2026-04-01 17:00:29
:::info Astounding Stories of Super-Science October 2022, by Astounding Stories is part of HackerNoon’s Book Blog Post series. You can jump to any chapter in this book here. THE MURDER OF ROGER ACKROYD - THE WHOLE TRUTH
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\ By Agatha Christie
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\ A slight gesture from Poirot enjoined me to stay behind the rest. I obeyed, going over to the fire and thoughtfully stirring the big logs on it with the toe of my boot.
I was puzzled. For the first time I was absolutely at sea as to Poirot’s meaning. For a moment I was inclined to think that the scene I had just witnessed was a gigantic piece of bombast—that he had been what he called “playing the comedy” with a view to making himself interesting and important. But, in spite of myself, I was forced to believe in an underlying reality. There had been real menace in his words—a certain indisputable sincerity. But I still believed him to be on entirely the wrong tack.
When the door shut behind the last of the party he came over to the fire.
“Well, my friend,” he said quietly, “and what do you think of it all?”
“I don’t know what to think,” I said frankly. “What was the point? Why not go straight to Inspector Raglan with the truth instead of giving the guilty person this elaborate warning?”
Poirot sat down and drew out his case of tiny Russian cigarettes. He smoked for a minute or two in silence. Then:—
“Use your little gray cells,” he said. “There is always a reason behind my actions.”
I hesitated for a moment, and then I said slowly:
“The first one that occurs to me is that you yourself do not know who the guilty person is, but that you are sure that he is to be found amongst the people here to-night. Therefore your words were intended to force a confession from the unknown murderer?”
Poirot nodded approvingly.
“A clever idea, but not the truth.”
“I thought, perhaps, that by making him believe you knew, you might force him out into the open—not necessarily by confession. He might try to silence you as he formerly silenced Mr. Ackroyd—before you could act to-morrow morning.”
“A trap with myself as the bait! Merci, mon ami, but I am not sufficiently heroic for that.”
“Then I fail to understand you. Surely you are running the risk of letting the murderer escape by thus putting him on his guard?”
Poirot shook his head.
“He cannot escape,” he said gravely. “There is only one way out—and that way does not lead to freedom.”
“You really believe that one of those people here to-night committed the murder?” I asked incredulously.
“Yes, my friend.”
“Which one?”
There was a silence for some minutes. Then Poirot tossed the stump of his cigarette into the grate and began to speak in a quiet, reflective tone.
“I will take you the way that I have traveled myself. Step by step you shall accompany me, and see for yourself that all the facts point indisputably to one person. Now, to begin with, there were two facts and one little discrepancy in time which especially attracted my attention. The first fact was the telephone call. If Ralph Paton were indeed the murderer, the telephone call became meaningless and absurd. Therefore, I said to myself, Ralph Paton is not the murderer.
“I satisfied myself that the call could not have been sent by any one in the house, yet I was convinced that it was amongst those present on the fatal evening that I had to look for my criminal. Therefore I concluded that the telephone call must have been sent by an accomplice. I was not quite pleased with that deduction, but I let it stand for the minute.
“I next examined the motive for the call. That was difficult. I could only get at it by judging its result. Which was—that the murder was discovered that night instead of—in all probability—the following morning. You agree with that?”
“Ye-es,” I admitted. “Yes. As you say, Mr. Ackroyd, having given orders that he was not to be disturbed, nobody would have been likely to go to the study that night.”
“Très bien. The affair marches, does it not? But matters were still obscure. What was the advantage of having the crime discovered that night in preference to the following morning? The only idea I could get hold of was that the murderer, knowing the crime was to be discovered at a certain time, could make sure of being present when the door was broken in—or at any rate immediately afterwards. And now we come to the second fact—the chair pulled out from the wall. Inspector Raglan dismissed that as of no importance. I, on the contrary, have always regarded it as of supreme importance.
“In your manuscript you have drawn a neat little plan of the study. If you had it with you this minute you would see that—the chair being drawn out in the position indicated by Parker—it would stand in a direct line between the door and the window.”
“The window!” I said quickly.
“You, too, have my first idea. I imagined that the chair was drawn out so that something connected with the window should not be seen by any one entering through the door. But I soon abandoned that supposition, for though the chair was a grandfather with a high back, it obscured very little of the window—only the part between the sash and the ground. No, mon ami—but remember that just in front of the window there stood a table with books and magazines upon it. Now that table was completely hidden by the drawn-out chair—and immediately I had my first shadowy suspicion of the truth.
“Supposing that there had been something on that table not intended to be seen? Something placed there by the murderer? As yet I had no inkling of what that something might be. But I knew certain very interesting facts about it. For instance, it was something that the murderer had not been able to take away with him at the time that he committed the crime. At the same time it was vital that it should be removed as soon as possible after the crime had been discovered. And so—the telephone message, and the opportunity for the murderer to be on the spot when the body was discovered.
“Now four people were on the scene before the police arrived. Yourself, Parker, Major Blunt, and Mr. Raymond. Parker I eliminated at once, since at whatever time the crime was discovered, he was the one person certain to be on the spot. Also it was he who told me of the pulled-out chair. Parker, then, was cleared (of the murder, that is. I still thought it possible that he had been blackmailing Mrs. Ferrars). Raymond and Blunt, however, remained under suspicion since, if the crime had been discovered in the early hours of the morning, it was quite possible that they might have arrived on the scene too late to prevent the object on the round table being discovered.
“Now what was that object? You heard my arguments to-night in reference to the scrap of conversation overheard? As soon as I learned that a representative of a dictaphone company had called, the idea of a dictaphone took root in my mind. You heard what I said in this room not half an hour ago? They all agreed with my theory—but one vital fact seems to have escaped them. Granted that a dictaphone was being used by Mr. Ackroyd that night—why was no dictaphone found?”
“I never thought of that,” I said.
“We know that a dictaphone was supplied to Mr. Ackroyd. But no dictaphone has been found amongst his effects. So, if something was taken from that table—why should not that something be the dictaphone? But there were certain difficulties in the way. The attention of every one was, of course, focused on the murdered man. I think any one could have gone to the table unnoticed by the other people in the room. But a dictaphone has a certain bulk—it cannot be slipped casually into a pocket. There must have been a receptacle of some kind capable of holding it.
“You see where I am arriving? The figure of the murderer is taking shape. A person who was on the scene straightway, but who might not have been if the crime had been discovered the following morning. A person carrying a receptacle into which the dictaphone might be fitted——”
I interrupted.
“But why remove the dictaphone? What was the point?”
“You are like Mr. Raymond. You take it for granted that what was heard at nine-thirty was Mr. Ackroyd’s voice speaking into a dictaphone. But consider this useful invention for a little minute. You dictate into it, do you not? And at some later time a secretary or a typist turns it on, and the voice speaks again.”
“You mean——” I gasped.
Poirot nodded.
“Yes, I mean that. At nine-thirty Mr. Ackroyd was already dead. It was the dictaphone speaking—not the man.”
“And the murderer switched it on. Then he must have been in the room at that minute?”
“Possibly. But we must not exclude the likelihood of some mechanical device having been applied—something after the nature of a time lock, or even of a simple alarm clock. But in that case we must add two qualifications to our imaginary portrait of the murderer. It must be some one who knew of Mr. Ackroyd’s purchase of the dictaphone and also some one with the necessary mechanical knowledge.
“I had got thus far in my own mind when we came to the footprints on the window ledge. Here there were three conclusions open to me. (1) They might really have been made by Ralph Paton. He had been at Fernly that night, and might have climbed into the study and found his uncle dead there. That was one hypothesis. (2) There was the possibility that the footmarks might have been made by somebody else who happened to have the same kind of studs in his shoes. But the inmates of the house had shoes soled with crepe rubber, and I declined to believe in the coincidence of some one from outside having the same kind of shoes as Ralph Paton wore. Charles Kent, as we know from the barmaid of the Dog and Whistle, had on a pair of boots ‘clean dropping off him.’ (3) Those prints were made by some one deliberately trying to throw suspicion on Ralph Paton. To test this last conclusion, it was necessary to ascertain certain facts. One pair of Ralph’s shoes had been obtained from the Three Boars by the police. Neither Ralph nor any one else could have worn them that evening, since they were downstairs being cleaned. According to the police theory, Ralph was wearing another pair of the same kind, and I found out that it was true that he had two pairs. Now for my theory to be proved correct it was necessary for the murderer to have worn Ralph’s shoes that evening—in which case Ralph must have been wearing yet a third pair of footwear of some kind. I could hardly suppose that he would bring three pairs of shoes all alike—the third pair of footwear were more likely to be boots. I got your sister to make inquiries on this point—laying some stress on the color, in order—I admit it frankly—to obscure the real reason for my asking.
“You know the result of her investigations. Ralph Paton had had a pair of boots with him. The first question I asked him when he came to my house yesterday morning was what he was wearing on his feet on the fatal night. He replied at once that he had worn boots—he was still wearing them, in fact—having nothing else to put on.
“So we get a step further in our description of the murderer—a person who had the opportunity to take these shoes of Ralph Paton’s from the Three Boars that day.”
He paused, and then said, with a slightly raised voice:—
“There is one further point. The murderer must have been a person who had the opportunity to purloin that dagger from the silver table. You might argue that any one in the house might have done so, but I will recall to you that Miss Ackroyd was very positive that the dagger was not there when she examined the silver table.”
He paused again.
“Let us recapitulate—now that all is clear. A person who was at the Three Boars earlier that day, a person who knew Ackroyd well enough to know that he had purchased a dictaphone, a person who was of a mechanical turn of mind, who had the opportunity to take the dagger from the silver table before Miss Flora arrived, who had with him a receptacle suitable for hiding the dictaphone—such as a black bag, and who had the study to himself for a few minutes after the crime was discovered while Parker was telephoning for the police. In fact—Dr. Sheppard!”
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This book is part of the public domain. Astounding Stories. (2008). ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE, JULY 2008. USA. Project Gutenberg. Release date: OCTOBER 2, 2008, from https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69087/pg69087-images.html
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2026-04-01 16:45:06
:::tip This is an installment of our “Community Member Spotlight” series, in which we invite our customers to share their work, spotlight their success, and inspire others with new ways to use technology to solve problems.
\ In this edition, Per Grapatin, Vice-President of Engineering at Glooko, a diabetes monitoring solution used by 1M+ patients, shares how they migrated one of their largest and most critical medical data workloads from a leading document database to Tiger Cloud, unlocking lower storage costs, faster ingest, and a cleaner architecture for future growth.
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I’m Per Grapatin, Vice President of Engineering at Glooko, a diabetes platform used by over 1M patients for glucose monitoring and chronic condition tracking. We simplify diabetes care, integrate with EHR workflows, and deliver measurable health outcomes.
Glooko ingests over 100M new data points every day, primarily timestamped measurements and patient events, to power real-time dashboards and analytics for patients and healthcare providers. Older devices collect glucose values every 5 minutes, newer ones every minute. To meet local data residency requirements, we utilize regional data centers in Germany, Ireland, Canada, and the U.S. for storage and analytics.
Real-time time-series workloads force ugly cost/performance trade-offs. You can buy your way out of performance bottlenecks, but it gets expensive fast. At Glooko, we hit the point where scaling our existing setup to keep up with rising demand just wasn’t worth the cost.
As we evaluated alternatives to our existing document database, Tiger Data stood out. We already trusted Postgres internally and had considered building our own time-series solution on it, but were uneasy about the risks of self-hosting a tech stack requiring HIPAA/GDPR compliance. In addition, we use AWS as the backbone of our digital system, so Tiger Data’s model running on EC2 with S3 storage made it easy to snap into our existing architecture.
With Tiger Cloud, we got the cost and performance benefits we needed on a hosted Postgres platform:
We unified everything on Tiger Cloud and kept it in a single Postgres platform, with compute and storage decoupled. That cleared our ingest/read bottlenecks without our costs exploding, and it gives us room to scale while shipping more functionality.
We designed new TimescaleDB hypertables around how we actually query per patient, per day. We kept only the fields we needed for analytics in the hot path and pushed the rest to cheaper storage. With this shift, query patterns now match the time-series partitioning relevant for clinicians and patients consuming the data (e.g. “Show me the last 90 days”, etc). Late-arriving data and continuous writes to recent time windows now occur in a normal, supported pattern rather than being managed on an ad-hoc basis.
In addition, we built a dedicated medical data service (MDS) with direct access to Tiger Cloud. Legacy services and mobile clients were updated to talk to MDS rather than with the database directly, simplifying and speeding up the ingestion process. It also made it easier to update schema and performance characteristics without rippling changes through the entire tech stack.
The end result was excellent. Ingestion is faster than before, costs are lower than before, and we ended up ahead of our original timeline.” Per Grapatin, Vice-President of Engineering at Glooko
Once the migration was done, we went back to the metrics and confirmed that Tiger Data did reduce costs compared to our earlier architecture. Storage got cheaper because we were storing less. Compute got cheaper because we could downsize instances more than we expected.
While we have finished the core migration from a document database to a unified Postgres platform on AWS, we remain focused on optimization. We plan to move our remaining medical data collections into Tiger Cloud so our high-volume telemetry and clinical datasets can live in one space, providing better performance for patient and provider-facing workloads.
2026-04-01 16:35:07
Most demand gen programs are optimized to win over the marketer. But the marketer isn't the decision. Here's the structural problem nobody's talking about — and what content strategy actually looks like when you solve for it.
I was on a call recently with the VP of Growth at a B2B infrastructure company going through a significant rebrand. Sharp operator. Clear on her strategy.
She was describing why she cared about content partnerships — not just ad placements, not just backlinks — and she landed on this:
We're leaving our champion to blow out in the wind, making these decisions. But I want them to think we're their partner. That we know what we're talking about. That we're helping them get what they want.
— VP of Growth, anonymized
That's not a brand brief. That's a diagnosis.
Her buyers — the ones who might choose her product — were showing up to internal budget meetings without the vocabulary, the narrative, or the credibility to close the room. And her current content strategy wasn't helping them. It was talking at them. Not equipping them.
She called it champion enablement.
I've been calling it the most underserved problem in B2B demand gen.
At a Gartner/Forrester conference, researchers put up a slide with a finding that stopped the room: 80% of internal stakeholders don't believe that marketing understands the business.
Think about what that means structurally for your demand gen program.
Your ICP persona is the marketer — the Director of Marketing, the VP of Demand Gen, the Head of Growth. They're your champion. They're the person who found you, engaged with your content, maybe even shortlisted you. But when they walk into the room with Procurement, Legal, Finance, or the CTO, they're already carrying a credibility tax. Eight out of ten of their peers don't trust their business judgment.
If I could just get Legal to say 'I've heard of them' when the team walks in — that familiarity makes the road so much easier to travel.
— VP of Growth, anonymized
The implication: you can run a perfect demand gen program — the right ICP targeting, the right channels, the right nurture sequences — and still lose deals in rooms you never had access to, to objections you never knew existed, from stakeholders who never read a single piece of your content.
That's not a channel problem. That's a structural problem.
Demand gen teams have gotten very sophisticated about the dark funnel — the research that happens before a prospect ever touches your website. Intent data, account-level signals, share-of-voice tracking. The 6th Sense playbooks. The Bombora dashboards.
But there's a second dark funnel that's even harder to see: the internal buying conversation.
Your champion doesn't just need to find you. They need to sell you — to people who weren't in any of your nurture sequences, didn't see your ads, haven't read your case studies, and may only ever hear your brand name once, in a five-minute hallway conversation.
The question worth asking: What does your buyer say about you when you're not in the room?
Not what they feel about you. Not what they've read. What they say — the words they use, the framing they reach for, the risks they address proactively.
If you don't know the answer, your champion doesn't either. And that's the gap your content strategy should be designed to close.
Most content strategy stops at awareness or consideration. The implicit assumption is: get in front of the right persona, deliver the right message, and the deal will move. But this model assumes your champion has the organizational credibility and internal fluency to carry the ball over the line.
For most complex B2B deals, that assumption is wrong.
Let's be specific. The VP of Growth I was speaking with outlined her actual problem: she needs her technical buyers to make the case to Procurement, her Procurement contacts to not raise blockers with Legal, and Legal to at least recognize her brand's name when it comes up. Three completely different audiences. Three completely different conversations. All happening without her in the room.
Her ideal outcome — and I thought this was the clearest articulation of champion enablement I've heard — was a scenario where the technical owner and the business owner walk into Legal together, mention her product, and Legal says: "Yeah, I've heard of them."
That's it. Not "I love them." Not "I've read their whitepaper." Just familiarity. Pre-existing signal. The absence of friction.
This reframes what content is actually for in a long-cycle B2B deal. It's not just awareness. It's pre-loading trust across a buying committee — most of whom you'll never directly reach through a campaign.
The metrics we optimize for don't capture champion enablement. MQL volume, CPL, pipeline influenced — all of these measure the top of the journey and the bottom of the funnel. None of them tell you whether your champion walked into their Q4 budget review armed or defenseless.
There's a reason for this: the channels we've built for demand gen are fundamentally optimized for one-to-one reach. You find a person who matches your ICP, you deliver a message, you measure their response. The buying committee problem is fundamentally a one-to-many problem — one champion, multiple stakeholders, none of them in your CRM.
CP narrows the scope, but it doesn't lighten the load. The depth of messaging required across roles and seniority levels — that's still all there.
— VP of Growth, anonymized
I've watched this play out across dozens of enterprise deals. The surface-level diagnosis is almost always the same: "the deal stalled." But when you trace it back, what actually happened is that the champion ran out of runway — they couldn't get the internal alignment they needed, because the organization didn't have enough signal about the vendor to move forward.
Not enough signal. Not negative signal. Just silence.
And in a risk-averse buying environment, silence is a no.
Here's where I'll push back on the instinct to dismiss champion enablement as "brand awareness" — a category that often gets deprioritized by demand gen teams under pressure to show attribution.
The right framing isn't brand vs. demand. It's pipeline velocity.
If 80% of your target accounts complete most of their research before talking to sales, and a meaningful portion of your deals stall internally rather than in your pipeline, then the ROI question isn't "did this piece of content drive an MQL?" It's: "did this content reduce the time between qualified opportunity and closed-won?"
That's measurable. You can track:
Account-level re-engagement rate: Are target accounts that consumed your enablement content cycling back to your site faster after initial outreach?
Sales cycle duration by content exposure cohort: Deals where the buying committee had some prior brand exposure versus deals where your sales rep was introducing the brand cold — is there a velocity difference?
Win rate among accounts with multi-stakeholder touchpoints: If Legal or Finance ever shows up in your attribution data (via intent tools or direct engagement), does that correlate with wins?
The VP I spoke with set a specific target: 100 accounts from her total addressable market influenced within the first quarter of a new content partnership. Not 100 leads. Not 100 MQLs. 100 accounts — company-level signals, from a universe of 40,000.
That's a 0.25% engagement threshold.
Achievable. Measurable.
And much closer to how enterprise pipeline actually works than any individual-level conversion metric.
We've been trained to think about content strategy as: find the right person, deliver the right message, at the right time.
Champion enablement demands a different frame: find the right person, give them what they need to win the rooms you'll never be in.
That shifts the question from "what does our ICP need to hear?" to "what does our ICP need to say — to their CFO, to their Legal team, to the procurement manager who's never heard of us?"
It shifts the content format from "what performs well on our blog?" to "what gets forwarded at 11pm before a budget meeting?"
And it shifts the distribution question from "how do we reach more of our ICP?" to "how do we get ambient presence in the rooms our ICP spends time in — even the ones we can't directly access?"
This isn't a rebrand of awareness campaigns. It's a different strategic intent. Awareness says: make them know we exist. Champion enablement says: make it easy for the people who already know we exist to get us approved.
For demand gen teams operating in complex, multi-stakeholder sales environments, the difference between those two goals is measured in quarters.
The companies that figure this out aren't spending more on demand gen. They're spending it differently — building content that travels internally, not just externally. Content that works in the rooms they'll never enter, with the stakeholders they'll never directly reach.
The pipeline is downstream of that trust. Start building it there.
2026-04-01 15:59:36
PixelSmile tackles AI emotion ambiguity with continuous labels, symmetric training, and precise facial expression control.
2026-04-01 15:36:15
AC-Foley shows why text prompts limit video-to-audio generation and how reference audio enables finer control, timbre transfer, and zero-shot synthesis.
2026-04-01 14:59:59
Charts had become a normal part of our lives, visual elements of our work. Why not create a chart-building webpage where you enter the data and it creates the webpage? And with the help of AI it could be even easier.
