Facebook to integrate the infrastructure for WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/25/technology/facebook-instagram-whatsapp-messenger.html <comment><USER3> > Mr. Zuckerberg has also ordered all of the apps to incorporate end-to-end > encryption, the people said, a significant step that protects messages from > being viewed by anyone except the participants in the conversation.

I don't blame NYT for getting this wrong wrt WhatsApp but it bears repeating: if you let someone else broker the key exchange, you trust them implicitly. That is to say that IMO this is not truly trustworthy "end to end encryption". To add insult to injury, WhatsApp permits rekeying to take place without any indication to the conversation's participants [in the default settings].

<comment><USER4> > if you let someone else broker the key exchange, you trust them implicitly.

Sort of.

Yes, they could serve you a MITM key, but it would be easily discoverable when you compare security codes in the client. And since the client is widely distributed on major app stores, it would be very risky to ship a compromised client.

Ultimately key exchange is a hard problem to solve. Notice that Signal doesn't do anything that much different; Signal does the key exchange and unless you verify each user's key offline, you have to trust it. Both WhatsApp and Signal have an option to display a notice when keys change, but Signal's is on by default.

Overall it's still pretty damn good. WhatsApp is perhaps the only major form of consumer communication where, by default and with no opt-out, every single chat really is fully encrypted using a widely respected protocol (libsignal). That's not nothing.

<comment><USER5> > Notice that Signal doesn't do anything that much different; Signal does the > key exchange and unless you verify each user's key offline, you have to > trust it.

Let's not forget Signal is FOSS and has reproducible builds ([https://signal.org/blog/reproducible- android/](https://signal.org/blog/reproducible-android/)). This makes it far easier to trust its verification code.

<comment><USER6> Yes, signal is better than FB or sms.. But the whole requiring phone number puts a nail in it on my end.

So Signal can learn who talks with whom via requests going through their LDAP- like server. They can get an idea how long calls are, and if it was a vid or audio call. They know the times of communication.

You know, they can see the _metadata_. When's the last time we had problems with metadata? The POTS network? Yep.

And you're indeed right the _client_ has reproducible builds. But the server side certainly doesn't. And we have no way to ascertain that.

<comment><USER7> Everytime Signal is brought up someone just has to chime in saying 'we must abandanon Signal at all costs because metadata'. The metadata limitation is well known and if metadata interception is a problem for your threat model there are steps to obscure your identity or you should use a different tool. For the 99% of other cases where I just don't want anyone snooping on my conversation with friends and family but don't care that people know I'm obviously conversing with my friends and family Signal is great. Let's not throw Signal out just because the metadata is still there.

<comment><USER8> If metadata is good enough to drone strike weddings, it's probably good enough to throw you in a concentration camp too. And since data never dies, it might be enough to throw your grand kids in concentration camps.

Now, protecting everyone's meta data is hard (probably impossible), and I don't mean to be defeatist - but "it's just metadata" doesn't sit well in a post Snowden world. We _know_ all large intelligence agencies hoover up this stuff.

And we also know that agencies are made up of people, and some people abuse their access.

<comment><USER7> I certainly don't mean to discount the importance of metadata. I specifically mentioned ensuring Signal fits your threat model.

To suggest that metadata of communication over Signal between my spouse and I will be used against my grand kids one day is a bit absurd though. Of course there's tons of metadata connecting my spouse and I. It would be more suspicious if there wasn't.

<comment><USER8> Spouse, "family" and friends are different goalposts. Mapping friends and family is AFAIK a key part of who gets bombed by the cia. Sure, if your spouse is found to be an "enemy of the state" under a new totalitarian government - your immediate family will have problems.

If a friend turns out to be union organizer, you might be banned from jobs, if the government decides to collude with employers (again).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oh man ignoring the privacy implications of this, all the "product" people at Facebook are going to destroy WhatsApp as we know and love. It is going to become a giant monstrosity with a 500MB binary size, lag, whole bunch of tracking code and super slow servers. It has begun to a certain extent already and it's only going get worse.

I assume they think that the network effect is going to lock users into WhatsApp but the moment it becomes too painful to run on a 100$ Android phone with 1GB of RAM, it will inevitably die. Sure it's not going to be instantaneous but I'm a 100% sure that all the PMs that run Facebook Messenger are itching to get their hands on WhatsApp.

I understand these changes are only on the server side, but I imagine the client side is not too far away. Some client changes are inevitable because I'm pretty sure they'll build a "unified" API for all these apps and it's is going to contain a whole bunch of messenger service code (because look at all those messenger features that noone cares about, surely we can't just drop what a whole org has been working on for two years)

<comment><USER10> You don't trust Zuckerberg to keep your private messages private? Even if that somehow happens, he'll be selling your messaging network info to everyone with two nickels to rub together.

No thanks. Delete Messenger/WhatsApp and move everything onto other services.

<comment><USER11> you have to delete instagram too

<comment><USER12> Nobody ever accused me of being a Facebook shill, I'm happy to say I've helped a number of people off WhatsApp after Facebook bought them.

But let's keep this serious: Instagram isn't a tool for secure messaging. It is a tool to publish images, mostly public images.

A person might very well decide to move sensitive communication off Instagram and continue to post their cat videos on Instagram.

A valid reason for not using Instagram however is to lead by example and weaken the network effect of Facebook.

Facebook is already in panic because users are leaving the platform so IMO now is a good time to test out alternative solutions :-)

<comment><USER10> This is precisely while I'm on instagram: There's no pretense of anything being private. It's like the best parts of Facebook (cool pictures/info from people who interest me) without the bullshit (TDS-fueled ramblings).

I'll be out of there as soon as a federated alternative pops up and gets the least bit of traction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder what the EU commission will say to that. They only agreed to the WhatsApp takeover because FB stated that they would not do exactly what Zuck has in mind.

<comment><USER14> FB have already been fined over that "When Facebook took over the WhatsApp messaging service in 2014, it told the [EU] commission it would not be able to match user accounts on both platforms, but went on to do exactly that." [https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/18/facebook- fi...](https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/18/facebook-fined-eu- whatsapp-european-commission)

<comment><USER15> Doing this after they're already talking about forcing them to sell WhatsApp is a bold move.

<comment><USER16> You can't sell the platform if it's heavily integrated. Whoever buys it will just have to rewrite it from scratch then.

<comment><USER17> > You can't sell the platform if it's heavily integrated. Whoever buys it will > just have to rewrite it from scratch then.

Not necessarily. My understanding is WhatsApp basically uses the Signal protocol right now, Signal itself is open source, so I assume an acquirer could just stand up some new Signal infrastructure and get 80%+ of WhatsApp functionality without much redevelopment.

<comment><USER18> Not if they integrate the messaging infrastructures as described in the article...

<comment><USER17> > Not if they integrate the messaging infrastructures as described in the > article...

WhatsApp is a phone app. Even if Facebook heavily integrates the messaging infrastructures, the problem an acquirer has is _porting the existing users over to a new messaging infrastructure_. Signal-based infrastructure is (relatively) turn key, most of the software is already developed, deployed, and tested. After you have that, the main thing you have to do is push a new version of the app out to all the different app stores that uses your new infrastructure. Bam, you're done.

I am simplifying certain things (there'd definitely be a somewhat complex transition period where your new app would have to support both infrastructures), but my main point is that this integration is not as big of a barrier to re-separation as it may seem.

<comment><USER15> > the problem an acquirer has is porting the existing users over to a new > messaging infrastructure.

If you're selling it, it would be your job to port it. This wouldn't be the purchaser's job, it would be Facebook's job. It would be like expecting someone to dismantle a bed your selling on eBay. No one in their right mind would agree to dismantle it for you unless you were giving it away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm going to start this comment by saying that I don't agree with or approve of most of/anything Facebook has been doing. Security and Privacy are very important to me when it comes to the internet. I don't have a Facebook account.

So now I'd like to point out that the article has a couple mistakes. You don't actually need to provide anything but a phone number to use Facebook Messenger, but not many people know this, it seems. Related to this is a lot of hand-wringing about "oh no this will mean Facebook is watching us in all these apps now". Well, I'll address this in a second. I want to talk about this quote in the article:

"Matching Facebook and Instagram users to their WhatsApp handles could give pause to those who prefer keeping their use of each app compartmentalized."

This is already impossible. WhatsApp and Instagram collect information on you whether you have a Facebook account and whether or not you are logged in if you do have one. They know who are you are (this is the reason why I don't really care how encrypted WhatsApp is, I'm not going to use it). So if this really bothers people, well, I've got some bad news.

</comment><comment><USER20> > "a Facebook user could send an encrypted message to someone who has only a > WhatsApp account, for example. Currently, that isn't possible because the > apps are separate."

This freaks me out, as i have deliberately chosen to stay away from facebook since the early days! I somehow felt repelled by the idea of facebook back then, now its trying to hunt me down! Oops!

I have been thinking of quitting Whatsapp since facebook acquired it, but continued using it since almost everyone i frequently communicate with does so on Whatsapp.

Maybe it's time to quit whatsapp before this integration happens! Or am i just freaking out ? :D

<comment><USER21> I don't think you're wrong. The point of this integration is to start connecting Whatsapp's giant database of phone numbers with Facebook Messenger/IG accounts. At this time, it's still possible to be anonymous on Whatsapp, but that ends once this project is completed.

Been trying to get friends and family to switch to Signal since early 2017 with no luck.

<comment><USER22> You're only as anonymous as the contact records in all the phones you're communicating with, i.e. not at all. The only winning move is not to play

[https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/26/how-to-stop-your-phone- from-...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/26/how-to-stop-your-phone-from- uploading-your-contacts-to-facebook.html)

<comment><USER23> This is a sour point for me. It bugs me that other people can reveal information about me and there is little I can do. I actually stopped entering contacts into my phone because of this. Or I put false names for ones I man need to label. I recognise my contacts by their phone number. I doubt my part is overly effective because others likely don't do this but it is my way of saying screw off. I hope one day legislation will regulate these companies and what they share about us. I thought Facebook promised it would not suck up the whatsapp data how can they integrate without all that data? Reminds me of a child. Was told no so going to just do it anyways and see if there is a punishment after. I hope some regulatory body sinks Facebook over this idea.

<comment><USER22> It's almost entirely ineffective. Each phone book upload probably nets them something like ~100 contacts, multiply that by 1.74 billion and the war is entirely lost. A bit like how self-driving cars may shortly redefine the meaning of 'public space'.

<comment><USER20> May I know why you deleted your reply ? Should I also be careful around here ? :)

<comment><USER22> Self preservation :) I didn't want to get drawn into a thread about some topic I shouldn't be paying attention to just now!

<comment><USER20> Ha ha, true! :) but i felt your point was good, there is an upside to the fact we are acknowledging the state of affairs as it is.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> At least on the East Coast, there is a growing groundswell for breaking up Facebook. I don't think we'll see it break until after 2020. But if I'm seeing it, Zuckerberg is seeing it. I suspect one reason for integrating infrastructure is to make it more difficult to unwind these companies in the years to come.

</comment><comment><USER25> It makes a lot of sense from the technical point of view.

Essentially, one could share a single table of "users" between Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Because the accounts can be easily identified and connected by email addresses and phone numbers, which don't change that often.

This way, a "Facebook Account" could become like a "Google Account", but for social media.

This is exactly how Google integrated YouTube.

It's bad for privacy, but good for everything else.

<comment><USER26> It would actually make product development a lot harder. You have three end- user apps developed by different teams, supporting different content, wrapped in different structures. Managing the differences when sending messages from one to another is probably going to result in very weird and inconsistent user experiences, especially in the shorter term.

Also, because of E2E encryption, the server infrastructure really cannot do the sort of content translation necessary to make things seamless.

<comment><USER25> I think the front-ends would remain completely separate, and the back-ends would be namespaced by a platform.

For instance: facebook.users, facebook.ads, facebook.feed, facebook.messenger, facebook.instagram, facebook.whatsapp.

This way, users and ads would be shared across all Facebook's platforms, which is, I believe, the main reason for the entire integration.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I have a feeling that they will live up to their encryption promise and this will actually provide them with a long term messaging service that can provide some stability for their company. The messages themselves are likely not valuable enough to creep into compared to the unified metadata that all this messaging can bring in.

<comment><USER28> I have just the opposite feeling. Facebook is going to remove end to end encryption as the default from WhatsApp and turn it into something like Messenger or Telegram, where chats are by default not end to end encrypted, and the user has to explicitly choose it. There'd be some backlash in the press. But most users won't bother about it, just like they don't bother about all the Facebook scandals to move off the platform or care enough to look for better privacy elsewhere.

What's more, Facebook can, and will, paint this as something it's doing in order to monitor content and handle fake news, earning brownie points from various governments who'd be eager to tap into this new source for surveillance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I'm not sure I understand the motivation. Seems like they don't have much to gain and they do have a lot to lose.

While (anecdotally) Facebook doesn't appear to be very hype with the youth today, Instagram and WhatsApp still appear to be quite popular. In a weird way Facebook is both the mainstream choice _and_ the underdog, that's a good position to be in IMO.

Beyond that what does it mean for people like me who use WhatsApp but do not have a Facebook account? Is the plan to force people like me to create a Facebook profile?

<comment><USER27> The article is pretty clear about your question. This is just going to provide cross platform messaging between all current and future apps.

<comment><USER29> But how can they hope to do that without some form of unified account?

<comment><USER30> They /could/ do it quite easily. I can email people who have different kinds of email account with no problem. The Jabber / XMPP protocol was designed to link messaging systems in this way.

While it would be great if they moved to a pure Jabber federation model or similar, I very much doubt they will do that, however, unless someone like the EU can get their act together and force them to do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I like WhatsApp but it seems that Zuckerberg is determined to destroy it.

At least I now have an incentive to move to Signal and convince my friends to do so, hopefully, or otherwise I'll be alone. Well, I can always be reached by SMS or email.

<comment><USER32> I thought Whatsapp use is great in the U.S., but I realized how big it is outside the U.S. when I saw it firsthand. It is insane, there are people who use it to run their entire business/livelihood.

I really hope it stays out of Zuck's "vision" but it likely won't, considering the amount of money he paid for it

<comment><USER33> As an immigrant from India in the US, when FB bought WhatsApp, I still remember the sense of surprise/wonder among my american freinds/colleagues as to why Whatsapp was worth so much. The kind of traction Whatsapp has, even now in India, is something no bay area startup can even dream of achieving. Every family member, remotely related relatives, every single classmate of mine since childhood, everyone has whatsapp, and almost everyone uses it everyday.

as someone who has no FB apps on phone other than whatsapp, I hope/wish this move means someone from messenger/insta can send message to Whatsapp account and vice versa. Nothing more than that.

FB has done a good job in keeping Whatsapp true to it's core features (except the status/stories debacle). Once it's whatsapp payments / business messaging picks up, there's no looking back for FB even if it's core FB web platform goes to zero, Whatsapp + Messenger + Instagram will be a force to reckon with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> As a person that doesn't have Facebook or Instagram accounts and minimal desire to be a part of that product line, I see myself abandoning Whatsapp. Only used it because of myself and family/friends I'm the only Android user to begin with. Guess I'm going back to iPhones in the next iteration.

 _ninja edit_ I was already debating going back to iPhone to begin with. I feel like this just cements it as my friends and I will give up Whatsapp for group iMessage

<comment><USER35> I deleted whatsapp after their purchase by facebook just to remain outside of the Zuckerverse. Signal allegedly offers a group chat feature, but getting 20 of your closest iphone-using friends to install signal rather than use iMessage seems unlikely.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I wonder what platform will he use for this? Like what framework?

If anyone has any idea, please share.

Edit -> I don't understand why the heck are honest technical questions downvoted!! It's not like I would have found a ready answer for my question with a simple Google search. If a question does not interest you, at least please don't downvote it! Some dumb people are courageous enough to ask questions.

<comment><USER37> Whats app is made with Erlang:

[http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp- archi...](http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-architecture- facebook-bought-for-19-billion.html)

the article (and others) have crazy stories about scale in WhatsApp (70 million messages a second (from a few years ago)).

Erlang (and Elixir) are perfect for this scale and high reliability challenge. But, its corporate decision, so it might wind up being rewritten in some idiotic language. Or, more likely, it will be a hodgepodge of micro services written in different languages and glued together with HAProxie (or whatever).

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> > The move, described by four people involved in the effort, requires > thousands of Facebook employees to reconfigure how WhatsApp, Instagram and > Facebook Messenger function at their most basic levels. While all three > services will continue operating as stand-alone apps, their underlying > messaging infrastructure will be unified, the people said. Facebook is still > in the early stages of the work and plans to complete it by the end of this > year or in early 2020, they said.

Thank god. If they collapsed WhatsApp into Facebook Messenger, I would quit WhatsApp.

</comment><comment><USER39> Some folks in this thread are convinced that end-to-end encryption is going away when the article says the exact opposite.

<comment><USER40> Unless they radically change how Facebook messenger works I don't see how it could even be called end-to-end encryption. For it to work how it does now (online and independently through the app) they would have to hold the encryption keys.

They would have to instead tie Facebook messenger to a phone like Whatsapp does and use a web app to send messages directly from the device instead. I don't see how else it could be done and still be called end-to-end encryption.

<comment><USER39> > Unless they radically change

And according to the article, this radical change is coming. Why is that so hard to believe?

<comment><USER41> Because there are no details beyond vague promises, and it entails serious restructuring and UX trade-offs that may affect revenue. At the moment, skepticism makes much more sense.

<comment><USER39> Just to be clear, do you think that the NYT is mistaken, or that Facebook has committed to something that is too difficult to execute due to technical and revenue concerns?

<comment><USER41> I don't think they committed to anything. It's just vague promises that can be reinterpreted in many ways, most of which can compromise trustworthy e2e encryption while also implementing some form of loophole-ridden e2e encryption.

Yeah, WhatsApp is e2e encrypted by default, but it also automatically backs up all your chat history encrypted using a WhatsApp-owned private key. Sure, you can opt-out of backups, but will your peers do as well? Without a clear spec, I think it's perfectly reasonable to be very skeptical of what will be the final product of this operation.

<comment><USER39> > just vague promises

Now I know you didn't read the article. There were no promises made because this was based on conversations with employees, not a press release.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> >To add insult to injury, WhatsApp permits rekeying to take place without any indication to the conversation's participants [in the default settings].

Agreed.

A nice Twitter thread [0] by Mustafa Al-Bassam back at the end of November on how that might be exploited by GCHQ:

>Ian Levy of GCHQ has released an essay on how law enforcement should get access to end-to-end encrypted communications. Here is the critical bit to pay attention to. They're proposing to exploit the fact that users don't verify each other's public keys, and inject bad keys.

Then this [1] later in the same thread by Twitter @inag_fc:

>This is a coordinated attack by 5 eyes. They slipped it through AU parliament in the week, presumably as some horse trading because there was practically no debate nor warning, beyond the normal straw man proposals.

[0] [https://twitter.com/musalbas/status/1068179464197156864](https://twitter.com/musalbas/status/1068179464197156864)

[1] [https://twitter.com/iang_fc/status/1071373264646225920](https://twitter.com/iang_fc/status/1071373264646225920)

</comment><comment><USER43> I wonder how people will feel about this. I always thought that to some extent, people use different social networks to segment their interactions. I.e. will this make it feel like my mom is on Instagram now?

<comment><USER44> The comments here are rather bleak, but for me, this is fantastic.

My family is all on WhatsApp, but my friends and colleagues are on Messenger and SMS.

Previously, I would only ever use Messenger, checking SMS and WhatsApp once a month at best.

A while ago, SMS got integrated to Messenger, I started staying in touch with people who only use SMS.

Now that they're adding WhatsApp, I literally don't know a single person I can't reach from Messenger/Gmail.

I love it, and I hope things go smoothly.

<comment><USER45> You love it that all your communication is controlled by only a single for profit company?

I wonder how you will feel the day FB decided to ban you for whatever rule their algorithm would decide you violated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I wonder much how XMPP is left over in WhatsApp's guts at this point.

<comment><USER47> facebook chat and whatsapp were both written in erlang and used ejabberd. It's kind of funny that through rewrites they have become less standard and compatible, and now the goal is to bring them back together closer to where they were.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Perhaps I'm being cynical, but I can see the business salivating over this. Integrate tracking into WhatsApp, you can now more easily graph who people talk to and use that for their FB and IG accounts, and probably destroy the e2e encryption while they're at it. Therefore re-monitizing that section of their userbase.

<comment><USER49> It's easy to grab your pitchfork when seeing just a headline, but I'm quoting the article verbatim here:

> Mr. Zuckerberg has also ordered all of the apps to incorporate end-to-end > encryption, the people said, a significant step that protects messages from > being viewed by anyone except the participants in the conversation.

<comment><USER50> I highly doubt Messenger will have end-to-end encryption, especially that they have to display those messages on Facebook web.

<comment><USER51> WhatsApp's UX is pretty darn good and would be copied for Messenger. You sign- in on the web from your phone and then messages are proxied through it.

Also an option to enable web E2E with a password-protected key stored on FB's servers is still pretty darn good.

<comment><USER50> Yes but Whatsapp does not have a real web client unlike Messenger, web.whatsapp.com is just reading data from your phone.

People are using both Messenger & Facebook web to send messages, they will have to break that somewhere for end-to-end.

<comment><USER51> It just means that two (or n) keys will need to be able to decrypt the message database. The web client doesn't have to behave any differently than the native client.

If Facebook is storing your encrypted message database on their servers then the problem gets significantly easier.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> Ironic timing: I just adopted Singal as a replacement for WhatsApp and have been telling all of my WhatsApp contacts I'm going to drop it in favor of Signal because I don't trust FB not to fiddle with Whatsapp's Infrastructure or pull games with the end-to-end encryption.

</comment><comment><USER53> If they change whatsapp im moving to telegram end of story.

<comment><USER54> Signal is the better choice

<comment><USER55> While it's the more secure choice, it's definitely not 'better'. Telegram has a better messaging infrastructure, more reliable, multi-platform (doesn't _need_ a phone), can create identities without a phone number, and (most important, IMO) the quality of life of using the app is far superior.

Use Signal if you absolutely need end to end encryption, extremely secure chat, and no way to use it outside of your phone being on and connected to the Internet.

Use Telegram if you want chat. Don't except high levels of security and for the average user who already uses Facebook Messenger and Instagram, it's good enough.

<comment><USER56> > Use Signal if you absolutely need end to end encryption, extremely secure > chat, and no way to use it outside of your phone being on and connected to > the Internet.

You can use Signal on Desktop without your phone being online. (This does not work with WhatsApp.)

<comment><USER41> How does it work? Where is the private key stored?

<comment><USER57> On the desktop. It's synced when you set up your desktop client (you have to scan a QR code on your phone).

<comment><USER58> And therein lies the problem the original poster was referring to: no way to create a WhatsApp account without a phone number.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> On the list of end-to-end encryption platforms I would trust the least, Messenger might be number 1. If they can make this happen slowly, maybe it will work.

<comment><USER60> messenger listens to you 24/7 i experienced this first hand with ridiculously specific targeted ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> "Currently, that isn't possible because the apps are separate."

It is impossible, because the don't want an open API, which other clients can use too.

<comment><USER62> Open APIs led to some of the biggest anti-Facebook stories over the last two years. I'd also like to see external clients and so on, but I don't expect that, given how many problems that brings.

<comment><USER63> Facebook got into trouble for opening data about users to its business partners. I'm sure this is not the same kind of "open API" that you would use to access and control your account and your interactions with the Silo. However, this kind of API will empower you to use a client that allows you to spend _less_ time on Facebook, the opposite of their strategy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> If only there was a federated protocol for messaging... oh, wait, there at least 2: XMPP and Matrix.

I guess everything old is new again.

</comment><comment><USER65> While much of the commentary is negative here, I do think this will give us inter-operability among whatsapp, messenger, facebook and instagram. For those who have accounts on all these, it will be beneficial to be able to access them in an richer, integrated manner.

</comment><comment><USER66> I saw this a few days ago. If this means I can populate my empty Instagram profile (which was weirdly given to me by having a Facebook account) - <USER2> this is a win. I share a lot of images on Facebook, so if these went on my Instagram feed I would be really happy.

<comment><USER67> You can already automate that fairly easily.

<comment><USER66> You mean using something like IFTTT?[1]

[1] [https://ifttt.com](https://ifttt.com)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Apple should really make a android version of iMessage.

<comment><USER69> If they did it for iMessage and Facetime they'd capture all chat traffic in America in a week. They'd risk losing the premium status of the iphone, but I think the real risk is they'd start a war with facebook and google. They'd be betting that google and facebook would keep their apps on the iphone if they invaded the android ecosystem. At least that's what I think. I'm not sure if Apple is ready to say all their applications are better then Google's yet.

<comment><USER70> I think a lot of us are now sufficiently locked into our ecosystem. Most iOS users would never "downgrade" to Android but I bet many Androids would be willing to pay $10/year for iMessage

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER71> But, Instagram has messaging already, no? So it's only needed to drop WhatsApp and Messenger to get integration done. Ah, and move users accounts.

</comment><comment><USER72> Anyone know of a viable whatsapp alternative that lots of people could use? The problem with all these systems is you have to go where people are, rather than where you'd like to be. whatsapp is ubiquitous but this is looking even worse for snooping now and I'd like to have a credible alternative to suggest. I thought signal was it but most people aren't using it

</comment><comment><USER73> It is also worth mentioning that Whatsapp relentlessly buggers you to backup to Google Drive or iCloud respectively, where all messages and contents are stored in plain text (at least on Drive, not sure about iCloud).

It's nice that they advertise end-to-end encrypting the messages in transit, but then just dump everything to the world's biggest data mining machine.

</comment><comment><USER74> I was under the (naive) assumption that Whatsapp prevents snooping for building a digital simulacrum of you - am I wrong in this? I see the article says that they are working on making the messaging product end-to-end encrypted, how do they know that they need to try and sell me socks because I mentioned socks once in a conversation to my grandmother?

<comment><USER75> Whatsapp has end to end encryption. But the metadata is not encrypted, and Facebook uses that data to track you. What is in the metadata? If I'm not mistaken it's the recipient, the time and probably the IP address of where you sent it. So if you start talking to someone new in Whatsapp, it shouldn't be a surprised when Facebook/Instagram will suggest you add them as friends/follow them based on that data. It doesn't know what you send to you're ex on a Friday at 2AM, and it doesn't know that you what you sent to your friend the next day, from her home WiFi.

<comment><USER74> Ah, ok, so the rule of thumb is you can talk about having murdered a guy, but don't message the person you murdered right before you kill them?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> Oh, if only we had some activity to define open standards so we could do secure interpersonal message with any app using common standard protocols and cryptography.

Oh wait. We do. That's what the IETF is for. We just let pricks like Zuckerberg run closed gardens because we suck at using choice to walk to things like signal.

Go signal!

<comment><USER77> Might want to check the names on this IETF draft... [https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-mls- protocol-02.html](https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-mls-protocol-02.html)

<comment><USER76> One Facebook author and like apple iMessages which used xmpp they lock the anchor certificate to a walled garden.

They're writing standards and deploying closed ecologies.

<comment><USER78> I'm not getting the sense from you that you're especially familiar with how this particular IETF effort came together.

<comment><USER76> True. Since i'm familiar with Richard Barnes I'll ask him in Prague.

Your comments in [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16325803](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16325803) seem relevant.

<comment><USER78> I'm not optimistic about MLS, the standard. I also don't think it's a secret plot against open protocols.

<comment><USER76> I don't think I am a secret plot believer. I just observe apple and others deploy group communication software and person to person as walled gardens even when they use xmpp and like protocols.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> The question I have abiut this is that some news agencies claim that this will make it harder for regulators to break up FB. Hows it even a legitimate argument. Cant FB use the same technology replicated for each product in the worst case?

</comment><comment><USER80> Q: for those of us with friends/groups that still insist on using WhatsApp to co-ordinate stuff, what's the recommended way to use it while handing over as little data as possible?

</comment><comment><USER81> Is there a paid secure messaging platform anyone can recommend? I don't want drag my friends and family to another platform only have it sell its users to the highest bidder.

<comment><USER82> iMessage. Just buy an iPhone.

Before anyone gets pissy, think about it, it's true.

<comment><USER81> There is no reason a chat app can't be multiplatform, plus the total cost to transition to iPhones would be in the thousands. Most of them would spring $3-5 a month for a platform secure though.

<comment><USER82> Ok? That doesn't make my answer to the question wrong.

FTR: I would _love_!!! an open source / open protocol messaging platform that wasn't owned by anyone. But, that doesn't seem to be in the cards for us all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> I'm guessing this means unifying every Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp user account into one unified "Facebook" account (already happened for Instagram).

<comment><USER84> > already happened for Instagram

This is the case for business accounts but not quite for normal users just yet. You can create an Instagram account with a username and password and it will repeatedly nag you to connect to Facebook for a while but eventually give up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER85> I'd image they want to consolidate all their services and add a couple more like what wechat did. They will probably add the ability to send money.

</comment><comment><USER86> Hopefully the EU sues them - this is unacceptable. Facebook should have never been allowed to buy out its core competition.

</comment><comment><USER87> This would actually make me delete my Facebook account finally, if I can message all people on Facebook through WhatsApp.

</comment><comment><USER88> I don't know if this will fix the underlying problem: people want something else.

</comment><comment><USER89> WhatsApp... like "what's up". I _just_ got that.

<comment><USER90> Wouldn't surprise me if its name was from Budweiser's What's Up ad back during the last dotcom boom. It was _really_ popular at the time.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhlZoq3niIY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhlZoq3niIY)

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> I wonder what this will mean for Whatsapp's privacy

</comment><comment><USER92> Summary: Facebook wants to turn WhatsApp into Telegram.

</comment><comment><USER93> Uh oh...lots of security bug bounty ahead!

</comment><comment><USER94> So long instagram, nice knowing you.

</comment><comment><USER95> This seems like a bad news for customers who care about their privacy. Zuckerberg unhinged!

</comment><comment><USER96> the end is here. orwell 1984

</comment><comment><USER97> > While all three services will continue operating as stand-alone apps, their > underlying messaging infrastructure will be unified...

The headline is missing a key word: infrastructure

<comment><USER18> This has to be the biggest clickbait I have seen in a while. HN title should reflect this because that changes interpretation completely.

<comment><USER98> It is a shame that HN does not have some system where you

\- mark a title as clickbait

\- either suggest an alternate title, or accept one from a list of previously submitted alternate titles

When enough karma has gathered behind a title the system can automatically replace it.

<comment><USER99> I have seen many titles on HN reported as "clickbait" which are changed eventually to reflect better the actual content.

I'm not sure if it is done my moderators or it just depends on the original poster to change it.

On the other hand, it is the exact title of the article being linked....

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> whats 'messenger?'

<comment><USER101> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Messenger](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Messenger)</comment></comment>


Donald Trump Is the Next President of the United States - <AUTHOR> http://www.realclearpolitics.com/elections/live_results/2016_general/president/map.html <comment><USER2> The pain that middle America has been feeling for a generation will now be felt throughout the entire country.

</comment><comment><USER3> For once it seems a proper time to say : May God saves America... and the world

</comment><comment><USER4> Ima just leave this here. [http://survivingtrump.com/](http://survivingtrump.com/)</comment>


Unicorns are setting up their own venture capital funds - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-11-15/unicorns-starting-their-own-vcs-welcome-to-peak-tech <comment><USER2> From an operations perspective, this is for Business Intelligence and creating a funnel for acquisitions.

Venture is one of the best ways to spot trends in your own market(s), and lead run any future competition with an acquisition, new product or product changes.

This is one of the major things that distinguishes major 21st century companies today from major companies in the past. If you know all of the up and coming competitors, or an entire new market that could threaten you, you can't be disrupted.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft knew all about Google

Yahoo knew everything about Google

Google knew everything about Facebook

Intel knew everything about ARM

Yet disruption ensued. "Can't be disrupted" is foolish.

<comment><USER4> Facebook knew everything about Snapchat, and they are currently crushing them.

Microsoft at their core also wasn't disrupted by Google.

Google at their core also wasn't disrupted by Facebook.

They're all tech giants in the same (broad) industry, but they have widely varying products. Competitive BI certainly has its merits if you are trying to stay at the top of your field.

<comment><USER3> Off the top of my head, Facebook is, indeed, the only giant I can think of that has not yet been disrupted; snap is indeed being crushed.

And, wrt the article, it's not VC that gave Facebook the BI they needed to know it is happening, but rather Onavo - a BI/Spying startup masquerading as a vpn/compression suite, which Facebook purchased and which gave them insight into what their mobile users do on the internet _other then facebook_

It's not illegal, but it should have been.

<comment><USER4> > Facebook is, indeed, the only giant I can think of that has not yet been > disrupted

It's also still the youngest one of them, but yes, for a company in the social networking space they've showed a lot of staying power (they could've already fallen to what could've become out of independent WhatsApp & Instagram). Facebook (and Google) only exist as they do today because an acquisition by Yahoo didn't happen, and I think they've internalized that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> A lot of blockchain tech startups raise money and then turn around and invest in other startups.

I think we're gonna look back at this in 5 years and collectively say, what were we thinking?

<comment><USER6> > we're gonna look back at this in 5 years and collectively say, what were we > thinking?

We did that after the housing bubble in 2008 (low down payments, flexible credit ratings, etc.)

The big question is: could this also be a systemic risk to the economy? No one liked bailing out the banks, but it was necessary to save the economy. It is not clear tech or crypto are similarly critical.

<comment><USER4> I think it's already pretty clear that crypto doesn't need bailouts.

The total cryptocurrency market size is at 1/4th of what it was at the beginning of the year, and there haven't been any significant results because of that. I would wager that the remaining 1/4th could be wiped out and it's still pretty much the same. Crypto projects were always very removed from the real world, both in valuation and usage (so if crypto vanishes it doesn't impact other companies).

The biggest result of the crypto market correcting will probably be software engineer salaries becoming a bit lower again (outside of SF).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> No better evidence you're in a bubble market if the billions flowing into self-driving cars and blockchain didn't convince you. If investors are willing for their startups to use their capital in this way then there really is just way too much money floating around.

<comment><USER8> Blockchain sure, but why do you think self-driving is a bubble?

<comment><USER9> Exactly my question. I have yet to see real use cases for blockchains beyond speculation and some light crime. And I think true self-driving cars (SAE Level 5 in specific) are 10-30 years out. But I think there's enough value to be had in lower, more achieveable levels that I expect some of the companies investing in those technologies now will be long-term financial winners.

<comment><USER10> Light crime, as in buying drugs, is one hell of a market. I don't have solid data, but it seems that 90-95% of all drug-related transactions go through bitcoin nowdays, at least on the consumer level.

<comment><USER11> I'd assume a large part of drug consumers still buys from their dealer in person, and why would you use Bitcoin then?

<comment><USER10> Among drug consumers I know personally or follow in social media, there's not a single one who buys in person. Compared to picking up a ziplock in designated location, it's unsafe to a ridiculous degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> So they've got cash and no ideas? If I were an investor I would be livid.

How is this different from blowing your funding round at a blackjack table?

</comment><comment><USER13> What happens to the unicorn's equity stake in a unicorn-backed company if the unicorn itself goes out of business? Does that equity get re-distributed to the unicorn's investors?

<comment><USER14> Seems like an asset that would be liquidated to pay failed co's creditors, preferred stockholders per liq prefs, and common if anything is left.

<comment><USER15> I think sometimes they get spun into their own legal entity, I'm thinking about Yahoo's and Naspers. In Naspers case their investment in Tencent is worth so much that actually Tencent's value is what drives most of Naspers stock price

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naspers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naspers)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> If you are a VC and one of your investments is doing this then next time why wouldn't your investors cut out the middleman (i.e. you) and go straight to them?

</comment><comment><USER17> And people still say dolphins are the second most intelligent species on Earth.

</comment><comment><USER18> This makes sense when your business strategy requires that you create a vibrant business ecosystem and the current support for these businesses is broken or inadequate. Focus and domain expertise become a competitive advantage and you can reap value from both the fund and the main business by creating value in the ecosystem.

</comment><comment><USER19> So Silicon Valley's version of the CDO or better yet and the even worse — synthetic CDO

<comment><USER20> > _So Silicon Valley's version of the CDO_

Not really.

If by "CDO" you mean "multiple assets in another asset," then every company is a CDO. If by CDO you mean "tranching," then pref stacks create (or for that matter, any company that issues debt is) a CDO. CDOs are differentiated by the kind of debt they buy and their tendency for having a tiny senior tranche and leveraged buyers of their riskiest tranches. That doesn't apply here.

(The latter _might_ apply, since the loss-making unicorns buying start-ups' equity need to raise new money to stay alive, but that's just classic leveraged buying.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> I didnt think much into this until the start up of a friend(yc backed, if i am not mistaken) failed. They did have their own venture fund to boost up the drone companies, but eventually they shut down.

Good thing to look out for.

</comment><comment><USER22> Big tech companies will do anything to avoid paying out more dividends.

</comment><comment><USER23> "When beggars and shoeshine boys, barbers and beauticians can tell you how to get rich it is time to remind yourself that there is no more dangerous illusion than the belief that one can get something for nothing."

      - Bernard Baruch

</comment><comment><USER24> As long as the money keeps flowing.</comment>


The Trials and Tribulations of Batch Processing (1967) [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/punched-cards/2/211/2253

<comment><USER2> I'm old enough to remember the days (daze?) of punched cards, when I was in high school and working at the Naval Electronic Labs on Point Loma (San Diego).

My worst experience was writing a whole compiler in IBM 360 assembler macros, and submitting it to the punch card department (probably a couple thousand cards), only to be chagrined when they wanted to know who was going to pay for this rather large job after the fact. (They kindly ate it.)

I have no idea how I got a systems programming job there for the summer, but somehow I finagled it. We were using a highly advanced new subsystem which had just appeared, TSO (time sharing option) for OS/360.

Good times. ;-)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nonsense. Nobody carried their cards like that. I worked for eight years in card shops, no one ever dropped the cards. You used trays with locking tabs.

Our master file was 40,000 cards, held in twenty heavy trays. We ran the file through twice a day, five days a week. Never dropped the cards.

They did jam, though.</comment>


SoYouLearn – A flexible and advanced spaced repetition platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.soyoulearn.com/ <comment><USER4> Founder here. Note: This is spaced repetition. I bootstrapped this over the past 1 1/2 years.

A few key differences:

\- A central DB (it has over 1.8M flash cards) which anybody can edit. Card owner can accept/reject the change request.

\- Courses are just _references_ to flash cards, nothing else.

\- You decide what you want to learn "Display me field X,Y,Z and prompt me to enter field 'A'. You can choose any field/audio)

\- Efficiently add bulk audio to a course

\- A super fast UI (it's an SPA)

I have a few ideas for premium which (as far as I know) would bring features that don't exist yet for any spaced repetition platform:

\- Prioritized learning (learn the most pressing ones)

\- In advance learning (You'll be gone for the weekend, but it's Friday and you have 1h time: You can prelearn "long term" flash cards that'd come around over the weekend).

Also for some tech background: Frontend is pure Clojurescript + Datascript. Backend is Clojure, Cassandra, Datomic, Elasticsearch. I'd use the tech stack again, hands down.

The best introduction is the video at the bottom of the landing page it show all the features. There are only few courses right now so early adopters should (hopefully) be willing to create their own courses.

Questions welcome.

<comment><USER5> Hopefully my use case is useful to you.

I'm a heavy user of Duolingo. Been trying to teach myself Russian for the past 2-3 years. Almost use it on daily bases (I have missed a few days here and there by accident or when I had no connection). Usually my repeat usage is anywhere from 20 days to now 143 consecutive days. My biggest frustration with Duolingo (Russian language) is that none of the grammar rules are explained. So even thought I'm able to repeat something, it's only after I google variations of a verb or a noun and the grammar case, is when I get the answer why something is, for example, ending in a "e", etc.

I have not paid the premium fee for Duolingo. Mainly because the premium adds no value to my learning. I've spent over $100-150 on Russian books from grammar to vocabulary.

If Duolingo added more grammar explanation for premium price, I would pay for that.

It takes Duolingo a few years to roll out a new language. It's hard to do it in-house. And still, with Russian language, they don't have all the grammar hints that exist on other languages like French (I've been told, French has it).

My view is, why not turn Duolingo into a marketplace and let other language expert create additional educational material to augment the lessons and let them sell it to me and follow the Apple's revenue share model. Perhaps a specific lesson might have 3-4 additional learning modules that I can buy from different providers. Each module has a star-rating (you can filter out the fake stars by how often someone is using Duolingo). Also once I find one provider's way of explaining, I'll look for more teaching modules from them.

My point is, if you can look into Udemy and how they turned their video system into a paid learning platform, you might come up with a premium model for your business.

Good luck!

<comment><USER6> Are you using Duolingo on iOS, Android, or a computer?

My wife has used all three, and says that grammar explanations are not on iOS and is on the other 2 platforms. She also believes that the explanations make us feel good, but don't actually help. (Then again she's using it to learn Polish and already knows Russian. So the grammar rules are pretty close to what she already knows.)

Plus there are some natural language rules that are just a mass of exceptions. For example try to explain to a non-native speaker why you ride in a car and on a bus.

And furthermore, most native speakers don't know their own grammar rules. For example why do we say "big red truck" and not "red big truck"? Odds are that you've never been taught this order, but you do it correctly:

        Quantity or number
        Quality or opinion
        Size
        Age
        Shape
        Color
        Proper adjective (often nationality, other place of origin, or material)
        Purpose or qualifier

<comment><USER5> I use it on iOS. So, for me the explanations really help. Because I understand the rules after seeing a few examples and the rules help me grasp it easier or see something subtle that I may have missed. Especially important in Russian.

But I can see it in a case where if you come from a language that has some grammatical overlap with Russian. It may not be as helpful, because she already has a mental language mapping for it. For English speakers or languages that some of these concepts are not native, it's quiet hard.

I do agree many native speakers do not know the rules. But they'e not the ones who would be creating the additional teaching modules. I'm sure there are plenty of Russian teachers who would love to make side money teaching Russian to non-native speakers and create explanation material.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is originally how Memrise worked. Courses were references to a database entry that people could contribute/improve upon but it failed to scale to large amounts of users and especially failed when the language maintainers found themselves too busy to update 'cards'. I used to volunteer my help in maintaining the Japanese/English databases. The largest issue was curation - many duplicate entries would exist due to anyone being able to add words. Sometimes a user would add a word instead of selecting the already existing word from the database - meaning the words later had to be merged as users could add mnemonics or parts of speech or example usage. One course might use the "has all the information" copy while another course has a barebones "just the word".

It was a fantastic idea that ultimately requires a lot of volunteers/manpower in constantly keeping things updated and pruning/merging duplicates. Eventually they (Memrise) moved to curated dictionaries that course creators could then pull from to make their own courses without affecting other course creators' copies. Creators can add new words but their words will not be automatically added to the curated set.

I wish you the best of luck! You may want to find curators, equivalent to higher-standing Wikipedia editors to make sure the word databases stay (1) accurate and (2) everyone can actually benefit from it without fear of selecting the wrong "Monday" in a list of 19 "Mondays".

<comment><USER8> If I understand correctly, the Memrise data is closed source right? So what motivated you to contribute to something you don't control? Or do you keep ownership of your contributions somehow?

<comment><USER7> Contributors generally had close relations with Ben Whately, at least if they could speak English or Mandarin, and could get access to the data so that we could better help contribute or come up with improvements. Once upon a time I had a copy of the JP/EN database, but have long since deleted it once I stopped being a contributor (when the data model had changed from the community-made wiki-like structure, so it wasn't much by choice).

A very large portion of the "original" Memrise community were people who had been abandoned by smart.fm, a free-to-use site which later became iknow.jp (subscription model). Our motivation for helping was a mixed bag of mostly the following three reasons, though I don't pretend to have known _every_ original contributor or their motivations.

1) For our own educational use

2) Because we wanted to be able to help others learn our language or a language we had interest in

3) Because we wanted to see the smart.fm community stick around in this new home, Memrise

Personally, I fell mostly under the first reason. I never found Anki good to use and preferred having a website to navigate to and easily sync across devices (even in the early days Memrise had plans for the app) by well... letting someone else handle things. So smart.fm/Memrise were more convenient for me and my learning.

I've played some part in many of the Japanese courses with 50,000+ users. So the work I contributed has helped at least some portion of them begin their studies and I take satisfaction in being able to have done that for them.

E:

I didn't answer all of your questions, so in short. Yes, their data was closed, but they were willing to share large portions of it (except user data, even anonymized user data!). My contributions have my "by {Username}" for my courses - although many of the courses I built/contributed to became standard "Memrise" courses under their name I don't mind getting or not getting the credit - so long as they continue to help people learn!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks nice at first glance.

I had a bit of confusion with the Spanish course. I read through the basic categories, and decided to say "Claim Known" for one of them. It then asked me to "Choose a way to learn." This was odd, because I was just saying I knew the words, not in a particular direction (confusion #1).

I chose that I knew them English => Spanish. I then went up to the top to set "English => Spanish" for the whole course. This jumped me into the course, which I did not expect (confusion #2).

I hit "back," went back to the landing page, searched for the course page, and went to the course in order to try and learn a particular set. I scrolled down to one I didn't know, and clicked on "English => Spanish" to start the set. Unfortunately, the "Claim Known" button was already active, which I hadn't realized (surprising, since I felt like I re-entered the course from scratch). So clicking on "English => Spanish" sent those words off as "known" (confusion #3).

Now I have a list of words that I don't know marked as "known," and I don't know exactly what this means (confusion #4) and how to find these words to tell the system I don't actually know them (confusion #5), and I'm not allowed to learn those words even when I click "Learn Now" because it tells me I know them already (confusion #6).

<comment><USER10> (New account since I'm hitting HN rate limit)

Thanks for the feedback! This is very helpful. There are definitely many rough edges in the app that will be improved. Regarding the UI: The React components state are actually always "remembered" so if you're in the middle of doing anything (like creating a course) you can go anywhere else and come back and find your UI in the exact same state. So it's feature but seems in your case was probably not optimal. I'll try to improve the UI around course learning!

<comment><USER11> The "More info" link about cookies leads to a non-existent page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> With a product like Anki out there I see no reason for this to exist. Does this product have any advantage over Anki that I'm missing? The only one I can see is a central database, something which Memrise has and which is quite mature on that platform.

A central database is also a disadvantage as far as I'm concerned as it means that copyrighted material is made significantly harder to study.

When you add to these the fact that Anki can be rewritten with Python plugins s that can change just about every hit of behaviour, interface, and add completely new functionality, I'm sorry but there's really no reason for this to exist, besides having a slightly nicer web interface.

<comment><USER13> I have the same questions. I have used Anki to learn several languages, more than one of which is at B2. I like entering my own cards. I like that Anki is 100% open source. Without a compelling reason, I wouldn't switch.

<comment><USER14> I would love to hear more about how you did that.

How would you advise a motivated, but time-limited person who wanted to learn a language to B2?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is cool! I've been _(very)_ slowly designing a self hosted solution similar to this!

I have far too many things ranging from professional to personal to menial that I need to jot down. A lot of it I want to remember, some of it I just want to be able to look up, but ultimate there's just far too much information in my life and I need a personal Google.

I'm not sure this product is my exact needs, but I'm really happy to see more people thinking about personal knowledge/data retention. It seems so important to me!

</comment><comment><USER16> I just can't imagine anything being more "flexible" than Anki, which is agpl python with a robust plugin ecosystem backed by a local sqlite database.

</comment><comment><USER17> Cool idea! I like that the data is pull-requestable. Have you thought about Duolingo style comments, where users can add comments for clarification/context? I find this very useful to get a better understanding of why something is (i.e. "why use "kein" instead of "nicht" here?")

Also, how well does it work on a phone? I'm assuming it's a PWA...?

Also, is there a way to "favorite" courses? From a UX perspective, "My Courses" feels like it should be "courses that I am currently learning". I don't expect that to mean "courses that I have created", especially since a small minority of users will actually do that.

<comment><USER4> Thanks. I actually already implemented comments on "change request" on the server and a bunch of the handling there but haven't completed the implementation.

It does not yet use PWA, though I'm intending to add it, so that I have offline support. It does however work pretty well on mobile right now. The entire SPA is rather small ~180KB (+ React). On my old phone it refreshes the entire app (initial load is slower) in 1 to 1 1/2 seconds. Reviewing on the phone is pretty good and I use it myself.

The course you're learning will be under "notebook". My course is really only the courses you created.

<comment><USER17> Ah. So if you start a course it's automatically added to notebook?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> This has much better web interface than anki's UI in my opinion. great job!

how to leverage internet/web to enhance education and self-life-long-learning is indeed still waiting for more creative adventures.

for me I'm still looking for a markdown-native CMS with authentication, not the static site generator as they do not have login thus not a CMS, not the "old" CMS with html editing etc either as they do not have native markdown support. so far I found none though.

<comment><USER19> Having a WYSIWYG that compiles to markdown is likely a better bet.

Markdown makes sense for technically inclined folks.

Educators who are not tech saavy are likely still better off with WYSIWYG.

Edit for the downvoters: Speak up - I have to work with both tech skilled and low digitally skilled educators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Love it! Going to play w/ this some more...

Care to share your stack/toolchain? front-end/back-end/API's?

<comment><USER4> Frontend is ~25k LOC Clojurescript: Rum + Datascript + React.

Backend: Cassandra + Datomic + Elasticsearch + Redis + Clojure.

SAAS: Mailgun, Datadog.

Editor: Cursive IDE (hands down best Clojure editor)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> how do they make money? aka, am I the product? :D

Saw this in the website:

> Note: All current functionality will remain free.

> Premium functions are available with a monthly or yearly subscription.

> With SoYouLearn premium you will be able to learn even faster and better.

edit: add the free bit from the website and formatting

</comment><comment><USER22> Cool as hell, I have always wanted this and have been thinking about such a flashcards base every day for quite a time already! Great news it's here! I just hope to see more cool free courses on this platform soon.

But there is a feature I want badly: a KDE5 plasmoid widget to show the cards on my desktop, switching them every now and then so they will catch my attention and get memorized as I use my PC (I use it about 10 hours a day and I believe many other hackers do the same) without me having to dedicate time for this. I also believe other people might also appreciate similar desktop widgets for Windows, Android and other platforms.

</comment><comment><USER23> I like it! I just did the European geography course, matching countries on the map with their names. But now I want to test myself and I can't figure out how to do that. Any way to randomly go through each flash card and answer in turn?

<comment><USER4> There is currently no way to manually test yourself on a course part. You now just learnt them and if you come online now you should see those flash cards due for review. Then depending on if you answer them correctly or wrong they will come around again in 4-6h or 2-3days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Looks cool, wish there was a Swift course. Maybe I'll make some cards as I go.

Here's a bug: Your search uses regular expressions without validating them.

1\. Go to "[https://www.soyoulearn.com/app/#/cards/search/"](https://www.soyoulearn.com/app/#/cards/search/")

2\. Type: c++

3\. The autocomplete errors and page goes blank

4\. Inspector Console: "SyntaxError: Invalid regular expression: /c++/: Nothing to repeat"

<comment><USER4> Good catch! I'll fix this asap

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I am running L-Lingo ( [https://l-lingo.com](https://l-lingo.com) ) - <USER2> language learning app that includes a spaced repetition system in addition to its lesson based content.

Here is what I learned in the last 10 years in this field. I hope you will find this valuable when developing SoYouLearn.

\- Language Content vs Features: We as developers like to focus our time and energy on implementing great flashcard features but often the language content itself is a second thought. Odten we do not curate the content ourself and let users do it or we prefer to use copyright free content. From our experience, the quality of the content is extremely important. Your students will quickly become frustrated if they see errors in the language content and then think that your whole product is of low quality -even if you have a great technical implementation! So make sure you have high quality content!

We have invested heavily in the content of our app and even wrote Grammar notes for nearly 20 languages -not because WE wanted to do it (we probably would have been much happier coding ;) but because OUR USERS where asking for this -repeatedly.

Also from our experience, students are more willing to pay for high quality content (e.g. Top 10000 Spanish Flashcards) then for advanced features. This is true especially for Flashcards because ANKI is well known, working very well and free. So why pay except for great content?

\- Focus on Languages OR other Areas: Yes in principle, spaced repetition works for all kinds of contents (languages obviously but also if you learn geography, anatomy, heck even for learning coding you can use flashcards). However once you want to built a powerful and more importantly user friendly system, there are important differences. E.g. when you learn languages like Chinese you need to provide a field for Pinyin, you should have audio associated and maybe also an example sentence. So what I want to say is if you focus your system on ONLY language learning you can make your UI much more user friendly.

I think you might come into troubles if some users use your product for language learning and others for learning other things as then your users will have different priorities on what features they need and what you should implement.

\- Include Motivational Aspects within your App: Learning something completely new is tough, Language Learning is even much tougher! A very high percentage of language learning app users give up very quickly. It took us many years here at L-Lingo to realize this and we are now spending approx. 50% of our time and effort to keep our users motivated to follow through on their language learning.

We do this in many different aspects, gamification of the language learning, learning reminders, giving our students tips on effective language learning etc.

Keep in mind: Even the best flashcards system does not work if your students are not motivated to use it regularly!

\- Beta testers and early adopters I think one of the key successes when we launched L-Lingo was to actively looking for a small but very engaged group of early users. And we focused on a small niche (Thai Language Learners!). I think this helped us to create value for this group early on, to understand what was really important (e.g. the quality of the content). So you made the first right step with this hackernews post but now try and find real permanent users that you can engage with regularly.

Thats all for now. Feel free to ask questions if you have!

</comment><comment><USER22> Another feature I miss is a button to discard a card. E.g. when I study country flags and see a flag I remember perfectly and have always knew - <USER3> want to click once and never see it again in the repeat series.

Also, it would be nice if I could choose the correct answer (e.g. a county name for a flag) by clicking it among a set of options instead of typing it in manually all the time.

<comment> barry-cotter Recognising the correct option from multiple choices is recognition, not recall. Recall is significantly harder and leads to more and better retention st the cost of greater frustration.

<comment><USER22> Perhaps, yet having to type it every time (I ALWAYS know the correct spelling, for my whole life I have been wondering how do people actually manage to misspell English words, even though English is not my first language ans I have actually had to study it from scratch at the school) is extremely annoying and discouraging, kicking me out of the flow state quickly. I just wonder how much less efficient recognition is compared to recall.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Good job! This is a really cool project, I think I might try to contribute some content. Just a few nits: tooltip in sidebar is really distracting, it should have a slower animation and pop up after a brief hover. Also login/create account form should listen to enter keypress for submit. Should I send these observations to the contact email in the future?

<comment><USER27> What is the license for contributing?

<comment><USER10> If you contribute changes to the existing flash cards they'll be licensed under "Creative Commons BY SA" (most likely), every flash card will tell you the license if you open "view" it. If you create your own they'll just belong to SYL, though, single flash cards are not copyright-able so there is no issue if you steal those flash cards. And I personally would have no issues when people re-use content for other use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This great project make me think on another good resource with many articles on HN. It's super-memory [http://www.super- memo.com/supermemo17.html](http://www.super-memo.com/supermemo17.html) a website with many information and tools about training you brain

</comment><comment><USER22> Does it have an API? I would like to build an app around the flashcards database (a completely free one, giving full and very visible credits to SoYouLearn of course). Can I?

<comment><USER4> It does not currently and it's not a priority for me right now. Can you contact me by email? I'm curious about your app, maybe we can work something out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I just signed up and I am a little freaked out. How did you know what my Native language is and what other languages I speak? The only info I provided was my email.

<comment><USER4> It just uses javascript navigator.languages object by default. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> How is any content I contribute licensed?

What will the pricing model be?

I'm reluctant to contribute to something that is going to be used as a profit center.

</comment><comment><USER31> I just moved to Spain, and just played around with the beginners Spanish course. This is badass. Thank you for making this.

<comment><USER31> One issue I've run into a few times though: I'll come back to a tab for it and hit enter, and it seems to try and reload. I then get this error:

more_vert This is not a valid session ID. Note that this URL ist not valid across browser reloads.

<comment><USER4> I'm having trouble reproducing this. Could you contact me by email and tell me the exact steps?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Need a spaced repitition program with audio and recognition. It would be great to be able to mix those in.

</comment><comment><USER33> Stuck on creating account, iOS , it just keeps spinning

<comment><USER4> Sorry to hear that. I know it's a bad excuse but: I don't own any Apple products so I haven't tested IPhone or iPad. Though I did test a MacOS VM with Safari. Can you try to use firefox for now? I'll try to borrow an iPhone soon and debug the problem in the next few days. Sorry about that.

<comment><USER34> You can run an emulated iOS device on a Mac if you have one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> ugh I'm not allowed to use my username that I've been using for many other website because it might be offensive.

<comment><USER4> Sorry, which username are you trying? I have a blacklist but I didn't check every single entry in it.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Running a car on water. Plausible or just more bad internet science? - <AUTHOR>

I've got a friend who's pretty smart and a good programmer, who keeps going on about building a car to run on just water. He's convinced it's possible and that other people have done it but that there's a big conspiracy by big oil to keep it covered up.
I've sat through all the videos he's shown me, and I've read countless websites and other documents he's supplied, but so far I haven't seen anything like what I'd consider proof.
I try and keep an open mind, and I'd love for this to be possible, but all I keep seeing is bad science, appallingly bad science and stuff bordering on outright fraud. The basic premise behind most of these claims is a means of converting water to hydrogen and oxygen, that requires less energy that what's obtainable from burning the hydrogen.
So here's my question: Does anyone here know of any evidence that supports this? Do you know anyone who's played with this, or of anyone, anywhere, who has set up a simple closed system to prove it? <comment><USER2> Can you ask your friend to send his tinfoil hat folding instructions? I've lost mine, and I'm pretty sure his would be superior anyway.

There is a reason you can find no conclusive evidence anywhere in the world that this is possible even in a lab environment...

<comment><AUTHOR> Trouble is, he thinks the videos _are_ conclusive evidence. I can provide links if anyone's interested (youtube only, no desire to promote these sites)

How do you demonstrate to someone that what they are watching is _not_ proof when they don't understand what you're talking about? Example - someone takes a 'fuel cell', _plugs in into mains power_ and exclaims how great it is because it's producing bubbles. Apparently this is a working example and therefore conclusive proof. He just does not comprehend when I say that it demonstrates nothing. Arghhh :/

This raises another question then - how can seemingly intelligent people fall for such bad science. Why don't people understand the basics of chemistry? Why on earth can someone who has completed a university level education be so lacking in the fundamentals of chemistry?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> far from possible - it actually takes more energy to pull apart an O-H bond than you get from burning H2. it has to do with the polarity of the bonds (oxygen holds on the hydrogen stronger than another hydrogen atom would). I just looked it up and the heat of combustion of H2 (energy released from burning) is about 280kJ/mol. while the dissociation of H2O (energy to pull it apart) is about 920kJ/mol..... so 3-4 times more energy to pull water apart than released by making it.... now if you strapped a solar panel to the roof and a wind turbine to the front.... maybe...... ...... nah that still wouldnt be enough..... complete bs

</comment><comment><USER4> Sounds like bad science too me. The energy put into breaking a hydrogen to oxygen bond will be the same as the energy release when forming the bond - which is what happens when hydrogen and oxygen is burnt.

Just think conservation of energy.

Having said that - it might be possible to run a car on water if you had a fusion reactor that would fit in your car. Pull the heavy hydrogen from the water and away you go. That technology is still a way off.

<comment><AUTHOR> The idea is that by having rods of certain dimensions, and by pulsing the current at exactly the right frequency, it is possible to break the bonds using less energy that normally required.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It'd be a violation of the 2nd law of thermodynamics? What sort of energy does he expect to extract from the water? Is he going to split it back into H2O and then burn the hydrogen? That just results in the same amount of H2O that you had to begin with (assuming 100% efficiency). The only way a car could run purely on water is to get the H to bond with something more chemically reactive than Oxygen, and that's just not possible since you're just running on water.

Look at the periodic table. There is just ONE element more electrochemically negative than Oxygen, and it's Fluorine. So unless he's planning to make a car that runs on water and Fluorine, it's not possible.

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

The one other alternative is fusion, and I'm sorry bud, but it ain't happening in a car anytime soon.

</comment><comment><USER6> What does he mean by "Run"?

If he takes electricity, puts it into some magical device containing water, and unplugs it, and then runs his car on the output, then it all depends on how much went in and how much came out.

I'll bet more went in than came out.

If he means he puts water into some magical device, and then the car runs on that, no chance.

There are cars that run on air. They put compressed air into a cylinder, then drive an engine similar to a steam engine. Then the proponents claim "It runs on Air!" and in a sense they're right.

Precision required. What actually happens?

Short answer: TANSTAAFL.

</comment><comment><USER7> Try to ask him if he really _wants_ it to be true. Everyone has a certain amount of bias, but if you _want_ something to be true, you'd end up lowering your threshold of proof to believe something.

</comment><comment><USER8> long story short: no. the process isn't efficient enough for water to actually successfully fuel anything.

the concept keeps getting rekindled with new breakthroughs, the latest one being the radio frequency generator that "burns" salt water. its still not efficient enough to make a car go. not yet, at least.</comment>


Ask HN: Doing something innovative with privacy? - <AUTHOR>

I'm trying to find panelists to speak at RSA early next year[1]. I'm the CTO at the International Association of Privacy Professionals[2] and we've done some pretty cool panels in the past at RSA including a panel with the CPOs from Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Facebook and another one with intelligence agency representatives (post Snowden). These have been packed sessions (500+ people) and have been well received.
This year we want to put together a panel to discuss best practices (or whether it is practical) to design and architect to meet the privacy expectations of consumers -- and do so ethically. Any side of the privacy conversation is welcome. The IAPP is not an advocacy organization so among our members are Axciom, members of the US intelligence community, people from Mozilla and the EFF, regulators from European data protection authorities and everything in between.
What I'm hoping to get from reaching out here (and I've been a member here for years) are people who are passionate about privacy and are doing something innovative or revolutionary in the space. It's easy for me to find privacy professionals at large organizations (those are our members) but generally startups don't join professional associations so reaching into that community is much more difficult. I know there are great things happening in the space and I want to give them a voice.
If you are interested, or want to suggest someone else, you can reply here or reach out to me at my work email jeff at privacyassociation dot org. BTW, if you are speaking you will get a free pass to the entire conference, but there is no funding for paying for travel expenses -- sorry.
[1] http://www.rsaconference.com/events/us15 [2] https://privacyassociation.org/ <comment><USER2> What makes you believe the fix to privacy is more likely to originate from a panel than from (a) a semi-random way of bumping into a dinosaur egg, like Twitter and Facebook, or (b) the efforts of an individual, like Moxie Marlinspike or some Google engineer toying with a 20% project?

The fix to privacy is more likely to originate from a project that gets users, like Dark Mail or Mailpile.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your username in combination with the content of your post is ironic. At what point in my post does it say I'm trying to assemble a panel to fix privacy? I'm looking for people, like Moxie Marlinspike, to speak to a crowd of information security professionals about their thoughts on privacy and privacy-related projects in a panel format. And rather than just assembling representatives from corporate giants I'd like to include individuals from startups.

<comment><USER2> > to discuss best practices</comment></comment></comment>


An Intro to Compilers (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://nicoleorchard.com/blog/compilers <comment><USER2> While somewhat irrelevant for a majority of developers, it feels great to understand how computers actually work.

Even many higher education IT programs often barely cover the underpinnings anymore.

I'm currently embarking on a fun little "from first principles" challenge:

Imagine a post-apocalyptic world where computers are a relic of the past.

You stumble upon a functioning device with a screen and keyboard. When powered on, all you get is a bare metal "assembly interpreter". You can type in riscv64 assembly instructions and they are executed. You can print to the screen via a UART. So you don't even get an assembler/linker to build on.

From there you have to build up an entire new software stack, with a proper language with compiler/vm, an operating system, a standard library, basic userspace tools, a UI, ...

Simulating the device and console is easy with qemu-system-riscv64 and a a bit of assembly.

It's very challenging, but also rewarding to study up/relearn and implement all the basic underpinnings of computers, all the way from hardware (CPU, memory, IO devices, ISAs) up to a GUI stack.

Hacking together a simple OS isn't actually all that hard when your hardware is constrained to a specific device. And writing a very simple language in assembly also isn't that bad. You can build progressively better languages on top of that.

I'd love to turn this into a somewhat guided, interactive learning experience that runs in the browser via tinyemu [1] or similar, but I won't have time for that.

[1] [https://bellard.org/tinyemu/](https://bellard.org/tinyemu/)

<comment><USER3> > _Even many higher education IT programs often barely cover the underpinnings > anymore._

Really? A compiler course seems quite standard in any licence/bachelor CS degree.

<comment><USER4> I go to a pretty good uni (not elite, but global top 30) and they don't have a compilers course, which I was very disappointed by. It's even a theory heavy degree!

<comment><USER5> This really surprises me - looking down the THE and QS global rankings, I know that at least all the universities outside the Far East teach compilers. I guess you're not saying which university you're at to keep it anonymous, but I'd be interested to hear which it was.

<comment><USER6> Which universities are you looking at? Mine technically had a compilers course but it wasn't required coursework and was generally offered every 2-3 years or so

<comment><USER5> The top 30 in QS and THE. Most of them have major compiler research groups, even.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I took a couple of compiler courses in university, and I think for the most part it made me a better programmer, mainly because it enforced understanding of how specific programming concepts and constructs are generally implemented. That, and a more intense look at the "heap of abstractions" you're generally working with when you write a higher-level language.

I've always advocated that, if you want to really understand the tools you are using, you need to understand at least one level below the "surface abstraction" that you are working if. Even better if you can understand two or three levels down.

There's a great talk from game developer Jonathan Blow [1] that describes how knowledge is lost "generationally" due to our lack of understanding of the black boxes we build things on top of. Not sure I 100% agree with his thoughts, but it's an interesting take.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW- SOdj4Kkk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW-SOdj4Kkk)

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm currently working on a compiler from scratch for fun/learning. Currently just compiling Standard ML without modules because it presents an interesting challenge, compilation-wise.

I'm self taught (but have been programming 10+ years) so it's been a really interesting experience - I've gotten exposure/actual use of some different data structures and algorithms that I've never used before.

If you're into this kinda thing, I suggest checking out the ProgrammingLanguages subreddit, there's a discord server as well.

</comment><comment><USER9> I spent a couple days writing a compiler for a custom shader language. It's a very simple lisp with minimal features, but enough to do everything I use in graphics. I compile this into glsl + a struct and functions for cpu side. A lot faster to prototype when I only have to modify my shader, and I can switch out the backend between webgl and opengl. Should be quick to add support for vulkan/metal/dx12 when I need that. I never would have thought to do this solution if I didn't already know how to write compilers. Somebody might say "oh, you could have used ____" \- maybe, but it wasn't much effort and I can make it work in a convenient way for me.

(in position f2) (in uv f2) (all sprite tex) (all color f4)

(vert (position 0.0 1.0))

(frag (* (sprite uv) color))

</comment><comment><USER10> Even if you never write or work on a compiler in the sense of a program that turns source code text into assembly, many programs (or parts thereof) are compilers in the sense of turning data or code in one form into another form.

<comment><USER11> This is especially true of "code generators" or "source-to-source" transformation tools. I did write one of each recently, and often had to look up the compiler literature to go forward.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That's pretty topical for me, last week I challenged myself to write a brainfuck compiler in 24 hours or less.

The end result worked out pretty well, and took less time than I expected:

[https://github.com/skx/bfcc/](https://github.com/skx/bfcc/)

</comment><comment><USER13> Discussed at the time: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15005031](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15005031)

</comment><comment><USER14> I'm writing a simple Lisp compiler with Bash at the moment. It's fun to find all the things you really miss from other languages!</comment>


Build a Pokedex from Pokemon with Django and Heroku - <AUTHOR> https://www.twilio.com/blog/2014/11/build-your-own-pokedex-with-django-mms-and-pokeapi.html

<comment><USER2> I have always wanted to do something like this but using image and object recognition to scan a card and tell you facts and information about it. It could be useful for a few different card games.</comment>


SVG Icons Using MIT License - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/edent/SuperTinyIcons/issues/214 <comment><USER2> The sane solution if one wants to play fairly is to create a licenses page on the webpage or app and mention the source of the icons and other OS software used.

This way you are acknowledging the license and you distribute it too with the copy.

This is how the YouTube app does it for example on Android. Settings/About/OS licenses.

<comment><USER3> What about using licenses.txt?

Along the lines of: security.txt, robots.txt, humans.txt.

<comment><USER2> That's a cool idea, never seen that, but after quite a while of googling here's one on the root domain:

[https://walltime.info/licenses.txt](https://walltime.info/licenses.txt)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I am partial to the quality of [https://svgporn.com/](https://svgporn.com/) they hand-write the SVG code for small file size.

<comment><USER5> sfw?

<comment><USER6> totally :D

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Given the actual condition being imposed on users of MIT/Expat-licensed assets:

        The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
        copies or substantial portions of the Software.

I'm failing to see what the hold-up is here.

\- If it's an SVG file, what's wrong with including the license text as a comment?

\- If it's a raster image, what's wrong with including the license text in the metadata?

The way I'm reading this, as long as the license text is somehow embedded in the asset - whether or not it's actually visible to someone viewing it as an image - then that fulfills the terms of the license, no?

If such an embedded license is sufficient, then I fail to see what the problem is. Is it just file size? Are these people really _so_ averse to content creators being credited for their work that said consumers of said works consider embedded attribution/licensing unacceptable (and why)?

If such an embedded license is _not_ sufficient, then why is it insufficient?

Obligatory: I ain't a lawyer. Given the sorts of quibbling that seems to be happening over a three-paragraph license that's ubiquitous in the world of software, I don't envy the actual lawyers one bit.

<comment><USER8> > Is it just file size?

The stated purpose of the project is "Icons under 1KB each". So embedding a 1KB license in each one would defeat the purpose.

Even if file size is not the main goal, embedding metadata could be self- defeating in other ways. If the license requires making the license available to end-users, would that prevent the use of asset pipeline optimization tools? (The motivation for using a permissive license is often to enable compatibility with general-purpose tools.) If the license only requires making the license available to maintainers, then why embed it in the first place?

<comment><USER7> My question is also about the other various instances of objections to MIT- licensed assets that were raised (i.e. in the article linked in the issue, as well as in other related issues). You're right that this specific case justifies minimal file sizes; maybe a modified/clarified license that only requires the copyright statement and a URL pointing to the license would be a better fit?

Re: asset pipelines, those would only be an issue if one of the "optimizations" is to strip metadata, which sounds an awful lot like a premature optimization to me.

On another note: most compression algorithms in vogue today can shrink the Expat license to less than ⅔ the plaintext size when base64-encoded. That's still hefty in the context of this specific project, but does still technically satisfy the letter (albeit probably not the spirit) of the license's requirements. Compressing the whole SVG file could almost certainly allow the icons to stay under 1kb, at least until decompressed (and an in- memory representation of that SVG file doesn't usually need to preserve comments).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I run this repo, but didn't open the comment. Curious to know why others think.

I chose MIT out of laziness, and because that's what done of the source files were using. I've never heard of the "Blue Oak" licence the comment refers to.

Lots of people and companies have contributed to the icon set over the last couple of years without issue.

I'm of the opinion that having an acknowledgements section of an app / website is sufficient.

I suppose I could add some metadata to each file, but that would inflate most of them to over 1KB.

<comment><USER10> > "I'm of the opinion"

Please if you are working/setting licenses, make sure it's not just an opinion and that there's enough data/you do enough research to back it up. As explained in many sites, MIT for code, CC for art.

<comment><USER9> Are SVGs code or art?

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends. SVGs could be both if, for example, they were hand-crafted. Code itself often is art because it requires creative skill and imagination to produce.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> How can these be licensed in any way, when the artwork is of trademarked logos? Genuine question. Aren't you entirely relying on the fact that the owners of the copyright of the logos benefits from your use and are unlikely to chase? I mean, if I decided my project was compatible with Coca-Cola and slapped the Coke logo on it, they'd come after me, no? Even if I had redrawn the logo myself.

<comment><USER12> (The usual: IANAL)

Trademark is different from copyright in that you can have a trademarked logo on your webpage (or in any other work) as long as you aren't implying association with the owner of the mark. Trademark owners can't come after you for, say, writing a scathing critique of their product that includes their logo for reference. But they _can_ come after you if you add their logo to a list of "companies using this library!" without their permission.

There are tons of questions I admittedly have about why reality shows blur out logos (I imagine they're avoiding creating the impression that a brand has endorsed the crazy stuff happening on the show through product placement) and why developers can include the github logo in reference to the github repo for a project when neither the author nor the project are associated with the github brand (my guess is that there's a carve-out for that sort of thing, since github wants people to do this as much as possible).

<comment><AUTHOR> Aside: You don't need to inform people you're not a lawyer. But, if you were, you would need to tell them "I am not _your_ lawyer" unless, in fact, you were.

<comment><USER11> My favourite blurb along those lines, from a forum, "I am a lawyer. But I'm not your lawyer. And, like contraceptives: someone else's lawyer won't protect you."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> For content, rather than code, I generally prefer to use one of the creative commons licenses.

[https://creativecommons.org/share-your- work/](https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/)

<comment><USER14> How would you differentiate _content_ from _code_ when the thing in question is as meta as SVG?

<comment><USER15> If the line is really that grey, dual license MIT/CC0?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> In such a case, where SVG markup code is MIT licensed, would a generated png count as the compiled binary?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> the link stopped working. here's the link: [https://github.com/edent/SuperTinyIcons/issues/214](https://github.com/edent/SuperTinyIcons/issues/214)</comment>


An instant setup AI-powered chat salesperson for your ecommerce site - <AUTHOR> https://www.toucanai.com <comment><AUTHOR> Toucan AI is a conversational AI platform that allows companies with online sales to instantly set up an AI salesperson for their website. E-commerce sites can use Toucan to increase sales conversions by guiding consumers to their perfect product through intelligent, personalized conversations about consumer preferences, directly asking and answering questions. Toucan AI offers sites and online marketplaces a powerful way to engage and convert more shoppers.</comment>