China's facial-recognition systems crunch data from cameras to monitor citizens - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-all-seeing-surveillance-state-feared-in-the-west-is-a-reality-in-china-1498493020 <comment><USER2> Non-Chinese shouldn't kid ourselves. Our governments want to do this too, and probably will. Drones with gigapixel cameras hovering over metro regions. Security cameras and police cars that continuously scan the faces of pedestrians and other drivers. It will happen.

<comment><USER3> Unlike the PRC, most of us live in governments where there is significantly more decentralization of power, and where those power centers are significantly more responsive to public pressure.

It's incumbent upon all of us to apply that pressure and work to maintain that decentralization. It's _especially_ incumbent upon technologists to a) refuse to develop or implement these types of systems and b) develop counter- measures.

<comment><USER4> what would be a "socially acceptable" counter-measure to getting your face scanned randomly out in public?

<comment><USER5> a visor with (very, very) bright IR LEDs over your face could hide you from camera sensors; i've seen something like this used to defeat license plate scanners, and i know that LEDs have greatly improved power efficiency in the last decade, but i don't have any experience in this kind of thing. maybe someone can pick up this idea and run with it if it's feasible.

this wouldn't defeat something like gait detection though: [http://www.geradts.com/html/Documents/gait.htm](http://www.geradts.com/html/Documents/gait.htm)

<comment><USER6> Do remember IR can damage your (and other's) retina even though it can be hard to see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Article

SHENZHEN—Gan Liping pumped her bike across a busy street, racing to beat a crossing light before it turned red. She didn't make it. Immediately, her face popped up on two video screens above the street. "Jaywalkers will be captured using facial-recognition technology," the screens said.

Facial-recognition technology, once a specter of dystopian science fiction, is becoming a feature of daily life in China, where authorities are using it on streets, in subway stations, at airports and at border crossings in a vast experiment in social engineering. Their goal: to influence behavior and identify lawbreakers.

Ms. Gan, 31 years old, had been caught on camera crossing illegally here once before, allowing the system to match her two images. Text displayed on the crosswalk screens identified her as a repeat offender.

"I won't ever run a red light again," she said.

<comment><USER8> These types of stories bring to David Brin's approach to privacy: [http://www.davidbrin.com/transparency.html](http://www.davidbrin.com/transparency.html)

Brin's argument is that as the technology to record everything becomes so cheap that the cost is trivial, trying to enforce privacy and anonymity in a sea of cameras is a losing battle. We're better off as a society if we allow the recording and de-anonymization of public spaces, but we should also make this information free to anyone. In return for the loss privacy in public spaces, we should demand that the wealthy and powerful give up some of their privacy as well. Obviously, the wealthy and powerful will fight to keep their privacy, but as recording devices become ubiquitous the landscape favors those pushing to set information free rather than those trying to secure it.

To relate it to the story here, rather than fighting the anonymity of private citizens who commit minor trespasses like jaywalking, we should be focusing on uncovering trespasses committed by those in power. Say, the financial dealings of Xi Jinping or Donald Trump.

<comment><USER9> Completely disagree. Instead, we make it illegal to record people in public spaces without warning and consent. Make it a criminal offence with strong penalties, especially for the publication of people-identifying records. It should be illegal to set up a camera on one's fence along a highway and publish the license plates and times of cars passing by.

<comment><USER10> Whether or not it's a good thing given the advent of ubiquitous facial recognition software, that's never ever going to happen. You're basically arguing for photography being banned in public spaces. The fact that would almost certainly be unconstitutional in the US is probably the least of the barriers to implementing such a law.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Passing thru the immigration checkpoint in Shanghai and having a kiosk take my photo without warning, and respond with a dystopian smiley face and shutter sound, was one of the more creepy things to happen to me.

<comment><USER12> Yes! Recently had the same experience at that airport.

It's not so much the fact of taking the picture that disturbed me - I fully expected to be catalogued, and filmed, in 1) an international airport and 2) in China. OK, if I had my way with society, we wouldn't be doing that, but that's the status quo right now and I can deal with it.

It's that I felt I was being tricked into it. Having your biometric picture taken and saved is somewhat intimate, I want to at least mentally prepare myself and pose for the camera. It's mainly an emotional problem. It is just a bit short shoving somebody into a foto booth.

My personal opinion is that China is often quite tone-deaf when it comes to being dystopian and creepy. The actual security practices are not too different from what we have in the west, but the way they present them make them seem like from a bad movie.

<comment><USER10> Of course, traveling from most places they already have a photo from your visa application. (I'd also note that, at least according to the visa processing service, they're very fussy about the quality of the visa photo. Absolutely no shadow, contrasting shirt, etc.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting, I think I saw this same exact example at GTC 2016. Although, on a quick search on mobile - I can't find the talk...

It was a Chinese company discussing their surveillance in major cities and their use of GPUs for their form of video compression. With the specific goal of keeping the data as small as possible.

It was the most dystopian talk I've ever been at, and the presentors were all smiles and laughs.

I honestly question how well it works at scale with hundreds of millions of faces at different angles. I asked them about this, and they said it won't be long now to fix. Their explanation was they only need one accurate view of their face to tag those people. Then they just track them where ever they go.

<comment><USER14> Not just that, but everyone has a unique way they walk, called their gait, so if you are identified once (usually by facial recognition) your gait can be used to identify you forever after, even if you try to hide your identity. Only way to go undetected then is to purposely change your gait and other things, but the important thing here is: We are at a point where the effort you have to go through to remain anonymous in the public is so high that it may not be worth the effort.

<comment><USER15> A few years back,I read about Chinese research on gait analysis via floor tiles that can uniquely identify you by calculations on weight and shear forces as you walk over them. I thought it was evil, but brilliant, out-of-the box thinking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> No doubt that once voice recognition, speech to text and NLP advances enough you'd have public safety microphones always looking out for counter- revolutionary speech and terrorist activity.

1984 is fantasy because the telescreens couldn't scale with a human listener. Worry not, deep learning will bridge the gap.

What a disaster!

</comment><comment><USER17> Was going through a UK airport and noticed they had some cameras with a silly looking LED light on them so I googled the manufacturer: [http://www.hrsid.com/product-mflow#queue](http://www.hrsid.com/product- mflow#queue)

They supply facial recognition hardware/software that can track you across your journey in an airport accurately.

It's not a huge leap to get it over an entire CCTV network.

<comment><USER18> The silly looking swirly light is intended to attract attention so that people will look directly into the camera. [Seriously. I found it in a technical description.]

That's evil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Basically, in the future, we're all stone-faced automatons, helplessly clawing at the walls of a social cage that demands our thoughts must be at least neutral and aloof, if not explicitly happy and positive.

</comment><comment><USER20> This has been reported and going on for a while.

* MIT Technology review has a story on this [1]

* Police robots in China scan all the faces they come across to identify fugitives [2]

* JD (i.e., the competitor of Alibaba which is somewhat analogous to Amazon here) You can pay for deliveries using facial recognition [3]

[1] [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603494/10-breakthrough- te...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603494/10-breakthrough- technologies-2017-paying-with-your-face/)

[2] [http://gbtimes.com/china/police-robot-makes-china- debut](http://gbtimes.com/china/police-robot-makes-china-debut)

[3] [https://qz.com/1009155/chinas-second-largest-ecommerce- compa...](https://qz.com/1009155/chinas-second-largest-ecommerce-company-jd- jd-just-used-a-robot-to-deliver-packages/)

<comment><USER21> > * Police robots in China scan all the faces they come across to identify > fugitives [2]

Not just China. Police in Wales (UK) are already using facial recognition systems[1] and have in fact already arrested at least one person because of it, just this month[2].

[1] [https://www.south- wales.police.uk/en/newsroom/introduction-o...](https://www.south- wales.police.uk/en/newsroom/introduction-of-facial-recognition-into-south- wales-police/)

[2] [https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/06/police- automat...](https://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2017/06/police-automatic- face-recognition/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> while 90% of this is really bad to everyone(privacy, oppression,etc), I see there is a small bright side , that the criminals can now be caught so quickly these days there from some news I read.

the videos are all connected and facials are recognized quickly(a few seconds for millions of faces), they tracked down criminals(and their cars) who was on the run for thousands of miles all the way, in less than 24 hours sometimes. I think the whole project was called something like "peaceful city project".

in US, where surveillance cameras are scarce to find in most public areas, you need eye witness all the time, many cases take years to resolve, if at all.

<comment> xkcd-sucks Yeah, 'criminals' are caught quickly when they harm an important businessman's mistresses' niece and it makes a good cctv news blurb. Not so much otherwise

<comment><USER23> What is the story behind your screen name?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> As if western governments were not already looking into this, (heck they''ve probably already implemented such policies for all we know). The only difference is that China is a no BS nation, they are actually (and surprisingly) very open about it. Perhaps the most disturbing thing here is not the story itself but the sheer hypocrisy of the western press / media. I think the time has come for us to take a good look at ourselves in the mirror and accept ourselves for what we actually are.

</comment><comment><USER25> Person of Interest TV show also on Netflix

[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1839578/)

Eagle Eye movie:[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059786/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1059786/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Our only hope is the continued incompetence of the governments purchasing and operating this equipment.

</comment><comment><USER27> Keep reading about weird face recognition stuff. Like, this popped up on 4chan yesterday...

[https://www.kairos.com/diversity- recognition](https://www.kairos.com/diversity-recognition)

</comment><comment><USER28> The creepiness factor aside, I'm trying to imagine how you'd implement a system to keep track of 1.3 billion people via face recognition. The hardware demands alone are mind boggling.

</comment><comment><USER29> welcome to having even less ability to resist the government

</comment><comment><USER30> Mmm pretty sure every government is doing this. It's just more public in China due to lack of data protection laws.

<comment><USER3> This sort of absolutely false equivalence only serves to strengthen the complacency of those of us who live in societies that retain greater degrees of freedom.

<comment><USER31> Could you elaborate a bit on the false equivalence. Depending on what you mean I may or may not disagree.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anybody can take photos or videos in public area, so does the government. If you are so paranoid about your privacy, stay at home, order online, simple as that.

<comment><USER33> If you are paranoid and a good make-up artist, there's CV Dazzle.

If you are paranoid and not a good make-up artist, you may have to settle for glasses and clothing with integrated LEDs designed to confuse known recognition algorithms. Or maybe just start wearing masks and veils in public.

<comment><USER23> The machines will be able to id you by height, limb proportions, cadence and hundreds of other things that cannot be concealed within reason.

<comment><USER33> Yes, but they don't make a record of your gait at the DMV and print it on your official ID card, do they?

They might be able to track John/Jane Doe #1 across a plaza, and maybe match that up across multiple cameras, but without a reference database connecting gaits to public identities, there is a possibility that without reasonable suspicion, the data for John/Jane Doe #1 would have to be purged before it could be linked to you.

Of course, a state-level actor that chooses not to obey the law could retain those data indefinitely, and eventually identify you via statistical analyses. If you don't want that to happen, you will need to get politically active and make public oversight of agencies that perform surveillance of the public an issue.

Otherwise, you might have to wear specialized clothing and shoes that change heel height and sole shape as you walk.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ireland to be among first countries to phase out oil and gas exploration - <AUTHOR> https://www.irishtimes.com/news/environment/ireland-to-be-among-first-countries-to-phase-out-oil-and-gas-exploration-1.4028136?mode=sample&auth-failed=1&pw-origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.irishtimes.com%2Fnews%2Fenvironment%2Fireland-to-be-among-first-countries-to-phase-out-oil-and-gas-exploration-1.4028136 <comment><USER2> That must be a substantial sacrifice.</comment>


Show HN: Random Present Finder - <AUTHOR>

I spent Saturday putting together an MVP: http://randompresentfinder.com
It takes a random word from the WordNik API and then searches Amazon with it for anything that isnt a book.
Plans for upgrades: Add price filter; Add other market places; Add automatic twitter postings; Add permalinks to get back to a specific product;
Comments and criticisms welcome <comment><USER2> First try :

"Thin Dailies, Unscented, Wrapped 120 Count (Pack of 2)

Get a fresh feeling all day, every day with Always Thin Dailies! Always Thin pantiliners are thin and comfortable, designed to feel like fresh underwear so you can wear them every day."

I would never thought about that. It works.

</comment><comment><USER3> Cool idea, but I don't think my wife wants an inspissator. As nice as it would be to make it easier for her to produce large batches of uniform tuberculosis culture medium four to six times per day, she usually only produces one or two batches daily.

</comment><comment><USER4> The idea seems novel. But without the filter I am left at the mercy of the system to guess what is good. Btw what is the default setting ?

<comment><AUTHOR> In the WordNik API i am ensuring the word has a dictionary defintion.

Then i am searching Amazon using the "All" category. When the results come back i am filtering out "books" and "ebooks", and then from whatever is left i show the first product.

So at the moment its just an open slather.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best ways to catch your emotions and get back to work? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Both Ayurvedic (yogi) and Buddhist tradition put a lot of focus on this through various forms of meditation and mindfulness. The short-form that seems to work well for me and helped me through times of grief goes something like this:

1\. Recognise you have an emotion. 2\. Give yourself some time to observe the emotion without judgement, It is OK to feel that way. 3\. Realize you can experience the emotion without having to be reactive to it. The emotion is a given, your reaction is a choice. 4\. Get back to work.

Another thing I find helpful is taking some prolonged exhale breaths to help your nervous system get out of its fight/flight response: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6037091/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6037091/)

<comment><USER3> I use long walks in Nature ;)

Very few actually walk alone to empty their minds. Most listen to podcasts. Chat on the phone. Walk the dog. Or with a stroller. And yet I have found it to be the surest remedy!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well it depends what emotions you are trying to catch. Don't try too hard. If they are in the way of your work, they are likely more important than it.

<comment><USER4> What emotions are you feeling that need catching?</comment></comment>


Research Blog: Machine Learning Book for Students and Researchers - <AUTHOR> http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2012/08/machine-learning-book-for-students-and.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+blogspot%2FgJZg+%28Official+Google+Research+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader <comment><USER2> Aside: I find it ridiculous that I can't read a blog post, a little bit of text and an image, without enabling javascript on two domains. I know that a bunch of you will think only masochists use NoScript, but the page is slow to appear and needlessly complicated. If there's anyone at Google who could help your company set a better example, please nudge the right people.

<comment><USER3> And this one is not in Google's cache. I've taken to reading the cached version of many blogspot pages, for this reason -- I have a browser extension that makes that just a couple of clicks to accomplish. Maybe Google has caught on to this.

EDIT: My mistake; I just had to strip off the bazillion query parameters.

Google cache of the post:

[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fgoogleresearch.blogspot.com%2F2012%2F08%2Fmachine- learning-book-for-students-and.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I haven't seen this book before but I did take Prof. Mohri's class a few years ago. His material is great but be warned that is's biased heavily towards theory (proofs and bounds instead of the more common/practical "rules of thumb"). You can get a lot done using machine learning tools having only a superficial familiarity with VC dimension, complexity bounds, etc... If however, you want to get deeper insight into the algorithms you're using or develop new algorithms yourself then Prof Mohri's of rigor is very useful.

<comment><USER5> I took Prof. Mohri's class this spring, and we actually used a draft version of this book. I agree with you that it's very theoretical, but Bishop, Mitchell, and the other ML resources don't address learning theory. VC- dimension isn't for everyone, but if you need to know about it, this is the book you want to use.

There's also the added bonus of this text coming from Prof. Mohri et al.'s experiences at Google, so there's a lot of discussion about online algorithms and ranking (which you don't see in many other places).

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> My favorite introductory textbook on machine learning is the Tom Mitchell book: [http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Tom-M- Mitchell/dp/007...](http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Tom-M- Mitchell/dp/0070428077)

The Bishop book is the most popular though: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387310738/ref=pd_rvi_gw_2/...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387310738/ref=pd_rvi_gw_2/102-4351241-7974535?_encoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=283155)

<comment><USER7> The Elements of Statistical Learning, by T. Hastie, R. Tibshirani and J. Friedman [1] is also a very good one. Plus, the book is freely available on the authors' website.

[1] <http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~tibs/ElemStatLearn/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone know if the table of contents is somewhere online?

<comment><USER9> One of the authors (Mohri) teaches a course called Foundation of Machine learning. Details are here[1] and may give an indication of the books' contents.

[1] <http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~mohri/ml10/>

<comment><USER5> Use this link instead:

<http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~mohri/ml12/>

It's the last class he taught before the book was published. I was in the class, and can confirm the lecture outline closely matches the book's contents.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Why is this news?

<comment><USER11> [http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/sunday-review/big-datas- im...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/sunday-review/big-datas-impact-in- the-world.html?pagewanted=all)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/business/how-big-data- beca...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/business/how-big-data-became-so- big-unboxed.html)

<comment><USER10> So this machine learning textbook is applied specifically to big data, in a way that is novel and new?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When will this be on MegaUpload?</comment>


"How can they be so good?" the strange story of Skype (2013) - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/09/skypes-secrets/ <comment> T-A The article makes an attempt to answer the question in the title (cheap computers forced Eastern European programmers to be really efficient) but I am reminded of Paul Graham's "Beating the Averages" essay [1]:

> It must have seemed to our competitors that we had some kind of secret > weapon-- that we were decoding their Enigma traffic or something. In fact we > did have a secret weapon, but it was simpler than they realized. No one was > leaking news of their features to us. We were just able to develop software > faster than anyone thought possible.

PG and Robert Morris could do that because they had a "secret weapon" (LISP). The Skype developers had one too [2]:

> Delphi was chosen because our first senior UI developer was very skilled at > Delphi (besides dozen other languages-environments) and we saw D as most > productive, fastest, efficient way to build our app given our team/lead > developer skills and also getting very good UX on MSWin platform.

[1] [http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

[2] [https://www.quora.com/What-programming-language-was-Skype- or...](https://www.quora.com/What-programming-language-was-Skype-originally- written-in?s=1)

<comment><USER2> > Estonia

> Eastern European

You just made a little Estonian girl cry.

<comment><USER3> Well Baltic European state, ... is that better?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My favorite is how Skype did things like making calls using SYSENTER and reading the BIOS using NTVDM before MS bought them. Of course, you won't see MS employees talk much about it.

</comment><comment><USER2> Particular how fates of post-Communist countries like Poland/Czechia/Slovakia/Lithuania vs Estonia dispersed. The former chose a way of low-cost, outsourcing and offshoring for global hegemons, many emigrated to developed countries like UK or Germany - cutting off their chance of success. One from post-Communist country will always be an underdog there trying to navigate the complex realities, business connections, regulations.

Meanwhile Estonia - extraordinary luck, lots of talent. Perhaps because it's a small country, cosy environment, one is less likely to emigrate? Proximity to and cultural similarities with Finland? Sad that both - Kazaa and Skype had become its own blown egg with only the brands surviving, Americans killed both.

<comment><USER5> How did Estonia handle transition period? Polish transformation was dominated by giving away national property, and mostly involved bribes. Deals like 1991 30 year _free_ lease for two huge factory buildings gifted to Levi Strauss in exchange for couple hundred $100/month jobs (1/2 average pay in Poland, 1/20 average US), buildings the city had to first borrow $700K to buy and renovate. Or PepsiCo paying $25 mil for privatized chocolate manufacturer(no debt), just to turn around and resell _one_ of their factories for $75mil. Etc etc, almost anything of value was sold for nothing.

<comment><USER2> The whole country on a backyard sale while population was chocked down ("shock therapy" \- thanks, Balcerowicz and Jeffrey Sachs!). The largest innovation these reforms farted out in the IT domain was a PHP clone of Classmates.

> Or PepsiCo paying $25 mil for privatized chocolate manufacturer(no debt), > just to turn around and resell _one_ of their factories for $75mil

The story of Wedel is a classic example of predatory business sucking out all the money from formely legit business while offering deteriorating quality ("ptasie mleczko" tastes like and has a quality of a turd, sorry).</comment></comment></comment>


Transfer learning in low-data environments with FloydHub, fast.ai, and PyTorch - <AUTHOR> https://blog.frame.ai/learning-more-with-less-1e618a5aa160 <comment><USER2> Looks like this task focused on binary sentiment analysis (positive or negative movie reviews) - have you tried this on something with a broader potential output space? This seems relevant for what you're calling "neural tags" on your client's customer conversations, which seems more open-ended than simply "positive" or "negative".

<comment><USER3> Yes, great insight! The choice to focus on sentiment here was mainly to align with fast.ai's original research—-hopefully maximizing the generalizability and accessibility of the results.

Internally we have made use of these results to improve a broad set of language tasks, hopefully will be able to publish on those in the coming months as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can you explain the domain-only model overtaking ULMFiT at 65k(?) unlabeled examples? Just noise, or is the ULM contribution competing with the domain model in some way?

<comment><USER3> I think in this case the alignment between unlabeled domain data and the language task supports a convergence in language task performance. One argument to continue to prefer the ULM+domain model is that it is likely more generally capable if you remain in same domain but switch to a task that is less directly related to your unlabeled data. I haven't seen any research that directly speaks to that intuition so it's a good area for further study.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Author here! Happy to answer any questions that folks have.

</comment><comment><USER5> Out of curiosity, have you done much work on examining your misclassifications? I'd be curious to know if there are giveaways for "negative" sentiment that show up in your task versus, say, reviews of Spiderman II.

<comment><USER3> In this work we didn't explore classification performance characteristics. I suspect the nature of the misclassification at lower levels of domain data would revolve around the ways language usage differs in reviews vs common english. "Blockbuster" may have generally negative or neutral sentiment in a wikipedia based language model, perhaps most often referring to the failed rental chain. In the context of movie reviews "blockbuster" is almost always universally positive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> How are you using these tools to solve your business problems?

<comment><USER3> One of the fantastic qualities of embedding based language models is that they provide a view on a semantic space that can be used quantitatively in most any downstream language task. As a conversational intelligence company Frame has many products that are enhanced by having a high quality domain specific language model to build on: tagging, sentiment, topic extraction, key words, summarization, etc. Best of all, these products can be iterated on in parallel! Improvements in a language model's representation of a body of text should improve all downstream task without modification.

<comment><USER7> The same thing is also true for computer vision models. A core deep network usually trained either with a dual embedding of associated text against search ranking or trained to predict tags or labels. The output network may be of limited use on the original training task but ends up producing an excellent embedding model by extracting the neurons from some deep layer.

You start automatically encoding your entire image collection and incoming images into that embedding model and rely on it as a lingua franca on which to base all sorts of other companion models like object detection, face recognition, gender/age/ethnicity prediction, spam detection, aesthetic / composition appraisal, caption generation, style transfer etc etc.</comment></comment></comment>


The Principle of least astonishment - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_astonishment

<comment><USER2> A hugely important UI/UX principle far too often honored in the breach.

Not only should _visual_ elements of behavior follow PoLA, but _behavior_ as well. Don't lose state, don't lose data, don't _disclose_ data.

And do not do things which cannot be reverted without being damned, damned, damned sure they're what the user _intended_ to do. This goes for both destruction and disclosure of data.</comment>


Mailchimp thinks it's OK to have Mixed Content in 2020 - <AUTHOR> https://mailchimp.com/help/i-got-a-security-alert-in-my-browser/ <comment><AUTHOR> The Money Quote:

> This is because images in Mailchimp are stored in the cloud, not on the same > server as the Mailchimp app. This doesn't affect the security of your > Mailchimp data in any way. It just allows nonsecure items to display within > our application.

No idea what any of that has to do with explicitly coding their system to fetch these resources over HTTP instead of HTTPS.

As a Mailchimp user, I can confirm this is indeed still how their system works. Mixed Content everywhere.</comment>


The Vortex: Why Users Feel Trapped in Their Devices (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nngroup.com/articles/device-vortex/ <comment><AUTHOR> > You pick up your phone to send a text to your friend. On your lock screen, > you see a Facebook notification that someone liked your post, so you open > the app. While scrolling in your Facebook news feed, you see an ad for your > favorite shoe brand. It's running a sale, and you do need a new pair of gym > shoes! Fifteen minutes later, you're on your bank's website checking your > balance, and you've completely forgotten to text your friend.

Yup. Happens to me all the time. Super annoying.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you do for global warming? - <AUTHOR> After a lot of discussions with my girlfriend about global warming we are still wondering what we can do to help fight the problem.
Some Background: There's evidence [0] that we will reach a point of no return regarding the climate change soon. Reaching this tipping point implies we create a self-reinforcing feedback loop where the whole 'Earth System' becomes destabilized which in turn leads to an increase in temperature of up to 50° in the next 100 years. See [3].
We think its clear there is reason to act now. There's some 'simple' points one can personally do to help:
* no flights * use public transport * use less energy
* buy local groceries * cut back on dairy products
However, the largest impact on climate does not come from e.g. flights [1] but from the energy industry. One can only impact this indirectly.
Lots of the general public (including politics) seems to be oblivious to the problem at hand - ignoring the problem fully or at least partly. With Fridays for future [2] there is (at least in Germany) work done in this regard. At the same time it has just been decided there won't be a tempo limit on german autobahns and no CO2-emission tax.
It looks like the best might be to improve education on the topic - but it has to happen fast. If more people try to reduce their emissions it might force the 'bigger forces' to reduce their emissions, too.
This whole topic has a very negative ring to it - "Life is probably over in 50 years" is not something everyone wants to be confronted with. At the same time everyone has to acknowledge this and has to react accordingly.
So, really, I'd like to spark a discussion what one can do, what has been done and what you are doing. Also, what can give hope :) ?
tldr; We are fucked, what can we do?
[0] https://www.pnas.org/content/115/33/8252 [1] check emissions by sector (link too long) [2] https://fridaysforfuture.de/ [3] https://www.azimuthproject.org/azimuth/show/HomePage <comment><USER2> Very often these personal efforts are simply virtue signalling or a way for people to feel better about themselves. Doesn't mean that you should be wasteful with your resources or actively damage your environment but please, don't pretend to be saving the earth by drinking less milk.

Where a difference can be made:

\- politics - if you are in politics yourself, or you can lobby and exercise some pressure to dictate policy, that can go a long way

\- industry leaders can actually make a difference but don't have the incentives for it

\- research and innovation - if you're an engineer this is probably where you can make the biggest difference even if you're unlikely to be one of the few people who have a breakthrough - renewable energy, alternative materials, new ways of food production and so on - you can put in work to improve the technology behind any of these to the point where they make more economic sense

</comment><comment><USER3> I read this: [https://www.minitab.com/en-us/Published-Articles/Weather- For...](https://www.minitab.com/en-us/Published-Articles/Weather-Forecasts-- Just-How-Reliable-Are-They-/)

And I extrapolated the results into forecasting the climate for 100 or 1,000 years from now and drew the conclusion that we are trying to model a complex system that can be affected drastically by small changes to the inputs of that system, and that we don't even come close to 1) understanding all the inputs into our climate, 2) do not understand the proper weighting of those inputs in a prediction model, and 3) even if we knew parts 1) and 2), our computational ability to account for both properly and produce a reliable prediction model doesn't exist.

Because of the nature of complex systems, making predictions on them is mathematically impossible. They're a non-reducible emergent behavior.

</comment><comment><USER4> My attitude is, do everything I can and take personal responsibility for everything I do. If in 50 years we've reached the tipping point, at least I won't be filled with regret of things I could have done differently. Blaming corporations for problems just adds another voice to the crowd, whereas lifestyle changes can help - if only minutely.

1\. Diet - been vegan since reading the catastrophic effects animals agriculture has on the environment. Currently 2 years in and feel healthy as an ox.

2\. Transport - run everywhere, cycle if necessary, drive and fly almost never.

3\. Consumerism - live minimalist to a point where I'm happy and fulfilled enough to live happy, but not living as a pauper. Being happy allows me to work more efficiently, so it's a cost-benefit thing.

4\. Investment - use the money saved from said minimalism to invest in carbon positive businesses and charities. Turns out that when you stop spending money on things and live on rice and beans, money starts coming out of your ears.

5\. Career - currently in the process of transitioning from a career in the aviation industry, to one in the renewable energy industry. I'll take a pay cut, but at least my skills can be put to better use. So yes, you can impact the energy industry directly. Provide talent, research better alternatives to fossil fuels, try to become an industry leader and change that industry.

In my eyes, saying there is nothing you can do is a cop-out. There is always something you can do. When people say there's nothing they can do, what they really should say is 'it will be exceedingly difficult to put into action the things I want to change'.

My philosophy is, if everything fails it's utterly my fault and no one else's - but, it's alright to fail and I likely will multiple times. The only thing I can change is myself and my actions.

</comment><comment><USER5> During your everyday life, you are given a range of choices you can make. Within that range is moral/immoral choices. However, you are limited with what you can do given the range of choices. The most effective action is to shift the range of choices so that even the most immoral choice is tolerable given the scope of the problem.

Groups like the Extinction Rebellion are having the correct approach. The problem isn't solvable through individual action but via collective action. We need to change the range of choices everyone can make instead of picking the moral choice within a small band of possibilities.

So what I think will work is to get into politics and civic life.

a) Join and help political parties make climate the #1 issue.

b) If you are in the USA, join the Bernie Sanders campaign as the climate is at the top for his campaign.

c) Do civil disobedience, Join groups like Extinction Rebellion.

e) Talk to people about the problem and have them join the fight.

d) Write software to help a,b,c, and e!

</comment><comment><USER6> I do convince people to use public transportation and being vegan to reduce their emissions.

So I don't need to.

I eat meat and use my SUVs but since I already convinced several people to do otherwise I do think I am entitled to some privilege. --> BUT I use the "ECO" function on my SUV.

Same as my colleagues ecologists that always travel by plane, buy a lot of disposable stuff but claim it is ok because they ar are spreading the message.

Samewise I do as voting I just need to convince 2 people of opposite party to not vote (mostly I do a big BBQ at home) and then I don't need to vote AND we _reduce carbon emissions_ but kind we offset it on BBQ (using charcoal..)

I think the secrete is to balance and being a net positive.

I am doing my part we need more people doing it.

<comment><USER7> This is a great strategy. I for one burn as much fossil fuel as possible. The sooner we run out, the sooner we can stop releasing that carbon into the air. I'm doing my part to reduce the finite supply of fossil fuels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I minimize my daily commute, recycle most things, that's about it, try not to worry about it too much. The anxiety available to everyone that I reject would be far too expensive for the potential benefit on a personal or global scale. This all started well before I was born and will continue far after I'm dead.

Settle down, we're not fucked. Lots of smart and motivated people have been, are, and will be working on it. (does this justification of inactivity have a formal name?)

Want to join them? Find them first, then prove you have something to offer. It's not an informal team fixing things at the neighborhood level, distributed among internet commenters. It's a huge and complicated inter-related set of disciplines filled with experts running at full steam around the world working with leaders and millions of dollars.

</comment><comment><USER9> I don't use languages with garbage collection, which are a big waste of energy.

</comment><comment><USER10> I personally have a small carbon footprint, considering I live in Europe. But I know that it's no more than virtuous wishful thinking if I were to start a vegan diet out of love for the environment. What we need is practical, economic solutions that actually make a difference - and to get there we need an unemotional discussion based on facts.

A tempo limit on the German Autobahn wouldn't have a big positive impact on the environment. I'd support a general CO2-emission tax (there's already a europe-wide emission tax for some industries [0]), but not as big and grand as Fridays for Future demands it - it'd make a lot of things much, much more expensive, and mostly low-income households would be affected, while the green upper middle class would just pay the premium.

However, like Greta Thunberg said: The fast and emotional exit from nuclear power for example in Germany was a wrong move. It could've been the best transition to renewable energies. Now, energy in Germany is crazy expensive, but thanks to coal they're even further away from reaching the paris agreement.

It's a good thing that Fridays for Future caused lots of discussions and that young people are getting active in politics. But scaremongering does not help. The whole thing smells like climate-populism.

Who says life will be over in 50 years?

[0] [https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en](https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en)

<comment><USER11> I'm assuming you're from Germany. This makes you (and me, from The Netherlands) a huge over consumer of "carbon". See for example [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/datablog/2009/sep/02/carbon- emissions-per-person-capita) or [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita) and compare European countries to the "third world".

Let's face it, with our long hot showers, far holidays, cars and meat eating we are making withdrawals from Earth, hoping the people in Africa will stay poor so they cannot, to balance it out...

<comment><USER10> > hoping that people in Africa will stay poor so they cannot

That's a pretty far-fetched allegation which does not contribute anything to the discussion, but instead makes it seem more black/white or rather good/bad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> One aspect of climate change that I found/find difficult is being forced to think about mortality of myself & mortality of "civilisation". But on another hand: this isn't specific to climate change: personally, I was always going to die at some point, of something. At a larger scale, historically, all civilisations eventually collapse. When civilisations collapse, this does not mean that all individuals involved perish, although some may. Other individuals involved switch to new patterns of living, when the costs of being involved in the civilisation exceed the benefits offered.

So from one perspective, as individuals & as societies we are all living on borrowed time anyway.

> Life is probably over in 50 years

I suggest that this is an exaggeration.

Personally, I find it very frustrating to deal with things that I have little control over -- when I focus more of my time & energy on things I can largely control, I can see results from my efforts relatively quickly & directly. I don't personally feel responsible for "saving civilisation". This isn't a particularly moral or ethical position to take.

But, enough philosophising, what actions to take?

The problem is caused by environmental impact of a very large number of people multiplied by the environmental impact per person. Someone with a high energy high pollution lifestyle in a developed country may have the same environmental impact as 20-30 people with much lower energy or lower impact lifestyles. Anything you personally do to change your behaviour or reduce your impact is essentially negligible. Taking actions that influence and reduce the impact of large numbers of other people seems more helpful. E.g. activism, or any helping roll out policies that reduce population growth, particularly in countries with higher per-capita environmental impact.

You may also wish to consider hedging: suppose the global economy & global human population keeps roughly doing its thing, business as usual, and not changing sufficiently quickly to limit climate change, how do you want to live your life? "Adaption" rather than "mitigation".

</comment><comment><USER13> Our only serious options will be international efforts, e.g. United Nations Climate Change conferences, etc. but any significant impactful effort will be _painful_ and climate change inequality will lead to quite a bit of resentment

</comment><comment><USER14> Where's the exact source for the 50 degrees theory? I've head of a domino effect for 5 degrees, but never for 50. Or has this just been a typo?

</comment><comment><USER15> Looking at the problem broadly, the issue is that we, as an entire species, are unable to commit to a single goal and execute. One of the externalities of this fact is we behave in such a way that makes our environment less inhabitable. This is one of the ways we need to reinterpret the problem. Global warming is a HUGE THREAT, but we can't solve it directly. Us being able to solve it directly means we can get the whole planet to agree.

We can't agree because of psychology (sorry for the rhyme). This immediately leads us to shadow work (Jungian depth psychology). As a human race, I think we all can agree, we have a VERY DARK shadow.

So I think our only hope to save the planet is to "save ourselves". Just think about it logically. Within 2 years, just in the USA, we have rolled back 8 years or more worth of efforts to stop global warming. The reasons are ultimately because of business, which is linked to consumers; who are consuming (mostly) because of.... psychology (be it from the consumer end/ or the producer end that jacks up prices). Unless the entire planet can agree on the course of action, we are going to have a bunch of great things get cancelled out by not so great things.

My hope in this comment is to get the conversation moved in that direction. How can we get the entire human race to commit to a goal that will take 10, 100, 1000 years to execute? And as daunting as that seems, it has to be WAY EASIER than figuring out the weather... and it should speak VOLUMES to all of us that we are more willing to figure out quantum physics, machine learning, AI, complex weather dynamics; but very few of us are willing to tackle this human condition that keeps the world going the way that it does. It's not enough to solve for scientific solutions; we have to develop solutions that appease our mental lives in ways that don't cause harm to ourselves or our planet.

I believe much of this come down to us developing a common mythos that makes us all feel (sorry for a lack of better words/terminology) like Marvel Superheroes; like Avengers. My case in point, look at how many people came out to see this comic book movie. If we felt the same way about our individual lives, we wouldn't feel the need to escape into movies or the numerous other outlets of consumerism that ultimately lead to global warming. This comes right up against our concepts and uses of religion, politics and anything else that we still consider sacred.

</comment><comment><USER16> I make allot of noise and flap my arms but ultimately, unless I'm feeling generous, all I do is make it worse, or marginally less worse. The truth imo is that we are bit players and the real players are destroying the planet as fast as possible for reasons unknown.

It's not true everyone had to react to it, many of the ppl. who have the power have a fatalististic attitude or just don't care

</comment><comment><USER17> Reminder that 100 companies contribute to 71% of global warming.

[https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable- business/2017/jul/10...](https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable- business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors- responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change)

What you or I do is moot and a waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER18> What about getting serious about app carbon footprint metrics, standards, and requirements? Wouldn't that be a useful project for EEs and other bright people on HN?

</comment><comment><USER19> I plant more and more trees because its the only thing a person individually can do without asking others for any kind of help.

</comment><comment><USER20> Nothing. I no longer believe anything is possible, so we will simply have to deal with the changes.

</comment><comment><USER21> Nothing. You can't have infinite growth on a finite planet

</comment><comment><USER22> I live frugally, but I'm not so good at cooking so I eat a lot of take out food. I could improve on that by cooking at home more often. I also try to become a vegetarian. Cutting out beef was easy, but also not eating chicken or pork is harder. Last summer was a wake up call and this summer looks to become just as hot and dry. :(

I know, we environmentalists are all ants and the thing that matters the most is to get the Americans to not reelect Trump, which seem unlikely to be possible. But it is better to do something than doing nothing and just being a cynical bastard. On May 24, they will hold another global Climate Strike. See you there!

</comment><comment><USER23> I drive with AC on and windows opened.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't plan on having kids :P</comment>


Historical Tuning of Keyboard Instruments - <AUTHOR> http://historicaltuning.com/

<comment><USER3> Whereas guitars are tuned by setting the dominant frequency of each string to a fixed reference, which can be easily automated, this is not the case for a piano.

This is because each piano string is governed by a non-linear differential equation describing its motion. The overtones therefore are not simple multiples of the fundamental frequency but instead appear displaced from where they would naively be expected. Although there is a strong systematic variation to these displacements, there is also a random component, rooted in difficult-to-characterize variations in the manufacture of each string.

Thus, each string unto itself has a unique Fourier spectra, and not only do the fundamentals need to be matched in frequency so as to minimize dissonance, but the higher modes as well.

Thus, ach piano has its own tuning, unique its constituent parts. (And, there may be multiple tunings for a single piano.)

Further, we do not have an adequate mathematical characterization of the sensation of 'dissonance' and thus the job of a professional piano tuner is to minimize this sensation when a pair of strings is played.

Though there are electronic systems for selecting the proper piano string fundamental, they can differ by as much as ten cents (10% of the distance between one note and the next) from a professional tuning.

Therefore, we can put a man on the moon, but we do not know how to tune a piano!

</comment><comment><USER4> Many modern digital tuners offer the ability to tune by various historical temperaments, making the use of historical tuning both easy and fast. However, it _is_ important IMO to understand how the different tuning methods came about, the math behind them and the harmonic implications they entail.

Trying to explain historical tuning using the circle of fifth is actually incorrect, even when it pertains to keyboard instruments. The concept of a cycle of fifths is relatively recent, is not compatible with harmonic theory before the 18th century, and is useless for explaining meantone for example.

It's also important to take into account that the different tuning methods go hand in hand with specific kinds/styles/periods of music. Therefore it's important to present them in a historical context. The website touches on this briefly, but a more comprehensive discussion can be found elsewhere, for example on wikipedia.

In western music one can discern the following periods which correspond with basically universal (disclaimer: the following is grossly generalized):

1\. Ancient Greece - the discovery of the mathematical rules of harmony (both musical and celestial) is attributed to Pythagoras, based on the superparticular ratios based on the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4: 2:1 - <USER2> (octave) 3:2 - diapente (fifth) 4:3 - diatessaron (fourth)

This mathematical framework was superimposed on the Greek system of tetrachords (4-note scales), in their various genera, which always covered a diatessaron (fourth), the most common genus being the diatonic (composed of 2 whole tones and 1 semitone). The so called Pythagorean system divided the diapason into two tetrachords, divided by a whole tone. It is interesting to note that the modern major scale is still basically the same construct as that of the ancient greeks: two diatonic tetrachords with a whole tone in the middle.

2\. Middle Ages (up until early 15th century) - the musical and mathematical thought of the middle ages came of course from the classical era, and in the music of the middle ages the prevalent tuning method for all intents and purposes was based on Pythagorean ideas. We now call this method the Pythagorean tuning.

The basic idea is that all ratios are derived from the fifth (3:2). In the key of C, D would be tuned at a ratio of 9:8 (fifth minus fourth), E would be tuned at (9:8)^2 (the product of two whole tones), etc. The advantage of this system, compared to the Greek system, is the ability to wander into other keys. With the advent of Guido d'Arezzo hexachord system with its moveable hexachords, knowing how to tune Bb or F#, or go even further to Ab or G# became a matter of tuning a sequence of fifth.

It is important to note that this does not imply a closed cycle of fifth. In fact, tuning a sequence of 12 fifths (and then canceling the 7 octaves we climbed), starting from C and ending on B#, would give us a note significantly higher than the one we started with. This difference is called the pythagorean comma (about 1/8 tone).

The implications of this system are manifold: \- no enharmonic identity - C is not B#, Eb is not D# \- # is (relatively) high, b is low \- Pythagorean thirds are dissonant: 9:8 * 9:8 = 81:64. Just thirds (based on the natural harmonic series) are 5:4, or 80:64. The resulting difference, 81:80, is called the syntonic comma (about 1/9 tone). In medieval music, cadences include only the stable, consonant intervals of fifths and octaves (with resulting fourths). Thirds and sixths are considered mid-way between consonant and dissonant, and are considered unstable.

3\. Renaissance and early baroque - the age of meantone (15th century to late 17th century) - while various experiments have been made during the renaissance with just intonation and with equal tuning, they never took hold. Just intonation means that we lose the ability to move between keys. Equal temperament means that we have lousy thirds (almost as lousy as pythagorean thirds). The musical taste of the renaissance demanded on the one hand consonant, sonorous thirds, and on the other hand the ability to move between keys.

To that end the meantone tuning was developed, with a very simple idea: if four 3:2 fifths give us a dissonant third that is too high, why don't we temper each of the four fifths so we'll get a pure third? The amount of tempering is actually very small, only a quarter of a syntonic comma, or about 5 cents in present-day terms. Contrary to just intonation, where the interval C-D is 9:8 and the interval C-E (where E is a pure third) is 10:9, in meantone tuning the D is right in the middle between C and E, therefore the name of this system.

The tempering of the fifths is continued in the sequence of fifths in both directions: C-G-D-etc, and C-F-Bb-etc. The implications are: \- no enharmonic identity - like in Pythagorean tuning. \- # is low, b is high (the opposite of Pythagorean tuning). \- fifths are slightly beating, but the pure thirds more than make up for it - 1/4 comma meantone has an indescribable sweetness to it. \- Since all fifths are equal, all keys sound the same, and you can easily move between keys. This also means that instruments with different pitches (as was the situation during the late 17th century and even later), could play together without problems on intonation, at least theoretically. In that regard meantone is a kind of equal temperament. \- When tuning keyboard instruments in meantone, the tuner has to select whether to tune each black key as sharp or flat. Also, one fifth would be unusable (it would be way too wide). Meantone temperament on a keyboard with 12 notes per octave is actually quite limiting.

It is important however to note that meantone is not a cyclical temperament, you can theoretically continue the sequence of fifth in both directions (sharp and flat) and you'll never close the circle.

A different way of thinking about meantone temperament is the division of the octave into X equal intervals. It turns out that 1/4 comma meantone fits almost exactly a division of the octave into 31 equal parts, where a whole tone is 5 parts, the diatonic semitone (e.g. C-Db) is 3 parts, the chromatic semitone (e.g. C-C#) is 2 parts.

This idea of dividing the octave into more than 12 equal parts led in the 16th century to much experimentation, mostly in Italy, in building keyboard instruments with split sharps, allowing the player to play both sharps and flats and removing the 12-notes per octave limit.

Renaissance theoreticians experimented with tempering fifths by varying amounts such as 1/5 comma, 1/6 comma, 2/7 comma, and leading to a division of the octave to 19 parts, 43 parts and 55 equal parts.

The 1/6 comma meantone (and corresponding division of the octave into 55 equal parts), became popular towards the end of the 17th century, and gained new adherents towards the end of the 18th century, with both Mozarts (father and son) being some of its proponents.

4\. Baroque - towards the end of the 17th century meantone temperament became increasingly seen as limiting and unsuitable to contemporary musical taste. As players and composers became more attached to the different _affects_ of the different keys, and wanted to be released from the limits of meantone on keyboards, musicologists started looking for a way to temper the fifths such that all fifths would be usable.

This led to the invention of the closed temperament, with Werckmeister being the first to offer a recipe for the tuning of keyboards, where 4 of the fifths are each tempered by a 1/4 of a pythagorean comma. The rest of the fifths are pure. This creates a system where all keys are usable, but some would be more dissonant than others.

Werckmeister was soon followed by others such as Neidhardt, Valotti, Kirnberger, etc, each with his own recipe for tempering some of the fifths by varying amounts. The principle is always the same: the total amount of tempering is equal to a Pythagorean comma.

Some instructions, such as the various instructions for the French "tempérament ordinaire" are much more vague, and just start with a pure third in one of the main keys (C, F or G), tempering its constituent fifths, and becoming more and more dissonant as one goes farther away in the cycle of fifths.

It is important to understand that all these temperaments were intended for keyboard instruments, and that players of other instruments, as well as singers, were expected to follow certain conventions based on meantone ideas, but that's another topic of discussion.

5\. Equal temperament - equal temperament, although a very old idea (it goes back at least to the 16th century), only gained popularity with the rise of the piano, being the first mass-produced musical instrument. Of course it also has to do with the fact that composers of the romantic era became increasingly adventurous in their harmonies and fond of employing enharmonic modulations, thus erasing any notion of difference between sharps and flats, from Chopin and Liszt to Wagner, Mahler and beyond.

Although the historical tuning methods came back into use together with the revival of early music and historical instruments, it is a sad fact that today equal temperament is so universal, so omnipresent that we have become completely desensitized to the fact that basically all the intervals we hear today, except for the octave, are dissonant to some degree.

If anybody has more questions I'd be happy to help. I've quite a bit of experience in this field.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I am not musical. This is a resource someone else suggested to me years ago to add to a small homeschooling site I run. It is listed on my site as a math resource. I thought math+music might appeal to some niche of the geek crowd, even though I am tone deaf and can't really appreciate it.</comment>


The Demise of Tilt, a Bargain for AirBnB, a Classic Loss for Investors Like A16Z - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcompany.com/3069164/how-tilt-veered-off-course <comment><USER2> The schadenfreude is high in this article.

They took a shot but missed. It happens.

Everyone second guesses when things don't work out. That happens too.</comment>


Show HN: Show HN - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/show <comment><USER2> Great work! I love when organic user behaviors are recognized and made first class features.

Allow me to emphasize something from the Show HN Guidelines[1]:

> _Be respectful. Anyone sharing creative work is making a contribution, > however modest._

> _Ask questions out of curiosity. Don 't cross-examine._

> _Instead of "you're doing it wrong", suggest alternatives. When someone is > learning, help them learn more._

> _When something isn 't good, you needn't pretend that it is. But in that > case, consider saying nothing._

The comments section of Show HN posts are not an invitation for you to tear someone apart for your own self-aggrandizing glory. If you want to be helpful, be constructive. If you don't want to be helpful, don't bother.

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

<comment><USER3> Absolutely agree on these guidelines. It takes a lot of bravery to put yourself out there in public. It should take just as much class to offer advice and constructive criticism instead of tearing somebody else's work down.

 _edit_ also, is it just me or is the front page plastered with Show HN links? Does anybody else think that's _awesome_?

<comment><USER4> Am I the only one who thinks it _isn 't_ awesome? As someone who comes to HN for news, I really don't want to see _any_ Shown HN on the front page. Certainly not half the front page filled with them.

<comment><AUTHOR> It'll settle down. Never judge HN by one day or even a few—the status quo ante is more stable than that. Genuine long-term changes here are more subtle. (Which is actually a challenge, but that's another story.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Stripe launched this way: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3053883). We didn't do any press or anything like that. (We didn't think of adding the Show HN prefix, though.)

<comment><USER6> Dropbox did too:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863)

The "Show HN" convention hadn't been invented at that point, though.

<comment><USER7> The comments on this post are perfect examples of why it's hard to predict what's going to take off and what won't. And also why it's sometimes a good idea to just give people the benefit of doubt.

<comment><USER8> These are awesome, are there more?

<comment><USER9> Leanpub, 1206 days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2329397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2329397)

(We didn't get any comments or many points, but it's nice to see that afterward we've had a number of Leanpub books do better...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Experiment (YC W13) started off as a Show HN, but back then we were called Microryza. It was a very modest thing, and after somehow getting near the top of the front page, we were flooded with traffic [[http://i.imgur.com/miMyx7x.png](http://i.imgur.com/miMyx7x.png)]. That traffic spike is what convinced us to quit our jobs and go all out. Show HN is definitely my favorite part of hacker news.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3833393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3833393)

<comment><USER11> Same! [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7745959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7745959)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's a definite influx of Show HN submissions happening right now. I see 7 in the top 30; I've never seen that many before.

I'm sure they won't remain at this level, but I hope formalizing the action will encourage more to post. I also hope that there is less of an expectation of a perfect product when something is submitted, and we can _respectfully_ offer advice. I've seen some products that were obviously weekend hacks torn apart as if there were a 15 person team building them for a year.

<comment><USER13> I know I've definitely been hesitant to post in the past for being called out for self-promotion or something. I think formalizing it like this will encourage a lot of people to share who might otherwise not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Note that this is a _filter_ on Show HN titles.

For the newest Show HN submissions, you must go to [https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew](https://news.ycombinator.com/shownew)

<comment><AUTHOR> Think of /show as the Show HN equivalent of the front page, and /shownew as the Show HN equivalent of /newest.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Related: [http://blog.ycombinator.com/make-things-and-show- them](http://blog.ycombinator.com/make-things-and-show-them)

My Favorite Part: "There have been about 24,000 Show HNs so far. The first used the title "Show and Tell HN", and was GitHub-related. The second, and the first to use the "Show HN" convention [2], was a face recognition project. And the third was a Hacker News alternative. Plus ça change..."

</comment><comment><USER16> At the risk of sounding like a stackoverflow pedant, would a hardware hack fit in Show HN? For example: Turn a raspberry pi into an FM transmitter [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7361782](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7361782).

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely. There have been hardware Show HNs. Let's have many more! (As always, though, we'd prefer primary sources.)

Obviously, the "other people can play with it" part of the guidelines can't apply to hardware in the same way as to software, but whatever that legal principle is where you interpret the law to fit the case, that's the principle here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Wow. Yay. Hacker News just got incredibly more hackery. Thank you so so much. Just looking at all the work people here are doing is _awesome_!

</comment><comment><USER18> Glad to see this implemented...now on to the feature creep!

Sometimes the submitters use a text post, which I imagine they do because they want to give some context to the project that may not be ideal to present prominently on a landing page, but which likely cuts down on click-throughs (because of the slight inconvenience of users having to find the link to click through to in the text post).

Maybe it's worth having a post-type...for submitters only...in which the submitter gets first say _and_ a click-through title? And those who use it for non-Show-HN submissions are mercilessly flagged to oblivion? Sometimes the submitter's first-comments are buried depending on the type of discussions that occur.

<comment><USER19> danso, that's an interesting idea, but it goes against one goals stated in the site guidelines, namely, a user should not be able to give their own comment or opinion preferential placement. It's the reason why urls in text posts are not turned into links (anchors), and why we're never supposed to editorialize submission titles. The same is true for rank weighting, since text based submissions sink faster than url based submissions.

Though not exactly, the guidelines roughly suggest a way around this issue; write something on your own site, and submit that instead. If the guidelines haven't changed since the last time I read them a week ago, pg essentially said to write your own blog post and submit it, or something like that. e.g.

      http://example.com/show-hn.html

This solves all of the problems, but few people realize it.

One of the tougher problems I've had on /newest with url based submissions is differentiating between spam links and people who just forgot to add the leading "Show HN:" when submitting their new site/biz. If you create a new travel, dentistry, or cooking site and forget the "Show HN:" on your submission title, there's a good chance I'll flag it as spam. I try to be lenient because I _really_ want to avoid clobbering someone who is just starting out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> The consequence will be a lot more Show HN on the front page, a bit like the "upvote all Show HN" day which broke HN completely. I'm seeing it already.

<comment><USER21> It would be just temporary as people try out the new feature. Things will stablize.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I'm curious. Do Show HN posts work the same way as normal link submissions? I have vague memories that certain types of posts are weighted differently and sink down the front page faster. Maybe that's for the Ask HN posts?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're thinking of posts without urls. There aren't any special rules for Show HNs, at least not yet.

<comment><USER23> Would you consider making Show HN posts text only? That way the submitter provides background info / context, why they made the service, what they hope to do with it, etc. I think requiring text-only for Show HN will help minimize people spamming their own links and more about people contributing the experience building their Show HN item.

Thoughts?

<comment><AUTHOR> Experience has taught us that it's healthier when HN stories point to things in the outside world. That's why posts without URLs are penalized.

The kind of discussion you describe is good, but it can and does take place in the threads right now.

<comment><USER23> Fair enough! As long as you keep up the moderation we should be good, hehe.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm kind of hoping that you all can take over at some point. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Great addition to be able to read through them "Shows".

Rant: I find it really distracting that, at the moment, half of the front page titles bear the prefix. Makes it harder to skim through, adds up to annoying visual cruft.

</comment><comment><USER25> Wouldn't be better to strip "Show HN: " from the titles in the Show HN page? They add a lot of noise.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hah, contrary to almost any other post, every comment including the top one is positive! That makes me glad and also it forces me to rephrase my one fear a bit.

I hope this won't give people the impression that "show HN" is now a channel where you should submit anything without hesitation. I like the organic nature of it and I think it's partly because you feel like you are asking people for their attention at the party, so you need to feel justified in doing so. But hopefully that will still be the case.

<comment><AUTHOR> We intend to enforce the Show HN guidelines ([https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)), so if anything, you should see the scope narrow a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> There are too many Show HNs all of a sudden!

</comment><comment><USER28> Just noticed this post. Perhaps this was the worst day for us to ask for feedback ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989526](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7989526)) for our new service, since there are so many ShowHN posts today? :)

Fully agree with the following.

>"Instead of "you're doing it wrong", suggest alternatives. When someone is learning, help them learn more."

</comment><comment><USER29> What's the etiquette on repost? It's quite possible that you posted at the wrong moment and got buried. (unfortunately, like this comment)

<comment><AUTHOR> The etiquette for reposting Show HNs is similar to that for reposting in general, but there is one difference.

The general rule of thumb is: when a story hasn't had significant attention on HN in about the last year, a small number of reposts is ok. That's so good stories can have more than one crack at the bat.

We can adjust that for Show HNs like this: if a Show HN has already had significant attention on HN, there shouldn't be another Show HN for the same project. In other words, no one-year cutoff. But if a Show HN hasn't had significant attention yet, a small number of reposts is ok.

As the guidelines at [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html) point out, though, if a project has had a new and interesting breakthrough, it might be ok to make a new Show HN out of that. But not for routine feature releases.

In case anyone is wondering, yes, we're eventually going to add this information to the Hacker News FAQ. We're dragging our heels about that, partly because we want to change things slowly, and partly because we have ideas for more sophisticated dupe detection that we might want to try out first.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Suggestion for the guidelines: add that Show HN often drives a spike of traffic to the site, so one should plan accordingly before submission.

</comment><comment><USER31> That's a great feature!

As a minor nitpick, the topline as well as the guidelines contain an unfortunate "here" link

| A list of the most recent Show HNs is _here_.

It could be changed to some more descriptive link text, for example:

| There is also a list of the _most recent Show HNs_.

See also: [http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere](http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere)

</comment><comment><USER32> I guess the filter should only include titles with a colon after the "Show HN". Right now there's the story from yesterday: "Show HN vs. TechCrunch vs. Product Hunt: what's most effective to launch a product".

(Is it weird that the first thing I did was to see if this story was there?)

<comment><AUTHOR> The trouble with that suggestion is that it's fairly common for people to omit the colon. I think we'll just deal with such cases manually; that's what we did with the one you mention—we put "Ask HN: " at the beginning of the title.

</comment></comment><comment> andrey-p Yes! I've been wanting this for a while. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER33> Awesome, thanks for listening to feedback and implementing this feature.

One question though, is there a big uptick in Show HN posts today or is something wrong with the HN RSS feed? Just noticed a full page of Show HN posts on the feed and was curious if it was organic or maybe a bug.

<comment><AUTHOR> It was all organic, and it seems to have settled down, as expected.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> As the creator (and neglector) of one of the more popular bastions of people interested in just Show HNs (showinghn.com), I think this is a good move. If anyone has any ideas of what other sort of value I could provide with showinghn.com, feel free to let me know.

</comment><comment><USER35> Really glad to see this - great work! I love following Show HN. I recently posted one about my startup that got to the front page and saw hundreds of sign ups and got some really honest feedback. Thank you for continuing to improve HN for the community!

</comment><comment><USER36> This is great, and actually got me rummaging through the /shownew last night.

However, looks like everyone else did too as the front page has >50% Show HN stories this morning.

Not that that's a bad thing, I imagine it's a good day to have submitted a Show HN.

</comment><comment><USER37> At the time I write it, the list of lists [1] doesn't have the "Show HN".

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/lists](https://news.ycombinator.com/lists)

<comment><AUTHOR> Since /ask isn't there either, we'll probably not add it. Or maybe we should add them both.

<comment><USER37> Now /show has appeared next to /ask, so they don't need to be on /lists since they are visible already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Absolutely great! Sharing your work with peers and getting inspiration from others' work is hard core of hacker culture, so it's nice to see HN to adjust the focus on that way.

I'm little bit worried that Show HN might turn to Spam HN. I think it should be limited so that one url can be posted only once and there should be some kind of update function. Updates would give the post some fixed amount of weight to rise it so that heavily downvoted ones wouldn't rise to front page anymore.

</comment><comment><USER39> This is cool. I often find myself combing through the New section looking for interesting Show HN posts that get lost in the ether. Nice one.

</comment><comment><USER40> Hey Dang now that we have a separate Show HN section , can we please move Show HN posts from the front page to that place (so that they don't appear on the front page anymore ?

Because at the moment 11 out of the top 30 stories are about Show HN.

It seems that now that there is a separate Show Hn section , the posts are getting more traction and in the process appearing on the front page.

<comment><USER41> I wouldn't say get them off the front page, but at least weigh them down.

<comment><USER42> I'd love an option in my profile "Don't show show HN"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Except 13/30 on the front page are now "Show HN" posts, making this page slightly redundant for the time being :)

</comment><comment><USER19> dang, Most people don't know that the rank of text-based submissions decays faster than url-based submissions, so by using the wrong type of submission on your "Show HN" you shoot yourself in the foot by using a text-based submission. This should be noted in the guidelines or adjusted in the code.

Also, I'd add a suggestion to the guidelines for "Show HN" submissions to use a landing page like "[http://example.org/show- hn.html"](http://example.org/show-hn.html") when appropriate so the submitter can ask for specific types of help or feedback. This solves the top-comment problem mentioned by danso, and also solves the text-based submission problem.

All in all, "Show HN" is an excellent addition. Thank you.

EDIT: The new code is actually finding the text-based submissions as well as the url-based submissions, but at first I thought it was missing the text- based ones.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, it's on our list to fix this, probably by just exempting Show HN posts from the url-less penalty.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> Checking in to say _thanks_ for making this happen. The most interesting part of HN just got a huge boost..

</comment><comment><USER45> I could click this link forever, it's just that great... also it leads to itself so there's that too.

</comment><comment><USER46> Fantastic addition to HN! I'll be visiting this daily.

Edit: Clicking on the YC logo from the guidelines brings up a 404.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks; we'll fix it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is great. Lets hope this helps surfacing good ideas which dont get traction or get shotdown.

</comment><comment><USER48> The link should be second from left.

</comment><comment><USER49> Anything that organizes the posts here into more categories is welcome. It is quite hard to navigate through posts and comments as it is.

Now, I wonder if it is possible to get the monthly hiring threads pinned to the top of ask.

Also, it is time for those 30 different HN mobile apps to update.

</comment><comment><USER50> Yay! Great change.

It's no secret the quality of discussion has decreased. I was fine with PG's stick approach with moderation - I couldn't think of anything better. But this looks like a carrot approach that can work. Very clever and elegant solution.

</comment><comment><USER51> This section is particularly helpful for the entrepreneurial side of HN that's looking for new solutions, but also keeps the more technical side of HN intact.

Looking forward to visiting Show HN on a regular basis.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm actually kind of bothered by this.

I was about to release signups for a private beta of my current project, but apparently that no longer fits the formal criteria of "Show HN."

Disappointing to say the least.

<comment><USER21> You cannot show something that cannot be seen? I guess?

<comment><USER52> Well, it can be seen and it can be used, but just not by everyone yet.

I have no idea where I'll go to do a beta now.

<comment><AUTHOR> > it can be seen and it can be used

In that case you can do a Show HN. The guidelines are only trying to prevent Show HNs for things that can't be used yet. If you want specific advice, you're welcome to email email@example.com. (That goes for anybody.)

We might need to relax this rule. Good work can get off the ground in many ways. Drew Houston got initial traction for Dropbox with a video rather than with working software. Our intention isn't to be overly strict—it's mostly to detach "Show HN" from vaporware landing pages and market tests that don't have serious work behind them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> grey-area This is great, thank you!

</comment><comment><USER53> I do worry that start-ups will now get lost in the fray or people will ignore the section :-/

In the mean time, I'd love to hear some feedback on my start-up: www.gopaperbox.com

</comment><comment><USER54> Anyone else notice that suddenly there are a dozen or so "Show HN" on the front page? I think this spurred a new way to hack your way to the top.

</comment><comment><USER55> yay!

great job, dang. i may start reading this more than the front page.

<comment><AUTHOR> May I add: Thanks to kevin, kogir and anonymous! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> Excellent. I may visit this page more than HN itself.

</comment><comment><USER57> Really nice guidelines, as someone always fearful of looking spammish almost made me want to submit my stuff, but it still needs some work.

</comment><comment><USER58> finally! I always like looking at the Show HN posts and have often wished feature existed, great :)

</comment><comment><USER59> How will 'Show HN' differ from Product Hunt? Is PH going to become subset of Show HN?

<comment><USER60> Many posts on PH aren't submitted by the creator of what is being posted. The main idea behind Show HN posts is posting your own creations. The public here is also more tech oriented than in PH - more product oriented.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Neat! I'm curious as to what percent of posts made to HN are Show vs. Other.

<comment><USER14> Using the data from a previous HN analysis of all posts until Feb 2014 [1], I've found that 1.45% of all submissions are Show HN submissions. (but that only found 18,000 submissions. If you use the given 24,000 submissions and the current number of articles [1.3m], the percentage is 1.75%)

I have the data loaded if you have any other Show HN questions.

[1] [http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker- news/](http://minimaxir.com/2014/02/hacking-hacker-news/)

<comment><USER61> Awesome! Thanks for sharing this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> The link should also say "Show HN" rather than just "show".

<comment><AUTHOR> Like everything else about this, that's by analogy to /ask.

Being laconic is part of HN's DNA. Probably always will be.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> I really like how if I go to Show HN, the first topic is "Show HN: Show HN"

Recursive!

<comment><USER63> Showception

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> These still show up on the front page (like /ask), right?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> Yo dawg, we heard you like "show hn" posts... :)

</comment><comment><USER66> You made this just for the headline, didn't you?

<comment><AUTHOR> No, but the hypnotic fascination of meta made that title inevitable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Awesome, I've always liked the `Show HN:` posts.

</comment><comment><USER68> Now everything gets a "Show HN" tag ;)

</comment><comment><USER69> Dang, I wish I could tag you. Thank you.

<comment><USER70> I wrote this a while ago to add some little details to HN: [https://github.com/SirCmpwn/HNImproved](https://github.com/SirCmpwn/HNImproved)

It lets you give specific users a specific color, if you want to call dang out specifically.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> Awesome, thanks for this nice feature :)

</comment><comment><USER72> Almost recursive... a neat feature.

</comment><comment><USER73> So much ShowHN on the front page

</comment><comment><USER74> Wow, that title is really meta.

</comment><comment><USER75> Finally.

</comment><comment><USER76> This is really good. (y)

</comment><comment><USER77> Cool! Great feature HN!

</comment><comment><USER78> Recursion ? !!!! :)

</comment><comment><USER79> self = \s.s s self show-hn

</comment><comment><USER80> I see what you did there...

</comment><comment><USER81> cool feat!

</comment><comment><USER82> FINALLY

</comment><comment><USER83> so hacker news is splitting into subreddits. cool. (although subreddits is not the right term... )

what other future subreddits are planned?

<comment><USER84> I'd imagine that "Ask HN" would be another major sub-heading.

<comment><USER85> How about "Tell HN?" That one doesn't work yet.

<comment><USER22> I'd think 'Show' and 'Tell' should be filtered into the same feed.

<comment><USER85> I was thinking that "show" would be about the submitter's own, new project and "tell" would be about old things that everyone should know or PSAs. But maybe you're right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> so we now have the show tab beside comments and ask at the top?

I think this is fantastic. I hope that more people will visit my site.

</comment><comment><USER87> I know this contributes nothing, but...

So meta.

<comment><USER88> So meta.</comment></comment>


Founders Never Sleep - <AUTHOR> http://gregario.us/2012/06/on-vacation/

<comment><USER2> I am honestly searching in vain for a point to this post. The title suggests that the fact that "founders never sleep" is a fact. The author went through a phase where that was true but now believes it's a "bad habit," without any advice on how to avoid it or mention that it was driven by his circumstances, which have since changed. It basically amounts to him saying "When I had no money, I had to work long hours to provide income for myself while also trying to run a startup. Now that the latter is profitable I no longer have to do this. This is good because I didn't enjoy my previous situation and don't recommend it."

How is that useful advice to those trying to earn a living and run a startup? What would be a better alternative?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry you didn't find a point to the post.

I think if there was a summary, it was simply that once you're a founder you will always find it hard to take your eyes off the prize.

Finding the balance between your life and work is one of the biggest challenges most of us have to deal with.

I don't think it is purely a circumstance of finances, however. No matter how much you're making, you will likely be highly engaged. When you're totally broke, working more and more can seem like the best way through it. When you're profitable, you can become addicted to how to make that grow bigger.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> i hate link bait</comment>


Twitter said to be testing two-step security in wake of AP hack - <AUTHOR> http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/twitter-said-to-be-testing-two-step-security-in-wake-of-ap-hack-50011027/ <comment><USER2> A few years ago there was a strange byline on a few tweets from @spam, it said "by {username}" indicating that there was some sort of system allowing specific users to send tweets from a different account, here is a screenshot from January 2010: <http://i.imgur.com/o0iVS.png>

Does anyone have any insight on why Twitter haven't implemented that sort of system (nominated accounts able to tweet from a corporate account) and seemingly abandoned the idea in 2010? One of our Twitter accounts has ~30,000 followers and we have to share the password amongst the company in a spreadsheet, that sort of poor security is encouraged by a single login model, with all the previous high profile account compromises it seems strange Twitter hasn't addressed this before. Maybe someone knows why, or can speculate why?

<comment><USER3> Depends... Which is a worse attack vector: a single account with a shared password, or a shared account where each person has their own personal account password?

Twitter really needs shared accounts + required two-factor for the personal accounts.

<comment><USER4> At the very least it's better for auditing. If one of your employee's accounts is hacked to send a fake tweet you immediately know which one instead of potentially having no way to know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Two factor authentication is a funny thing in 2013.

All computer users understand passwords (and the basics of password complexity/secrecy) at this point. That covers the "something you know" factor.

Many users conceptually understand a "something you have/are" factor in the form of biometric scans or smartcards. Unfortunately, those approaches are not practical to deploy outside a controlled enterprise setting.

On the Web, the only approach that isn't a non-starter today is TOTP, what Google Authenticator uses. Unfortunately, basically zero users understand this, creating a large education issue, and frankly it's a pain in the neck for users ("why do I need to go find my phone to log in??"). The upside is it's easy for Web app developers to integrate TOTP, and it adds significantly to account security if used correctly.

Facebook and Google have offered this as an option for quite some time, and with Twitter's current prominence as part of corporate advertising, I am surprised they are this late to the party.

<comment><USER6> > Unfortunately, those approaches are not practical to deploy outside a > controlled enterprise setting.

In what way? Bloomberg uses custom hardware developed in-house (the "B-unit") for four-factor authentication (password, biometric, visual sync, token). These devices are sent to customers all over the world where there is no control over them. All of the device and biometric enrollment is done through the software remotely when the device is received by the end user. So in my experience it is definitely possible to do this outside of the typical employee/enterprise scenario.

<comment><USER7> Background on the B-Unit: <http://www.bloomberg.com/bunit/Overview_Features.pdf>

Definitely an interesting device.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Any service that acts as an oauth provider but which doesn't use 2 factor is being grossly negligent, and should be avoided.

</comment><comment><USER9> Two-step authentication, especially for something as prominent as twitter, is always a good thing. So, kudos to them.

<comment><USER10> > kudos to them.

Kudos for being horribly late and reactive instead of proactive?

This should have been implemented long long ago imo. Though i do give them more slack than with all of our banking institutions that still don't offer two-factor. But these recent events show how importing two-factor(or security in general) for even things like social media are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I am surprised that Twitter has not used features for bigger customers like this as a monitizing strategy. When they used to have a user cap, they could have just charged companies or people to go over that cap. Same thing here, charge for two factor authentication. Maybe even charge for verified accounts.

</comment><comment><USER12> Imagine logging in to services only using Google Glass. When prompted to log in, a temporary passcode pops up on Glass. I think it would make two-factor authentication much more streamlined and unobtrusive compared to having your phone beside you and opening an app just to log in.

</comment><comment><USER13> Good news! Your service is now so popular, well liked, and extensively used that important organizations use it and trust it.

Bad news: Now you have to go the extra mile to make sure it isn't misused.

I think this still falls into the category of problems that it's good to have, barely.

</comment><comment><USER14> I had thought that they would most definitely be thinking of 2 factor authentication.

Couldn't they even achieve this quickly using Twilio to send SMS token codes to users who opt to have 2 factor auth?

</comment><comment><USER15> Maybe accounts for clients like the AP need not a two-factor system, but perhaps messages should only originate from a whitelisted set of IP addresses.

<comment><USER16> This isn't really a good solution for mobile phones which change IP address frequently.

<comment><USER15> Of course it isn't. But I can't imagine why the AP would want anyone to send tweets on their behalf from a mobile phone.

Maybe there isn't a single solution that meets the needs of every user.

<comment><USER17> >But I can't imagine why the AP would want anyone to send tweets on their behalf from a mobile phone.

Reporters in the field? Especially in a breaking news situation where they want to be first.

<comment><USER15> Are you suggesting that there may be many AP reporters who are authorized to tweet on AP's behalf from the field, implying a total lack of editorial control (and probably a total lack of coordination as well)? I think that is very unlikely. I'd find it very hard to believe that there isn't a very well defined system in place to control all official correspondence.

They have a news desk that is staffed 24hrs per day. Surely a person there could monitor tweets or communications from reporters in the field. I'd even expect there to be a different individual with the keys to the Twittermachine.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Make it a publicly visible badge so we know how serious account holders are about their security.

</comment><comment><USER19> I just hope they will use the same _standard_ mechanism that Google and now MS use.</comment>


Silicon Valley is engineering your phone,apps and social media to get you hooked - <AUTHOR> https://www.geekdave.in/2018/12/once-you-know-about-this-brain-hacking.html <comment><AUTHOR> Title was long so i used shorter line, Original title: Once You know about this 'Brain hacking' technique, you will realize why you are addicted to your smartphone.</comment>


Soldiers with top secret clearance forced to use potentially insecure app - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2019/11/12/soldiers-with-top-secret-clearances-were-forced-use-an-app-that-could-endanger-them-they-say/ <comment><USER2> I'm shocked, shocked I tell you that management doesn't understand what security means. Shocked.

The military and cyber security just don't mix. It's simply too complicated. The military is a blunt tool. Security is nuanced. It's going to get a lot worse before it gets worse.

Source: 7 years in uniform

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I had to shorten the title due to HN's size limit.</comment>