Ask HN: Rate my webapp - <AUTHOR> http://marquepages.appspot.com/

<comment><USER2> "problem is I don't have time to finish my reading at a stretch..." unfortunatly, this is where I stopped reading ;)

Go for images or video rather than a paragraph of text. You didn't really grab my interest with so much text on the page, and nothing else.

</comment><comment><USER3> So, it's an online bookmark manager that solves the problem of a long to-read list by... deleting the list?

</comment><comment><USER4> I liked the clean design but I didn't understand why, after I logged in, I had a random link to a Forth programming website already stored in my links page. A little strange. The idea of only having 4 links per user is a good solution to the quotas imposed by Google App Engine, on which you are hosting this project but, from the user's perspective, this does not make the site very useful. It's your first Django project, so congrats on getting it up and running. Now, maybe you can add a Firefox toolbar or any number of other features that existing bookmarking services offer. Also, consider allowing users to have public and private bookmarks with tagging so that there is some interaction among the users on the site. Take a look at StumbleUpon as probably the most effective implementation of this type of service. You can learn a lot from their feature set. Then you need to think about how you can set yourself apart. Nice start, though.

<comment><AUTHOR> The whole point is that by being able to save only four links, you'll be a little more picky about what you want to save. This webapp is not about saving bookmarks but about _really_ reading things.

Btw, the forth link was supposed to be an easter egg ;)</comment></comment>


Would anyone have any interest in "Who wants to be trained/certified?" threads? - <AUTHOR> In a similar vein to the "Who wants to be hired?"  posts which are extremely valuable, I was wondering if there is an apetite for a thread for people seeking certification. e.g. for ITIL, LPIC, Prince, PSM... etc. ? <comment><USER2> There's appetite for many such threads, but first try asking the question in regular 'Ask HN' without making it seem official, regular or too structured to test interest. I've seen quite a few questions which hardly got 5 replies. Yesterdays "Seeking Tutor" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20328296](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20328296)) got no replies this month (some last month), "Who is starting a startup?" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20335253](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20335253)) hasn't got any traction, "Seeking co-founder" ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19821656](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19821656)) had few replies.

Dang, one of the HN moderator, commented on such threads [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15151412](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15151412) and it seems unlikely more get added.</comment>


Yahoo Mail one-ups Gmail with better calendar integration - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/01/yahoo-mail-calendar/ <comment><USER2> "Looks like those free lunches are already starting to pay off."

Stopped reading there. Mayer has been there 5 weeks. I highly doubt this has anything to do with her.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are we actually celebrating them adding a link on the Mail page?

Also, this has nothing to do with Mayer - this was likely in the works long before her move was announced.

<comment><USER4> Yes, we are celebrating the ability to use tabs to open mail vs a browser tab. Because surely nobody likes browser tabs. _sigh_ news fail.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> But Yahoo Mail has _the_ worst SPAM filter with Microsoft just after. They both never stop SPAM at all. Gmail has the best SPAM filter!</comment>


Kickstarter Fundraising Record About To Be Broken - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/02/08/kickstarter-fundraising-record-about-to-be-broken/

<comment><USER2> The article would have been approximately 88 times better if the writer had bothered to mention what the hell the Elevation Dock does, why anyone is interested in it at all, etc. As it is, it just leaves the reader saying 'what the hell does it DO? Are the people interested in it mad?'

<comment><USER3> I got 1 paragraph in, wondered what the dock actually does, quickly skimmed a few lines to see it it had decent pics or explanation, then looked for the link to Kickstarter and left the site.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Forgive me my sarcasm, but the posterboy of crowdfunding will be a piece of hardware that is designed for people who are too lazy to use two hands to undock their smartphone?

<comment><USER5> Like the computer is designed for people that are too lazy to do math? Or the car for people who are too lazy to walk? This is a perfect posterchild because no company, including apple would spend the time and resources to make the perfect dock. Kickstarter facilitated a non-obvious innovation that made it big. Clearly the need is there.

<comment><USER6> Straw man argument :)

<comment><USER7> There are no straw man arguments in this entire thread, let alone the comment you replied to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This doesn't break the trend of the most funded Kickstarter projects being accessories for Apple products.

Afaik, you don't have any legal obligation to deliver perks to people that fund your project. A decent scam would be to come up with a "dream" iAccesory that generates a lot of interest and pocket the money without going through the mess of actually manufacturing and shipping the product.

<comment><USER9> I would be absolutely shocked if no such obligation exists in practice.

<comment><USER8> From the accountability section on kickstarter ([http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/creating%20a%20project#A...](http://www.kickstarter.com/help/faq/creating%20a%20project#Acco)):

"If I am unable to complete my project as listed, what should I do?

If you are unable to fulfill the promises made to backers, cannot complete the project as advertised, or decide to abandon the project for any reason, you are expected to cancel funding. A failure to do so could result in damage to your reputation or even legal action on behalf of your backers."

So definitely it's possible that your backers could start a class action lawsuit and sue you because you took their money and didn't deliver a product, but this would require some organization on the backers' part, kickstarter wouldn't do this on their behalf.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm really not big on accessories (I prefer universal/multifunction devices), but I have to say, this dock is pretty impressive (if it works as advertised).

Most docks are like 80% there, this dock's attention to detail brings it close to 100% (perfection), kind of like the MacBook Pro...

</comment><comment><USER11> I love the idea and execution of Kickstarter, but I do find myself disappointed that much of its "funding" (at least the high profile stuff) is really just pre-ordering.

<comment><USER12> Although one can argue that is a benefit. You can 'guess' how many you might sell, this tells you how many you will sell. So its a win in that perspective. If you spent $75K tooling up to make this thing and only sold a hundred, well you'd be putting the rest up on Woot! or something. This takes the risk out of it.

<comment><USER11> Oh for sure it is better than the guesswork of the old way of market research and relying on unfavorable deals with investors, but when put in the same space as actual investments which entail a level of risk, I have to wonder if the pre-orders will siphon money off the "We need 50k to pay our bills while we do something cool for y'all" projects, which I think are also important. For now it's all relatively small so there probably isn't much cannibalization going on, but I see it as an inevitable concern.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The only problem with this is the risk that the next iPhone coming out a few months after this ships could have a different body and might not fit.

<comment><USER14> I always assumed the spec for dock manufacturers (and the dock connector pinout/protocol) was designed to support at least one generation of devices past and future. With some speaker docks costing hundreds of dollars, I sure hope that's the case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This dock is gorgeous and innovative and I'm not even thinking about buying one.

I do love the easy 30 pin charging on the elevation dock but to me the killer feature of a charging dock is a simple landscape swivel (i.e. no engine).

I haven't seen one that does it right but all the talk about the Elevation Dock this morning got me looking though docks and this is about the closest I could find to what I'm looking for:

[http://www.ebay.com/itm/Swivel-Mount-USB-Desktop-Cradle- Char...](http://www.ebay.com/itm/Swivel-Mount-USB-Desktop-Cradle-Charger-GM- iPhone-4-/330597524997?pt=PDA_Accessories&hash=item4cf925e605)

Ideally I'd like something that leaves the lower speakers free though.

</comment><comment><USER16> There's a good chance their time at the top will be short-lived. Double Fine just posted a proposal to fund an old school point-and-click adventure on Kickstarter.

[http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine- adv...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure)

At this moment they are at "2,951 BACKERS $156,197 PLEDGED OF $400,000 GOAL 33 DAYS TO GO" and rising very fast.

<comment><USER17> Also see the HN submission on this Kickstarter: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3569676> (tl;dr: Tim Schafer!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> It's funny that the Apple dock has this problem, given that ye olde original Palm Pilot dock had a big chunk of steel in it just to avoid this very issue.

</comment><comment><USER19> Watched the video, Did anyone really remove their iDevice from the doc like that? I know I didn't. Nice design thought.

<comment><AUTHOR> Kickstarter becomes more and more the platform to be for stuff like that. As I see, anything related to mobile gets a lot of traction there.

<comment><USER20> More like anything related to iOS gets traction - I don't recall seeing a single Android-specific or even compatible project on Kickstarter, let alone the most successful ones. It helps if design-y people love your products/brand.

<comment><USER21> iOS devices present a (mostly) constant form factor, allowing a large addressable market with customers/funders who are willing to pay for quality. A rigorously-designed dock can address not only iPhones, but iPods as well.

That's the Apple platform strength - the weakness is changes are sometimes sudden and can eliminate or subsume 3rd party product markets entirely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I want one, and I don't even own an iPhone.

</comment><comment><USER23> What was the previous record? Diaspora?

<comment><USER13> The TikTok+LunaTik multi-touch watch kit raised over $942,000. [http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1104350651/tiktok- lunati...](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1104350651/tiktok-lunatik- multi-touch-watch-kits?ref=most-funded)</comment></comment>


Jester, a Sinatra-like web framework for Nimrod - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/dom96/jester

<comment><USER2> I didn't know what Nimrod was (probably like most people), so I'll save you the Google effort:

> Nimrod is a statically typed, imperative programming language that tries to > give the programmer ultimate power without compromises on runtime > efficiency. This means it focuses on compile-time mechanisms in all their > various forms.

> Beneath a nice infix/indentation based syntax with a powerful (AST based, > hygienic) macro system lies a semantic model that supports a soft realtime > GC on thread local heaps. Asynchronous message passing is used between > threads, so no "stop the world" mechanism is necessary. An unsafe shared > memory heap is also provided for the increased efficiency that results from > that model.

[http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4749](http://lambda-the- ultimate.org/node/4749)

[http://nimrod-code.org/](http://nimrod-code.org/)

<comment><USER3> > I'll save you the Google effort

It's kind of sad that the act of searching the web is now reduced to a brand name. I'm not blaming you, I say it too. With the PRISM and friend revelation I feel it's time to go back to what we used to say before Google quasi- monopoly became effective and use generic terms like "search engine", "search the web", etc.

<comment><USER2> True, I use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine but I still call it googling.

But people who try to change language forcefully are annoying and mostly wasting their time (see the politically-correct crowd). It has to occur naturally.

So I'm ok with it being google for now. Photocopying in favor of Xeroxing has somewhat faded. Although calling tissues Kleenex is still going strong.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, the long term perspective didn't cross my mind. Let's hope it does indeed turn out this way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> What a nice surprise to see my own project on the front page of HN. :)

Here are some examples of web apps which use Jester in production for those interested: Nimrod forum ([http://forum.nimrod-code.org](http://forum.nimrod- code.org)) and Nimbuild ([http://build.nimrod-code.org](http://build.nimrod- code.org)). The source code for both is also available on Github: [https://github.com/nimrod-code/nimforum](https://github.com/nimrod- code/nimforum) and [https://github.com/nimrod- code/nimbuild](https://github.com/nimrod-code/nimbuild).

<comment><USER5> It is funny I just replied to your comment on the other thread where I brought up Nimrod. It is nice to see Jester, as it is something I would like to play with in the near future as well.

Congrats to you and the Nimrod crew for shining in your unique little space.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just the project I've been meaning to code in the language that's on the top of my list. Now my saturday night is perfect. I'm gonna read this code after pizza. :) Thanks for the effort!

</comment><comment><USER7> Would love to hear from someone to uses Nimrod in production. I'm not familiar with the language.

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't know what any of these things mean -___-

</comment><comment><USER9> Introducing [random noun] a [random noun] for [random noun].

<comment><USER10> I am the creator of the [random noun] programming language, I am happy to see that you are using it in so many ways. Keep up the good work!

<comment><USER9> It's a very [adjective] [noun]! (patiently waiting for my Mad Libs C&D)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Never heard of sinatra before. Just checked /tests folder. It's a small and beautiful piece of code. I shall bookmark this.

</comment><comment><USER12> This looks pretty interesting, will probably try and play with it tomorrow. Are there any uses where Nimrod is used in production? Seems like quite a nice language</comment>


Show HN: A Gmail desktop client in Electron - paulo-tanaka https://github.com/paulot/gmail <comment><AUTHOR> Interesting use of Electron.

Did you recreate the Gmail interface and leverage its API[1], or is this just running gmail.com in a webview?

[1] [https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/?hl=en](https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/?hl=en)

<comment> paulo-tanaka Just as a webview. I thought of recreating the interface using the API, but frankly it seemed like over-engineering the problem. My goal with this project is to simply provide a better way to use gmail, and not have it lost in the millions of tabs that I constantly keep open in my browser.

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> This is bizarre. It seems everybody want to use Electron for something. Couldn't you create a shortcut to opening Chrome in "app mode" (without URL bar or browser menus) directly in Gmail?

<comment> paulo-tanaka Sure, but by making it an app it more tightly integrates with the desktop. For instance, I personally find it rather useless that when you resize gmail to a small screen, around 25% of my screen's real-estate is taken by the hangouts menu, which I almost never use. A much better use of screen space would be to hide the hangouts menu, when the screen diminishes. Also, by going the app route we can set some nice app specific shortcuts to gmail page functionalities that users might not know about and leverage Apple's awesome search bar under the help menu.

The idea of this app was to make a gmail equivalent to what Caprine ([https://github.com/sindresorhus/caprine](https://github.com/sindresorhus/caprine)) is for fb messenger. I've been using the gmail app since last week (when I made it) and so far, I like it more than I thought I would.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> You should probably rename the project before Google comes after you for copyright infringement. Nice project :-D</comment>


Ask HN: What do people not understand about being a software developer? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Development and operations are two very different things, that just happen to be friends, so please stop asking me to do tech support.

I'm as bad at using windows as you are, maybe worse.

</comment><comment><USER3> The reason behind varying estimates. People seem to tell programming is an act of typing.

<comment><USER4> Exactly this. Some people have hard time to understand that sometimes writing 5 lines of code can take whole day of chasing the bug and sometimes if everything goes smooth whole system can be prototype in a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> You need to know a minimum of 7 (seven) languages, not just one.</comment>


Verizon workers can now be fired if they fix copper phone lines - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/verizon-workers-can-now-be-fired-if-they-fix-copper-phone-lines/ <comment><USER2> Cell phone sound quality is noticeably worse than a pots line or T1. I purposely use a landline when I need to make an important call. Presumably the call quality of VoiceLink is the same as normal cell phones, which is why modems (ie fax, alarms) don't work.

<comment><USER3> Or "adequate" VoIP, e.g. Linux 18.104.22.168 on Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty on a very modest AT&T DSL line. When I account for differences in instruments, Sennheiser headset vs. an old wireless phone system with an indifferent speaker, easily equal, and indeed noticeably a lot better than most any cell call (although maybe my Nexus 5X Project Fi calls going over local WiFi to a POTS line are pretty good, I'll have to start paying attention).

(And I'm glad I've moved out of Verizon to AT&T (!!!) territory, AT&T is seriously inconsistent about their DSL services, but here I got what seems to be a solid U-verse Internet installation in less than 24 hours after closing on the house I just moved to.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's the problem here? If the wireless alternative is available, it's used. Otherwise, the copper phone line is repaired.</comment>


What If the Singularity Does Not Happen? (2007) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://longnow.org/seminars/02007/feb/15/what-if-the-singularity-does-not-happen/ <comment><USER3> Visions of the Singularity in the near term failed to account for two things: 1) obtaining regulatory approval for innovations in various spheres (medicine, aviation) takes _forever_ , 2) innovations that rely on the consumer market are slowed by people wanting to use their present purchases for some amount of time before shelling out again for the next generation of tech.

An exponentially faster development of technology is limited by how fast the workings of government agencies and consumers' minds operate.

I rolled my eyes when I read Kurzweil's predictions of medical advances in his early-millennium books. Even if we invent nanobots or whatever so quickly, the FDA and its counterparts are not going to allow applying those technologies the very moment they are invented.

<comment><USER4> > Even if we invent nanobots or whatever so quickly, the FDA and its > counterparts are not going to allow applying those technologies the very > moment they are invented.

I've often wondered if countries (such as maybe China or India) where medical devices/pharmaceuticals/etc are more lightly regulated may some day end up pulling ahead of countries like the US with stricter regulations.

Of course, stricter regulations exist for a reason – to reduce incidence of death or injury from insufficiently tested treatments. But, there is always a risk-reward tradeoff–being willing to tolerate a greater incidence of death/injury due to new treatments may increase the progress of medical science–and some societies may collectively decide to locate that tradeoff at a different position than what the US (or even other Western countries) does.

<comment><USER5> > to reduce the incidence of death/injury

... Or you know large scale existential crisis. Nanotechnology is freaky man. Could be the easiest way for reality to be rewritten without anyone noticing..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The video didn't load for me, but there was a similar talk on Youtube from Vinge: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzRuPGnJxCs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RzRuPGnJxCs)

<comment><USER7> You can also read Vinge's essay from 1993:

[https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html](https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html)

<comment><USER8> "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

Four years to go... will we make it?

<comment><USER7> China has made AI a priority. Hard to say what's going to happen but I would expect the AI arms race between the US and China to have quite an impact.

[https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609038/chinas-ai- awakenin...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609038/chinas-ai-awakening/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> To me a singularity does not seem to be approaching. In particular it doesn't seem like technology is "accelerating faster and faster". The broadest metric for human progress is GDP growth, and in the U.S. GDP growth hasn't really been accelerating, it's been around 2.5% a year for the past decade or so.

AI in particular has made some advances but most basic activities remain undoable. AI cannot fold my laundry or generate a believable sentence well enough for those features to make their way into a consumer product. Voice recognition like Alexa is the only big impact of AI so far, which places it below advances like "touch screen glass" in terms of its impact on society.

It could certainly change. The biggest question right now is whether self driving cars will work, or whether it will fizzle. In the 50's many car companies thought the next step was inevitably personal airplanes, and that fizzled. So it's possible it just won't happen.

<comment><USER10> Really? How much progress was made on thinking machines in the 19th century? How much between 1900 and 1950? 1950 and 2000? 2000 and 2010? 2010 and now?

I think each of those timespans is very roughly equivalent. In the past 10 years voice recognition has gone from useless to ubiquitous. Neural image labeling and segmentation likewise. Physical robots have gone from taking a few faltering steps to doing parkour. None of that counts as "AI" any more because it works and we know how, but the rate at which new capabilities are moving from the realm of "AI" to the realm of "normal engineering" is increasing exponentially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I really like Vernor Vinge's fiction, and he's got some really big ideas, but sometimes in contexts like these I'm surprised by how shallow and provincial the thinking is. He seems unable to step out the present western 20th/21st century worldview.

The singularity (if it comes) should feature intelligences whose modes and motivations are so superior and advanced, they are literally incomprehensible to us. Questions like "Will the machines allow humans to live?" are ill-posed. As human philosophers can't agree on the meaning or the existence of free will, will the machines? Will they have will, free or otherwise? Or is free will itself the mere shadow on the wall of the a richer thing that we can't truly, ever comprehend? So talking about what the machines/intelligences 'want' is getting ahead of ourselves.

<comment> loup-vaillant > _Questions like "Will the machines allow humans to live?" are ill-posed._

I don't think so. Even if the machine doesn't care about you (it may not even have a notion of what is a human), you are still made of atoms it could use for something else.

<comment><USER10> Are you still a living human if it just shoops you off into a virtual world indistinguishable from your current one, so it can use your atoms for something more productive? What about if you upgrade yourself to the point where you're no longer made of mortal meat?

<comment> loup-vaillant > _Are you still a living human if it just shoops you off into a virtual world > indistinguishable from your current one_

As far as I can assess, yes I am. (For a couple reasons, including my disbelief in philosophical zombies, I believe in mind uploading).

> _so it can use your atoms for something more productive?_

Wait a minute, running a Matrix takes energy no matter how you put it. Energy the machine could use for something else… If the machine doesn't care about me, why would it even bother? It would just take the atoms and discard any information (that is, me) that it does not need. Running a Matrix is a strong indication that the machine _does_ , in fact, care about me.

> _What about if you upgrade yourself to the point where you 're no longer > made of mortal meat?_

That's more delicate. I'm not sure exactly what would ensure the continuity of my identity. Mere mind uploading most likely would, but upgrades to my own brain… I think the answer will depend on what neurosciences and such tell us.

<comment><USER10> All very good answers!

For the second one I feel that a combination of scientific curiosity and altruism would be enough for most AIs up to the weakly godlike level to keep us around.

For the third, I don't think continuity can be a significant factor in identity, because even we as meat-humans don't experience it, and given the possibility of physically-indistinguishable duplicates, it leans on Cartesian dualism. Also once we can upload our mind to a data file, it does weird things to a whole bunch of current morals which are based on the scarcity of any given human mind.

<comment><USER12> > _altruism_

Some of the worst human beings I've ever encountered were also extremely talented and intelligent engineers. There is zero reason to assume a hyperintelligent AI would automatically be altruistic.

<comment> loup-vaillant More specifically, the AI is likely to be scientifically curious because it is a likely way to further its goals: understand the universe so it can be more efficient at doing whatever it is it is programmed to do.

Altruism on the other hand sounds more like an _end_ goal, not just an instrumental, intermediate goal. Unless the AI is _specifically_ programmed to be altruist, it will likely be utterly indifferent. Which if it becomes powerful enough will be more like trampling an ant without even noticing it.

Then comes the _really_ difficult part: programming altruism. What does that mean exactly? Ultimately, it boils down to tell the AI what we want, except we don't exactly know what we want, let alone what we _will_ want once we learn more, become wiser etc. We don't want the AI to keep us in soft rooms with children toys and morphine shots just because we asked it to keep us safe and happy…

<comment><USER10> "All altruism is enlightened self-interest" \- Heinlein

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> What if the singularity already happened? How would we know? It's unfalsifiable unmeasurable woo-woo.

The singularity and AGI are apocalypse for atheists.

<comment><USER14> Agreed. There is a really funny article by idlewords (who also regularly comments here) about this: [https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm](https://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm)

Not only is the Singularity religion for atheists, it also sparked tremendously bizarre offshoot beliefs, like that "Roko's Basilisk" meme that the "Eliezer Yudkowsky" crowd was briefly obsessed with.

<comment><USER15> "Not only is the Singularity religion for atheists"

I also don't understand this statement. I asked the parent about why the singularity and AGI are "the apocalypse" for atheists, but I also don't follow the logic of this statement. Granted, I don't think there will ever be a "singularity", but I fail to see how it is in any way linked to atheism. Maybe a small subset of people, like you said, a "bizarre offshoot".

<comment><USER14> Ah, yes. Sorry, I'm an atheist myself and I can see how my sentence could be misconstrued.

Let me rephrase: there's a bunch of Silicon Valley technologists and like- minded people, who consider themselves enlightened atheists, and who have fallen prey to a different kind of religion: an apocalyptic tech-religion with a set of distinct beliefs such as the Coming of the Singularity, the Evil AI, the Upload Your Mind to the Cloud and Live Forever cult, etc. Not everyone believes in the same subset, and not everyone believes in the more bizarre of these beliefs.

As an atheist myself, I definitely didn't mean that all or even the majority of atheists will fall for this. I meant that a specific subset of tech-minded, nerd, and likely well-to-do atheists tend to fall for these techno-religions.

It's a "religion for atheists" because it's a religion that tries to hide the trappings of a more traditional religion, for people who presumably reject them and who don't consider themselves open to new age pseudoscience either. But tell me it's not cute how Ray Kurzweil has faith in reaching immortality (salvation) in his own lifetime.

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the explanation. I agree there's a small group of virtual-theists like Kurzweil, he's been a bit off kilter for many, many years. I'd love to upload my mind into VR when my meatbag expires, but the chances of that happening in my life are near zero, and not much better for brain uploading in general, IMO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Another risk is that, as the singularity seems closer and closer, people are going to throw up their hands, stop learning math and science figuring the machines will do it all, and generally check out. If too many people do this too soon, sustainable recursive self-improvement won't happen and we'll be stuck with AI that doesn't quite work and nobody to fix it.

<comment><USER17> people still play chess even though machines are a class above.

<comment><USER16> Chess is fun, but will people enjoy fixing old security bugs?

You could imagine an AI that's very good at adding features to itself, but just can't get security right because it doesn't think adversarially. Corporate software groups often have this same limitation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is ridiculous, a sudden singularity. The reason is that computation (brain) power required shows no signs of singular growth, just steady growth.

</comment><comment><USER19> At this point the most likely future looks like one where we use all of our resources, wreck the environment, and enter a new dark age. The potential benefits/dangers of AI seem distant in comparison.

<comment><USER20> Some people _like_ the dark ages. The advantage goes to aggression and physical strength. Some would rather compete in such a world. It could be why they seemingly battle against civilization.

<comment><USER14> I know this is totally not the point of TFA, the parent comment or yours, but apparently the current consensus is that there was no such thing as the "Dark Ages", and it wasn't a particularly illiterate or barbaric age: [https://going-medieval.com/2017/05/26/theres-no-such- thing-a...](https://going-medieval.com/2017/05/26/theres-no-such-thing-as-the- dark-ages-but-ok/)

<comment><USER19> Fair enough – I was speaking in a more general sense. A better historical analogy would probably be something like the phenomenon Jared Diamond describes in his book "Collapse"[1].

[1]: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_to_Fail_or_Succeed)

<comment><USER14> Sure, I know it wasn't your point. I just couldn't resist commenting because I read that article recently :)

Your link is interesting, I didn't know about that book!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Ok, I have this theory and it's probably kinda ignorant, so I welcome some criticism.

It looks like biological intelligence is purely a product of having an electrical network with _tons_ of connections. That's the brain, right? And less intelligent species have less connections, so we can probably draw a straight line from low intellect - low connectivity to high intellect - <USER2> connectivity. My argument is that intelligence is a product of the complexity of an electrical network.

So will machine intelligence be purely a product of creating an electrical network with tons of connections? If I took billions of computers, wrote some basic logic for how they communicated with each other, and then wired it all up, would I get an intelligent being?

If those suppositions hold true, then all we need to do to reach AGI is to continue to invest in the internet (as it is the most advanced electrical network we've made to date). Continue to add more computers and continue to remove hindrances to the operation of the network (censorship, rate limiting, political logic). Then it will just magically wake up one day and say "hello world".

<comment><USER22> A neuron uses far more than electricity to communicate. The number of neurotransmitters and receptor types alone is staggering. There's a reason why biology evolved past using gap junctions. The computer science view of the brain compares how the brain works to FLOPS, much like how previous generations compared the brain to horsepower from the steam engine. Better analogy, but still naive.

<comment><USER23> This is an important thing that optimists often miss. If you naively apply simple estimates of how many flops it takes to simulate a mind… well, I have and it would be possible to put ~35,000 real-time human minds onto all the iPhones Apple sold this year: [https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/10/01/pocket- brai...](https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/10/01/pocket-brains/)

There's also the problem that we don't yet know how ignorant we are about our minds. I'm sure neuroscientists do at least have a rough idea by now of how much there is left to learn, but I'd be surprised if they are confident enough to be able to estimate the cost of the remaining required research to less than a factor of 10, especially as we necessarily started with the easy-to- learn knowledge.</comment></comment></comment>


Cloud Atlas 'astonishingly different' in US and UK editions, study finds (2016) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/cloud-atlas-astonishingly-different-in-us-and-uk-editions-study-finds <comment><USER2> Until now, I never really thought about how version control might work in writing and publishing.

"Cloud Atlas" was published in '04\. I wonder what systems are in place now?

</comment><comment><USER3> There's no way that software developers were the first people to realize that version control was a good idea... Right?</comment>


Visual Studio Code Tours - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/vsls-contrib/codetour <comment><USER2> Woah. The tour markers feature was really unexpected, that's a really clever approach. Great work!

[https://github.com/vsls- contrib/codetour/blob/master/README....](https://github.com/vsls- contrib/codetour/blob/master/README.md#tour-markers)

<comment><AUTHOR> Not the author BTW. We're just looking at various collaboration tools to help our devs beat the remote working challenges. This is one thing we found. The other great one was VS Code Live Share.</comment></comment>


How long do Y-Comb startups live before getting acquired or dissolving? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> You want to fail as quickly as possible. Startups are like dating. If its not going to work out you want it to bomb quickly, so you don't waste your time and so you can move on to the next one...

<comment><USER3> > You want to fail as quickly as possible.

A bunch of us got _that_ out of the way!

<comment><USER4> Getting rejected by YC is not failure. YC has specific things they're looking for, and only so many resources to go around; getting rejected means that (a) you didn't match what they were looking for or (b) you didn't seem as promising as some of the other people who applied.

A friend of mine is a marathon runner who usually comes in under 3 hours. It turns out that there are enough people in that category that the Boston Marathon offers slots by lottery, and this year he wasn't one of them. Not getting a slot in the Boston Marathon doesn't mean you can't finish the race; it just means you have to find a different place to run.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Most that die, die in less than a year. We don't have enough data yet to say what happens to the ones that don't.

<comment><USER6> Seems like the data is insufficient to talk about them dying, too: You've been going for 1.85 years, so even if the survival rate weren't particularly higher for year-old startups, the ones that have died so far would still be mostly younger than a year.</comment></comment>


Comment on the USPTO guidelines restoring software patents - <AUTHOR> https://www.uspto.gov/patent/laws-and-regulations/comments-public/comments-2019-revised-subject-matter-eligibility <comment><USER2> Ugh, the USPTO is getting really nasty here. If you actually read the proposed rules, they amount to saying "if the Supreme Court hasn't _specifically_ ruled that the matter is patent-ineligible, then we should assume it is patent- eligible," which is a very myopic view of how SCOTUS has consistently ruled on patentability in the past decade.

Of course, the real problem here isn't the USPTO, it's the Federal Circuit. The Federal Circuit's decisions are binding precedent unless overruled by the Supreme Court, and the Federal Circuit has pretty consistently followed the test being cited in the guidelines, so USPTO has to follow. This is despite SCOTUS constantly telling the Federal Circuit that they have it utterly wrong on patentability; they just haven't gotten the message yet.

<comment><USER3> >This is despite SCOTUS constantly telling the Federal Circuit that they have it utterly wrong on patentability; they just haven't gotten the message yet.

The remedy there is for SCOTUS to make definitive rulings, is it not?

<comment><USER4> The ideal remedy is for Congress to update the patent law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Today is the last day to submit your opinion in the Patent Office's efforts to re-empower software patents contrary to the supreme court's finds. Please consider using the EFF form to submit an opposition letter. [https://act.eff.org/action/save-alice-tell-the-patent- office...](https://act.eff.org/action/save-alice-tell-the-patent-office-to- apply-supreme-court-law)

</comment><comment><USER6> A fully expect this administration's agency executives to do whatever it takes to take profit over people. We saw what another agency head in the FCC did for net neutrality at the behest of companies desire for profit over people. The administrations policies here will be similar. Comments to the USPTO will be ignored unless they favor of the position the politics demand.

</comment><comment><USER7> I opened 3 of the comments at random and they were all word-for-word identical.

<comment><USER8> Those are from a call to action campaign from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

[https://act.eff.org/action/save-alice-tell-the-patent- office...](https://act.eff.org/action/save-alice-tell-the-patent-office-to- apply-supreme-court-law)

<comment><USER9> Is there any point to these campaigns? It's not a vote, right? The idea is that they're supposed to collect diverse arguments and get as many informed perspectives as they can. "Lots of people pushed a button to post this comment" is not going to be a very powerful perspective.

<comment><USER10> Sheer volume is worth something. Perhaps only a little after the fiasco at the FCC with the forged net neutrality comments.

<comment><USER9> Isn't the FCC process actually explicit about the fact that number-of-votes isn't a factor? I don't know where I read this, but I feel like I read something about the regulatory feedback process and thought to myself "this is exactly how AfD at Wikipedia work" (where voting is also useless and actually counterproductive).

<comment><USER10> If volume isn't expressly ruled out as a factor it probably ought to be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Why are only responses from "Individuals" listed?

<comment><USER12> Nobody else has submitted their comments yet. The submission window is set to close today.

These were mostly submitted somewhat automatically via the EFF

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> ALICE is a garbage decision.

SCOTUS should focus on enablement rather than subject matter. [https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2164.html](https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s2164.html)

<comment><USER14> Is there some particular issue with enablement? At least as far as business method software patents go, enablement is often easily satisfied because they're commonly a combination of entirely well understood features.</comment></comment>


Cloudera and Hortonworks merger means Hadoop's influence is declining - <AUTHOR> https://venturebeat.com/2018/10/06/cloudera-and-hortonworks-merger-means-hadoops-influence-is-declining/ <comment><USER2> The move makes sense. Cloudera has cash on board and Hortonworks has excellent technical chops and associated vision. The offering is not Hadoop only. Druid can be deployed with ease and Superset can hook into it nicely, all with proper metrics captured. Ambari is a wonderful single pane of glass to manage it all nicely. YARN is really good at managing capacity leveraging cgroups. Spark is one thing but far from the only thing. E.g.Flink. Hadoop3 introduces Docker containers right into YARN. It is all driven with JVM components, so security actually works. For all its limitations HDFS also has pretty cool powers. HBase is also a beast for a couple use cases. It is a versatile platform and is evolving well. Of course the learning curve is pretty steep. But payoffs are huge.

</comment><comment><USER3> This article makes it sound like Spark needs to be run on Hadoop clusters and that's not the case. Spark can be run on object stores like AWS S3 and Azure.

I also don't agree with the author's assertion that Spark is "Scala centric". Yes, Spark is written in Scala, but PySpark is definitely a first class citizen. Databricks maintains a MLFlow project to make it easy to use Python with Spark: [https://databricks.com/blog/2018/06/05/introducing-mlflow- an...](https://databricks.com/blog/2018/06/05/introducing-mlflow-an-open- source-machine-learning-platform.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> > I also don't agree with the author's assertion that Spark is "Scala > centric". Yes, Spark is written in Scala, but PySpark is definitely a first > class citizen.

To be fair, prior to Spark Dataframes (i.e. the days of pure RDDs), the only way to get performance out of Spark was to write Scala code. The serialization overhead of PySpark precluded it from large-scale data engineering workloads. Most companies rewrote their PySpark code in Scala for production.

Now that we have Spark dataframes, PySpark performance is mostly on-par with ScalaSpark for many SQL-amenable operations. And with Apache Arrow in-memory support on Spark >2.3, the Python serialization overhead problem goes away.

But Spark is still to some extent Scala-centric. The documentation is trilingual, but there is still a distinct Scala-first culture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Thank goodness on Hadoop's influence. Hadoop has mostly been about 1 time transformations with large machines. It's doesn't exactly produce an efficent way to do a process, nor does it make it easy to do that. (The amount of speciality integration for your app is a bit large). (Also the move in spark was needed.. but it's still behind the times with "microbatching")

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> To me, Hadoop was primarily designed around large-scale semi-structured data like logs; this plays to its strengths of scale and schema-on-read.

If I'm not mistaken, Hadoop was created at Google to handle weblogs (side note: in 2014, Google announced that Hadoop was no longer being used internally)

Enterprise data however is primarily structured and relational, which is more suited to handling in a database-like system. Hadoop was never designed for this use case. Scalable cloud databases like Redshift, Aurora etc. always seemed to be a better fit. Cloudera created technology like Impala and Kudu to address this but not sure about the uptake there.

<comment><USER5> No, Hadoop was started at Yahoo! by Doug Cutting, the original author of Lucene.

Hadoop was based on Google's published papers on the Google File System (GFS) and MapReduce. The later project, HBase, was a direct carbon copy of Google's BigTable paper.

By the time Hadoop reached maturity, Google had mostly moved onto newer technologies such as Colossus and Megastore, and mostly doesn't use MapReduce anymore.

To my knowledge, Google has never used Hadoop internally, although you can lease a hosted version of Hadoop on Google Cloud Platform.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're quite right. It was GFS and MapReduce that was invented by Google, and Doug Cutting based it on those technologies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> On demand cloud compute and storage killed the Hadoop beast. Python/C++ tooling is slowly gaining marketshare back to the HPC glory days where MPI was king.

Once IBM mainframe, the king of CAp, is put in a major AWS/MS/GCP data center expect them to gobble Cloudera. Or Principal corporation goes nuts and starts taking on Guidewire.

</comment><comment><USER7> > The deal signifies that the Hadoop market could no longer sustain two big > competitors.

MapR is still out there.</comment>


The Top 25 Most Dangerous Programming Errors - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7824939.stm

<comment><USER2> This is just a repeat of <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=430577> only now it's the BBC writing about it, rather than the original page.

I wonder if someone at the BBC monitors HN - it's not the first time a link has appeared here, only to be followed promptly by an article on the BBC web site.

Nah, probably not.

<comment><USER3> Even Jeff Atwood has a take on it <http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001210.html> (I posted that version because I suspect that it is all too easy to ignore such common issues in the race to get some code operational plus he gives some explanation of the key issues.)</comment></comment>


Asciimatics – create full-screen text UIs on any platform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/peterbrittain/asciimatics <comment><USER2> Asciimatics is awesome! I was able to create this terminal-based presentation tool (with colors and effects) using it: [https://github.com/vinayak- mehta/present](https://github.com/vinayak-mehta/present)

<comment><USER3> That looks really fun!

<comment><USER2> Yes it was fun making it thanks to all the asciimatics effects! I was also able to extend an internal asciimatics class to add a feature for pre-recorded code demos, which lets you _play_ code on a slide, like someone is typing it :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> How does this compare to Urwid¹, which also does this?

1\. [http://urwid.org/](http://urwid.org/)

</comment><comment><USER5> As an app dev newb, I was searching recently for something vaguely TUI toolkit-ish, with standard pluggable elements. I know of ncurses, but it's quite low-level. I was surprised to find virtually nothing (though my search- fu may have been weak).

What resources --- libraries, documentation, books --- for TUI development would folks recommend?

<comment><USER6> There is tcell and tview for golang.

[https://github.com/rivo/tview](https://github.com/rivo/tview)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm loving all these TUI libraries being posted here lately.

<comment><USER5> What else recently, if you don't mind?

<comment><USER7> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24318367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24318367)

Here's one, with a few more in comments. There were a bunch more posted over the past ~72 hrs that I can't seem to find now

<comment><USER5> Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For emoji-capable terminals, games & simulations like that of (other-front- page-story) [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24317034](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24317034) seem promising with this!

</comment><comment><USER9> Need a game demo like solitaire.

<comment><USER10> I tried to do this with nurses and nodejs many years ago, but the library did allow it to output to a telnet session, so I gave up.

</comment></comment><comment> S-E-P I'm having ncurses flashbacks hardcore right about now. Great work :)

</comment><comment><USER11> Are there any non-Python TUIs?</comment>


Ask HN: Why are there no good file formats for digital forms? - <AUTHOR> Recently, I have been receiving and returning a lot of forms via email. When I say "forms", I mean the paper-style digital forms bureaucratic organisations seem to love. Typically these are in a PDF format. Overall, filling these forms has been a painful experience. It seems that there are significant issues with the creation and compatibility of popular formats. Filling out these forms digitally is never straightforward. It is almost always easier to print them, fill them out by hand with a pen, and then scan them back in.
By contrast, form-filling on the web is not so bad. Web forms are simple to use, ubiquitous, relatively accessible, and rarely have major compatibility issues. Many forms can even be auto-filled with varying success. Most of us would agree that forms are more-or-less a "solved problem" on the web.
The main barrier to the usage web forms is that they need to be hosted on a website. Large, bureaucratic organisations seem to struggle with building websites and technology in general. These organisations prefer to treat their digital forms as if they are paper forms. You download the form, or receive it via email, and then you return a filled copy. The filled copy is read by human eyes, and the information is entered into "the system" with human fingers.
Why is there no web-technology-based file format for digital forms? The form can be typical HTML, CSS, and maybe even JS. Instead of hitting "Submit" and POSTing the form payload to a server, the user could hit "Save" and the file itself would be altered to contain the form payload. This concept would allow much of the existing web tech we use for forms to be re-used, and would allow organisations to build automation around their forms in a piecemeal fashion.
What do you think? <comment><AUTHOR> For fun, here are some of the bad form-filling experiences I have had recently:

1\. Received PDF via email. The file was designed to be filled digitally (it had actual fillable fields). However, none of the PDF readers I tried could fill all of the fields. Some of the fields were broken/missing. It is possible the file was created incorrectly, or that my PDF software was not-entirely- compatible with the form. I had to insert a text overlay to fill in the broken fields.

2\. Received a PDF file via email. It did not have fillable fields at all - <USER2> was like a raw scan. I could only fill it digitally by manually overlaying text, which would have been a pain. I decided to print-fill-scan instead.

3\. Received a Microsoft Word document (.doc) file via email. No actual fillable fields - just sections created with underlined space characters. I didn't want to print-and-scan, so I "overtyped" in these sections to replace the space characters with my entries. Where check marks were required, I pasted a check mark character in. One field required me to circle an option, so I had to use a shape overlay.

</comment><comment><USER3> My job requires me to both create and provide PDF order forms and receive, complete and return many forms.

Our healthcare-related clientele is both slow to adopt technology and, understandably, still have a need to print and complete forms by hand – at least partially – because of the settings they find themselves in. We still get a ton of faxed in! So we can't exclusively create web-based forms. But I have used Adobe Acrobat Pro to make them fillable digitally. It works well the majority of the time, but it is not without fail. In fact, it has gotten worse since many browsers open a link to a PDF in the browser window. They don't tend to have full compatibility with all form fields and many people don't realize they are looking at a PDF, but thing it is a "web form."

On the other side, I have always looked to streamline completing redundant forms as much as possible. I have gone as far as emulating, as you suggest, in HTML, CS and JS. It's a bit of a side project, as well: businessformsplus.org.

It offers the familiarity of a paper form or PDF and allows printing to use the final product as needed. And most have a feature to allow saving/caching info that may remain unchanged from form to form.

Do some searching on HN or the web for PDF APIs. There are some really nice ones that allow you to upload a scan of a paper form and create a digital version with fillable fields either directly or through API. Some allow you to build forms from scratch or utilize a more traditional web form to later fill out the PDF form.

In my personal life, the beginning of the school year is torturous with the paper forms that have to be filled out for each child, even though you did the same thing the year before and the majority of the information is the same for each child (household info, emergency contacts, etc.) Getting schools to adopt would be the hard part, but offering up a service that would carry information over from previous years and share between siblings would be huge!

</comment><comment><USER4> It is a feature I wanted to have in a web browser; the ability to save form data to a local file (and to be able to refill a form with the saved data from a selected file). (This might be possible with an extension. I wanted it for a different purpose, although the purpose you give is also a use of the same function.)</comment>


A subscription model could have saved Sparrow - <AUTHOR> http://yonasbe.tumblr.com/post/27991372129/a-subscription-model-could-have-saved-sparrow

<comment><USER2> How is this blog even worthy of hacker news?</comment>


A German word for:"It only works when I try to show you how it does not work"? - <AUTHOR> https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/54648/what-is-the-german-word-for-it-only-works-when-i-try-to-show-you-how-it-does-n <comment><USER2> That translation is wrong. It's almost the opposite.

Vorführeffekt is when you are trying to show something works (for example to an audience/in a presentation) and it does NOT work in said presentation.

Remember this oldie but goldie for USB Plug and Play on Windows? [https://youtu.be/IW7Rqwwth84](https://youtu.be/IW7Rqwwth84)

PS: thanks for all the comments! Didn't realise the double negation would work too. (Trying to show a bug you found in a meeting/to an audience but then it turns out it actually behaves unexpectedly as originally intended. No bug.)

<comment><USER3> No. Vorführeffekt is used for anything that suddenly behaves differently when an audience is present. Be that features that suddenly don't work when observed, or bugs that suddenly don't reproduce anymore, etc.

<comment><USER4> That's how I use the word, too. It's a Heisenbug, though only one that manifests itself when you try to present something.

<comment><USER5> A Heisenbug can be observed in many situations. The Vorführeffekt happens only in front of an audience.

<comment><USER6> I think I get what you're trying to say, but by definition an observation requires an audience, even if it's an audience of 1. Maybe say an increased audience size?

<comment><USER7> I think a "presenter" is required.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The answer also has a great piece of wisdom in its footnote:

> "That's why we prefer to use power point presentations and (maybe even > faked) screen shots to present software in early stages of development, > instead of really running a live installation of the program."

When I was giving speaker training, I was always telling people to avoid live demos. There are many things that can go wrong and ruin your presentation with the main culprit being the WiFi connection at the venue (or lack thereof).

Invariably, people would not listen to the recommnedation, to only have their presentation fail miserably exactly for that reason. Even those with no live demos where not immune, since they hosted their presentation online.

<comment><USER9> Why not both: do the live demo but have some slides prepared just in case.

<comment><USER10> Almost twice as much work?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> With camel casting, the German word you are looking for is: EsFunktioniertNurWennIchDirZeigeWieEsNichtFunktioniert

Without camel casting, the word is: Scheisse

<comment><USER12> Scheiße works in every kind of situation. Sort of like блядь in Russian. (Still amazing that you can have both strings in one message, as well as my dribble in what goes for English, thanks unicode!) I wonder how other languages handle this kind of situation (I am vaguely aware of merde)

<comment><USER13> Dutch has the word "kut" for those sort of situations, it pretty much has the same role as "fuck" in english. (Though these days "fuck" is a perfectly well understood word in dutch too)

I'd be highly surprised if there are languages out there without such a universal word.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I like to call it the Admin Effect. It got so bad to the point where anytime I approached a user to fix an issue, the first thing they said was "It'll probably just work now that you're here... yep, there it goes, thanks I guess".

<comment><USER13> Back when I was doing tech support at a school I'd be getting calls just to come over so it'd work. Oh well, at least it's an excuse to go for a walk and have a bit of a chit chat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I really enjoyed learning the word "verschlimmbesserung" from my colleagues (the act of by trying to improve something, making it worse). In the context of programming it works really well.

<comment><USER13> Surprisingly google translate does a rather nice job on that word, It translates it to "disimprovement" which seems perfectly cromulent to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Also known as "effet Bonaldi" in French: [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jérôme_Bonaldi#L'«_effet_Bonal...](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jérôme_Bonaldi#L'«_effet_Bonaldi_»)

<comment><USER17> Definitely, this blimped into my mind. The Bonaldi effect is more like « demoing something with great hype, that was working perfectly at rehearsal time, will ultimately fail with an audience, in proportion with the hype/reality ratio », but yeah it ended up being generalised enough to be a superset of Vorführeffekt.

For non French readers, the Bonaldi effect is generally understood as having catastrophic side effects, causes, or downright coincidences way beyond the intended demo not working: the climatic example being a demo of a vacuum cleaner that was met with the studio's mains breaker triggering and outright killing the live broadcasting, millions of TV viewers being suddenly met with static (post mort en showed the vacuum cleaner was not in cause). An analogy would be demoing some totally harmless piece of code and encounter a kernel panic or a LAN/WAN takedowns.

In spite of Bonaldi trying increasingly hard for such events not to happen, they still did, and the audience was increasingly watching the show both for the often cheesy devices demonstrated, the comedic effect of the hype of such obvious cheesiness and the unexpected ways things would go sideways.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I thought the english term "Demo effect" is widely used as well? Is it not?

[https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=demo%20effec...](https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=demo%20effect)

</comment><comment><USER19> One thing learned growing up in a German household (my parents are from there, I was born in the US) is that there are special words and phrases and putdowns in German for almost anything. My grandmother also spoke Yiddish which confused the hell out of me as I thought some things I heard were German but weren't. My favorite putdown was always "Brat mir einen Storch und macht die beine recht knusprig" (spelling might be wrong).

<comment><USER20> Aren't these German words just compound expressions? It's just that they don't put hyphens or spaces between words.

<comment><USER13> While they are in a technical sense, it still _feels_ different to use a compound word vs a sentence expressing the same idea.

Compare in english: bedtime vs time to go to bed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Friendly reminder that German compounds aren't that special compared to English ones. We just don't separate their components with spaces.

<comment><USER20> Exactly, I never understood the Internet's dumbfounding with German compound words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The whole stuff somehow reminds me of the classic "magic and more magic switch":

[http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic- story.html](http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html)

</comment><comment><USER23> In russian this is called "General's effect", where general is an army general. Basically, something is working as long as a higher rank official is present and not working otherwise.

<comment><USER9> That's the opposite. The soldiers make it work for the general whereas the German word would be used if it works 'in general' but doesn't when it's demonstrated to the general during an inspection.

<comment><USER24> So it works in general, but not for generals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wild guess: someone heard the word "Heisenbug" once and couldn't recall it, so asked StackExchange for help?

EDIT: it even is mentioned in the comments.

<comment><USER26> (German here) "Heisenbug" is _not_ the same at all! That's... about _a bug_ (also see [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug) \-- although I dislike being a "definition fanatic", here it's even in the word itself - "...- _bug_ ")

"Heisenbug" does not have anything to do with the main feature (" _Vorführ_ -Effekt" \-- meaning " _demonstration[ /presentation]_ effect"), that you try to present it to others. It also occurs when you debug it on your own and even when you are not looking, unlike the _Vorführeffekt_ which specifically happens when you _demonstrate something_ (not a bug, but can be a bug - anything).

If it is something that is supposed to work but it does not when you demonstrate it, there does _not_ have to be a "bug" somewhere for this effect! It can just be that the power goes out city-wide. Which does not have to be due to a bug in that outside system either, you could just have overlooked scheduled maintenance. Or somebody trips over the power cable. The reason for the failure can be completely external and outside the thing you are trying to present.

 _Vorführeffekt_ is much more general. The other comments have quite a few good examples and explanations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> "Vorführeffekt."

lol

With blurry glasses, i read that as 'f*ck you effect"

In UK, "sod's law" is essentially the same thing, though more general than just "only works when I demonstrate that it doesn't"

</comment><comment><USER28> Inverse: "A schrödinbug or schroedinbug . . . is a bug that manifests itself in running software after a programmer notices that the code should never have worked in the first place." [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heisenbug)

</comment><comment><USER29> I told my co-workers that Murphy's law only fails when you try to demonstrate it - they were all from India and had never heard the term before, thought I was being serious and dedicated a guy to learning all about it. I like this word better though, sounds very cool when you say it. I think this is going replace Murphy.

<comment><USER21> It doesn't fail: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, including demonstrating Murphy's law.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> In Russian, the word is визит-эффект ([https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B8%D1%8...](https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B7%D0%B8%D1%82-%D1%8D%D1%84%D1%84%D0%B5%D0%BA%D1%82))

</comment><comment><USER31> Basically it is like Murphy's law.[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law)

</comment><comment><USER32> Bill Gates presents Windows 98 and plugs USB device in -> blue screen!

"Demo effect" is the English version for this.

</comment><comment><USER33> English translation: doh!</comment>


MS-DOS runs the US Army's food service management system - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MS-DOS#mediaviewer/File:US_Navy_110129-N-7676W-152_Culinary_Specialist_3rd_Class_John_Smith_uses_the_existing_DOS-based_food_service_management_system_aboard_the_aircraft.jpg

<comment><USER2> When I worked at Burger King a few years back, they used something very similar for stock control and daily takings.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't have any problem with them using ms-dos because maybe its a good system, and there is no need to change it. But the pic with the floppy disks...

Where do they buy floppies? drives? motherboards for those drives?

<comment><USER4> There's a site selling floppy disks/drives, and their "gold standard" is the modular Dell laptop floppy drive (which has USB, and is recent). And disks aren't in short supply.</comment></comment>


Ethical open source licensing – Persona non Grata Preamble - <AUTHOR> http://lists.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss_lists.opensource.org/2020-February/021237.html <comment><USER2> I kinda like the idea of preventing "bad actors" from accessing FOSS software, however I have some objections:

\- these kind of terms are probably hard to support in court. a good actor today might become a bad actor tomorrow (Amazon wasn't always regarded as a bad actor -- think of Google and it's "don't be evil" policy)

\- The definition of bad actor might change from person to person. Amazon is cited for collaborating with ICE, but a ton of other companies are doing shady business too. To go to an extreme and consider pervasive data collection as surveillance and thus as an attack to the fundamental right of privacy would mean considering bad actors the vast majority of modern companies. Which is not bad, but cuts them off FOSS software. This is bad (for the software).

\- the inclusion of specific companies (and to some extent, some values instead of some other) seems arbitrary.

Also, last but not the least:

      I've been exploring ideas around ways in which
      licensing could be used for dealing with unethical
      behavior in FOSS
      [cut]
      Amazon - for collaboration with ICE
      BP - assisting in climate destruction

Collaborating with ICE and climate destruction are unethical in general, not just for software.

I agree on the unethicalness of Amazon/BP (and many other) but I don't like software licenses as a way to push some kind of political agenda (no matter what side the agenda comes from).

Push it too much and we'll see licenses in which the Persona Non Grata is someone endorsing LGBT rights or free healthcare.

After all, everyone can come up with a license, right?</comment>


We are building our Mobile MVP on top of Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wishberg.com/post/78625120439/our-first-step-towards-mobile-now-wish-from-anywhere

<comment><USER2> So all my wish posted on twitter will get Sync to my Wishberg account as well? If yes, Pretty cool!!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it will if your account is connected. If not, then it will create a second account - but once twitter is linked to main account, all wishes get merged in to one.

Kind of dropbox for wishes. It syncs up wishes in to one.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Timely – Automatic Time Tracking - <AUTHOR> https://timelyapp.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hey Hacker News! Today we're launching our brand new version of Timely. It's a completely automatic time tracking platform so you'll never to think about what you worked on again or for how long. From who you email, to what places you've been to, how long you were on facebook or even where you drove your car.

You can also see a demo video here: [https://youtu.be/Qb8bRDm1Zs8](https://youtu.be/Qb8bRDm1Zs8)</comment>


Show HN: Combining DeOldify and EDVR - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/btahir/deoldify_and_edvr <comment><USER2> You should example gifs/images to demonstrate the repo. Also before and after would be nice too</comment>


Facebook Wanted Gizmodo to Kill Investigative Tool - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/facebook-wanted-us-to-kill-this-investigative-tool-1826620111 <comment><USER2> As a background, the problematic part of Facebook's policy is that, while end- users are the owner of all content they produce, they [Facebook] essentially consider all their HTML their copyright. They have argued in court (and won [1]) that scraping essentially requires creating an in-memory copy of this HTML before the user-produced content can be extracted, and thus is a violation of their copyright.

It's a very unfortunate precedent in my opinion, that limits pretty much all forms of scraping. Copyright law should not be abused for this, but yet here we are.

If the Knight's institute manages to get Facebook to amend their policy that is a great step in the right direction, but I feel that copyright should not be abused to restrict scraping like this: the copyrightable content is not what is being scraped at all, it is immediately thrown away after the user- produced content is extracted.

This means there is no way for a user to even legally get their own content extracted from Facebook this way, and on top of that, web browser make in- memory copies of Facebook's HTML all the time; heck, they even specifically instruct browsers and proxies to cache a lot of their content.

[1] [http://www.knowmad.law/single- post/scraping](http://www.knowmad.law/single-post/scraping)

<comment><USER3> This is a bit like selling pens, after copyrighting the chemical composition of the ink, and then insisting that anything an author writes with the pen belongs to the company.

How can this kind of reasoning survive a sane court of law?

<comment><USER4> I'm thinking of it like Facebook is a book (well, a journal that's a compendium of everyone else's writing). You're only allowed to read from it while Facebook holds the book and turns the pages for you. If you pick up the book and turn the page yourself, you've taken possession of the book, which is theft since they didn't give you permission.

<comment><USER5> I think that's absolutely how Facebook wants it to work (as well as many other website operators), but absolutely opposite of how the process physically works. Also, I wouldn't equate copyright violation (especially non-commercial) and theft.

<comment><USER4> What I mean is that is how Facebook wants it to work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I realized the futility of trying to keep my data private. I used to never upload my contacts to any site, because I valued my privacy and my contacts' privacy. Then I found things like my phone number being detected by Facebook, and I realized that it didn't matter what I did. Any one of the hundreds of people who had my phone number could upload my information without my consent, and thus nothing I did mattered. I was infuriated but now I just give up, because there's no way to control your own information.

Even something as private as DNA is no longer under my own control. A sibling signed himself up for 23andme, and I realized that once he did that, I'm as good as being up there too. My entire family tree can now be identified because of that single person, which is scary as hell.

<comment><USER7> Everybody used to be in the phone book, a few people were unlisted and it seemed a bit strange but otherwise you could just look anybody up in a directory and call them.

I don't really understand the motivation trying to keep one's phone number or address secret.

<comment><USER8> I'm old enough to have lived with a phone number published and not have to worry about it. Then came the telemarketers. Still, long distance calls were expensive and such calls were relatively rare. Next, long distance calling became effectively free and telemarketing calls were becoming frequent. However, it was still only a dumb phone - so nothing to worry about. Then, smart phones came along, storing personal information and being potentially vulnerable to threats. They were also used for authentication. But hey, not to worry, since it's just like before: everybody used to be in the phone book ...

<comment><USER9> First they came for the Landlines. I was not a landline, so I did not speak up...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I once managed a Facebook account on behalf of someone else. Normally, you would expect this to confuse Facebook greatly. Instead the opposite happened: Whenever I was logged in as them, Facebook recommended me people that they knew.

This means you can find out who someone knows if (a) they're not already a Facebook user, and (b) you create a profile for them. Whoopsie.

I kind of want to write a dystopian story about babies being bartered based on their social network rating, which of course is derived from their family history. We're all reduced to numbers in the end.

hyper-reality: [https://vimeo.com/166807261](https://vimeo.com/166807261)

<comment><USER11> _I kind of want to write a dystopian story about babies being bartered based on their social network rating, which of course is derived from their family history._

I'd have to go look for it but I swear there's an episode of either Next Generation or Deep Space 9 that covers almost this exact topic to the letter. Anyone else know what I'm thinking of??

<comment><USER10> Critical Care [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Care_(Star_Trek:_Vo...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Care_\(Star_Trek:_Voyager\))

<comment><USER11> That's the one (lo and behold it was Voyager, after all)! Curious if that's where your mind was when you threw the idea of writing that story of yours?

<comment><USER10> Star Trek was one of my biggest influences. I've been trying to think of a way to modernize the series without cannibalizing Roddenberry's ideals. Or go the other way and do a Game of Thrones style Star Trek universe.

Also [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkedd6A6_mU](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Wkedd6A6_mU) was one of the funniest trek videos I've seen.

<comment><USER12> Looks like CBS is bringing back Picard for a series - [https://twitter.com/SirPatStew/status/1025840545216823296](https://twitter.com/SirPatStew/status/1025840545216823296)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Quoth Facebook, from the article:

"We don't expose this information via our API and we don't allow accessing or collecting data from Facebook using automated means"

Oh man what a world we live in. Facebook is free to leech your phone of every last bit of personal data... but heavens forbid an end user or journalist tries to learn something about Facebook.

<comment><USER14> I agree with your sentiment, but then if said journalist sold said data to foreign government, then how different would that be to what happened with Cambridge Analytica?

Yes, being able to access your data is nice, but you also have to balance it with people trying to trick people into leaking their data for nefarious reasons. Obviously, here, it's an open source project and we can see that it's (probably) secure, but then where do you draw the line?

<comment><USER15> Facebook closed up a lot of API endpoints after the CA incident became big (including _public_ page post data, to my annoyance).

<comment><USER14> And this is one of those APIs that is closed. This application is intentionally going around it, and if any data ends up leaking, all the people in this thread demanding access to data will be the first to attack Facebook for not doing a better job at guarding user data.

<comment><USER16> It seems like they were able to get the data just fine, so they're not guarding user data _now_. I think the best way for facebook to protect this data is to not have it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > _Facebook disagreed and escalated the conversation to their head of policy > for Facebook's Platform, who said they didn't want users entering their > Facebook credentials anywhere that wasn't an official Facebook site—because > anything else is bad security hygiene and could open users up to phishing > attacks. She said we needed to take our tool off Github within a week._

I mean, this is a fair point. It wouldn't be the first time that a Github tool was forked to surreptitiously send information to a 3rd party.

So they updated the tool to let users login to Facebook.com through the browser and just hijacked the session cookie to gain access to the pages.

Since this is a program which runs on the users machine, and downloads standard Facebook pages over their standard HTTP interface, I don't see how Terms of Service can differentiate between accessing Facebook services through this program versus Chrome.exe or Edge.exe.

What makes one thing a user agent and another thing not a user agent?

<comment><USER18> I think the difference in intent and purpose between PYMK Inspector and Edge/Chrome is pretty obvious.

<comment><USER19> Yes, Edge/Chrome is for the drone users that are Facebook's bread and butter whilst PYMK Inspector users have some semblance of awareness of user privacy and the asymmetry of the situation.

Putting on my 'big business c*nt' hat I can totally understand why Facebook wouldn't want PYMK users.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I became deeply concerned when the article seemed to suggest that Gizmodo was more worried about losing their Facebook page, or being sued, than sticking to a high standard of journalistic integrity. By the sound of things Gizmodo was saved by a Cambridge Analytica deus ex machina.

I can't help but think that there will be ever more regulation because of it.

<comment><USER21> Y'all know that that Facebook page is part of the income stream that helps them keep the lights on for that journalism, right? And that getting sued is a fast way to no longer being able to do that journalism?

The problem it should raise for you is letting overwhelmingly omnipresent companies chill journalism in this way, not that the journalists worry about being chilled.

<comment><USER20> Not sure I agree, it's the job of the 4th estate to speak truth to power, that is why it is afforded special privileges and protections.

If you predicate your ability to speak truth to power on a business model that relies on the power structure you are criticizing you undermine your raison d'être.

<comment><USER21> Cool. So what's your solution when private businesses are busily making sure that those "special privileges and protections" don't mean anything to the people who have to _hear_ you speaking truth to power?

<comment><USER20> I hear your criticism... I personally don't have a solution as news media isn't my area of domain. However, there must be a technical solution to the problem. I've seen one or two HN threads discussing a decentralised web. Perhaps that's indeed the solution?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Since it is not using the Facebook platform or API, what is Facebook's recourse? If it was using the API and there was a developer with a Facebook account they could "hold accountable" then they could do something, but there is no specific Facebook account associated with creating this software. Ban/censor the Gizmodo page on Facebook.com? That would be an interesting gambit that would surely backfire in the court of public opinion.

This is just like Facebook banning anything which tries to track unfriending, another thing you can't do through the platform API and that they have actively worked to oppose and suppress.

Let's take Facebook's argument to its logical conclusion which would suggest that they should go on the warpath to ban all password manager applications that store a user's Facebook username and password.

<comment><USER23> Facebook's recourse is to change their HTML specifically to break this tool. Which leads to a cat-and-mouse game.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Link to the project's source: [https://github.com/GMG-Special-Projects- Desk/pymk-inspector](https://github.com/GMG-Special-Projects-Desk/pymk- inspector)

</comment><comment><USER25> Is there a good reason not have a law that prohibits service providers from mandating the means by which you form requests your machine sends to them.

I totally get limiting the volume and frequency of requests. That's fair. Bandwidth costs providerds money afterall. But why really should you have any say over how I formulate my requests? Whether they comee from your app, a personal script I wrote or I hand form them in Fiddler, what's the problem besides the service provider's control-mongering.

Am I missing something here?

</comment><comment><USER26> The DMCA provides a mechanism for the government to define some activities that do not violate the DMCA--essentially, a whitelist of activities. It's done by the Librarian of Congress and the exceptions last 3 years. This is how jailbreaking became clearly legal.

It provides certainty for activities that, under the law, are arguably legal-- but making the argument in court would be very expensive and time-consuming.

What if a similar process was instituted for the CFAA? This would take some of the reins out of the hands of self-interested parties like Facebook, and provide certainty for people who are operating in good faith in the public interest.

An example of this would be to say that it is legal for a person to use automated tools to observe their own authentic interactions with hosted software, and it is legal for other people to make such tools available to the public. That would cover Gizmodo's tool, I think.

</comment><comment><USER27> Had Gizmodo not changed the login approach, could FB send a DMCA takedown request in good faith to GitHub? I'm asking for a...um...friend that is developing a client-side-only open source tool that allows them to automate tasks on websites they visit from their computer, some of which may require credentials.

Is the law settled with regards to distributing non-commercial tools to do something a site may not allow in their ToS, or is it similar to doing it yourself where it's fuzzy based on the reasonableness of the ToS and intent and a whole bunch of other things?

</comment><comment><USER28> It is creepy how much data Facebook has on users. I created a fake Facebook account using an email account not associated with my name and using a made up fantasy name. I created it on a computer at a large hospital while logged into the computer with a coworker's credentials. Facebook immediately suggested all my family and friends upon creating the account. I still haven't figured out how they did it.

<comment><USER29> Did you ever log in to FB with your own account on that machine? If you did, they leave a cookie there; even if no cookie, perhaps they used canvas fingerprinting (It's frightening how many websites do -- there's an about:config setting in Firefox that would let you know and block that).

Did you have your phone with you, with the FB app? If you did, they likely have your exact location, and possibly also the exact location of the browser.

A false positive costs them essentially nothing; So they'll always offer the 50-or so highest scoring matches to you. It's possible that those were matched to you because you had just logged out from the same public IP 5 minutes before (even if it was another machine on the network), and there were no other sources of information about that fake account.

It is creepy. It should be illegal, but unforunately, it's legal -- and the governments are happy about it because it's often illegal for THEM to collect all this data, but it's not illegal to let FB collect it and ask them for a copy.

<comment><USER28> I did have my phone with me. Did not log into Facebook at all with my real account at the computer before making the fake account so no cookie.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Even though the code does something possibly illegal (by violating copyright) when executed -- can't it still live on github as free speech? (like an anarchist textbook or 3d printing schematic of a gun or bitcoin core)? Can't it just be demonstrative and educational, and if you download it and run it you may be held liable but otherwise the code itself is fine and legal to simply exist?

</comment><comment><USER31> Facebook knew they were dealing with a popular blog, yet it seems they decided to approach the issue in the most expensive and inflammatory way possible. Why not simply implement mechanisms for making the data more difficult to scrape and let the app die on it's own?

<comment><USER32> Scorched-earth policies serve as a warning to others who might try the same thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So who here is cutting the cord? I quit about 12 months ago, the dissonance of using the service and knowing how bad it was got to be too much to handle. It isn't the end of the world! It's actually quite nice to miss all the junk that constitutes a majority of the networks content.

It may sound crazy to suggest techies could lead an exodus off Facebook, but look at twitter: techies lead the influx _onto_ that service, so why not the other way around? When are we going to put our money where our mouths are, "vote with our feet" and leave Facebook (i.e. permanently delete your account)? Otherwise all this handwringing seems meaningless- they keep misbehaving because they know no one's going to do anything.

</comment><comment><USER34> Hi, ex-FB'er here.

> Facebook has nearly limitless access to all the phone numbers, email > addresses, home addresses, and social media handles most people on Earth > have ever used.

They're overlooking an obvious one which is location. If you and a stranger use your FB apps from the same restaurant the same evening, the stranger will appear higher in your search results of someone with their name. It would be reasonable for this to feed PYMK.

</comment><comment><USER35> You have to feel a little sorry for them in the position they currently find themselves in. If they allow journalists this kind of access and power, what's to prevent bad actors using it as well?

The very thing they are in trouble for is giving third parties (which would be to include journalists) unfettered access. It's kind of disengeneous Gizmodo didn't even recognize their own cognitive dissonance in this situation.

<comment><USER36> > You have to feel a little sorry for them in the position they currently find > themselves in. If they allow journalists this kind of access and power, > what's to prevent bad actors using it as well?

On the same lines, here's another question - what prevents Facebook from turning into a bad actor and using the power it has?

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Is the data from PYMK subject to GDPR / available for export? As a user I should have a way to archive and keep track of PYMK, whether it be a third party open source tool, or via some other means?

<comment><USER38> Under GDPR it pretty clearly falls under "opinions we have about you", and ought to be requestable. I'm wondering when the first GDPR case against FB will substantively materialise, and it surely will. They're the obvious first target.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Might they also be scanning the wifi networks we all connect to and if they see us on the same network as someone else N amount of times, go ahead and make the suggestion?

</comment><comment><USER40> It was unclear to me from the article what the outcome was. Did they keep the tool up and Facebook got bored and went away?

<comment><USER41> "Shortly thereafter, in March, Facebook's world exploded, when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica had gotten access to the profile information of millions of Facebook users, going through what was considered an "official route" in 2012. Facebook stopped bothering us about our PYMK Inspector, and the tool currently remains up."

likely they still have an issue with it, but as the article implies they are busy with other issues/data scandals to make a further issue with the "tool" at this time atleast.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm glad events as such surface to the public. While the merits of Facebook are undeniable, they are an evil company.

</comment><comment><USER43> Pretty rich given that violating privacy is Fb's business model.

</comment><comment><USER44> These large tech companies hate people who tell the truth and expose their evil intentions. Alex Jones got kicked for telling the truth. Richie Allen got blacklisted to speaking truth.

</comment><comment><USER45> Wow. Fuck Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER46> Google needs to be investigated as well. It violates people's privacy to the same degree as FB.

<comment><USER47> Like we've already asked, please stop posting generically about Google and Facebook. We're here to learn and this isn't getting us there.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Meta: Who in HN is pushing this story down? It currently has 3x the points as the "Facebook Field Guide to ML" story, currently at #1. They were published around the same time and this currently is at #6.</comment>


NEGAPEDIA – THE NEGATIVE SIDE OF WIKIPEDIA - <AUTHOR> http://en.negapedia.org/ <comment><USER2> From the guidelines: [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

> _In Submissions_

> _Please don 't do things to make titles stand out, like using uppercase or > exclamation points, or adding a parenthetical remark saying how great an > article is. It's implicit in submitting something that you think it's > important._</comment>