Intel made smart glasses that look normal - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/5/16966530/intel-vaunt-smart-glasses-announced-ar-video <comment><USER2> Despite all the negativity around Google Glasses' camera, that was actually the best feature. You could really capture some great moments directly from your eye's perspective at the wink of an eye. My mother recently passed and out of all the photos and videos, my favorite was a 10 second video of me handing her flowers shot from Google Glasses. It looks like she's staring right back into my soul.

I have a three month old daughter now and I find myself fumbling about with my phone trying to take photos of her. Just last night I dropped my Pixel phone while trying to capture a photo of her. Phone is fine, but she wasn't too happy with the loud noise of my phone hitting the wood floor :) I kind of miss Google Glasses simply for the camera feature.

Instead of a minimal heads up display, I would much rather have a minimal wearable camera without all the extra functionality Google Glasses offered. Google Clips seems to be an alternative hands-free camera with different pros and cons (+I can be in the photo. -Can't capture the same type of photos from my eye viewpoint).

<comment><USER3> Just my two cents; I'm a father of 4 and I'm okay with not capturing those moments on film. And I mean that in two senses. One, I'm fine using my very imperfect memory to recall special moments and two, because of the logistical problems with grabbing the camera I'm not willing to risk missing out being fully in the moment. The occasionally photograph from an event or time period seems sufficient to conjure up the feelings from that time.

Regarding an always on camera - I'll second other comments in warning there are just so many concerns with abuse, I don't see how to get around those.

<comment><USER4> I hate that I lost it, will have to spend an afternoon on the internet achive, But these are so tired. It's the _exact_ same things people were spouting when phones started to have cameras. That came, and it turned out, having a quality camera you take with you is pretty cool and the end of the world didn't happen. Button cameras have existed for literally decades, if someone wants to take discrete pictures of you the means are there and it's a hell of a lot less awkward than staring at someone while your HUD camera grabs them.

A heads up display with no way of taking in data from the outside world is gimped to the point of uselessness and I think you really need to sit down and logic through the "concerns of abuse". There's no opportunity for privacy violation that isn't easier with another form of tech; at least Ive never heard one that sounds remotely plausible.

<comment><USER5> > That came, and it turned out, having a quality camera you take with you is > pretty cool and the end of the world didn't happen.

It's a _little_ early to say that, given that we're talking about things that take 50 years to transpire. You're telling people right now, in the midst of the smartphone explosion, that it's all said and done and over - you won't regret it at any point in your life, you'll always be glad of that smartphone, etc. But you don't know that yet.

And I will say that for some people it has already happened. I have missed countless things in the last 10 years because I was looking for my phone to take a picture. Events that happened and I never witnessed them to even get a memory of, just because I was looking down for my phone.

I already regret having the camera nearby but not quite ready to go for the last 10 years. Your examples are already wrong, and actually quite offensive in your tone, suggesting that you know better than everyone and that you know how everyone will feel in 50 years.

The concerns are real and justified, even if you personally don't share them.

<comment><USER4> So it's your phone's fault you've "missed experiences". I have to say, I've never heard that one.

Obviously no one can take away anyone's concern; however it's a larger leap to say all concerns are justified. I really don't understand your point, 50 years seems incredibly arbitrary. The smart phone explosion has come and gone; 95% of adults in the US have a cellphone and 77% have a smartphone[0]. Next to none of today's tech even existed 50 years ago can we not comment on any technological progress? I am nearly certain opinions will change over the next quarter century, and not in the way the luddites predict.

[0] [http://www.pewinternet.org/fact- sheet/mobile/](http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/mobile/)

<comment><USER5> > So it's your phone's fault you've "missed experiences".

I did not say that, don't twist my words like that. It is my fault I missed the experiences - I was busy looking for my phone.

> The smart phone explosion has come and gone; 95% of adults in the US have a > cellphone and 77% have a smartphone

Sounds like we're at the start of people having smartphones. I don't see how you look at those numbers and think it's gone. The explosion and cultural changes are just starting, as backed up by those numbers.

> Next to none of today's tech even existed 50 years ago can we not comment on > any technological progress?

I'm not sure where you got this. Of course we can comment on technological progress. But it's ridiculous to talk about the smartphone explosion and its societal effects like its the distance past. This stuff is happening now, nothing is "settled" or "said and done". It's all starting, really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is actually something I would like to wear. It's like normal glasses, I am not recording videos of the people around me, and it could show me relevant information when needed without looking at my phone. I can think of a few use cases this could cover, in a very elegant way.

The nice thing is, that they are completely "invisible" for other people around me.

<comment><USER7> I do think they are cool and could be useful, but not to the point of making someone that doesn't wear glasses want to wear them.

My main problem is what does it give me over wearing a smart watch? The only thing I can think of is being slightly more discreet and the "gesture" not being rude to activate when you are in company. That is something I found out quickly when I started wearing an Apple Watch - even if you are just checking a text message it appears you are checking the time and want to leave. Since then I have greatly cut down on notifications going to my watch, and have even fewer that even ping on my phone.

To me, having a camera on it is what would make it compelling, but at the same time make it creepy. Say being able show driving directions overlaid on the actual road, versus some floating text. Or you sit down at a desk with just a keyboard and mouse and your "displays" are only shown in your field of view - and you can customize, move and resize them as you wish.

<comment><USER8> > you sit down at a desk with just a keyboard and mouse and your "displays" > are only shown in your field of view - and you can customize, move and > resize them as you wish

This. I don't wear glasses and don't like the idea of walking around with notifications floating around my eyes.

But a set of monitors that fill my field of vision and fit in my pocket sounds awesome.

<comment><USER9> From what I understand (I'd love to be wrong here) we have currently no AR or VR technology which could conceivably be used to work with a lot of text. The resolution is not there and it's possible that it won't ever be.

Which is a damn shame, because I'd sell my kidney for the ability to work with two decently sized (virtual) displays from my couch or in the garden...

<comment><USER10> I'm intrigued by the 'possibly never will be' part, any references or reading on that?

<comment><USER11> I can answer a little. It's a problem of the conjunction of providing enough resolution that the screen is useful while having a large enough viewing angle. If I want to replicate the screen for my Surface Book, 3kx2k, at normal working distance that screen takes up about 1/5th of my working vision (that being the area my glasses cover which is a majority of my whole field of view and as much as I could expect of a non-contacts AR solution). So to render that screen and be able to place it inside the normal working field of view any AR glasses would need to have a resolution of about 5-6x whatever screen you want to duplicate, and this number gets worse as we talk about replicating TV screens which are further away and thus need even higher resolution to look the same.

It's a problem of being able to pack that many pixels onto the tiny screen area of a glasses based AR solution and then being able to process and render that in a mobile form factor. It's a hard problem to solve to say the least.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think there's definitely a market for endurance athletes. Runners and cyclists would like to see time, speed, distance, cadence, power output, navigation, etc without having to look down at a wristwatch or bike computer. Those people are accustomed to spending a lot on sports equipment. There are existing products like the Everysight Raptor and Garmin Varia View but they're bulky or goofy looking or obstruct vision, so Intel has plenty of space to offer a better alternative.

<comment><USER13> I agree in general that it would be useful in these situations.

As someone who wears glasses, I find it impossible to run with them because of the movement or them just falling off. Are people who wear glasses able to run with them - am I doing something wrong?

<comment><USER14> At the gym I don't really need it on the machines. Treadmill is flat, ellpitical removes bounce. But if I'm sprinting outside they can start to slide.

Get a strap for your glasses and have it pulled fairly tight to your head. They are cheap. One similar to this. It needs to be the correct shape for your glasses frame so it's probably best to go to a real store and try a few straps in person.

[https://www.amazon.com/Peeper-Keepers-Eyeglass-Retainer- Hold...](https://www.amazon.com/Peeper-Keepers-Eyeglass-Retainer- Holder/dp/B002UL6XKS)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Good for Intel.

This might just be the start of a new, big, market at a time when they desperately need to diversify their sources of revenue. Seeing them achieve that through in-house innovation as opposed to copying (or buying) competing products would be great.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'm disappointed that "programming for Vaunt will involve JavaScript". We're stuck with this horribly designed language on the web because browsers don't run anything else (natively), and there is a strong trend in the field to replace it, either with compilation of saner languages to JS or with WebAssembly. We don't need to infect another nascent market with this atrocity, let it die.

<comment><USER17> Just get over it. Either JS will kill every other language or webassembly will save us. Place your bets.

<comment><USER18> False dichotomy

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Interesting that they chose red as the display color. One of the co-creators of Google Glass said that they initially all thought red would be good, but after trying different colors the consensus was that it was terrible. This was because there wasn't enough contrast with the background environment.

It sounds like Intel's tech is fundamentally different—they paint your retina with a laser—and this may make the background issue irrelevant. And it was certainly part of the safety pitch, which was that this is a very low-powered laser. If it had blue or green in it they couldn't make this claim.

<comment><USER20> >> Google Glass said that they initially all thought red would be good, but after trying different colors the consensus was that it was terrible

They should have looked at a larger sample size. Red is used in rangefinder viewfinders for over 30+ years. Leica M240 has red and white as options. Red is by far the best from all standpoints - contrast, legibility and versatility.

Red dot sights are used in firearms and they are also by far superior to any other color.

I am doubtful of Google engineers and whether they put enough thought into exploring colors by using a larger sample size or cross checking different industries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I really like how much effort they put in to make things as natural and unintruive as possible.

The article mentionned there's no interaction yet; I wonder if they could track eyeball movement and use eye blinks for clicking. (Someone else mentionned a ring as an input device which is also an excellent idea.)

</comment><comment><USER22> I want these, and then I want an app on them that will tell me if the person standing directly in front of me is on my LinkedIn/Facebook, and if so, what their name is and what they do.

<comment><USER23> That'd be quite the technological feat considering they don't currently have cameras built in.

<comment><USER24> The Facebook app already know where you are. If both you and the other person have the Fb app, then I'm sure this feature could be implemented relatively easily.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't see the point of these overpriced smartwatches and glasses that can barely do one thing (display notifications), but I want my future full AR/VR glasses, so I'm glad the early adopters pay for it.

Right now, what I'd want is a very simple, slim, long-lasting watch that would notify me of emails, messages, phone calls and notifications based on their origin (business account, work account, personal, random). It doesn't even need a display, different vibration modes and LED's would do fine.

<comment><USER26> I didn't until I bought an Apple Watch and now I wear it every day and find it a very useful accessory.

<comment><USER27> I'm curious, what is it useful for? I've been thinking of getting one since it came out, but can't really imagine what I'd use it for after the coolness of the new gadget wears off.

<comment><USER28> I'm thinking of getting one for a single application - Drafts.

It's basically a take-a-note app. You talk to the watch, it records and transcribes your message, storing it in an application that's similar to an email client. At the end of my day I would open my inbox and process my notes.

I've also been getting into time tracking and I think there are some apps for starting and stopping timers from the watch.

<comment><USER29> Not to burst your bubble or anything, but as an Apple Watch user I've found that apps on the watch are nothing like you would have hoped: they're slow and limited. I'm not saying that Apple Watch isn't _useful_ –I'm just saying that in my experience, its value comes from things other than apps.

<comment><USER28> This review on YouTube:

[https://youtu.be/SzZjAMOnPtk?t=240](https://youtu.be/SzZjAMOnPtk?t=240)

Shows the watch app starting in about a second or two.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Did anyone get tech specs on the display?

How many characters can it display at once? One line or multiple lines? What's the resolution? Are images supported?

I don't think a monochrome device will sell, but the display is (to me) by far the most interesting development here.

<comment><USER31> It's in the article: It's a monochrome Virtual Retinal Display (VRD), powered by a monochrome VCSEL light source and MEMS scanner. The resolution of the image is 400X100 pixels.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Surveillance will become ubiquitous. There's no plausible scenario where it doesn't, right? Can't legislate it away once the sensors/cameras become unnoticeably small.

So we'll need new social norms to control what people share about what they learn. E.g. we already don't mention what we hear from behind bathroom doors in polite company. We'll need rules so that people can continue to operate as humans in this new paradigm.

</comment><comment> pi-squared Yeah, right - "no one will use it for every tweet notification, it will only provide contextual information" \- it will be used for whatever people want to use it and we know what people want to use it for (porn).

<comment><USER33> It's a monochrome display. Pretty hard to use it for porn.

<comment><USER9> > Pretty hard to use it for porn.

It's not hard, it's an innate characteristic of porn. It's the inverse of rule 36 - as long as a communication channel exists, it will be used for porn, no matter how inconvenient it might be. Also, playing it straight, someone will have a fetish for porn over that channel, no way around it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> My immediate thought was "burn-in".

<comment><USER35> Projects inverse image of every other notification, problem solved EyeSaver (TM)

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> Oh yeah, that swipe gesture looks so natural...

Now in addition to people talking out loud alone on the streets, people checking their notifications on their watch and phones at dinner, we'll have people looking at your teeth doing weird eye and head motions when you talk to them...

<comment><USER37> I can't help but think wearable computers aren't going to become viable until we further refine brain computer interfaces.

<comment><USER38> I cant help but to think of the dystopia that will come from further refinement of brain computer interfaces

<comment><USER39> Not sure why this comment is being downvoted - seems like a perfectly valid concern, particularly if you've read Rainbows End by Verner Vinge

<comment><USER38> Most people on HN believe that technology will only ever improve society, with very limited negative effects that can be mitigated or eliminated with more technology.

Over all they see any negative effects (both current and future) caused by technological advancement to be a technological problem that can be eliminated

In their minds the dystopian worlds depicted in scifi and fantasy just simply can not happen, "we will not allow it"

<comment><USER40> > _" Most people on HN believe that technology will only ever improve society, > with very limited negative effects that can be mitigated or eliminated with > more technology."_

I think it's safe to say that there are people who are enthusiastic about the promises of technology and those who are concerned about how it can be used, and likely significant overlap of those two groups. The likelihood of making an error when making sweeping generalizations about the constituency of HN (or anything else, for that matter) is pretty much guaranteed to miss the mark for a large subset of the population.

Your comment upthread likewise is very general and unsubstantive, and comes off as flip, for that matter. I suspect that has more to do with why your comment was down voted than about your particular concerns or position: after all, the comment doesn't say much. Granted, the comment you're replying to doesn't have a whole lot either, but that isn't an excuse for commenting poorly oneself. Dig in. Share specific thoughts or concerns you have. Help move the conversation in a constructive direction.

<comment><USER38> >>Dig in. Share specific thoughts or concerns you have. Help move the conversation in a constructive direction.

I have, most substantive comments get higher levels of down votes so why bother.

HN has become a echo chamber and if you push to hard against the echo chamber you just get banned.

<comment><USER40> Yeah, I can imagine that's frustrating. Is it something you actually want to take some action on? Do you want to help make HN a better place? Please don't take that as accusatory: it takes effort to be constructive, and each person has to make a decision whether or not that's worth the effort. If it's not (or perhaps at least not right now), it may not worth commenting at all: as you say, your comments have been attracting downvotes regardless.

If you think it _is_ worth the effort, then I'd ask you to take a step back and see if there may be ways you can change how you're commenting: Communication is a many way street, involving all parties involved. The only one you have control over however, is yourself, so really the only thing you _can_ do.

You mention "push[ing] hard against the echo chamber", so it sounds like you _are_ interested in making HN a better place. I definitely think it's important to figure out ways to have constructive conversations about difficult topics. I also think there are ways of going about this that actively work _against_ that. It's really important to keep in mind normal human psychology and behavior.

Unconstructive complaining is very unlikely to move the needle in a positive direction. It adds to the noise and degrades the overall atmosphere. Commenting on the internet is hard: it's low bandwidth compared to many other forms we're used to: we don't have the benefit of intonation or body language. On a diverse forum, we can't rely on a common background in which to place what we're saying. It sometimes feels like there are more ways it can go _wrong_ than to go _right_.

So extra time and care is important, particularly if you're interested in discussing contentious issues. When things go wrong, it's really important to take a step back and see how you might have contributed to the situation, and, even if you think you didn't do anything wrong, to look at what you can do to actively prevent whatever went wrong in the future.

It's perhaps trite, but I think it often can be summed up in "it's not what you say, it's how you say it", with the corollary that as the topic becomes more contentious, it's even more important to take care in how you say it.

I hope you _do_ choose to look at ways you might change how you comment to have the effect you want, to make HN the place you want it to be. HN is a community and how each member chooses to contribute makes HN what it is. We can each help make it the place we want it to be by how we participate: how we comment, vote, and submit.

<comment><USER38> My biggest problem with HN commenting is the rate limiting, if you get too many down votes other people can respond but you are barred from responding, any attempt get met with "you are posting to fast"

I honestly do not care about the down voting, I do care about being silenced... That is what is frustrating to not be able to respond to people. I understand the rationality behind the rate limiting but personally I find it to be an affront to free speech.

HN actively works against controversial conversations and promotes the echo chamber by the way the moderate and implement commenting.

<comment><USER40> I'll sign off after this, as it's not clear to me whether I'm being effective.

I'm going to take a step back and look at the behavior you're describing. I'm going to use as a starting point that the moderators penalize behavior, not position.†

* Member begins commenting in a way that's unconstructive.

* Mods rate-limit the member, in an effort to limit the opportunities the member has to continue to post unconstructively.

* Member feels this is limiting their ability to respond.

It _is_ limiting the member's ability to respond, but the member has shown that they're responses aren't, on balance, constructive. They aren't completely banned from responding, and in your case, you're aware you're rate- limited. That _should_ make each comment you _can_ post more valuable to you, and an opportunity to take extra care in each comment you post. It's human nature to react negatively to restrictions, so I can understand it's frustrating.

However, it's frustrating to many members who _do_ mostly follow the guidelines and post in the spirit of the sight to have conversations degrade due to repeated behavior of a minority of members. You acknowledge the rationality behind rate limiting, and feel frustrated when it's applied to you. That's human nature, and understandable as well. It's on all of us to work against our more destructive tendencies, and help each other in doing so. "Better angels of our nature", and all that. (That's why I'm taking the time to write these comments, by the way.)

And the mods do lift rate limits. It doesn't need to be a permanent condition. Contact them via the contact link in the footer and see if there's something you can do. I encourage you to do so.

\---

† If you don't subscribe to this, I think your options are to limit your discussions to non-contentious topics, or to stop commenting all together. You're unlikely to change how the mods moderate HN by behaving in a way they consider destructive. Continuing to comment in ways you're aware are against the guidelines or you believe the mods are going to react poorly to is very likely going to get you banned eventually, with frustration all around.

<comment><USER38> >>>I'll sign off after this, as it's not clear to me whether I'm being effective.

I hope not, I believe this is a decent conversation. I understand your point, and yes some of my comments are flippant and oneliners, I personally believe those kind of comments are relevant and constructive as well. hell the last election was won with bumper Sticker rhetoric. Not everything needs to be a dissertation

I seems to me that I am the one being ineffective, as it seem you have come to the impression that I understand my comments would be downvoted and/or that I know my comment is "nonconstructive" and have chosen to post them anyway. This is not true, my original comment that started this was a parody of the comment I replied to, i did not add more because the original comment did not have any additional substance. They made a statement of fact backed by no data, and I made a statement of fact backed by no data. The political bias of HN lead to my comment, which IMO has clear historical reasons for being true prediction, Was downvoted multiple times whereas the parent comment gets up voted. [My comment as since rebounded and is now in the Positive, it was in a negative when this conversation started]

Your claim however is the downvotes are not motivated by politics or disagreement but instead because the community believes it was a unconstrictive comment. this is the basis of our disagreement and resulting conversation.

>>>Member begins commenting in a way that's unconstructive.

That is a big assumption, that downvotes == unconstrctive. when more often downvotes == unpopular or against the mainstream view.

Contrary to every web sites attempts and goal down votes are used by users to express disagreement. So if a person disagrees with a post regardless of it substantive value to the conversation it they will down vote it. So to assume a heavily down voted comment is unconstructive is a terrible, and flawed assumption to make

Also I Pretty sure on HN rate limiting is an automated not manual process. If I am wrong on that then may opinion would shift to the moderators which I will not comment on as that seems to be instant ban here...

>>>You acknowledge the rationality behind rate limiting, and feel frustrated when it's applied to you

I understand the logic they applied when creating it. To limit spam, flame wars, etc. I do not agree with that logic and believe it a failed and overly aggressive policy. If anything it should be thread not user based, meaning the thread should be rate limited instead of the user...

>>>Continuing to comment in ways you're aware are against the guidelines or you believe the mods are going to react poorly to is very likely going to get you banned eventually, with frustration all around.

Well technically speaking any comment is "against the guidelines" if is deemed so by the moderators, HN guidelines like most sites are written is such an overly broad manner as to include anything and nothing at the same time, all dependent upon the mods subjective opinion and personal bias. This is not just a problem on HN but every websites anymore as the political landscape gets more polarized and people start creating echo chambers for themselves, and HN is a political echo chamber even if it attempts to claim an apolitical stance.

>>>I think your options are to limit your discussions to non-contentious topics, or to stop commenting all together.

Where politics meets technology is where my interest lies. No topic I am interested in non-contentious. I desire to advocate using technology to advance individual freedom, and guard against using technology to create or aid Authoritarian societies filled with surveillance, censorship, and tyranny. As the technology industry in general along with HN moves more and more away from Individualism and more towards Authoritarianism my views seem to considered "destructive" even though 5 or 10 years ago they would not have been. I desire to see HN and society in general shift away from this Authoritarian censorship culture and more towards Individualism and free speech. I simply can not self censor to the point where I only comment on apolitical topics as that will only allow the echo chamber to fester.

<comment><USER40> A point of clarification:

When I describe moderator action, I'm speaking specifically of action by HN admins, who are able to rate-limit. As I understand it, downvotes on their own do not result in rate-limiting. I can understand why you may have misread this, as the conversation started out discussing downvotes, and while I was careful in the language I chose, I didn't point out that I was also excluding downvotes from my last comment.

I did so for a couple of reasons: you brought up rate-limiting and banning, which are actions only a mod can take, or change; downvotes are by far the action of HN members, and as such, much harder to categorize systematically. People downvote for all kinds of reasons, and not everyone agrees on how downvotes should be handled, and why they were given in any particular instance. A distinct impression I have is that often people view downvotes as disagreement, when they could just as easily be interpreted as a downvote for an unsubstantive or uncivil comment. And I believe that a disagreement couched in a civil and substantive way is much less likely to receive a downvote than one that is rude, snarky, and unsubstantive. You'll note a recurring theme here: it's more often than not what you say, but how you say it. You mention parody: parody is really difficult, and while I appreciate the wit of those who are able to wield it, most are not able to do so in a manner that's enlightening, and the misses hurt discourse much more than the rare win helps.

There's not a lot else I have to say with respect to the rest of what you've commented here. I think I've addressed most of it, if not specifically, in a way that's pretty easy to derive given other things I've commented. Operating from a position of defense and opposition does not lend itself to good faith and moving forward. Some games are played to win, and some are played to keep playing: and conversation, particularly on contentious topics, is most definitely the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Paradoxically, the biggest selling point for me is that they're not produced by Google.

<comment><USER15> There's nothing paradoxical about that.

Google products come with visible and invisible strings; this, at least for now, doesn't.

<comment><USER42> At least, not visible ones.

<comment><USER43> If it helps, think Intel NUC vs. ChromeBox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I watched the Verge video this morning where they tried to explain how the hologram projector works, but I am still confused. How can it ensure a sharp image shining directly through your own intraocular lens (not the glasses themselves) to the retina? If you have a "longer" or "shorter" eyeball the light ray's focus point will not be on the retina itself.

<comment><USER45> Laser light is "coherent" both spatially and temporally. Spatial coherence allows the beam to be "collimated", which basically just means that it looks like a cylinder and not a cone. That's why you can shine a laser at the moon and see the spot; most of the energy from the laser makes it to the same place, bounces back to your eyes, and you get a bright spot. Shining a flashlight doesn't work because the light spreads out too much. Technically some of the light still gets to the moon and back to your eyes, it's just below the threshold of your eye's ability to distinguish differences in brightness.

For the glasses, the laser is probably being scanned using a mems mirror (like how a DLP tv works, sorta), and modulated in brightness periodically to create the pixels. Since there's only one "point" of contact between your lens and the beam, the lens doesn't distort the beam like it would an image. That's where the idea of focus comes in. If you were looking at a photograph with your eye, there would be many sources and colors of light. Since the lens refracts incoming light based on direction, position, and color, your lens' job is to make sure the "pixels" of the photograph stay spatially organized with respect to each other. That's what being in focus means. And since the laser has only one color and one direction, all that light stays together and makes a nice dot on your retina. The only thing left to do is make a correction to the overall distortion pattern your lens introduces ,which is similar for pretty much everyone. Same reason you need to add barrel distortion before sending video to an HMD. I think that's what they were showing with that "warping" red image of the glasses' display.

<comment><USER44> Thank you for the explanation! I had figured that laser light was indeed different than normal light rays, but couldn't remember my undergrad optics to explain why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Special things start to happen with retinal projection + bufferless, clockless, stochastic rendering of signed distance fields.

<comment><USER46> Key:

bufferless - Don't wait for an image, just stream pixels as fast as you find them

clockless - No world "ticks", the world is an append-only log of "percepts"¹ which can be projected onto any time.

stochastic - Don't wait for certainty about a pixel, just push out the most probable ones first

signed distance field - Afformentioned "percepts" don't have well defined boundaries like a polygon, instead "fields" centered on a point describe how light moves around them. Any two fields can be trivially summed, so you can ignore most of a scene when searching for a specific pixel near a small number of local fields.

Together they allow you to supply the eyes with nearly zero-latency data with arbitrarily low computing power.

¹ _As an aside, there is evidence humans don 't see a "now" tick either, we perceive "fields out of time" directly, log them, and interpolate their relationship to "now" thereafter, such that we feel that we are "seeing" something which our eyes have already stopped reporting about. Thus SDFs and clockless rendering are a natural fit and map well to human perception._

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I would be excited if these can display charts, graphs, pictures and video -- stuff that's too detailed for a smart watch and Alexa can't speak out loud.

I was just learning how to make a "Julia Child" omelette and would've loved to have her technique (<5 secs!) on repeat while I perform the maneuver.

</comment><comment><USER48> Gestures might be needed for some cases, but there are many situations when you could just use the smartphone as the control device. Often I do have one hand available, but the problem using a smartphone is that it requires me to stare at the screen. For example walking in the city, driving the car.

</comment><comment><USER49>
      Q. Hey, this won't just try to show me
         more Twitter bullshit, will it?

      A. No, no, no! Heh heh! It will show you
         Yelp bullshit. Much better, yes?

      Q. Ah... so the advertising will finally
         be the kind we all yearn for?

      A. Yessssss!

Wow. Thanks guys.

</comment><comment><USER50> > "You can ignore people more efficiently that way."

They should really have a chat with my SO. She can always tell if someone is paying attention.

I think squinting is a pretty natural gesture that could be used for controlling this device. That is - if it's feasible to make it so.

</comment><comment><USER51> I'm not sure I would want these. Shining a laser (even though it will be safe and well tested) right into my eyes seems a bit.. risky. I presume the laser will be controlled by its own microcontroller, well tested and "unhackable".. but still, if we can learn anything from Spectre, it's that inconspicuous system parts can open a security hole. Burning holes into a retina is quickly done given the right amount of power.

There's also the thing that blue light accelerates retina cell death.. I'd rather wait for some long term studies before putting these on.

<comment><USER52> Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it's unsafe. From the description it sounds like the laser is incapable of a high enough output to damage your eyes.

<comment><USER51> In that case, only my 2nd concern would hold - potential unforseeable long term effects. I'll pass the beta invite on that one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> > Using a Vaunt display is unlike anything else I've tried. It projects a > rectangle of red text and icons down in the lower right of your visual > field.

Interesting choice of location -- I would have thought it would be better to put it somewhere above the normal field of view, as most people tend to look up when thinking and trying to recall something. The kind of information smart glasses offer seems like it could be more naturally accessed that way.

</comment><comment><USER54> So the tech geek in my wants to love these things. It is so SciFi future-y. I just cannot see using them.

1\. I paid to have my eyes fixed so I do not need glasses. 2\. I am not sure what value any of this brings. I have not see the killer app..

That being said there is an irrational part of me that wants to hold out for the in eyeball version of this. The real issue is the killer app, now that I think about it, is the brain interface where you can think about they information you want and have it come up. Until then...well.

</comment><comment><USER55> I think this looks awesome. The only problem is I have two pairs of glasses - one for reading/computer and one for everything else - so I'll need two of them.

If I was them, I would add a bone conduction speaker in the stem so it can give you audible information as well.

I also like the ring input device another commenter mentioned.[1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16308730](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16308730)

<comment><USER56> > If I was them, I would add a bone conduction speaker in the stem so it can > give you audible information as well.

It would probably be too heavy, part of their 'non-intrusiveness' goal is to make it be very light.

<comment><USER55> Yeah, maybe. Hopefully they'll get the miniaturisation down enough to include it in version two!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Wearables are one area where not having feature bloat means a MUCH better product.

Battery life, normal temperature, reliability vs a gimmick that 1 out of a 1,000 users will want.

</comment><comment><USER58> I can picture using this with a voice interface w/ full screen transparent overlay toggle for navigating the world. Eye-swiping seems too difficult. Couple that with sensing where your hands are and you could manipulate 3d interfaces with gestures. People talking to themselves on a Jawbone was weird enough. Now they'll be full skitso where everyone's a talking mime with their own personal minority report / terminator UI.

</comment><comment><USER59> I can't help but think of how much more productive a factory worker or repairman would be with these glasses, if it were possible to display instructions, dimensions, parts of a reference manual, etc...

The first successful business in the "glasses with HUD" space will be one that targets businesses which manufacture complex things using human beings.

<comment><USER60> If you can display it on that tiny ass screen you could probably just program a machine to do it. Sounds like a business that wouldnt last long.

<comment><USER61> A machine that walks into a hotel to service an elevator?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Interesting marketing choice that all of the images are of the actual glasses, and none of the images are of what your eyes see.

<comment><USER63> From the description it sounds incredibly difficult to photograph or represent the UI in an accurate way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> _> Intel intends to attract investors who can contribute to the business with strong sales channels, industry or design expertise, rather than financial backers._

Luxottica-Essilor? They own global eyeglass distribution, both offline and online. They can take the Android market. Apple's glasses are supposedly a couple of years away.

</comment><comment><USER65> These are only normal if you enjoy keeping up with the latest fashions.

I don't like huge thick rimmed glasses and I never will.

<comment><USER66> Whether it fits your personal style has no bearing at all on whether it's normal. I don't like v-neck shirts, so personally I never wear them, but they're definitely normal.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Knowing Intel, project will be canned in a year or two; back to x86 chips and related peripherals.

</comment><comment><USER68> Intel is a dyed in the wool monopolist, which will mean the high cost will bar widespread acceptance

</comment><comment><USER69> When can I actually buy a pair? How much will they cost?

This is the kind of product I would be really interested in using. I was sad when Google Glass died after pushback in the Bay Area.

</comment><comment><USER70> Basically the Pebble of AR.

Since Intel doesn't productize themselves, I wonder who Intel will find to build and sell it. Traditional PC companies don't seem like a great fit, but I have a feeling the launch partners will be companies like Asus anyway.

</comment><comment><USER71> "holographic grading" should really be "holographic grating".

</comment><comment><USER72> where can we sign-up? I googled _vaunt_ and first thing that comes up is a bra company, NSFW: [https://sneakyvaunt.com/](https://sneakyvaunt.com/)

</comment><comment><USER73> give me a small ring on my finger to control it and I'll buy a pair.

<comment><USER74> Funny you should say that - when I was working @Intel I wrote a proposal for a Bluetooth Low Power ring that provide a simple input device for headless devices with 1 rotary input and one press input, sufficient to scroll and click on items.

Another proposal I had was a bracelet that would sense capacitance changes in the hand upon fingers touching each other; this way you could have a 12-key "keyboard" on the phalanges of the non-opposable fingers (3 phalanges x 4 fingers) touch-able by the thumb.

Such technologies would require minimal power input and provide good interaction with any headset; but at the time Intel were not interested in the research needed to build a prototype.

<comment><USER75> Speaking of ring interfaces, Ring [0] was a Kickstarter project that happened. I seem to recall that it did ship but didn't actually work too well. I suspect that your simpler interface would have been a lot more successful.

I think some of it depends on which finger you're targeting, too. Wearing it on the index finger makes it easier to tap/push buttons using the thumb.

In my HCI class, we went over this paper [1] (2010). It has a wide variety of always-available input and output and many of them would work well with these glasses. My hardware crush is a Myo [2], although I don't know how well it works. The videos of it look neat, at least :).

Also, I had the exact same idea for a hand interface as a project for my Ubicomp class, but I didn't have the skills to do it. I ended up doing research for "smart jewelry" instead :|

[0] [https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1761670738/ring- shortcu...](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1761670738/ring-shortcut- everything/posts)

[1] [https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp- content/uploads/2016/11/FnT2011-AlwaysAvailable.pdf)

[2] [https://www.myo.com/](https://www.myo.com/)

<comment><USER76> I found this use of the Myo (to control the robotic arm of an amputee) really cool -- it seems like they found a life-changing use for what might have ended up a cool toy -- [http://developerblog.myo.com/meet-the-man-with-a-myo- control...](http://developerblog.myo.com/meet-the-man-with-a-myo-controlled- robotic-arm/) \-- not sure how perfectly it works though.

<comment><USER77> Probably not particularly well as the Myo band only detects a handful of super basic gestures, and unless they have changed their stance in the past year or two they refuse to expose the raw data to developers. This makes it impossible to distinguish more than their predefined gestures.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> IMHO, Soon, smart glasses will be as ubiquitous as cellphones. We as humans keep increasing our communications and multitasking. This item covers both.

</comment><comment><USER79> Restaurant reviews, recipes, shopping lists. Yeah, I'll wait for something more compelling I guess.

<comment><USER12> Well that's the point. Intel is releasing a developer preview in the hopes that third parties will create something more compelling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> For me, real life ad-block is the killer app for AR.

</comment><comment><USER80> This will be the most useful for high school kids cheating at tests :D

</comment><comment><USER81> It's interesting that this is on the front page at the same time as the article about Apple. I would love a product with Apple quality that would provide real value AR. Hope they make it happen.

</comment><comment><USER82> Hope this spectre doesn't meltdown.

</comment><comment><USER83> In a few years, we will all be wearing those VR-goggles that Wade Watts is using in Ready Player One. Can't wait!

<comment><USER84> I'm more interested in the augmented reality glasses in the Daemon and Freedom books by Daniel Suarez. Those could be game changers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> How much though?

</comment><comment><USER69> Want!

</comment><comment><USER85> Good news after bad news: meltdown and spectre.

</comment><comment><USER86> "uses retinal projection to put a display in your eyeball..."

That sounds awful! Like some shit from Black Mirror! Jesus, Fuck!

<comment><USER86> I'd like to clarify, tech is great and all, but I don't want to become a fucking cyborg. What the hell is wrong with these people?

<comment><USER87> Would you please start commenting civilly and substantively?

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

<comment><USER86> Did I say something offensive to cyborgs? My bad. Cyborgs are people too, well sort of...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> They're waiting for you Gordon ... in the test chamber.

</comment><comment><USER89> This will lead to all glasses wearers being treated with suspicion, until such time as cameras are also readily available in shirt buttons and everything else. At that point recording will become unavoidable and therefore normalized.

<comment><USER90> The device under discussion does not have a camera.

<comment><USER89> Fair enough, but this tidbit from the article would still give people pause:

>no microphone (for now)</comment></comment></comment>


Bloomberg made his billions with a computer system you've probably never seen - <AUTHOR> https://www.vox.com/2020-presidential-election/2019/12/11/21005008/michael-bloomberg-terminal-net-worth-2020 <comment><USER2> Which was sold to wall street, hedge funds, and the like. His autobiography is a good history on this, they were (are?) a great developer organization</comment>


I just warranty deeded my house into an Ethereum smart contract. AMA - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/7p155y/i_just_warranty_deeded_my_house_into_an_ethereum/ <comment><USER2> Hell of a way to try and pump, from the "act like a fool so as to lure even greater fools into the pool" playbook. Of course reading some comments it seems likely that this was not just one person, and probably not their residence.</comment>


How do I motivate my friends to work on side projects? - <AUTHOR> I'm a college student studying CS and I'm constantly working on 3+ side projects as well as trying to stay up to date with all the newest trends in CS and teaching myself several new languages, and I think this makes me pretty marketable to companies as well as keeps me continuously fascinated.
I can tell many of my friends sort of want to work on side projects too, but aren't really passionate enough to dive in and actually do them. These are my friends who I really want to see succeed though, so I'm looking for advice on how to motivate them.  I don't necessarily want to just invite them to work on every one of my personal projects with me, but some maybe.
Any of your input would be greatly appreciated.  I'm sure many of you have faced the same sorts of situations.  Thanks a lot! <comment><USER2> Between the ages of 16 and 22, I hung out with a bunch of really smart people who weren't really passionate about actually diving in and actually doing stuff. We thought of ourselves as musicians, philosophers, thinkers, people who "got it", better than everyone else, avoiding the rat race, etc. We liked talking. Didn't like doing. Most of us were underachievers at school.

Here's what I've learnt. THE SINGLE GREATEST THING you can do to motivate them is to become successful yourself. This applies in everything from fitness to relationship success. Want to get people fitter? Get fit yourself. Etc.

You may find that it's actually best for both you and your friends for you to FIND and work with people who are passionate enough. Some of them will be inspired by your example. Others will never be interested, and your precious, limited time is better spent focusing on people who actually care.

The advice I wish I got when I was 16- find kickass, badass friends who get shit done. Otherwise you're all just validating each other's fiction and bullshit about why you're dicking around.

... all of this is really more about me and my experience than you- your mileage may vary, your experience might be completely different. Maybe your friends just need to watch a few great motivational videos (this one is my favorite- I've watched it so much it's started to seep into my self-talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-jwWYX7Jlo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-jwWYX7Jlo)).

But just putting this out there in case it's useful or triggers something.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have many friends who are in Sales. I have shown them many side projects and tried to convince them to sell it in their spare time. They are all enthusiastic at first and joke about which sports car they will buy when it takes off.

The truth is they never even attempt to sell it, not once.

I do not get mad at them though, I have just learned not to work with friends. You need boundaries in business. I suggest you do the same :).

</comment><comment><USER4> You can't force people to be motivated. You can only show them the way. Build out your own projects. Pick one friend, show them what you've been working on, ask them if they want to join you, if they say yes, then tell them exactly what you need and by when. If they don't put anything together by the due date, then you do it yourself and move on.

</comment><comment><USER5> Hey also a Computer Science student here. I know it is no fun hacking alone and sometimes you feel like having your own badass hacker crew crunching code and saving the day. As they say "Charity Begins at Home" Your first step could to show the fruits of your own passion and motivation to your friends on something cool you hacked during the weekend. I am motivated by Python Celeb programmers like Kenneth Retiz and how he made a badass Python library called "requests". It is the innate ability to take charge and do it. If you think you can solve a problem, by the philosophy of open source you are under an obligation to solve that problem and make it available to everyone else. On the other hand it's their freewill. They can choose to hack on side projects or not depending on their priorities. They might have more higher priority obligations to do and pursuing a side project is really not on their list right now.

</comment><comment><USER6> > These are my friends who I really want to see succeed though, so I'm looking > for advice on how to motivate them.

I was reminded of Richard Branson's motley collection of friends he started with in business. Some stayed with him for several years, while others who made vital contributions moved on after a few seasons. Ultimately, you're looking for people who want to join the fun. Growth, success, & money follows.

Incidentally, you might find Branson's book of interest> [http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211099.Losing_My_Virginit...](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/211099.Losing_My_Virginity)

</comment><comment><USER7> Look, it may sound harsh, but get new friends.

Take the time that you'd spend trying to find some way to get your friends to work on a project with you and channel that energy into finding other people who actually want to work on stuff. Join meetups, find local groups, get out there.

If you feel like you're pulling teeth now to just get them to start, imagine once you're actually working and hit a speedbump. Trust me, you're gonna have a bad time.

<comment><USER8> Sorry, but that's pretty crazy. Not everyone you meet has to have the exact same set of goals and priorities as you. It's good to broaden your circles and be friends with people who don't always agree with you or enjoy doing what you do.

<comment><USER7> I don't think we disagree. You don't have to ditch your old friends, but if you wanna build side projects you should find new people who are into that instead of wasting time trying to convince people who obviously _aren 't_.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Just a question: why should your friends want to work on side projects? Or, why do you believe your friends should want to work on side projects?

<comment><AUTHOR> I think they should work on _something_ whether it is side projects, research, etc. just to better themselves as CS students and as potential job candidates

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Frankly, it sounds like you need to distance yourself from them if they aren't as motivated as you are. If you are constantly with them, they will probably bring you down when they hear about your side projects. Focus on yourself first always.

</comment><comment><USER11> You can't teach passion

<comment><AUTHOR> That's like saying they are a lost cause. And nobody is a lost cause

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> You will find that many people just aren't motivated enough for things like side projects. It's the same thing with business. I have tried 3 times (and failed) to start side-businesses with friends..and failed each time because my friends were not motivated enough to spend their free time on something besides relaxing or partying.

</comment><comment><USER13> Let them have fun their own way.

<comment><USER13> I'm going to expand on this because it's important. You're only young once, don't waste it. Go outside, get some fresh air, find some dudes and / or ladies to consensually smooch upon, there's plenty of time later for the toil.</comment></comment>


Can cannibalism lead to disease resistance? (2018) - <AUTHOR> https://blogs.agu.org/sciencecommunication/2018/07/10/brains-for-breakfast-can-cannibalism-lead-to-disease-resistance/ <comment><USER2> An honest title should be "Can cannibalism promote resistance to cannibalism- induced diseases?" \- which most people would guess since evolution will promote survival of the disease-resistant lineages.

The current click-bait title implies cannibalism could improve resistance to disease in general.

<comment><USER3> Yes, or "Can disease lead to disease resistance?"

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The title is a bit of a misphrasing, cannibalism didn't give anybody resistance, it just killed everyone that didn't have it.

<comment><USER5> Then the surviving population would be resistant. That's how evolution works.

<comment><USER4> If Bill Gates killed every person in New York that didn't have a bike, would it be accurate to say that he gave every New Yorker a bike?

<comment><USER5> No, but it would be accurate to say that he was exerting selective pressure on people to have bikes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Far more efficient than burying people and wasting all the land.

<comment><USER7> > wasting all the land

The waste exists only because we deem those locations as sacred. Otherwise, burying is the most efficient use of resources.

<comment><USER6> How? I don't think human bodies are mineral rich.

<comment><USER7> It isn't about minerals. You become food for the critters and microorganisms and your resources are placed back into the natural cycle.

<comment><USER6> But ... there's 50 kg of meat for an average person. Should be good for a whole week!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Girl, 12, beats Einstein and Stephen Hawking to get top score in IQ test - <AUTHOR> http://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/parenting/girl-12-beats-einstein-and-stephen-hawking-to-get-top-score-in-iq-test/story-fnet08ui-1227514524634 <comment><USER2> Cattell III B measures english vocabulary, not raw cognitive horsepower. I've no doubt this girl is extremely smart, but the test she took can be gamed rather easily. As the article mentions, two other children aced the same test. I'd be much more interested to see the results of Raven's Progressive Matrices.

One more thing: I'm pretty sure this article is a submarine[1] for a TV show about child geniuses.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> That just proves how useless the test is.</comment>


Moving from Heroku to your own server - <AUTHOR> http://thevagabondgeek.com/14-moving-a-rails-app-from-heroku-to-your-own-server

<comment><USER2> While parts of this are straight forward, I find it amusing that switching from Postgres on Heroku to MySQL is glossed over as such a trivial step. Why not just stay on Postgres when you move to your own server?</comment>


PropertyCross - Helping you select a cross-platform mobile framework - <AUTHOR> http://propertycross.com/ <comment><USER2> Most excellent!

Can't wait until this is expanded to include the other frameworks that are missing.

</comment><comment><USER3> The TodoMVC of Mobile Frameworks? Awesome! Have an upvote!

</comment><comment><USER4> Why does Native not support Android?

<comment><USER5> They are still developing the Android version

<comment><USER6> I'm working on it! Hoping to submit the pull request in the new year. :)</comment></comment></comment>


The class of all classes not containing themselves - <AUTHOR> http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/116425/the-class-of-all-classes-not-containing-themselves

<comment><USER2> Good stuff, been reading through "the joy of sets" on my commute. I think it's a shame that more formal set theory and topology aren't taught as part of the standard comp sci curriculum.

I remember an interviewer who specialized in machine learning looking at me like I was crazy for asking which distance function he wanted me to use. But d = max(Si) seems like it would be faster to calculate that d = sq( Sum (Si^2) )</comment>


Why was Linode attacked and why doesn't the USGOV assist? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/04/linode_back_at_last_after_ten_days_of_hell/ <comment><USER2> poorly editorialized title

<comment><USER3> and per part of a subsequent announcement from linode, "Multiple Federal law enforcement authorities are also investigating and have cases open" \- [http://status.linode.com/incidents/ghdlhfnfngnh](http://status.linode.com/incidents/ghdlhfnfngnh)</comment></comment>


XRTML - a markup language for defining real-time updates - <AUTHOR> http://www.xrtml.org/

<comment><USER2> So, they have a registered trademark on the word "Realtime"? Great.

</comment><comment><USER3> It'll be a cold day in hell when I use XML for real-time communication.

<comment><USER4> xRTML is a client-side javascript framework. <http://bit.ly/zhakvV> It doesn't just support XML-like tags, it has other APIs too.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: CTO of seed funded company or Director of well funded company? - <AUTHOR> I have been offered positions from two separate companies here in SF.
One is a well funded startup in need of someone to grow and manage their engineering team as the Director of Engineering
The other is a seed funded startup iterating on their product with an offshore team in the short term and currently raising the next round of funding. Seed funding is good for another 6 months. I will be signing on as the CTO.
Both pay what I consider fair salary and equity for what stage they're at.
Any thoughts or insights are appreciated. Ultimately I want to run my own startup and I am having trouble gauging how much of an impact either of these will have on my long term goals. <comment><USER2> CTO of the seed funded startup because your ultimate goal is to start/run your own startup. This may validate your goal, or it may change it.

The DoE role could arguably distract you from your long-term goals. A well funded situation with good perks could create a golden cage.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Challenge yourself

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you have to ask, you're prob not that excited about the startup. I'd go with DoE.</comment>


When no one retires - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/cover-story/2018/11/when-no-one-retires <comment><USER2> So everything will be fine because people will accept to work until death ? Do not count on me

<comment><USER3> Ok, but please don't post unsubstantive comments here.

Especially please don't begin a new thread with one. It has a degrading effect on discussions, which are sensitive to initial conditions.</comment></comment>


eBay is port scanning visitors to their website - <AUTHOR> https://blog.nem.ec/2020/05/24/ebay-port-scanning/ <comment><USER2> This might explain why some preinstalled HP laptop software (with open ports?) causes a BSOD when users visit ebay [https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook- Operating-System-and-...](https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Notebook-Operating- System-and-Recovery/Blu-screen-error-after-login-to-ebay-costumer- page/td-p/6692602)

<comment><USER3> A preinstalled local server, presumably running in kernel space for it cause BSOD, crash when connected from localhost and attempted TLS handshake? The preinstalled crapware never changes.

<comment><USER4> I feel like the only good option at this point when purchasing a prebuilt desktop or a laptop is to nuke the drive and do a clean install of Windows. Seems like the only way to ensure that you've killed the crapware and any partitions meant to preserve/reinstall it.

<comment><USER5> Sometimes that isn't even enough. Windows for example ships with a feature called the "Windows Platform Binary Table" that will load and run DLLs embedded in a machine's ACPI tables.

<comment><USER6> Is there software that will enumerate ACPI for DLLs?

<comment><USER7> You can look for ACPI table(s) called "WPBT" using RWEverything (if you are a Windows user): [http://rweverything.com/downloads/RwPortableX64V1.7.zip](http://rweverything.com/downloads/RwPortableX64V1.7.zip)

or look into the following filesystem path in Linux: /sys/firmware/acpi/tables

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I asked this earlier and nobody had a response, so thought I'd ask it again: is there an extension to block this?

Edit: @Windows users: pip install pydivert and then try to write a script to block connections from Chrome to non-Chrome processes. you might need GetTcpTable2() or something. (Looking into this now. Check out [http://stackoverflow.com/a/25431340](http://stackoverflow.com/a/25431340))

<comment><USER9> As far as I know these port scans are done using WebRTC. Using a browser extension[0] it is easy to deactivate it on the go. Personally, I always have WebRTC disabled by default (as it has several nasty security implications), and only activate it if I explicitly need it for something.

[0] [https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/happy- bonobo-...](https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/happy-bonobo- disable-webrtc/)

<comment><USER10> irrc, eBay uses websocket connections [0] to scan the ports. Firefox doesn't offer an option to disable websockets in the _about:config_ page. However, I have read about workarounds by setting

      network.websocket.max-connections=0

This is a global setting and is applied to all websites. I also wasn't able to test this myself yet. Are there any good extensions for blocking websockets on for specific domains?

[0] [https://nullsweep.com/why-is-this-website-port-scanning- me/](https://nullsweep.com/why-is-this-website-port-scanning-me/)

<comment><USER11> To people reading this, many websites rely on websockets for real-time information. They would likely fallback to per-refresh HTTP requests, but it also may break a bunch of sites.

<comment><USER12> As a developer on a product that uses websocket extensively, I'm afraid that this will lead to the already huge distrust in the technology.

If IT admins get wind of this they'll just block it (or never unblock it since it's been blocked by some from day 1) and our product gets degraded experience.

<comment><USER13> like dropping ICMP replies on firewalls. idiotic because it gives a very false sense of security. it's been a useless "security" practice since the 90s.

<comment><USER14> But don't firewalls drop everything inbound by default? So it's more that people don't know they should create rules to allow ICMP, no?

<comment><USER15> Connection comes from your browser i.e. localhost to yourself, firewall is not setup to block such connections in most cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> It's crystal clear why they do this.

Many companies or persons share their desktops for remote usage. Later they sell this service to eBay users. And they're using it for different fraudulent activities - from making real sales (just for stars) to bidding to own items (for rising price).

For years eBay fight this.

<comment><USER17> It seems like eBay wants it both ways. They want to have a huge user base with low friction to get started, but they also don't want fraudulent players. Instead of doing KYC (know your customer) like many financial services, they're stuck doing dirty tricks like this to try and combat fraud.

<comment><USER18> Cheating is rampant in all financial services that mediate transactions between end customers. No shortage of stories about card fraud or PayPal woes.

<comment><USER19> That is largely down to the liablity being on the end points of the transaction not on the transport layer...

Either the consumer or the merchant bears the cost for fraud, rarely does paypal or the banks if they did the problem of identity fraud would be solved, and would not be called "identity theft"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A similar article was on HN a few days ago:

[https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/list-of- well-...](https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/list-of-well-known- web-sites-that-port-scan-their-visitors/)

Here's the discussion about it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23361823](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23361823)

</comment><comment><USER21> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246170](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246170)

<comment><USER22> In case anyone thinks this is a dupe, it's not. This post is inspired by the first article. It gives a much more detailed analysis of the code and what data is sent where.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The company that is actually providing this service is by Lexis Nexis [https://risk.lexisnexis.com/corporations-and-non- profits/fra...](https://risk.lexisnexis.com/corporations-and-non- profits/fraud-and-identity-management)

</comment><comment><USER24> eBay has a big fraud headache. They have a bunch of algorithms (from the pre- ML-hype days) that take a variety of inputs to determine whether a given transaction is fraudulent or not. Presence of remote login service on the user's computer may tip the scale heavily in this calculation. Fraud detection is a necessary evil for all financial transaction companies in order to keep costs low for everyone else.

If you're worried about privacy, use CCPA's right to information and ask them for a dump of everything they have on you. They are supposed to give you info that other SPs like Threatmetrix have on you as well if they really are transmitting it to 3rd parties.

<comment><USER25> > Fraud detection is a necessary evil for all financial transaction companies > in order to keep costs low for everyone else.

That doesn't mean they should be allowed to behave like cybercriminals. The risk of fraud doesn't give them a free pass to abuse our trust and invade our privacy. They aren't entitled to know what software people run on their own computers. Especially if they learn this information through underhanded means like port scanning people's local networks without their permission or knowledge. It doesn't matter how much money they're losing because of fraud, they don't get to violate these boundaries in order to reduce the risk associated with their own business.

<comment><USER24> Is "behaving like cyber criminals" bad though? Just because it's doing something out of the ordinary in terms of tech doesn't mean it's bad. Fighting cybercrime is always a cat and mouse game akin to counter terrorism, counter espionage or even plain cops and robbers. You need to think like your enemy, have informers, etc etc, while not harming the good citizens. That's what is going on here.

Are there cops who misuse their power? Absolutely. Are there spies who use information for personal gains? Sure. There need to be checks and balances that make it bad for such people to go rogue.

Privacy acts aim to do some of that. They bring accountability but also an ability to opt out (the latter is hard though - akin to ostracizing oneself from a community).

<comment><USER25> It's true that the consequences of being port scanned by some website are probably negligible. However, that is not the _real_ problem.

The real problem is the _audacity_ of these people. They think they can do whatever they want. Not only that, they think they are _justified_ in doing it. They need this information for their own purposes, so they just take it from people without asking, without even informing them. In their minds, what they did was not objectionable. They _needed_ to do it, so they didn't do anything wrong. Those fraudsters left them no choice: they just _had_ to invade the privacy of every single person who visited their website.

It's the same logic every abuser uses. It betrays a fundamental lack of respect for the people who use their service. It's impossible to have trust without this respect.

<comment><USER24> This notion of invasion of privacy is all relative. If they ask you for your mother's maiden name or first pet or the city where you had your first kiss, you are okay typing it in a form for them.

If they try to infer the active port numbers on your computer to see if there's a Remote Desktop installed by a bot, you're not okay.

What's the alternative? Do you want them to disclose everything they do in a marketing article even though 99.99% of people will have no clue what that means and 10 of the 100 people that bother to read and understand will use it against them. To what end? To gain your trust? You - who has already given them your credit card number, mothers maiden name and city where you first got intimate with your first partner?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I never understood why websockets aren't subject to same origin policy and CORS (or similar policies). Any web expert here could explain this design (non-)decision?

<comment><USER27> Surprisingly often websocket connections are made to a different domain from what is serving the site itself. I'm not sure about the root cause to the pattern, but sure as hell know that our company has been doing it at least since 2013.

Browsers set the "Origin" header for ws:// calls, and the websocket servers are expected to check that. Without the check, it'd be possible to issue blind writes (CSRF) from random webpages to the ws:// endpoints. If you're using main site authentication with a separate websocket domain and auth'd requests, all garden variety security scanners will flag the separate websocket domain as a problem, and only the robust ones actually try to validate the server side configuration.

Disclosure: I have triaged and responded to a few of such reports.

<comment><USER28> > Surprisingly often websocket connections are made to a different domain from > what is serving the site itself.

That's probably because websockets require asynchronous servers optimizing for number of active connections, while normal sites are best served by servers optimized for response time.

Of course, you _can_ have both handled by the same origin, but it's not the blatantly obvious way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is what happens when there is a browser monopoly. Fixing security do not have priority. Maximizing revenue is the priority. The browser should stop outgoing connections that are not from the same origin. Then users have to opt in like with popup windows.

</comment><comment><USER30> Has anyone confirmed whether they're still continuing this practice? I'm curious, but at the same time feel highly uncomfortable visiting a website that has no problems exploiting a browser loophole.

<comment><USER31> Just tried ebay.co.uk and I can see several clear.png calls with 204 and a payload as described in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Extremely well written sum-up, learned a lot about how to approach an investigation like this. Thank you.

</comment><comment><USER33> Just wait until the database of ip and open ports is leaked and hackers start exploiting vulnerabilities of softwares listening to these ports to break into random people devices.

<comment><USER34> That database has existed for ages: [https://www.shodan.io/](https://www.shodan.io/)

<comment><USER35> Does Shodan have a map of public ip -> natted local network ip:port pairs?

I thought it was only public ip ports.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Perhaps they've asked threat metrix to handle a portion of their security and this was their solution?

At the end of the day, we all need to realize that we send out far more information than we receive when we surf the web.

</comment><comment><USER37> I saw him talk about how Threat Matrix is usually blocked.....but Threat Matrix has their clients get unique endpoint URLs to disguise it. I don't really know how AdBlock works, but aside from the extra time it would take, why doesn't adblockers look up the record of any URLs on the page and see if they are a CNAME for an A url that is on the block list?

<comment><USER38> uBlock origin does exactly that on browsers which support it. Which I believe is only Firefox at this time. [https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock- issues/issues/780](https://github.com/uBlockOrigin/uBlock-issues/issues/780)

<comment><USER37> Well, I was already using Ff+UblockO, so this is just another reason to keep using it. I would really prefer I not get port scanned.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> The real issue is not that eBay or some other specific website uses Javascript to port scan network. The real issue is that browsers allow such behavior by default.

</comment><comment><USER40> A couple Chrome devtools debugging tips:

1\. Local Overrides feature allows you to persist and edit source files across page loads (unfortunately only source files currently, so you're out of luck if the JS comes from an XHR or something)

2\. F3 on the network panel will let you search for a string across all resources the page loaded. Can be useful for tracking down where stuff like user-agent checks are called (if not obfuscated).

Also calling the code obfuscated is pretty generous. It's amazing how common things like shift ciphers, XOR tricks, etc. are when the browser's REPL cuts through them like butter.

<comment><USER41> Thanks for the tips! Local Overrides is new to me and would have helped a lot. I made heavy use of F3 (also Ctrl+Shift+F) to find my way around those scripts, and to find my place again after each page refresh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act)

</comment><comment><USER43> Huh. I've been using eBay a lot this week, and it might have triggered a kernel bug. I had terrible internet performance that got resolved by rebooting my Ubuntu 18.04 laptop.

</comment><comment><USER44> macOS users, I believe based on my testing that you can block your installed web browsers from localhost port scanning using LittleSnitch. This way you can continue to allow WebRTC and WebSockets to the rest of the Internet (where it's useful), while denying web browsers access to localhost except for specific ports you allow.

However, I encourage you to be careful and _only_ block web browsers to localhost using this method, because lots of macOS applications depend on localhost connections to talk to themselves, so if you block everything from talking to localhost you may break e.g. LittleSnitch, macOS itself, etc. NO WARRANTY, HAVE BACKUPS, standard stuff.

To set this up, for each /Applications/Browser.app, create a LittleSnitch 'Deny Connections' To 'IP Addresses' rule and enter '127.0.0.1, ::1' without quotes into the text field and click OK. Then right-click on the newly-created application rule and select 'Increase Priority', which will bold the rule text 'Deny outgoing connections to 2 IP addresses'. Repeat this for each Browser.app you use.

If you'd like to specifically enable certain localhost ports to be accessible by your browser (such as 80/443), you can create another rule using the above steps, but before saving the rule, change 'Deny' to 'Allow' and click the '\/' dropdown caret button and enter the appropriate port and select TCP. I encountered some UI quirks doing this but once it's created it works as it should.

Here's a screenshot of the results of my testing for comparing against. I'm not really familiar with how LS works so I can't offer much support, but I fresh-installed it and left all the defaults alone and it worked, so more advanced users shouldn't have much trouble. [https://i.imgur.com/T0yqrdM.png](https://i.imgur.com/T0yqrdM.png)

Good luck!

(For those wondering if other software can do this, I tested various macOS application firewalls today and most of them either global-allow localhost connections or don't offer outbound filtering at all. So far, the only one that can block web browsers _only_ from connecting to localhost is LittleSnitch, with some quirks that I wrote a note to their support about. At least one let me create the rule and cheerfully said it was active and then it didn't block anything.)

<comment><USER45> Ah thanks for this. I was looking for a way to accomplish this. I own LS so I'm going to give this a shot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> What can you possibly know from such a scan?

Standard clearly states that pretty much nothing: [https://www.w3.org/TR/websockets/#concept-websocket-close- fa...](https://www.w3.org/TR/websockets/#concept-websocket-close-fail)

Sure they're shady and that needs to be blocked, but security implications? Pretty much nil.

<comment><USER47> _Sure they 're shady and that needs to be blocked, but security implications? Pretty much nil._

Fingerprinting. Vulnerability discovery. Messing up programs that don't know how to deal with unexpected HTTP requests.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I remember while working at some company, I started using a local flask server.

For some reason, I remember one company router kept making http request on port 5000 or 8000, can't remember which port, because it was literally showing on the terminal, with the http path, at random times.

I'm sure being a hacker must be pretty fun these days.

</comment><comment><USER49> Great article! Finally I got it. Between this one and the original post. 'Why is this website port scanning me'. Can anyone shed some thoughts / reason why the scan is not performed on Linux machines? Maybe not RDP, but VNC servers that the scan performs on Windows m/cs ..

</comment><comment><USER50> Could for ex. a website like ebay also access the intern Intranet in a company? Or my cloudstorage like SharePoint that is open in the same browser?

</comment><comment><USER51> Here's how to block websites from port-scanning localhost through the browser: [https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/block-localhost-port- scans.html](https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/block-localhost-port-scans.html)

</comment><comment><USER52> I thought it was no secret to anyone that all services track digital fingerprints ... and there are many ways to do this. to fight them i use antidetection browser such as [https://gologinapp.com/](https://gologinapp.com/) or other. Are there any alternatives to this?

</comment><comment><USER53> Google's internal sso (which I accidentally stumbled upon) collects other endpoint-specific parameters to compose the digital signature (like browser window size and monitor size).

This feels more effective and less intrusive. Not sure why ebay went this rather weird and creepy way instead.

<comment><USER54> Looking for fraud signs is my guess, people don't usually use eBay through TeamViewer so if it's on and the port is open then an otherwise normal transaction gets really suspicious for example. They're probably feeding the open port info into their model to determine fraud risk for user logins and transactions.

They may not even be using it actively yet because they'd need to gather a lot of example data to detect outliers.

<comment><USER55> how can they differentiate between idling tv server running on (all) my machines vs. active tv session?

<comment><USER54> I don't know if there's a detectable difference just looking at the ports; just having TeamViewer installed slightly increases the risk of any transaction being fraudulent though. I'm just trying to provide an example of how port data could be used for a meaningful purpose. Even just as an additional fingerprinting component it could be useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> wasn't this on the front page just a few days ago?

<comment><USER57> More than one discussion can be had.

<comment><USER58> I respectfully disagree in this case—the last story was too recent, and this one does not contain any significant new information, so we're likely to end up just rehashing the same points (and have so far, in my estimation).

Edit: But, thefreeman above just informed me there's actual new information in this article (which I originally hadn't read, because the comments here made me assume it was the same as the last story on HN). So, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I immediately thought about this after reading the Wikipedia page of Peter Theil and Palentir where he stated he wanted to use technology that was used to protect PayPal (that was purchased by eBay)

</comment><comment><USER60> I thought it would be obvious that eBay is doing this to identify bots (usually on servers) vs. real users (on client-only devices).

<comment><USER61> That is one of the main purposes, yes. I have no problem with it, personally. Many HN users are very privacy-conscious and consider it not acceptable for any purpose, though; including that one. I think both positions are fine.

<comment><USER60> > Many HN users are very privacy-conscious and consider it not acceptable for > any purpose, though; including that one

It's an opinion, I suppose, but it doesn't seem to be based on reasonable expectations. Anyone can portscan anyone else, lots of security researchers have published their findings from portscanning large IP address ranges etc. ... If I don't want other people to see or access open ports on my system, I can firewall them.

<comment><USER62> External portscans are quite different from using your own machine to portscan itself/the local network.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> I'm just a layman, but I don't see how ThreatMatrix could possibly be seen as within the spirit of GDPR. I hope regulators throw the book here.

</comment><comment><USER64> Humanity constructed something wonderful and new. (The internet.) And the corporate web has all but destroyed it.

<comment><USER65> Slightly OT but I'd suggest that the thing that has "ruined" the internet (for me) more than any other single thing are trolls, and they predate the corporate web by a long way.

<comment><USER66> I would take 2x trolls over the abusive advertising and tracking network we have now.</comment></comment></comment>


NY Court of Appeals finds retroactive liability unconstitutional - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> You mess up when posting this? There is no link.</comment>


I have overdosed on new, brilliant ideas - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/03/victor-keegan-entrepreneurs

<comment><USER2> _He tells me his son, a standup comedian, has just got into Cambridge to study politics. Amazing, the lengths they go to to get new material these days._

:-)</comment>


Exodus – Painless relocation of Linux binaries without containers - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Intoli/exodus <comment><USER2> This is a helpful tool. I live in hope that one day the Linux community will realize that tools like this being helpful are a symptom of ridiculous design flaw in the system.

</comment><comment><USER3> This project is awesome. Do you know if there's a way to bundle up something like a python or PHP script so it runs standalone without needing the runtimes on the target system?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! For Python, `cx_Freeze` should be able to accomplish what you describe in a cross-platform way. I don't know of any similar PHP tools off the top of my head.

[1] - [http://cx-freeze.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html](http://cx- freeze.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> on the readme page, there is a recorded terminal demoing how to use it.

My question: how to generate similar terminal record?

<comment><AUTHOR> The short answer is that I used gifine [1]. The longer answer is that I researched this extensively and wrote a post called _Terminal Recorders: A Comprehensive Guide_ that covers many of the available options [2]. If you're trying to pick a tool to use, you might find that post useful. Gifine was the right choice for me, but there are pros and cons for each tool.

\- [1] [https://github.com/leafo/gifine](https://github.com/leafo/gifine)

\- [2] [https://intoli.com/blog/terminal- recorders/](https://intoli.com/blog/terminal-recorders/)

<comment><USER4> Great! Thank you very much!</comment></comment></comment>


Best Monitors for Programmers - <AUTHOR> http://www.programmingrelief.com/best-monitors-for-programmers.php

<comment><USER2> One important thing to note, which was mentioned in several other articles referenced on HN over the last couple weeks - the Seiki monitor (TV) only does 30Hz at max resolution. While I haven't personally tried this, I have heard others say this is completely unacceptable and I believe them. So just beware of the limitations of that model.

</comment><comment><USER3> I have 3 Dell U2412M 24" monitors vertically oriented. They get the job done.</comment>


Death of Moore's Law will cause economic crisis - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/hardware/140858/death-moores-law-will-cause-economic-crisis <comment><USER2> I think Kaku is a sensationalist and often uses his bloated public image as a physics genius to pretend to know much more about certain fields than he (probably) does. That said, the cessation of the effects of Moore's law would of course have economic consequences, but the economy is adaptive. Further, consumers have become much more interested in technological aspects other than computing power, such as form factors and UX/UI advancements. I don't think it's necessary that if Moore's law became unproductive the tech industry would fail to make advancements that they might promote along the same fast paced life cycles of their current products.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. A lack of huge technical leaps forward hasn't stopped the automotive industry from planning obsolescence. I don't see any reason to assume electronics will be any different.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Kaku is a computer scientist? Wow I didn't know that(snark). Maybe he should stop trying to be an expert on everything. Maybe he should stop being a media whore.</comment>