A single study of two things as complicated as advertising measurement and happiness/satisfaction, and the intuitively compelling conclusion is immediately embraced as the truth because it's "obvious."

Edit: Again with the downvotes...come on HN. I'm not defending advertising, I'm criticizing the reporting on a study in a world which has a rampant replication crisis.

Another idea I had after reading the article is that advertising is more pervasive in big cities. From what I can recall, big city inhabitants tend to have a lower life satisfaction rating than smaller town dwellers. So countries with more urban dwellers might normally have more advertising and less life satisfaction... because big cities, not necessarily advertising. Also richer nations tend to be less happy, and by being richer have more advertising. There's a lot of ways to interpret the data.

It's funny to see the group-think dynamic on display needed to make non relevant comments go up and comments related to the article be down-voted (which aren't even stating anything specific... you and I never even said 'it's this' just questioning 'maybe not that')

Another super interesting thing that I glean from the down-votes is the bottom down view only when convenient.

If you post on HN that tech companies are evil and conspiring against our privacy, people will say (IMO mostly rightly BTW) that it's mostly bottom up, with consumers CHOOSING bad options. But as soon as advertising comes in the mix, now the world is top down, with evil marketeers manipulating the masses anyway they want.

To all the down-voters: your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer!

If not, it seems like we should operate on our best hypothesis with evidence for it, not speculate about unknown unknowns.

You did at one point say that advertising might not be causing the lower satisfaction, it might just be exacerbating other problems that cause lower satisfaction. While that possibility certainly warrants investigation to see what those other problems are, it doesn't have any implications for how we treat advertising: either way we should be seeking to decrease its influence on our lives.

Nope! We shouldn't. Speculation is precisely what we should do! That's what a critical review of research involves. We should take this as excellent motivation for further research. It could be true, but we haven't done nearly enough work to conclude as much. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm saying it's uncertain, and it's strictly unscientific to proceed by assuming something uncertain is the truth just because it's intuitively compelling. Intuitively compelling narratives are very dangerous in science, because they make you believe you have a shortcut to the truth and they're vindicated right up until they aren't. It's not a good habit.

Happiness is incredibly complicated. Contradicting evidence and results abound across studies of life satisfaction. Measuring the impact and success of advertising itself is highly complex; the researchers have shown this correlation under their current methodology. What are we to conclude if someone uses a different methodology to study the same topic, equally as valid, and comes away with a different conclusion? That's very possible, and we can't dismiss it. The researchers themselves hedge their claims and don't come out and say they've found causation.

I don't really have a dog in the race with advertising. But I really despise this kind of reporting by HBR, because the result is threads like this one where people walk away with unproven "truths" that become part of the popular zeitgeist because they just seem to vindicate obvious beliefs. Today it's advertising, tomorrow it'll be something else. Given the replication crisis we're undergoing, we shouldn't take anything away from studies like this except that further research is required.

Nobody is proposing we stop researching, so let's not dignify that idea by discussing it further.

I'm proposing that as we continue researching, we proceed to take action with the best information we currently have.

> I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm saying it's uncertain, and it's strictly unscientific to proceed by assuming something uncertain is the truth...

It's not unscientific because of the nature of the truth, it's unscientific because science never tells you how to proceed, ever. It only tells you an approximation of the truth so you can make an educated decision on how you want to proceed. There is no should in science.

> ...just because it's intuitively compelling. Intuitively compelling narratives are very dangerous in science, because they make you believe you have a shortcut to the truth and they're vindicated right up until they aren't. It's not a good habit.

I'm not confused about these facts--you don't need to explain them. This is irrelevant, because this isn't why I want to take action on this study.

> Happiness is incredibly complicated. Contradicting evidence and results abound across studies of life satisfaction. Measuring the impact and success of advertising itself is highly complex; the researchers have shown this correlation under their current methodology.

> What are we to conclude if someone uses a different methodology to study the same topic, equally as valid, and comes away with a different conclusion?

If that happens, we change our minds.

What are we to conclude if someone uses a different methodology to study the same topic, equally as valid, and comes away with the same conclusion? Would you just call for more evidence?

This isn't the first study on related subjects, and so far I haven't found any that would lead me to a different conclusion.

> That's very possible, and we can't dismiss it. The researchers themselves hedge their claims and don't come out and say they've found causation.

It's also possible that the conclusions are true, and that by waiting to take action we let people suffer from the effects of advertising longer than necessary.

If we wait to take action until we're completely sure of the facts, we'll never take action, because evidence is almost never 100% conclusive.

The only information I have on this subject indicates that advertising is harmful. You are correct that this information is not 100% conclusive. However, just because we don't know something 100% conclusively, doesn't mean we should not take action on it--the vast majority of decisions in life are made with incomplete information.

We make decisions based on two things: 1. The best information we have, and 2. Our goals.

So there's basically two possibilities here: either you have some information I don't (in which case, please share that information with the class) or you have different goals (i.e. you would be pro-advertising even if it were proven that it makes people less happy).

Which of course leads to the ethical question: is it right for people to live in ignorance if it makes them happy, it it's not their choice? Is it fundamentally better for people to be happy rather than aware of massive inequality (up to and including significant poverty)? How much would be appropriate to hide, for how much additional happiness? Is it better in the long run for some to be unhappy if it brings attention to inequality?

I don't have any of those answers, but they're interesting and challenging questions.

It's artificial. If they just had knowledge, like say wikipedia or ad blocked internet. They would be wanting real things like education, health care, self-determination, not Nikes.

The documentary relates "The story of the relationship between Sigmund Freud and his American nephew, Edward Bernays. Bernays invented the public relations profession in the 1920s and was the first person to take Freud's ideas to manipulate the masses. He showed American corporations how they could make people want things they didn't need by systematically linking mass-produced goods to their unconscious desires."

I wouldn't pretend to answer if it is "right" (what does it even mean), but a lot of people already do live in ignorance. Maybe not in the straight way of ignorance of not being able to recollect some information, but certainly in terms of assigning certain labels and judgements to it. So many people watch a TV with someone having a great time and think/feel to themselves things like "they stole the money somehow to get there", "they had rich parents", "they are not happy anyway", "life is unfair, they got their riches through unfairness", "money is the root of all evil", "money brings unhappiness", "it's not their real life, just some fake instagram story" etc.

Advertisement, like Instagram or facebook is tailored to give us the impressions the Joneses are doing much better for themselves. Some of this is true, some is designed to tap into this emotion.

I actually woke up 30 min ago iterating over all the things I didn't get in life that most other people had in abundance. It's not the first time I pondered that. After the excuses you mention above I always come back to a thought I had when I was I think 6 years old:

Other peoples lives, their expectations and their opinions are not really all that interesting or important. They could be if they put minimal effort into creating or evolving them. In stead they just copy this stuff from the next guy without review - then dedicate their lives to living up to them.

I consider myself extremely privileged to escape from that formula. I've never written it down before but happiness now starts with having oxygen to breath, then comes having water to drink, food and a place to sleep share the 3rd spot, 4th is having the mind set to think about something, 5th is a sense of safety and the privilege to implement the thoughts, 6th is to be able to share the thoughts and brainstorm, 7th is to have good people in my life, 8th is to be able to pay my bills, 9th a decent set of garments etc

Having what other people are having is still on the list some place but to have 1-4 makes for a fantastic life. 5 includes health and fitness. The rest is really just nonsense by comparison.

What I'm trying to say is that satisfaction is overrated. You get only so much of it, trying to optimize for it just diminishes it.

> the survey question “How satisfied are you with your life?”

Not satisfied? Well good! Time to accomplish something!

1) Prime Directive: don't introduce knowledge that will make someone's life harder or more complicated if you don't have to.

2) If they have the means to get that knowledge, you're now obligated to fill in the disparity between your quality of life, such that they can be at least as happy as you are.

Without unfulfilled desires, there is no room for self-actualization. See: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Thinking about long term, the life of their children, perhaps their children's children, is likely to be significantly enhanced when things like access to healthcare and education become a possibility.

> So what should Apple do? Customized icons for different types of drives would be a good start. Time Machine drives get custom icons automatically, as do many other types of storage devices that were more common in the past, so surely Apple could design different icons for SSDs and Fusion Drives, and then display them appropriately based on the type of drive.

Apple could repurpose one of the existing SSD icons pretty easily.

That doesn't sound like Apple has icons for SSDs already.

The author is making the point that this shouldn't take much effort because Apple already uses different icons.

There's no SSD icon.

Of course, at RenTech in particular the employee-only fund is the good fund. But that's not always the case, so the parent commenter has a point. Deferred/locked up compensation can really suck.

Yeah, but only the long tenured/high performing employees get access to the good fund (there's a merely average fund that most employee deferred comp goes into, if I understand correctly).

Former colleague of mine was a M&A trader at Lehman during the crash. 95% of his net worth was in his fund, which was up 50%+ for the year when the bankruptcy trustee seized everything. IIRC, he was starting to get his money back in ~2014-15.

RenTech and TGS had a spectacular year as always. But even if you don't work at a firm like that, being on the right team at a strong second tier firm can be extremely lucrative.

I have not seen any of the typical sell side grind common to investment banking among hedge funds. New grads hired to reputable hedge funds typically work comparable hours to their friends who work at Google/Facebook. They might earn 20 - 100% more though.

I also know another new grad recently hired at Hudson River Trading, and another new grad recently hired at Jump Trading. Both are earning over $400k per year, but they work 45 hour weeks. And since RenTech has been mentioned in this thread: the people I know there have wonderful work life balance.

I have found that most popular conceptions of bad work life balance in finance apply to banking and sell side, not to the buy side. Working as a developer at a bank usually sucks, both financially and culturally, in my experience. Not always, but commonly. Working at a hedge fund can be very nice both financially and culturally.

As an aside, i love that the names for things vary so much across the industry. Where i am, "research development" means things like building historical market data archives that other people can use to backtest algorithms etc.

It's essentially like rectangles versus squares. You can create a key derivation function out of anything which passes all the criteria of a password hashing function. But it won't be a particularly performant or useful key derivation function. Likewise you can create a password hashing algorithm out of a dedicated key derivation function, but that's insufficient on its own.

There's no need to get bogged down in the details, just continue recommending a reputable implementation of these algorithms. On the other hand, if you'd like to learn more out of intellectual curiosity, Boneh & Shoup's textbook is good (work in progress) [1]. Galbraith's textbook includes chapters which cover the topic to a depth that's beyond what you're looking for, but you'll learn whatever it is you want to know [2].

Finally, more accessible, informal answers that get the basic idea across are [3], [4].

1. https://toc.cryptobook.us/

2. https://www.math.auckland.ac.nz/~sgal018/crypto-book/main.pd...

3. https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/95410/what-is-t...

4. https://crypto.stackexchange.com/questions/70716/key-derivat...

    A Key derivation function (KDF) is a basic and essential component of cryptographic systems: Its goal is to take a source of initial keying material, usually containing some good amount of randomness, but not distributed uniformly or for which an attacker has some partial knowledge, and derive from it one or more cryptographically strong secret keys.

Hash functions take arbitrary length input (well, up to some very large maximum size) and provide fixed-length output.

eXtensible Output Functions (XOFs)take arbitrary length input (up to some very large max) and provide arbitrary length output (up to some very large max).

Password Hashing Functions take (at least) three inputs: a unique salt, a secret password, and a tuning parameter (or set of parameters). They use the tuning parameter(s) to change the amount of work needed to compute their outputs. For any set of inputs they produce a deterministic output. The output may or may not be directly suitable for use as a cryptographic key, and may or may not be variable length.

Some password hashing functions are KDFs, taking effectively arbitrary input length and producing effectively arbitrary output length. PBKDF2 and Argon2 are KDFs.

Some password hashing functions are NOT KDFs, having limits on their input & output sizes. Bcrypt is not a KDF and not a hash function: it has a maximum 56-byte input (55 bytes if taking a null-terminated string, 72 bytes max in newer implementations) and a 60-byte output. It's suitable for logins where the password is hashed and compared to the stored hash, but not for directly deriving key material. And it's not necessarily suitable for non-ASCII passwords/passphrases, due to the short input.

[1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/264

> Bcrypt is not a KDF and not a hash function

This is true, but it's also a good example of what I was saying in my other comment. bcrypt is an example of a password hashing function which is not itself a KDF, but which can be used to construct a KDF.

All password hashing functions can be used to construct key derivation functions or simply are key derivation functions. But not all password hashing functions are key derivation functions. Whether or not it would be advisable to use a given password hashing function as a KDF depends, of course. In bcrypt's case you can construct a reasonable KDF. For example: https://github.com/pyca/bcrypt/blob/master/README.rst

The relevant bit here is this:

Verifiers SHALL store memorized secrets in a form that is resistant to offline attacks. Memorized secrets SHALL be salted and hashed using a suitable one-way key derivation function. Key derivation functions take a password, a salt, and a cost factor as inputs then generate a password hash.

They are specific about the type of KDF required: "one-way key derivation function".

The examples given later are PBKDF2 and Balloon.

Edit: NIST uses "one-way key derivation function" in their requirements, which I like, but that perhaps unfairly excludes other potential functions.