AT&T confirms it is buying ad platform AppNexus reportedly for between $1.6B-$2B - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/att-appnexus/ <comment><USER2> And just this morning I received a text from AT&T that said, in part, "Your privacy comes first, as always."

I wonder if they are getting their definition of privacy from the same place they get their definition of unlimited?

<comment><USER3> I think they mean the first thing they target is your privacy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There should be some decent commentary from industry people on r/adops:

[https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/8tqezg/att_to_acquir...](https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/8tqezg/att_to_acquire_appnexus_for_16_billion/)

[https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/8t2z0f/atts_brian_le...](https://old.reddit.com/r/adops/comments/8t2z0f/atts_brian_lesser_on_the_future_of_advertising/)

<comment><USER5> Extra props for including "old." there.

<comment> coastal-fiesta Why the dislike of the new interface?

<comment><USER6> How it looks, how it behaves, how it performs. If they implement it, I will finally be able to break the addiction, and will probably sell off my 11 year old account.

<comment><USER7> What's the going rate on decade-plus accounts? I've got one with a catchy handle, too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is incredibly disturbing, they need not inject a unique ID like Verizon's, they can now do it all on the backend.

<comment><USER9> When I went to start streaming the world cup, AT&T took the initiative to "sign me in" to a third party (Fox) without asking for credentials or permission.

They know who you are. They know everywhere you go. And they are happy to spread what they know about you around.

<comment><USER10> Have you used your login for any other TV service? The OTT industry has settled on a pretty broad single sign-on ecosystem. If you've logged into any OTT service with your crendentials, you likely don't need to do it again for any other service.

[https://www.fiercecable.com/cable/tv-everywhere-starts- up-46...](https://www.fiercecable.com/cable/tv-everywhere-starts-up-46-single- sign-adobe-says)

<comment><USER9> No. I've got Firefox configured to nuke almost everything on restart, plus I run PrivacyBadger and uBlock Origin. This is not me overlooking an existing login.

(I also run a site-specific browsers via Chrome to isolate my Gmail login and keep Google from knowing who I am, I have no Facebook login, etc. I'm not serious enough to run a VPN or Tor, and my setup isn't enough to guard against browser fingerprinting, but I'm reasonably paranoid.)

<comment><USER11> If they're your ISP they own you.

Personally it's handy as my ISP lets me watch tv on any device on my home network. They did it badly because it breaks if I change the SSID.

But you're not truly paranoid unless you're using tor or a vpn to get away from your ISP's network. Your efforts mostly are an annoyance to yourself but no impediment to other.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> On one side: Net neutrality is dead, so you can see where AT&T might see a future for expanding their advertising business. But on the other side: Between GDPR and the constant calls for the US to adopt something similar, the default integration of ad blockers into more browsers, and the fact that targeted advertising just... isn't all that effective, it seems like a poor business to start investing in now.

<comment><USER13> >default integration of ad blockers into more browsers

Good idea! The only way this could fail is if some huge advertising company had created their own browser and became dominant on the market. We would be so screwed! XD

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Wow. Wow. Wow.

Part of me is terrified that someone who has all my details just bought a firm that can trad on them. (It's economic magic though - as if the Federal Reserve bought a hedge fund)

But part of me says that when one dinosaur buys another, the end result is rarely Excellence. I suspect that this will wind up a disaster and write-off.

<comment><USER15> Been blocking ads for years pretty thoroughly. Its a trillion $ industry that might as well not exist really.

My advice: buy an unlocked Android phone. Throw DNS66 on it to block in app ads. Use browsers that support ublock origin, I advise Fennec which is Firefox for Android stripped of the Mozilla crap.

You are not a powerless victim, you have agency.

<comment> le-mark How is Fennec on the battery life? I tried firefox on android several years ago and uninstalled immediately due to battery consumption. Has that story changed?

<comment><USER16> I'd recommend giving Firefox another shot. It's leaps and bounds ahead of where it was on mobile more than a year ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Well, since ISPs are now free to sell / monetize consumer traffic data [0], this makes some sense. They are pretty desperate for ways to be something more than a dumb pipe for other's content.

[0] [https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/sjres34/summary](https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/115/sjres34/summary)

<comment><USER18> they were always free to do that...

<comment><USER17> Absence (with the threat of regulation) is a very different state than an explicit ban on regulation (via the CRA) and what amounts to a governmental endorsement of their move into ad tech.

You're correct that the rules never went into effect, but they also had no reason to invest in ad tech with the (increasingly probable) regulation looming in the future.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Last year, AT&T hired Brian Lesser, the former CEO of GroupM/WPP. They have been planning to enter the digital marketing as a player for a while now.

</comment><comment><USER20> More and more "vertical integration".

And, with the current FCC, I expect more forced "channeling" of customers/users into said integration.

I wrote Congress regarding net neutrality. I got one response -- and that not from my own representatives. And, despite my pointing this behavior out in my original letter, it just continued to shill the ATT, Comcast, Verizon, et al. talking points.

Right now, at home, on the connection Comcast just raised the monthly cost of by circa 30% since the beginning of this year, I'm using a VPN to keep their nose (and JS injection) out of my business.

I reiterate: We need a competing physical layer. One that we keep from getting likewise co-opted.

</comment><comment><USER21> Interesting answer to Verizon's acquisition of AOL + Yahoo, until all the recent acquisitions I (naively) just assumed ISP's revenue was primary from selling services (cable, internet, tv, data, etc) and reselling the data somehow, but did not connect that they're all very much in adtech...

<comment><USER22> I am more surprised to see Oracle in adtech. I assumed ATT would want a piece of the pie when I read about Verizon's supercookies. I think I still fail to grasp the size of the ad tech/marketing industry. I know it is big but I think it is bigger than I can comprehend.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This reminds me of all those times that Yahoo bought advertising networks and tools.

</comment><comment><USER24> So as someone getting AT&T Fiber this week, what VPNs should I look at using?

<comment><USER25> Make your own with a box in AWS or any other cloud provider running something like Strongswan on Linux or iked on OpenBSD.

All the out of the box VPNs I've found have some shortcomings, either being horribly insecure (PPTP, seriously?), overpriced, often abused (which means their entire subnet is banned by pretty much everything) and the providers sometimes seem shady (I want a VPN to escape cancer aka ads, not the government - in this case I'd actually prefer something akin to an ISP complying with local laws versus a "bulletproof" one who could very well be a fly-by-night operation up to no good).

<comment><USER26> I've found that a lot of typical residential traffic (Netflix) is blocked when routing through datacenters.

I'd love to hear your experience.

<comment><USER11> Lots of gaming traffic is also banned. People use AWS for malicious purposes (usually free tier) and then the IP gets recycled, eventually, to a legitimate user.

Popular cloud hosts with a freemium option are a bad idea for personal vpn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Sounds like a bargain to acquihire pkhuong... [https://www.pvk.ca/](https://www.pvk.ca/)

;-)

<comment><USER28> too late.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Well this is horrifying.

</comment><comment><USER30> Big congrats to Brian OKelley and Michael Rubenstein

<comment><USER31> With IPO rumors existing for at least 4 years and a price under $2B, is this a good exit for the company's leadership and employees? (Understanding that an exit is better than nothing at all!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The unaccounted for $0.4B goes to bonuses for CEOs? /s</comment>


Grey text - <AUTHOR> I've been reading this site for a while now. I notice in most discussions that a large percentage of commenters have their text greyed out. From watching, it appears that this happens either when a bunch of people downvote them or when a privileged user does something to their post.
Which ever the cause I think this is a policy that is harmful to deep and meaningful discussion. There's no doubt that this sort of "public muting" will have the affect of reinforcing group think. Does it seem healthy to do this to opposing views? Shouldn't we all desire to have our beliefs challenged by alternate viewpoints once in a while?
I see grey text in every thread, about every subject, for what appears to be any reason at all. Every day I see polite, reasoned opinions, about things that are far from "settled matters", even about such things as esoteric as Javascript code architecture, muted for saying something against the grain.
This is not a positive thing.
I ask that you please cease this absurd practice. If a post's content is inappropriate or detracts from a discussion, please remove it, but please stop this group think enforcing policy. <comment><USER2> You are very right.

A YC Moderator responded to a similar post alleging that it was necessary to maintain civility. _If someone reading this is a Moderator, I dare you to do a test._ You have the resources. Select several hundred suppressed comments at random and tabulate wether there is abuse in the post, or if not then tabulate it as disagreement. This is the sort of thing you are paid to do, so do it!

As you say it's actually being used to suppress divergence of opinion. Every time it's done to me, it takes longer than before for me to resume commenting on HN. Eventually I will stop.

What can be done? Sufficient loss of reputation points for a down vote etc. would probably be enough to discourage frivolous actions.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Sufficient loss of reputation points for a down vote etc. would probably be > enough to discourage frivolous actions.

This sounds like a great resolution. It's not that I think jerks need to get their voices heard, there should be some sort of detriment to abusive / rude / unhelpful posts, and I think your suggestion accomplishes that without reinforcing the group think. Good idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> If you find it annoying to read, use something like Dark Reader[0].

If you think a voting system is a harmful way of deciding what content is useful, then what do you propose instead?

[0]: [https://darkreader.org/](https://darkreader.org/)</comment>


28nm – The Last Node of Moore's Law - <AUTHOR> http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1321536&elq=93547af6f4464bdf8196f5ae3089e92b

<comment><USER2> How much more expensive are FinFETs to manufacture ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multigate_device#FinFET](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multigate_device#FinFET), basically 3D devices that trade height for width)? Per this article Intel is the only one doing them, and it includes FinFET technology in a list of expensive things.

With the article's focus on SoC chips, which might not be using FinFETs any time soon, I wonder if Intel will be able to do better with their 14 nm process node at their $5 billion Fab 42....

<comment><AUTHOR> Last I heard Fab 42 was delayed indefinitely. Not enough profit. Current talk is Intel is looking at IoT.

<comment><USER2> Woah. So they have, e.g. [http://www.extremetech.com/computing/174832-intel- cancels-14...](http://www.extremetech.com/computing/174832-intel-cancels-14nm- fab-42-in-arizona-but-its-nothing-to-worry-about)

And the Broadwell chips using it are reported to be delayed (not in the least surprising for a "tick" to a new process node), although as one analyst points out, if you miss the back to school buying period, as it will, there's no great rush afterwords to start shipping in quantity.

And getting to facts on the ground, as of late December I judged Haswell server systems (the "tock" architectural jump in 22 nm after the Ivy Bridge "tick" to it) not yet mature enough.</comment></comment></comment>


OpenShift by Red Hat - <AUTHOR> http://openshift.redhat.com/ <comment><USER2> So I need to warch some YouTube deployment videos or sign up to know how this actually works? And costs? Beyond the cute graphics on the home page it gets very confusing regarding what differentiates this from the competition.

EDIT: OK, I found more answers here: <https://www.redhat.com/openshift/faq>

</comment><comment><USER3> Why all the hatred towards OpenShift? It's just another PaaS solution and primarily a competitor to VMWare's CloudFoundry. Personally I welcome competition in this area.

</comment><comment><USER4> It's true that we're intent on serving enterprise customers, but we realize that many developers working on enterprise apps start out with personal project or small department projects and want as much innovation as they can have as long as we can stand behind it. The issue with many platforms is that the vendor doesn't have the long-term ability to stand behind the APIs and offer support. That's important when you get sick of debugging your own platform and you want to debug your app instead.

Power is intended to be a hosted version of the Aeolus capability: configure, update and migrate VMs across different clouds on-prem and off-prem.

We do support Java EE, and we're the only ones to do so right now. Check out the new Java development model called CDI which is part of EE 6 and is a radical simplification for Java while still providing access to nice things like transactions.

Finally, yes you could stand up your own JBoss on EC2, but then you'd have to patch it, back it up, configure all the systems management and load balancing and networking and keep that all up to date, etc. The lovely thing about whichever PaaS you choose is that we do all of that for you.

Issac (from Red Hat)

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand why they are working on OpenShift/Aeolus Project rather than joining Openstack

<comment><USER6> Because we are working on OpenStack [1] and the three projects you mentioned in your posting are all completely different things.

OpenShift: a PaaS service which runs on EC2

Aeolus: a graphical tool for managing VMs across different clouds (eg. manage and migrate your VMs across EC2 + OpenStack + vCloud)

OpenStack: basically an open source version of EC2 (not precisely, but that's roughly the aim).

[1] [https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Getting_started_with_OpenStac...](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Getting_started_with_OpenStack_Nova)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wow, that's some bad layout. The content section is narrow enough, but at least for me I have to make my browser window pretty wide so that it's all visible (OS X, Safari/Chrome/Firefox).

</comment><comment><USER8> Could be quite interesting if it has solid J2EE support (like Elastic Beanstalk but with JBoss instead of Tomcat) with message queues and everything.

<comment><USER3> I like Elastic Beanstalk, especially since it's just EC2 under the hood. You can still tweak for example Tomcat or Linux settings if you really need to (by creating a custom Beanstalk AMI).

Concerning message queues and other JEE features. There's nobody preventing you from deploying an EC2 instance with ActiveMQ or another broker :).

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> So, it is a Heroku clone, but without all its clarity that matters and visual beauty that sells. ^_^

And Power (can't tell how I hate that stupid primitive branding for idiots by idiots) is an attempt to be like AWS - disk-image based hosting.

What is really interesting, is that some people have invested money in such projects _at this time_ , and believes that it will be profitable. ^_^

<comment><USER10> I think Red Hat has an advantage here since they're a vendor that is now trusted by major corporations. These corporations have difficulty embracing the cloud because it's managed by someone else and use tools in ways that's far removed from their standards and expectations. It's good to have more competition in this space.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder what would be the pricing

</comment><comment><USER11> Bizarre.</comment>


Why natural cycles only play a small role in rate of global warming - <AUTHOR> https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/06/guest-post-why-natural-cycles-only-play-small-role-in-rate-of-global-warming/ <comment><AUTHOR> Journal article (free full text): [https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0555...](https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0555.1)</comment>


Hello HN this is how our story started. Regulated Enterprise Selenim Load Test - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/ButlerThing/status/870634634861740032 <comment><AUTHOR> Hi there, I have managed to get 150+ fully headed chrome browsers running on one VM with no affect on performance of each individual session. This potentially opens the door to do the most realistic load testing possible. I love to hear your thoughts. Please look at Butlerthing.io/product for a demo</comment>


The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I Work So Much - <AUTHOR> http://togelius.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-curse-of-increasing-marginal-work.html <comment><USER2> Recognizing the increasing marginal utility of work is _exactly_ what allows you to live your life well. IF you take advantage of it correctly.

Imagine you are stuck in a room with 10 screaming people. You could expend a bunch of effort and get one of the people to stop screaming, but this hardly seems worth the effort. There will still be 9 people screaming, and now you will be too exhausted to work on your own projects. Instead you devote a little effort to learning how to deal with the screaming while you get your work done.

THIS IS A MISTAKE.

It is a mistake because getting that person to stop screaming is a permanent improvement upon your situation. Getting the first person to stop screaming has very little utility, but the next one is easier AND makes an even bigger difference. The next one even more so, etc. By the time you get down to only 2 or 3 screaming people you are amazed at all the new things you can hear. You can almost hear yourself think!

When you work on things that give yourself more capability you are making permanent stackable improvements. By the time I had fixed the loudest screaming voices of nutrition, sleep, exercise, and constructively reacting to stress, I couldn't even recognize the person I used to be.

<comment><USER3>
        constructively reacting to stress

Can you expand on that point?

<comment><USER4> Small children (and many adults; and to some extent everyone) overreact when they get stressed: they become angry, self-centered, and incapable of measured logical thinking; they interpret incidental or minor problems as calamities; they lose sight of context and feel insulted by normally harmless comments; they ascribe their stress to totally unrelated causes. When multiple people are involved, and more than one is stressed, you get horrible miscommunication, and shouting matches where both people are convinced that the other one is a jerk.

As people grow up, they can learn to control their emotional response, or at least learn non-destructive coping mechanisms. (For instance, leaving an argument alone until both parties have calmed down enough to think about what's really at stake in the argument and what's important and come up with solutions that both can agree to.) They can learn the true causes of their stress, and try to fix those, instead of blaming unrelated people or events.

<comment><USER5> This is the most well-expressed comment I've read in a while.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is only true if you don't value the "compulsory" part of the job: Teaching, writing grant proposals, supervising Masters-level students, supervising Ph.D students where you do not publish as first author, etc. The system is set up so that researchers don't primarily research, which is a big problem and places absurd incentives to do an unhealthy amount of work.

On the contrary, I find that in most jobs I do, there is decreasing marginal utility of my work, since I have a finite amount of energy and the quality of my work goes down as I cross the 40-hour mark. People seem to have individual differences in where this cut-off point is, but I have yet to meet someone who claims it is not there. So for me, given that I value all my work, the concept of increasing marginal utility of work is strange. It would perhaps be different in another field than plain vanilla software development consulting, would be interesting to have a discussion around this.

<comment><USER7> I think it's pretty common in tech jobs as well. A frequent setup is that you have a longer-term project that's _really_ interesting but not deadline- pressing, so you can only work on it when you've gotten other immediate things out of the way first. There are attempts to try to explicitly make schedule space for the interesting long-term work (like Google's 20% time), but it still often ends up that you have to get a bunch of other less-interesting stuff off your plate each day or week, before you can get to the best stuff.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, I've got an interesting website reflow project that's on my todo list and will make a big difference, but it's not a priority I can block time out for, and the daily stream of tasks that need to be done "now" means I rarely get to it, but simply adding more hours to my work day wont actually produce the desired/best work.

<comment><USER9> You might be surprised with what you can get away with not doing from your stream of daily tasks that need to be done.

<comment><USER8> I'm pushing that to its logical extreme already ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "These are all tasks that I must do - not doing them would mean that I am simply not doing my job... The utility of that sixtieth work hour is so much higher than the tenth or twentieth because I can use it do my own research."

I don't think he makes a very good case here. The twentieth hour of work could mean the difference between doing his job and failing at it. The sixtieth could make him more prestigious.

There is a good case to be made for increasing marginal work utility, but it's much easier to make in terms of basic numbers in an ordinary market economy: working more hours often leads to a higher average hourly rate. For instance, if you are a consultant, and you spend extra time writing books, you may become a recognized expert and be able to demand much higher rates.

That makes it sound like overwork is logical. But this calculation targets only money, and money has a _decreasing_ marginal utility. And many other aspects of life also have a decreasing marginal utility, which is why people lead varied lives.

So, this problem has more to do with tunnel vision about your goals than with a fundamental curse of life. Keep at least a few goals in mind most of the time, and that will prevent you from falling into this trap.

My list would be something like (not necessarily in this order): health, family, friends, financial security, achievement, helping others, and making improvements for future generations. Usually I'm falling behind in a couple of these areas at any given time, and that helps me see what I need to do to change.

</comment><comment><USER11> Marginal utility to whom? The author? His university? Society? It seems to me in almost every case (except possibly the first) that everyone would be better served hiring someone to take care of the incidental work that consumes the first 60 hours (or as much as possible) and letting the professor work on his research.

The fact that this isn't so points to a couple of possibilities.

1\. Only the professor gets much utility out of his research--the organization which employs him would prefer him to spend his time on managing phd students and teaching.

2\. Universities are organized to optimize for organizational utility and not for each professor's maximal utility.

Incidentally, this story reminds me of many developers who are promoted to be managers and then are removed from what they loved about their profession in the first place. Similar to the author, such managers often have side projects at home to keep coding.

Unfortunately, the professor doesn't have the option of 'dropping out' of management like the developer-turned-manager does.

<comment><USER12> Or, research, teaching, and management are ALL important and interconnected, and have increasing marginal utility.

<comment><USER11> That's a possibility, but then why does he prioritize teaching and management over research?

<comment><USER13> Because teaching and management are on a more urgent timetable?

<comment><USER11> Urgency is not the same as importance.

<comment><USER13> Right, hence the dilemma in the article.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Author basically has a hobby (research), which costs him lot of time. It is like a manager who can not code because of his job. There are two ways:

* step down from administrator/teaching role and become full time researcher with all implications (lower salary, less prestige)

* give others full supports to do "your research", give them credit, your ideas and so on.

Sitting on too many chairs is just bad.

<comment><USER7> If it was just a question of salary/prestige, I think taking a lower-salary job with more research time would be appealing to many people. But many pure- research jobs also have little employment stability, or just don't exist. The ones that do exist are often "soft money" jobs like postdoc and research scientist, which are tied to grants, typically with a contract length of 1-3 years. It's _possible_ to chain such jobs together, but stressful and uncertain, and may require moving frequently (which can be tricky if you have a partner, and especially if you have school-age kids).

There are stable research positions, but they tend to actually be high- prestige and hard to get, like faculty member or permanent fellow at a research institute (Institute for Advanced Study and the like). In some fields you may also be able to find research positions in industry, or at a national laboratory, and those options are pretty popular, where they exist. A really well-funded lab that can string together enough grants to insulate the research scientists from the money flow and provide them _de facto_ permanent jobs can also be such a place, e.g. the heyday of the MIT AI Lab, which had many non-faculty researchers. Also a popular option when it exists, but fairly rare in CS (more common in areas like medicine).

<comment><USER15> > If it was just a question of salary/prestige, I think taking a lower-salary > job with more research time would be appealing to many people.

My experience is that it's not necessary the case. Even when such jobs exist ("low-salary" permanent research positions that may exist in some european countries for instance), a lot of people still prefer to take a professor position at some point.

Also, passed a certain age, some researchers find themselves less productive research-wise and want to do other things.

<comment><USER7> > "low-salary" permanent research positions that may exist in some european > countries for instance

Hmm, I'd be interested in learning more; sounds like the kind of position I want. :-) Around here (Nordic region) I don't know of any such positions though. There are teaching-only positions, which can be a good option if you like teaching but not research: no grant or publication pressure, just a stable job with reasonable work hours. And there are regular faculty positions, with the usual teaching/service/research/management mix. But I don't know of an option to go research-only, at least in CS. In some areas you could work for a state agency as permanent research staff, but I don't know of any that do CS research (civil-service research positions do exist in areas like historical archives, social science, energy policy, international relations, healthcare policy, etc.).

edit: I did think of one place with such positions, the French state technical research institute INRIA. Maybe I should learn French...

<comment><USER15> Actually, I was thinking of INRIA and CNRS in France. You don't even need to speak French to apply. Basically, there are two types of positions, junior and senior. What I find surprising is that many junior researchers apply for a professor position it they think they won't be able to get a senior researcher position (there is less and less of those). They trade a lot of academic freedom for about fifty percent salary increase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is academic work studying this. The superlinear return on time invested does occur in a variety of fields, and pay tends to follow the productivity gains.

Here is a paper which cites a lot of the literature (note: primary topic of the article is flamewar inducing):

[http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.ph...](http://www.aeaweb.org/aea/2014conference/program/retrieve.php?pdfid=1103)

<comment><USER17> I didn't read the paper in its entirety, but is the argument something like

competition introduces a superlinear factor in the time/pay equation

superlinear factors on average hurt women more than men since the latter are more likely to be on the upper end of workload (assuming a linear correlation of time/pay, you'd already get from a 77% "wage gap" to a pay gap of around 92%, which would tighten further or disappear if we account for "winner-takes- it-all" distribution of pay)

I find it relatively easy to believe that today's working environment leads to an incentive structure similar to all-pay auctions, where the employer reaps huge benefits due to everyone's fiction of attainable winning, and which hurt a majority of people, but women more visibly than men.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Let's say you have a queue processor called Q. It takes in jobs described by tuples of (hours, utility) like (8,1), (2,4), (5,15).

Using the above example, you make an interesting observation: if your queue processor processes only two items, it has an efficiency of (1+4)/(8+2) = 0.5 utilities per hour. If you process three items, it shoots up to (1+4+15)/(8+2+5) = 1.33 utilities per hour.

Remarkable! It would seem that the more items on the queue you process, the more efficient this queue processor becomes. Perhaps you have just discovered the Law of Increasing Marginal Queue Processing Utility.

Or perhaps the queue is being processed in the wrong order.

<comment><USER19> Or perhaps we attach a third field to the tuple and call it a "priority" and require that everything with higher priority is done before anything with low priority. Let's call it (I am probably inventing the term here) "priority queue".

Author actually writes about it. There are plenty of tasks that may be of low value to him but are absolutely essential for external reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The problem here is that the first 40 hours of work--which the author believes has low utility--are the hours which generate the money to pay for the author's job. The author places higher utility on the next 20 hours, but those hours don't generate money, but prestige and scientific advancement.

The situation is similar to an artist who cannot (yet) make money off her "artistic" work. Instead she has to do commercial work to support her "artistic" ambitions.

Utility seems to have several dimensions. It's easy to say that the first 40 hours of commercial work have low utility, but without those first hours, you would not able to survive to do the rest of the work that you are more interested in.

At the end of the day, you have to pay your bills. The work that pays your bills is not automatically lower utility than the work that you do for fun/prestige/skill/art/etc.

<comment><USER21> Except that's likely not the case here. For many professors, their salary is effectively paid by grants they bring to the university, which depend solely on their research. People who are paid to be teaching with no expectation of research do not generally have tenure track positions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> My company (rather big american software house) doesn't encourage me to work very hard. The harder I work, the more of my coworkers will be let go, but the software will still suck the same. The customers will pay the same. The competition adopts a similar strategy.

</comment><comment><USER23> For certain types of academic work (e.g., writing a book) the mental cost of initially loading all the relevant material into working memory takes a very long time, so once I've paid this upfront cost, I tend to keep working as much as physically possible to amortize the upfront costs.

If I stop working at 5pm like salaried ppl (or say 8pm like startup ppl), then the next day I'll have to spend another 2--3 hours to get back to the same mental state. I rather continue push on and ship something tonight (with some damaging health effects) than pay the upfront costs again tomorrow.

<comment><USER24> And burn out at 40 realizing that you can't keep a train of thought more than 2 minutes.

<comment><USER25> Or just structure your time differently, work really hard for 2 days. Take a day off, work a half day the next and work a normal day.

There are gains from working in long shifts, but if it's done everyday they completely disappear and turn negative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> First thought: this person has described a clear way in which his job is (truly, seemingly unfixably) broken.

Second thought: this seems like a business opportunity. Why are there such high-ritual organizations employing these people?

Third thought: Why are university professors allowed to do research at all if this isn't profitable? You'd expect if it makes them money they'd actually help, that's not happening, so it must not, but why have them spend so much time on it anyway? I keep hearing about publish or perish... what on earth is going on?

<comment><USER27> This author has an unusual view on what constitutes his job. In my area, bioinformatics and life sciences, it is taken for granted that a professor or PI (principal investigator) will be performing very few or no experiments personally.

Becoming a PI is a devil's bargain: you get more resources and personnel to tackle the questions that interest you, but in exchange, you largely give up the ability to directly do research yourself. The research gets done, but the actual code is written or experiments performed by grad students and postdocs. The PI has two main tasks: 1) getting grants, and 2) deciding on the goals and methods of the research.

Many PIs would argue that having a PI do experiments personally is actually a suboptimal use of time, like having Steven Spielberg meddle in minutiae of costume or set design instead of managing the big picture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't understand this. If he has the freedom to choose what he works on, and if it's conceivable that he could coast on 40 hours doing 'just his job', what forces him to spend the 40-60th hours on advertising research etc rather than doing his own?

It seems like he should be able to just do his 40 hour job then do as much personal research as he likes after hours.

<comment><USER29> It seems like work because it's done at work. An aspect of an academic job is that once you've done your 40 hours, you are free to use your employer's facilities, which include physical infrastructure but also library access, and the "branding" of the university to promote yourself. This is what provides that extra utility.

A line cook at McDonald's, if faced with what to do after putting in 40 hours, could at most make more burgers. Many white collar workers are restricted by things like confidentiality and conflict of interest rules.

Many of us get our super utility out of hours 41-60 by having a side business at home.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> > But as I was good at research I got promoted to a position where I had to > spend most of my time doing something else

Peter principle??

<comment><USER31> I would ascribe it to a different form of bad management. Lets say you have 10 first class applications graduated for every first class level job. There are immense value judgments to be made, but from a lazy manager perspective its much less psychically painful to just reward the guy who works the longest hours or has the worst stockholm syndrome (as this guy clearly has, because someone's getting a reward for his excessive work and it isn't him...)

Things are always going to get weird when the supply is too large compared to the demand.

If the average PHD creates 4 new PHDs in his lifetime, then all four are in deep trouble unless three extra jobs are created for them to sit in. What, you say the number of jobs is shrinking? Whoops. Life's going to suck for all four.

<comment><USER30> Ah.. that's a better explanation. Thanks for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This issue is one of the reasons the Iron Triangle (MacLeod-Gervais-Rao organizational model) is so interesting to me. See also: [http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/can-agile- bre...](http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/can-agile-break-the- iron-triangle-can-open-allocation/) .

I spent a lot of time investigating this in a number of different organizations. What I found is that most people who think they're overworked and have "no time" are spending a lot of time working on the wrong things. They've volunteered for mediocre projects and created too many recurring commitments for themselves. Recurring commitments make it harder to fire you, but they don't do much for your career, because doing the same job 20 times doesn't deliver much more benefit than doing it once.

If you work at a company where everyone works 9 to 8, you also have to work 9 to 8. The good news is that you can still probably get most of your work done in 2 hours, freeing up 9 to network internally and look for better projects, or read books/papers to study up on the skills your next job will require. If you never volunteer (except for a career-advancing project) and avoid recurring commitments, this means you have a lot of time to "learn on the clock". (Don't be dumb and write side-project code at your day job; you can do your exploration/research at your day job to make the side-project work more efficient at home, but it has to be done on your own time and machinery.) This is how most of the programmers who are reinventing themselves as "data scientists" are doing it.

Doing more grunt work, here meaning work that you don't learn or gain anything from, is a pointless game (for the Clueless). You get tired faster, you're more likely to lose social polish and fail politically. The first people fired or PIP'd in a "low performer initiative" (which is a dishonest layoff) are usually overperformers who worked too hard, got themselves emotionally overinvolved, and lost the political game. It's only in a deep cut (10 to 20%) that the company runs out of politically-failed "pain in the ass" employees and start removing the long-term underperformers who've been hiding for years.

Of course, there is work (growth-oriented work, in particular) where the returns are exponential and, for that kind of work, you shouldn't stop because it's 5:00pm. If one programmer is growing at 4% per year and the other one works three times as hard and grows at 12% per year, the difference over 20 years is that the former will be just 2.2 times more productive, and the latter will be 9.6 times more productive. (In capability, if not salary, I've seen programmers grow at _30_ percent per year.) That may not matter for salarymen, but it's a big deal if you ever want to go off and start your own thing. The 4%-growth engineer is barely able to justify a senior-level salary; the 12%-growth engineer is a sought-after "10x" engineer.

So what's the answer? If the work is strategically valuable and growth- oriented, do as much of it as you physically can do well. This doesn't mean neglecting your social life or relationships or fitness, because those are important too. It does mean that you shouldn't stop just because it's 5:00 and you're three episodes behind on the Walking Dead. (I'd say that the average person can handle about 65 hours per week; beyond that, it starts to get unsustainable for most.)

For the scut work that's not going to help your career or teach you anything, that just gets shuffled around because no one wants to do it, do as little as possible. The politically optimal point, when assigned bad work, seems to be the 35th percentile in quality. Below the 25th percentile, you risk the appearance of having intentionally blown off the grunt work (which is different from just not being well-suited to it, because the former will be taken against you and the latter will be tacitly accepted) but above the 50th, you're in danger of doing it too well and getting assigned more of it.

The importance is knowing the difference. You need to do just enough of the "dues paying" work to fit in, and avoid recurring commitments as much as you can get away with, but put as much of your work time as possible into the compounding-interest growth-oriented work, and as little into the dead-end grunt work. In Iron Triangle terms, this is why strategy wins out over dedication.

<comment><USER33> Do you have any tips for identifying career advancing projects? Identifying grunt and growth work is easy enough, but correctly guessing what might become a high profile project is a skill that has always eluded me.

<comment><USER32> It's easier to tell if the project will help your _external_ career. Will you get to put some of the work into open source software? Will you be able to present it at conferences? Is it going to make an interesting line on your CV?

For _internal_ career prediction, that's harder. My advice: just talk to people. The reputation of the project is a better indicator than any technical details. A project that is technically excellent but poorly sold internally is still going to be an effective failure.

<comment><USER34> Not necessarily. GMail, Google Instant, Knowledge Graph, and every visual redesign Google's ever done were all very controversial internally, with a number of people predicting that they'd be the death of the company. (When Instant was under construction, we had a betting pool going on in my team about how long until it'd be rolled back, something I'm glad to say nobody won.) All of those turned out to be quite large career boosts to people who worked on them, and in GMail & Instant's case, good career boosts externally as well.

I would evaluate external career boosts the same way I evaluate startup ideas. (Evan Williams has a good framework here:)

[http://evhead.com/2007/12/how-to-evaluate-new-product- idea.a...](http://evhead.com/2007/12/how-to-evaluate-new-product-idea.asp)

For internal career boosts, I would do the same, but eliminate the question about discoverability and monetizability, and view "wideness" and "deepness" through the lense of the power of individual executives within the company. It's not enough to hold a wide appeal to potential users, you need to hold wide appeal to the users _that your VP cares about pleasing_ , or you need to deliver value along the lines of your VP's thought process.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Designing a Scalable Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://natishalom.typepad.com/nati_shaloms_blog/2009/04/writing-your-own-scalable-twitter.html

<comment><USER2> I don't understand why he puts numbers on the scaling requirements. Either it scales or it doesn't.

Otherwise a good read.

<comment><USER3> It either scales or it doesn't? You really underestimate the amount of effort needed to scale even the simplest website to millions of users. Even if your web app is written in OMG-uberfast x86 assembly, I can guarantee you that you'll have trouble scaling to Google-size traffic.

There are different levels of scaling. The more users you have, the harder it becomes. But it's generally not worth scaling beyond what you actually need because if you don't need it, then you've wasted tons and tons of man power that could have been invested in other areas.

<comment><USER2> Scalable, by definition, means more nodes = more capacity.

Speed has nothing to do with it.

A simple stateless website that requires no shared data like from a db, is scalable, since you can add more web servers to fulfill more requests.

Using memcached, however, isn't scaling, because while memcached itself does scale, if the backend it reads from doesn't, the whole system doesn't.

<comment><USER3> Even so, there's a limit to how many nodes you can add given an architecture. Scale from 1 concurrent user to 1000? No problem, just add a server. Scale to 100000? Add many servers, and load balancers, maybe master-slave replication for database. Scale to 10 million? Putting more boxes in your data center help you anymore because your data center is full, you don't have enough bandwidth and even the master-slave database setup you had overloaded. You need to setup multiple geographically distinct data centers in the world and shard your database. What if you have 100 billion users? Adding more data centers on the same planet won't help anymore; I don't even know whether anybody is technically capable of serving 100 billion concurrent users.

Sure, the latter architecture can serve 1 concurrent user, but it's also 100000 times more expensive. The answer is not as simple as "it scales or it does not".

<comment><USER2> Fair enough, I just wish articles would stop using the word 'scalable' to describe everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think Twitter is a bad usage case, because it's not something that NEEDS to be scalable.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you read link summary or just the title while searching? - <AUTHOR> While searching in any search engine, do read the short summary or just the title to determine that was something you want to know? <comment><USER2> Depends on the quality of the title and what I am searching for.

Generally I've found that a lot of people are not terse enough with webpage titles, email subjects or forum post titles (which become webpage title).

I'm curious as to why you ask such a question. ;)</comment>


End of the Road for the Land Rover Defender - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/news/end-of-the-road-for-the-land-rover-defender/ <comment><AUTHOR> 'The Land Rover is "the car" most people in the developing world saw first' \-- 'For the Love of Cars' ~ [http://www.channel4.com/programmes/for-the-love- of-cars/vide...](http://www.channel4.com/programmes/for-the-love-of- cars/videos/all/s1-ep2-series-1-land-rover)</comment>


What's Wrong With CS Research (2007) - <AUTHOR> http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/whats-wrong-with-cs-research.html

<comment><USER2> What a load of bullocks. There are many fields within CS that are very interesting that don't fall within any of these characterizations, like AI, machine learning and computer vision.</comment>


Everything is broken - <AUTHOR> http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%22is+broken%22&start=0 I thought that I was seeing a lot of "... is broken" headlines lately and I was right. <comment><AUTHOR> Everything

Python's lambda

Twitter

Venture Capital

Embedded Video

Internet Identity

Vimgolf

Klout

The stream

Tims watch

College

news.yc

Agile Development

Startup Hiring

The CMS

The Classroom

Interviewing process

Venture capital

TV

That Whole Concept

Chip and PIN

Trouble Ticket System

Our Grading System

Firefox on Linux

Google Analytics JavaScript

The VC model

The Nonprofit Model

My Extrovert Button

Facebooks data export

Your Test Suite

This

Forth

Tech Blogging

The Traditional Workplace

XML Security

POSIX close(2)

GiftRockets business model

our government

Stock market reporting

Tell PG: Logout

HNSearch

Venture Capital: Who (Not What)

Hacker Newss RSS feed

Hunter Becomes the Prey - <USER2>

Identity on the web

Example #745 of how Microsoft

Crowdsourcing

Nvidias Fermi (GTX480)

Copyright

Hey, Fred, the VC Model

Open Source: The Model

The VC Model

Venture Capital

Your To-do List

IE9′s Viewport Code

The VC distribution system

Reality

Proof the peer review process

Seth Godin: This

The VC Shakeout The cycle

the drug-discovery model

Catching exceptions

Information Loss: Linking from Twitter

The Submissions System

Windows (and thus Microsoft)

WWDC selling out fast = WWDC

The Android back stack

Intel Software Division

Android Market Search

Advertising in Mobile Games

Webkit (Chrome, Safari) console.log

Local Discovery

Hacker News RSS feed

Googles hiring process

The Legal System in America

Mark Zuckerberg: Believe the Company

Amazon Order Search

Greece

[Python-Dev] hasattr

think bookmarks, history or info retrievals in browsers

What

Healthcare

Tell PG: The HN down-vote feature

Chip and PIN

Reddit

Opera: Browser market

RSS feed

PayPal Moves Into Facebook But The App

Music

This

The Traditional Venture Capital Model

Newsy: The News

Tell PG: Posting on HN

The S3 SLA

Education

Adeo Ressi Explains His VC

VC

Software vendor model

Even Forced SSL

Symbian OS

Viewing RSS in a browser

Silicon Valley

An overview file locking

Google Instant Proves Googles Design Process

peer review

RSS

The MMORPG Subscription-Based Business Model

This

When it Comes to the Web, Venture Capitalism

Gartner figures out that the Windows ecosystem

The global economy

AES on the iPhone

the patent system

SOPA/PIPA Debacle Show How Congress/House

How PHP

What do you think

Social content discovery

RTFM

Vimeos search

Your code

the patent system

The Internet

The Mothership

Education

zooming on mobile

The iphone app Hacker News

Googles hiring process

Does anyone else feel the Feature Request

Privacy of 3.5 Billion Cellphone Users Compromised – GSM Code

the Packtpub CMS Competition

Rails asset caching

Shopping

kottke: Twitter

Notice HN: The Review System on most major sites

Andrew Klavan on Reality

Of Rubber Stamps and CheckBoxes - your Android ListView

Email

Ogg and WebM technical alert: default FFmpeg Vorbis encoder

Video: Angel Investor Chris Dixon on Startups & the VC Model

Peer to Patent: Community Patent Review the system

Google App Engine

Googles Opt Out from 3rd party cookies extension

Delicious Spy

The Pharmaceutical R&D Model

the Discussion on Swartz

Google

The VC product

Your (Ruby) code

We think micro-stock

The VC Product

Getting Things Done Is Not So Clear: The Exquisite App

App Discoverability</comment>


Show HN: Can anonymous chat within identified groups create better discussions? - <AUTHOR> http://freeversation.com/blog/2011/06/29/identified-anonymity/

<comment><USER2> I await the results of this experiment with interest.

My gut feeling is that:

A) To first order this won't really work. You can't really be anonymous in a closed group. In a small closed group you can't be anonymous at all (the degenerate case, two people, is obvious; writing style is an identifier in larger groups) and in a really large group the stakes of letting your mask slip are too high and will squelch serious conversation, while the lure of the big crowd will drive trolls and comedians.

B) To second order this could work great. The second-order advantage of this is the _useful social fiction_ of anonymity. Anonymity doesn't have to be cryptographically strong to be useful. Think: a masked ball. The masks aren't that highly effective - that seven-foot-tall masked woman is pretty easy to ID, mask or no - but if everyone plays along the game can go well. Plus, you can get _plausible deniability_ , which can be very useful in social situations. ("No, it wasn't me who confessed that secret in anonymous chat. It must have been some other native speaker of Finnish from a basketball team in Toledo, Ohio.")

C) But, alas, I'm not sure use case (B) is significant enough to drive a product on its own. Nor that it will be easy to get the site's culture off on the right foot.

A great experiment; I hope it goes well despite my worst fears. We certainly need many more alternatives to the "stand naked in front of the world on the Googleable Internet" model of online conversation.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the interest, all good points.

Even in smaller groups though, people may be able to consciously subvert their mannerisms and still get their point across. Not saying it will be easy, but I wouldn't rule it out.

I agree with the plausible deniability point, but i think it can theoretically apply equally to small (and by small i mean at least 10 ppl) and large groups alike. There are many ideas that are not too controversial, but just touchy enough that plausible deniability would be sufficient to overcome the anxiety barrier. This would only work for comments that a user would have no problem being suspected of saying, as long as noone could categorically prove it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A forum was recently launched at work which allows anonymous posts and comments. It has been both good and bad.

The good: Open discussions about sensitive topics with fear being singled out. A good example of this is that someone posted about the company doing more to accommodate individuals who are transgender. Obviously, the person who posted it wanted to speak out with fear of stigmas attached. Also, it has been great for openly discussing what we think the company is doing wrong.

The bad: There are some bad seeds that have been very negative about the company, how we work, what we focus on, what tools we use, etc. This in and of itself is not bad, but it isn't always a discussion. Instead, it is more in line with trolling.

Overall, it has been good for us, but we are constantly looking at how to make it better. Like how to promote the good aspects while trying to discourage the bad.

<comment><USER5> It defeats the whole point of this system if those who criticize things are simply labelled trolls to be considered bad corporate citizens.

Chairman Mao called for a hundred flowers (opinions) to bloom. He invited criticism of the system. At first people said "It's a trap" and no one seriously criticized, only token critiques were offered. Perhaps similar to modern suggestions about policies for washing mugs, what sort of free coffee should be available in the breakroom, or if there should be a third bathroom for transgender. Things that don't represent any serious challenge to the existing order.

Then Mao made clear he really wanted criticism of the system and no one should hold back. So people started talking about what was wrong, and telling the truth about the failures of totalitarian communism. These criticisms were considered "absurd", the people were labelled trolls ("rightists"), rounded up, and executed in the Anti-Rightist Campaign.

If you want honest feedback from people, calling them trolls, with the implicit threat that criticism is wrong and should be eliminated, is not the way to get it.

The only way to have real honest feedback in a small group is to listen sincerely, and _eliminate punishment of dissidents_. This can only be done through trust, which is developed slowly and with difficulty. 99.99% of the time when corporate says to trust them and it's OK to make suggestions, they are lying and intend to identify and destroy anyone who seems to be a threat to their agenda.

I guarantee that if we collect a list of all the actual "troll" things that were said, most people outside your system will see significant numbers of them as representing valid criticism, and therefore unmask the truth that labeling the criticism "trolls" is an exercise of power to eliminate minority dissent.

<comment><USER4> We want input. I know the executives want feedback. Our company has a good history change through complaints and feedback. The founders were skeptical of version control, a programmer said we need it. They adopted CVS even though the founders thought it was pointless. We moved to SVN a couple years later when another new programmer said CVS was crap. One frontend/designer told the founders the brand and company name was crap. He created a new brand and name. Now he is in charge of the marketing department. We now have a UX department because one designer wanted to try it.

We have changed lots of things about our process and tools because the managers listen to what we, the developers, designers, QA, etc, say and ask for.

As we grow (doubling this year), our biggest challenge is maintaining the communication. Management wants, and I believe they are sincere, to have a way for anyone to complain or point out what we are doing wrong in an open and safe way. Part of that means being able to post anonymously. We once had a great discussion questioning why we are growing and why we focus on the market we do. These are big topics, unlike washing dishes and choice of coffee.

The problem is not people complaining or questioning what we are doing. The problem is someone anonymously saying "x sucks" then not having a discussion. Yes, X does suck, but if the person posting this isn't willing to give examples of why it sucks or suggest how to fix it, I consider it a harmful use of the anonymous post.

<comment><USER5> Thanks for the response. I'll mostly skip the first three paragraphs of use of anonymity that is good, but I will say it is a bit weird that version control advocacy required anonymity. If there is fear of reprisal from something that most normal developers reasonably advocate for, then there is a culture of fear present, which is nearly always based on past experiences of punishment. Something to look into and perhaps fix there.

The last paragraph is where you give an example of bad use of anonymity. You state a situation where someone says X sucks, and it is known that X does suck. This you say is harmful use. But it is not harmful. The person says X sucks, and X does suck. Since you know that X sucks, you yourself and others must know why it sucks. Saying it is not only wrong but _harmful_ to _state what is obvious and known_ at your firm is yet another indication that you have a corporate environment of fear and reprisals. Obviously someone doing "harm" should be gotten rid of, therefore, accepting your assertion it is harm, the person should be eliminated. Not considered though is that the person is obviously NOT doing harm and that stating so is unfounded propaganda to squash an unpopular statement of truth.

<comment><USER6> I think his point is when someone says "X sucks" but has a hidden agenda. Or just is destructive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps you could run each message through Google translate or something similar (e.g. English -> French -> English) to obfuscate the writing style. Otherwise, as others have already pointed out, it is very indicative of who the author is.

<comment><USER8> I foresee this having hilarious unintended consequences.

<comment><USER9> i wonder if you could repeat with different languages and take some kind of semantic median? interesting problem.

[just to clarify, given the replies - i am talking about repeating in parallel, not in series. the idea being that errors might cancel out, rather than accumulate]

<comment><USER10> I think all conversations should be run back and forth through Google Translate until they reach equilibrium (a la Translation Party). For added awesomeness, do a multi-way equilibrium instead of just two languages.

<comment><USER11> Your post in Translation Party:

      I (translation of a la carte party) have achieved a balance
      between the universal and Google, and I need to translate
      the conversation. Not only, Blip.fm, from how to move from
      the language of two additional multi balance.

I think two languages is bad enough.

<comment><USER12> Tangential, but Translation Party doesn't work for me in the newest (stable) Firefox and Chrome.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Possibly. However, I've found that it's fairly easy to identify who is saying what based on writing style, grammar and punctuation habits. Any HR person will tell you that's how they identify respondents to "anonymous" employee surveys.

<comment><USER5> This is a good point. To date I have not had an anonymous survey in a small group that hasn't bitten me in the ass afterwards.

I also find some anonymous surveys interesting when they are placed in my mailbox and come with a unique identification number. When asking about this uid, I am always told it is for quality control purposes or such. Yeah right.

Anyway, the proposed idea is interesting. I could see it being abused though. Someone from management, A, who wants to know what you really think of them could set up a fake discussion using several other sign ins from coworkers B C and D (and of course management has their passwords, that's required per the corporate contract), puppets who then ask "What do you think of boss A?" followed by puppet accounts B-D saying A is a jerk and then listening to see your response. This is the sort of thing that happens with the sort of jock management that infects many workplaces.

<comment><USER14> Of course, in the long term these problems needs to be fixed. That will of course take time though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This immediately strikes me as a "why didn't I think of that" idea, but in practice (in my workplace at least) everyone would figure out who was who based on the writing style and general tone. In a larger more anonymous group of people (like a class) you could probably get away with it, but then what have you got to lose in the first place by just voicing your opinion publicly?

But good luck, I think this is a pretty cool idea.

<comment><USER8> It seems best suited for a group who are familiar, but not necessarily friends. A class is an excellent example; close coworkers are not.

And depending on what it is you want to say, you may have a lot to lose. Have you never taken a class with a teacher who displays blatant favoritism, or is sexist or racist enough to make a difference to you, but not to the administration? Being able to say something without an authority figure being able to punish you can be pretty important.

<comment><USER3> One of the co-founders here; we entirely agree that the concept works better in large numbers. We're particularly interested in how the site could be used for those larger classroom or office discussions, as a way to increase productivity and generate more innovative ideas. It could be really useful for social circles as well, but the group would likely have to be more than 10 people.

<comment><USER8> I think the social circle aspect might be overrated. How often do you need to speak anonymously within a group of friends, unless you're trying to stage an intervention or something?

<comment><USER3> Maybe. The premise of this whole concept is that we don't really know most people's ideas. Even our friends may have important things to say, but we would never know about them. For that reason, I can't say it categorically wouldn't work in a social setting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you have something to say but fear that your writing style will "out" you, feel free to ask me to rewrite your message:

<http://raganwald.posterous.com/freedom-of-speech>

</comment><comment><USER17> I think it's a cool idea, kinda like LikeALittle but for organizational stuff.

To pre-select the group of people who can participate, you might want to look at a model like Yammer, which validates accounts based on the email domain. This way, you wouldn't have to invite specific emails (which would make me less trustful of the anonymity). If you go on Glassdoor, you see a lot of this dynamic where employees will write reviews meant more for the company than for perspective hires. It's because a lot of companies don't have a really good feedback system where the anonymity can be trusted. Might be a good use case to focus on in the beginning.

</comment><comment><USER18> This looks really cool, I like the layout. I have been working on something similar, (<http://mobilethread.com>), which lets you setup/join anonymous chat threads and is designed to run in a smartphone web browser. I got around the emails issue by creating a unique URL for each thread which you can then email/SMS/embed in a QR code. When joining, a user automatically gets a random name or they can set their own. Finally, anything you post gets removed after four hours, inactive threads get removed after a week. I decided against Captcha but did implement thread creation/message flood limits.

</comment><comment><USER19> Makes me wonder what comments here would be like if names weren't shown until a couple of hours posting.

<comment><USER20> I made a reddit subreddit that did this. I used CSS to hide names and comment scores (yes people can still see them if they want, it was just a prototype). The overall response was pretty negative.

<comment><USER21> I changed everyone's name to "Spartacus" over at f7u12. Nobody seemed to mind much.

<comment><USER20> Yeah but f7u12 is one of the most popular subreddits with its own purpose. I made /r/hidden expressly to experiment with anonymity. I showed it to a good number of people and asked their opinion, whether they'd use it (assuming it got popular), etc and almost everyone told me that either a) the anonymity would be irrelevant to them or b) they'd prefer to not be anonymous so they could "enjoy" their karma.

<comment><USER22> I think the problem might be that reddit is already as anonymous as someone wants it to be, so that alone isn't a feature.

Where it's a cool idea is when the anonymity is used to nullify influence of prominent users for a community that has that as a problem. You'd need a sufficiently interesting topic with that need, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Anonymous chats with verified memberships have a number of interesting applications. For example, I seem to recall Mencius Moldbug discussing them as a mechanism for regime change.

The idea being that in a totalitarian regime like North Korea (or to a lesser extent, the countries of the 'Arab Spring'), it's well known that even the elites are discontented and would support the overthrow of the regime. But there is a knowledge problem, a coordination problem, that they cannot be sure of the support of all the other elites and factions. If they declare their opposition publicly, the still loyal elements will dispose of them. But private declarations which are safe also do not reach enough people to constitute any sort of Schelling point. (This is one of the main points of protests: taking risks, demonstrating solidarity, and a genuine costly signal. If there's sporadic gunfire and suppression from the regime, all the better - scare away the pikers.)

On the other hand, suppose you had a secure anonymous forum for, say, just military officers? With one of the anonymous e-voting schemes integrated to get a headcount of subversive questions like 'how many of us officers would support a regime change?' Then maybe public protests would no longer be the best way to solve the coordination problem for coups...

<comment><USER5> That's a very interesting post. The problem is that in such extreme cases as North Korea, if the government is setting up this discussion list or has any access to it there is no possibility that the conversation was really anonymous. If the government doesn't have access, then mere silent participation without informing would be considered treason. Even if there was anonymous speech going on, Jung merely needs to approach each participant one by one and have them identify which statements were theirs. By a process of elimination, you find who the dissidents are, even if they refuse to talk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great idea. As others have said writing style, grammer, punctuation are the biggest threat to anonymity.

As a tangent I wonder if there's some sort of lossy compression you could do with English that would mangle this enough to make text anonymous. People have suggest google translate a few times, that's using a translation tool to hide some of the original meaning. Has anyone done a dedicated library to mangle text this way?

<comment><USER25> what if a site like this integrated a system that identified an individual's writing patterns and alerted the person to them, prompting changes in text they submit, thus attempting to ensure anonymity?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It would be fun if this approach was also used for the Google+ Circles, so you could have anonymous conversations within a circle.

<comment><USER27> Another co-founder here. Circles integration is a cool idea. I'll look into implementing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Neat, I had thought about putting this same concept into action, though it seemed like anonymity would be really difficult until you had a large enough user base. Otherwise, you invite say 10 friends to a conversation and only 3 accept, then it's going to be pretty easy to narrow down who is who.

</comment><comment><USER29> On a small IRC network I used to frequent, at one time I set up a channel with a bot that lead to a very similar situation. The idea was that channel ops can see people talk even if the channel is muted (+m). Furthermore, on unreal, you can set auditorium mode (+u) which hides all users in that channel from /names and /who. The aforementioned bot was the only op on that channel and was set up to repeat everything said in the channel for everyone to see, effectively anonymizing it. The problem was, this isn't scalable unless you remove flood throttle from the bot (which is almost always a _very_ bad idea) and there's still the possibility of the person running the bot looking at the raw IRC data to find out who is saying what. It was funny while it lasted though.

</comment><comment><USER30> There's a technique to create forecasts based on this concept. The Delphi method <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi_method>

If I recall it correctly, it's an iterative process: 1\. you create a question list 2\. every expert answers the questions (anonymous) 3\. a secretary processes the questions and makes an overview (+ creates a new question list if there's no consensus)

Like that every expert has equal amount to say, without compromising the identities of people.

The main disadvantage of the Delphi method is that it takes a lot of time. Maybe you can change your concept to "Delphi on the cloud" -- cashing in on company's that want to make accurate forecasts.

</comment><comment><USER31> I think the anonymous identified group chat idea is really great, but I think that the concept around the experience should be more temporary, to accent the anonymous nature - ie although maybe at any point during the chat you can save out the contents, perhaps it should be more of a chat than a forum and perhaps the discussions should be more throwaway (like removed after 7 days of nonactivity). In my not expertly opinion at the moment the way it comes across for me is a forum/newsletter look but that's not the strength of the system.

Great idea though and I think this would work great as a enterprise tool to help honest discussion where company politics can get in the way sometimes.

</comment><comment><USER32> Could someone explain how this is different from a regular web forum, IRC, Usenet, or pretty much any other form of communication that doesn't require you to reveal your real identity?

<comment><USER33> In this case, you have full knowledge of the pool of people you are talking to. It wouldn't be a 'regular' forum or IRC, but rather... say you and 5 and your friends all signed into a single IRC channel (so only the 6 of you), but all with randomized names, so you don't know exactly who you're talking to.

As for how the interaction would differ? Depends completely on the people involved.

<comment><USER32> _"It wouldn't be a 'regular' forum or IRC, but rather... say you and 5 and your friends all signed into a single IRC channel (so only the 6 of you), but all with randomized names"_

I still don't see any difference between this and regular IRC.

There's no requirement on regular IRC to use your real name. Make up a random name if you want.

If you're too lazy to pick a random name yourself, you could automate it with something like this:

      #
      # IRCUSER is set to a random dictionary word
      #
      BIG_RANDOM=$(echo $(($RANDOM * 2))) # A number between 0 and (32767 * 2)
                                          # Note, this will not be regularly distributed
                                          # but who cares?
      export IRCUSER=$(head -n $BIG_RANDOM /usr/share/dict/words | tail -n 1)

<comment><USER34> The whole point is to make it easy to get n specific people chatting together where they can speak anonymously.

Yes, it's not different than IRC... so long as you had a bot that could create a room, invite n people, install an irc client on their machines, get them in the room, teach them how to use it, etc, etc.

This is an attempt to make it easier. This is like the dropbox of inviting specific people to an anonymous irc room. It's nothing new, nothing innovative, but it makes it easier.

<comment><USER32> Web-based IRC clients have existed for a long time. To use them all you have to do is point your browser at a website. The usernames assigned by these clients are usually something like "guest0", "guest1", etc. That's probably anonymous enough.

You could connect to any number of public IRC servers already set up all over the world. Then simply join the channel of your choice. No bots necessary.

As far as invitations go and teaching people what to do, you're going to have to do that any way. With existing web-based IRC clients it's as simple as pointing your friends/colleagues to the website and telling them to join channel #whatever.

<comment><USER27> Your friends would still know who invited them to the discussion.

<comment><USER32> Well, they could also join without being invited. In fact, most of the communication happening on IRC is between people who've spontaneously joined without being invited.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Tried, failed miserably. Look up bored at butler.

The general course of events is: Person A will make a comment about person B, person B will complain (under some misguided expectation that the site should be moderated), and you will have to handle the problems. And if you are in a place with a draconian internet policy, you will be paying dearly. Then the site warps to something which loses the original idea of anonymity

</comment><comment><USER36> For the bigger picture of use case mentioned here, what's wrong with IRC. And for the specific use case mentioned in the blog as in School/College, I don't understand how hiding in a closet can relate to productivity. This instead might encourage people to single out someone who is already low and take a dig. As mentioned, people can log in as anonymous but nothing stops you from taking someone's name out there!

<comment><USER3> The issue of anonymous slander is obviously a big one, certainly not limited to our site alone. Having some aspect of identified group information may in fact limit that type of trolling, but that remains to be seen. Everything can be used irresponsibly. Your first point speaks to the question of anonymity's overall purpose. Wanting to be anonymous isn't always a sign of weakness- it's a reality for a lot of confident, intelligent people. Productivity, in our view, is hampered by the absence of contributions from people who have great ideas to share.

<comment><USER36> Oh yes, the word is "anonymous slander" and I also appreciate the fact that many a times ideas don't come out just because you are too scared. I was just trying to point out the irresponsible use which is kind of bound to happen if given in hands of irresponsible people.

I see that you are a co-founder. So curious about this - did launch of Google circles affect your decision to launch or not to launch? I am asking because Google circles kind of deals with similar group bound problem, though it's not anonymous but very helpful!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> To lend some credence to the "it's easy to tell who's writing what", we recently used Rypple as a team review aid for team members to anonymously ask for feedback from the rest of the team.

It was immediately obvious who was writing what. Granted, we had a relatively low population of people writing feedback (5), but I'd imagine it wouldn't change much until you had at least twice as many people.

</comment><comment><USER38> This reminds me of an anonymous variant SGI & Netscape's bad-attitude newsgroups:

<http://everything2.com/title/Bad-Attitude>

Failures of those newsgroups were attributed mostly to changes in company culture. I'd be very interested in seeing how this works anonymously.

</comment><comment><USER39> We at spottiness.com are very interested in this line of work. I can see the appeal of the simplicity of the solution you propose. On the other hand, in many cases the invitees would prefer to not have their emails associated with their comments anywhere (your service would have that information internally). That is an interesting problem.

<comment><USER3> just to clarify, we don't associate emails with individual comments even in our backend. Emails of those invited appear at the top of the discussion page. Each comment can be posted independently of whatever email is up there.

<comment><USER39> But the participant would have to take your statement at face value.

<comment><USER3> that is definitely true. I think a major part of developing this type of discussion space is generating user trust. Besides trusting us, we also need users to trust each other, to keep comments responsible. It's a big task no doubt.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> You'd think a service revolving around privacy (i.e. anonymity) would go to greater lengths to use SSL across the entire site. Otherwise, fantastic idea. Can't say I haven't bounced the idea around of the "groupthink" need lately.

<comment><USER27> I disagree. SSL is always nice, but end-to-end encryption isn't magic. SSL protects you from targeted man in the middle attacks by governments, isps, and users on the same network. Your friends are neither.

<comment><USER41> they can be if they're on the same college LAN

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> This is creepy. I'm working word for word on the exact same thing.

<comment><USER42> Why is this down-voted? I literally worked on this idea for the entire summer. People I had talked to sent me links to this and asked if it was mine. I'm in no way insinuating that this guy stole it but you can probably understand why this feels a little spooky.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I love this kind of attempt at innovation. I hope you are able to stick with this enough to find a userbase for it.

<comment><USER3> Appreciate the support. We're doing our best to get it out there and see how people actually use it. We created it because we think it's important, simple as that. So we definitely plan on sticking around.

<comment><USER22> Well, best of luck. It's a cool project, and I think marketing is going to be the decisive battle for you guys.

FWIW, I wanted to chime in on the issue raised by others. For use in smaller groups, much of the issue of identifiable style could be obfuscated by instructing the users on using generic sentence structure, word count, rate of input, and synonyms.

Or, you could even have a list of commonly useful expressions, and typing isn't an option or is limited to filling in blanks as with MadLibs. The list of stuff that's hard to say to directly is probably not all that long.

Best of luck.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I've used anonymous groupware before, and yes, it was pretty cool.

</comment><comment><USER44> I can see useful brainstorming apps being born from this concept.

</comment><comment><USER45> very nice idea. I had an idea similar to this but it didn't involve the anonymous aspect you bring in.

It would be good if you included markdown

<comment><USER27> Duly noted. Markdown isn't a priority, but it's been added to the wishlist.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> real world analogue: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule>

</comment><comment><USER47> How many times does irc need to be re-invented before it's considered fully invented?

<comment><USER48> As long as it makes fun :)

Here is my quite private project for friends and family — it works pretty well for us for instant discussions on a concrete topic: <http://getch.at>

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> This is what scientific journals do with anonymous paper reviews. It works for specific situations but in many cases you can tell who the reviewer is by the content of their review.

</comment><comment><USER50> Is everyone anonymous or pseudo-anonymous (My messages are attributed to anonymous35 or something)? If so, as people leave and email/anonymous names disappear you can identify people.

<comment><USER27> Freeversation is a forum, not a live chat site, so the names never disappear.</comment></comment>


ZenHub launches free tier for small teams - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoworld.com/article/3117331/development-tools/github-extender-zenhub-throws-open-the-doors-on-its-free-tier.html <comment><USER2> Announcement at Zenhub: [https://www.zenhub.com/blog/small-teams-can-now-use- zenhub-f...](https://www.zenhub.com/blog/small-teams-can-now-use-zenhub-free/)</comment>


Hilbert: A Latex-like math-oriented programming language - <AUTHOR> http://hilbert-lang.org <comment><USER3> The information on the pretty website is spare. However, there are a few issues which give me pause.

The integral example already given is one. One must wonder what is going on "under the hood" to give such a result. My hypothesis is that Riemann sums are what's going on, and that the integral uses 0 as a sample point. An interesting point is that this is one of the unit tests. [https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/blob/master/test/inter...](https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/blob/master/test/interpreter/test_integral.rb#L9)

Another is the example of lim[x->0] 1/x => oo. This is not true; the limit does not exist. If one said lim[x->0+] => oo there would be a better case. Also a unit test. [https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/blob/master/test/inter...](https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/blob/master/test/interpreter/test_limit.rb#L11)

(1 2 3; 4 5 6) * (1 2 3) => (14 32) is not how matrix multiplication is normally done. ( (1 2 3) would need to be (1; 2; 3).)

All in all, the grammar seems to be quite irregular; it seems to be the result of a sequence of wanting to solve one very particular kind of problem (take a limit, differentiate a function, take a sum) and cludging it into the parser.

[https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/blob/master/lib/hilber...](https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/blob/master/lib/hilbert/world.rb#L50) has seven exclamation marks in a row. That's amusing... I don't know anything about Ruby, but I feel that it must be a joke.

<comment><USER4> On the limit issue: you are assuming the x is real. In the complex domain inf has no sign and the limit is pretty correct. But yes, this depends on assumptions.

<comment><USER5> This is a possible loophole, yes. However, if the repo author intended to work with functions of a complex variable, then why aren't the integrals in the README contour integrals?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6>
        S(log(x)dx)[0..1]
        => - <USER2>

It's not very convincing when one of your examples is mathematically wrong (the integral should be -1).

<comment><USER7> Also writing infinity as oo is questionable, IMHO. Use Inf or Infinity or ∞.

<comment><USER8> I believe this notation might be borrowed from SymPy, a symbolic math lib for python --- not that this justifies it; I don't quite care for it much either.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It would appear as though the repo owner is no longer accepting new issues (the "Submit new Issue" button is greyed out). So, in lieu of submitting a new issue, here is the issue that I would have opened (in Markdown):

Looking through the README, the first thing that made me balk was the fact that the limit of `1/x` as `x->0` is __not __infinity. The limit doesn 't exist! However:

* The limit as x goes to zero _from the right_ of `1/x` is infinity, and

* The limit as x goes to zero _from the left_ of `1/x` is negative infinity.

So, to quickly determine whether or not this was just a documentation issue, I installed Hilbert ([and eventually succeeded]([https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/pull/68](https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/pull/68) )) and tried to discover the syntax for one-sided limits:

``` Enjoy! -> lim[x->0+] 1/x

Enjoy! -> ```

Hmmm...no output. Okay. Does any output work?

``` Enjoy! -> 3+2

5

Enjoy! -> ```

Okay, good, we at least have that much... Hmmm...

``` Enjoy! -> lim[x->0^+] 1/x

Enjoy! -> ```

Nope, that's not it, either. Poking at the source code, [it doesn't seem as though one-sided limits are implemented]([https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/blob/1750822d0577e69ab...](https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/blob/1750822d0577e69ab3784d635402cf87474e6f9f/lib/hilbert/lexer/main_lexer.rb#L25) ).

Well, okay, how about a simpler limit?

``` Enjoy! -> lim[x->0] x+2

Enjoy! -> ```

Uhhh...okay, how about some differentiation?

``` Enjoy! -> d/dx(cos(x))

I'm so sorry, something wrong. Please feel free to report this.

Enjoy! -> ```

This error message is of no use, and I have no idea what's going on, but this language appears to be broken.

<comment><USER9> I think you need to call `postulate zfc_analysis`. With that, I get:

        Enjoy! -> lim[x->0] 1/x
        oo
        Enjoy! -> d/dx(cos(x))
        - sin( x )
        Enjoy! -> lim[x->0] x+2
        2.0

<comment><USER5> W...why would that not automatically be called?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Fortress[1] had stylesheets that allowed rendering mathematical formula. Never gained much traction needless to say:

>> Fortress is being designed from the outset to have multiple syntactic stylesheets. Source code can be rendered as ASCII text, in Unicode, or as a prettied image. This would allow for support of mathematical symbols and other symbols in the rendered output for easier reading.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_languag...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_%28programming_language%29)

</comment><comment><USER11> Ummmm... what is TURE?

<comment><USER12> I made a pull request that fixes that typo: [https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/pull/58](https://github.com/gogotanaka/Hilbert/pull/58)

<comment><USER13> You along with 7 others it seems. They didn't even bother checking whether a PR was already filed for it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If you really want to program mathematics, look at Coq, Agda or Idris.

<comment><USER15> Well, there's a significant difference there. Hilbert seems aimed at computational mathematics more in line with Mathematica rather than the logical foundational work occurring in Coq/Agda/Idris.

<comment><USER14> It'd be nice to achieve both... you wouldn't get some of the silly errors documented elsewhere in the thread.

Admittedly, that's way more ambitious than anything anyone's actually implemented, ever...</comment></comment></comment>


$3 million machine learning prize - <AUTHOR> http://www.heritagehealthprize.com/competition.php

<comment><USER2> So, essentially, this is a contest to make a way to predict who is most at risk for going back to the hospital.

while this sounds nice, there are some issues.

1\. How can this do anything but hurt people? Medical professionals do all they can to keep people from returning to the hospital, explaining to patients what they should be doing in a medical sense, the only real use is to deny insurance or increase rates on "high risk" people.

2\. Should they implement the winning solution, then act on it by sending additional "how to be healthy" propaganda or otherwise attempting to prevent those people, the pattern of behavior of will change accordingly, thus likely breaking the predictive capability.

This is not like the netflix "present better suggestions" problem. This does not need to be that fast, efficient, nor as creative. Just having a large set of statistics taken from the dataset (which seems rather small) and making a large Bayesian Network to crunch out the probability of needing medical care in a given time frame seems to be the best solution to the problem.

I am interested in seeing other views on these points. heavens, I might learning something about a field I am a dilettante in from a master. (ironically this is more the goal then being "right" is)

<comment><USER3> You should read the new yorker story [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all) . It answers your questions, mostly. For (1), if the health insurer is forced to treat those patients and acknowledges who they are they can spend a bit of money on preventive and follow-up care and save a lot of money on hospitalization, surgeries, etc. (2) This is true, but if the algorithm is retrainable (and it should be, as it's machine learning) there's the possibility that all you have to do is a bit of domain adaptation to keep things going; if this doesn't work, another contest 5 years from now will probably pay for itself.

The problem with your proposed solution is precisely that there seems to be far too little data points and far too many variables. Not only that but I expect most of the information to be in the interactions between variables and clever features that cover that. Most ways of learning bayesian networks don't work very well when you have to model interactions. I'd bet on the usual winning approaches for this sort of thing, which is clever boosting, matrix decomposition, and random forests, all of which can model interactions and somewhat deal with incomplete data.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why this will save money:

 _The Hot Spotters - Can we lower medical costs by giving the neediest patients better care?_ by Atul Gawande

[http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_...](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/24/110124fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all)

On HN: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2154579>

</comment><comment><USER5> The benefits of finding these folks are many:

[http://kottke.org/11/01/controlling-healthcare-costs-by- focu...](http://kottke.org/11/01/controlling-healthcare-costs-by-focusing-on- the-neediest-patients)

</comment><comment><USER6> "training dataset includes several thousand anonymized patients and will be made available"

That seems like an awfully small dataset. It also doesn't look like it is limited to one disease which would make the search space enormous especially if all the patients didn't have the same labs drawn!

If it was completely standardized data several thousand may be sufficient to train, but I think they are looking for something more 'magic' than that.

<comment><USER7> The dataset sounds so small that I'd expect the winning answer will be extensively seeded by medical doctors. Diagnostic data is usually very difficult to approach with AI, and practising doctors have good heuristics. That suggests, to me, that the best one can hope for is using this dataset to refine those heuristics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Oooh. This is just begging for a privacy firestorm when someone de-anonymizes the data, which I'm guessing won't be super hard given the kind of medical features they'd need to provide to make this task useful.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure about that- unlike social network data, there isn't a publicly availible dataset containing the names of all the people in here which could be used to de-anonymize this data.

<comment><USER8> You're perhaps right. Of course, these people are on things like Facebook, Twitter and blogs and if you can narrow down age, gender, location and medical condition, you might be able to correlate with public posts.

You can also look for specific people in there if you have certain kinds of prior information about them: For example, Aravind Narayanan was able to de- anonymize some part of the Netflix set [<http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0610105>]. Maybe that won't translate to this data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What makes solving this problem worth three million?

<comment><USER11> _"The winning algorithm will be able to predict patients at risk for an unplanned hospital admission with a high rate of accuracy."_

Algorithm says no insurance for you.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, can they anonymize my entry and my prize? I don't think I'd want my friends and family knowing I helped these guys out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Without a legal protection in place which disallows something like this for deciding the insurance rates, this sounds like something which can get abused.

But I think it is better that is happens in public via an open competition rather then in a private research group funded by an insurance company. At least, everyone will immediately know what can be predicted rather then finding it out through a class action suit years later.

<comment><USER14> yeah because pricing insurance correctly is a bad idea....

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hm sounds like an interesting challenge, can anyone register for this, or do you have to be US-based?

</comment><comment><USER16> sorry, I don't think being born in the west entitles you to millions of dollars of medical care at other's expense when a million dollars means hundreds of lives saved.

</comment><comment><USER17> Doctors can tell you which patients will be back, the problem is they can't, because if they do, that will be discrimination which would be grounds for burning the doctor at the stake. The software which does exactly the same thing, however, can't be burned at the stake for discrimination because in the event where the guilty party cries fowl, you simply print out the math. It's genius.

You 1% (repeat sickly offenders) causing 30% of the medical care costs better get ready to pay your increased share to acquire that care. If it can be determined that one human would likely need 10 million dollars of medical care (on account of heavily defective dna) and another human will likely need only 200 thousand (flawless dna), the one who is likely to need more should be paying more.

<comment><USER18> Wait, _should_? I didn't pick my parents... (I happen to be perfectly fine, but that's at least part good luck.)

<comment><USER19> Unfortunately, despite popular myth, not every consequence applied to a person is a result of their choices and actions. The American Dream might be equality of people, but the harsh reality is that there's actually quite a lot of variance.

So we get to answer the really interesting question of exactly how much do we, as a country, want to spend to support a dream against reality?</comment></comment></comment>