand/name mattresses according to physical properties would eliminate any advantage sellers have of creating artificial value in model naming and numbering. Widespread use of such websites would have a devastating impact on premium priced products as consumers would no longer attach value to "premium" marketing labels and branding.

If sellers want to make brand names, model numbers and other identifiers redundant, buyers will eventually be the beneficiaries.

<comment><USER21> I believe you are handwaving the problem away here.

Have you ever tried to go to a mattress shop and ask them about spring density, the gauge of steel used, and the spring layout on a mattress? These information is totally proprietary and the average salesman wouldn't know either.

<comment><USER9> This information could be obtained by users/consumer review companies by reverse engineering (or purely testing) products to make numerical comparisons of various properties.

In the case of mattresses, the size of springs isn't as relevant as the amount of sag in the bed when a 70kg person is lying on it. A more advanced measure could be the evenness of weight distribution across the mattress. These measurements are unlikely to be performed by consumers because of the time and effort required. However product review companies could generate revenue from selling consumers detailed comparisons/analysis of products.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I almost wish retailers _would_ try to price discriminate more based on all the personal information they gather. That would finally create a massive financial incentive for people to defend their privacy.

Geek: "Hey, if you use this browser extension you won't get tracked."

User: <Yawn>

Geek: "Did I mention you'll also get better prices when you shop online?"

User: "Sign me up!"

<comment><USER23> Unfortunately, that will probably play out the other way around. Stross mentioned "loyalty cards", trading privacy for prizes or discounts; online that will be "loyalty cookies" ...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> "More recently we've seen comparison sites with customer ratings to supply metadata about, for example, supplier reliability: but these tread dangerously close to defamation in some cases: see for example the class action lawsuit against Yelp (alleging extortion: dismissed, but shows the shape of things to come). Price comparisons are relatively safe."

As someone intimately familiar w/3rd party seller feedback on Amazon, I can tell you that the feedback there is taken very seriously by 3rd party sellers, by customers, and by Amazon. If a seller drops below a rating threshold, they are warned, and if the poor ratings persist, they're given the kiss of death: their "Featured Merchant" status is revoked.

I've never heard any suggestion of these ratings treading "dangerously close to defamation."

IMO, online feedback / reputations are very successful at rewarding good sellers and punishing bad ones. So this paragraph is a pretty weak dismissal of customer ratings as a way of proving a value add.

<comment><USER25> I think the difference is that sellers opt in to sell through Amazon, and probably sign a contract allowing Amazon to collect and display feedback; Yelp is operating without the seller's explicit consent. So unless the rating site can lock in a huge swath of consumer demand and so demand that sellers consent to allowing feedback, the artcle's point about _independent_ rating sites stands.

<comment><USER24> Good point, I stand corrected.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I wonder about the editor aspect of small shops, like a book shop with a special selection, or a shop with children's toys (one of those closed in our neighborhood recently, apparently some former customers cried).

Amazon sucks for discovery of things imo. At least for serendipity - in an extreme case, an acquaintance met his lover in a library...

Will those small retailers simply be replaced by affiliates who are content with earning 10% on their referrals? Is 10% a fair price for that kind of thing? And Amazon even seems to have a cap on how much you can earn, like if the item is really expensive you won't even get the full 10%?

<comment><USER27> _Amazon sucks for discovery of things imo._

I have always been a library lover, and even took a library science course (cataloging and classification) as an undergraduate elective. But from the beginning on Amazon I have liked the "customers who bought this also bought . . . " recommendations built from Amazon's database, and I have learned of many interesting books by Amazon's recommendations that I later bought. In library science, "browsing function" is discovery of books by scanning the shelves where books of similar classification are put, which groups books differently in each library (each library has a different collection, and some libraries are classified by the Dewey system, and some by the Library of Congress system, in English-speaking countries). Amazon does very well as a place to apply the browsing function, because its collection size is huge, and similarities of books can be scanned by author, by subject (Amazon has subject classifications for most of its books), by what readers have written reviews of them, and by what buyers have bought them. I now wish that my friendly local public library, which I use VERY heavily and where my second son volunteers, would implement browsing paths as varied and as powerful as Amazon's, and my local public library is already famous in many parts of the United States for having some of the most detailed cataloging and one of the most powerful and convenient online catalogs in the country.

Compare

[https://catalog.hclib.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=elibrary#f...](https://catalog.hclib.org/ipac20/ipac.jsp?profile=elibrary#focus)

to

<http://www.amazon.com/>

starting with some of your favorite books to see what browsing turns up in each online catalog.

<comment><USER28> Amazon desperately needs personalized rankings a la Netflix, particularly as they expand into digital content.

I've been _trying_ to watch some of Amazon's free Prime video content, but it's very difficult - I have to wade through page after page of My Little Pony to get to anything I'm interested in. There is practically no discoverability features besides "customers who watched this also...", which is generally not very useful.

Moving ratings? They are so highly variable for media, and so subjective to personal taste, that they are practically useless. Global reviews work fine for electronics, but they fall apart utterly when applied to content. Go look at the star rating distribution for any reasonably controversial book - <USER2> over the place, and tells me nothing about how _I_ would like it.

The MP3 store is similar. iTunes does a pretty decent job with Genius, but is still pretty poor discoverability-wise. Spotify's new-content discoverability is also extremely poor. Rdio is pretty good, but I would _pay_ for a Pandora that plugs into a music store/subscription service. IMO this is some pretty lazy engineering - what works for selling DVD players does not work for selling content, but Amazon's UI for browsing digital video is practically identical to their physical-shopping UI, and that's entirely unacceptable.

<comment><USER29> Maybe you aren't giving Amazon the credit they deserve. MLP is huge in the hipster geek set that frequents HN. Cf <http://www.google.com/m?q=my+little+brony>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> One of his examples is bad.

I'm pretty sure that the much publicized "different customers see different prices on Amazon" debacle was just a simple A/B test, and not some complex scheme along the lines of, "Joe can afford to pay more!"

<comment><USER31> Usually it is that the sellers are actually different, like one is Amazon itself, and the other is a third-party.

So you have a product that is priced like: Amazon.com: $14.99 with $5 shipping (free for Prime) 3rd Party: $12.99 with $3 shipping.

Amazon will show Prime members the first one, and non-Prime members the 2nd one.

<comment><USER24> Yes there's definitely the prime vs non prime vs 3rd party price differences.

But are you sure there's no evidence of what he references? He seems pretty explicit, and it seems a very odd conclusion w/no specific evidence: "prices on offer to different customers varying for the same product, presumably on the basis of the customer's willingness to pay more for goods in prior transactions."

<comment><USER29> When I hear an odd conclusion with no evidence, I usually disregard the conclusion, not infer the existence of fascinating undetected evidence.

<comment><USER24> When I read an article linked from Hacker News, then read some comments that are generally not tearing it to pieces, I assume the author must have some credibility and therefore is not throwing out conclusions for fun. Also, I have a minor in inferring existence of fascinating undetected evidence.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is not a very cohesive argument. Basically he is suggesting that we are going to see tiered pricing in all retail, but doesn't explain what the tiers will be based on.

A more likely scenario? Price will equal convenience. Retail stores will be more connected to the internet so that you can see who has what item in stock within 5 miles of where you are. The Big Box retailers do this already.

We will then see a new breed of startups based on adding impulse purchases to the item that you bought online and are picking up locally (loss leaders online).

</comment><comment><USER33> Interesting observations, but I'm inclined to think that the complex pricing algorithms will have relatively limited applicability. The problem is that they exert a non-trivial cognitive cost on the buyer; most consumers, given the choice, would likely be happy to pay a few percent extra to _not_ have to worry about the futures market for potatoes with each trip to the supermarket.

The key exceptions to this are with goods or services that are both highly perishable and very expensive -- such as airline tickets. An empty seat on an airplane is a non-storable asset which "perishes" the instant the plane takes off; therefore the airline is highly incentivised to sell it at _any_ price -- but obviously as high as possible -- rather than let it expire. Meanwhile, for most consumers, airline tickets are bloody expensive to purchase, and it's worth no small amount of hassle to find a good price. Thus there's significant motivation on both sides to fuel a constantly-evolving algorithmic war between airline pricing schemes and intelligent price-comparison agents.

A seat at the barber's is also "perishable" in a sense, in that any time a client isn't sat in it, the barber is losing potential revenue. However it's only fractionally perishable: unlike an plane about to close its doors, a barber's seat that is unoccupied in any given minute can still get a client the next. So there's not the same do-or-die motivation to fill that seat, which diminishes the need for clever algorithmic pricing. From the consumer's side, meanwhile, a haircut is a relatively trivial expense -- not worth the time or effort to try to scrounge a better deal. Any barber that doesn't simply list its price in a sign on the window is one that wouldn't be getting my business, in any case.

The cognitive simplicity of making a purchase is an asset that doesn't just extend to pricing. One of the major successes of the iPhone and iPad, for example, is the fact that there is effectively only one model being promoted at any given time. Unlike other brands of mobile devices -- where the consumer is essentially asked to balance out their requirements for price, UX/UI, app availability, form factor, memory, camera, battery life, etc. -- the iPhone customer is asked to make a single choice:

       Do I want one?

       [ ] Yes
       [ ] No

The simplicity of this choice has been a genuine factor in iOS's success. (NB: I'm not an iOS fanboy; I just switched from an iPhone to a Galaxy Nexus and am almost completely happy with it. But must give credit where it's due.)

Anyhow, I think that Stross is correct when he says that the disintermediation of tradable goods will cause a price-based race to the bottom. This is probably unavoidable. Furthermore, even for non-tradable goods/services such as locally-delivered services, many of these will inevitably be automated and will also be racing to the bottom. (I fully expect that most fast-food will be cooked and served by automated systems within 10 years; interventions by organised labour my forestall this for a while longer, but not indefinitely). What interests me is how anything non-cheap/automated will survive: it will be, as Stross suggests, anything which creates value in a way that is _not_ based on price. My believe is that the key ingredients in this will be creativity and meaning.

In America, for example, I've seen anecdotal evidence that small local farms are have been withstanding the recession, and even expanding fairly considerably. If this is true, it's certainly not because they offer any price advantage; rather, it's because they form relationships with their customer base that provide layers of meaning that add value beyond the simple raw commodity. Where this kind of relationship can be successfully cultivated, I believe that there's a real future for locally-based retail. Otherwise, the future is all about local automation and disintermediated global markets.

<comment><USER34> An example of the simplification of this process. Over the holidays, my dad needed to buy an external hard drive to backup his music collection. He has one of these hi-fi devices that has a built-in hard drive and is slowly transferring his music collection to it.

We bought it from a retailer because he wanted it right then, so he could run the backup procedure and have me fix it if it didn't work (yes, family tech support is a joy). We went into the shop, and none of the USB external hard drive manufacturers actually tell you what speed the drive runs at. That is, they don't tell you what RPM the drives run at. As it is a backup drive, it's not like it needs to be fast (the first run may take all night, but afterwards, it will probably only be a gigabyte or so of changed files every few days). But the fact that none of the companies actually advertise the RPM slightly shocked me. Not just on the boxes either, but if I scanned the barcodes with the barcode/QR app I have on my phone, the manufacturers websites don't list the RPM either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> An interesting discussion of what's coming. I agree that suppliers are in a race to the bottom unless they can provide added value, but the author seems to fixate on algorithmic pricing as the ultimate determinant of who wins. He mentions Amazon in this context, but does not mention Amazon Prime, which is just the sort of value-add he's talking about.

I think Bezos saw this coming a long time ago and so he got Amazon ready to be more than a simple rock-bottom-price retail outlet. People love Amazon, and once they get Prime, they start buying from Amazon because all the hurdles have been taken away. In the meantime, Prime offers them additional benefits like streaming movies & TV. I don't think you can really look at the future of retail without this offering looming pretty large. And I don't even have Amazon Prime!</comment>


Does making development non-trivial (e.g., iphone apps) result in fewer but better apps? - <AUTHOR>

Also, perhaps this is why people make money on these iphone apps?  There's definitely a non-trivial barrier to entry.<p>If all of this is true, then what incentive does a company have for improving its SDK in a way other than adding new APIs? <comment><USER2> It's a fallacy as old as assembly. "In the old days, men were men and compilers a thing of the future". Better tools are better, period. No amount of side effects will change this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Could you elaborate? Don't you see a benefit in keeping less experienced programmers out?

<comment><USER2> Well, first we should have a reason to believe keeping them out is a good thing.

But my point is that even if it would be some advantage, the overall cost is too great. Having a bad API and a steep learning curve is a bad thing for everybody, good or bad. Even an experienced programmer would do more in the same amount of time if he had better tools.

Case in point: most good programmers these days work in high level languages like ruby, lisp, python etc. They enjoy diversity, and they enjoy power. What advantage would be if you forced them to write C++? They would still be better (maybe even more so...) then the average, but the total productivity would be way lower.</comment></comment></comment>


Compare Covid-19 across different areas over time - <AUTHOR> https://www.covidbyregion.com <comment><AUTHOR> I built a tool that allows you to compare Covid-19 cases/deaths across different areas (countries, states, counties). It also has some pretty nifty features under the "advanced" section - like starting the comparison with every region at 50 confirmed cases.</comment>


We only use 10% of our brains? - <AUTHOR> http://gregdetre.blogspot.com/2008/11/we-only-use-10-of-our-brains.html

<comment><USER2> I don't think it's true in any sense. I think someone just made it up.</comment>


Ask HN: Whats your favourite piece of math? - <AUTHOR> Anything goes. <comment><USER2> Laplace transform[1]. Starting with a signal in the time domain, you can take the Fourier transform to map it into the frequency domain and then the Laplace transform (Z-transform[2]) to map it into discrete time domain. Discrete time is what digital computers do. At this point implementing the control loop on a digital computer is remarkably straight forward.

Taking your system's closed loop transfer function[3], you can use the above Laplace and Z-transforms to produce the desired closed loop control algorithm to "optimally" control your system. (I put "optimally" in quotes because it is optimum for the system as defined; if your understanding / definition of your system is wrong, it will be optimally controlling for a _different_ system and be suboptiomal for your actual system.)

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

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-transform](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-transform)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory#Closed- loop_tra...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_theory#Closed- loop_transfer_function)

</comment><comment><USER3> The Fourier transform and its computational offshoot, the Fast Fourier Transform. We wouldn't have any of modern electronics and telecommunications without the mathematical insight that the FT brought. The fact that you can go from the time domain to the frequency domain and back again is nothing less than astounding. Optics was also benefitted by the FT because you can use is to filter unwanted optical frequencies and diffraction effects from your images using Fourier transformation.

</comment><comment><USER4> Cantor's diagonal proof that א ≠ ₀א.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantor%27s_diagonal_argument)

</comment><comment><USER5> Shouldn't "favourite" -> "maths"?</comment>


The Pleasure of Practicing: A Musician's Account of Overcoming Impostor Syndrome - <AUTHOR> http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/01/07/glenn-kurtz-practicing/ <comment><USER2> A big takeaway:

      Everyone who gives up a serious childhood dream — of
      becoming an artist, a doctor, an engineer, an athlete —
      lives the rest of their life with a sense of loss, with
      nagging what ifs.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article tells a great story about overcoming certain hangups about one's ability, but never touches on talent not being matched to an audience. In some industries it's not what you know, but who you know, and the context. Take for example that famous experiment with Joshua Bell playing the violin in DC Metro Station: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM21gPmkDpI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM21gPmkDpI) Nobody even noticed, and having known it was Joshua Bell, they certainly would have. Practicing all alone with a musical instrument in my bedroom is no more exaltation than it is a mismatch of talent and audience. If anything my neighbor will be filing a noise complaint...

<comment><USER4> It's not really about audience but about context. There is a reason why something is music to a whole generation of kids while their parents think it sounds like noise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Last paragraph is nice:

> I sit down to practice the fullness of my doubts and desire, my fantasies > and flaws. Each day I follow them as far as I can bear it, for now. This is > what teaches me my limits; this is what enables me to improve. I think it is > the same with anything you seriously practice, anything you deeply love.

More than work, with time you see it as a journey. You try something and you see how it goes. Experience just slowly builds a map of that weird space we call art.

</comment><comment><USER6> > And I struggle to harmonize them, to find my way between them, uncertain > whether this work is worth it or a waste of my time.

I don't know I think I would say pick something to do in life that, even if you never achieve that mastery, you never regret a single moment spent doing it, because it was awesome.

</comment><comment><USER3> One word: Practice time - By Mr Positivity [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlCRfTmBSGs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlCRfTmBSGs)

</comment><comment><USER7> So if he doesn't get to play Carnegie Hall, he just ups and drops the whole thing? Yeah, well, welcome to the topsy-turvy world of rock and roll. I'll admit I only skimmed it, because the opening came across as whiny, but I guess the gist is that practicing should be taken as a pleasure unto itself. Well, duh. If you don't like playing your instrument for its own sake, I would guess you'd never make it as a pro regardless of your skill.

It became evident at an early age that I was not the next Jimmy Page. That didn't keep me from continuing with the guitar for the next forty years. Oh, I've been paid for my playing from time to time, but I'd never make a living at it. Just like the huge numbers of musicians who are far, far better than I'll ever dream to be: they can't make a living at it, either. It's a tough business. Oh, you had to go be an editorial assistant? Hey, beats waiting tables, which is what even more skilled musicians are doing every day in cities around the world.

There is no danger of anyone paying to hear me play the mandolin I bought this year, either. Doesn't stop me from playing the hell out of it. I _like_ playing it, knowing I'll never make a dime off doing so. I've not even concluded that I'll ever be any _good_ at it, let alone paid. But my wife doesn't mind my playing (that she says, anyway), I like it, so I'll stick with it.

The imposter syndrome part I never got (I might have skimmed the article, but I specifically looked for that). How can a musician have imposter syndrome? Developers, eh, I may not find out for a month or two that they suck (which is what "imposters" worry about). A musician? Pick up that Fender, knock out _Crossroads_ for me, we'll find out really quick whether you're any good.

(Feel free to down vote me for mouthing off about an article I barely read, I probably deserve it. I'll take the hit, but frankly what I read was whiny and kind of boring/obvious, yet I couldn't let it go without comment.)

<comment><USER8> This comment was clearly made by someone who has never practiced art or music at a high level. You are trying to compare your experience as a musician with someone who has worked toward and dreamed of being one of the best there ever was since some time in, most likely, early adolescence.

I was among the best in my year on my instrument in the country. I went to one of the top music schools in the world, and then I moved to New York to keep studying and start working as a musician. Some time in the middle of the financial crisis, I got tired of being broke all the time, and of constantly battling injuries (that's thing you've probably never had to worry about, as an amateur musician. Your arm is sore? You get to take a few days off!), and teaching music to the spoiled children of the masters of the universe. I learned to code and started working as a programmer.

Everyone who has ever been among the best, but didn't quite make it, has to, at some point, decide they didn't make it, and quit. Once I quit, I barely touched my instrument for two years. Playing when you're out of practice can be pretty painful to someone who is highly trained. You've worked for years toward perfection and then you just have to start accepting... less than that.

Here's another thing that happens when you quit: you have a constant voice in the back of your mind wondering whether you gave up too easily. You were there with the best people in the world, and now you watch them take their place among the leading lights of the art, and you can't stop picturing yourself among them. It's not whining, it's the painful experience of giving up your lifelong image of yourself. Being a musician, a top level, professional musician, dominates your whole identity. Try to imagine this: rather than finding out at an early age that you're not the next Jimmy Page, you get very good very quickly at a young age, and people start telling you, hey, you could be the next Jimmy Page. You work for decades to get good enough, sacrificing your personal relationships, your childhood, choosing over and over again to stay in and work instead of doing whatever else you could be doing, and then at age 30 after years of near misses and barely scraping by, you realize you're just not the next Jimmy Page. It's not an early realization, it's a gradual defeat. And it's devastating.

Regarding imposter syndrome, there have been studies of musicians using the standard "sandwich method" of delivering criticism, in which the criticism is sandwiched between two compliments. Trained musicians often don't hear or register the compliments at all. I had this experience with my girlfriend recently. She played some excerpts for me, I said, "wow you sound great, I liked X and Y. Here are a few things you should work on." She asked me later if I thought she was complete shit. I said, "I said you sounded great," and she said "You did?" She literally had not even heard me say I thought she sounded great.

Here's another fact about the music world. People are often loath to tell you that you don't sound good (or don't sound great). Musicians know this, and so every time someone tells you that performance was great, there's a little part of you that wonders if you're being lied to. Often you'll get hired by a contractor to play a gig, and then never get called by them again. Sometimes that's because they have their regular people and you were just a stand in, or because they died or moved or whatever. Other times it's because they didn't like your playing. But they never tell you which one it is. So every time you don't get called back for a gig, regardless of what the actual reason is, there's a chance it's because you weren't good enough. Feedback is not consistent and it is not reliable.

So given those two facts, is it a wonder musicians can suffer from imposter syndrome? It's not a question of, "people will realize I can't play guitar," it's the very fine line between being very very good, and being great. Regardless of which side of the line you're on, you're always wondering.

Does that clear things up?

<comment><USER9> Here's something I've wanted to ask a professional musician for a while. It seems like most listeners' enjoyment doesn't actually depend much on your technique, which you've spent years perfecting. Practicing your instrument (or more general "musicianship") might not even be the main limiting factor for becoming a sought-after musician, as opposed to things like charisma and theatrics, or songwriting, or imagination... I don't know. What do you think?

<comment><USER8> I think of technique in very different terms. Technique is the ability to execute very precisely what's in your head on your instrument. That ability is meaningless without all the things you list, especially, I'd say, imagination, but so too are those things meaningless without technique. You can have all the imagination in the world, but if you can't execute what's in your head exactly, that imagination will not be illuminated for the audience.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> So this piece is essentially comments on another piece by this Kurtz guy, and the commentary is quite banal. Luckily the author seems to thoroughly reproduce the original piece which really wasn't too bad.

<comment><USER8> It's a book review. Is that not a valid form of writing to you?</comment></comment>


Mr. Google's Guidebook (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://whimsley.typepad.com/whimsley/2008/03/mr-googles-guid.html?

<comment><USER2> That's something rare on the web these days.

Too often, all textual content is optimized for shares, search engines, and algorithms.

Reading fiction that makes a point is a happy surprise.

\-----

Speaking of which: I now realize that today's web spiders are completely ignorant of fiction. You can't write a piece of fiction without algorithms interpreting your work literally.

</comment><comment><USER3> mirror?

<comment><USER4> [http://tomslee.net/2008/03/mr-googles- guid.html](http://tomslee.net/2008/03/mr-googles-guid.html)

It also works better on mobile.</comment></comment>


Dear awesome startups, don't join an accelerator, unless… - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/02/16/dear-awesome-startups-dont-join-an-accelerator-unless-y-combinator/ <comment><USER2> Of the twelve startups founded since 2007 that have reached a billion dollar valuation, two of them were funded by YC and another of them was founded by a YC alumni. It's crazy to say that's a bad outcome.

It's a mistake to think getting into an accelerator is about getting access to VC. VCs are probably the most connected people in the startup industry, pretty much anyone with a good startup can get an intro to any VC they want within two degrees of separation.

The point about pivoting is particularly wrong, a substantial number of YC funded startups have pivoted during their YC period and raised successfully on or before demoday.

Someone who argues mentors are no use while you're in the process of building your startup has obviously never built a startup.

<comment><USER3> Can you list these 12 companies? (Which one was founded by a YC alumni?)

<comment><USER2> Instagram, Pinterest, Square, Dropbox, Evernote, Yammer, Groupon, AirBnB, Gilt, LivingSocial, Nicira and Zynga

(Although depending on your criteria you might want to include Hulu, Vancl, Rovio and Wonga in that list too taking it to 16)

Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann previously founded MightyQuiz (YC W08).

<comment><USER4> I noticed that we were missing some b2b companies, Yammer being one. Not sure how many more there are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is it true that Dropbox/AirBNB make up most of YC's (monetary) value? I know they're the big ones, but it still sounds fishy. What about Reddit, for example? Heroku? The company that built Draw Something? (I forget their name).

Also, _many_ of the 400 companies who have been through YC are very recent, and simply haven't had a chance to grow as much as Dropbox has.

Other than these questions, I think the article does make a few valid points - it does seem to me that there are a _lot_ of programs around, and I'm not sure they are worth the time for most people. I'd be interested to know if the prevailing sentiment among VCs really is that most seed accelerators don't matter (discluding YC).

<comment><USER2> 1) Yes. It's true of angel investments generally too, the top companies form a disproportionately large percentage of the value.

2) Yes, you basically need to do cohort analysis for meaningful results.

3) It depends what you mean by "most seed accelerators don't matter", certainly there's a big drop-off in quality in startups as you go further down the rankings of seed accelerators and VCs pay less attention to them. That doesn't mean that the accelerators aren't adding value to the startups though.

<comment><USER5> Yes, it turns out the article is correct (see also frankdenbow's helpful comment below).

Follow-up question/observation: the article makes it see like only Dropbox and AirBNB were "winners", which I understood to mean they were the only 2 that gave YC a return. Here's the quote from the article:

'And even though most YC companies have no problems raising additional capital, the program has only produced two big "winners." Dropbox and Airbnb make up three quarters of the value of Y Combinator's $10 billion portfolio. That's two huge successes out of something like 400 companies.'

Is this only true because Dropbox and Airbnb are spectacularly successful? E.g., if another YC company became the next Google next year, would the article have said "YC has produced only 1 success", and Drobpox/Airbnb would be relegated to "not as good as the Google-sized success"?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What is telling to me is that nobody, not PG or anybody else could have predicted which of the 400 ended up to be billion dollar companies. But for those two that made it to that magical marker being in YC made all the difference.

> And even though most YC companies have no problems raising additional > capital, the program has _only_ produced two big "winners."

The word 'only' has no place in that sentence, it is a pretty good record for early stage investing, and it does not take into account stripe, heroku and others.

<comment><USER7> The nature of power-law distributions is that there will be a few exceptional outliers. If you set your definition of what a "big winner" is on those outliers, of course you will only have a few.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The article mentions that most of YC's value is in just two companies (Dropbox, AirBNB) out of some 400 funded. That would be awful performance for a traditional VC, but the amount of time and money put in by YC into each of those 400 companies is between 1/100 and 1/1000 of how much a traditional VC would put into a deal.

So, if you're comparing to a traditional VC model, compare YC to one that has made e.g. 10 investments. And to have Dropbox, AirBNB as two of your ten (regardless of all others), is something every VC would envy.

<comment><USER6> Apples (VCs) to oranges (seed investors / incubators).

For a VC 2 out of 400 would be spectacularly bad, for an incubator to have 2 winners of that magnitude is actually really good and there are a few others that have already exited (Heroku, YC08 iirc for instance) that increase that even further.

Add in stripe and the current crop of 'hot' stuff and YC is looking pretty good.

But you still can't compare it with a VC, it's a different model, different risk/reward.

<comment><USER8> Incubators and VCs may be oranges and apples, but YC started a new kind of incubation system, to which the name "accelerator" (which is in common use) is more fitting than "incubator".

A traditional VC, compared to an incubator, was able to offer access to bigger money in the next rounds (whether the VC's own, or other funds it co-invests in), and networking.

But YC (and other accelerators) actually give you everything a traditional VC does. The main difference is bureaucracy & first round size: A traditional VC spends 2-3 whole months trying to decide if to take a deal or not; therefore it makes no sense to invest anything less than $500K (and often no less than $2M), and you have 1-2 investments/year/partner.

YC and other accelerators invest ~$20K, with (comparatively) no overhead, but otherwise give the same access to networking and future money.

It's apples to oranges only in the sense that when you're hungry, either one will help you get through the hunger. For one of them, you have to wait much longer in line, and it keeps your hunger at bay for longer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Accelerators need the good companies more than the good companies need the accelerators."

<comment><USER10> I remember a talk by Joi Ito, where he reasoned all his pro bono activities in a similar way: You want to be in the room when the next Google takes the stage - because they will chose their investors, not the other way round.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't think anyone who hasn't started a company is qualified to write an article like this.

 _If there's a chance you'll pivot halfway through the program and demo a one- month-old idea to a crowd of investors and media, you're not going to win._

This is just flat-out wrong... Greplin, Codeacademy, Meteor all come to mind. Most companies don't pivot, but the ones that do, often end up doing the best (at least in YC history).

<comment><USER12> The OP's point is that the major benefits of accelerators don't always align with the needs of a given company. It's probably a fair point - Demo Day happens on Demo Day, not on the one day that happens to be ideal for all the companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> "So don't join an accelerator unless you can win it." So we're basically in a situation in which self-selection rules now. In the future, if you made it through an accelerator and "won" it you were already in a position to do so. That means that the benefit of actually winning the round from the accelerator was minimal since you most likely would have succeeded anyway.

Given the massive difference in funding between an accelerator seed (tens of thousands) and the first raised round (millions) it seems like the accelerators disproportionately gain from having these self selected success stories.

Accelerators, more recently, really seem to provide business direction and a stream of well documented CEO advice which, for a lot of these startups, solves zero of their engineering or customer problems. It's not that the mentorship provided at the labs is not useful but rather that it seems to solve a less important part of the overall problems early companies have.

And to top it off, like the article mentions, the effort rewarded during an accelerator is often related to pizzaz, flash, and cool demos rather than core product. I hope the accelerators look to strengthen their offerings to seed companies and really incubate them rather than slip further towards the "gateway to VCs" which, at times, seems like the predominant movement.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think the biggest problem is not so much the equity that you can lose, but also the time startups lose, especially in many of the newly created accelerators. I have seen founders being obligated to attend 9-5 in poorly designed co-working office-spaces when their own arrangements are much more efficient, having to pitch daily to people that have no impact on your success and having to attend day-long workshops on subjects they already master or are irrelevant to their challenges. In that way I have seen startups join accelerators and wasting a lot of time boosting the accelerators themselves (especially if they are corporate-driven) but decelerating themselves. When it comes to Demoday, there suddenly are few investors and even fewer press. The key thing that new accelerators don't realize is that YC did this for many, many years until their current status quo. Many accelerators think that just by calling a demo-day and showing ten startups that they pumped a total of $500K in, they will be the next YC. If they don't have the track-record yet, they better have 200K of followup cash ready for each startup to show that they really mean it and that their curation process resulted in a meaningful selection.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'll call hogwash. This article, I think, is missing the point by a thousand miles.

I don't think that YC invests in guys who want to draw cats for you (no offense to Mr. Cuban). That's the first layer.

I've been to pitch events where within the first 11.3 words you know that it is going to go nowhere. And then you learn that someone threw money at them.

What percentage of startups have a chance --purely on the nature of the business they propose to attack-- to reach a billion dollars. Is it 1%, 2%, 10% or 0.1%?

I would venture to guess that, YC or not, if you took all startups launching in the US, a very small number of them have a shot at a billion dollars.

No, not because there might be execution problems or anything like that.

Markets with billion dollar potential are relatively scarce when compared to, say, $25MM, $50MM or even $100MM markets.

And, even if you found one, there's the very real possibility of it being a displacement market rather than virgin territory ready for the taking. In other words, you have to share the cake with n players. More accurately, you have to STEAL cake from others. Chances are you are going to get poked in the eyes and kicked out of the room before that happens.

If the market is only good for a billion dollars total and there are ten players already in it, what are the chances of you capturing 100% of it? Right.

This means that, in order to even have a shot at a billion dollars you have to look for a market that is large. Huge large. If, for easy numbers, you identify a $100bn market, now you only have to steal 1% of the cake. And, while I am not saying that this is easy, it would be far more plausible than capturing 100% of a billion dollar market.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a insightful and interesting article but for a lot of folks I think accelerators are Extremely helpful.

(A) Lot of accelerators are readily accepting foreign companies and entrepreneurs. Helping provide them a base and also help with visa issues. Which would be very tough on their own.

(B) Many of these ideas are not well polished and need to refined further and converted into a viable business. And accelerators also help founders hyper- focus on the product.

With that said if you have a little cash for a few months time, have already started to work on your MVP and have decent connections in the industry. Then working in a co-working space and hacking your product is the best thing to do.

But each case is unique IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER17> There is a fundamental disconnect with the concept of an Accelerator and the concept of a Disruptive Startup. If you do the math, honestly, they are a really crappy deal for the Startup. The "acceleration" they provide is little more than standard information, standard anecdote experiences, and standard MBA advice. If what they offered actually had they value they claim, they would be creating a startup themselves. Accelerators are parasites on your ambition and capability. Trust yourself, trust your team, and be adult enough to not sign up for a nanny program that is just going to treat you like children and take a portion of your equity for it.

<comment><USER18> It the beginning, yc had much more interaction with their startups and it's clear that they wanted the startup to survive at any cost. Once the model grew larger there were just too many startups to mentor. Then, pg wanted them to fail as quickly as they could if they could not make something of their company quickly. That way yc would only have to mentor what he considered the strong companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> healthenclave: your comments are dead, looks like you've been hellbanned. Can't quite tell why since you literally only have that one comment.

<comment><USER16> I have no idea :( and it's my 1st comment

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is the ultimate linkbait title: "Sentence that is completed only if you ...".

<comment><USER21> I actually read the entire article and still not sure how to finish that sentence. Her main conclusion is "hustle", which has nothing to do with joining an accelerator.

<comment><USER22> I thought it was "don't join an accelerator unless... you can be the best company there" which is also a bit silly in my opinion (I think she said "win it" at one stage).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> it sounds like this is an interesting article, but on my android this website was barely usable. the feed on the right took up more space than the actual article and the header was huge. maybe it renders better on other phones, but for a site of the size of pando, they really should address a broader base for usability

</comment><comment><USER24> this was a great read.</comment>


The Newest Way To Game Twitter - Fake Followers - <AUTHOR> http://brooksbayne.com/post/79132853/the-newest-way-to-game-twitter-fake-followers

<comment><USER2> Ev responds:

[http://brooksbayne.com/post/79132853/the-newest-way-to- game-...](http://brooksbayne.com/post/79132853/the-newest-way-to-game-twitter- fake-followers#comment-6353220)

<comment><USER3> And to save you some time: this is a non-story or at least a mischaracterized one.

At this link he says the follower surges on the accounts in question are from Twitter's new "suggested people to follow" page at signup time.

<comment><USER4> That's how I started following Penn Jillette. On the other hand, I have my profile pic uploaded.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Another explanation might be an increase in Twitter spam. I can only speak for myself, but I've been getting tons a spammy followers over the past couple weeks. You'd think that the most popular accounts (like the ones highlighted in the article) would see the highest levels of spam, thus the sharp increase in new followers. I'm sure the suggested followers feature Ev mentioned plays a part as well.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is what happens when your research leads you down one path instead of checking the obvious sources first. These people are on the list of suggested users: <http://twitter.com/invitations/suggestions> Twitter is suggesting people follow these people.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm not much of a twitter user but the uptake in the general public in the UK in the last two weeks is crazy - its gone from no-one to everyone in the space of a week.

Personally I think there was some kind of internal BBC briefing about using twitter for publicity - then the radio 1 jocks logged profiles all in the same weekend, started talking about it daily the week after and so started a snowball from the publicity.

Could that explain some of it?

<comment><USER8> I noticed a sharp increase in local Twitter usage on the radio here as well (US) a few weeks ago. That was most likely in response to Britney Spears' account getting hacked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Man, if this is true it seems pretty pathetic.</comment>