Rumor: Internal Yahoo memo suggests CEO Jerry Yang may be out - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2008/11/05/rumor-internal-yahoo-memo-suggests-ceo-jerry-yang-may-be-out/ <comment><USER2> Being bost companies have denied it already and the circumstances around it all (not to mention the fact that Microsoft and Yahoo reaching a deal from supposedly dead talks in less than 24 hours at ~$19 a share? c'mon!) lead me to believe this truly is a rumor...

but would Jerry really be missed? I mean he did make nearly everyone at Yahoo soil themselves when he sends them an e-mail that 10% of them are fired but nobody knows who, and then tells them, more or less, "have a happy weekend" _smile and wink_.

</comment><comment><USER3> The article has been updated to indicate that the rumor was baloney.

</comment><comment><USER4> Oh, Yahoo stock is going to start doing some zig-zagging soon. The volume on the trades went pretty high when it touched $9, and those people will want to exit with some profit.

</comment><comment><USER5> Rumor != news

Maybe ban rumors from HN?</comment>


Crisis text line to release massive data set to researchers - <AUTHOR> http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/homepage-feature/item/91451-crisis-text-line-to-release-massive-data-set-to-researchers <comment><AUTHOR> > The organization planned right from its launch in 2013 to make data > available, and set things up that way - getting the OK from texters to use > some of their information while protecting their privacy.

I question how they obtained approval:

* Is it some sort of click-wrap EULA? A person is considering suicide, and they are preseted with a EULA to read, which they must consent to in order to get help?!

* Is it opt-in after the crisis is over? I would be surprised if the response or opt-in rate was very high

* Is it opt-out? Is that appropriate for what are the most private thoughts one can imagine? Wouldn't many people feel violated to know those thoughts are retained and now objects of research?

It would be too bad if their anonymization algorithm failed to catch something; I hope they do more than strip metadata.

Is anything at all sacred and too private for our mass surveillance society?</comment>


Adding Twitter for Mac to Share Options on YOURLS - <AUTHOR> http://deanperry.me/2011/adding-twitter-for-mac-to-share-options-on-yourls/

<comment><USER2> Heads up, can't see anything. I'm getting a 404 error on the article and a Forbidden on the domain.

Google's Cached version works though: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0I2WYDD...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0I2WYDDZ5sIJ:deanperry.me/2011/adding- twitter-for-mac-to-share-options-on- yourls/+twitter+for+mac+share+options+on+yourls&cd=1&hl=en)</comment>


The fall 1989 NeXT Software and Peripherals catalog in glorious 600 DPI - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/KevinSavetz/status/1146616172709703681 <comment><USER2> Direct link to archive.org copy of catalog: [https://archive.org/details/nextsoftwareandperipheralsfall19...](https://archive.org/details/nextsoftwareandperipheralsfall1989)

From page 110 ([https://archive.org/details/nextsoftwareandperipheralsfall19...](https://archive.org/details/nextsoftwareandperipheralsfall1989/page/n109)) on Xanadu: "The Xanadu Server will be released..." ;)

<comment><AUTHOR> Xanadu will happen one day :) it just takes a lil time.

Steve Wozniak's Surprise Tribute to Ted Nelson, 2014

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl0Wfs70rV4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl0Wfs70rV4)</comment></comment>


Shocking New Data Reveals: Americans 'Not Too Happy' - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3zp8x/report-reveals-record-number-of-americans-not-too-happy <comment><USER2> How is the data shocking in the current climate?

</comment><comment><USER3> That's why I'm doing www.kdalive.com</comment>


Regular Expression Matching can be Ugly and Slow - <AUTHOR> http://stevehanov.ca/blog/index.php?id=90 <comment><USER2> Although this might not be applicable given the topic, someone might as well say it:

> Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular > expressions." Now they have two problems. --Jamie Zawinski

As a sort of 'untold' rule of thumb, I avoid writing regex scripts like the plague and let my macros do all the globbing. Although I'm sure writing stuff in bash or C on a regular basis would trump this rule altogether, but, then again, I also avoid writing/reading anything in bash or C like the plague as well. _sighs_

<comment><USER3> The original quote is: "If you have a problem and you think awk(1) is the solution, then you have two problems." -David Tilbrook (<http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247>)

<comment><USER4> What if my only other choice was sed or perl?</comment></comment></comment>


Hackers and HOSPITALS: How you can help - <AUTHOR> https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/hackers-and-hospitals-how-you-can-help <comment><USER2> I'm a security engineer for a regional health system that includes 4 hospitals and numerous clinics. This is absolutely true and so much worse. I was dragged into a bridge line with Cerner and had to explain to one of their System Engineers how to create a certificate. I had to walk him through everything. I've seen other vendors install EMS solutions that left very insecure intranet portals open to the world. I've found vulnerabilities in software and technology stacks, made a case with the vendor only to have them deny it and then attempt to make changes without notification. It seems rampant.</comment>


Develop multitasking applications with PHP V5 - <AUTHOR> http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/web/library/os-php-multitask/ <comment><USER2> Or, rather, _please, please, please_ don't follow advice from 2007 on _clever_ PHP hacks. That's a recipe for trouble in any circumstances, and even more so in case of the (buggy) attempts at concurrency present in PHP5.

It is now a decade later, there are other tools (PHP version _seven_ has been released, ffs).</comment>


Exploiting Convenience: Thieves target Apple Stores in ID scam - <AUTHOR> http://finance.yahoo.com/news/NY-document-ID-theft-ring-apf-2269010423.html?x=0&.v=1

<comment><AUTHOR> Apple stores had two things the thieves needed: High value merchandise that can be fences for a good return, and a very convenient checkout process. You don't even need to go to a register in most stores, and the employee is more concerned about putting a "paid for" sticker on the box than looking at the card they quickly swipe on their handheld terminal.</comment>


One Ancient Commodore Amiga Runs the Heat and AC for 19 Public Schools - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/infrastructure/a16010/30-year-old-computer-runs-school-heat/ <comment><USER2> Solved it for 50% of the cost:

[https://www.amigaforever.com/emulator/](https://www.amigaforever.com/emulator/)

can I have my $1M now.

of course the $250 computer to run the emulator will have to come out of the school systems half.</comment>


C/C++ package dependency management for xmake - <AUTHOR> https://xmake.io/#/guide/package_management <comment><AUTHOR> Support to install and use multi-platform dependent package (android, iphoneos and etc). see [https://github.com/xmake-io/xmake- repo/blob/0e4a905bd8dbe198...](https://github.com/xmake-io/xmake- repo/blob/0e4a905bd8dbe19838072100fe77eda94fae08ac/packages/z/zlib/xmake.lua#L12-L29)</comment>


1980's tech + kids [video] - <AUTHOR> http://youtu.be/gdSHeKfZG7c

<comment><USER2> I thought they did remarkably well. Even though they don't know the proper names, the correctly identified the correct use case for many of the items. To call somthing a CD is to say that it is for playing music. To say something goes in to an iPod is to say it stores music (or data).

There's a valuable lesson for tech entrepreneurs here. The users of your product don't care that it's a magnetic storage device, they care that it stores music. Your users don't care if it's a funky yellow box with a plunger on top, they care that they (think that they) can watch a movie.

Wash away all the technical specifics and focus on what your users want to do. It's product development 101, but we are often so wrapped up how our products work, we forget this crucial perspective.

</comment><comment><USER3> They would probably be equally confused if confronted with 2040's tech.

</comment><comment><USER4> I remember those 8.5" floppy's as a kid. Oregon Trail best game evar

<comment><USER5> 5 1/4", that one was. Mislabeled in the video.</comment></comment>


TikTok: How would the US go about banning the Chinese app? - dane-pgp https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53621492 <comment> dane-pgp > One way to address this would be to tell Apple and Google to use a "kill > switch" facility they both have, which lets them remotely wipe or prevent > blacklisted apps from launching.

I wonder if this would lead to some sort of cat-and-mouse game where ByteDance keep making the app available under different names and encouraging Android users to side-load it.

Presumably there would have to be some sort of judicial process before each new version of the app could be added to the blacklist, with evidence proving that it really was created or controlled by ByteDance, or there would be First Amendment implications.</comment>


A Study Plan to Cure JavaScript Fatigue - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@sachagreif/a-study-plan-to-cure-javascript-fatigue-8ad3a54f2eb1#.vdxbscqxk <comment><USER2> Then, of course, there's the user-side meaning of "JavaScript fatigue", which is "so many modern websites are bloated with unnecessary JS that I've resorted to blocking JS by default."</comment>


Machine Learning for Programming – Peter Norvig - <AUTHOR> http://www.infoq.com/presentations/machine-learning-general-programming <comment><USER2> Presentation - [https://www.dropbox.com/s/qw2z41o6wujze5p/SPLASH2014-PeterNo...](https://www.dropbox.com/s/qw2z41o6wujze5p/SPLASH2014-PeterNorvig- KeynoteMachineLearningforProgramming.pdf)

Publication - [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2661744](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2661744)

</comment><comment><USER3> Can someone kindly transcribe this video for hearing impaired ?

</comment><comment><USER4> Thanks for posting - this is something I'm very interested in and will be checking the slides / mp3 out soon.

I'm rather concerned that engineers will be replaced by AI in the future. I wish we had some sort of developers union.

<comment><USER5> Programmers will be literally the _last_ profession to be replaced by AI. If computers ever exceed human programming capability, we're essentially at the singularity (recursive self-improvement) and have bigger things to worry about.

Of course that doesn't mean some kinds of gruntwork programming can't be automated. Lots of CS research over the last half-century has focused on exactly this: how to eliminate repetitive drudgery and provide the right abstractions to enable human programmers to concentrate on what's interesting and build bigger, more capable programs. In some sense a high-level language compiler is an "AI" that programs for you: you give it a compact specification of what the machine should do and it "writes a program" (generates machine code) to do it.

The ability to machine-learn some functional components of a program doesn't replace human programmers, any more than compilers do. It just enables programmers to spend their time and energy in other ways and levels-up the kind of programs we're able to produce.

<comment><USER6> I think nurturers and entertainers will be replaced last, because it will take serious social changes to get people to prefer being entertained or cared for by a robot. There's no social change needed to replace programmers.

<comment><USER7> A few years ago teachers were selfless nurturers doing an essential job for low pay. Now they're lazy overcompensated government workers and there's a dozen startups trying to replace them with computers.

Pixar disagrees that people won't accept computer-generated entertainment.

I agree that there's zero (maybe even negative) social capital for programmers but as teachers have found out, one well-funded PR campaign can undo even the best social capital.

<comment><USER8> > A few years ago teachers were selfless nurturers doing an essential job for > low pay. Now they're lazy overcompensated government workers

The same faction -- and in many case the same _individuals_ \-- that portray teachers as lazy overcompensated government workers today have been doing so for decades. Conversely, the same people that have seen them as selfless nurturers have been doing that for just as long. Nothing has changed in the last "few years" in that regard.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Economist Espresso daily briefing for smartphones - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/blogs/newsbook/2014/11/economist-espresso

<comment><AUTHOR> Subscription fee + highly curated content + no ads (I think?) ... maybe this is the future of the newspaper business in the digital economy?</comment>


Facebook knows you're gay before you do - <AUTHOR> http://americablog.com/2013/03/facebook-might-know-youre-gay-before-you-do.html <comment><USER4> I wonder if anyone here has actually tried running a Facebook ad campaign and has seen the results? I have, and Facebook is not nearly as sophisticated as this article and many commenters are making it out to be.

The article makes a claim with a very unsubstantiated sense of certitude:

> Matt's two comments, along with other data points ... led Facebook to > estimate that if you lined a hundred people with characteristics identical > to Matt's, a significant number of them will be closeted gays

 _At best_ , the article can state Facebook _might_ have estimated that Matt was a closeted gay. _I seriously doubt that._ Facebook (on the ad manager) only estimates that 14 million people are interested in the "Gay" topic. And it only estimates that 4 million are interested in the LGBT topic. Looking at those numbers, those figures are probably drawn off like pages. Even if Facebook were trying to sneakily indirectly profile everyone, they're doing a bad job of it.

The more likely explanation is that this is a coincidence due to someone targeting their ads at people interested in liberal politics (which Facebook would know from liking a politician).

The paranoid, Occams-razor-butchering explanation is the one the article gives.

I'd wager that for every closeted gay that was targeted this ad, 50 other not closeted-gays saw this ad and thought it was weird and then moved on.

</comment><comment><USER5> What I wonder is, what kind of attitude will people who grow up with those kinds of analytics have towards them?

A little while ago in a conversation about privacy an acquaintance told me that he feels good about the fact there is someone or something out there that cares about his interests, even if it's Google [1]. Thinking back to this brings up in my mind the conversation with the AI Morpheus in Deus Ex [2]; looks like it is still a tossup whether it will turn out to have been prescient. I don't consider data mining to be inherently unethical but I'm not sure what to think of this.

[1] To put this in context, at the time the person in question also reported feeling depressed and lonely.

[2] <https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Deus_Ex#Morpheus_2>

I'll quote the juiciest part:

 _"Morpheus: Human beings feel pleasure when they are watched. I have recorded their smiles as I tell them who they are.

JC Denton: Some people just don't understand the dangers of indiscriminate surveillance.

Morpheus: The need to be observed and understood was once satisfied by God. Now we can implement the same functionality with data-mining algorithms.

JC Denton: Electronic surveillance hardly inspires reverence. Perhaps fear and obedience, but not reverence.

Morpheus: God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary.

JC Denton: No one will ever worship a software entity peering at them through a camera.

Morpheus: The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment.

JC Denton: You underestimate humankind's love of freedom.

Morpheus: The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization."_

<comment><USER6> Someone really needs to tell fiction-writers that "Contemplate the inevitable/eternal" tropes have gotten very, very old. I can't speak for all readers, but I for one have stopped seeing these conversations as any kind of serious thematic debate and started just waiting for the hero to punch Mr. Zen Cleverdick in the face.

Perhaps a Herbert reference is appropriate. "The most fundamental principles of the universe are accident and error."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I remember a while back that Target had to back of a similar approach when it began sending out coupons to women that they suspected (w/ apparently a high degree of accuracy) were pregnant. The main anecdote was about a father who found out his daughter was pregnant because they started to receive the coupons. Target eventually backed off this approach (at least for newly pregnant women) because many of their customers complained that the marketing campaign was creepy.

<comment><USER8> I don't think they _stopped_ it. Just adjusted it so the offers we're alongside random stuff (eg discounts on lawn mowers). That way people wouldn't freak out (presumably because they didn't know how much the company really knew about them)

[http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping- habits.h...](http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html)

Edit: Worth posting the whole quote (just found it).

"With the pregnancy products, though, we learned that some women react badly," the executive said. "Then we started mixing in all these ads for things we knew pregnant women would never buy, so the baby ads looked random. We'd put an ad for a lawn mower next to diapers. We'd put a coupon for wineglasses next to infant clothes. That way, it looked like all the products were chosen by chance.

"And we found out that as long as a pregnant woman thinks she hasn't been spied on, she'll use the coupons. She just assumes that everyone else on her block got the same mailer for diapers and cribs. As long as we don't spook her, it works."

<comment><USER9> Offering alcohol to someone you know is pregnant, ugh.

<comment><USER10> You do know that the medical profession has figured out a small amount of alcohol (a drink or so) after the first trimester isn't a problem, right?

<comment><USER11> Bullshit.

<comment><USER12> Studies have not been able to show negative effects from moderate drinking in pregnancy. The medical community tells women not to drink because they have not been able to show that any level of drinking is "safe".

[http://palatepress.com/2012/02/wine/light-drinking-during- pr...](http://palatepress.com/2012/02/wine/light-drinking-during-pregnancy- what-recent-studies-do-and-do-not-tell-us/)

The medical profession is positively paleolithic and incredibly patriarchal when it comes to pregnancy. There is no rational sense of weighing risks by probability, instead it's a "you can never be too safe!" attitude. My wife researched this issue heavily during pregnancy, and what really ground her gears were all the people who say "the safest option is to just not drink at all." But the fact of the matter is that these same people continued to engage in incredibly risky behavior like the wife continuing to drive during pregnancy.

<comment><USER13> Inconclusive either way is different from 'shown drinking isn't a problem'. So technically, he's right, even if a little too aggressive about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is a bit creepy but it is the kind of thing that could be guessed from facebook activity so it is kind of to be expected.

Lately I've been seeing ads that correlate with things that happen to me completely outside Facebook. About things on sites I only access through google for example. I find this more disturbing.

I checked the "Block third-party cookies and site data" in Chrome so they shouldn't be able to track my web browsing through ads. I'm not sure where they get their info.

For example, last week I bought a new kind of barbecue sauce at the grocery store and the next day Facebook was asking me to like the specific brand's page. It made me wonder. Are banks funnelling purchase information to Facebook?

I never researched this sauce online although I had looked up recipes on how to make homemade sauce through google. But facebook seemed to know the specific brand I had bought.

A similar thing happened to me when I bought replacement windshield wipers for my car a few months ago. I don't know, maybe facebook was just following the weather and knowing that there had been a lot of wiper destroying freezing rain at the time, was suggesting liking major wiper sellers to everybody around here but I still found it suspicious. I had not looked up any wipers online or mentioned that I needed some anywhere and the ad showed up just after my purchase. I know this is all very unscientific. Anybody else have similar experiences?

<comment><USER15> Another hypothesis is that Facebook had been showing you the barbeque sauce ad all along, which is why you bought it. You only noticed afterwards.

<comment><USER16> Or more likely to me, the barbecue sauce company recently launched a marketing campaign that influenced you to buy one (and the campaign is continuing on Facebook where you see it now).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Don't assume everything is pure science and not just mere coincidence. Facebook sometimes gives me military related ads that specifically call out military people -- let's assume the marketer knows enough to put some sort of targeting on their ads, then why would I be getting those ads? There are too many variables at play to know. Also, I've seen some bugs where people get ads specific to one location even though their IP address and their stated location on their profile is something completely different. We could chalk this up to coincidence or maybe there was enough data on his profile to assume Matt is gay. At the same time, I don't think it's creepy because the advertisers don't see the names/identities of the people they target on Facebook, so the ads are still private until the user actually signs up for a product or service.

<comment><USER18> 100% accuracy is never going to be possible. In fact I wouldn't be surprised to see a price structure for targeted advertisements based on confidence intervals.

<comment><USER17> Of course. So when someone posts an article with anecdotal evidence towards the way Facebook uses data, we can assume it might be true in thousands of other cases or tens of millions of cases. It's hard to know which though.

A different pricing structure would be interesting to see sometime in the future.

<comment><USER19> I made a point earlier that the advertiser chooses the target audience and I don't believe FB does what this article claims. I've seen retargeting creep into FB lately but again someone is making assertions rather than an algorithm IMO. Some 3rd party ad networks let you really drill down.

I think FB can do what this article claims but is not actually doing it.

<comment><USER18> I can't say what FB did here with much confidence - its an anecodte. But I'd like to point out that it isn't hard to reverse engineer the information out of FB. Buy a targeted ad and then watch the click-throughs. Cross reference the click-throughs from that ad with data from another tracker that knows identities and you've now been able to link whatever your FB ad criteria was to the identities of anyone who clicks through - even if they don't do anything else besides click through.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The article title is inaccurate - "Matt" did know he was gay, he just wasn't out yet. Facebook's ad platform didn't figure it out before he did. Just as in the Target story, the young woman knew she was pregnant, she just hadn't told her father.

The fear mongering is a little high in this article. However, we should stop and think: why is it so scary for others to potentially know that we're gay? Or pregnant? Neither of these is a shameful state.

<comment><USER21> Nothing wrong with being gay/lgbt. But in many states in the US you can legally be fired or denied housing on the basis of being lgbt.

<comment><USER22> really ? i thought USA was the land of the free ...

<comment><USER23> The law hasn't caught up to today's social standards quite yet. Just like you can fire someone because you don't like how they dress, you can fire someone for being gay, as choice in clothes and sexual orientation aren't "protected classes":

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_class>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My money is on the facebook widgets embedded in other sites this guy visits. Like buttons, login buttons, perhaps a comment widget or three.

Many users may not realize that you don't need to actually click these widgets in order to be recorded by them. Unless you're using a blocker (e.g. Ghostery or DoNotTrackMe), your browser is pinging facebook every time they're included on a page.

Visit a few gay porn sites that have those widgets embedded and facebook can make a pretty educated guess you're gay.

Do porn sites not embed these things? Ok, how about any number of LGBTQ blogs, news sites, advocacy sites, or even sites that just show things that appeal slightly more to a gay audience than average, such as men's fashion or disney showtunes.

</comment><comment><USER25> Can you imagine what's going to happen the first time we have presidential candidates that have clickstreams stored from back when they were twelve?

That's going to be some powerful lobbying mojo - certainly more powerful than anyone's privacy policy.

</comment><comment><USER26> Another thing that Facebook is doing is running a background service on your phone to track your location.

I went to a restaurant. Didn't open the Facebook app while I was there. When I accessed Facebook on my desktop, the first thing it showed me was an ad to like that restaurant.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is very interesting, particularly because this capability exists without people knowing the little clues they leave can be put together in this way.

The EU data protection act contains the concept of sensitive personal data thanks to the abuse of people by the Nazis. It includes ethnic origin, religion, medical information and sexuality.

The idea is that once you can put together a list of people meeting a particular criteria it's very easy to round them up. While I don't think Facebook or the US are in danger of that kind of excess, neither was Holland before the second world war. Yet one of the reasons for the high death toll of Dutch Jews was the good state of the records:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Netherlands_(193...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Netherlands_\(1939%E2%80%931945\)#High_Jewish_death_toll)

I think it might be a good idea for Facebook and others to consider not just the data they have but also the inferences that can be drawn on it, and reflect whether that leaves them with certain responsibilities like easy opt out or not storing certain things.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is amazing and creepy at the same time. It's no wonder Data Scientist is one of the highest paying jobs in tech right now.

Facebook (and other similarly sized companies) have petabytes of data - <USER2> can they do with it? Imagine!

</comment><comment><USER29> Considering how many adult websites are adding social features (i.e. Like buttons), I assume 'Big Data' already has much more accurate information on a person's sexual interests than most people realize.

</comment><comment><USER30> You should be running Ghostery and NoScript/ScriptSafe with JS turned off be default. It's your Internet condom from viruses and advertisers. Like a condom, not 100% effective but you shouldn't concern yourself with edge cases. People can still track you many other ways, but the point is right now they DON'T, so this will keep you pretty safe from this for now. I have any and all domains owned by Facebook and any other social networks I don't use blocked at the router.

Obviously, in reading the article, the primary problem here is that he's a Facebook user, so no amount of protection would help. You can't really use Facebook safely.

</comment><comment><USER31> call me naive, but it has been my impression that Facebook ads are never that sophisticated. He liked a gay-friendly post and then he got served a gay- friendly ad that happened to be about coming out.

<comment><USER32> To put things into perspective, I told Facebook seven or eight years ago that I _was_ gay and it hasn't stopped serving heterosexually-oriented dating ads in the mix ever since, presumably because a filter on "male NOT currently in a relationship" is close enough...

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> How facetious to post such an article on a web page that, upon scrolling to the end, will recommend to me an article about deadly meningitis hitting gay men in NYC ...

</comment><comment><USER34> Even worse is the "Why not try X, your friend Y is."

This was especially fun in my case when, under the heading "You might like" I had: "<girlfriends name> just signed up on <dating site>". :)

I don't entirely mind them profiling me based on what I _choose_ to put on Facebook. But leaking it to my friends is weird.

(I know you can restrict the audience for everything you do, and I actively do this, but it is soooo easy to slip up).

</comment><comment><USER35> Can they predict how long before I finally am off the Facebook platform?

<comment><USER36> Almost certainly. I wonder what their churn management interventions are.

<comment><USER17> I don't know all their transactional email strategies, but I've noticed one is those "Do you know [name] or [name]" emails that try to coax you back onto Facebook by asking you if you know certain people and want to friend them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> It's been about a year since I placed a FB ad but I was under the impression that whomever is placing the ad targets an audience not FB itself. If that is still correct then whoever was placing the "coming out" ad was acting more like an observant bartender mentioned in the article rather than an intelligent algorithm.

<comment><USER37> This is exactly right. I mean I think Facebook is as creepy as the next guy, but this article makes the unsubstantiated claim that Facebook guessed his orientation. Unless they have some secret new interface for their advertisers in this case it's unlikely. That said I'm sure they could predict this with a high level of accuracy if they wanted to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > And in the case of the phone company, if you had a little sexy talk with > your significant other, no one was the wiser because you had a reasonable > expectation your amorous dialogue wasn't being stored for posterity.

Was that really an expectation? I'm in my early 30s and still remember having a shared party telephone line for several years of my youth and before machine switched networks, operators were also known to listen in on conversations and spread the latest gossip around town.

The focus on privacy seemed to not really happen until digital cell phones started entering the scene, which is _very_ late in the life of the phone networks.

</comment><comment><USER39> I suspect survivor bias. If you believe there is a billion people on Facebook (even if it's wrong by order or two of magnitude, doesn't matter), several millions of them must be gay. Some percentage of them would be closeted gay. Some of them would have friends that visited or liked "coming out" pages. So if Facebook just displayed random page which your friends liked - <USER3> knowing anything else about you - it would inevitably happen that somebody who is gay and thinks about coming out would see such ad sooner or later and would be creeped out about how much Facebook knows about him.

</comment><comment><USER40> The "Like" button is tracking users all over the web. Isn't it possible that their algorithms are correlating patterns in his web history for ad placement on FB too?

<comment><USER41> That's what the article is saying, yes.

<comment><USER40> It seemed like there was more emphasis on his comment on a Rob Portman gay marriage story.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm totally pro-facebook: It's a nice, free platform where people can share pictures and chat (the chat is awesome since everybody has facebook).

But someday people are gonna realize how much information they have given facebook about themselves. It's like people go out of their ways to have such a complete profile as possible...

</comment><comment><USER43> That sounded amazing but it's just a bad title. "Facebook knows you're gay before your parents" would be true.

</comment><comment><USER44> This is old news; researchers figured out how to do this years ago:

[https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mit-students- faceboo...](https://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/mit-students-facebook- gaydar-raises-privacy-issues/8139)

[Edit: looks like the article mentions this]

</comment><comment><USER45> I have the perfect solution ... Randomly click on articles you have no interest in. I'm sure (other than my nerdism) that my profile is so eclectic that they're totally confused. And if that doesn't work, I don't have a Facebook account.

<comment><USER46> On the contrary , they know you are the sort of person who randomly clicks on ads to confuse learning systems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> Not surprising at all. Ads are targeted based on user behavior on the entire web, not just Facebook. Cookies and such follow you every where and are collected by various sites.

</comment><comment><USER48> FB big data will soon be able to predict your next bowel movement and recommend reading material based on your Likes.

</comment><comment><USER49> Nope, facebook wasn't around yet.</comment>


Show HN: SQL Trainer – Learn SQL by doing live data exercises - <AUTHOR> https://app.bytescout.com/sql-trainer/index.html <comment><USER2> Some other similar tools I added to my notes from a similar thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17905666](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17905666)

Interactive PostgreSQL SQL Tutorial - [https://chartio.com/learn/sql/](https://chartio.com/learn/sql/)

Select STAR SQL - [https://selectstarsql.com/](https://selectstarsql.com/)

SQL Bolt - [https://sqlbolt.com/](https://sqlbolt.com/) \- Learn SQL with simple, interactive exercises

SQL Window functions - [https://www.windowfunctions.com/](https://www.windowfunctions.com/)

PostgreSQL Exercises - [https://pgexercises.com/](https://pgexercises.com/)

SQL Zoo - [http://sqlzoo.net/](http://sqlzoo.net/)

SQL Teaching - [https://www.sqlteaching.com/](https://www.sqlteaching.com/)

<comment><USER3> Schemaverse - [https://schemaverse.com/](https://schemaverse.com/) \- The Schemaverse is a space-based strategy game implemented entirely within a PostgreSQL database.

<comment><USER4> I saw that before. It's pretty crazy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi, My name is Eugene and we made this little online SQL language trainer to help non-programmers to learn basic SQL queries. And more important, it shows the result of query entered.

Any suggestions and comments are welcome!

and many thanks for all the suggestion already made! And seems like we should better remove MySQL specific command from the very first question.

<comment><USER5> Hey Eugene! In the last question, it seems you can get the same result by doing top 3, or limit 3, but only limit 3 is accepted as valid. You might either want to, if there's a valid reason for the distinction (execution order?), want to highlight as the difference between top and limit, or if there isn't, accept both.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the suggestion! yes, definitely will need to update the way it checks for correct answer as there can be multiple variations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It would be nice if I could hit continue from the keyboard so that I could do the whole tutorial without using the mouse.

<comment><USER7> [https://vimium.github.io/](https://vimium.github.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Something that all of these tools (?) are missing are tutorials around concurrency, allowing multiple sessions to be in progress, interfering with each others operation. TBH this is an under-taught area of databases in general.

I have vague ideas about building a browser-based tool that allowed the user to queue up operations to be performed in order in multiple concurrent database sessions, allowing exact locking & blocking behaviour to be experimented with, but have never had time to work on this.

</comment><comment><USER9> This is another one I found a couple of weeks ago: [https://selectstarsql.com/](https://selectstarsql.com/)

</comment><comment><USER10> This is nice, but it's unfortunate that it starts off with commands specific to MySQL.

<comment><USER11> Is there an alternative (like a command to list all tables and which works on all DBMS)?

I mean using a specific sqlite/oracle/tsql/... command wouldn't be any better.

<comment><USER10> No, there isn't. But I don't see the need to start with these commands anyway. Or if the OP really feels like that's a necessary starting point, it would be great to have an option in the future to select what DBMS you're using. I wasn't intending to bash the work, but sticking to a single DBMS really limits the utility of what seems like it could be very general resource.

<comment><USER11> I like the idea of being able to select which dialect one wants to learn and maybe a table listing the most prominent differences (like LIMIT vs. TOP) at the end, would be nice too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Pretty nice! It would be cool if this also had some basic joins added as well.

<comment><AUTHOR> JOIN excercise added. [https://app.bytescout.com/sql- trainer/index.html](https://app.bytescout.com/sql-trainer/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Here is another: [https://sqlbolt.com](https://sqlbolt.com)

</comment><comment><USER14> This is great, lots of my classes are using textbooks similar to this. On (13) "Please type SQL query to get 3 largest orders from orders table", it doesn't really tell you what column to order the results by.

</comment><comment><USER15> I learned everything from: sqlteaching.com

It was created in a hackathon and uses sql.js, you can also create your own exercises through sql.js if you know a thing or two about web development ;)

<comment><USER16> SQL Teaching itself is also open source! [https://github.com/rhc2104/sqlteaching](https://github.com/rhc2104/sqlteaching)

(Creator of SQL Teaching)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Just to toot my own horn - I wrote a book called SQL Practice Problems (available on Amazon), plus I also have an expanded problem set on my website SQLPracticeProblem.com.

The framework for the problems is that you get the problem statement, the expected results, and then you figure out how to write the SQL to get the results. I have lots of hints if you get stuck, but there's also a hint-free version, which some people prefer.

It really helps for people who like a "learn-by-doing" approach.

</comment><comment><USER18> I like this, but as mentioned, it's a shame that it starts of with a MySQL specific command, SHOW tables

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback! Will change it

<comment><USER19> Maybe just an _INFO_ block stating when a command is specific to a subset of DB engines and/or limited in applicability

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks! added info that it is available in MySQL only. MySQL is pretty popular so this query can be good to know anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> This is great. I'm mostly a front end dev and my SQL is rather poor...

<comment><USER21> This is common in front end devs. The higher you go in the stack the less you worry about these operations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Nice! I like the tutorial format. I made this along similar lines: [http://konsumer.js.org/learnsql/](http://konsumer.js.org/learnsql/)

</comment><comment><USER23> Looks cool. But in my experience, theoretical understanding and some simple proofs are quite important in mastering SQL. I would suggest the intro to DB online course offered by Stanford.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the suggestion! I found the the theory can work great after some doing. Stanford course looks great for this purpose!

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I like this one very much: [http://sql-ex.ru/](http://sql-ex.ru/) Major part of questions is based on MS SQL Server though.

</comment><comment><USER25> > In some popular databases like MySQL and others you may get the list of > available tables just by typing: SHOW TABLES;

Is there _any_ database other than MySQL that does that?

</comment><comment><USER26> For Oracle, there is [https://livesql.oracle.com](https://livesql.oracle.com)

</comment><comment><USER27> Would be cool if you didn't have to use your mouse so much. Kept having to click the next box to select it.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> discussion on Product Hunt: [https://www.producthunt.com/posts/bytescout-sql- trainer](https://www.producthunt.com/posts/bytescout-sql-trainer)</comment>


Getting Git - <AUTHOR> http://www.slideshare.net/chacon/getting-git?src=embed <comment><USER2> Looks well done, but seems like there ought to be audio with this (am I missing something basic?)

<comment><USER3> There's a voice-over version and a video of him giving the talk at RailsConf 2008 here:

<http://gitcasts.com/git-talk>

(pdf version of the sides: <http://s3.amazonaws.com/chacon/git-talk.pdf>)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just to be clear, this slideshow was done at RailsConf 08, about a year and a half ago. Although all the internals stuff is still relevant, the 150 commands thing is no longer an issue. The only binary in your path since 1.6 is 'git', not 'git-branch', 'git-ls-tree', etc. So the slides where I'm talking about being confusing with all the commands is not relevant anymore.

</comment><comment><USER5> Do those slides seriously lump Mercurial and Darcs together as distributed delta-based version control systems?

<comment><USER4> I apologize for that - at the time I misunderstood Mercurial internals. It confused me that Hg does store all it's files this way - and importantly it stores its file revisions under the file name, so renames have to be tracked explicitly to find the history of the file properly, which isn't the case with Git. I was focused on that - content vs file tracking.

However, you are right, Mercurial is fundamentally a DAG based system and I didn't know that at the time and nobody I had talked to about this knew either. To be fair, just a few months ago a Googler made the inverse mistake about Git when talking about Hg at Google IO, so I'm not alone. :)

<comment><USER5> Quite all right. :) I think a lot of people locked into Git or Mercurial have a distorted view of how different the two systems are. Especially these days, the differences are ultimately minor, which is why projects like hg-git, which allows transparently working with a Git repositories from Mercurial, are possible in the first place. Yes, Mercurial's revlogs versus Git's blobs have performance implications for both systems, but that difference is not meaningfully user-visible 99% of the time--and the rest really just ends up being differences in terminology and commands, more than anything.</comment></comment></comment>


When not to use deep learning - <AUTHOR> http://hyperparameter.space/blog/when-not-to-use-deep-learning/ <comment><USER2> My naïve understanding of deep learning is that it works by finding patterns in the answers, instead of actually solving problems.

If I take a multiple-choice exam and always answer "C", then I have a good chance at getting more than 25%.

For image recognition, I think the classifier is doing the real work (trying to actually answer the question), and the deep learning is just seeing if the answer matches the pattern of expected answers.

Somehow, this actually works. I think that it's because true randomness is hard to find.

The problem that I've found is that it's really difficult to teach deep learning. I'm making a Chinese-English teaching tool ( [http://pingtype.github.io](http://pingtype.github.io) ) and sourcing my translations from Google Translate. I find a lot of mistakes in my dictionary that obviously came from Google's model getting the word spacing wrong. I can fix it in my own dictionary immediately. If I submit the correction to Google, it just changes some weightings, and hundreds of people will have to submit the same correction before their deep learning will finally catch on that it needs to change something.

<comment><USER3> Your naive understanding is supported by at least one deep learning authority:

> I haven't found a way to properly articulate this yet but somehow everything > we do in deep learning is memorization (interpolation, pattern recognition, > etc) instead of thinking (extrapolation, induction, etc). I haven't seen a > single compelling example of a neural network that I would say "thinks", in > a very abstract and hard-to-define feeling of what properties that would > have and what that would look like.

> All the while I'm thinking: this thinking process this person goes through > as he analyzes this data: THAT is what Machine Learning SHOULD do

\-- Andrej Karpathy

Deep learning for image recognition works because our visual world is made up of structured hierarchical features: Dark/Light, Texture, Edge, Part of Object, Object, Scene. Deep learning layers create increasingly higher-level features in a computationally feasible way.

<comment><USER4> So a better name for "deep learning" would be "shallow understanding"?

<comment><USER5> I personally prefer 'generic hashing/parsing'; deep learning excels at the automatic creation of a mapping of unstructured information to structured information, after a sufficient period of training.

<comment><USER6> Hmm... but isn't that what our brains do as well? Unstructured intensities of light bouncing off our retinas which becomes a structured recognized object.

<comment><USER5> It definitely seems to be part of what our brain does. The visual cortex is an apt comparison since that's where a lot of the structural inspiration for modern ANNs comes from. But, there does seem to be a little more than that too; it's not clear whether all the brain does is reducible to a hash function (reducible in any useful sense, at least; a very very very big, very very very sparse hash function, perhaps).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was expecting more discussion of alternatives.

For instance, in cases where deep neural networks aren't desirable or don't outperform classical approaches, I'm a big fan of boosted decision trees, due to their accuracy on many real-world datasets, their ease-of-use, and the existence of great open source implementations. xgboost (which routinely wins Kaggle competitions) and Spark MLLib both have high-performance distributed training algorithms for gradient boosted trees. And as far as hyperparameter searches go, there just aren't as many parameters to optimize. (And frameworks like Spark are already fantastic for embarrassingly parallel tasks like hyperparameter searches.)

<comment><USER8> _Spark MLLib both have high-performance distributed training algorithms for gradient boosted trees._

Well it exists, but I wouldn't describe it as high performance in either accuracy or speed.

I'm a big fan of Spark, but Spark ML needs some love from people who actually use it.

Until that happens, just use XGB (which now has Spark integration[1])

[1] [http://dmlc.ml/2016/03/14/xgboost4j-portable-distributed- xgb...](http://dmlc.ml/2016/03/14/xgboost4j-portable-distributed-xgboost-in- spark-flink-and-dataflow.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author discusses how linear models are generally more interpretable than deep learning methods, but I'd argue that's actually changing pretty quickly. Especially for large image/sequence inputs (which covers most of the applications that are getting hyped up), linear regressions don't perform very well, and often that performance difference prevents them from picking out important features. Given that fast, scalable methods for feature importance are on the rise (e.g. [https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02685](https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.02685), which the author mentions), you often get equally interpretable feature scores from deep models that are more accurate than analogous ones from linear models.

Basically, my point is that model interpretation strongly depends on how accurate your model is, and because deep learning models are so much better than linear models for some tasks, it makes sense to use them - even if your primary goal _is_ interpretability.

That said, I do believe that if you ever care at all about interpretation, you should almost never be using multilayer perceptrons (which have recently become part of the widening umbrella term "deep learning"), because they rarely work better than decision tree models or basic linear models (and MLPs are generally less or equally as interpretable when compared to traditional methods).

<comment><USER3> Feature importance is not quite the same as interpretability.

Random Forests can give feature importance, but that does not account for interactions between features. So, in the end, you don't know how a model made a decision (it could be because there is a feature with high importance, but it could also be because there is an informative interaction between lower importance features).

If you want to compare deep learning with linear models, you should leave image data out of it. Compare them on structured data and bag of words.

MLP's and boosted decision trees, in my experience, definitely beat decision tree and linear models, on structured data. But they lack longterm robustness (complex forecasting models need constant retraining, which can hamper their adoption by business units) and don't pass regulation (it is not enough to say "has_asthma" is a high-importance feature).

In finance and health care, interpretability is enormously valued. It is a constant trade-off between accuracy and interpretability.

A long time ago, Caruana made hospital triage models, with neural networks being the clear winner in generalization performance. Instead, they opted for a simple logistic regression when productionizing. Why?

> [...] patients with pneumonia who have a history of asthma have lower risk > of dying from pneumonia than the general population. Needless to say, this > rule is counterintuitive. But it reflected a true pattern in the training > data: patients with a history of asthma who presented with pneumonia usually > were admitted not only to the hospital but directly to the ICU (Intensive > Care Unit). The good news is that the aggressive care received by asthmatic > pneumonia patients was so effective that it lowered their risk of dying from > pneumonia compared to the general population. The bad news is that because > the prognosis for these patients is better than average, models trained on > the data incorrectly learn that asthma lowers risk, when in fact asthmatics > have much higher risk (if not hospitalized).

[http://people.dbmi.columbia.edu/noemie/papers/15kdd.pdf](http://people.dbmi.columbia.edu/noemie/papers/15kdd.pdf)

Though there is nothing holding you back from using both simple linear, and complex non-linear models at the same time: Only when the models severely disagree do you pick the interpretable model. Or use the linear model to find data issues, like those mentioned above, that are tremendously obscured (if not impossible to identify) when only using deep learning in a train-test framework.

<comment><USER10> The anecdote about pneumonia and the ICU is pretty puzzling. Why wasn't submission to the ICU one of the classification "labels"?

<comment><USER11> Here is a talk about that paper: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqPcq0n59rQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UqPcq0n59rQ)

I see that it has also gotten mainstream news coverage as some kind of lesson about the dangers of machine learning. The real problem is they didn't have data that could answer the question they had, P(Death|No hospitalization), so instead they fit models to answer a different question, P(Death|Hospitalization).

Then they didn't like that the complex models answered the second question too well, so they used simpler ones that made it easier to manually filter out any results that didn't make sense as answers _to the first question_ (which isn't one they could answer to begin with).

No model they fit is safe. You could only use one limited to domains where P(Death|No hospitalization) ~ P(Death|Hospitalization), which isn't something they assessed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The point is that training deep nets carries a big cost, in both computational and debugging time. Such expense doesn't make sense for lots of day-to-day prediction problems and the ROI of tweaking a deep net to them, even when tweaking small networks, might be too low. "

As a Masters student now training deep models for a little while now, I think this point is underemphasized. Doing something novel (so, not just image classification) requires a TON of engineering, not to mention the research considerations. And there are so many tiny decisions and hyperparameters, that even when I thought I had considerable domain knowledge I found it very lacking. I guess it should not be surprising given that 'Deep Learning' refers to a very broad set of models only related by having a learned hierarchical representation. There are a few problems where you can use existing deep learning almost off the shelf (most notably image classification, segmentation), but for most applications I think we're not there yet. As long as this remains true (which I suspect will be for a long time), SVMs and decision trees and linear models are still definitely worth knowing and understanding.

</comment><comment><USER13> If NN was able to do small data then are they better than their counter parts?

I mean if you can do it for small data and it was good then we would be seeing it dominate kaggle in all problem domains. Maybe the small data problems belong to other algorithm (such as tree base and forest, SVM).

disclaimer - I'm bias for tree base algorithm in medium and small data since it is my thesis.

<comment><USER12> I think no - SVMs are explicitly optimized to generalize the best from small data ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinge_loss](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinge_loss) \- 'The hinge loss is used for "maximum-margin" classification'), whereas NNs have more hacky regularization methods. I am not sure if the same is true for tree-based methods, but of course those are lovely due to how interpretable they are when you have few features.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Pretty much agree, and _particularly_ on the budget/time aspect.</comment>


"You just need to get started" is bad advice - <AUTHOR> http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/getting-started-is-bad-advice

<comment><USER2> I highly dislike comparing academia to the real world... how things are done in the two are incredibly different and often _do not apply_ to the other at all... the author is comparing two extreme cases, a typical maneuver for an academic, when in the real world, the REAL situation would very much be a mix of what he's speaking out against, and what he is suggesting you should do. (lean startup anyone?)</comment>


Rocket Men: The Team Building North Korea's Nuclear Missile - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/15/world/asia/north-korea-scientists-weapons.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage&mtrref=mobile.nytimes.com&gwh=8BB6D491DBDDBF3F62519AC2AD4A3F04&gwt=pay <comment><USER2> I guess when you stop sending all of your engineers and scientists to the gulag, they actually have a chance to improve their designs (or integrate stolen ones).</comment>


The Jargon File - a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang - <AUTHOR> http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html

<comment><USER2> This month it's 10 years since the last update.</comment>


Why We Must Save Marriage - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@keiyakukekkon/why-we-must-save-marriage-10f024f1afb3 <comment><USER2> > We simply believe that the standard should be preserved

So, that's the only argument for marriage in the whole article? No thanks, my partner and I have no intention of 'getting married' even though we still have the same, if not greater, amount of commitment to each other.</comment>


Smartphones and the location data marketplace - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/20/opinion/location-tracking-smartphone-marketing.html <comment><USER2> Yeah, apps are bad, but what concerns me (well, scares me to my bones, actually) is the prospect of malware below the app level. The operating system, drivers, and hardware are all ripe for abuse at an unimaginable scale. The "baseband" blob in particular seems like a holy grail of invasive surveillance. And, theoretically, there's a huge opportunity for the manufacturer of the PCB _and every chip on it_ , to add what is logically a blob - a region of the chip that is mostly dormant, but reacts to some signal and come's alive. And _we cannot verify that these features don 't exist_ because they are too small!

I mean, if I was China I'd be actively pursuing inserting this kind of trojan horse in _everything_. Yeah, you'd only get to use it once at scale, but that's all it would take. And you'd probably get away with targeted use for a long time before anyone discovered it.

 _This_ , that is, national security, is the best reason to pass "right to repair" laws, and build out replacement hardware and software options that are _verifiably open_. Heck, if I was with NSA I'd be pushing hard to fund that kind of work with NSA money.

<comment><USER3> > Heck, if I was with NSA I'd be pushing hard to fund that kind of work with > NSA money.

But what if the NSA had their own backdoors installed in hardware made by US firms?

<comment><USER2> AFAIK very few PCB- or chip-level electronics are made in the USA. And this kind of insertion would best be done at the last possible moment, at the factory. So if you don't have the physical factories, you don't get this opportunity. No doubt the NSA (or any national intelligence agency) would want this, but you can't have it unless you have the physical fabs.

So, being practical engineers, if I was the NSA I'd make deals with telecom's to 'assist' with writing the baseband. But the irony is that the device manufacturer could easily disable this backdoor in favor of their own. Oops! :)

<comment><USER3> > But the irony is that the device manufacturer could easily disable this > backdoor in favor of their own.

I'm not sure it works that way. Perhaps the NSA could force certain US companies to specifically design and install backdoors, and require these backdoors to be always active. (One of my possibly ungrounded/paranoid fears is that they do this with Intel ME).

<comment><USER4> The balance of likelihood is they do on both Intel and AMD management engines as that's what any competent agency should do in this age. To my mind, there's no other real reason for the explosion of interest in ARM chips on server. ARM design is sufficiently well understood and simple that usable chips can be designed and fabbed away from the control of US companies even if it provides poor performance trade offs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> We need to legally ban online targeted advertising, as it causes far more problems than it solves.

I'm sure the internet will do fine with a less intrusive monetization scheme.

<comment><USER5> What harm?

<comment><USER6> Of the top of my head:

* Journalism no longer prioritizing truth, but eyeballs/clicks. * Immense user frustration * Waste of bandwidth (energy costs, etc)

I bet there are many more.

<comment><USER5> Even without targeted advertising journalism would still use advertising, they'd just make way less money.

<comment><USER7> I agree with your first part, but the second part isn't true if it were prohibited to do targeted advertising for _everyone_.

It's an arms race, you only earn less without targeting when your competitors are targeting. When all advertising is equally poorly targeted, everyone's getting their fair share of the available advertising dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The book Dragnet Nation, from ~5 yrs ag, did a great job (then) on this subject. That along with Chaos Monkeys help escalate my fear and paranoia. Anyone I engage on the subject? They're oblivious.

[https://www.amazon.com/Dragnet-Nation-Security-Relentless- Su...](https://www.amazon.com/Dragnet-Nation-Security-Relentless- Surveillance/dp/B01LTHXKEU)

</comment><comment><USER9> This is a good explanation suitable for the layperson. Though there are a few confusing bits, like:

> _And every app is potentially leaking data to five or 10 other apps._

it's overall absolutely very good, relatively excellent.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't understand why this reporting doesn't include the phone companies? They have far more data.

<comment><USER10> Much of the public's understanding of cell phone tracking has centered around the cell provider, the telephone network, and big players like Facebook and Google. They're missing a big piece. The NYT is shedding light on this missing piece.

This article puts the spotlight on yet another group of companies and another tracking mechanism. These companies are small, virtually unknown to the public, and they're providing SDKs which others are building real and useful mobile apps upon. One example given was an otherwise legitimate weather app which pulls your location to provide local weather data. You grant the app access to your location information because it has a reason to have it, and it does something useful with the data.

The article introduces the public to what you probably already knew. Those SDKs can (and do) ingest that same location data for their own purposes. In the article, they find that the SDK provides your fine location data to a location services company (Cuebiq) for a total of twenty times over the course of an eight minute walk. Most users have no idea this is going on behind the scenes. They just see the weather app.

The article isn't attempting to dismiss other forms of tracking. It is trying to better introduce a new form of tracking that most people poorly understand, if at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Related recent thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21833718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21833718)

Since the article title is baity, we changed it in accordance with the HN guidelines ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)). If anyone suggests a better title, we can change it again.

<comment><USER12> I think the article's original title should stand. While some people might consider it "baity", I would describe "Smartphones Are Spies" as an accurate description of reality and the content of the article.

The article is making an a public accusation: a lot of spying is happening, and they are naming some of the (in their opinion) responsible parties. Changing that to a title that only indicates the general subject of the discussion ("location data marketplace") obscures the article's thesis: "Your smartphone is probably sending your precise location to companies right now." (which is just a more detailed way of saying "smartphones are spies")

[regardless, it's your house, use whatever titles you want]

<comment><USER11> As I said, I'm happy to change it to something better if anyone suggests it, but "Smartphones are spies" is obviously sensational and this thread is already filling up with low-quality comments.

The definition of a better title on HN, btw, is: more accurate and neutral, and preferably using representative language from the article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> we need to create an app development regime that does not "trojanize" apps or pirate any derivative data.

In my eyes the mobile industry as a whole has voluntarily succumbed to a supply chain attack

</comment><comment><USER14> Good job. That 'location pings' animation looks chilling. Very appropriate.

</comment><comment><USER15> The irony as this page blocks many attempts to send my information to known data rapers.

You're part of the problem nytimes, how about you start setting the gold standard and show the world you're better than others?

Oh wait, that data is too valuable to your business isn't it?

Can't wait to hear their so called "solutions".

<comment><USER16> At least in this case they mention that explicitly at the end of the article:

"Like other media companies, The Times collects data on its visitors when they read stories like this one. For more detail please see our privacy policy and our publisher's description of The Times's practices and continued steps to increase transparency and protections."

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> If you're reading this and work in a role that helps companies turn profit from these practices, fuck you.

<comment><USER11> Please don't post unsubstantive comments here. We want curious conversation, not denunciatory rhetoric, and the latter destroys the former.

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

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Wow, the flagging is strong with this article.

Prediction: the whole article will be flagged soon. Too much heat on VCs.

<comment><USER11> This article isn't being flagged. This and related topics are perennially popular on HN. Some comments have been flagged, correctly, because they break the site guidelines.

Would you please stop it with the trollish comments now? You've already posted five to this thread. That's over the top.</comment></comment>


Take my idea: The Stephen Fry channel - <AUTHOR>

A TV channel dedicated only to showing TV programs, dramas, comedies, documentaries, childrens programs, crime drama, period drama, quiz shows and lifestyle programs starring Stephen Fry.
24 X 7 Stephen Fry. No re-runs ever.
All Fry, all the time. If you run a TV station feel free to take this inspiration.
You'll make big money.
The only problem is what to do with all the leftover Stephen Fry TV content that there isn't time to show...... <comment><USER2> While he has done a great number of videos you could probably make commercial use of (the GNU one should be primetime), you couldn't include Jeeves and Wooster, Blackadder and Fry & Laurie.

</comment><comment><USER3> That's basically the (Australian) ABC.</comment>


Open source 3D printed robocar mods - <AUTHOR> https://markku.ai/post/chilicorn-rail/ <comment><USER2> They've also published:

[https://github.com/markku-ai/donkey-vis](https://github.com/markku-ai/donkey- vis)

An amazing way to visualize what you're autonomous donkey car "sees" when implementing a training.

[http://www.donkeycar.com/](http://www.donkeycar.com/)</comment>


Lucky to Be a Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://duartes.org/gustavo/blog/post/lucky-to-be-a-programmer/ <comment><USER2> I agree with much of the article, unfortunately, I don't think it applies to everybody. Not long ago I was discussing a creative architecture I had devised to make an api simpler, and the friend I was discussing with, who is also a long-time programmer, recognized how elated I was with my solution. He said he'd never felt that way about programming. He liked making things, and to that end, programming was a tool rather than a process.

I'm trying to think of a way to describe the difference. Is programming your craft? or your task?</comment>


Le Slide by Slidenjoy: We Did It - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVzE4EzfGoc <comment><AUTHOR> This is Le Slide. Light, foldable, portable, directional, ultra-thin and customizable: Le Slide is all of these at once!

Anytime, in any circumstances. Available in 16 finishing materials and 3 sizes. Le Slide works on a single USB port. Plug it and that's it.

Starting from ( 349€ )*

www.yourslide.com

</comment><comment><USER2> I like the idea, but I'm not sure the hinges on laptops are designed to take that much extra weight...</comment>


Ask HN: Coda, Textmate, or Espresso for development? - <AUTHOR>

I'm currently using TextMate, but I've heard good things about the other two. Particularly for being all-in-one development tools.
What are you using? Can you please tell me the pros/cons of each?
All comparison websites I've found are a bit outdated, so I'm assuming a lot of newer/wanted features have been released in each since. <comment><USER2> I have both textmate and espresso and tried coda for a while. I am staying with textmate and I am doing it not because textmate is better than the other two but because it does the job the way I expect it to. Even though I bought espresso, I never used it, it came with a bundle and I was very excited about it but in the end, my workflow is already working and instead of switching to a new app, I decided to learn emacs and slowly switch to it because it enables me to code on my mac and on my linux box with the same tools.

TextMate Pros: * if you need a text editor, you will love it * the bundles are great * works as expected * customizable

TextMate cons: * you need extra tools such as ssh, ftp and the like * it has no nice GUI for visually doing stuff such as css (the cons are rational cons but they don't affect my job)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the reply. I feel the same way with TextMate just working how you'd expect.

Maybe I'll pick up Coda one day, but it looks like I'll stay with TM for now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I really see Coda/Espresso and Textmate filling two different roles rather than competing head-to-head.

For Rails development and other scripting, I use Textmate. I appreciate the extensive syntax highlighting, extendability through bundles, and the wide selection of themes. The lack of FTP built into Textmate isn't really an issue as I use Capistrano for deployment via command line.

For editing my marketing websites, basic PHP scripting, or anytime I need to edit and FTP files, I use Coda. It's a great all-around solution and almost worth buying a Mac just for it (and Textmate).

I tried Espresso after having used Coda for a while and just couldn't make the switch despite being a big fan of their CSSEdit. I primarily blame that on me getting so used to working with Coda.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I'll pick up Coda eventually, but for now, I really like how TextMate works.

Capistrano is new to me, albeit interesting. Thanks for the recommendation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've used coda for awhile now i actually prefer the simplicity of textmate. Coda can lag when you get to a few hundred lines and mo code collapsing was always a pain for me.

</comment><comment><USER5> Of course, it depends on what you're developing for/in. I used to really like skEdit, but it suffered from lack of development.</comment>


Ask HN: Do former startup domain names have any value? - <AUTHOR> What happens to the domain names of former startups that went down? are there any buyers for them? any cases of startups out there that got their domains from a former startup? or the owners of the domain of the dead startup just let it expire? <comment><USER2> I guess the "taint" of a failed startup would make domain names unappealing.

However if it is a name that the general public might try, e.g. pets.com, then it could be valuable, in this case pets.com now redirects to petsmart.com.

<comment><AUTHOR> How much you think petsmart paid for that domain?

<comment><USER2> No idea. But you could look at any one of the several domain name marketplaces and see what sorts of money is being asked for domains. Of course, the selling and asking prices can be very far apart.</comment></comment></comment>


GNU SIP Witch 1.0 released for peer-to-peer next gen VoIP - <AUTHOR> http://planet.gnu.org/gnutelephony/?p=18 <comment><USER2> Does anyone know why is it "next gen"? And how does "peer-to-peer" mean in this case?

The only description of sip witch with some actual content (that I could find) is here: <http://www.slideshare.net/gnutelephony/harvard2010> However it's missing some really important points and looks like technical issues are just skipped:

\- How do users locate each other? (looks like user@domain is "known" somehow) GNU telephony blog mentions "peer-to-peer mesh calling networks" but I can't find any actual working prototype.

\- Why wouldn't I just use Freeswitch which can support both nat traversal and ZRTP?

\- How do they imagine the initial connection with both sides behind the firewall if no ports are mapped? (skype can do that due to known network of hosts)

If they don't have some great solutions here, I'm not sure why are they writing this from scratch instead of adding those "peer-to-peer mesh calling networks" capabilities as a standardised protocol to PBXes which are used nowadays (asterisk, freeswitch, yate).

<comment><USER3> If it's user@domain, it's probably just using SIP URI routing. (You define records in your domain to lookup the responsible SIP server, similar to how email works, but more complicated just for the fun of it.)

FreeSWITCH is a great starting point, but NAT traversal isn't reliable for point to point, for the general case. You have to consider symmetric NAT without UPnP and firewalls that allow outbound+response, but no incoming. In these cases, you are going to need a proxy with a public IP that can relay audio. That's the only reliable thing that's going to work in all cases. (Just look at the IETF's documents on NAT traversal where they come up with all these complex ways to try to exploit limitations in certain NAT devices...)

Actual NAT traversal in SIP/RTP is very straightforward. You just ignore the silly parts in spec that specify IPs, and just reply to the IP:port combo you received from. For RTP, same deal. You know where you'll receive RTP, so as soon as you get a packet there, you just reply to the IP:port it came from.

Skype's "breakthrough" that let them win so much early on was that they used P2P to do public IP relays, since connectivity between any two points is not guaranteed. (Had MS been smart enough to proxy audio/video in their clients early on, they might have dominated this market to begin with...)

So, to overcome this with free software, they'd need a public IP relay system that protects things end-to-end. If they do that, it could be worth watching. But from that linked presentation, they expect Sipwitch to update the firewall rules in such access. Good luck with that.

<comment><USER2> I can't find the bits about updating firewall rules, but anyways... They keep concentrating on the media path, while getting the signalling to the right place is just as hard. They need some public relay and that's one part I still haven't seen seriously mentioned yet. I disagree with "Actual NAT traversal in SIP/RTP is very straightforward." - since there are many issues:

\- They can't use end-to-end encryption since public relay has to add information about the public address the message came from (unless it wants to transfer the media itself).

\- They can't allow random changes to addresses by intermediate nodes, since that would allow trivial attack on the mesh infrastructure.

How will they stop a situation where someone creates lots of nodes, proxies SIP, but randomises the media addresses? Media address can't be encoded at the source, since it has to come from the relay. It wouldn't be hard for a competing company to spawn thousands of nodes on EC2 and overload the network with broken "relay" nodes.

<comment><USER3> Sorry I should have made it clear. SIP/RTP don't work with NATs at all (public IP and a NAT'd client) if you follow the spec. By NAT traversal with SIP, I'm referring to this case, not NAT'd client to NAT'd client.

You're right that using relays requires some thought in order to keep it secure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> The blog post tells us a release has occurred, who wrote it, who the FSF is, what the relationship between Witch and Free Call is. However I can't for the life of me figure out what GNU SIP Witch is.

<comment><USER5> Here: <http://www.gnutelephony.org/index.php/GNU_SIP_Witch> I found this by following two links from the article. But it was random luck, I agree with you that the article lack of some important informations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Asterisk not open enough for GNU?

<comment><USER2> They might take issue with a couple of things like <https://issues.asterisk.org/view_license_agreement.php> , "commercial edition" based on the open one, deals between asterisk and skype which makes closed-source skype channels available for asterisk (who knows how would it affect skype-competitor plugins) and many others. While nothing critical, I think GNU people might not entirely like it.

<comment><USER6> The fsf/GNU isn't anti-commercial, just anti-proprietary. Free speech vs. Free beer. I doubt Asterisk dealings with Skype for special access for it's customers that pay a preium service fee really bothers them, except maybe helping Skype propagate it's proprietary tech indirectly.

What asterisk does is no different than MySQL and QT.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's kind of funny, but not really how they botch the description "Apple OS/X"; all they has to say was Mac OS X.</comment>


Ask HN: Ideas for a Tropical Hacker Island? - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for ideas / brainstorm around creative uses for an actual 100 acre tropical island.
Volcanic rock, 3 beaches, jungle. 100" of rain a year; no history of hurricanes; very remote; undeveloped.
Ideas include retreat space and annual festival. Hacker space; treehouse village; medicine work; yoga; adventure retreats; rock climbing; water sports; etc.
I'd like to use the space to create a space for adventure, healing, insight and invention.
I've considered doing something where folks can control a virtual share of the Island and vote on design and uses and get access.
Hoping to get discussion on ideas and insight that would excite you. (More brainstorm vs. feasibility critique).
If you'd prefer to email me: firstname.lastname@example.com
I'm committed to contributing the space and seeing what we can build on it. <comment><USER2> Swap notes with Garrett Lisi and the Pacific Science Institute ([http://www.pacificscienceinstitute.org](http://www.pacificscienceinstitute.org)) ?

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great, I'll invite him to the Island.

<comment><USER3> Please do. And let me know if it has decent surf. :) firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><AUTHOR> It does seem to have decent surf, though I'm not a surfer.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Faster JavaScript parsing - <AUTHOR> http://blog.mozilla.com/nnethercote/2011/07/01/faster-javascript-parsing/ <comment><USER2> Reminds me of something I once read that said "You can't make code run faster, you can only make it do fewer things"

<comment><USER3> [http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2010-Augu...](http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd- current/2010-August/019310.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You know that you've done a good job of optimizing your stack when parsing JS is a bottleneck. Kudos on getting to this point and pushing past it.

<comment><USER5> In the article he says you will see about a tenth of a second improvement on a 1 MB codebase. That's fantastic, but I wouldn't call it a bottleneck.

<comment><USER6> If each page you load takes 0.3 seconds and your workload involves loading a hundred pages, that's a tangible improvement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why do they parse 16 bit UCS2? Although Javascript strings are internally UCS2, the files as transferred on the web are all UTF8 which should be easier to parse fast, and involve less conversion, unless there is something really broken in the spec.

<comment><USER8> > the files as transferred on the web are all UTF8

Except they're not. There's a ton of ISO-8859-1 out there, as well as Big5, Shift_JIS, and so forth.

So Gecko canonicalizes all input to a single encoding; that happens to be UTF-16 for various historical reasons.

Note, by the way, that since some non-ASCII characters are syntax-special in JavaScript parsing it in UTF-8 may not in fact be simpler to do fast, because locating particular non-ASCII chars in a UTF8 stream is a bit of a PITA.

<comment><USER7> Has anyone got any more up to date figures than these <http://www.w3.org/QA/2008/05/utf8-web-growth.html> from 1998, when UTF-8 + ASCII was already 50% of the web? I think there is a lot less ISO 8859-1 than there was back then.

I also think that for Javascript files, almost all will be ASCII, with some UTF-8, and little else. JSON is of course only allowed to be Unicode, and I suspect that almost all of it is UTF8, although that will not generally hit the Javascript parser I presume (although maybe Gecko also normalises it?).

Locating non ASCII chars obviously is an issue, but no worse than the line feed issue mentioned in the article. Doubling the size of the input is generally a big performance hit that will be much more significant.

<comment><USER8> > Doubling the size of the input is generally a big > performance hit that > will be much more significant.

Apart from cache locality issues, it's not, really. And for a linear scan like this prefetching does OK.

And yes, Gecko normalizes JSON input to the JS engine.

I don't have numbers, sorry. But yes, UTF-8 would be the other thing to try normalizing to; it has its own benefits and drawbacks when the system is considered as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Interesting to see that the parsing does not work on a stream anymore, but on a whole 'file'.

This gives up the real world optimisation of starting work on a partially downloaded file on slow network connections.

Even fast internet connections take a while to download 1MB of javascript. Not to mention the majority of internet users on slower connections.

I think this work could be improved to go back to the old behaviour.

<comment><USER10> According to the stats gathered by HTTP Archive, the average response size (i.e. after compression) of a JavaScript file is 15kB: <http://httparchive.org/interesting.php#responsesizes>

This will make JavaScript parsing faster for the vast majority of sites, and for the majority of users.

If you have a single JavaScript file that is 1MB _after_ gzipping, you really should think about modularising your code and lazy-loading the bits that aren't immediately required. See <http://ajaxpatterns.org/On- Demand_Javascript>

<comment><USER11> Also, don't forget that in most cases the JS code is probably loaded from the browser's cache anyway.</comment></comment></comment>


The Average Person Is Worth $1.7M in This Small Country - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/brianroberts/2018/04/10/highest-net-worth-country/#302e9d834805 <comment><USER2> Linkbait ([https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html))

It's Monaco.</comment>


Rocket Internet's Africa Internet Gp Raises $326M from Goldman Sachs and Others - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/03/rocket-internets-africa-internet-group-raises-326m-from-goldman-sachs-and-others/ <comment><USER2> From what I've seen of Rocket Internet, they're mostly copy/pasting businesses, without much innovation. When I hear about startups in Africa, there's a lot of innovative things being done, simply because the needs in Africa are wholly different. So with is AIG, separate from Rocket Internet, in terms of leadership and management style? Do AIG companies actually do innovative things, or just a lot of copy paste, like the rest of Rocket Internet?</comment>


The Difference between $1 Billion-Plus in Exits and "Success" - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/12/20/the-difference-between-1-billion-plus-in-exits-and-"success"/

<comment><USER2> "He compares those assembly-line-esque entrepreneurs who say they are just "the startup guy" to a 40-year-old man who still hangs out at a disco trying to pick up young girls."

The money quote. Really. I really have no respect for the 20-something "entrepreneur" flipping companies left and right (most of which don't have long term value). Replace "startup" with "business" and "founder" with "owner" and a lot of these companies look quite shaky.

Nice to see there are some people who still but weight in real, long term value.

<comment><USER3> I think this is an incredibly unfair assessment, to the point of being downright silly.

Taking $20 million for a company that's been around for a few years or in this man's case $750 million (!) is not immature or unwise by any stretch of the imagination. Saying no to $750 million, in many instances, leaves the realm of "risky entrepreneur" and enters that of compulsive gambler. He made $750 million before the crash: genius, not stupid.

Perhaps the reason Bezos and Jobs, etc. stuck around to make their companies successful is because there wasn't a Google around back then with infinite amounts of money ready to throw at them. In fact, the story of many of these "early" Silicon Valley companies is about big companies _missing_ the opportunity to buy them or crush them (IBM with Microsoft, Yahoo almost owning a stake in Google, etc). Let's also not forget that in the first bubble the path to riches was IPO, _not_ sellout, thus it makes sense that people would stick with their companies longer, because _that_ was the way to get rich.

To me this is all just a function of the market. Today IPO's are much more rare, and the market pushes towards buyouts.

<comment><USER4> I don't think his issue is with the amount of money these founders make, but the pyramid scheme nature of many startups. For a company to be actually worth 750 million it's got to be producing ~75 million or more each year in profit at some time in the near future, or have a lot of assets.

Facebook may be slightly profitable, but if they are not pulling in around 100 million in profit each year within ten years they are worth less than one billion today.</comment></comment></comment>


Digital Resistance: the Telegram monument built by schoolchildren in Russia - <AUTHOR> https://nevnov.ru/554515-shkolniki-iz-lenoblasti-naduli-deputata-i-na-ego-dengi-ustanovili-pamyatnik-telegramu <comment><AUTHOR> Monument built on 27th April 2018 in Staropolye[0] village in Saint-Petersburg region, Russia.

This[1] is original news and there are few other news[2,3] that use original news as reference. There is video[4] posted by Meduza.io[5].

There is news in English too[6].

[0] [https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE...](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BF%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B5_%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B5_%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%B5)

[1] [https://nevnov.ru/554515-shkolniki-iz-lenoblasti-naduli- depu...](https://nevnov.ru/554515-shkolniki-iz-lenoblasti-naduli-deputata-i- na-ego-dengi-ustanovili-pamyatnik-telegramu)

[2] [http://www.the-village.ru/village/city/news- city/310725-pamy...](http://www.the-village.ru/village/city/news- city/310725-pamyatnik-telegram)

[3] [https://ria.ru/society/20180428/1519629909.html](https://ria.ru/society/20180428/1519629909.html)

[4] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c6C9-2qnvY](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8c6C9-2qnvY)

[5] [https://meduza.io/video/2018/04/27/v-leningradskoy- oblasti-p...](https://meduza.io/video/2018/04/27/v-leningradskoy-oblasti- poyavilsya-pamyatnik-telegramu-ego-nevolno-profinansiroval-deputat)

[6] [https://www.sott.net/article/384053-Digital-Resistance- Schoo...](https://www.sott.net/article/384053-Digital-Resistance- Schoolchildren-trick-Russian-officials-into-erecting-monument-to-banned- internet-messenger-Telegram)</comment>


How CSS3 hyphenation works in different browsers. - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/hyphenator/wiki/en_CSS3Hyphenation <comment><USER2> Finally! But of course IE doesn't support it. And I'm surprised Chrome doesn't.</comment>


The Rationale Behind Soaring App Development Prices - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/04/app-development-prices/

<comment><USER2> I authored this report. Glad to take any questions.</comment>


Paying Zero for Public Services - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/paying-zero-public-services

<comment><USER2> Interesting. The summary is that this non profit prints and distributes these things that look like money that they call the "Zero Rupee Note" -- it's like bill with a zero on it. Poor people can give these to corrupt officials to protest the bribes they want.

A priori, I would have thought this was worse than pointless, because giving corrupt officials these notes is sort of biting sarcasm. Wouldn't it be better to just say no?

Well, according to the article, they work. The reason, agains according to the article, is that officials can potentially get in a lot of trouble for taking bribes, so they are likely to cave to someone who doesn't play ball. The difference between refusal to pay and paying with the fake bill is that the people actually /use/ the fake bill since the perception is that they have the backing of this large non profit, versus them fighting back alone.

If the article is accurate, the whole concept is quite interesting.

<comment><USER3> I am reminded of the tradition in Chicago that when you bribe an alderman or judge to do you a favor, you put the dirty money in an envelope and put the envelope on the table. It seems that even among public servants who are as crooked as a dog's hind leg, there is some residual _shame_ at taking bribes, which expresses itself as an unwillingness to touch the bribe with bare hands.

(But maybe I'm reading too much into that tradition: last year, a Boston city councillor was videotaped by the FBI stuffing cash into her bra.)

<comment><USER4> I don't think it's shame; just practicality.

If I'm about to hand someone a large sum of cash, it's generally not practical to carry that in my wallet. Plus, that money likely came from, or is going to, someone who _also_ doesn't want that money mingling with "their" money. (likely someone who will be dealing with several such envelopes)

And, in general, you don't want to have more money than you owe in front of you, while you count out a criminal's portion. If you do, you'll quickly find that prices go up.

There's also plausible deniability. Stacks of cash attract more attention and aren't as easy to explain away as envelopes. And envelopes of cash have the hallmark of the legitimate proceeds of a cash-only business 'on its way to the bank'. If the money is mingled with your own, that's a harder argument to make.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I can appreciate this as a "hack" to get stuff done in India, it seems a bit unnecessary. As others note, the reason why this works is that it's an implicit threat.

The better alternative is to address the underlying reasons for a lot of the corruption - and that's excessive regulation and costs to register and conform with the law. There's been a lot of work in this area with respect to legal versus off the books capital (e.g. Mystery of Capital by Hernando De Soto). You can quite easily see the plight of the entrepreneur/individual by looking at the World Bank's Doing Business reports - here's India's - <http://doingbusiness.org/ExploreEconomies/?economyid=89>

e,g.: it takes 13 procedures and 30 days to formally start a business in India versus 6 procedures and 6 days in the US.

This obviously isn't just India either. Most developing countries are like this. It's through regulations and compliance that government officials can seek graft. Streamlining has the effect of not only reducing corruption but making any form of transaction with the state far more efficient resulting in higher growth (there's a positive relationship between GDP growth and better rankings on the World Bank's doing business index).

<comment><USER6> I agree. But I think that implicit threat can also help to change the perceived public climate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The World Bank should have titled this something along the lines of "Corruption blah blah blah", instead of "Paying Zero for Public Services".

</comment><comment><USER8> That's a very interesting model. Iran is another country that would benefit from this.

Everyone from the traffic cop, health ministry inspectors, the 'bill' collector all the way up to the courts system can be bought for the right price.

It is so accepted and deeply rooted into the current system that as a foreigner you will not get anything done, because you simply don't speak the same lingo or understand the hints. Apparently when the traffic cop pulls you over for speeding and asks for a 'light'.. thats signal to give him money and have a good day. (I was a passenger in this car)

It's a shame because good people get sucked into it as well. no body wants to be left behind when the only way to progress is to pay 'dues'.

</comment><comment><USER9> Pic of the money: [http://blogs.worldbank.org/files/publicsphere/rupees_front.j...](http://blogs.worldbank.org/files/publicsphere/rupees_front.jpg)

</comment><comment> sid- Looks like india has invented the zero all over again. Hope it works. Much needed.</comment>