We Post Nothing About Our Daughter Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/09/facebook_privacy_and_kids_don_t_post_photos_of_your_kids_online.html <comment><USER2> This seems incredibly odd to me.

On one hand, they indicate strongly valued privacy with the "no posts about the child" rule; seemingly recognizing the hidden costs of permissive 'oversharing'.

But, on the other hand, they place a very high importance on reserving (vanity) domain and user names, securing the right for her to sharecrop out her personal information in as-accurate-a-means as possible; reinforcing the _value_ and importance of being able to overshare?

e.g. Reserving JaneAnnSmith.com at birth to ... what? Spare her the inconvenience/indirection of someone else buying that domain in the intervening years and her having to instead register jasmith.com or (heaven forbid) jane-ann-smith.com ?

Securing facebook.com/janeannsmith to spare her facebook.com/123456789 or something?

And does anyone even think for a moment that it's likely for today's real- name-based social networks will be relevant, years from now?

Reserving a Facebook name today is akin to having reserved a geocities name, at birth, for a child who will graduate high school next year -- and that's for the earliest of early adopters. Were the name registered for a child born around geocities peak, that child may still be in _junior high_.

The ephemeral nature of these networks (over such time frames) only further underscores the apparent importance the parents are placing on _precisely_ identifying her online history. (getting that facebook username _just in case_ it's still relevant...)

It seems rather than teaching their child to value privacy, to understand the power/benefit dynamic of these networks, to hopefully avoid her growing up forever linked to juvenile mis-steps, they're instead raising her to be a narcissist.

That is: Not to value her privacy and personal identity in and of themselves, but to value privacy and personal identity as a tool to 'spin' her public identity in the most-favorable fashion.

<comment><USER3> People keep saying facebook will disappear... but maybe it won't? Maybe it will become like email, less used but ever-present.

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, I believe Facebook toed over that critical mass that has moved it into a long-term dominator of social networking. It has long since passed the point where it's going to just go away and be replaced by something else, like Myspace and other past social sites were. They may not be around forever, but it seems unlikely they'll be unseated any time soon. We are no longer in an age where a bunch of geeks moving on to something new changes the dynamic of the internet. We are now in a time when the average Joe Sixpack and his grandmother don't look for new things, don't try new things, and don't care about new things. They will stick with Facebook indefinitely, the same way a lot of people still stick with the big three over the air networks for their sole television entertainment.

<comment><USER5> AOL is still around, and my sister still has, and uses (infrequently)and aol.com address. Though she would prefer I communicated via facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm a new parent and my wife and I are not taking any measures to minimize our kid's Facebook exposure.

As a general rule, it's pretty safe to "do what everybody else is doing." If Facebook albums parents made for kids when they were little come back to haunt this coming generation as a group, the ills will be remedied either by making or using certain sorts of analysis illegal (the college application hypothetical) or society will adapt by adjusting perceptions of certain information (the prom date hypothetical).

It is illustrative to note how the national reaction to youth drug use in presidential candidates changed from Clinton ("I didn't inhale") to G.W.B. to Obama ("maybe a little blow"). Similar adaptation will happen when it comes to information on Facebook and the like.

<comment><USER7> _As a general rule, it 's pretty safe to do "what everybody else is doing."_

I noticed this rule after the housing crash. If one person was underwater on their mortgage, no one would blink. But, when hundreds of thousands of people become underwater, Congress started to get involved to (attempt to) provide relief.

It seems impossible to limit someone's exposure on Facebook, especially when any 3rd party will happily post a photo of your family member online. I also suspect that untagging a person on FB is analogous to FB's soft-deleting of statuses. The damage is already done.

<comment><USER8> > _I noticed this rule after the housing crash. If one person was underwater > on their mortgage, no one would blink. But, when hundreds of thousands of > people become underwater, Congress started to get involved to (attempt to) > provide relief._

Considering that hundrends of thousadns still lost their houses, it's not much of a comfort -- or good advice in general.

"Do what everybody else is doing" will at best lead to mediocre results (by definition).

Consider the effect of such an advice to someone in a slum neighborhood where "everybody" is dealing drugs, to get the worst case scenario.

<comment><USER9> Yes. Something about bridge jumping.

<comment><USER10> I hate it when people say this as a response.

If I'm on a bridge, and people are jumping off en masse, then one of two things is happening:

1\. They've all been mentally affected, in which case, I almost certainly am too, or;

2\. They know something I don't.

It's disingenuous to throw out a contrived example of a herd of people nonsensically jumping off a bridge. If that many people are jumping off a bridge, _you probably should too,_ because they probably know something you don't (yet).

<comment><USER11> There was a great Dilbert that had his mum asking him the "if everyone jumped off a bridge, would you?" question. His response was along the lines of "if they all came back and told me how awesome it was, yes".

<comment><USER12> Also, this:

[http://xkcd.com/1170/](http://xkcd.com/1170/)

"Imagine reading this on CNN: 'Many fled their vehicles and jumped from the bridge. Those who stayed behind...'"

<comment><USER13> Thank you, this puts a great twist on the situation.. basically saying that if all of his generally smart, sane friends all of a sudden jumped off a bridge, most likely there was a REALLY good reason behind why they did it

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > When we think she's mature enough (an important distinction from her being > technically old enough), we'll hand her an envelope with her master password > inside.

Let me guess. She'll probably reject that envelope for the following reasons:

1\. The account is known to be compromised (being under a third party control). Even if parent credentials could be removed, there's still a possibility they could gain access with social engineering with support, as they know detailed history of the account.

2\. Unless she's completely monitored and barred from any network access, she'd probably already have another set of accounts by that time. Otherwise would signify she doesn't need any.

3\. By that time she'd have her own perception of her own identity, that would be likely (but not necessarily) different from her parents' view of the time she didn't have much of personality - which is enough of a reason to reject the mismatching accounts and create ones to her own tastes.

<comment><USER15> I imagine it being pretty funny and old fashioned thinking when she is presented with the envelope.

"Ya, rite M&P. I'll get rite on this and... whatever..." rolling her eyes as her attention returns to the table top augmented reality reality show where she virtually lives with all her favorite Disney, Nickelodeon, Fox, ESPN, Democrat, Republican, Tea Party, and Occupy celebrities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> > We turned to KnowEm.com, a website I often rely on to search for usernames, > even though the site is primarily intended as a brand registration service. > We certainly had a front-runner for her name, but we would have chosen > something different if the KnowEm results produced limited availability or > if we found negative content associated with our selection.

> With her name decided, we spent several hours registering her URL and a vast > array of social media sites. All of that tied back to a single email > account, which would act as a primary access key. We listed my permanent > email address as a secondary -- just as you'd fill out financial paperwork > for a minor at a bank. We built a password management system for her to > store all of her login information.

> On the day of her birth, our daughter already had accounts at Facebook, > Twitter, Instagram, and even Github. And to this day, we've never posted any > content.

While I can definitely understand the sentiment and have thought about doing similar things, seeing it all laid out like this seems very strange.

1) Is your twitter/gmail username really that important? Is this sort of personal pre-SEO really that much of an issue? And if it is, won't that just put enormous pressure on new services every generation as people want the slate (username and searchability) wiped clean for themselves?

2) Shouldn't setting all of this up be something your kid eventually does (or that you help them do)? Isn't the presumption that your kid wants a Facebook and Github account a pretty specific one?

<comment><USER17> On the other hand, it's never too early to start helicopter parenting.

<comment><USER18> Exactly. This article is a great compliment to the discussion yesterday about how society is increasingly risk-averse. This seems like a crazy amount of parental effort to resist what will seem like totally banal cultural norms to their daughter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The author is wrong because she assumes social customs are immutable. They aren't.

In 2028 there will be nothing embarrassing about appearing in thousands of online photos dating back to your birth. Because _almost everyone_ will be in the same boat.

In fact, it may be considered weird and suspicious if there's not much online content about you.

<comment><USER8> > _In 2028 there will be nothing embarrassing about appearing in thousands of > online photos dating back to your birth. Because almost everyone will be in > the same boat._

Or you know, those that aren't will have it as an advantage.

Like how everybody is nearly overweight, but still those are aren't have a leg up.

<comment><USER19> I'll grant that it's logically possible.

But I don't really understand why people think it's disadvantageous if others can find out whether or not you were cute when you were two years old. I think it has more to do with fear of what's new than any logical argument.

Putting my money where my mouth is, here is my son:

[http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7402/9525304181_8da5d48e22_b.j...](http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7402/9525304181_8da5d48e22_b.jpg)

In what future dystopia will the presence of this photo on the public internet harm him? "Ooh, I see here that you once looked at the ocean as a child. You're fired."

<comment><USER20> Simple example: Your pretty child is also quite a bit overweight. Or fell and got a big bruise that you for some reason just treated yourself and failed to bring up in some health insurance form.

Less trivial stuff (like having acne) has been used to deny people coverage when they've been diagnosed with cancer.

This is just of the top off my head, which is the point: We simply don't _know_ what might happen in the future. Most probably (and hopefully) not much, put we don't know.

<comment><USER21> (1) that kid is not overweight and (2) it's actually OK from a medical perspective for a child to be a little overweight, as children grow in bursts, have a much better metabolism and their day is filled with plenty of exercise.

And in fact, if a kid doesn't have some meat on their bones, that's a reason for concern.

<comment><USER20> Agreed, but you're not making the argument that a potential health insurance company would (like the acne case I mentioned). And again, this is just off the top of my head. One specific case, one specific instance of "I didn't see that coming", while there may be lots and lots of other such cases.

[Edit: To make it clear, I haven't even looked at the picture previously posted, I was providing an unrelated example.]

<comment><USER22> This level of fear and worry about what an insurance company might try to argue seems too high, and not because insurance companies don't deny people for silly reasons, but because it literally isn't worth the years of fear and worry next to how little it will probably help. There are better sources of reasons to deny people, anyway, than pictures of chubby kids.

<comment><USER20> Again, this was just _one_ example of the top off my head. I could probably have come up with lots of others. My point being that we don't know how what we post today might be used in the future. Saying that it's not going to have consequences because everyone else will also do it is a very weak argument.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Just to add some context, the author also wrote a quantified self article about documenting every thing her daughter did [1] (time, food taken, diaper wetness, color of urine, thickness of poop, sleep habits, etc). These are not your standard parents.

1: [http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/07...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/data_mine_1/2013/07/data_driven_parenting_tracking_baby_sleep_eating_and_pooping_on_spreadsheets.html)

<comment><USER2> To be fair, many 'new parent' classes urge people to record a good bit of that information, in the event that the child is having trouble gaining weight, has an illness, etc.

Mix that 'good advice' with the 'quantified self' band-wagon that rolled through and it doesn't seem too crazy for a journalist to have taken up that torch -- at least long enough for an article or three.

To have continued well after it became clear that their child was properly growing/healthy -- and other article subjects presented themselves -- would be something different though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's not you who uploads the pics, it's your friends and family, then they tag the faces. Then fb steals your friends address book info using the facebook app/email connections and builds out a network and ghost profile just for you.

You might never use facebook but you're on there. All of us are. Because your friends don't give a damn about privacy and screwed the pooch.

And Zuck knows. That's why he said on stage we'll all eventually have a profile, with his weird all-knowing nerd giggle (youtube 'zuckerburgs 10 evil seconds'), because even a ghost profile is still a profile, it's got data. It's verified. And you'll never delete it. Ever.

This ain't going back in.

<comment><USER25> Can they create profiles for children under 13? Can I sue them if my 10 year old child has a ghost profile?

<comment><USER24> How would you know?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> > I adore Kate's parents, and they're raising her to be an amazing young > woman. But they're essentially robbing her of a digital adulthood that's > free of bias and presupposition.

Oh god, these types of smug parents annoy the crap out of me. This is the digital version of the mom who lectures you for letting your kid watch Sesame Street or eats Frosted Flakes, because don't you know sugar/TV are going to destroy his mind and body.

<comment><USER27> True. Also, her daughter is going to be plenty embarrassed by her mom's high- anxiety-parenting (including, but not limited to the poop-tracking) when these articles are dug up by her friends in middle school.

<comment><USER26> Yeah. "We don't want any information about our kid online, that's why we are writing articles about her pooping habits on Slate."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> So they're not posting anything about her online, but she's got more social- media accounts than the average American? How does proclaiming her existence to the digital world's user lists protect her from "facial recognition, Facebook profiling, and corporate data mining"? Like any human - when she reaches the age where these things become relevant, she'll either use the ones these companies have known about for a decade, or she'll create her own account that Mom & Dad aren't monitoring.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think this is, digitally, fighting the last war.

Kids grow up in their own world, not ours. The idea of checking domain names and Instagram account names _before_ choosing the child's name is hilarious to me. Like domain names and Instagram are going to matter to teenagers 16 years from now.

<comment><USER29> Domain names are about as close as you can get to infrastructure digital world - so, they may matter - but perhaps not.

Instagram? Who's to say - but my hunch is you're right.

We purchased a few name related domain names for our firstborn - if they're useless or unwanted, so it goes, but the downside risk seemed minor enough that I decided to go for it. I mean, when you compare it with all the other kid gear that gets used for 2-12 months before it's outgrown, domain names are a cheap extravagance. (Even when considering the holding cost)

<comment><USER18> I'd argue that domain names don't matter much right now, for people. How many teenagers have their own name as a domain? How many even want one? Heck, how many adults have or want one? Even with the .name TLD, I don't feel like it's ever really taken off. And there might be a ton of new TLDs in use 15 years from now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> You live life, you leave a trail, this hasn't changed in the digital world, only made more convenient. For your kids to live in the world of the future and interact with others, they will need an identity, it is unavoidable unless they want to live off-the-grid in bush country.

We can see grade school and high school pictures of famous celebrities because pictures were taken with analog film cameras once. We can see old baby pictures of people who are 65 years old today because photography has existed for over a century.

Maybe you're not taking pictures of your daughter, but someone else will, and they can tag her with metadata for their own purposes.

I don't post my kids pictures publicly (I do to close friends), not for hyperbolic fears that someone might profile them and show them a targeted ad (The Horrors!), but because honesty, I've seen enough weirdos doing stuff with people's pictures online that I don't want them showing up on some jackass's website, especially ones people fap off to. Especially true for young girls, as there are people who steal portraits from other sites and they end up in spammy popup ads or worse.

But even that is a losing battle, as again, photos are taken everywhere by everyone. As the cost of cameras goes to zero, they will be omnipresent, and as networking becomes more and more ubiquitous, a world where you are always being filmed and classified is inevitable. It won't even require centralized governments or corporations to scale, just ordinary people filming decentralized.

<comment><USER31> > Maybe you're not taking pictures of your daughter, but someone else will, > and they can tag her with metadata for their own purposes.

The article didn't mention anything about not taking photos, it was simply about not sharing them publicly in any fashion. That's pretty much how it has been until the past few years--most photos were kept private.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> People talk about stealth candidates in politics. I suspect that phrase will take on new meaning in the future. We'll have candidates whose histories will have been protected from public knowledge in this way.

<comment><USER33> Or maybe even candidates who have meticulously constructed fake histories for themselves from a young age.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Admirable, but naive. Facial recognition of baby pics is useless for the most part. By the time their daughter is 18 she will have plenty of tagged pictures of herself. Cameras are already everywhere and their use is accelerating. Google Glasses like devices are coming. And your picture ID is already used for facial recognition.

</comment><comment><USER35> This approach is doomed to failure. From the moment their daughter starts spending time with people outside her immediate family, she will start showing up in others' photos and her face will be linked to those people. Given that there's some unknown person who repeatedly shows up with certain people, the second her name leaks somewhere it will be easy to reveal her history.

Even without face recognition, disparate 'anonymous' accounts on different sites can be linked to her, as long as a few associates can be linked to real- world people [1].

[1] [http://www.academia.edu/1518346/Link_Prediction_in_Highly_Fr...](http://www.academia.edu/1518346/Link_Prediction_in_Highly_Fractional_Data_Sets)

</comment><comment><USER36> Most sites close accounts if they're for someone under the age of X. (18, 13?) So, these accounts are really the parents accounts, just in the name of the daughter, right?

> The process started in earnest as we were selecting her name. We'd narrowed > the list down to a few alternatives and ran each (and their variants) > through domain and keyword searches to see what was available. Next, we > crawled through Google to see what content had been posted with those name > combinations, and we also looked to see if a Gmail address was open.

Wait, what? Surely calling your daughter "Jane Doe" would be best, because then you could claim "Oh no, that's not me!" when presented with articles about drunken rampages or whatever. It'd be hard to find out if you were Jane_Doe_9297376 or Jane_Doe_91919229191.

For some reason I feel sorry for the child named with a pleasing combination of name and TLD.

</comment><comment><USER37> Sorry this article has everything wrong about it. Reading this article makes me feel bad for the daughter of the author. I mean seriously ? A classic example of bad parenting in my opinion. So you are not going to post anything online. great. What about offline ? What about living life ? Everything has a trail, everything. This online post by the author itself has a trail that can be tracked to their daughter if someone really wants to.

Kids are not some kind of machine or algorithm that you can program in certain way. Seriously, what's wrong with some parents. Teach your kids the value of privacy by taking a balanced approach and not doing crazy things like reserving domain names and what not. Just because you are not posting anything online does not mean there is no trail. There always is and who knows what the digital world will be like in 20 years.

</comment><comment><USER38> Disclaimer: I am working on a project in this space with the goal to give parents more control on how to share pictures of their baby (www.getbabydigest.com)

While the author of this article seems to take things to a certain extreme, I think this is a legitimate concern for parents today. Being a new parent, I consider my wife and I to be the average facebook "parent" users. We have a need to share pictures of our kid with close friends and family and since facebook most easily meets that need, my wife and I do post pictures of our kid there. We try to limit it to things we think would not be too embarrassing for him when he looks back them years from now.

It's hard however to know how he is going to react to them 10-20 years from now, let alone any impact it may have on his identity as he gets older. For now, sharing on Facebook, seems like the best alternative to email since its so easy to post and get feedback. I've looked at other alternatives (23snaps, kidfolio) but they all require re-creating my network from scratch which has been a non-starter for me. I think we're lacking a more private, secure alternative to Facebook that still makes sharing & commenting as easy as Facebook. And more importantly does not sell your data.

</comment><comment><USER39> I think these are outsized reactions to the problems described. I also don't believe there aren't any photos of their child online. As a new parent I can't imagine not using the Internet to share updates with my family whether it's via tumblr or something less public like email or an Apple Photo Stream. Most of these services have facial recognition.

Finding a balance between privacy and ease of sharing is something parents are going to wrestle with from now on. And, In the event you trade in your privacy to Facebook, you don't even get a worthwhile service. Facebook albums aren't designed with children in mind -- they don't care about a child's growth, they makes no notes on a child's milestones.

I've started trying to solve this problem with some fellow parents. At the very least I hope we can give people one less thing to worry about. If you'd like to chat about the possibilities and challenges in this space or what my research has uncovered so far, please find me on Twitter: @conceptualitis

</comment><comment><USER40> So if I'm reading this right, they don't post _pictures_ , but they made sure her name was easily Googleable?

My name is Michael Roberts. Go ahead. Try to find out who I am from Google. I mean, sure, throw in my username here and you get my site since that was meant to be findable, but still - from my name alone, I'm effectively anonymous.

</comment><comment><USER41> The biggest problem with this I see (beyond the general creepiness of it and the huge impression I get that this is less about privacy and more about wanting to preemptively micromanage your kid's potential future "brand") is the futility of it. I'm lost as to how squatting handles and URLs and profile names and domains on a dozen internet services somehow protects someone's identity or anonymity or would actually prevent them from being impersonated, which are the stated goals according to the article.

I'm not inclined to believe that this is an effective long game, either. A small fraction of these services are going to be relevant in five, ten, fifteen years. If my parents had tried the same thing before I was born (not long after web browsers were invented), they would have been worried about reserving BBS login names for me. I have to expect that the broad majority of people my age now don't even know what a BBS is.

</comment><comment><USER42> I did just about everything wrong by this author's lights--posted plenty of photos and updates, gave them their own e-mail and social media accounts, etc. It didn't even occur to me to weigh their poops or do any sort of qualitative analysis of their urine! Somehow... _Somehow_ , I says, they managed to turn out all right.

</comment><comment><USER43> What a great idea!

I haven't done the 'sign up for everything' piece, but my wife and I have made a conscious effort to minimize what we post about our daughter online. We don't refer to her by name, we don't tag her in photos, we minimize photos of her. Now, we both have active online lives, so we talk about her online, but hopefully in a respectful manner. Sometimes it is really hard to resist sharing that cute photo, simply because sites, FB in particular, make sharing so easy, but I think we've found a path that works for us.

I think a lot of parents, especially less privacy aware and/or tech savvy ones, are not aware of what they are doing for their kids when they post photos online. (Just as few non technical folks I have talked to know that the links at the top of Google search results are ads.) They just want to share information (mostly pictures) with friends and families.

</comment><comment><USER44> Provocative article, but as with many things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.

I think it's cute people think social networks (in their current form) will still be around in 18 years. Technology will be in a place that probably very few of us can fathom at this current juncture. I like one of the users' comments on here that the act of registering all of these accounts for their child is akin to registering a geocities name back in the day. We all laugh at it now.

Like I said, the answer is somewhere in the middle. You don't have to do all or nothing. Just be judicious, as you would in your non-digital life (I would hope). Anything in excess can become problematic.

When my partner and I have a child some day, we'll probably be very careful about what we post online. It won't be excessive, but we won't be hermits either as unexisting can be just as odd/problematic as superexisting.

</comment><comment><USER45> This is dumb beyond belief.

Amazing how important some people believe themselves and their little angels to be. If my 3 month old daughter grows up to be significant enough that my bathtub picture of her somehow has impact on her future then I hope to have raised her well enough to recognize the humor in that situation.

</comment><comment><USER46> The services you sign up for are unlikely to exist in 10 years time let alone 20.

<comment><USER47> It's quite likely that the content itself may well be mirrored to an archive as has happened with geocities. It's likely that any truly embarrassing or interesting picture will be pretty much immortal online.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I think it's great that the parents are at least putting some thought into protecting their daughter's privacy online, even including the choice of her name. My name is so dirt common that unless you know something else about me, there's no way you're going to be able to zero in on articles about me, and I like that. One of my brother's children is named after one of our great grandparents, OTOH, and I'm reasonably sure there's nobody in that age group with that name. (Probably nobody under 70, even.) I'm not sure how I feel about that.

</comment><comment><USER49> This article is written by a parent and being debated by pseudo-teenagers (~ 15-25 age group). Of course it'll be ripped apart just like my comment :) Who needs privacy until you are a parent yourself.

<comment><USER50> There is something like twice as many people using HN who are older than 25 than there are younger than 25, if the most recent age poll is to be believed: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058598](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6058598)

The old _" you wouldn't understand if you aren't a yourself parent"_ line really is tiresome.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> I don't post (much, though not nothing) about my son online, but for different reasons. The idea that you're going to realistically provide some kind of anonymity capability by not posting pics of your kid of FB is a fantasy. Facial recognition is going to be part of reality due to state, private, and personal facial recognition capabilities. At school, in public, at work, facial recognition technologies will track everyone - there will be no opting out and it won't matter what you did or didn't post on FB.

Resistance is futile.

</comment><comment><USER52> I'm not sure how they intend to police photos of their daughter as taken by cameras not under their control, or on accounts not under their control, or other information posted about her by friends and family. Given the technologies involved, it would not be terribly hard to infer the daughter's photographs and personal information (name, etc.) and connect the two. There's also the very real possibility that she may not be interested in their idea of her personality and identity by the time she's grown up.

<comment><USER53> You write articles about how you want your childs privacy to be respected and hope some of your friends pay attention.

I have a young child, it's normal for most people to ask my permission before putting photos of him on facebook. Generally, the people who live their lives on facebook over-sharing everything don't tend to ask, though I don't know too many people like that..

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> I know this is smarmy but, check out this screen shot with a google ad in the article: [http://imgur.com/dB9cyeQ](http://imgur.com/dB9cyeQ)

</comment><comment><USER55> So glad my parents signed up for my own personal ARPANET node before I was born. (Unfortunately, they were only able to snag a class B address space.)

</comment><comment><USER56> Whatever happens to their daughter is going to happen to the entire world, pretty much, and thus is going to have to be addressed collectively by our future selves anyway. We just have to stand up to those who misuse the data in discriminatory ways, sure, but simply refusing to take part in the future of the collective human experience is hardly a real solution.

</comment><comment><USER57> We also don't post any pictures of our kid online. But for the simple reason that I know that it would be mostly for my own ego, I feel immense pride and have to hold back the pictures/videos on my phone frequently. Who genuinely likes to see hundreds of pics of their friends kids? I wonder...

</comment><comment><USER58> The key takeaway is to avoid creating any content on internet that can be used for any indexing / linking back for anyone apart from yourself. Of course I do not like the idea that facebook is scanning your pics/info and using that further up.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Does anyone else do this (or something similar)?

I'm curious to see how people introduce the Internet to their children in a relatively-responsible way.

<comment><USER59> My son (9) has a Minecraft account, a Steam account, and an email address which he doesn't know the password to (because he wouldn't remember it).

His main interaction thusfar has been chatting with people in Minecraft and on Steam, which concerns me only over the language.

<comment><USER60> Mine, too (he's 11). He's also got an XBox live account for Portal 2, a youtube / gmail (mostly for videos about Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program), and an account here: [http://scratch.mit.edu/](http://scratch.mit.edu/) .

None of these things _existed_ 11 years ago, and I expect there will be a new set of things 11 years hence.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> I wonder if marketing your encrypted p2p social network to paranoid parents would be a good way to get users.

</comment><comment><USER62> 1\. The kid's face is going to change over time

2\. Facebook might not be around by the time she is a teen

</comment><comment><USER63> Put the photos on your own domain and link to them from Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER64> are. you. fucking. serious. I think you're trolling, and we're victims of some sort of social reaction experiment.

</comment><comment><USER65> So just stop using FB. Problem solved.

<comment><USER66> Er, not really. Choosing not to actively use Facebook doesn't protect you from shadow profiles or the actions of people that you know.

<comment><USER65> You are correct, sir. I was being snarky and you called me on it. Thanks. I genuinely appreciate it.</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What search engine do you use for finding movies and TV shows? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> I still haven't found a better replacement for the trailers that play before the actual movie.

I end up watching a much greater percentage of those than movies I try to find and enjoy on my own.

However, with my Netflix usage increasing, I've found that I usually peruse their recommendations and watching something from there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Does IMDb count?

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you use their search engine? I've found that to be not that great for regular usage.</comment></comment>


Run PHP client-side or in Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://asmblah.github.io/uniter/demo/interactive.html

<comment><AUTHOR> I know this kind of thing has been done before, but this is my attempt to bring PHP to the browser (and Node.js.)

Hopefully it will be useful for reusing validation code/dependency injection containers client side, etc.</comment>


Russia 'targeted chemical weapons watchdog OPCW' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-45746837 <comment><USER2> I always wondered how common it was for spies to use diplomatic passports as a cover. It could be so easy, you could bring in anything, guns, electronic devices - and I guess on a commercial flight without going through a metal detector. This is separate from the "economic advisor" who is really a secret CIA or KGB agent or something. In this case it was 4 Russian spies who did travel on diplomatic passports, and the Dutch security service lets the world see what they got from them, a bunch of cell phone like devices.

This is interesting because they were just so blatant about it, parking their rental car right next to the OPCW hq (chemical weapons watchdog) in the Netherlands, filled with electronic devices. It looks like a big FU to the western countries by using diplo. passports, but maybe it's more common than I think? I forget day to day that there really is an ongoing effort between countries to spy on each other, and in this case yet another situation where a Russian agency is working against international agencies.

In the recent UK chemical weapons attack they were not using diplo passports.</comment>


Ask HN: Is "public key" a misnomer? - <AUTHOR> It seems like an asymmetric public key would be more intuitively called a public lock? <comment><USER2> If you only consider encryption, that might be so.

But as soon as you're talking about signatures your lock analogy breaks down.</comment>


Bee - A Collection of lightweight Dart Web UI Components - <AUTHOR> https://www.blossom.io/bee

<comment><USER2> I don't know the dart Web UI package - but from the example code:

        Launch Overlay
        <x-overlay width="600px" class="q-example-overlay">

Does that then get transpiled into valid HTML (and inline javascript?) or is that what's actually served to the browser?

<comment> nik-graf Sorry for the late reply.

Right now there is a lot of stuff happening to simulate Web Components. Going forward they will become a W3C Standard and we can reduce the complexity. You might want to look at the current Draft [https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcomponents/raw- file/tip/explainer/...](https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/webcomponents/raw- file/tip/explainer/index.html)

What's happening at the moment is that the output for <x-loading></x-loading> is:

            ...

If a component like the overlay also contains logic the code will be added to your compiled and minified JavaScript output.

For blossom.io/bee you can find the compiled output here [https://www.blossom.io/bee_documentation.html_bootstrap.dart...](https://www.blossom.io/bee_documentation.html_bootstrap.dart.js)</comment></comment>


Show HN: RudderStack, open-source CDI (open-source Segment alternative) - <AUTHOR> RudderStack (https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server) is an open-source customer data infrastructure (a.k.a open-source alternative to Segment).
We firstly want to thank the HN community for showing us love and support in our previous HN post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21081756). At that point, we had just open-sourced the repo and were not fully prepared for a Show HN. We wanted to share updates since then and also do our official Show HN.
Updates since Sept 2019
<comment></comment><comment>=====
1. Changed the name from Rudder to RudderStack :)
2. API compatibility with Segment
3. Open-source control plane so no dependency on the hosted control plane for open-source users. (https://github.com/rudderlabs/rudder-server/blob/config-gen/utils/config-gen/README.md)
4. Multiple hosting options: Docker, Kubernetes, Native, Terraform.
5. 30 integrations (https://rudderstack.com/) including cloud mode and device mode
6. Support all the popular data-warehouses & lakes - RedShift, Snowflake, BigQuery, S3, Google Cloud Storage, Azure Blob Storage (via MINIO)
7. Detailed documentation - https://docs.rudderstack.com/
8. Multiple production deployments including few really large ones (our largest deployment is sending a peak of ~40K events/sec, ~100M events/day)
9. Switched license from SSPL to AGPLv3 (after long discussions internally as well as on HN)
10. Built some interesting Analytics & ML use cases
11. Launched our "paid plans"  (primarily around managed hosting) </comment><comment><AUTHOR> Founder here. Happy to answer any questions</comment>


Avoid a Void: eradicating null-pointer dereferencing - <AUTHOR> http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3558

<comment><USER3> I've grown to really like Objective-Cs way of just ignoring the problem. Sending a message to nil returns 0 (or a few variants on 0 depending on the return type). No thrown runtime errors.

<comment><USER4> If you're smart enough to test for it returning 0, you're smart enough to test if it is 0. And if you're stupid enough.. now it fails silently?

<comment><USER3> In Objective-C you often end up with patterns like this:

      if ([[obj delegate] shouldThisDoSomething]) { ... stuff ... }

When calling "delegate" on obj, it might return nil if there isn't one set (or if obj itself is nil). If it does return nil, sending "shouldThisDoSomething" results in 0 (aka nil). nil == false, So "stuff" will never happen - which is pretty much as expected in 99%* of cases. (* made up statistic)

This behavior, combined with a few rules like naming certain methods in a way that asks permission rather than forbids an action, gets you an entire system where you can almost completely forget about the issue while retaining programmer control for the few special cases where it might matter and you can test for it.

(Nil also sticks out like a sore thumb in the debugger if you're stepping through and trying to figure out why something didn't work like you thought it should.)

Aside: Nothing fails silently unless you never test it. It's just a matter of how you're exposed to the failure. IMO, sending to nil resulting in 0/nil is very good at eliminating a lot of if/else boilerplate for certain situations which means less code cluttering my screen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5>
      >
      >   x.f (args)
      >
      > x, a reference, should normally denote an object but can
      > be void, in which case the call will fail and produce an
      > exception, often leading to a crash. *This is one of the
      > main sources of instability in today's software.*

Says who ?

I have been routinely programming in C++ for the last 10 years and not only I have not ran into this sort of bug in my own code, I have never seen it encountered by anyone else in my vicinity. I understand they wanted to create a dramatic backdrop for some cool new feature they are really proud of, but conjuring facts out of thin air is not a way to do it.

<comment><USER6> I'm certainly familiar with this as an error. It's all-too-common:

      Bla x = someFunctionThatMightReturnNull();

      if(x.foo()) ...

Sure, people _should_ check the return value, but that check is often forgotten, especially if x.foo() is some sort of validity or integrity checking. It's an edge case.

And really, a proof by "I've-never-seen-it" seems like a weak justification for accusing researchers of "conjuring facts out of thin air". If you're actually interested, the article by Tony Hoare (which was also posted on LTU) provides provides more concrete figures, if I recall. I think it's pretty well understood as a very common error.

I'd be interested to know what you think common sources of instability are in your experience?

<comment><USER5> "This is one of the main sources of instability in today's software." is a sweepingly bold statement, which is statistically inaccurate at best and completely made-up at worst. Most likely it is simply applicable to a subset of languages that do in fact make this sort of a mistake easy to make. These languages do not however include either C or C++, which still account for a lot today's software.

If you have a link for the Tony Hoare article, it'd be interesting to see what its sampling base was.

<comment><USER6> You've never had a problem with a null pointer in C or C++? _Ever?_

You didn't answer my question, either. What do you think are the most common sources of instability?

<comment><USER5> > _You've never had a problem with a null pointer in C or C++? Ever?_

Not once we had a recorded bug caused by calling a class method on a null pointer. If the code is operating with references, it requires some ingenuity to return a null _reference_ from a function. And if the code operates with pointers, the null checks are typically there. So, yeah, the p->foo() with p being null is a very uncommon issue.

With regards to what are the common sources of instability are - <USER2> strictly on my experience, the "instability" in C++ context typically comes from not enforcing class invariants, or not adhering to the declared class semantics. This clearly can come in a variety of forms and shapes, and it is hardly possible to pinpoint specific language construct as a single most common root of these problems. Also, I frankly do not remember when was the last time we had an actual _crash_ in our production code. In C context the sources of crashes vary, but more often than not they are caused by the side effects of the functions, i.e. you have a data structure (pointed at or allocated in some other fashion), you feed it to the function and this call invalidates it, but you assume it does not. This sort of thing. Again, if there are pointers, then any C programmer worth his salt will have either an assert or a conditional right after where this pointer is initialized or changed. I have _never_ seen a bug caused by calling a null function pointer, and there is some code that makes a very extensive use of them.

Hopefully this answers your question.

Now, how about the link to that article ?

<comment><USER6> This is what I was thinking of (I misspoke, it's a presentation, rather than a paper), but I recall seeing more than just an abstract somewhere. Perhaps I was reading commentary:

<http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3186>

From what you've said, it sounds like your code (and perhaps team?) are better than average. You say yourself, you haven't had an actual crash since you can remember. If you _were_ having crashes, then my money would be on them being caused by one of: null references (which generally just falls into the category of "not checking return values") and not accounting for edge cases. But you don't have crashes, so all of this is a little bit speculative, isn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> One approach I have seen people take in Objective C (and Scala) is to return a Maybe "monad" from functions instead of the value directly - forces the caller to match for cases when the actual value comes back versus the "non value".

<comment><USER3> Are you sure you're thinking about Objective-C? Objective-C lets you send messages to nil/0 which then return nil/0 silently - a feature used quite often in all Objective-C code I've been exposed to and written myself in the 2 years I've been doing it.

<comment><USER7> Yes Obj-C - not sure of the details as it was only what people had showed me (second hand knowledge)</comment></comment></comment>


Optimizing for the Speed of Light - <AUTHOR> http://www.bizcoder.com/optimizing-for-the-speed-of-light <comment><USER2> Text only version while the site is down: [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:D8y6DGJ...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:D8y6DGJYhxoJ:www.bizcoder.com/optimizing- for-the-speed-of-light&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

</comment><comment><USER3> Looks like it's down

<comment><USER4> not optimizing for hn.

<comment><USER5> Well that's embarrassing.

<comment><USER5> The site is back, but I this was a sufficient kick in the ass to finally get the blog moved onto a proper platform.

<comment><USER4> After being cheeky I wanted to make sure I circled back. I liked the article a lot. Well written, solid points. I think that client side caching, is something that gets overlooked a lot, especially in enterprise web apps. Performance sure does make us perform a fine dance.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Viadeo: Nipping at LinkedIn's heels - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/business/21612178-second-largest-professional-social-network-scrambling-make-its-mark-nipping <comment><USER2> Honest question for the engineers/programmers in here that are also on LinkedIn:

Have you gotten any value from LinkedIn?

I realized a few weeks ago that 1) I have a LinkedIn account, 2) I make semi- regular updates to my LinkedIn account, 3) to my knowledge, I have received exactly zero value from having a LinkedIn account. It feels like this weird social network where they've convinced everyone that they _have_ to have an account/profile, but nobody really knows why.

I guess I'm curious if other people have had better/different experiences.

<comment><USER3> The only value I have gotten out of my profile is that it grants me the ability to see _other_ people's profiles. Though, perhaps the fact that others can see info about me is some value to me also.

<comment><USER2> The "others can see info about me" is the value that I've landed on in my head. I don't recall ever getting a valuable message _through_ the LinkedIn platform, but I will concede that there's possibly passive value in having an account as the absence of one could be a red flag for future potential employers.

That said, I'm also unconvinced that I want/need to be passively recruited at this point in my career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Well, it's a single place where recruiters can go to find all the relevant information about me, I direct them there from my website etc. I also participate in a few relevant industry groups which has garnered some attention to my work.

I suppose because everything I do on linkedin is connected in the way that social networks connect everything together it has helped raise my web profile higher than just having my website would.

It also means I can use my website as a sales pitch, funnelling interested parties off to LinkedIn if they require more details about my professional history.

I have also had several interviews with companies and a job offer because of LinkedIn, although none of the opportunities were actually quite right for me.

So same answer as bastijn really, I think it offers some benefit, because its there and everyone seems to be on it.</comment>


CppCon 2018: Kate Gregory "Simplicity: Not Just for Beginners" - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0Ak6xtVXno <comment><USER2> This is excellent. Well worth watching. Lots of great advice.

</comment><comment><USER3> More people should see this!</comment>


Thoughts on 'The Equity Equation' - <AUTHOR> http://www.venturehacks.com/articles/equity-equation

<comment><USER2> His argument that you have to pay market rate regardless of the equity equation is false. If a transaction is a net loss for the company, you shouldn't do it.

If your situation is so desperate that you feel _forced_ to hire someone (or take more funding) at what seems an excessively high price, then what's really going on is that you're overvaluing the company. If your situation is desperate, your value is low.

<comment><USER3> What about the other half of his argument, that you shouldn't pay more than market rate?

<comment><USER2> That's already covered in the original essay:

"How much of an additional margin should the company need as the "activation energy" for the deal? Since this is in effect the company's profit on a hire, the market will determine that: if you're a hot opportunity, you can charge more."</comment></comment></comment>


Google Allo – First Impression - <AUTHOR> http://prodissues.com/2016/09/google-allo-first-impression.html <comment><USER2> The more proprietary chat platforms that arise, the more I want to see Matrix[1] / Riot[2] succeed.

Communication networks should not be corporate controlled walled gardens.

[1]: [https://matrix.org](https://matrix.org)

[2]: [https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot- ios.html](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-ios.html) [https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot- android.html](https://matrix.org/docs/projects/client/riot-android.html)

<comment><USER3> I'm surprised that email is not corporate controlled yet.

What did email do right that chat did wrong? Afaik, there was once a good standard for chat.

<comment><USER4> > I'm surprised that email is not corporate controlled yet.

With the vast majority of email users using a tiny number of email providers, it effectively is. If Gmail decides that your personal mail server is sending spam, it becomes effectively useless.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, but there is no denying that email "federation" works very well (which makes sense, and it was pretty much the only major design goal). The lack of easy federation is why there are millions of chat 'bubbles' out there.

<comment> yoz-y Also, chat ecosystems are somewhat federated on your device. Notifications and grouping (on iOS) and contacts integration (on Android and Windows) make it quite easy to run multiple chat clients at the same time so people do not bother.

The one big problem is group conversations, however.

<comment><USER6> Group conversation starts to suck when you have to fall back to SMS. Just from personal use, IM-type services handle it fine but they're not always cross platform.

Friends on iPhones use the iOS IM app but when they add someone to a group chat who isn't on iOS, they get the messages as attachments to MMS. Android's Messenger app handles this OK at the moment but it didn't always. And when SMS/MMS was integrated into Hangouts, it never handled it well.

Hangouts works fine for groups messages and at least you can install that on iOS but not everyone will want to use something else when they already use iMessage. Allo works but unless you use Allo, you get SMS/MMS from some random new number.

Basically, from what I gather, good group conversation support is a function of IP-based IM services and SMS/MMS was never really meant to handle that without workarounds and hacks. But SMS/MMS are a standard that any mobile device can handle whereas all the third party services and apps require either a particular OS or at least another messaging app to be installed.

Really would've loved to see a standard protocol with proper encryption and adoption by all major platforms but that doesn't seem to work for the Apples/Googles/Facebooks/etc of the world who would rather use Messaging as a way to keep you on their platform. Why would you leave when it would mean you can't keep those group chats you have with friends, family, and coworkers you've been having for all this time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> The assistant piece of Allo is not too bad at all for a first drop. I noticed that it handled context decently between users who invoked the assistant in their chats. If you ask about a type of takeout in a specific place, and then the other party in the chat says "what about another type" without referring to the place, it handles the situation. However, if the first person says something right after the results are returned. It ignores the context.

The Google team also added the ability to not return the same response for any given request, unless the request falls into generic search. It's not necessary, but gives it that human kind of element, and keeps it interesting.

I didn't try any kind of logical reasoning since it seemed to be heavily reliant on Google search, which is still keyword based to a degree. One day this will probably change, but it's a hard problem to solve given an open domain.

I thought I would see more direct integration with APIs as opposed to defaulting to search. I don't think I saw any in-fact beyond what is offered through search. EG - book me a ride with uber just goes to the search results.

I'm wondering if this team is working together with the home product. If there is also a heavy reliance on search, I can't imagine the user experience will be that great.

<comment><USER8> I'm guessing the lack of APIs is due to the Assistant being in a preview state, and that we'll see the start of a slew of them on Oct 4, when things like Google Home are released (and are also powered by the Assistant, according to the assistant if you ask it what Google Home is).

Right now, you can ask the assistant to turn on/off lights, call a taxi, etc, and it just responds with "I can't do that yet."

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> From the article:

> It's like the early days of the iPhone – the skeuomorphism design helped > users get accustomed to use it, through the icons that imitated physical > objects. Once they got educated, more than 8 years latter, the flat design > was introduced.

Does anybody have a link for an official proclamation from Apple confirming this? To me it felt like an effort to bring something new and exciting as skeuomorphism was getting boring after 6 revisions of the of the OS. I dread that day, but I think in a few years, skeuomorphism will come back, once some high profile designers will get bored with minimalistic flat design and will proclaim how "amazing" skeuomorphism is.

<comment><USER10> Jony Ive was interviewed about it at the time.

"When we sat down last November (to work on iOS 7), we understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn't need physical buttons, they understood the benefits," says Ive. "So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way."

From [http://www.cultofmac.com/246312/jony-ive-explains-why-he- dec...](http://www.cultofmac.com/246312/jony-ive-explains-why-he-decided-to- gut-skeuomorphism-out-of-ios/)

<comment><USER9> Thanks for the reference.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wasn't impressed until I messaged Google Assistant a photo of my tabby cat (no text, just the photo), to which the assistant responded with search suggestions about _tabby cats_. While not breaking new ground by any means (I mean this and more have been done before), it's very cool to have it in my pocket, as it were, and I'm going to keep Allo installed for now just to see where the Google Assistant goes.

Really wish I could handle SMS messaging from within Allo so I wouldn't have to switch between apps to talk to people. It's bad enough that my colleagues use WhatsApp and two groups of my friends use Slack and Facebook Messenger, respectively.

I really don't understand Duo though. It's a nice little app and also nice to have a cross-platform alternative to FaceTime (which I've never used precisely because the majority of my friends do not use Apple devices) but Hangouts did video already, why not just rebuild Hangouts from scratch as Duo and Allo in one app?

Yes, I realise this is the question that has been on everyone's lips and has been asked many times before and after the launch of these apps. I've still yet to see a sensible answer though.

<comment><USER12> I regularly show people Google Photos and shout at them DON'T YOU UNDERSTAND HOW INCREDIBLE THIS IS? IT KNOWS WHAT "FOOD" MEANS IN BASICALLY ANY VARIATION YOU CAN THINK OF!

My favorite "this shouldn't be possible" searches are food, flowers, sunsets, dogs, (to which it returned a picture of my dog's BUTT in the dog door. No face. No paws. Just a butt with tail sticking out) Christmas (to which it returned a photo of my wife, taken in July, at Bronner's Christmas Village in Michigan, etc.

It's completely incredible how accurate it is, and it's transformed the way I access and use my photos. I still cannot get over how "food" can mean literally millions of things and it will show me plates, people eating, food on a table, food in a takeout container, individual ingredients, food being cooked, etc. Those are all so dramatically different that the fact it's able to return them so accurately boggles my mind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's a shame. I was really hoping that Allo would launch as a direct competitor to iMessage. I know I'm not alone in this, but the ability to use the desktop client for iMessage is the only thing keeping me with IOS.

With Android, PushBullet and the others were alright, but pale in comparison. When Google picked up GrandCentral and dubbed it 'Voice', I thought this would be the perfect solution. 'One number to rule them all' with SMS, an eventual desktop client, etc --- but it left out the non-US users. We were grandfathered in, but I have very little use for a Seattle phone number these days.

I'm not sure why Google brought this out as another client instead of incorporating these features into one of their existing applications.

It feels like Google is trying to reinvent the wheel by giving it corners.

<comment><USER6> For a while, Hangouts seemed to be going in this direction so it's disappointing to see this move away from that. It's already got support on mobile and desktop, works on Android, iOS, Windows, OSX, Linux, etc. When they added SMS/MMS support and started messing with Voice integration there were definitely some version-1 issues but it was promising.

And then they spun out SMS/MMS to Messenger and now Allo. Video calls got duplicated in Duo. I haven't heard much of anything about Voice for a while so who knows where that's headed. Hangouts still works fine for IM across mobile and desktop but with the other stuff gone, duplicated, or split off, I'm back to needing multiple apps on different platforms to deal with the variety of messaging I've still got to use in order to contact people depending on their platform.

<comment><USER14> The amount of messaging apps coming out of Google leads me to believe there must be some internal strife between teams or something, like people would rather start their own than join Hangouts because the team has some issues or something. It just doesn't make sense that they keep creating additional ones.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Trying to chat with others I find difficult. Other services that use your number will attempt to tell others you're trying to send them a message if they're not signed up yet. Allo? Not so much. In fact many of my techie friends, two of which worked at Google, are not even on it and it doesn't work with any of Google's existing chat apps. So I have to go out of my way to try to get friends on it.

Nope. Too much friction. Gave up. The AI is okay but didn't seem much better than, say, Google Now. So I didn't really understand why I would even use it.

Dou is kinda the same way and I really wish they would have combined them. You could even let the AI work in the video mode and if it overheats something it can add information.

<comment><USER16> > Other services that use your number will attempt to tell others you're > trying to send them a message if they're not signed up yet. Allo? Not so > much.

Doesn't it send them a text with a link to get allo? I'm certain it sent my wife a text like this.

<comment><USER15> Oh. Two of my friends said they got nothing so I assumed it did not. Now I don't know what happened there. Honestly I'm torn, too, as that seems like it would be necessary but also annoying. Sigh.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Seeing as Hangouts is becoming worse and worse and worse(recent update removed tabs on the bottom of the screen, now it's all in a single window - and I get notifications in the corner of the screen with the full content of each message - really awkward if I'm in a meeting. In the old version, a tab would light up green and that was it. But the absolute worst offence is that there is no way to go back to the old interface - google took the executive decision to break it for everyone, so they did, I'm really pissed off about it), I would really like to switch to a different IM. Allo would be nice, if not for the fact that it doesn't have a desktop client. That's unacceptable.

</comment><comment><USER18> I'm finding the auto responses suggested by Allo to be pretty creepy. They are just close enough to what I would type to tempt me to save time by clicking on them. But they aren't actually the words I would choose myself. Yet the recipient thinks these words are mine. So Google is subtly modifying the very language used by billions of people. Shades of Newspeak.

<comment><USER19> You are already selecting precanned phrases in your mind most of the time, this just visualizes it. You still can cognitively work harder to write a new phrase, this just let's your instinctual responses come out faster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I see a lot of people asking why not club this feature (and Duo) into Hangouts. I use Hangouts too, but it looks like they'd grown too complicated for a common user who wanted to 'just' do a quick text chat or a quick video chat. Hangouts had chat, SMS, video, phone calling and what not. While I didn't see any problem at all with that and found that good (except the UI that was still not good), probably it's a little daunting for some people.

I still wish what others are wishing here, that there is a unified app which just does all these things nicely with enough simplicity.

<comment><USER21> What I find useful about Hangouts is SMS history backups. Android should backup SMSes when moving to a new phone.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> You can ask @Google assistant to set a reminder, check your emails, draft and send email to your contacts, share your location(in group). You can summon @Google in your group chats. So far it is certainly an interesting toy.

<comment><USER23> You can also do all of these things with the Google app, with the exact same inputs. I had a full conversation with Allo that I repeated verbally after saying "Ok Google" and the results were identical.

<comment><USER24> Can you check your emails with 'OK Google'? I use my Android phone as a satnav, and it would be really helpful on the commute to get it to read me the at least the subject lines of my inbox, I can't seem to make it do anything other than Google "Read my unread emails".

<comment><USER25> That's certainly my biggest disappointment so far with the Google Assistant, even though I understand that they will improve it with time. I wish it was at least better integrated within the Google ecosystem, so that I can interrogate it regarding my emails, my calendar or my contacts. Why can't I reference a friend using their google+ handle? Or ask for my next dentist appointment that's on my calendar? Or my last amazon order receipt in my mails? Hopefully stuff like that will come and it will make the Assistant a bit more useful and less gimmicky.

<comment><USER26> "Show my next flight to Melbourne" and "show my last Deliveroo email receipt" both are working for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> When the AI ends up showing me a Google search, it's kind of disappointing. If I wanted to do a Google search, I'd do it myself instead of adding the step of asking the AI to search it for me.

</comment><comment><USER28> Having tried it out, I'm more than a little puzzled. What I don't understand is why make this yet another new platform, instead of just adding it as a new feature to hangouts?

All they've done is introduce friction to the onboarding process.

Unless I'm really missing something here. As the linked article says, Google already has our contacts, and they already have a list of the people we chat with, etc. Why not just make use of this instead of asking everyone to start from scratch again?

</comment><comment><USER29> If there are any Googlers on here reading this, some free unsolicited advice from me to you:

GMail is awesome. It made email 10 times better and easier (for me anyways) to use.

Here's an idea: GText. Despite all the products that have come out, we still refer to texting as, well, texting. So, mail:GMail::text:GText.

Here's my problem with Apple's iMessages: they take up all this space on my phone. And when I change phones, more often than not, I end up losing all my old texts (because Apple hasn't figured out idiot-proof migration).

So, what I would LOVE is something like GMail for texting... i.e., GText.

\- Almost unlimited storage in the cloud so I can keep all my old texts.

\- Access to all my texts via a web browser.

\- Search through all my old texts with powerful Google Search.

\- Never lose old texts just because I changed my phone.

\- All the cool GMail features such as Labels and Filters, and colors for labels.

<comment><USER30> You're in luck! There is a little-known product made by Google called Hangouts[0].

It is cross platform: iOS, Android, Web, and has native apps for Windows and macOS. It stores your texts in the cloud forever, lets you send emojis and images, files, lets you video chat from any platform to any platform, and every single person with a gmail account already has it! Bonus: on Android phones it can also send SMS and MMS, without a proxy!

Hopefully this small project will take off and eventually become bigger than Allo.

0\. [http://hangouts.google.com](http://hangouts.google.com)

<comment><USER31> Little known? You must be kidding. It has more than 1 Billion installations [0].

It's pre-installed on every Android Handset and is the designated successor to Google Talk, a once great XMPP chat service which had offered real xmpp federation until Google rebranded it to Hangouts. I really liked Google Talk back then, Hangouts gradually made it worse and worse.

The hurdles to onboard new chat members are too big (you need a G Account, needed a Google Plus profile at some time). While the G Account is a given on Android phones, it's a big hurdle for adding iOS users. The process is buggy as well: After adding an account for a friend, we often had to wait 1-2 days to "find" the person on Hangouts and be able to add them to the group chat.

On top of that, the app is slow slow slow (the browser chat as well).

As a community moderator I had to deal with above issues constantly but we kept using Hangouts for years... despite its shortcomings. Ultimately though, we abandoned it and switched to Telegram. Much faster mobile Apps, super easy onboarding for new members and a great Browser client as well (plus the company is FOSS friendly, allows custom implementations).

The Hangouts dev team even knows about its bad reputation and the product manager even acknowledged that at some time [0]: "P.S. Unlike what the /r/Android subreddit says, the Hangouts team does come to work every morning trying to make it better :)"

[0]: [https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE](https://plus.google.com/+MayurKamat/posts/T1FNqgAWzgE)

<comment><USER32> The parent comment was being sarcastic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "than again", I'm going to blame Emacs...

</comment><comment><USER34> Looking forward to v2 which adds multilingual (French & German) support, codenamed 'Allo 'Allo</comment>


APIs: Developing in 3 Dimensions - <AUTHOR> https://www.lunchbadger.com/apis-3-dimensions/ <comment><USER2> Great article ! the 3rd dimension is the most underrated

<comment><AUTHOR> for sure, it's like the Golden Gate bridge too - once you're done on one end of painting it's time to start re-painting from the beginning again

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Good post! Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER4> Love the 3D APIs</comment>


Making a Three Cent Microcontroller Useful - <AUTHOR> https://hackaday.com/2019/04/26/making-a-three-cent-microcontroller-useful/ <comment><USER2> With 1KB of flash do you even need a compiler?

<comment><USER3> You don't _need_ a compiler, but if you have a good enough C compiler, there's often no significant disadvantage to using it. Even with a simple 8-bit instruction set, I've found writing in assembly to be quite a bit more difficult than writing in C just because of the mental overhead of having to manually manage registers.</comment></comment>


On Being Jewish in State Prison (2009) - <AUTHOR> https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2009/david-arenberg-reflects-being-jewish-state-prison <comment><USER3> I always find it unbelievable that they let these kinds of hierarchies arise in prisons, especially in American prisons (from what I've heard, European prisons have it too, but to a much lesser degree). Someone told me they allow it on purpose to help keep order. Maybe it is also a consequence of overfull, understaffed prisons.

It's probably naive, but one thing I would do if I was in charge would be to aggressively break up any kind of hierarchy or authority among inmates - <USER2> least to prevent prison from turning into a "crime school".

Edit: some people suggest these gangs arise due to the size of prisons and the large inflow of new inmates [1], whereas in the old days (-1950s) prison used to organize itself according to some kind of convict code.

[1]: [https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/end-prison- gan...](https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2015/05/end-prison-gangs-break- largest-prisons-000034)

<comment><USER4> >It's probably naive [...] not least to prevent prison from turning into a "crime school".

I am very confident the type of people working in SV could make a huge impact, if only running prisons was like software development.

But the goal of US prison is not to solve difficult problems. It is simply to benefit the US prison-police-state-complex.

The other problem is it would be like when designing, your functions, or people, don't do what they're supposed to do and have a mind of their own. For example, an HBO documentary on death row inmate Troy Kell noted he was being punished for heroin overdose[1]. Thing is, he is in solitary. How does a guy in solitary become a heroin addict? Well, like the article mentioned, the drugs come in through the guards. Sometimes this, and things like Abu Ghraib, the Stanford Prison Experiment and regular police killings make me wonder if the authorities here are any better than the guys inside.

1 - [https://youtu.be/UEl7zsOE2Sk](https://youtu.be/UEl7zsOE2Sk)

<comment><USER5> > I am very confident the type of people working in SV could make a huge > impact, if only running prisons was like software development.

> But the goal of US prison is not to solve difficult problems. It is simply > to benefit the US prison-police-state-complex.

See, that's why they couldn't make a real impact. The whole system is set up with the wrong incentives. From the SV/startup perspective, it's like one of your suppliers being the nephew of your biggest investor and a stipulation of the investment. Sucks to be you if they do a shitty job and cost you money, or make it hard to achieve goals. They know they have leverage over you, so you're stuck.

Prisons could kill large amounts of people that enter them, and release people as sexually molested PTSD wrecks that have little normal economic recourse and new ideas and connections about how to make money in extra-legal ways, and society still wouldn't care enough to change things. This is obvious, because _that 's what prisons do in the U.S._ and _we haven 't changed jack-shit._

I don't have high hopes for change. A decade ago there was a lot of media attention and articles about how California used to be the shining example of the U.S. prison system (in the 1970's), with extremely low recidivism rates, and inmates leaving prison with a skill or craft they learned inside and able to find gainful employment. Nothing came from it during two terms of a Democrat president after that, I doubt we'll get change from a Republican one now, especially with his particular rhetoric on crime. Until we as a society get past "Justice == punishment" and focus quite a bit on rehabilitation, we're cutting off our nose to spite out face.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Pretty great article. I wonder how common this man's experience is; specifically that his identity as a Jew is defined in some way by oppression. I was raised as a Jew in New York and hardly saw any overt antisemitism (the few times I did as a child I remember quite clearly), but unlike the author of this article I was always aware of it. I think for me my identity as a Jew was reinforced by the perception that there were people who would want to hurt me because I was Jewish, regardless of whether I identified myself as such.

<comment><USER7> YouTube is proof of how rare anti Jew behavior is in the US. It happens but very rarely and always involves uneducated poor people.

I dare someone to deny me service or try to lynch me. I will sue using the courts and physically defend my house and family through the glorious protection of the second amendment.

<comment><USER8> > YouTube is proof of how rare anti Jew behavior is in the US

Can you expound on this?

<comment><USER9> Probably from the comments on specific videos...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The US prison system is far beyond fucked up. It destroys humans instead of rehabilitating them, a great majority of which could without a doubt be rehabilitated.

<comment><USER11> It's also a place where unfortunately people feel that criminals morally deserve whatever happens to them there, including rape.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I kind of lost all sympathy with him when he advocated violence for opposing views. Live by the fist, die by the fist. He's living his own Hell, where his own vices are coming back to torture him.

<comment><USER13> I usually lose all sympathy for people when they advocate genocide, but you do you.

<comment><USER12> The author is a communist, and communists killed more people than the Nazis did. The difference was that it was "self-genocide", and had a few more ideological layers involved.

Still, I would rather meet communists with words, rather than throw them out of helicopters. Don't you see how that's more reasonable?

If Nazis or Communists are actually taking action like fighting/murdering/jailing, then I will join in the fight against them. But while they only use words, even though their words are disgusting vitriol, using force against them only helps their cause and cheapens our own.

<comment><USER13> First of all, I don't think the author claims to be a communist anywhere, just that his parents were, at one time, members of the communist party. Second of all, popular estimates of the death toll of communism are ludicrously exaggerated, sometimes outright fabricated, and often include a lot of questionable cases. The Black Book of Communism, where the infamous 100 million figure comes from, includes Soviet soldiers that died in WW2 and vastly inflates the number of people who died in gulags and famines, among many other inaccuracies. The gulag figure is orders of magnitude bigger than the number of people who were even sentenced to forced labor in first place. It is widely regarded as complete trash by serious historians. This is not to discount the very real human suffering under dictators like Stalin and Mao, but to compare famines resulting for incompetence to the deliberate industrialized slaughter of 11 million people is just stupid.

On the subject of fighting Nazis, I'll leave you with a quote from Hitler himself, perhaps the pre-eminent expert on Nazis: "Only one thing could have stopped our movement – if our adversaries had understood its principle and from the first day smashed with the utmost brutality the nucleus of our new movement."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find it hard to feel sorry for him. He clearly brought the prison sentence on himself. On the other hand, it is not right that anyone should suffer discrimination.

<comment><USER15> Regardless of our feelings toward any individual and their punishment, it's necessary to look at this problem from an organizational level. Groups of prisoners seeking out individuals with some attribute, including those having committed the most heinous crimes, is a sign that the prison as an organization is not fulfilling its duties. First and foremost, a prison is about control. I don't see it as a place that should allow anarchic dog-eat- dog behavior while someone bars the door, but rather the authorities have a monopoly on violence. They set the ground rules for behavior. Otherwise, what is the whole apparatus of guards and administration for?

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I remember seeing an HN post a couple years ago about a startup focusing on education in jails. Anyone has more info on what's the name of that startup and what its up to?

</comment><comment><USER17> What state was the prison in?

</comment><comment><USER18> When I read these types of articles, there is always an underlining irony present there...

Out of all the diverse groups of people in the prison, only the racist whites (Nazis) would tolerate and give protection to this person - yet this person's entire write-up is predominantly against this same group of people.

A further explanation is provided to the reader that picks up on this: while these Natzi-people must truly hate him, they only truly protect him because there exists an even deeper more-menacing underlining racism within them.

All the other groups, are just fine, nothing more than a structured response to the racism.

While low on details, the story ends with the realization that while white discrimination is an evil unlike any other discrimination, it does allow the strong to find their true roots.

This story would be told quite differently if this person went to prison in a Muslim country.

<comment><USER19> I have an alternate theory: gang members in jail act like assholes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Im a Jew and this sounds like bullshit to me. I wonder if anyone interviewed his fellow prisoners to see how real his was.

This prison culture exists but his view is tainted by being a total outsider to it, and it appears, a desire to gain sympathy by exaggerating.

He sounds like a rich kid in prison getting manipulated and bullied because he's not able to defend himself or attract allies.

The fact that he claims to have dealt with nazis in America outside of prison makes me think he's a huge liar.

There are no nazis in America. There are racist poor idiots in prison and outside that wish they were nazis. The few that try anything violent get locked up in prison like the common criminals they are. Other violent crime is a massively bigger problem.

Trust me, I'll be the first one ready to fight if anyone starts killing Jews.

That tiny tiny tiny rally in Virginia was organized by agent provocateurs probably from Russia.

<comment><USER20> > There are no Nazis in America

My first memory of Jewishness in America was my local synagogue being burned down, with swastikas spray painted on the sidewalk out front.

In JR High I was mocked for being a Jew - for my people having killed Jesus. Also for being chubby and smart, but Jew was easy to throw into the mix. My uniformly Catholic teachers pretended not to hear it.

Russian provocateurs may have organized the rally, but it was Americans that showed up to carry torches and chant about blood and soil.

When I spent a summer in Raleigh NC, one person told me I could not be a Jew, obviously, because I had neither horns nor tail.

You're welcome to play No True Scotsman, but if you think anything short of throwing people in a gas chamber is nothing but bullshit you need to pull your head out of the sand.

<comment><USER21> _My first memory of Jewishness in America was my local synagogue being burned down, with swastikas spray painted on the sidewalk out front._

Were those Nazis that committed those acts, or wannabes? I think that is parent's point. How many of those "Nazis" can name a single plank of the Nazi platform? (And I'm sure that more than one can do just that, but not even a majority.) In other words, are they Nazis or more like the character Otto in the movie _A Fish Called Wanda_?

Otto West: Apes don't read philosophy. Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don't understand it. Now let me correct you on a couple of things, OK? Aristotle was not Belgian. The central message of Buddhism is not "Every man for himself." And the London Underground is not a political movement. Those are all mistakes, Otto. I looked them up.

But at the end of the day, IMO, it's all just semantics. Some people irrationally hate Jews, some have a distaste for blacks. Whether or not they fit a particular label or not is a distraction from the fact that there are violently hateful people out there, and there weren't Jews they'd find someone else to hate that isn't like them.

<comment><USER20> > Were those Nazis that committed those acts, or wannabes?

Does it matter? If you throw up a symbol of the Nazis while burning down a synagogue (that is to say, performing one of their most memorable policies), what distinguishes a wannabe from a real Nazi? Enumerating the policies which Hitler campaigned with?

<comment><USER21> _Does it matter?_

That's my underlying question. There was more to the 30-40s era Nazi platform than just hating non-white Christians. But now it's "don't like Jews? Nazi!" and the haters pick that up by spraying symbols, and then we all play along by pulling out the fainting couch. Do we do anyone a service by acting like dealing with ignorant, hateful white people is the same as defeating Hitler himself? Personally, I think we'd do everyone a great service by ditching the labels, a label the wannabes _hope_ you pin on them, and just call it like it is: un-American white people who don't buy into the melting pot ideal that has made the country what it is.

<comment><USER22> There definitely is an overuse of the word "fascist" and "Nazi" but if you're chanting blood and soil, reading the Daily Stormer and advocating for the same violence the original Nazi's were, then I think it is absolutely appropriate to use that label, to me anything else is downplaying the threat of those ideas.

<comment><USER21> _to me anything else is downplaying the threat of those ideas._

Fair enough. My perspective comes from growing up in Indiana, probably one of the last places left that still had the occasional KKK rally. And frankly were it not for what they advocated, it was kind of pathetic. A dozen or so middle- aged rednecks pissed off about how it's not 1954 anymore, wearing Halloween costumes. The protesters would outnumber the participants. And there frequent calls to just quit protesting. Let them have their little get-together with an audience of...no one. I think that would be a lovely idea.

Keep an eye on them, that's for sure. If they commit a crime, investigate it, prosecute them. But otherwise quit giving them press, quit giving them labels that they _like_. Because calling them Nazis gives them credibility they don't deserve, IMO. They're surrounded by people that think they're assholes, so they only have the power we choose to give them. They can't pass any laws, they'll never get anywhere near a majority (underlying racism in the current political system is a long way from these nutters). Unlike the U. S. South of last century, the police generally aren't on their side. So keep a close watch, keep them contained, keep the amount of press proportional to the participation. If it's the "million Nazi march" on the Mall in D. C., then the NYT and WAPost should most certainly report. But if it's twelve sad, old guys in funny outfits, could we not make it tomorrow's headline?</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Bundles - <AUTHOR> http://bundles.chaoscollective.org/?create <comment><USER2> I like where it's going, though didn't find relevant topics that I like in there.

If you were looking to jump start it, perhaps looking at the "programming collective intelligence" examples with delicious could be a good start. For every website someone submits to a bundle, have the machine overnight generate so websites related to it and then display the updated bundle or sister bundle. That would be neat to compare the machine generated ones versus the crowd sourced ones.</comment>