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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

Conclusion:

> But, basically if one presses the switch it causes the flip-flops to change state and to then either add or remove power from the microphones.

> The 'mute' button appears to be very real and functional. When the button glows 'red' the power is removed from the microphones.

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I sometimes write articles describing investigations similar to this one. Do you think this article’s structure is appropriate?

Or would it be better to reduce the need for comments like this one by putting the conclusion much earlier in the piece? I understand not putting the conclusion in the title, but perhaps in the first paragraph, in the spirit of BLUF [0]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BLUF_(communication)

I think that BLUF is definitely the better way of writing most informational pieces, particularly articles such as this.

It's a similar concept to the 'Topic Sentence' which would be used to sum up the ideas of the following paragraph.

The only reason I could see for actively choosing not to use BLUF - would be to force users to read more of your article for the sake of it, which seems (to me) like a 'cheap' tactic.

Do you think presenting the conclusion up-front could detract from the “story-telling” of the piece? By walking the reader through the investigation and its findings in chronological order, perhaps the article aims to make the reader feel like they are performing the investigation themselves?

Some readers could prefer the story-telling style, but others prioritize getting the information. To contrast, a novel wouldn't give away the ending on the first page, but a scholarly article absolutely has to give the take-away in the abstract.

I personally think for informative reporting, it's maximally respectful of the reader's time and attention to give a quick summary up front. Then they can decide if they want to continue for the full details and story-telling experience. Many people won't, but those people would probably skip the story in the first place and click through to the comments for the punch line.

Thanks for bringing up this discussion!

Agreed. Although being upfront to some degree is useful there is a balance, some things are better revealed in context to fully appreciate. If the conclusion is less binary or singular something can be sacrificed without ruining everything, but in this case I can't see a way to not destroy the story telling... I'm pretty sure I preferred reading this without BLUF.

I can't think of one right off the bat, but I've read some great novels where the author starts by telling you what's going to happen, but you still don't want to stop reading. In fact sometimes it makes you all the more interested in continuing with the story.

This blog is all about decapping various ICs and providing die photos. The motivating question is mostly irrelevant, the intended audience is there to let someone else deal with boiling acid and still get cool pictures of chips to look at (and sometimes reverse-engineer). It's all about teardowns that don't give up whenever there's an IC package or epoxy blob.

As far as I can see from the blog, it's a technical blog. I would expect its regular users to read to the end and it kind of makes sense to put the conclusion at the bottom.

Technical users are exactly the ones who are looking to get information, not an entertaining story.

There is a reason academia uses abstracts, and it's not because the attention spans of the readers are unusually short.

I personally enjoy a good story. I think articles like this are about the story as much as if not more than their informational aspect. They are kind of like cool stories you tell your friends. You can see it the conversational sentences in this article.

Especially if it's an article and not a video when I could easily skim to the end to read the conclusion if I don't want to read the story. I feel disrespectful towards the author if I want the conclusion up front.

We used to do that with all of our security assessment reports. It let people actually focus on the content vs. being distracted by waiting for the punchline at the end. To a person, our customers absolutely loved it.

I have noted this with several high ranking posts on HN. I wonder whether it's a case of the author being unaware of BLUF, or simply that they want you to read their work before finding the conclusion?

I see it a lot at work and chalk it up to some people having learned/internalized a legalistic way of building up a pattern of facts and basing each on the previous. It’s not so much that they want you to read 2 pages but that they want you to believe every newly introduced bit of the story.

Here in Japan too, bottom-up is the standard pattern.

Japanese people can learn to use BLUF, but it's very much not the culturally expected approach.

It makes sense if you're telling a story, and that I understand. But when you're trying to make a point, I feel like it's more respectful of people's time to get to the point; if they want details they can read on.

How does that fit with the culturally expected approach in Japan? If you're sharing a revelation, is it still normal to build up rather than start with the answer?

>> you're trying to make a point I here this is the root of the divergence.

YOU are not trying to make a point. If a point is there, your role is only to help to reveal it.

In other words, it should be in balance and objective.

It's too late to edit. The first line should be split between your comment and my reply.

It makes sense, but I'm a big fan of the TL;DR approach; if you're sharing a point, get to it, then embellish all you like after that. If someone clicked through, bought your book, whatever to find out, what does 1+1 equal; start with "1+1 = 2. The following is a long and detailed account of why...".

On a tangent, I find it quite refreshing in film when they start with the punchline. You know what happens in the end before you even start; if it's a good film, it's still worth watching, even knowing the end.

The conclusion needs to be in the headline. If I'd seen this last night I would have emailed the HN mods using the footer Contact link to have the clickbait stripped out of it. I'm doing so now anyways.

I'm not sure the original headline was that baity, since (1) the original title implies that the article will investigate the question, which is exactly what it does; and (2) if the conclusion had been that the button was fake, the title would certainly have said so.

But point taken and I've changed it now. Thanks!

> I understand not putting the conclusion in the title

Why?

I would hazard a guess that fewer people would read the article if the headline was, "Amazon Echo Flex: Microphone mute, real or fake? It's real."

> The SOC (system on chip) controller seems to be connected to the flip flop resets, which makes sense as the product powers on with the microphone enabled as default....

It sounds like you could press mute, walk away and it could reset unmuting itself in the process without you realizing. You would need to constantly monitor that LED for assurance it is still muted. It’s not clear to me from the article how the SOC is connected to the flipflop reset. i.e. can the flipflop reset be initiated via software?

A mechanical switch that can’t so easily and unexpectedly lose its state would be preferable. There are probably good reasons they didn’t do that (aesthetics, cost, reliability?)

Can the device turn itself into automated update and then restart thus enabling adversary to listen to whatever is going on at someone's house?

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