Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | xevb3k's commentslogin

Why do you (and why do people in general) not use server logs for analytics of this sort?

Seems like it might show requests that failed to get to the point of processing the analytics JS as well as those running adblockers.


Your logs may be split across different services, and some of those services may be difficult to access. For example, if you're using a CDN, many hits won't go to your server.

Off-the-shelf analytics solutions have a ton of heuristics and in-house knowledge built up over decades that help deal with inherently janky data. For example: over half of all internet traffic these days is bots. All modern analytics solutions know how to discriminate bot traffic (to an acceptable extent), you would have to re-create that or get heavily skewed data. As another example, inferring geography from IP: Google, Adobe, etc maintain their own in-house databases for this sort of thing.

Analytics solutions can be configured to send data for interactions that don't involve a page load. There are a lot of interactions that won't put anything into the logfile unless you re-invent tracking beacons. The situation gets more complicated for Single-Page Applications for both types of tracking, but generally the solutions for off-the-shelf technologies are more understood and can be applied more generally.

For another thing, cost and ease of access. Google Analytics has a free version. And for businesses, many of the people who want data work in marketing or UX, not the sort of people who have various types of expertise to dig around in logfiles. At the level of effort it would take for someone to build a logfile tool or learn to dig through the data, GA would offer more benefit at lower cost.

For a solo dev or small team running a not-too-complicated website, logfile parsing may make sense. For a large-enough organization, a custom solution that addresses their specific needs may make sense. But aside from a few sweet spots, most off-the-shelf tools are going to give a better benefit at lower cost. This is especially true of companies that have different teams with different needs and skills, and that benefit from integrations with other tools (like testing or personalization platforms).

Also, slightly-less related... analytics load time is not always a dominant factor in not recording clicks. Most clicks on ads go through a chain of redirects through a half-dozen different services that set cookies, read cookies, attach data, increment counters, etc. There's a large window where a user can cancel navigation before a request is made to the website. Analytics should run pretty fast, unless there is a long time in-between when your server receives the initial request and when the user begins to receive HTML.


Thank you for your detailed answer.

I understand the reasons better, it’s unfortunate and slightly depressing to me that the community hasn’t been able to come up with a better solution. Particularly as the google analytics approaches involves giving data up to a 3rd party for processing.


> Google Analytics has a free version.

So did you ever stop to ask yourself, if it's free then who exactly is the product? And did they consent to be being sold?


Yes, I did ask myself that.

Google has an Analytics product so that website owners can see how much money they make from AdWords, thus encouraging them to spend more money on AdWords. GA is a strategic complement to Google's advertising services, and that is how they derive value from it.

Google does not dip into GA data for their own uses. Post-GDPR this is extra-explicit because they take pains to clarify how much they are not a Controller and only a Processor, but this has always been in their TOS. Frankly, most people's GA implementations are dumpster fires and trying to make use of that data would be more cost and less benefit than punching themselves in the dick.

Google does look at GA data on occasion, but only for the purposes of debugging and for ensuring compliance with the TOS (e.g. they will flag accounts that contain PII).


Not sure how I’d set up server logging on a serverless site. (Not being snarky; I really don’t know.)

I accept that GA will be off +/-10% because it’s clientside. Don’t need total accuracy to make marketing decisions.


"Serverless"... someone's running a server. What kind? For instance, if you're on AWS and an ELB is involved, you can set up ELB logging to S3.


Yes but you’re saying twitter say their metrics are off by a factor of 5 because it’s not running the GA JS. If you wanted to properly investigate that looking at the server logs would probably give a better idea in this case.

I guess with serverless you should be able to see this either with your own logging or perhaps on AWS with Cloudwatch? (no idea as I’ve not used it).


> Why do you (and why do people in general) not use server logs for analytics of this sort?

It almost seems that the tracking of users has to be looped through as many third parties as possible.

I don't know, whatever, it makes it easier to block.


In Japanese there’s 地球 which means Earth (this planet), and 土 which means soil.

地 can also mean soil, but it’s a different word from 地球 meaning the planet earth. I don’t think it’s commonly used by itself to mean soil either, but I could be wrong.


It means ground, as in the surface on which we live and build things on. 球 means ball or sphere. I wonder if that’s the reason why flat Earthers are rare in China and Japan - the very phrase ‘flat Earth’ is an oxymoron in these languages :)


Right, but the word 地球 can only mean the planet Earth, it’s not synonymous with anything else and there’s no room for confusion.

Soil, or ground (on any planet) is a different word. There’s not much room for confusion.


I was under the impression that 土 could be used for "earth," so I apologize. Thanks for the correction!


I’ve not heard it used that way, but I could be wrong. There’s possibly also a historical usage in this sense.


While the OP has said they have 20% equity. Given the other two founders have a controlling interest, to what extent could they push the OP out and take/reduce their equity?

I’m not saying they would, but I’m wondering how possible it is. Could they vote to redistribute equity, or massively dilute OPs equity and then distribute more equity to themselves for example?


Very possible. It depends on the operating agreement, but unless any investment or creation of shares requires unanimous consent, they can be diluted to virtually nothing.


Interesting, it’s always been my assumption, and unless everyone is operating in good faith, if don’t have board control (and/or >50% of equity) it’s a possibility that I might well get diluted to nothing.

As such, unless I’m confident that I trust everyone involved, I would value equity quite low (and I’ve certainly been screwed out of equity in the past...)


First author should be the person who did the work, that’s pretty strandard. Corresponding author doesn’t always need to be first author.

Honestly this does sound pretty terrible. The student doesn’t have to publish, and you don’t get to misrepresent yourself as first author if they don’t want to.

Really really want to be first author, redo the work yourself. That’s the only way you can claim credit (and responsibility) for having done the work.


Can it completely satisfy our current energy requirements?

Last I heard, nuclear was the only non-fossil fuel way of doing that. Is that still the case?


Not without major improvements in battery tech or many massive public works projects like damns with pumps.


Or massive public works projects like nuclear reactors.

But yeah, obviously dams and deep wells with pumps are orders of magnitude less expensive than nuclear reactors. So that's likely where the money will go.

But it's ALL gonna be pricey. Only thing that isn't quite as pricey are the fossil fuels. Very little stomach for future development on those however.


Last I heard, that San Onofre upgrade didn't go so well. Who's paying for that, again?


It’s reasonably clear that the chip shown in the article is very unlikely to be any kind of microcontroller/semiconductor.

It’s embedded in ceramic. Such devices need to be fired at very high temperatures which a semiconductor wouldn’t be able to withstand.


You can make two half ceramic pieces and cement them together nearly seamlessly with a semiconductor inside. This was common before DIP packages.


In any case, someone who can make a malicious IC die look like a balun could just as easily add their die to the EEPROM package that's intended to be there.

It makes no sense for state-level bad guys to create disguised packages and add them to boards at the assembly house. There are any number of other links in the supply chain where they could accomplish the same goal with an actual nonzero chance of getting away with it.


The key benefit of injecting at the assembly house is that it means you can target the injections based on the final customer. This reduces the footprint of the attack, which reduces the chances of your exploit being publicly exposed, and reduces the risks inherent in scaling up a highly specialised top secret supply chain.


You're arguing against compromising the boards, right?


No.

I'm pointing out an advantage in putting the exploit into the supply chain as late as possible, such that it can be selected for based on customer.

Compromising the motherboard may be a good approach if the boards have some amount of customisation for each customer.


No it wasn’t? They used to use gold caps.

You could absolutely use a novel manufacturing technique to make something that looks like the picture in the article.

It wouldn’t make much sense to do so, because that part doesn’t even belong on a computer motherboard, it’s an RF component.



That’s fair enough, I don’t think that process would work here though?

I also don’t understand why you would do that. Given the ceramic part in question doesn’t look like anything that would be on a motherboard, and has been identified as an RF component.


I was going to say, the number of ways to make something look like a ceramic component are more relevant.


I find quotas in bad taste, and somewhat lazy.

There is clearly an issue, but if we attempt to fix it with positive discrimination, we just create more issues.

A better way to approach the problem might be increased scrutiny (for discrimination) on boards/companies with significant gender bias, and increased penalties.

This would be harder to implement of course, but might go further to actually solving the issue.


There is a fundamental unanswered question in the area of gender discrimination, which is whether we can remedy past positive discrimination simply by removing overt discrimination going forward. That presupposes two things:

1) That you can actually get rid of gender bias among corporate boards that are almost entirely men;

2) That the system isn't path dependent (i.e. removing the positive discrimination will result in an outcome that is the same as would have been the outcome if the positive discrimination had never occurred).

Real-world systems are generally path-dependent. If a storm knocks down a fence, the fence doesn't go back to normal after the storm passes. If you bend a paperclip, it will stay bent after you let go.

Taking affirmative action off the table is tantamount to saying that society simply should not fix problems that result from the path-dependent effects of prior discrimination. Now that's debatable, but I don't think either side of that debate is "lazy."

FWIW, I think the California law is probably unconstitutional. (The Constitution doesn't always say what you want it to say!)


If a fence is knocked down you fix the fence.

Quotas suggest an approach that works more like “we know some fences are damaged in various ways, one way many of the fences are damaged is that they have water damage. So we’re going to replace 25% of the poles in all fences, with poles resistant to water damage.”

There’s an argument that if you show that there’s been gender discrimination, you should throw out the entire board and put a new one in place using a process more resistant to all forms of discrimination.

But applying a fix without strong evidence that discrimination has taken place does seem lazy, because you’re attempting to apply a blanket fix. It does nothing to address the underlying issues, and tries to apply a fix in cases where no issue exists.


Clearly, if you knock a fence down, you can't put the fence back up simply by saying "it is now unlawful to knock fences down". So: if not quotas, what repairs this fence?


If you find evidence of discrimination, you take action. What action exactly is up for debate. You could even go so far as replacing the board.

But not all, all male boards will be caused by discrimination, and adding a few females members will not solve this problem in many cases.


What do you do about the generations of discrimination (of "fences being knocked down") without repercussions? You can outlaw and punish the behavior now, but look around and notice how many fences are still standing. How do you fix that? That's the path-dependence problem Rayiner is talking about.


To what extent may we apply this principle? Was the promise of forty acres and a mule to formerly enslaved black farmers in the U.S. too "far"? Was the actual result of some land redistribution and the Freedmen's Bureau providing supplies and opportunities to freed slaves too far? Maybe you believe this. If not, could we establish where the threshold is? That is, what's the volume of harm-over-time a group would drop below before being disqualified for any positive rights?


How can you implement penalties for gender bias without introducing a threshold for an acceptable division of representation? And once that threshold is established, how exactly does it differ from a quota?


I guess the argument would be that you look at practices instead of outcomes, but that seems impossibly hard to implement


[flagged]


Bringing in someone's personal details or history as ammunition in an argument is a particularly toxic trope and counts as personal attack, which we ban accounts for. Please don't do this on HN again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


This seems unnecessarily personal. I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make here?

I can’t add any more founders without a time machine but most of our managers are female and I’m proud of the work we’re doing internally to increase diversity, inclusion and belonging. We’re hardly perfect but I can tell you we’re trying in earnest to improve.


Let’s say you expect boards in general to be 50% male/female.

In case where this is not the case, and where it has not been the case for a number of years you might launch an investigation.

It might be that there are reasonable reasons in this instance. For example, the company was cofounded by two women or men, it’s a small company, and the composition of the board has never changed etc.

It might be that the company has a board with frequently changing members, but always selects male members. In that case, it’s easier to argue that discrimination has taken place. At which point you might launch an investigation and apply penalties etc.


The proposal is that a poor ratio results in stricter scrutiny, not a penelty. They would still need to investigate and find other evidence of illegal bias.


I don’t understand this comment.

The USA has a strong semiconductor industry. Probably stronger than China’s. China is traditionally not very strong an semiconductor fabrication.

What they are strong at is PCB assembly. Or rather cheap PCB assembly. You can do that in the USA too, it’s just not as cheap.

I’d guess most military stuff is done in the USA of domestic and mostly non-China made parts.


You’d think so, but a lot of stuff still comes from outside the States. I was an electrician on aircraft in the Navy and got to see a lot of the electronic stuff. Some stuff comes from overseas


How much comes from China or Russia?


I guess we read the article differently. Because he didn’t seem to be saying 5G was dangerous, more that this was the public perception, and that vendors are doing little to manage the PR around this.


If that's the intent, it's poorly written.

It's fine to observe that search results pop up a lot of pieces and discussions about 5G health concerns. And those may lead to adoption problems whether they're true or not. But if you're writing a good column, even though it is an opinion piece, you should probably then point out things like: XYZ studies dispute these health effects and that these sort of concerns have been brought up with pretty much every new radio technology.

If you just say there's a bunch of scary information out there (without even pointing to anything specific), you leave the impression that there's likely some truth in all of it.

Dvorak at least was a pretty high profile tech columnist. But he's tended toward a clickbait style even before there were links to click on.


He did say that topic having a real lack of studies was the main problem. 5G radiation is not the same as previous cellphone radiation which does have "XYZ studies dispute these health effects".

Sometimes presenting both sides of the argument would require making up an other side of the argument or propping it up because it doesn't exist or is bad. In that case presenting both sides of the argument would be sensationalizing.

I read this as him saying that the industry is trying to make unstudied radiation ubiquitous in our lives. The industry is not used to this pushback. The PR that results is bad.

Critical reading does not mean reacting to your first impression on the article. Especially when discussing whether the work of a man who's been covering tech since 1980 was censored over it.


That maybe the case, but bad enough to get fired over? That’s not clear to me.

The way modern writing works, I would expect he got paid very little for writing this. You’re kind of asked to push out X many blog posts a day, there’s not a huge amount of time for research... or even re-reading/thinking over the implications of your work.


Please let's not just surrender to "That's how modern writing works." I suppose it is at some publications, perhaps including pcmag.com. But there are plenty of thoughtful, researched articles and columns out there to read. That column has maybe a tweet's worth of content.


It’s not how things work everywhere I’m sure. But it seems likely in this case. As such, the content doesn’t surprise me, and I would put the blame solely on the author in this case.


I assume they won’t actually have to pay? I’d guess whatever contract their is with the seller also requires that the art is delivered safely to the purchaser.

I wonder what the message is here, or if there is a message beyond the publicity. I guess something about the art having no inherent value...


It's now a part of art history, it would be a foolish move on the part of the buyer to not accept it. Banksy has reaffirmed why he's maybe the only contemporary visual artist today who counts as a household name. Although I guess we cuold debate whether he's first and foremost a visual artist, or a performance artist. The audacity of his stunts and trickery far outweigh the merits of his clever visual puns.


Walked past one of his works on the upper west side of manhattan. I wouldn’t have known it was his except for the plaque put up next to the plastic barrier installed to protect it.

Kind of crazy that the art is likely worth as much as the entire building it’s on. Although, this is Manhattan so who knows.


His works in the Gaza strip are definitely worth more than the entire buildings.


If that’s the case, I guess Banksy will be laughing even harder...


“But is the work destroyed? Or is it transformed? Even Branczik isn’t sure. “You could argue that the work is now more valuable,” Branczik said. “It’s certainly the first piece to be spontaneously shredded as an auction ends.”


since information cannot be destroyed (at least, according to quantum physics), i argue it's transformed. And it's just as valuable transformed, if not more so.


I doubt a burned, sorry, transformed, version of the Mona Lisa would be more worth than before.


What if Leonardo had very publicly transformed it before he died?


An urn with the ashes of the painting would not be that much worth or admired now.


Sports rather than art, but this comment is vaguely reminiscent of cricket.


They'll pay and be happy to do so.

Banksy's art is valuable exactly because his art pushes the boundary. It wasn't just destroyed for no reason. His graffiti art is meant to be public, and he has made no secret he thinks private art collection is bullshit.


But the shredding functionality was part of the work of art all along. A feature, not a bug!


I read on Vice they are already speculating that this may have increased its value.


Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: