A look at some of Python's useful itertools - <AUTHOR> http://naiquevin.github.io/a-look-at-some-of-pythons-useful-itertools.html <comment><USER2> My intention is not to be snarky, but people post all the time about discovering the itertools or collections library. I notice it's a common gap in newer Python programmers.

Save yourself time and effort down the road and read through both libraries' documentation, they're well worth the effort:

<http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/itertools.html>

<http://docs.python.org/3.3/library/collections.html>

I tend to use defaultdict, deque (thread safe), namedtuple, imap, izip, drop/takewhile. In Python 3, map and zip have been replaced with their itertools equivalents.

I blame Haskell for all the lazy evaluation influence. :P

<comment><USER3> >My intention is not to be snarky, but people post all the time about discovering the itertools or collections library. I notice it's a common gap in newer Python programmers.

Not only in Python, but programming languages in general.

I still find people writing Java or .NET code that aren't aware of all nice classes that are part of the runtime and end up creating their half baked solutions for their problems.

Nowadays developers seem to code without reading.

<comment><USER4> _Nowadays developers seem to code without reading._

When your standard library documentation is so vast that it would take weeks to read and understand it all, and you'd never remember most of it anyway without context and experience using it, I don't think "coding without reading" is really a fair complaint.

We as an industry need to get better at documentation, and in particular about separating tutorial/overview documentation that presents a map and summary of what's available from reference documentation, or we're going to keep reinventing wheels like this.

Python is a particularly unfortunate example, because while its documentation is vast, it has very little tutorial/overview material beyond the very basics. For example, given that a substantial proportion of Python's standard library actually doesn't work very well in practice, it would be helpful to have a deeper tutorial/map document somewhere that introduced the various areas of the standard library and that also promoted the good ones and suggested popular alternatives for the not so good ones where they exist.

<comment><USER5> Documentation discoverability is one problem. Willingness to learn and trust is another one. People simply want to use things that they themselves have proven to work before.

As an example an old colleague wanted to dump some data from python to a csv- file and did this by for-looping through each row and each item and concatenating each cell and a semicolon to a string. Even after pointing out to him that python already has a built in csv writer, that handles all issues of escaping etc, he didn't want to use it because he didn't know what it did and didnt want to learn anything new. His version didn't even do escaping inside the for-loop and he didn't see the issue of not doing it. To him the for-loop gave exactly the same result and didn't require any learning and was thus better, and why change something that works... My last suggestion was to at least use ";".join(...) but it was also a bit too magic so he stuck to his well known for-loop.

Usually standard libraries are quite reliable but in some cases, and especially if adding third party libraries, bugs and performance issues inside the library can really give you hell. If the library is supposed to just perform a simple task maybe you would rather implement it yourself as you then also have influence to fix those issues yourself later. Experiences like this can scare you away from even the most reliable libraries in the future.

<comment><USER4> _Usually standard libraries are quite reliable but in some cases, and especially if adding third party libraries, bugs and performance issues inside the library can really give you hell._

I think part of the problem is that the statement above is maybe not as true as it used to be.

Let's stick with Python as an example, though it's far from the only culprit so I hesitate to single it out here. I have a growing list of areas of the standard library that today I just assume won't work acceptably. I have tried to use them before, and I have found them to be either bug-ridden or not robustly portable or so slow as not to be worthwhile or missing enough basic functionality that you need to add something else anyway or just write everything from scratch. The everyday stuff in Python is pretty good, the basic data structures and common supporting functions like itertools, but when you start getting into the less common areas I have a very low opinion of the design and quality of the Python standard library, and that opinion is born of direct personal experience.

On top of the quality and robustness, there's also usability to consider. Even if some of Python's built-in libraries do work, there might be much neater, easier ways to achieve the same result that are only a `pip install` away. Libraries like Kenneth Reitz's Requests come immediately to mind; if I were teaching a newbie to program Python tomorrow, somehow I doubt urllib[N] would feature much.

I'm not sure how that hypothetical newbie is supposed to discover these things today without someone experienced to guide them, though. Whether it's Python and PyPI or Perl and CPAN or C++ and Boost or whatever other language and library repository you like, there's a lot of collective wisdom about the easiest/safest/fastest ways to get things done, but it lives in the combined experience of veterans rather than in comprehensive tutorials to follow once you've got the basics down. And that's only when there is already a recognisable place to look for general use third party libraries, not even considering all the third party libraries that might be out there but for whatever reason aren't incorporated into any _de facto_ standard repository to make discovery (relatively) easy if you at least know what you're looking for.

Is it any wonder that newbies reinvent wheels under these conditions? It seems almost inevitable to me.

<comment><USER6> I haven't come away with the same impression of the Python standard library. Besides urllib, what are the biggest offenders in your mind?

<comment><USER4> From a few recent projects:

The subprocess system is fairly awful in both usability and portability.

The shutil filesystem tools had bugs and documentation issues the only time I ever tried to use them.

The various compression libraries had horrible performance problems last time I tried them; shelling out to various command-line equivalents was around 4-5x faster.

The command-line parsing tools are OK if you want to write a *nix-style command line tool, but not quite flexible enough for more advanced/customised uses.

I have yet to discover any decent GUI library for Python, standard or otherwise, so I'm not sure whether this one counts.

Logging is flexible but can be awkward to configure, particularly across an application that wants various logging itself but also uses libraries that offer to log.

<comment><USER7> You can build a cli parser exactly like git uses (positional and short/long) using argparse. What is difficult about that? Opt parse perhaps, but if you're talking about argparse, it seems like you're just whining. The rest of your comments I (overall) agree with

<comment><USER4> _You can build a cli parser exactly like git uses (positional and short/long) using argparse._

But what if I want something that _isn't_ like Git? I'm slightly amused that anyone would suggest Git as some sort of example of a good CLI, but in any case, not all platforms share the command line conventions of *nix shells.

Suppose I'm running on Windows (where options conventionally start with '/') and I don't want all the magic that argparse does with initial '-' characters. If I set prefix_chars to '/', does that also disable the '--' pseudo-argument? We were originally talking about documentation, and as far as I'm aware, the documentation for argparse doesn't actually specify this either way.

Suppose I want to have a set of basic choices, each setting a flag to say it's there. What if I also want some shortcut choices that represent combinations of the basic ones and set all of the corresponding flags? As far as I'm aware, you can't quite do this with any of the standard actions, so you have to start writing an entire new class to define a custom action instead. At least you can do that, but what was wrong with accepting a simple function, and where does anything say how argparse.Action is actually defined and why it's necessary instead?

Suppose I want to present the same data as the automatic help option, but reformat it in some completely different way that makes more sense for my program before it gets printed? There are assorted functions to display or return formatted help strings, but nothing seems to just give back a neat bundle of the relevant information for further processing. Collecting the data and rendering it for output are conflated.

Argparse, like much of the Python standard library, has a lot of power as long as you want to do things exactly its way, but it's not designed in a way that is particularly easy to extend. IMHO, a better strategy for designing standard libraries for languages is to create templates/frameworks/whatever you want to call them, and then to provide some specific implementations for basic cases. This way, when inevitably someone needs to go beyond the out-of-the-box functionality, they can still fit in with established conventions instead of starting over from scratch, which is generally better both for compatibility and for minimising the amount of extra logic that much be built on top of the tried and tested standard library. Of course you do have to be careful not to go too far and make simple cases look artificially complicated, but no-one ever said designing good APIs was easy. :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8>
        def flatmap(f, items):
            return itertools.chain(*map(f, items))

1\. in Python 2 `map` is eager which — as with the previous `even` filter — may lead to unnecessary work if you only need part of the list (or a dead process if the input is infinite...). itertools.imap (or a generator comprehension) would be better. This is "fixed" in Python 3 (where the `map` builtin has become lazy and `itertools.imap` has been removed) but

2\. it's being eagerly unpacked through *, itertools.chain also provides a from_iterable method which doesn't have that issue (and can be used to flatten infinite streams), introduced in 2.6

So `flatmap` would probably be better as:

        def flatmap(f, items):
            return itertools.chain.from_iterable(
                itertools.imap(
                    f, items))

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the corrections. I have made an edit (although not sure how long it will take to clear the github-pages cache)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wrote my favorite function ever last semester with itertools! It (roughly) lazily generates a list of dictionaries that map players to their moves for all possible moves. It turns out you can do that with a chain of combinations, two cartesian products, and an imap: [https://github.com/shargoj/acquire/blob/master/gametree.py#L...](https://github.com/shargoj/acquire/blob/master/gametree.py#L72)

</comment><comment><USER10> On the other hand, I suspect some early programmers might get ahold of this and perform a lot of premature optimizations. A piece of code that runs 20 loops instead of 8 once every couple of hours probably doesn't need to be optimized. A piece of code that does two checks when one would suffice that runs 1000 times every second might need optimization. Profile first, then optimize.</comment>


Wolfram Alpha - a new kind of Fail - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/05/19/dziuba_wolfram/ <comment><USER2> Ironically, the article's rant on failure helped me to see a few new things I could do with W.A., which made me appreciate it more. :)

I think of Wolfram Alpha as "smarts in, smarts out"; if you want intelligent results from a smart engine, you need an intelligent query, or you see the digital equivalent of a blank stare. Requiring some thought when posing a query isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Wolfram Alpha also has a nice feedback form on the front page. Not that I'm holding my breath, but what the author of the article should do is put all his rants into that feedback form, wait a month, and then comment on any changes made. That type of followup article would be more interesting to me.</comment>


Bitcoin is nearing a 'death cross' on the charts. Here's what it means - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/28/bitcoin-is-nearing-a-death-cross-on-the-charts-heres-what-it-means.html <comment><AUTHOR> WARNING: loud video starts to play automatically on the page</comment>


Show HN: Send Whatsapp messages without creating a new contact - <AUTHOR> https://huchen.dev/whatsapp/ <comment><USER2> How does this work behind the scenes?</comment>


Soon college graduate looking at options and for advice. - <AUTHOR>

I'm graduating from a top-50 college not particularly well known for its CS department in CS and Business.
I have this business with a few friends. We act as middlemen to redirect college students to the cheapest ways to get their books. We're at a few locations, and this past year sold about $80k worth of product through Amazon (of which we're affiliates) and an average of 10k traffic at our heaviest site on season (textbooks are seasonal). You can check out the site (for all its coding mishaps and horrors) at www.tuftstext.com .
I've worked for a small start-up after freshman year, a large web company last year, and working at a top tier tech company this summer doing software development. For all intents and purposes, I might be able to have a career in software development post-graduation.
This business with a few friends is beginning to grow in idea and in scope. We're looking at expanding the suite of tools we have available, bringing in an additional developer and designer over the summer, and starting up hardcore inbound marketing efforts to really drive up traffic. It excites the hell out of me.
As job offers will likely be made this summer (we're all graduating next year), the big conversation is approaching about continuing or not. In my wildest fantasies we'd all move into a shitty apartment for at least 6 months, work the hell out of the business and see where it goes. Nothing would make me happier than to work on this full-time, but I'm unsure if it's just my young over-estimation of our abilities pushing me in that direction.<p>Have any of you been in similar positions? If so, what happened? Do you regret your choice, whatever it was?
Thank you so much for your time, even if you just skimmed it.
EDIT:
Just wanted to clarify the business itself, as I didn't anticipate the generosity of HNers to extend to analyzing my particular situation in detail.
We currently occupy the textbook referral space, connecting students and the cheapest ways to get their books. We also offer the ability to schedule courses for students, a valuable tool most campuses don't offer. In the immediate future, we hope to extend to the geographically-based marketplace space. By that I mean college students selling textbooks, furniture, homeware, cookware, etc. to other college students on their campus. No shipping hassles. Craigslist on a smaller scale of a community you trust by association. <comment><USER2> Hiya, UC Berkeley engineer, MIT Sloan MBA guy here. I'd advise you to reconsider continuing. Plenty of students have tried the text-book business and have failed. The problem is that text books have such low profit-margins that there are few viable ways to make a sustainable business out these ventures.

I would consider your venture a great success as you have learned many things from it, and you have a great site to show for during interviews. That said, investors will likely not invest due to low margins, low barrier of entry for others, no switching cost for your users (therefore low loyalty to your brand), hard to scale... and the list goes on.

As a student I believe you've done a tremendous accomplishment, but would advise you reconsider either your business or working on your current venture full time.

Best of wishes and desire tremendous success for your career or venture.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow, thank you so much for replying, it really means a lot to hear any sort of feedback!

We spent the past year on textbooks alone because we knew the space and had the code. As the year and summer progresses, we will be moving more permanently into the geographically-based marketplace space, with an emphasis on the Craigslist style of meeting someone at a location to exchange goods, or pick something up. Starting with colleges (because it's a community of people who generally have good reason to trust one another), I'd like to see us develop a product that allows students to resell textbooks to one another, sell furniture to one another, etc.

That said, obviously it's a space heavily occupied right now. My guess is (if you'll read my response) you'll hardly change your mind, and that's great too -- the fact you responded at all means a lot to me!

<comment><USER3> It's not a space I'd personally want to touch with a ten foot pole and a government handout.

But so what? You're enjoying it, and from the sounds of it you're probably making enough that nobody involved is going to starve or end up buried under a debt mountain. Managing the downside risk works out to "use a lawyer and don't sign anything with stupid terms."

As long as you're keeping your skills up, your failure mode is "quit, get a job somewhere playing code monkey for (floor $60k/yr, ceil ???)." You've got a safety net that is virtually unrivaled in history.

So go nuts, be young, spend a few years making mistakes and learning stuff. As career trajectories go, "failed startup" is far better for your resume than "agency seat filler" \- at least for the next year or three, and assuming you do your due diligence with regard to skills maintenance, networking, and documenting your expertise (which would be equally important as an agency seat filler).

Yeah, there are better ways to optimize for career trajectory. If that's your sole priority, you should probably land a job at Googlesoft or in a field like finance, then spend the next year or three focused on networking your ass off.

But would you be happy with it, during or after? Probably less so.

Since neither option is exactly going to have you standing in the bread line, even if your choice of venture turns out to be a spectacular failure - you're free to choose based on personal fulfillment, not just socioeconomic leverage.

And, you know, it could work out. Which would be nice, but it's not something that's _necessary_ for it to be worth your time.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the reply, it means a lot.

These are the kinds of points I've been thinking, but wanted to make sure I wasn't overly confident in thinking. It's very very nice hearing it from someone else. Thank you for your time!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> > It excites the hell out of me.

> In my wildest fantasies...

> Nothing would make me happier than to work on this full-time

I think you answered your own question. You can't make any stronger statements for what you want to do than the above lines I quoted. The FUD will always be there with this sort of decision.

Also, don't take any advice on if it will work or not. Nobody has the experience you do working this niche. Even if they are doing something similar, your situation is unique, and you will find other angles you can hit this from to make it grow. With your time time attention on this, you might also find other things you can experiment with when your niche is out of season.

All the things you mentioned that you would like to do will give you great experience also. Go for it.

</comment><comment><USER5> Since you seem gung-Ho give it a try. But you may want to rethink your market sizing ambitions. I agree the textbook flipping market seems pretty competitive. This won't be a "make you rich" business unless you expand and find a competitive advantage.</comment>


Connected Papers: Explore Graphs of Related Papers - <AUTHOR> https://www.connectedpapers.com/ <comment><USER2> This could be extremely useful. I tried it on one physics paper and the results made sense, and led to discoveries of relevant publications. Very nicely done.</comment>


Eric Schmidt And Stephen Colbert Talk Politics - <AUTHOR> http://m.techcrunch.com/2012/12/15/eric-schmidt-and-stephen-colbert-talk-politics-google-vs-amazon-and-the-strange-allure-of-failure-video/?icid=tc_home_art& <comment><USER2> I've always felt that Colbert's talent as an interviewer are paralleled only by Dick Cavett (at his best). He is clearly a very fast reasoner with staggering intellect. But as much I enjoy The Colbert Report, it seems like a waste that he devotes his efforts to comedy and the sideshow bit. I think it continues to be a net positive for people that watch -- like a sort of cultural salve -- but he's just so damn rational that it makes you want to grab him and tell him to think bigger.

Also, is Schmidt always this stilted or is he nervous?

<comment><USER3> Schmidt is not really a naturally charismatic speaker. This is a video of when he was a regular manager (I think) taking public speaking classes: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bA1I6MUOKkU>.

As you can see, public speaking was something he had to actively train and work on. Public speaking is something most people need to train and work on. We can't all give presentations like Steve Jobs (and even he obsessively prepared for those).

<comment><USER4> Just wanted to thank you for the link to the public speaking video. A fascinating watch and impressive evolution the before/after effect.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Full video: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HpBHWUPa8Q>

</comment><comment><USER6> "Clearly has no idea what Google Play is"

Oh dear, Techcrunch, you seem to have misunderstood comedy.</comment>


Ask HN: Are we addicted to screens? - <AUTHOR>

Smartphones -> everyone has one, they had screens in the past too, but they weren't so resourceful Elevator -> there's a screen showing news, ads Restaurant, bars -> TV Leisure -> Videogames, TV, computer Go to a club -> screens projecting videos or images increasingly more common Work -> PC Take a photo -> See through a screen See a live band -> Sometimes you have to watch it through the screen, or it's more practical to watch it through the live filming, some nuts pay a lot to watch a music show through the tiny screen of their cameras/phones, because they're recording
It's kinda unsettling to me how much more time of the day nowadays is spent with your eyes hooked to a screen
And it makes me wonder if we are not addicted to looking at them, you can see a lot of times if there's a screen in a place, even a interesting one, like a party, some people can't help but get their eyeballs fixed into it and gently ignore the rest
The other day I was at home drinking with friends and I brought my notebook to the living room to put some music, little time after, they picked it up and started the "youtube party", I had no interest at all in watching tiny videos instead of having a conversation and it seriously bothered me.. The same "Youtube party" friend constantly shifts from the people to playing pointless games on the smartphone(yeah, he's kind of a retard)
so, what happens? Is it because I'm a programmer and am already tired of excessive lack of interpersonal interactions or does anyone feel the same sometimes? <comment><USER2> Yeah, I have noticed this too, this is one reason why I think its important to get out in nature from time to time, whether its going hiking, camping or snowboarding, etc. Basically, our modern lives are usually fairly mundane. We commute, go to work, etc and have predictable routines to where we naturally get bored of this and crave stimulation and this manifests itself often in the form of the digital media you are talking about. By breaking from this routine and getting out occasionally in such a way that you can stimulate your senses.

</comment><comment><USER3> A programmer lamenting lack of interpersonal interactions... there's hope for the world, or at least for you. The addiction isn't the screen, it's the stimulation of being a voyeur on the actions of others. This is not a new phenomenon, just that the screen opens a window that would, in the past, have required a lot more physical travel, time, cost, etc. Now they can be lazy voyeurs essentially for free. Whether or not this is progress is a good question.

</comment><comment><USER4> Vision affords high input bandwidth and loose constraints. The key constraint being, you have to look at the interface.

Other senses afford low input bandwidth and have many constraints. They tend to trump vision only where needing to look at the interface is problematic, or where the data exists in another form (audio) and transcoding it is problematic, or where closed-loop feedback control is needed (tactile feedback & haptics).

</comment><comment><USER5> People are affected by flickering lights at a very basic level - we stare at fire, too.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a major concern of postmodernist theory. This stuff mostly went above my head in my philosophy classes, but I recommend reading Baudrillard and Don Dellilo for their takes on our obsession with simulacra.</comment>


October Brings Node.js 10.x to LTS and Node.js 11 to Current - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@nodejs/october-brings-node-js-10-x-to-lts-and-node-js-11-to-current-ae19f8f12b51 <comment><USER2> >This version also comes with the experimental release of Node-ChakraCore

Wow, it looks like Microsoft is really truly supporting this!

I have to be honest, when I first saw they were trying to run their engine in node, I thought it would be like all the attempts before. Half-assed, or done once then not kept up to date.

But not only are they still maintaining it, but they are still improving it!

I really hope that node-chakracore gains more adoption, even if only as an alternative from the v8 monoculture that we have. And that being said, I'm going off now to put my money where my mouth is and install it locally and see how much I can run with it.

<comment><USER3> With Node's growing popularity, could you expect any different? Google and Apple compete on the cloud and node is very important there. By getting involved in the process, Microsoft keeps themselves from being at the mercy of Google's choices. Apple doesn't because Cloud is a much smaller part of their business (though native node on iOS and OSX would be very nice to have). Mozilla was also working on that, but I guess it's even less of a priority for them since they appeared to drop everything

<comment><USER2> But that's my point, is that I expected MS to stand it up, get it like 50-80% working, then drop it. It's happened a lot of times:

* nashorn - started off as a reimplementation of node APIs in java's JS engine, died around 2015 for this purpose

* rhinodo - same as the above, never really got anywhere. no change since 2015

* spidernode - mozilla's take on it, looks like most development started and ended 2 years ago, with only superficial changes since then.

* node-jsc - still being developed, but it's only a few months old, and still isn't even fully caught up to node's version 8 APIs.

The ground is littered with failed attempts at this, and I think that is because it's always a LOT more work than people think, and the work doesn't just stop when you get it running, it keeps going. And you either need a crazy amount of dedication, a wide audience, or a lot of funding to keep it up. And it's hard to stay dedicated without users, it's hard to get an audience when stuff doesn't work, and it's hard to keep funding when the work isn't providing any immediate benefit for your company.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to dissuade or put down developers working on those projects, I think it's an extremely awesome thing that's well above my ability and I hope that they continue so one day we can see competition in the server-side-javascript space similar to how we see competition in the browser space to really drive innovation. But this stuff isn't easy, and it is really nice to see a company say they are going to build this, then actually put their money down and fund it. And on top of that they are adding new features, new developer niceties, and actually working to make it a viable option, not just a checkbox and a pat on the back for giving it a good try.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This other post contains the performance claims: [https://medium.com/@nodejs/october-brings-node-js-10-x-to- lt...](https://medium.com/@nodejs/october-brings-node-js-10-x-to-lts-and-node- js-11-to-current-ae19f8f12b51)

</comment><comment><USER5> If you are using async/await, you also enjoy a performance boost.

[https://auth0.com/blog/nodejs-10-new-changes- deprecations/](https://auth0.com/blog/nodejs-10-new-changes-deprecations/)

</comment><comment><USER6> I am really disappointed with the direction ES module support has taken in Node.JS. It isn't like it was done poorly, in fact I think it was done quite thoughtfully... And yet it feels like it hurts ES modules very hard. Interoperabilility is just too poor. I don't even bother trying to use it. I'd rather continue using the polyfills.

</comment><comment><USER7> The native modules has been my biggest pain point, that modules stop working after a major release. Glad they are working on it! I try to use "pure" JS modules as much as possible, but it's not always possible when working with low level code, hardware, or OS integration.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does anyone have a summary of the major changes from version 8? The changes are split up into lots of small increments in the changelog but it'd be good to see a summary.

<comment><USER9> I'd love to know the performance improvements compared to 8 too, comparing 10 to 6 isn't particularly useful though interesting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> 18 months is not what I call LTS. not even 30 months is LTS.

<comment><USER11> JavaScript code is basically obsolete as soon as it is written... In that context 18 months might be a long time.

Edit: I probably wasn't clear enough that I was joking.

Edit 2: I also found out that the LTS release should receive 30 months of maintenance. They say that end of life for node 10 will be April 2021.

<comment><USER12> ? I work on large enterprise app in node there is code that was written 5 years ago and still works fine with 0 changes so not sure "JavaScript code is basically obsolete as soon as it is written" is applicable on the server side.

<comment><USER13> I'm a huge fan of Node.js, particularly in the enterprise, but I question your " _0 changes..._ " claim. At the very least you'll have to update dependencies to deal with breaks on their part due to upgrades.

<comment> nevi-me As someone who has a fairly large codebase that's been largely untouched for 3-4 years, I'd disagree. Nothing has stopped me from updating some ancient dependencies. Perhaps we should make a difference between Node and semver- major library changes

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't see such a claim on the changelog. Am I missing it?

Edit: The original title spoke about huge latency and performance improvements. It had been changed since I wrote this, hence this comment is now obsolete.

<comment><USER15> more likely that's compared to an earlier LTS version (8.x or 6.x)

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Node 11 now comes with v8 v7.0, does this mean Webassembly threads are supported? Or are they behind a flag?

<comment><USER17> I was curious about this also, but couldn't find an answer. The most relevant thing I learned was that WebAssembly is exposed as a global object since Node.js 8.0.0, without a runtime flag.

[https://nodejs.org/api/globals.html#globals_webassembly](https://nodejs.org/api/globals.html#globals_webassembly)

A list of WebAssembly features implemented by Node.js can be found here (the right most column):

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/WebAssembly#Browser...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/WebAssembly#Browser_compatibility)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The linked page seems to not contain the words 'compute' or 'latency'

Is there a better link for the title or a better title for the link?

<comment><USER19> [https://medium.com/@nodejs/october-brings-node-js-10-x-to- lt...](https://medium.com/@nodejs/october-brings-node-js-10-x-to-lts-and-node- js-11-to-current-ae19f8f12b51)</comment></comment>


Color, the new amazing mobile app that crashes your phone within minutes - <AUTHOR> http://arnorhs.com/2011/03/24/color-the-new-amazing-mobile-app-that-crashes-your-phone-within-minutes/ <comment><USER2> Boy, there are a million reasons to hate on Color, but the fact that their 1.0 app crashes is the least convincing and the most mean-spirited. Everybody's 1.0 app crashes.

<comment><USER3> _> >Everybody's 1.0 app crashes._

No, that is wrong.

My 1.0 apps don't crash (as per itunesconnect which says "No Crash Reports" for my last 3 iPhone/iPad apps which are all on their 1.0 version).

One of them was recently ranked #1 on Apple's top charts for its category. So this isn't a matter of trivial apps with a low user base.

<comment><USER4> Everybody's who is in it for a big exit pile of money 1.0 app crashs

<comment><USER4> *big pile of exit money

i blame phone on-screen keyboards. Give me back my clickety keys!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Am I the only one who is annoyed at apps that require GPS to be enabled? I can deal with it for things like Navigation where I can plug my phone into my car to keep the battery up. But for general use, it just sucks up way too much battery and is easy to forget to turn off.

The result is that I just avoid apps that require it.

<comment><USER6> Location-based apps requiring GPS to work is a surprise to you?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This seems like a classic, "OMG TC IS SCOOPING US!" reaction. They rushed to get something out ended up throwing some real crap over the wall. This is going to hurt them a little bit, but $40mm will help that pain go away.

Color would have been much better served by a "Give us your email address" page like <http://lifepath.me/> to drum up excitement.

</comment><comment><USER8> Jokes aside, I bounced the concept for colors.com off of some people and they didn't like the idea of automatically sharing pictures they take with people who are nearby. While there is something interesting to this concept, I think it could go either way. It could be a lot like Google Wave. It is certainly innovative, but I'm not convinced it will catch on. Maybe it will...

Thoughts anyone?

<comment><USER9> I'm sure it will catch on, it's a just a pretty obvious thing to do. But I wonder how color plans to maintain market dominance?

I can't see enough of a first-mover advantage here to justify such a big bet. - But perhaps they have something awesome up their sleeve that we don't know about yet?

<comment><USER8> It's funny you say it's obvious. The whole elastic network concept wasn't obvious to me at all until they explained it. It's somewhat engenius in my opinion, but maybe I'm slow and this idea is obvious. Like I said though, I think the concept has some mainstream acceptance problems and I'm not sure it will work.

<comment><USER9> Well, I should clarify that I think the concept of grouping photos (videos, chats, etc.) by GPS is obvious. It's been done before and so far this is not much more than a logical progression (making it easier and more fun).

I don't even know what "elastic network" is supposed to mean, but yes, they better have a lot of that, for $41M...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Nitpick: there's a big difference between an app crashing (which is what this sounds like) and an app crashing your phone (rendering it unusable or forcing a reboot).

<comment><USER11> The app actually _is_ crashing phones. It turns out that it's quite possible for apps to crash most Android phones, either by making the phone so unresponsive that a watchdog kicks in, or by using so much RAM that the OOM killer goes to town.

<comment><USER12> If it's possible for an application to bring down the system that sounds like the system was poorly designed.

<comment><USER13> And... you've essentially discredited windows, linux, and os x.

<comment><USER14> Really? Not once have I had an application take down GNU/Linux. Sure an application takes down X once in a blue moon, but never the whole Os. And I've been using it for about 15 years now. The few full scale crashes I've experienced were due to hardware errors.

Only once have I experienced a full crash on android. The phone simply rebooted. No idea why.

I have never used OSX or windows after XP, so I can't say anything about them.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure if this is meant to be a serious comment, but not only is it misleading, it's also naive. As you try to lead the conversation into talking about an actual kernel halt or panic as opposed to what the OP actually said.

This was the original claim that you responded to. "by making the phone so unresponsive that a watchdog kicks in, or by using so much RAM that the OOM killer goes to town."

Crashes obviously happen on linux systems all the time. That's why this exists <http://linux.die.net/man/8/watchdog> and why we have reports like this [http://www.unix.com/aix/106921-process-crashing-aix-due- memo...](http://www.unix.com/aix/106921-process-crashing-aix-due-memory- leak.html) and this <http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6059> etc. Are you claiming that such a situation can't arise on linux.

The same is obviously true on Windows and OSX.

Pivoting the conversation isn't the best way to make your point.

edit - Not to mention you attempt to use anecdotal evidence to support a general claim. Such has no place here.

<comment><USER14> First of all: Sorry for the late reply. I somehow didn't notice your post before now.

I was actually replying to jbrennan who said "If it's possible for an application to bring down the system that sounds like the system was poorly designed." and burrows who said "And... you've essentially discredited windows, linux, and os x.". I didn't notice what ootachi said until you pointed it out. I consider "bring down the system" to main exactly that, kernel halt or panic.

The links you provided where about processes crashing and/or processes with memory leaks, which I could in no way consider to be "bringing down the system" (unless it's a very poor system where such things actually do bring down the whole system), and it would be completely insane of me to claim that processes cannot crash on _nix.

My point was simply that kernel panics or anything that "brings down the system" very rarely occur, and normally occur due to hardware errors on _nix systems, and as far as I know on newer Windows systems as well (again, never used OSX so I have nothing to go on there).

Simply put: When jbrennan said "bring down the system" that, to me at least, means anything that the _only_ recovery from is a reboot of the system, no more, no less, and that is what I was responding to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "They have so much faith in this product, that they've pumped 41 million dollars into the company . . ."

I think the right assumption is that "they have so much faith in the team."

Chief Scientist @ LinkedIn, Founder of Lala, Founder of BillShrink, etc

</comment><comment><USER16> Sequoia did not give them 41 million.

<comment><USER17> Was it "only" M$25, with other investors having put up the remaining M$16?

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I tried it out and while it worked fine and didn't crash, I struggled to find the purpose in my day to day life. It might be great at a concert or something. Also, I'd like to just share with a subset of users - not share with everyone.

</comment><comment><USER19> Working link to the hilarious slideshow, anyone?

<comment><USER20> [https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ajdtctfhv4hn_264g329...](https://docs.google.com/present/view?id=ajdtctfhv4hn_264g329gwcc&pli=1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Why so negative?

</comment><comment><USER22> This might get down-voted to oblivion, but here it goes:

OP, cool it down with the link bait headlines. It seems like fashionable to bad mouth Color right now with their monster financing, etc, but if you have ever built anything (and it looks like you have) you know damn well how hard it is.

And V 1.0, 40 million or not, always stinks and If it doesn't you shipped to late.

So, let's give this guys some time so we can understand why Sequoia gave so much money to Color.

<comment><USER23> _And V 1.0, 40 million or not, always stinks and If it doesn't you shipped to late._

Whatever happened to beta releases?

<comment><USER24> I don't believe Apple will allow you to release a beta product on the app store.</comment></comment></comment>


Apply HN: The Mirror AI - <AUTHOR> The idea is to build a neural interface for Artificial Intelligence in Virtual Reality.
Sounds crazy but what's the point? Looking at the problem of General AI, recent/future advancements in the field are going to deal with a lack of training environment. I strongly believe that in the future one will need the tools to train AI on how to interact with the "actual" 3D world. That includes awareness of space (3D sight and sounds), time and touch.
While being essential for the general AI development, this would also greatly improve weak AI efficiency. Given the learned notion of the 3D abstractions and corresponding real-world interactions, one would be able to extract much more meaning from the 2D projections or textual information. Not mentioning human/AI interactions that would require strong understanding of the emotions and causal relationships.
My background is purely technical with a focus on High Performance Computing and Big Data. My most recent affiliations: Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Intel Corporation, IARPA. <comment><USER2> I think you have in mind a robot in the real world. I do believe that the real AI would have to be embodied, have body which can use to sense and understand the things by itself (example: you can teach an AI to recognize a chair but you can not teach that it can use a rock as a chair unless it goes and sits there).

Emotions are one of the things you might need to create a similar human intelligence, but there are also more things you would need (abstract representation, abstract reasoning, imagination, self representation, etc). Take a look to this research about machine conciousness: [http://www.conscious-robots.com/consscale/](http://www.conscious- robots.com/consscale/)

Unfortunately the research are more focused in the AI that leads to better algorithms as better image recognition. All the part about a real robot intelligence which can feel is mostly missing and few people work on this.

<comment><AUTHOR> The robots are extremely expensive to build, scale and adopt just for the sake of training. With VR it will be much more plausible.

Plus not only me would get to develop the "core". I want to provide the ground for this direction.

And yeap, the actual "mission" behind this idea is actually closer to "a real robot intelligence which can feel" and reason.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Are you suggesting that we improve AI by directly tapping into the human brain's 3D representations? (Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "interface".)

We're still at the beginning of learning how the brain works. Can you lay out a plausible roadmap for how your product will be realized within the 10 years? 20 years?

In short, yes, it does sound crazy.

<comment><AUTHOR> In short, yes.

By interface I mean a "cage" of neurons connected to the inputs/outputs (similarly to humans) that can host different deep neural networks (and be used as a training environment).

The basic interface can be realised within weeks - that would include stereo- imaging input and basic motor tasks. But the more complex it gets - the more work is needed of course (not mentioning development of the hosted AI models).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> When would real be real enough? Didn't DARPA already do this for some of their AI work?

<comment><AUTHOR> Real is real - when you make it real ,) I think that DARPA's research (robotics) is lacking the scale (which VR and mass adoption can bring).

<comment><USER4> Anything like OpenAI's Gym: [https://gym.openai.com](https://gym.openai.com)

<comment><AUTHOR> One might think about it as adding additional degrees of freedom.

The goal is similar but unlike OpenAI's Gym or DeepMind I want to construct a training ground much more close to the reality in VR that would also allow interactions with humans (e.g. to be trained as well).

It's a logical step after image recognition and playing simple games.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> What are the status and roadmap in regard to implementation?

<comment><AUTHOR> Speaking honestly, the idea is at the level of early experiments. I can get the basic stereo-imaging and motor inputs/outputs within a month. Next would be work on getting feedback system from the environment/surrounding objects including the spectator interactions. This would take another month or a bit more. Finally another month (and more) would consist of experiments on embedding neural nets and scaling the training process. If to move quickly 3 months is enough to build a basis.</comment></comment>


Altucher: NYC Is Dead Forever - <AUTHOR> https://jamesaltucher.com/blog/nyc-is-dead-forever-heres-why/ <comment><USER2> I live in Manhattan and stayed put throughout the pandemic. Compared to months ago, NYC is doing quite well, culturally at least. Yesterday I took a walk from midtown to FiDi and back. Restaurants were open, diners were enjoying outdoor seating, families were out and about, stores were open, bikers were biking, and it really felt like _something_ was back to some semblance of "normal." Not to mention that compared to the rest of the country, it feels like we've passed the worst of the pandemic storm.

There is a whole other financial issue affecting the city right now, however. Tax income is going to drop off a cliff, many stores have closed, and some percentage of wealthy people may leave, which will force the government to confront its sky-high spending and investments in social programs.

NYC will certainly look different, and may take several years to fully recover, but I think declaring it dead at the height of a globe-altering pandemic is premature.

<comment><USER3> There is also this issue of skyrocketing violent crime that many people are choosing to ignore. As an older person who lived through the "bad old days" of NYC in the 70s, 80s, and early 90s what's happening today is, unfortunately, very reminiscent. The pandemic aside, the utter and total leadership failures of Deblasio and the City Council have led us to where we are. The NYC that many people have come to know and enjoy for the last 25 years is sliding back into a very different kind of city, with our "leaders" doing absolutely nothing to address the issue.

[https://gothamist.com/news/49-people-shot-72-hours-wave- gun-...](https://gothamist.com/news/49-people-shot-72-hours-wave-gun-violence- continues-nyc)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Please note that this article was written by the "Bitcoin" guy.

[https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-man-behind-bitcoin- geniu...](https://finance.yahoo.com/news/meet-man-behind-bitcoin-genius-ads- internet-134441715.html)

I wouldn't take anything he says seriously. There's probably a buck in it for him to flip to write something like this.

</comment><comment><USER5> Soho is packed with outdoor diners.

I went from phone call to CT Scan in 17 mins at NYP hospital.

Museums open August 24.

Whole Food delivers to my front door. Your local herb friend probably does too. And how many Apple Stores?

Got my new NYC lease. Landlord raised the rent. Guess he's not buying the doom and gloom?

NYC will do just fine. We'll figure it out.

:-)

<comment><USER6> > Got my new NYC lease. Landlord raised the rent. Guess he's not buying the > doom and gloom?

He doesn't think you buy the doom and gloom anyway. You did pay after all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Rents are down, so that will eventually attract people back. A supply and demand problem in the classic case.

Office buildings can be converted to housing in the short run.

In the long run, in-person offices will probably beat distributed teams in many industries, like finance where small margins produce results. Especially since Goldman Sachs probably likes to discuss strategic plans like destabilizing national economies in private and in person.

Near-tautological cycles of real estate appreciation in high demand urban centers have prevented addressing major glaring problems, so a correction to the demand curve and valuations may enable zoning reform in order to get people back to the city.

Finally: why would anyone move to Phoenix with looming global warming?

<comment><USER8> > Office buildings can be converted to housing in the short run.

This is just not feasible in the short run due to huge costs of extra plumbing and other infrastructure changes. Hotel to housing conversions are much cheaper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Two obligatory comments:

1\. Manhattan is not NYC. There are five, count them, five boroughs. Didn't Johnny T on Glove and Boots teach you numbskulls nothin'? Manhattan is one borough. The author would probably wet his pants if he stepped into Brooklyn, and require a full adult diaper if he found himself on Staten Island. (Exaggeration for humorous effect, but he should know better.)

2\. The "how dare you kick my dog, he's great" posts that show up when NYC is disparaged are par for the course here. They show an admirable love and loyalty for Manhattan and, who knows, they may have read about the Bronx in a book somewhere. There will always be a Manhattan unless they tow it out to sea and sink it. (Imagine the Environmental Impact Statement for that project.) Will the Manhattan of the mid and late 1900s still be around? Paris still thrives, but does the Paris of the 1920s still exist?

3\. Waiting for the inevitable dumping on New Jersey that happens when NYC starts getting insecure...

<comment><USER10> I grew up in Manhattan in the 1970s. There was only one borough that mattered. Nobody gave a fuck about any of the others.

I suppose it's different now, parts of Brooklyn might matter.

 _inevitable dumping on New Jersey_

Mr. Richard Feder of Fort Lee, New Jersey, is that you? Roseanne Roseannadanna says "you belong in New Jersey".

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This guy can't see past the end of the pandemic and on that basis alone is declaring NYC dead forever?? What a garbage article.

<comment><USER12> Sensationalism pays

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The author's context is too narrow, NYC will definitely be a different place going on, but that has been true for centuries.

</comment><comment><USER14> With due apologies to Winston Churchill: "the rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated" \- NYC

<comment><USER15> Mark Twain

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> You see this kind of reactionary pearl-clutching every day of the history of the human race. NYC will change, as will everywhere on Earth, it is not dead.

<comment><USER17> NYC is dead _right now_. The question is whether it will come back to life.

My hunch is yes, because it is still a good brand.

<comment><USER18> Are the fundamentals still sound?

The biggest fundamental being challenged now is "Do people need to work in the same physical location?"

<comment><USER19> Wouldn't remote working actually make hipsters across the country free to move to a city that has a brand that resonates with them?

<comment><USER20> New York is not built on taxes collected from hipsters.

<comment><USER19> The era when some of New York City (even parts of Manhattan) had substandard public services didn't stop hipsters moving there. A city might not be corporately "thriving" with a tax base of such residents, but due to the power of its brand the city can still draw alternative young people and keep the legacy of art and culture going.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> NYC has taxed the wealthy very aggressively to pay for cultural entertainment (to keep the wealthy) and social services that help reelect the politicians who set up this system. Clearly there will be changes coming.

</comment><comment><USER22> If there is a viable vaccine or vaccines by early 2021 then all of these histrionics will vanish into the clickbait ether from which they came.

</comment><comment><USER23> Netcraft confirms!

</comment><comment><USER24> > _But NYC is the center of the financial universe._

Erm...? I think London, Singapore, Hong Kong and Tokyo would disagree.

I stopped reading at that point tbh.

<comment><USER17> Orbiters...

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Why do I care what this random guy thinks? Is this "old man yells at clouds" hour?

<comment><USER5> He's not some random guy.

<comment><USER25> He's nobody to me. Also his writing is very poor and full of histrionics. He should take a class somewhere.

<comment><USER26> That leaves the question of who you are and why your opinion matters then. You could be a rogue GPT-3 experiment for all any of us know.

<comment><USER25> At least I'm not out there writing condescending blog posts where I bloviate about cities ceasing to exist. Gimme a break.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This poor person is broken, clearly he has a rough time and is a defeatist.

I try to never hire defeatists into my companies and screen for them.

the pendelum will swing back and corporates will see that culture and office also matters.

<comment><USER17> Maybe, but sometimes change is permanent and cities lose their elevated status forever.

History is rife with examples.

<comment><USER27> Of course, history is full of such examples.

Calling timing is hard, he may be right but it may not be this time round.</comment></comment></comment>


Is Anyone Listening to You on Alexa? A Global Team Reviews Audio - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-10/is-anyone-listening-to-you-on-alexa-a-global-team-reviews-audio <comment><USER2> Well what a coincidence

[https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/111599165366219571...](https://twitter.com/matthewstoller/status/1115991653662195713)

<comment><USER3> I don't work for Amazon or Google, but I agree with them in this case.

I read through the full text of the bill ([http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=&Sessio...](http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=&SessionId=108&GA=101&DocTypeId=SB&DocNum=1719&GAID=15&LegID=&SpecSess=&Session=)) and it seems like it sounds like the companies can be sued if one user agrees to a written policy, but then is used by another user (e.g. a spouse or sibling or friend), which makes smart speakers basically impossible to exist. (User identification isn't good enough, and even if it were, mistakes can happen)

> No private entity may turn on or enable, cause to be turned on or enabled, > or otherwise use a digital device's microphone to listen for or collect > information, including spoken words or other audible or inaudible sounds, > unless a user first agrees to a written policy informing the user[..]

<comment><USER4> > which makes smart speakers basically impossible to exist.

Then perhaps in their current form, they shouldn't exist. It's already illegal to record people without their consent in many states. We shouldn't give up this right to privacy for a bit of convenience.

<comment><USER5> By that logic, any device with a microphone and potential to record should not exist.

Smart speakers are not telephone calls, and even if they were, federal law only requires consent of one party to record (11 states require all-party consent).

In public spaces, you generally lose any right to consent to recording. If you're in someone else's home and they record you with their smart speaker device, then your beef is with that person whose private property you're being recorded on. Same as if they were recording you with their phone's camera in their private residence, vs recording you in a public space.

<comment><USER6> I don't agree. In your example, being in someone else's home doesn't put you in a public space for purposes of recording consent.

A dumb recording device can't do something illegal without its owner's/user's affirmative action. If the homeowner uses the recording thing illegally they're liable for that use.

In contrast, Alexa and similar devices operate on rules built-in by their builders. They do what their builders intend, not what applicable law or their owners require. Liability should rest with the builders.

<comment><USER5> Right - being in someone else's home is their private residence. If they break the law using devices there then they are liable, not the device manufacturer. Maybe I didn't specify that enough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> A few choice excerpts:

"Sometimes they hear recordings they find upsetting, or possibly criminal. Two of the workers said they picked up what they believe was a sexual assault. When something like that happens, they may share the experience in the internal chat room as a way of relieving stress. Amazon says it has procedures in place for workers to follow when they hear something distressing, but two Romania-based employees said that, after requesting guidance for such cases, they were told it wasn't Amazon's job to interfere."

"Amazon, in its marketing and privacy policy materials, doesn't explicitly say humans are listening to recordings of some conversations picked up by Alexa. "We use your requests to Alexa to train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems," the company says in a list of frequently asked questions."

<comment><USER8> People sometimes say alarming things as part of sex play.

<comment><USER9> Sometimes they don't.

<comment><USER8> Sure.

And if there's any question, that's why we agree on safe words.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I mean, is this really news? We know that Amazon records the clips of what you say to Alexa for the purposes of improving the recognition. Everything after you say "Alexa..."

How would they tell whether their models are right or wrong without listening and having someone compare?

I see nothing in this article to suggest the clips they're listening to are related to an always-on microphone.

<comment><USER11> _Everything after you say "Alexa..."_

It's everything after the product _thinks_ you said "Alexa".

<comment><USER12> That's probably one of the only competitive advantages of Bixby. That's likely not going to get misheard very often. Though I guess "OK Google" is probably hard to mishear, too.

<comment><USER13> Not so sure about that. Google has now become a verb, not hard to imagine false positives.

<comment><USER12> True, I imagine its false positive rate is higher than Bixby's. But I think the specific combination of "o-kay-goo-gull" probably doesn't clash with too many things; even when talking about Google. But my Alexa seems to pick up all sorts of words vaguely sounding like Alexa when I play videos.

<comment><USER6> So I'm sitting in my office, talking with a colleague…

"OK, Google patent 9,876,543 and see if we're infringing."

or if my colleague is named Alexa…

"Alexa, let's hammer those idiots."

I think the first would wake Google Home. I guess Alexa lets you change the wake word to 'echo' or 'computer'. It would be better if it let you use something arbitrary like 'Rumplestiltskin'

IP leakage or potential misunderstandings don't seem so improbable to me. Especially if the listeners in (from OP Bloomberg article) in Costa Rica, India, or Romania aren't au courant with "hammer those idiots" as English idiom in context.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hotels in Seattle used for flyins by $bigtechco have Alexas.

I unplugged it for one flyin.

The housekeeper plugged it back in while I was out.

I unplugged it again.

Why in the world would I want any of these smart speakers?

<comment><USER15> There are "smart-apartments" going up in my area that have Alexas and whatnot preinstalled. They're some of the nicer apartments in the area and I'd love to live there. However, it's against the leasing agreement (which is pretty firm) to remove / disable them. Insane.

<comment><USER8> > However, it's against the leasing agreement (which is pretty firm) to remove > / disable them.

I find that hard to believe. In fact, I can't imagine how it's not illegal. Or if it's not, how it can remain legal.

<comment><USER15> IIRC they are doing some kind of tech study which got them a grant to build the place. There's an entire suite of things from "smart-solar" to the Alexas. The thing about the lease is not fact, it's just what the leasing office told me when I asked about it, I did not read an actual legal document.

<comment><USER16> If that's true then the hype about tech companies being literally Hitler is pretty much right. That's fucking insane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Facebook is using smartphones to listen to what people say: [https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/ne...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and- tech/news/facebook-using-people-s-phones-to-listen-in-on-what-they-re-saying- claims-professor-a7057526.html)

A lot of people said Facebook ads suggest them products or services debated on phone calls.

If you have Echo or Kindle Fire TV, guess it can be easily reproduced when Amazon really listening and analyze your voice.

<comment><USER18> "A lot of people said" is not enough for a proof. What might be happening, is that Alice and Bob are friends. Bob spends some time researching a topic, say looking for a new car of brand X. He calls Alice and tells her about him wanting to buy a car of brand X. Some time later, Alice sees ads for car of brand X. Now, it could have been FB listening on the phone call. But there's another possibility - FB knows that Alice and Bob are friends, and it knows Bob likes brand X, so it assumes that a friend of Bob will be interested in brand X.

<comment><USER17> > "A lot of people said" is not enough for a proof.

Agree. Here's something like video proof from BBC: [https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35639549](https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35639549)

<comment><USER19> This sounds like a technological proof of concept that someone _could_ build such a thing, and a few anecdotes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> People in the sixties: "I better not say that or the government will wiretap my house."

Today: "Hey, wiretap, do you have a recipe for pancakes?"

[https://twitter.com/andreacoravos/status/999761670540025856?...](https://twitter.com/andreacoravos/status/999761670540025856?lang=en)

<comment><USER21> The joke doesn't really make any sense though. How will they know to wiretap your house because of what you're saying unless it's wiretapped already?

<comment><USER22> That is pretty much the way it works now using parallel construction to make up a reason to make the wiretap official.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Shouldn't people be having fun with or trolling these always-listening systems by speaking gibberish, in tongues or reciting custom sea shanties that reenact purely fictional accounts of high crimes on the open seas?

</comment><comment><USER24> It's usually good for a company to listen to what their customers are saying. This time, not so much.

</comment><comment><USER25> It's called "supervised" machine learning for a reason...

The important part is that tens of millions of people used Alexa everyday and the utterances are anonymized before being used as training data, so you don't know who said what, just that somewhere someone said "blah".

<comment><USER26> I'm sure their anonymization policy is un-misleading as their terms around whether employees listen to Alexa commands

<comment><USER27> How have we got to the point where someone listening via a microphone inside my house is fine as long as it's not real-time?

<comment><USER28> Everyone who owns one of these devices has given express permission and must know. Its fine since they have told Amazon its fine

<comment><USER29> It's antagonistic and obviously misleading to state that a person has given explicit permission to a company without any further explanation when the reality you're basing that on is that the permission was in the wording of a contract that person clicked "agree" on.

You may insist all day that this person was irresponsible in examining the contract, which I will also disagree with, but claiming that they have given explicit permission is a lie on your part, and I would have a hard time believing that you don't know that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Apologies to the poor folks reviewing audio, but the only room my Echo is allowed in is the bathroom.

<comment><USER31> No joke, part of me believes that bathrooms (and kitchens, to a lesser degree) are the first places voice-controlled smart home tech will _really_ take off. My place is about as smart as it can be today but it's still mostly a novelty.

Once people can perform actually useful tasks with their voice - "hey siri, turn the shower on to 40 degrees" or "alexa, preheat the oven to 300" \- while their hands are full doing something else it'll kickstart the whole field.

<comment><USER32> This sounds dangerous.

<comment><USER31> How so? The device could always require confirmation for hazardous commands - "are you sure you want me to turn the oven on?" Most already do this for e.g. deleting calendar appointments anyway.

<comment><USER32> This could be hacked and burn you.

<comment><USER31> I mean....there will be a future in which voice data is processed locally rather than in the cloud. Nobody said this stuff has to be connected to the internet.

<comment><USER33> Snips' home assistant does local processing

[https://www.home-assistant.io/components/snips/](https://www.home- assistant.io/components/snips/)

<comment><USER31> Oooh, thanks for the heads up - I've been playing around with HA but hadn't seen this component. I'll check it out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> There's an interesting disconnect from pieces like this and those demanding that tech companies monitor every piece of content on their networks.

<comment><USER35> Is there? Seems like a massive difference between recordings in the privacy of one's home and, say, tweets intentionally published to the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> As a user its not just I don't mind but I expect them to do so, at least to improve the product.

<comment><USER37> As I bystander, I expect them to never record my voice since it's against my express wishes. Only one of us ever gets what he wants. Doesn't seem fair.

<comment><USER38> This is the case all the time, though. You get recorded by CCTV cameras everywhere you go, even if you don't want them to.

<comment><USER39> In a public place I expect some level of privacy intrusions. CCTV cameras aren't so bad in public as long as the recordings are only stored for a few weeks and the data is not analyised unless there is reason to believe it contains evidence.

For example its acceptable to access the video to prove someone stole from your store but it is not acceptable to use facial recognition on your cctv to see who your best customers are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> It is in my opinion absolutely unacceptable that this submission was originally the article title and that was subsequently changed, presumably to defuse it. Someone needs to clarify when the norm of using the submission title applies, when it's thrown out, why it's thrown out, and who gets to decide.

In my opinion, the only sensible approach is for the title policy to be unilaterally enforced. Any departure from it will invariably involve someone's subjective 'political' stance on a matter.

As it stands, it looks as if someone at Amazon applied pressure to have this changed. I really hope that isn't the case because it's almost too shady to be believed.

<comment><USER41> I agree with you to certain extent. I think the problem with titles directly out of the article is that many times they are bait.

The writers of those articles are purposefully leaving key information out, to grab people's attention and likely force them to read the entire article to find the missing information or fulfill the title entice.

In this case I think the change of title is definitely defusing the article, but it's also giving the key information that was left out in the bait title.

I agree with you because changing the original title feels like a disruption of the discourse and opens a bias door for whoever changes the title. But, I also believe that bait titles erode the quality of the content and make harder to consume and evaluate information. It's a hard problem.

<comment><USER40> I disagree almost entirely on the basis of that being a ludicrous sort of infantilization, as if this community can't be trusted to sort fact from fiction and must instead be coddled towards the "correct" interpretation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> I think this sort of process, assuming the privacy and security teams have their say, is an absolutely legitimate part of product improvement.

<comment><USER43> Don't the people developing these speech/AI methods generally have advanced degrees?

In that case, shouldn't they be aware, from the same grad school training that prepared them for this work, that a (genuine) human subjects board would require informed consent for this, at the least?

Do they have informed consent?

<comment><USER42> I am both an Ex-Googler and a PhD researcher (working with human data). You don't require informed consent in this case, it's not human subjects research, and the terms of service cover this already. What is being done is completely legal and if people don't like it, they're free not to use the service.

<comment><USER43> How is this not human subjects research?

And is modern consumer "terms of service" the human subjects ethical standard for corporate researchers?

<comment><USER42> because humans aren't the subject of research here, instead they are data providers. The alexa product is the subject of research here (and it's not research, it's product improvement).

I don't understand your question about terms of service and ethics here. I work with real human subjects research data and it's a completely different field that does not apply to this situation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Is this supposed to be sinister? They need to QA the product they are building so it's a better experience for customers.

</comment><comment><USER45> I accept that Amazon, Google, etc. are likely listening to me with computer AI, but the fact the employees could pass these around causes some worry. It's like when I worked my first job at AOL and people would read Rosie O'Donnell's mail and chats. The human element is more troubling than the AI.

</comment><comment><USER46> The Bloomberg cookie banner is such a dark pattern (literally) it's laughable. Can't tell yes from no with the buttons.

</comment><comment><USER47> I was reading a while ago about how many nukes we set off in the 50s and 60s and thought: what are we doing today that future generations will think "what were they thinking?"

Surveillance capitalism was the first thing to come to mind.

<comment><USER48> For better or worse, I expect the opposite will happen. Future generations simply will not have the same expectations and fears around privacy.

The modern Western conceptions of privacy are relatively anomalous from a historical perspective. There's nothing to stop them from changing again.

<comment><USER47> What's happening now is totally different from the lack of privacy experienced in a tribe or a close knit village. This is top down panopticon surveillance where an opaque eye spies on everyone on behalf of a complex of corporations, advertisers, criminals, and governments. The lack of privacy in a village was reciprocal. This is completely asymmetrical and exploitative.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Amazon products are the worst if you are concerned about privacy (their tablets are awful)... Google probably comes at a close 2nd and Huawei maybe 20th? (that's a wild guess but Amazon is hard to beat)

<comment><USER50> Presumably Apple are the best in your totally impartial and unbiased opinion, right?

<comment><USER49> Apple is better at PR for sure... but we have seen in the past that they lie about sharing your information with the government...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Ai is so pnambic right now.¹

We are flooded with hype about AI, but they seldom mention the armies of people it takes to get it working and to keep it working.

Even members f the public are recruited to train AI system without their knowledge, i.e.: captcha google translate suggestions.

Sounds more like a smokescreen for normal human intelligence to me.

1: [http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/p/pnambic.html](http://www.jargon.net/jargonfile/p/pnambic.html)

</comment><comment><USER52> Have you thought how funny it is that Amazon is using people in order to train AI to get a competitive advantage?

<comment><USER53> No, I haven't, because that's how all ML models learn. It's called supervised learning and supervision comes in the form of labels produced by human taggers. It's not something special that only Amazon Alexa does. Tagging is as necessary in ML as data entry in accounting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> Another reason to support on-device audio processing _cough_ Apple _cough_

</comment><comment><USER55> I know someone who does this. Some people use Alexa to text so they get a bunch of sexts. Many, many people just like to say the worst things they can think of to try and get Alexa to say something anti Semitic or what not.

</comment><comment><USER56> I don't mind not buying a Google Home it whatever, but is Google listening on my "Ok Google" enabled Android phone as well?

<comment><USER57> How else would it catch the words "Ok, Google" in the first place?

<comment><USER48> All these things have dedicated low-power hardware that just listens for the trigger phrase and has no network access. That's why you can't choose your trigger phrase.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Idk about everyone else here but for a while now and forever more when I see people in the comments justifying tech companies immoral behavior I assume its shills. Whether directly paid or whether the companies have propaganda campaigns that just get idle commenter on their side.

<comment><USER41> Amazon apart, what's inmmoral about labeling data that you got with the consent of the user?

It's hard to appreciate what you are saying when you're basically judging the incentive of economic/technological progress as an inmmoral behavior (in this case the intention of improving a technology)

Labeling data and training a machine learning model sounds far from inmoral. Perhaps for some people the idea of companies developing machine learning models and capturing data to train them is an ethically gray concept.

<comment><USER58> Does Amazon clearly says that everything you say to Alexa will be recorded and reviewed by its employees? Or they prefer to hide this somewhere in the legal documents using vague wordings? That's what is wrong. They know that if they say about it explicitly, their product will look worse than competitors', so they try to hide it.

<comment><USER59> Everything you say is not reviewed by employees, that would be impossible given the scale. It clearly says in the article that a very small sample are chosen for human annotation. Every single voice assistant uses supervised machine learning algorithmns, which require labeled data. It won't look better or worse than any of the others in that regard.

<comment><USER58> Yes, I meant "everything you say is recorded and _might be_ reviewed by employees". But Amazon doesn't have to make every customer a beta-tester. And Alexa could give a warning when setting up for the first time, something like "Look, we are recording everything you tell me so please don't say something too embarassing or something that might get you into a trouble with police". While this is what any honest person should do, no way Amazon or any other major tech company does this.

<comment><USER59> I don't disagree, it probably should be made more explicit to customers that someone could listen to certain things said to the device. I just wanted to point out that there is a big difference between reviewing everything a customer says and having the possibility of certain phrases reviewed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Earlier today someone made a tongue-in-cheek comment about [https://notnews.ycombinator.com](https://notnews.ycombinator.com). I thought it was flippant, but here this article's title proves that it was prescient, instead.

</comment><comment><USER61> No surprise there

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm shocked. Shocked!

<comment><USER63> I don't think the sarcasm is warranted, because as technical people, we already implicitly understand how the system works.

I was listening to Reply All [0] yesterday, and one of the hosts had to explain to the other that, of course, the device has to listen to you to constantly in some fashion in order to know if you've said 'Alexa' or 'OK Google' or whatever.

It hadn't even occurred to me that people wouldn't know that.

[0] [https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/139-the-reply-all- hotl...](https://www.gimletmedia.com/reply-all/139-the-reply-all- hotline#episode-player)

<comment><USER58> I think the problem is not that the device is listening. The problem is that users' recording and seacrh queries are saved to the cloud, stored indefinitely and reviewed by other people. And some users might even not realise it and think that they are just talking to a robot, not to a team of Amazon's employees.

<comment><USER63> You're right, of course. I think I was just reacting to the tone of the earlier comment

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> >Millions more are reluctant to invite the devices and their powerful microphones into their homes out of concern that someone might be listening.

Sometimes, someone is.

This wording is misleading, because it sounds like someone is listening through the device as the speech is being picked up by it, but in fact it's recordings.

<comment><USER65> What is a recording? Does a 10 millisecond delay mean it is a recording? What is the legally binding lock-out time for this audio stream before a human can listen to it?

<comment><USER64> A recording is end pointed audio captured and stored on a server and reviewed later.

There is no legally binding lock out time because there doesn't need to be. Live-listening is impractical at scale and also worthless for what the article is describing they do with the data.

Remember, this work is being done to make it so humans _don't_ have to be in the loop.

<comment><USER65> Why is live-listening impractical at scale? How can Discord provide such a service? You seem to be conflating Amazon's intent with the unknowable intent of anyone that can touch such data, which is a common fatal flaw in reasoning.

<comment><USER64> >Why is live-listening impractical at scale?

Because there is no value in doing so. A person could collect all the spare change thrown into fountains at shopping malls, but they don't.

<comment><USER32> If I worked on voice search I would wish to have full context to train my models on. Full context could be year long. Ethics are an issue here for sure.

<comment><USER64> Sure. But the devices don't do that.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Snapchat: another example of the hubris of privilege and systematic bias in tech - <AUTHOR> http://blog.samiurr.com/snapchat-another-example-of-the-hubris-of-privilege <comment><USER2> The problem with posts like these is that you assume you know what's going on in the head of another person. That's a dangerous game to play.

Also, just because someone makes a decision that's different from the decision you would have made doesn't mean their decision was the "wrong" decision. You would have taken the money, I would have taken the money, and I'm sure a lot of others would have taken the money. However, choosing not to take the money isn't the "wrong" choice, it's just a different choice. And, given that he had all the information about the deal (or at the very least more information than the rest of us), I'd say calling his decision wrong when you hardly have any information on it at all is its own form hypocritical hubris.

Anyway, morals of the story are (1) different !== wrong and (2) it's best not to judge the actions of others, especially when you're lacking the details.

PS. I am so judging you.

PPS. I am also fine with being a hypocrite.

<comment><AUTHOR> OP here. Completely agree that "wrong" is a subjective and relative measure. It depends on what one's priorities are: utility to the world or personal profit or whatever else. I did make an assumption about Evan's intentions and thought-process, but his action remains the same. He passed up taking cash for Snapchat, an app that has no real value in my personal opinion. He also passed up the opportunity, in my opinion, to take that cash and create something of real value. I may be wrong to come to those conclusions, but they are my opinions. I suppose you can call it hubris to post my opinion on the internet, as it is obviously comparable to turning down billions of dollars for a useless product.

<comment><USER2> I posted a reply here before HN crashed but it seems to not have been brought back when HN came back up.

Here's the gist: it's not that posting an opinion online is hubris, it's what your opinion entails and is based on. You have no facts about the deal, and no qualifications to speak on good business acquisitions. You call the product "worthless" while teams of people at Facebook and Google seem to value it very highly. I'm going to have to assume that the people FB and Google hire are all very intelligent and capable at their jobs, and they see value in purchasing the company (which is why they made the offer). You, however, with no information have decided they're all morons and you know better because SnapChat is "worthless". That, my friend, is indeed hubris. You assume that you know more than everyone else who has far more intimate knowledge of the company and product.

Here's the moral of the story: just because something seems "worthless" to you doesn't mean that it has no worth to anyone else. If other highly trained and educated people say it's worth quite a bit of money, then, perhaps, you should re-evaluate your viewpoint.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The Snapchat founder is incompetent because of his race, gender, and socio- economic status. Got it.

<comment><AUTHOR> If that's the takeaway you got from my post, then I'm sorry: I was not able to articulate myself well.

There's no doubt that he's talented and gifted. And it's possible that I'm absolutely wrong and Evan and Snapchat are planning some amazing features. But I highly doubt that, and I would propose that it would be more pragmatic to take the cash offered and do something more meaningful.

<comment><USER3> That money isn't coming out of thin air. Why is the onus not on Facebook or Google to use the $3 billion and $4 billion they were going to use to buy Snapchat on something more meaningful? Why is it Spiegel's responsibility? Especially if he didn't ask for the offers in the first place?

<comment><USER4> Completely agree. Whenever I see articles about how "[founder] rejects offer from Google/FB/Apple for [$X]" and the resulting criticism that the founder must be shortsighted, I never see any discussion on the other side fo the fence. Why on earth does Google or Facebook think Snapchat is worth any money? _Somebody_ over there does, do they have the same mentality as Spiegel?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _Evan Spiegel is just another talented but arrogant, unaware-of-his-own- privilege guy._

To his credit, he's aware of it:

 _I bring this up because I want to acknowledge inequality. At Stanford, and in Silicon Valley, we perpetuate the myth of meritocracy. We believe that the harder we work, the more we will achieve. The more effort that we take to craft ourselves, and our brands, the more opportunities we will create for ourselves.

But in Cape Town, and in America, and across the world - This is not true. I am a young, white, educated male. I got really, really lucky. And life isn't fair. So if life isn't fair - It's not about working harder; it's about working the system._

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/135235429/Design-Yourself- Conferen...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/135235429/Design-Yourself-Conference- Opening-Keynote-by-Evan-Spiegel-CEO-of-Snapchat)

</comment><comment><USER6> I assume that Snapchat has had more offers to buy it than just Facebook and Google. Probably many hundreds offers starting at a few thousand, to a few hundred thousand, to a million. When do you stop and sell out? Is there a right time? I might have considered it at a billion but apparently that would have been a mere 25% of what I could get for it.

The rest of the article is idiotic: "Evan is only 23 years old, a straight white male, and _chances are_ , has never been denied anything in his life." _Chances are_ I can make up anything I want about someone's life to fit whatever narrative I'm trying to express.

</comment><comment><USER7> I dislike this article because it uses the auspices of privilege and bias to talk about one guy being essentially a fool in the writer's eyes. Privilege and bias are not the reasons I point to for anyone refusing a seemingly good offer. Evan might know things we as outsiders do not, he might be selfish, he might foolish but that seems to me to have little to do with his race, his sex or his socioeconomic background.

</comment><comment><USER8> Guess Google was incompetent for not selling to Yahoo and aiming big. Glad we got this cleared up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Surely you must admit that there is a massive difference between the potential of Google and Snapchat.

<comment><USER9> Hindsight is 20/20\. What was Google when Yahoo turned them over?

<comment><USER10> At the time, I was still aware that it was a much better search engine than anything Yahoo had.

<comment><USER11> What was the perceived worth of search engines as a general concept back then though? That's the relevant question, not which search was best.

<comment><USER10> It was immediately obvious that search engines were worthwhile - that's actually the origin of Yahoo's name - "Yahoo, I can finally find stuff on the www!" Before search engines started getting really good, we relied on stuff like web rings and other indexes of sites.

<comment><USER11> Were they making money though, just from the search side of things? Yahoo expanded into being a "media company" and portal as a way to generate revenue - search was just one way to get people in the door. Sorry, that's what I meant by worth (financial worth).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think not selling for a clearly outrageous valuation tells us something else is at play here. I suspect, this is this mans life's work and he doesn't wish to sell it.

When you find your life's work (as I have), you will understand.

Until then, your assumptions that your priorities are more important or valid than his shows your own ignorance, not his.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think the author is missing one important bit - most of modern world (or at least the people who built modern technology companies) is created by people like that - middle/upper class white males who know they could take risks because if things don't work out, they still are ok.

Would Gates or Zuckerberg drop out of Harvard if they were the first in their family to attend college with immigrant parents demanding to know why they're not a doctor/lawyer - probably not.

PS I'd also like people to stop using the formulaic 'straight white male' as if one's sexual proclivities make any difference here. Ie someone writing about a field where this matters (say pro sports or fashion industry to pick opposite examples) - fine, talk about it. Otherwise please stop regurgitating same PC keyword over and over.

</comment><comment><USER14> I really don't think his background/race/gender is much to blame. I think it's more of him being overly idealistic and letting all of his success go to his head. It's great that he thinks that Snapchat has the potential to go onto be something worth more than 4 billion, but he needs to be realistic. Snapchat is just a social utility app. I don't see an obvious path for revenue generation and growth without some sort of acquisitions/merger deal. Hopefully he has some good plans for Snapchat's future.

</comment><comment><USER15> _" It is filled with Evan Spiegels, brash young white men who have the world at their feet and have never known the problems of others. This is partly "_

This statement is inaccurate at best, more than 1/2 of start-ups in the valley and 25% nationwide are by immigrants (overwhelmingly Asian). So to say it is "filled by white men" is to ignore that a growing bulk of founders are foreign-born and non-white.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good thing you responded to a statement that admittedly lacked data with a statement that also lacked any real data except some statistics pulled out of the derriere. Here's a real study done that found that 87% of VC-backed startup founders are white, and 89% of VC-backed startup founders are male: [http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/data-race- gen...](http://www.cbinsights.com/blog/venture-capital/data-race-gender- silicon-valley-venture-capital-diversity)

<comment><USER15> Actually, before attacking someone you need to do bit more research: [http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/10/15/how- india...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/singularity/2012/10/15/how-indians- defied-gravity-and-achieved-success-in-silicon-valley/)

Also look up Anna Lee Saxenian's work. [http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~anno/Papers/Americas_new...](http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~anno/Papers/Americas_new_immigrant_entrepreneurs_II.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "Evan Spiegel showed his arrogance to the world by turning down the offers..." So because someone will not sell his/her company, that means the person is arrogant. Wow. Speaking of arrogance...

</comment><comment><USER17> Why would you sell your company for $4B, when you're growing by 15% a month or whatever and are very likely to be worth >$10B by the end of the year and quite likely to be worth $20B the year after??

<comment><USER18> That $4B is about potential, not scale. Growing by 15% does not increase the value by 15%!

<comment><USER17> Correct, that's why I wrote $10B and not $4B * 1.15^12 = $21B.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> "Renaissance Engineer" <\- samiur is another arrogant asshat, upset that his pet project (and I'm only guessing samiur is a guy) isn't worth $4B to Google.

</comment><comment><USER20> I am really confused. I thought snapchap "turned down" the money because they wanted to see next quarter's numbers before opening a conversation about an acquisition. They didn't say "no we're not selling", they said something along the lines of "talk to us in 6 months". I can't find the source but that was my initial impression when I read the first article on this topic.

</comment><comment><USER21> To me the take away is that he doesn't care that his company exposed the private information of the company's users.

</comment><comment><USER22> So if Evan Speigels had been female, black and poor (i.e. not privileged) he would have taken the money and that would have been the right thing to do? Why because people without privilege are incapable of being stupid or greedy?

</comment><comment><USER23> I think you're expecting a lot out of someone who is 23.

<comment><AUTHOR> That maybe so, but so are the people who invested in Snapchat. By the way, I am 23 myself. I'm not saying that everyone at 23 needs to be mature with their thinking of the world, but we should at least promote the ones that are.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> >Evan Spiegel is just another talented but arrogant, unaware-of-his-own- privilege guy.

From a profile on Spiegel in LA Weekly:

"John Spiegel strove to make sure his children understood that their life was privileged. Every Christmas, he would take them to hand out food at Head Start centers. Through their church, All Saints Episcopal in Beverly Hills, they traveled to Mexico to build houses for the poor"

"He laid out his case in a letter to his father on Feb. 12, 2008. He began by thanking his father for working so hard to afford "such an amazing lifestyle," assuring him that he understood how privileged they were. "We live in a bubble," Evan wrote."

"But where he is a real outlier is in his attitude toward his own success. One of the cherished ideas of the tech world is that success is based on talent and hard work, and that everyone has an equal chance. But Spiegel, who grew up in a wealthy family, has little use for what he calls "the myth of meritocracy." Where others see success as a function of effort, he sees it as luck."

[http://www.laweekly.com/2013-10-17/news/snapchat-evan- spiege...](http://www.laweekly.com/2013-10-17/news/snapchat-evan- spiegel/full/)

I would say these statements fly directly into the face of your characterization of Spiegel.

>I would be hard-pressed to find someone who thought Snapchat was actually useful to the world. Popular, yes, and fun too, but not particularly useful. Certainly not $4 billion useful. To turn down that amount of money means that Evan sees Snapchat as his primary priority. With $4 billion, Evan could easily fund multiple new startups that are doing meaningful work to change the world (or at least make money!).

Couldn't you dismiss Facebook and Twitter with the same criticism? Who determines what is useful to the world? Enhancing communication isn't the same as curing cancer, but I think you could argue there is some benefit from connecting people?

I'm not sure where you get that his refusal to accept a buyout makes him more out of touch. Do you think Zuck should have sold out at 1 billion to Yahoo so he could go build and invest in other companies? Isn't there a Zuckerburg quote where he said if he sold Facebook, he would go out and build the same company again? Also isn't it plausible to believe that Instagram sold out too early?

So why are you faulting a guy for thinking that his billion dollar company (which comes around very rarely) is his main goal right now? He probably recognizes that this is his one shot at becoming a tech icon, is it absurd to swing for the fences?</comment>