Ask HN: Phone number as a second authentication factor - <AUTHOR> Most internet banking apps, send you an SMS or allow you to enter a password to access full banking features. Someone who has access to your phone, already has access to your SMS and password generator app.<p>Historically, your phone was a 2nd factor, but not anymore. Why do app developers ignore this basic thing? <comment><USER2> I feel like you're glossing over several factors. In your scenario:

1: Person must have physical access and control of your phone.

2: Person must have Phone pin-code or password, in order to unlock phone and access either SMS, banking app, or password app. Or somehow brute force password or decrypt phone contents.

3: Person must have either password for banking app or password to Password App to gain banking password.

If you're not using passwords (and different ones at that) for your phone, password manager, and banking apps, then _that 's_ the whole in your security, not from using SMS as a second factor.

There are issues with using SMS in 2FA, but it's not the issues that you've brought up.</comment>


Show HN: Underline.js is like underscore.js but using modern ES7 syntax - <AUTHOR> http://ankurp.github.io/underline/?hn <comment><USER2> I'm calling it now. This will get at least 30 upvotes.</comment>


Ask HN: CS major or business informatics major - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, I'm a 20 year old German business student who got into programming and wants to switch his major. Right now I have choice between two majors - a pure CS major and a "business informatics" major which is a mix of business and CS classes. Since it's a tough choice for me, it would be great if you could give me advice on this situation. (I'm sorry if I have violated any rules since this is my first post here.)
Because I have already studied one year in my business major, I'd rather switch to the business informatics major, so that I can keep my grades . However, the business informatics major would still take three years to complete, the same time as the pure CS major. Because I'd have already completed many classes, I'd have a lot of time for self-learning and personal projects.
The downside of this major is of course, that CS topics aren't covered with the same depth as in the CS major. I'd miss out on theoretical and technical Computer Science, as well on one class about functional programming. I'd still have classes about OOP, programming projects and later on some classes about advanced programming topics.
The alternative, the CS major, has the typical classes of a CS major and I'd start from scratch with this major (I can take about 1-2 business classes to the general education section).
My questions are:
-Will chosing the "business informatics" major make me drastically less employable in software engineering positions, even if I have a good portfolio of personal projects?
-Will I miss out on a lot of core concepts in the theoretical & technical Computer Science courses, which will make me less proficient in programming later on?
-Could you give me your personal opinion about this situation?
Thank you for replies. <comment><USER2> I'm not sure what the curriculum looks like for the "business informatics" at your school, but if it's anything like what a similar "business CS" program offered at my college was it is mostly admin/management stuff or setting up and maintaining enterprise software (Cisco routers, using Microsoft products, ect). I had a friend who took a 300-level (Junior) class as an elective and they introduced Vim/Emacs halfway through and tested on it...we were both amazed at that level many of them hadn't even written much code, worked on a large code-base, or had a grasp on any programming paradigms/design patterns yet were getting a degree in a computer field in less than a year. I guess it goes to show how different levels of abstraction can be applied to CS to get a job done (ie. they didn't need to know how any of the tools worked internally...just how to use them to accomplish a job).

> Will chosing the "business informatics" major make me drastically less > employable in software engineering positions, even if I have a good > portfolio of personal projects?

Drastically? Probably not, especially if you have some projects under your belt to demonstrate your skills. If your goal is to be a "software engineer" though, I think you're better off getting a CS degree because it directly feeds into a software career.

> Will I miss out on a lot of core concepts in the theoretical & technical > Computer Science courses, which will make me less proficient in programming > later on?

Of course you will miss out on some things. There is a reason these are 2 different programs at your school because they are aiming at teaching 2 different things. CS dives into theoretical components such as OS design, programming paradigms and design, algorithms, ect. Now you can learn all these on your own of course, but I find it far more difficult especially at a higher level of understanding. "business informatics" (as I understand it), is about putting software in place which is going to aid business in some way or possibly train you to be in some sort of "software management" position.

Just my 2 cents though.

<comment><AUTHOR> First, thanks thanks for the reply.

About the curriculum of business informatics major: It has programming classes from the first semester and programming projects with CS students, so I think it's not just a degree to set up enterprise software.

These programming classes are

-Practical programming I & II (OOP, Algorithms and data structures) together with CS people.

-Software Projects I & II (Classes about working as a team on a programming project with a big project on the side)

-Bachelor Project I & II (Again a big programming project, also with CS people)

The business informatics students can chose one of these specialisations:

-Computational finance,

-Logistics,

-E-Commerce,

-IT-Systems (That'd be the setting up enterprise software path).

I'd take the first specialisation 'computational finance' and could have some 'advanced' programming classes with CS students, like Introduction to AI, or Heuristically Optimization Techniques together

The business side of the major is (which I have mainly completed): Introduction classes to Accounting, Marketing, Logistics, Investemnts etc.

As I said, the business informatics major appeals to me because I could keep my grades (for which I've worked quite hard for) and would have lots of free time to spend on personal projects. The only problem with it, as I asked, if it's 'good enough' for good SE positions.</comment></comment>


How much to pay a skilled intern? - <AUTHOR>

The startup I work for is looking to hire an intern to help us with front-end development.
We've found a guy that we like, but we are ignorant to the fair amount that he should be paid.
The position would be in the bay area.
What do you suggest? <comment><USER2> We pay an hourly equivalent that is about 40-50% of what a starting full-time salary would be at the same position, and have never had problems with enough (quality) applicants.

However: \- We are in the midwest, without much competition. \- We are in a college town where there is mandatory internships as part of the CS program.

So YMMV.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd shoot for about 80% of the starting salary you'd pay if they were a new full time employee just getting out of college.</comment>


Ask HN: Has Apple lost its way? Is their decline imminent? - <AUTHOR> I have been hearing a lot of complaints, issues all around the news and people I meet or talk to about decline in Customer service, brand equity, confidence, brand affinity etc.
Are people losing confidence in Apple and with coming devices like watch, car, VR etc from Apple, do you think the decline is going to accelerate?
I used to love apple and its philosophy and products. it is no longer the same company. Its strategies are no different than IBM or Sony for that matter. They have amazing talent which is why they produce beautiful products, but why is then people all around the world are showing pessimism in their direction. has its peak done and gone
Has Apple lost its way? <comment><USER3> People show pessimism because they fear their size / cash on hand; hate the "walled garden"; love to bet against the big kid on the block.

So I suppose, it's all a matter of who you talk to. The genius bar repaired my years out of warranty MacbookPro for free (failing video card = new motherboard = not a cheap repair) so customer service for me has been nothing but top notch, as it has been in the past.

Love the "walled garden" \- everything is getting better at working together and working together more consistently. Side note to this is I have friends who were die hard Android users who all just switched to new iPhone 6/Plus S's

And picking on the big kid on the block - meh - someone needs to get picked on. Google get's it's share - facebook gets beat up on occasion. happens.

So... they're considering building a car, or the watch or whatever. It's not like their hurting for money. Google is into so many products and industries that have absolutely nothing to do with search its dissying.

And what makes you compare Apple to IBM? They have almost no server presence, have never believed in "big iron" server configurations - OS X Server is now just an addon to OS X. IMO, Apple couldn't be any more different then IBM or MS for that matter.

Analysts love to speculate. It's apart of their job. Most of these people get paid to write pro or against Apple. No one knows what Apple is doing other then Apple.

(not defending them. I love Apple products and use them primarily - but people give them more shit then they deserve IMO.)

<comment><AUTHOR> You are right. From business perspective they are diversifying and making its bigger and better. Which in all fairness is fine. I was mostly talking about decline in consumer sentiment due to its focus more on selling rather than satisfying customer. I am hearing this from die- hard Apple fans and that is concerning

<comment><USER3> Their not without faults - no company is.

I personally - as a die hard fan - think their moving towards more consumer facing ideas then professional facing ideas.

I think the iPad Pro is a great idea with the stylus / keyboard.

I think a lot of features in OS X are bad ideas - I've never once made a program absolute full screen - who works like that? (personal opinion). I'm all for size and portability but a Macbook Pro with no built in ethernet or cd / dvd? Sorry, their not completely dead yet. A lot of offices still don't allow wifi and theres always a need for an optical drive. Sure - I have a thunderbolt ethernet adaptor and I can get a external drive - but 1 more thing to carry is 1 more thing to loose.

I do see convergence - with the Ax processors getting faster with every generation - watch in a few more, Intel processors get dropped - OS X gets renamed to Desktop OS (following the naming of WatchOS and TVOS), becomes a branch of iOS and the App Stores get unified. 1 app, downloadable across all devices, using App Thinning to distribute app assets as needed.

This obviously will be a problem for pro apps (going back to my gripe) - <USER2> you imagine Photoshop being sold in the App Store? Hell will have frozen over for that to happen.

But I've gotten off track - It's impossible to please everyone. A company becomes more consumer focused and you piss off the pros. A company becomes more professional focused and you piss off the consumers. Still - sure as hell beats using Windows - but even MS caved. Windows 8 was a great idea - unfortunately, their target market is businesses and businesses a: don't want to spend money on training employees on a new interface and b: won't spend the money on touch screens - which is why 10 exists how it does. For consumers, 8 was great! For businesses, 8 sucked. 10 is the happy median. Not everyone is pleased with it, but it pleases enough.

Apple is in the same boat. Pro's rave about Apple when new products come out, but they need to please the consumer so they spend money before they please the pros (of which there are ALOT less of)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You've asked a relevant question. Sadly, Apple lost their way a couple of years ago. [http://www.techhive.com/article/248264/cupertino_is_becoming...](http://www.techhive.com/article/248264/cupertino_is_becoming_cappuccino.html)</comment>


The AI Unemployment Anti-FAQ (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/ <comment><USER3> The problem with this explaination is that it focuses on the technical aspect and not on the economical one : how is the value created shared among the people in the economy?

Technological progress allows concentration of power in the one who holds the capital, as he will be the main one to benefit from a more efficient capital : with the new machine you can make 15 buns whereas you made less with the new one. The employee is not paid more : the capitalist earns the cost saved.

Problem is that the capitalist doesn't spend 100% of his income : he will consume some, invest some and save the rest in unproductive accounts or stocks. He may produce 50% more hot dogs, but the demand will not follow.

Economics theory says that in this case prices may go down, but that would mean a lowering of the capitalist's profits. He may in this case reduce quality in order to lower the prices while preserving his margins.

Hence we see here 3 things : accumation of capital in a few hands, an era of deflation and low yields due to low demand and high monetary stock needed to be invested, and a reduction of quality of the product.

The last one is counter intuitive but may be seen in reality : buildings have reached the point where it's commodity, replaced every 30 years, clothes are worthless and the quality of food has been decreasing for the last 30 years (at least in my country, France).

If we get richer everyday, why can't we make buildings that are aesthical, solid and durable anymore? Why is quality food reserved only for rich people?

<comment><USER4> > Technological progress allows concentration of power in the one who holds > the capital, as he will be the main one to benefit from a more efficient > capital

I do not think that is true. The consumers of all goods and services also benefit from technological progress, because they become cheaper, more widely available, higher quality (different ways of saying the same thing).

Technological progress in the last ~200 years has radically improved the lives of everyone, most significantly by freeing them from being subsistence farmers and clothes-makers. Even though most people today do not own a lot of capital, the cost of living well has come down so substantially that even poor people today arguably have much better quality of life than historical kings. For example, the majority of US households below the poverty line own an automobile, have multiple televisions with cable TV, a refrigerator, air conditioning, mobile phones, etc. [1] Despite owning no capital, the life of even those in poverty is astronomically better off than 200 years ago.

Are you familiar with the trope where poor people from the distant past would wear clothes until they literally turned into rags? The reason that happened is because clothing was _ridiculously expensive_ compared to today. There was an article about this on Hacker News about two years ago called "The $3500 Shirt - A History Lesson in Economics" [2]. To summarize, in the pre- industrial age, a _single shirt_ required _so much labor_ that its cost was on the order of $3500 - $4000 in modern dollars. Buying a single piece of clothing could cost you multiple months' wages.

> Back in the pre-industrial days, the making of thread, cloth, and clothing > ate up all the time that a woman wasn't spending cooking and cleaning and > raising the children. That's why single women were called "spinsters" \- > spinning thread was their primary job. "I somehow or somewhere got the > idea," wrote Lucy Larcom in the 18th century, "when I was a small child, > that the chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind." [2]

NPR also published an article on called "The History Of Light" [3] which traces how much light (like candle light or lamp light) you could buy with a day's worth of labor, at various points in history. In Babylonian times, your day's wages could buy you 10 minutes worth of light. Light was therefore relatively expensive and in-affordable. By the 1990s, a day's wages can buy about 20,000 hours worth of light. Light is so cheap everyone has practically unlimited amounts, which led to substantial changes across modern society.

Technological progress has drastically improved the lives of _everyone_. It has not made everyone _rich_ , but those in poverty today are phenomenally better off than at any time in the past.

[1] [http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understandi...](http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2011/09/understanding- poverty-in-the-united-states-surprising-facts-about-americas-poor)

[2] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8940950)

[3] [http://www.npr.org/2014/05/02/309040279/in-4-000-years- one-t...](http://www.npr.org/2014/05/02/309040279/in-4-000-years-one-thing- hasnt-changed-it-takes-time-to-buy-light)

<comment><USER3> This does not contradicts what I'm saying. Maybe you should mention that in the US this prosperity is financed by debt.

<comment><USER5> It contradicts one specific bit in your reasoning, namely the "[modern] clothes are worthless" part.

I think the point that Pyxl101 was getting at is that your assertion that modern clothes are of vastly inferior quality compared to older clothes is maybe not well-founded.

Whether or not that's true, idk. Whether or not it's fair to pick out one specific bit of your reasoning, idk.

If you have sources for any of your claims, then maybe we could continue discussion.

<comment><USER3> I was referring to fast-fashion brands such as Zara, H&M, etc... On a large scale in the near past, you can see a drop of quality in the clothes sold on the market. You may say that it is a conterpart of lower prices, but even expensive clothes are degrading quality in order to preserve their margins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Some parts are good points, but some parts are strawman arguments.

If all jobs require four years of expertise to apply for, every time one job gets mechanized, while employers switch over to automation, the employees made redundant would need to sustain themselves while studying to gain the expertise required for a job in a different field at the same salary.

We do have an increasing number of distinct jobs that each take many years of study.

So far, I have felt confident in my ability to evolve in this job sector because I am good at logic, which most of programming relates to. But if the logic aspect of the job was trivialized to the point that anyone could tell a machine what it must do, I might have to move towards a new field, and learn to solve Schrödinger's equations and be deeply knowledgeable about quantum mechanics to be able to program some future, more complex machine.

And yet even that is easier than having to go from driving trucks to managing logistics.

<comment><USER7> >If all jobs require four years of expertise to apply for, every time one job gets mechanized, while employers switch over to automation, the employees made redundant would need to sustain themselves while studying to gain the expertise required for a job in a different field at the same salary.

>We do have an increasing number of distinct jobs that each take many years of study.

Can you name say, three or four of these jobs which require four solid years of study to master and have been automated away completely in the last 20 years?

Because this sounds kinda like bullshit to me.

<comment><USER8> The _if_ at the beginning should give away that this isn't hard data from looking at our current reality, and more a thought experiment as we trend into a future run by AI.

Things like accounting though; a friend of mine got his CPA. Basically required to go through two years of college (he had a bachelors already, was more of a top up in relevant areas), then prep for a shit ton of CPA testing, work under some CPAs for at least a year, before getting the cert. And any legit accounting firm here expects that.

That's not a trivial amount of effort.

But now Turbo Tax is walking me through taxes with a few clicks. Not completely AI managed personal finance, but in 10 years?

What does my 32 year old friend do at 42? Become a programmer? How long will that take him with no prior knowledge?

<comment><USER7> Most of the accountants I know seem to spend a their time managing flows of data, forecasting, interpreting legislation & making judgement calls on tax matters. Things that would require "strong AI" that isn't anywhere to be seen currently.

All the automation appears to have done (when it works, which it often doesn't) is made the job less tedious than it was 10-20 years ago.

Automation CLEARLY hasn't reduced the demand for accountants, just the kind of skills they have, since the numbers have been going up along with inflation: [https://s3-ap- southeast-2.amazonaws.com/oca/media/wysiwyg/20...](https://s3-ap- southeast-2.amazonaws.com/oca/media/wysiwyg/2016/03/Why+%26+How/accountant- job-outlook.gif)

I could see demand for accountants dry if up tax legislation suddenly became radically simpler but that doesn't seem likely currently. If anything it's growing more complex.

<comment><USER9> Those sound like more senior accounting positions, which are _least_ vulnerable to automation.

The problem is at the bottom end of the ladder. As software gets better, the entry-level positions will disappear. There will be no longer be a viable path from fresh CPA graduate to 'making judgement calls on tax matters', and you'll have a bunch of people who paid for a useless degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is pretty bad.

He goes on for pages taking down his own straw men without even getting close to the completely artificial "make-work" nature of most of our pre-AI economy.

We spend hundreds of billions above-and-beyond what could be strictly considered defense. To this day, a great deal of our interior is subsidized into farming, even though that level of effort has not been necessary for over 100 years. We are bankrupting ourselves on a health care system that costs almost twice as much as its western european counterpart to produce uniformly inferior outcomes, and contrary to the right-wing propaganda of torts-gone- wild, much of this cost is pure admin/bureaucratic overhead. Don't even get me started on the bureaucracy and make work of our various educational systems! Municipalities across the nation throw millions of dollars, bad after good, without claw-backs, to any pack of two-bit hucksters rolling into town with a promise of jobs.

If you ask me, our present system is already under tremendous stress just trying to find work for people. It doesn't even care that much if it is productive--just keep those peasants busy so they won't get into trouble.

</comment><comment><USER11> > for AI or productivity growth or increased trade or immigration or > graduating students to increase unemployment, instead of resulting in more > hot dogs and buns for everyone, you must be doing something terribly wrong > that you weren't doing wrong in 1950.

Not necessarily. There's going to eventually come a point where any job that can be performed by a low-skilled worker can be performed by automation.

The example used to combat this notion is that servants used to be more plentiful than they are now, and low-skilled workers would be ripe for these types of careers. Well, what did servants do? The same thing my robot vacuum cleaner and dishwasher and microwave and Amazon Echo do now.

<comment><USER12> Right. He doesn't seem to address how fully general AI can entirely obviate (at least some class) of human labor. It's true that comparative advantage means you can still profitably produce something when others can do it better. But it doesn't guarantee that the (positive) market price will be enough to pay for the worker's sustenance.

This isn't idle speculation: it's exactly what happened to horses once technology obsoleted them, which caused them to die off except for some very narrow cases (rough terrain) and vanity competitions. I know, "humans aren't horses", but they're identical in terms of "what happens when technology can replace all their economic use cases much more cheaply".

So yes: human workers would be able to sell computation services at the market price of $0.50/PFLOPS-hour ... they just won't be able to feed themselves at that wage. (This basic dynamic is arguably what's happening with disability overclassification.)

With that said, Yudkowsky does make a strong case that AI unemployment is not the problem _now_ and that we aren't in that world yet although IMHO he's bought too uncritically into the mentality of "historically NGDP solved everything, just like inflation always cured unemployment, so NGDP must be a cureall".

<comment><AUTHOR> "This isn't idle speculation: it's exactly what happened to horses once technology obsoleted them which caused them to die off except for some very narrow cases and vanity competitions."

The article does explicitly address this. Do you think the response is unsatisfying, and if so, could you explain why?

"Q. How about timescales longer than ten years? There was one class of laborers permanently unemployed by the automobile revolution, namely horses. There are a lot fewer horses nowadays because there is literally nothing left for horses to do that machines can't do better; horses' marginal labor productivity dropped below their cost of living. Could that happen to humans too, if AI advanced far enough that it could do all the labor?

A. If we imagine that in future decades machine intelligence is slowly going past the equivalent of IQ 70, 80, 90, eating up more and more jobs along the way... then I defer to Robin Hanson's analysis in Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence, in which, as the abstract says, "Machines complement human labor when [humans] become more productive at the jobs they perform, but machines also substitute for human labor by taking over human jobs. At first, complementary effects dominate, and human wages rise with computer productivity. But eventually substitution can dominate, making wages fall as fast as computer prices now do."

Q. Could we already be in this substitution regime -

A. No, no, a dozen times no, for the dozen reasons already mentioned. That sentence in Hanson's paper has nothing to do with what is going on right now. The future cannot be a cause of the past. (etc.)"

<comment><USER13> > The future cannot be a cause of the past.

This is the failed assumption of the author; that computers need human intelligence to displace jobs but they don't. They've been displacing jobs since their invention and they're getting better at it every year. They don't need to have an IQ of 70 or even an IQ at all.

<comment><USER7> They created jobs too, a lot of which people assume are done by robots because they're done in other countries.

Apple may only employ 100,000 people in the US but 1.3 million not-robots work for the company that actually _makes_ those phones.

The argument that it automation is "naturally" creating fewer jobs that it eliminates is refuted simply by looking overseas where all those new jobs actually are.

Or are they just temporary?

Foxconn threatened _in 2011_ that within three years their 1.2 million strong workforce would be largely replaced by robots:

[http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial- robot...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/industrial- robots/foxconn-to-replace-human-workers-with-one-million-robots)

Here we are 5 years later with them employing another 100,000 warm bodies while making identical threats.

<comment><USER14> I don't think the argument is that automation creates _no_ jobs, the argument is that (at least in the current instance of automation) it creates dramatically fewer jobs than it eliminates, and the balance is not being made up for over time or in other industries, resulting in a substantial net decrease in employment or wages.

Apple's 1.3 million-strong workforce is itself being automated out of existence... [http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As a counter point from today, not 2013 [http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/12/federal-report-ai- co...](http://arstechnica.com/business/2016/12/federal-report-ai-could- threaten-up-to-47-percent-of-jobs-in-two-decades/)

Edit: Salient point in article from one of the reports

"If labor productivity increases do not translate into wage increases, then the large economic gains brought about by AI could accrue to a select few," the report says. "Instead of broadly shared prosperity for workers and consumers, this might push towards reduced competition and increased wealth inequality."

</comment><comment><USER16> It's funny that automation is under attack. Any conventional measure says that productivity growth declines and the number of jobs grows.

First, the rise of unemployment is not supported by facts.

The widely cited unemployment rate went down to 4.6%.[1] That's the pre-crisis level of the overheated 2008 economy. This reduction is costly, but manageable.

Jobs disappear, but new ones get created. Nonfarm payrolls (aka "created jobs") are well above zero.[2]

So what's the unemployment the media keep talking about?

The unemployment voter. 4.6% is greater than the winner's margin in any of the recent presidential elections. It's a valuable asset to candidates and, thus, a hot media topic.

The average voter actually gets better thanks to productivity gains, not employment (which we can't reduce below 4% anyway). Productivity accounted for 2 percentage points of per-hour output growth.[3] It still contributes at least 0.5 pp. This decline is the real problem: losing those 2% means being poorer by 21.9% by the end of the decade.

But productivity doesn't vote, so this loss is going to happen.

[1] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=4CaW](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=4CaW)

[2] [https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?category_id=0&graph_id=12...](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?category_id=0&graph_id=12880)

[3] Gordon, "Perspectives on The Rise and Fall of American Growth." p. 73.

<comment><USER17> Unemployment, in the sense of "who is looking for a job but can't find one" is low, but the labor force participation rate is at 62.7%, close to a 30-year low [0][1]. It seems to have bottomed-out in the last couple years and is currently holding steady, but the current level is not encouraging. Note that a low participation rate, as in, "people have just given up looking for a job and resigned themselves to permanent unemployment because there are no economic prospects in their vicinity" _does_ tally quite well with the stories the media keeps talking.

Note also that median wages are not yet climbing after their recession decline, despite the falling unemployment (classically, 5% is about the level at which you expect wages to start rising), suggesting that a lot of the new jobs being created are kind of shitty.

[0] [https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000) [1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-force-participation- rat...](http://www.businessinsider.com/labor-force-participation-rate- september-2014-2014-10)

<comment><USER18> > labor force participation rate is at 62.7%, close to a 30-year low. It seems > to have bottomed-out in the last couple years and is currently holding > steady

The LFPP is the share over the 16-and-over (with no upper age limit) population that is in working or seeking work. The effect you describe is kind of what you'd expect if a big demographic bulge had been passing into retirement age, and but then largely completed that move.

<comment><USER19> This is true, but I assume you are referring to the Baby Boomers. That generation wasn't so much a bulge as it was a boom, meaning the boomers also had at least as many children as they were (average 2 kids per couple). When the next generation goes to retirement, it will be just as large.

I guess what I'm saying is if you believe the participation rate will increase because a large group of people are retired and the next generation is smaller, it isn't.

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

<comment><USER18> Actually, no, Gen X was a bust compared to the Boomer generation, followed by another boom with the Millennials, which is why there is a transition directly from Boomers to Millennials as the numerically dominant generation. Fertility dropped starting in the late 50s and more sharply after 1964.

<comment><USER19> Yes, you are correct, even accounting for immigration. GenX is of course larger than the Greatest Generation and the Lost Generation that preceded the boomers. We will get a little labor participation relief, but not much. GenX is still significantly larger than the generations proceeding the boomers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think Jevon's Paradox[1] might apply to our relationship with AI. Jevon's Paradox states that the more efficiently a resource is used, the more the demand for it increases.

Thus with AI, the more efficiently human labor is used, the more demand for it increases? Thus one person is able to accomplish far more with the aid of robots, therefore the usefulness of labor increases. The out of work argument only works if there is a fixed amount of production that needs to be done and then there's no more to be done after that. However, if that were the case, then we'd have all we would need and no one would have to work because working more would just produce useless stuff that would not be used.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons's_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons's_paradox)

<comment><USER21> I think the question of what happens if humans have no jobs left to do is extremely premature. Different stages of AI and automation are being conflated in to the same arguments.

Rather, the issue that needs to be considered right now is what happens, in the US, if there is a big disruption to a large group of jobs which have been fairly stable for decades in a very short period of time? Specifically I am thinking about accounting (imminent), lawyers (already happening), financial advisors (happening), insurance agents (happening), real estate agents (imminent), drivers (coming soon), travel agents (transition complete) and so on.

Society as a whole gains benefits, if not direct access, but perhaps at a cost of removing the socio-economic status of a large group of people. This, of course, has happened many times before.

The greater AI-employment questions should be answered after we are pretty sure humans are even going to survive 5, 10 decades from now.

<comment><USER22> Humans made it through Napoleon, the Bolsheviks, chattel slavery, WWII and various flu epidemics. I doubt we'll end ourselves in 10 years.

"Removing socio-economic status" _SHOULD_ be a goal, to the extent that that status comes from rents ( which it usually does ) . Status seeking is a huge drain on us, and if production starts to go exponential, then the "economic" part fades in importance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This article just leans on the same historic analogies that don't hold up to scrutiny. These answers fall way short of the effect of automation and AI will have. You are not replacing the job with another, you are replacing the human brain!

I always refer people to this video to explain what it will be like, and it debases almost all the points made in this FAQ:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

All these historical analogies fall flat on their face when it comes to an AI being trained to do your exact job. This is not another case of farmers moving to different higher skilled jobs. We are the employed horses of the 1800s about to be made unemployable by the advent of cars.

<comment><AUTHOR> "We are the employed horses of the 1800s about to be made unemployable by the advent of cars."

The article explicitly addresses that:

"Q. How about timescales longer than ten years? There was one class of laborers permanently unemployed by the automobile revolution, namely horses. There are a lot fewer horses nowadays because there is literally nothing left for horses to do that machines can't do better; horses' marginal labor productivity dropped below their cost of living. Could that happen to humans too, if AI advanced far enough that it could do all the labor?"

"A. If we imagine that in future decades machine intelligence is slowly going past the equivalent of IQ 70, 80, 90, eating up more and more jobs along the way... then I defer to Robin Hanson's analysis in Economic Growth Given Machine Intelligence, in which, as the abstract says, "Machines complement human labor when [humans] become more productive at the jobs they perform, but machines also substitute for human labor by taking over human jobs. At first, complementary effects dominate, and human wages rise with computer productivity. But eventually substitution can dominate, making wages fall as fast as computer prices now do.""

"Q. Could we already be in this substitution regime -"

"A. No, no, a dozen times no, for the dozen reasons already mentioned. That sentence in Hanson's paper has nothing to do with what is going on right now. The future cannot be a cause of the past. Future scenarios, even if they seem to associate the concept of AI with the concept of unemployment, cannot rationally increase the probability that current AI is responsible for current unemployment."

"Q. But AI will inevitably become a problem later?"

"A. Not necessarily. We only get the Hansonian scenario if... (etc, etc.)"

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Cached link, for those who can't reach the site (I get a 504): [http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YP88PLE...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YP88PLEg9AEJ:lesswrong.com/lw/hh4/the_robots_ai_and_unemployment_antifaq/&num=1&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

</comment><comment><USER25> The entire argument is that "automation didnt get invented recently so how can it be the cause of a recent phenomenon". This seems pretty weak to me. Maybe automation has finally automated all (or enough) of the jobs that any human can be trained to do with minimal education, so there aren't any jobs for a percentage of the population anymore?

Assuming that people who lose their jobs to automation will find new ones requires every person be able to perform some sort of new job. But with automation doing most physical tasks and now some mental ones, is it so crazy to think that the bar of competency required to do anything worth paying for is being raised?

<comment><AUTHOR> The article addresses that explicitly. Some questions in the "Anti-FAQ" are:

"Maybe we've finally reached the point where there's no work left to be done, or where all the jobs that people can easily be retrained into can be even more easily automated."

"What if what's changed is that we're out of new jobs to create? What if we've already got enough hot dog buns, for every kind of hot dog bun there is in the labor market, and now AI is automating away the last jobs and the last of the demand for labor?"

"How about timescales longer than ten years? There was one class of laborers permanently unemployed by the automobile revolution, namely horses. There are a lot fewer horses nowadays because there is literally nothing left for horses to do that machines can't do better; horses' marginal labor productivity dropped below their cost of living. Could that happen to humans too, if AI advanced far enough that it could do all the labor?"

and then there are responses to each of these.

Do you think the responses are unsatisfying, and if so, could you explain why in some more detail?

<comment><USER25> _Do you think the responses are unsatisfying_

Their response to

 _" Maybe we've finally reached the point where there's no work left to be done, or where all the jobs that people can easily be retrained into can be even more easily automated."_

Is

 _If the problem is automation, and we didn 't experience any sudden leap in automation in 2008, then why can't people get back at least the jobs they used to have..._

Seems there is a pretty easy explanation- recessions and growth are a feature of our financial system, the noise of which dominates the underlying trend. So yes, people lost their jobs in the recession, but jobs have been recovered since the recession too- just not as many, which is what you would expect from a gradual trend.

Their responses to the horses question, which I think is a very good question, is merely

 _No, no, a dozen times no, for the dozen reasons already mentioned._ and then no mention of the reasons, for which I certainly don't see a dozen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is from 2013 so in terms of recovery years it is a bit dated...

But the first three questions all posit that unemployment was rising, and that reemployment was not occurring which is(and was) belied by this graph -[https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000](https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000)

<comment><USER27> Does that one graph really tell the whole story? Things not captured here include:

\- underemployment, like law school grads working in book stores because no lawyer needs a clerk now that computers do the research for them.

\- contractors vs. part time vs. full time. I've seen it asserted that we've lost a lot of salaried positions in favour of contractor arrangements (gig economy) or shift work.

\- people who've transitioned from unemployed to being on long-term Medicaid—I don't believe they count as "unemployed", but various mental illness issues can be caused or made worse by being long-term out of work.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> People have too much debt, housing costs are too high, and poorly designed social assistance programs discourages work.

Suppose Bob is unemployed and lives with his parents in the suburbs. Bob collects unemployment, is eligible for several social programs and has a deferral on his student loans.

Bob could get hired at $50,000/year in New York City in a second. But housing within any reasonable distance is $2000/month, taking the job would require Bob to start making $1000/month payments on his student loans and cause him to lose $15,000/year in unemployment and other benefits.

Which means Bob can't take that job. He would need a job that pays more than that, which isn't available. So Bob remains unemployed.

Construct a lot of new housing, replace existing social assistance with a UBI, and introduce moderate inflation to reduce the real value of existing debts and maintain the nominal value of housing while reducing its real cost, and we've solved a big part of it.

<comment><USER29> Why should debt be forgiven via inflation? Also, this causes interest rates to go up as lenders will expect another surprise inflation.

<comment><USER28> > Why should debt be forgiven via inflation?

Because the debt was induced by harmful interest rate subsidies that bring about a highly undesirable wealth transfer from government (i.e. all taxpayers) to banks, distort markets like housing and education by inflating their prices relative to the rest of the economy (including wages), and cause people to take on excessive debt because people care about monthly payments rather than principal amounts and subsidized interest causes the borrowable principal amount to explode at a given monthly payment, since government- subsidized interest then constitutes a large fraction of the payment and is at no risk of default so lenders are willing to make excessively large loans. See also housing crisis.

Undoing the damage done by those subsidies requires their inverse, which is inflation. It transfers wealth from banks to the government to the benefit of taxpayers, allows the real price of housing and education to fall to where they should be without shocking the market by reducing their nominal prices, and allows people to pay off the unwisely-induced existing debt principal with lower value currency.

> Also, this causes interest rates to go up as lenders will expect another > surprise inflation.

And then people won't borrow as much principal in the future, so paying down principal will be easier at prevailing wages, which is the desired result.

You're also assuming lenders have control over that given the way the government creating money affects interest rates. When the government creates money it has the effect of reducing the amount of government debt in circulation (they have money, they don't need to issue bonds), which reduces interest rates on bonds and forces would-be bond purchasers into buying some other debt, which increases competition for lending and reduces interest rates in other lending markets too.

<comment><USER29> Interest rate subsidies help students and banks. Also, where's the money coming from? From lenders, i.e. people's bank accounts.

> It transfers wealth from banks to the government to the benefit of taxpayers

No, it transfers money from lenders (like you and me who have bank accounts) to borrowers. People own banks and lend money to banks. Banks don't have any magical stash of money. If banks lose wealth, then I lose wealth (my bank account earns less real interest).

> You're also assuming lenders have control over that given the way the > government creating money affects interest rates. When the government > creates money it has the effect of reducing the amount of government debt in > circulation (they have money, they don't need to issue bonds), which reduces > interest rates on bonds and forces would-be bond purchasers into buying some > other debt, which increases competition for lending and reduces interest > rates in other lending markets too.

Yes, the government will loan less, but interest rates will go up (right now they're a low 2-3%) to adjust for the risk of inflation which cancels that affect. Lenders have control over interest rates obviously; only they buy bonds. Infact, if the inflation is a surprise, then lenders will be risk- averse causing drastic increase in interest rates (they'll be thinking "what if the government inflates money even more next time in a surprise?"). Lenders like stability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Eliezer really needs to learn how to stick to his areas of expertise. When he talks about decision theory or the mathematical formalisms of AI it can be spectacular; when he wades into economics or quantum mechanics it's frequently embarrassing.

<comment><USER30> As someone who is degree-qualified in the area of economics, I have to say I prefer this facetious and reasonably well-informed takedown of bad pop economics (and his HP fanfic!) to his utterly serious entertainment of ridiculous ideas like Roko's Basilisk in the area of expertise he's dedicating his life to...

(Rothbard's law: people tend to specialize in what they are _worst_ at [also applied to Rothbard])

<comment><AUTHOR> Eliezer never took Roko's Basilisk seriously; unfortunately, there's a great deal of misinformation about this online. Here's what happened:

"What I considered to be obvious common sense was that you did not spread potential information hazards because it would be a crappy thing to do to someone. The problem wasn't Roko's post itself, about CEV, being correct. That thought never occurred to me for a fraction of a second. The problem was that Roko's post seemed near in idea-space to a large class of potential hazards, all of which, regardless of their plausibility, had the property that they presented no potential benefit to anyone. They were pure infohazards. The only thing they could possibly do was be detrimental to brains that represented them, if one of the possible variants of the idea turned out to be repairable of the obvious objections and defeaters. So I deleted it, because on my worldview there was no reason not to. I did not want LessWrong.com to be a place where people were exposed to potential infohazards because somebody like me thought they were being clever about reasoning that they probably weren't infohazards. On my view, the key fact about Roko's Basilisk wasn't that it was plausible, or implausible, the key fact was just that shoving it in people's faces seemed like a fundamentally crap thing to do because there was no upside.

Again, I deleted that post not because I had decided that this thing probably presented a real hazard, but because I was afraid some unknown variant of it might, and because it seemed to me like the obvious General Procedure For Handling Things That Might Be Infohazards said you shouldn't post them to the Internet. If you look at the original SF story where the term "basilisk" was coined, it's about a mind-erasing image and the.... trolls, I guess, though the story predates modern trolling, who go around spraypainting the Basilisk on walls, using computer guidance so they don't know themselves what the Basilisk looks like, in hopes the Basilisk will erase some innocent mind, for the lulz. These people are the villains of the story. The good guys, of course, try to erase the Basilisk from the walls. Painting Basilisks on walls is a crap thing to do. Since there was no upside to being exposed to Roko's Basilisk, its probability of being true was irrelevant. And Roko himself had thought this was a thing that might actually work. So I yelled at Roko for violating basic sanity about infohazards for stupid reasons, and then deleted the post. He, by his own lights, had violated the obvious code for the ethical handling of infohazards, conditional on such things existing, and I was indignant about this." [https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2cm2eg/rokos_ba...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2cm2eg/rokos_basilisk/cjjbqqo/?context=3)

<comment><USER31> I fail to see the misinformation. If he believes in "infohazards" and takes his "timeless decision theory" seriously, then he took this seriously. In fact he took it seriously enough to delete the thread. Nothing he said contradicts these facts.

I'll say it. The guy is a quack. A quack in the robes mathematics rather than medicine, but a quack all the same. No one in philosophy or in mathematics takes these ideas seriously. He never puts these ideas up to peer review, but rather sticks them on his blog where a bunch of people that think of themselves as "smart" and "deep thinkers" read them and nod in agreement. Yet in the end all of these are very _very_ fringe ideas with no evidence either logically or physically to support them.

In the end, Roko's Basilisk, and these ideas of the some potentially benevolent or malevolent AI that controls the the simulation in which we live are indistinguishable from God and his ideas about them are indistinguishable from the same flawed centuries old Pascal's Wager complete with the exact same logical flaws pointed out centuries ago.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think this ignores the most important question of all: Given the rises in automation, how do we avoid adding up in a Hunger Games-esque future?

And before anyone says UBI: Do you honestly think that Paul Ryan, who is planning on gutting Social Security and Medicare right this second, would go along with that? UBI is going to be off the table for at least 20 years.

<comment><USER18> > I think this ignores the most important question of all: Given the rises in > automation, how do we avoid adding up in a Hunger Games-esque future?

Unconditional Basic Income, or something very similar.

> And before anyone says UBI: Do you honestly think that Paul Ryan, who is > planning on gutting Social Security and Medicare right this second, would go > along with that?

Probably not. Paul Ryan remaining in a position to exert decisive control over policy and avoiding a dystopian future may well be mutually exclusive options.

> UBI is going to be off the table for at least 20 years.

Congressional and Presidential elections are much more frequent than that and can result in sudden and dramatic reversal of policy direction, especially in the face of widespread economic concerns.

Sufficient economic pain, historically and globally speaking, has also been known to provoke large and fundamental political change outside of normal electoral timelines and succession processes.

<comment><USER31> >Congressional and Presidential elections are much more frequent than that and can result in sudden and dramatic reversal of policy direction, especially in the face of widespread economic concerns.

The frequency of elections is immaterial in the era of uber-gerrymandering and population migration. Censuses are every 10 years.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It's more than just technology: anxiety went up substantially from a mix of

-social status awareness (Facebook and other social networks allow me to constantly compare myself to others)

-for older white Americans the world seems to be under a liberal assault: gay rights, genderless bathrooms, black lives matter, muslim immigrants, a black president, microaggressions etc. All these changes came in relatively rapid succession and the old guard felt it strongly. I'm a liberal man in NYC but I also feel stressed when talking with people: what if I accidentally say something inappropriate, am considered racist or sexist despite my best intentions, wtf is a microaggression etc. I'm for these changes but I think they came in too fast.

-world news are now delivered as they happen, way more effectively than in the past; it's well-known that reading news causes anxiety -the US Republicans deliberately misinformed and angered their constituency in their quest to fight Obama. They essentially subverted democracy by blindly resisting the other side and not engaging in any dialogue whatsoever. To justify their position and keep their constituency's support, they had to misinform and anger them.

The world is in a much better spot than ever before, but our awareness to every problem around the globe has also heightened. We are also just developing the right mechanisms to defend from information manipulation - <USER2> news, clickbait and super-biased reporting (on both sides) erode trust - it's hard to know what is true and what not anymore, and some people don't even try, they just react (see pizzagate).

I also disagree with the author - a lot of jobs disappeared and this time they are not coming back in the form of other jobs. Through automation and information technologies one person can do the work many many others used to before. Revenue-per-employee increased dramatically because of this very reason, in all areas from finance to tech and services. Many jobs that were be doable with a high-school degree disappeared and they are not coming back.

[http://www.medicaldaily.com/social-anxiety-and-craving- assur...](http://www.medicaldaily.com/social-anxiety-and-craving-assurance- makes-your-facebook-use-problematic-uncontrolled-356646)

[http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american- middl...](http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middle-class- is-losing-ground/)

<comment><USER22> Gad, I wish social status would just die already.

To the extent that they are not bubbly[1], trades are still a solid way to make money and don't require classroom training beyond high school. Sure, your knees might be shot when you're... forty, but still...

[1] thinking oilfield here...

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Although the article has little evidence substantiating it, and many, many argument flaws, I do think its main hypothesis is correct, and the current unemployment is not caused mainly by automation.

If you look at the graphs at [0], productivity is falling, not increasing, as is capital. It looks much more that the world is getting old-fashioned poor than automation pushing people out of work.

EDIT: Forgot the link

0: [https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/11/17/there-are-two- produ...](https://bankunderground.co.uk/2016/11/17/there-are-two-productivity- puzzles/)

</comment><comment><USER35> The jobs are coming back, sure, but they're all bullsh*t jobs. And more and more we're all at the beck and call of computers. Seriously? Just so we can say we have a job?

</comment><comment><USER36> There may be new jobs that come around, but new jobs require retraining. And what if we automate those new jobs faster than people can be reasonably expected to retrain for them?

</comment><comment><USER37> Apparently LW got the hug of death.

[https://archive.fo/8ew3S](https://archive.fo/8ew3S) has an archive.

</comment><comment><USER38> I would laugh, but I have a robot that does that for me now.

</comment><comment><USER39> The problem with the economy is Obamacare. Once that's gone, the jobs will come pouring back. Easy

</comment><comment><USER40> Anecdata: we are a 4 head-count startup. One of our heads is leaving soon. I thought about the impact on operations and realized most of his tasks can be automated and the rest we can absorb without overloading. Automation and AI are surely a main factor in some jobs never coming back. High productivity (also thanks to cheaper/better/faster IT-related services) is also a factor.

</comment><comment><USER41> space bat real talk. people will only be paid if they can give something valuable in return. if people dont have something valuable to offer or they have something of low value, they will not be hired or they will be hired for very little. so if people cant get jobs or become chronically underemployed the question is 'why dont people have anything valuable to offer?' there are probably many reasons, education, technology substitution for human capital, 'automation' though i dont get accused of being a luddite (which i am not) or sharing their fallacies (which i do not). automation will not take away someones job irreplaceably until that automation is 'strong' enough to do lots of stuff. its getting there and it may be contributing to our problems. but its not a reason to panic, if less people can have jobs thats actually a very good thing, we can spend time on other cool stuff. its a reason to restructure our society a little. things that work often work for a period, very few things/processes continue or work indefinitely in the universe. so we could maybe rethink how our society distributes wealth, ownership, etc. how do we get people in a position to offer something valuable? economists spouting dogma and ignoring real problems is pretty dysfunctional. they teach this sort of junk in schools too. its important to fall back on what we know but its also important to re examine what we think we know. its important to think in simple principles when reexamining. gorund-up. economists/many scientists dont like doing that for more reasons that id like to get into here. it falls to people with common sense frankly, which i find lacking on blogs like this.</comment>


IBM acquires Red Hat - <AUTHOR> https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-acquire-red-hat-completely-changing-cloud-landscape-and-becoming-world's-1-hybrid-cloud-provider?fbclid=IwAR3B4TDmlpBIef4CNRNj5YXTI7j9Zh4-RvOYGDBTLQuVwnBVH_pjsMTsRFM <comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321884](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18321884).

</comment><comment><USER3> This is just as well, as I'm moving quite a bit to Net and OpenBSD. I'm tired of the Linux drama (systemd, CoC, balkanised standards, etc.) the broken stuff between distros. The slower changes for BSD development typically means more stable software. And ZFS. Plus, I actually prefer the ICS/BSD license for software in general, as it's maximally free. I've found over the years, that my BSD boxes are far and away more stable than their Linux counterparts. I do devops mostly, so stability and long-term availability are key factors. ext4 is getting long in the tooth and btrfs is nowhere near ZFS in stability or ability or I/O. I've never had a BSD system crash unexpectedly other than bad HW. I cannot say the same for Linux, even RHEL. I feel like a kid again in many ways, because I get to explore all the cool things the BSDs can do again. I'm even moving my Raspberry Pi over to NetBSD in the coming days as a prototype platform to explore BSD embedded possibilities.</comment>


Show HN: I'm Writing a Book on React "Thinking in React" - <AUTHOR> https://www.thinkinginreact.xyz/ <comment><USER2> Feedback..

Your website seems to be build for 2560px width. Icons in the "What you get" are not aligned correctly. Links are broken ("introduction", "demo" and "source" for example).

I can't even get to the content to give feedback on it.

</comment><comment><USER3> Nice pricing model. If I get the book now will I be able to read future chapters once they're released?</comment>


Show HN: RoughNotation – create and animate hand-drawn annotations on a web page - <AUTHOR> https://roughnotation.com/ <comment><USER2> Love this (and all of Preet's work).

Made a statistics visual awhile back using roughjs[0], seems like the perfect setting with which to add roughnotation :)

[0] [https://www.jwilber.me/permutationtest/](https://www.jwilber.me/permutationtest/)

<comment><USER3> You know, it's funny that presumably this explanation of the permutation test is intended for people with very little / no knowledge of statistics.

And yet, I still don't get it. Like, at all. I feel like I'd make a very bad data scientist ;)

<comment><USER4> The first measurement made (between the red and blue groups) shows a difference between the average wool quality of the two groups. Since the members were selected at random, you might conclude that the new shampoo is working because, what are the odds that you just picked all the good alpacas at random? That's what we're checking.

For several permutations of different groups (each group is a new random slection of alpacas so a mix of blue and red alpacas) take the same measurement (average of group a - average of group b)

Count the number of times that the difference was as good or better as your original measurement and you will find out the odds that being in your treatment group made a difference. (If random groupings show similar measurements then it means it's more likely that your specific treatment/control group did nothing).

<comment><USER3> And now I get it. That's all the explanation I needed. Thank you :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Amazing! There are many cool libraries now thanks to author.

1\. Roughjs - rough primitives [https://roughjs.com/](https://roughjs.com/)

2\. roughViz - rough data visualization [https://github.com/jwilber/roughViz](https://github.com/jwilber/roughViz)

3\. Wired-elements - rough wireframes [https://github.com/wiredjs/wired- elements](https://github.com/wiredjs/wired-elements)

</comment><comment><USER6> Amazing examples. Great library. Coupled with the Intersection Observer API[0], this software could add a lot of value to an instructive app or website. Imagine these beautiful annotations tastefully animating as various elements are observed as the user scrolls.

[0] [https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Intersectio...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en- US/docs/Web/API/Intersection_Observer_API)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is cool. Slightly OT but I saw the word animate and I got excited because I'm in the market for some easy to use animation software. Krita & Synfig just aren't doing it for me.

The best one I ever used was a web app built a decade ago by an iirc ~12 year Korean American kid. It seems to have disappeared off the web but it was just amazing for usability. Anyone remember it / the name of it?

<comment><USER8> Hi there. Please check out [https://gif.com.ai](https://gif.com.ai)

You probably haven't heard of it because it's a bit under the radar and not really being promoted to the outside yet.

<comment><USER9> Woah this site is something else. I'm having a really hard time following. What does it do? What is a token?

<comment><USER10> Your comment is so weird to me. Did we check the same page? Are you and alt account that is trying to promote that page?

<comment><USER9> I am not an alt of whoever that person is. Which page did you check? Why is my comment weird?

<comment><USER10> I kinda don't want to put it into words, since speaking ill of anyone's project isn't my thing. But, you're looking at someone pricing basic gif interactions and integration behind a "token"-money system a'la mobile games. It's not adding anything special either, it's literally using the 1996 GIF format with some js stuff. You'll find this and it's like without much trouble, or be able to code it yourself if you really like wrong solutions.

So tl;dr: It's a tech that's a couple of decades too late, with an egregious pricing method, and throwing in the word "intelligence" for who knows why.

If someone want's to do this, hey, I don't want to stop them. Go for it. But looking at that, and going "Woah this site is something else." and asking about the tokens? You can probably see how I can think you might have something to do with that page?

Unless. "Woah this site is something else." as in... this looks like a parody of something, or otherwise a joke, then yeah. It totally does look like something else.

So, anyways. You did ask. I know it makes me seem like an ass for putting it into words.

<comment><USER9> Yeah, "Woah this site is something else" -> This is hot garbage, why the eff would you make it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is really cool, but after looking at your twitter account and ROUGH.JS, so far I've been most impressed by this [0], which only had one retweet since I got to it. I'm a sucker for interesting maps.

0: [https://twitter.com/preetster/status/1250862620103438336](https://twitter.com/preetster/status/1250862620103438336)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. the idea behind rough was to provide primitives to draw anything. maps and dataviz are definitely one of the main use cases.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Being able to add small text between margins would enable the ability for an app/extension to let person A markup an article with their thoughts and emphasis, and share it with person B. That's something I'd personally use.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. I had thought of adding text to annotations but didn't want to complicate the first draft of this.

<comment><USER12> I just realized you're the creator of RoughJS too. Great job on these awesome extensions!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This may be one of the best 'product' landing pages I've ever seen. Kudos.

</comment><comment><USER14> Not sure what I'd use this for, but I love the look of it so much I feel like I need to find an excuse!

Can I ask what use case you had in mind when creating this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Online tutorials, presentations, editing, Direct attention of the reader to something specific.

I was thinking anything that you'd do such annotations on physical paper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Should be a Chrome Extension. Would absolutely kill as one.

<comment><USER16> how?

<comment><USER17> I could see it being used for screenshots of text to draw attention to certain points. Tweets, facebook posts, etc.

<comment><USER18> Code-annotated screenshots would be rad, a bit like LogRocket logs a session, but static, so you can receive feedback and immediately act on it.

Killer features also as GitHub Action/App

Generate a shareable/anotable link on every branch/pr

Make annotations back to GitHub issues, so they can be tracked/resolved there, and added back to the annotation UI as such.

And I could keep going...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is cool. I wonder if this could just be a CSS library instead, where you just add the class "annotate-circle" to an element and it will use pseudo- elements (:before, :after) to draw the lines.

<comment><USER20> With CSS Houdini it's possible.

To draw these irregular lines / shapes with normal CSS it's really hard, maybe if you inline some SVG.

<comment><AUTHOR> I did implement a version of this in Houdini a couple of years back, that and a short thread of what Houdini was lacking in this case: [https://twitter.com/preetster/status/1265679970006757376](https://twitter.com/preetster/status/1265679970006757376)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> As someone who lives and breathes in a hand-annotated world every day, this is incredibly helpful. I can't believe it exists for free. Thank you

</comment><comment><USER22> This could be the blink + marquee of this generation.

<comment><USER11> People certainly want to add extra oomph to posts. I could picture it being used either instead of or in addition to some of the emoji in a typical emoji- heavy pieces of content like this: [https://twitter.com/MetroUK/status/1266078167590219776](https://twitter.com/MetroUK/status/1266078167590219776) (Not on twitter unless twitter implements this, but on the web)

<comment><USER22> I cannot wait for zalgo and these things are combined with text effects to create the ultimate abomination.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is really cool. I like that it brings a bit of human touch to webpages. How does it work?

<comment><USER24> A technical post on that by the author: [https://shihn.ca/posts/2020/roughjs- algorithms/](https://shihn.ca/posts/2020/roughjs-algorithms/)

</comment></comment><comment> wes-k Looks wonderful! Anyway to get it to only draw the annotation once? Looks like everything gets two passes which adds to the roughness but also adds a bit of noise and delay to the animation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes definitely possible. It just looks more sketchy with two passes. And it should be easy to configure. Perhaps add to the issues with any thoughts? Thanks [https://github.com/pshihn/rough- notation/issues](https://github.com/pshihn/rough-notation/issues)

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> That is beautiful and very well done. I might drop this onto my personal homepage today for a nice emphasis underline in the header.

Bravo!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Looks really cool. Does anyone know of something like this but that works with the iPad's pencil?

Would love to have something like a mix between the Notes app and Etherpad, so that I can take notes using the Apple Pencil, then "replay" the writing process, and hopefully be able to post it online as well.

</comment><comment><USER27> This can be used in an ObservableHQ notebook as demonstrated here: [https://observablehq.com/@thadk/rough-notation- example](https://observablehq.com/@thadk/rough-notation-example)

</comment><comment><USER28> This is neat but I totally thought it was going to let me doodle on the page myself

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah sorry, should have titled the post better. :/

<comment><USER28> That's cool, this is still a neat thing! And I think it could probably be fairly simply hooked up to respond to user input as part of a markup tool.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Love it! Looking forward to using it in future projects!

</comment><comment><USER30> I'd love to use this, but I don't see an easy way how to using the frameworks I know, React (well) and Svelte (a bit).

<comment><AUTHOR> People have created framework wrappers for this:

Rect: [https://github.com/linkstrifer/react-rough- notation](https://github.com/linkstrifer/react-rough-notation) Svelte: [https://github.com/dimfeld/svelte-rough- notation](https://github.com/dimfeld/svelte-rough-notation) Vue: [https://github.com/Leecason/vue-rough- notation](https://github.com/Leecason/vue-rough-notation)

<comment><USER30> Wow, thanks! That's exactly what I want, with a demonstration code example. I'll be using this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Displays are really wide today. Most web pages are relatively narrow, content- wise.

Opportunity to use the empty space for markup.

</comment><comment><USER32> This is great!

Does anyone know if there's a similar library that can do rough notations like this within Sketch?

</comment><comment><USER33> Great job on this! What made you think of this product and how long did it take you to make?

<comment><AUTHOR> I wrote roughjs a couple of years ago and had always thought it would be nice to use it in all the ways people draw hand-drawn shapes. Annotation is one of them. I never got around to implementing it. Since roughjs does most of the heavy lifting, implementing this was not a lot of time. I did it in a day (~4-6 hours). Actually it took longer to make the website for the project and writing the readme :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> really nice - would be great if there would be a tufte-style feature (animated info box next to the highlighted text) or sth. similar

</comment><comment><USER35> nice. going to think on ways to use it!

</comment><comment><USER36> a text popover feature would be super useful!

<comment><AUTHOR> Definitely. Please add an issue with what you'd like to see. Thanks.</comment></comment>


Browser auto-fill phishing - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/anttiviljami/browser-autofill-phishing <comment><USER2> Wow, great demonstration. I'd never thought about this being exploited. I wonder if the fix could be something as simple as the browser only allowing non-hidden [Edit: "not visible to the user", I should have said, as this does not appear to auto-fill <input type="hidden"> ] fields to be auto-filled. Otherwise, a warning about what auto-fill information (IE "Your name and credit card information are going to be submitted, continue?") has been filled in would be a nice touch. Maybe a browser extension could accomplish this?

<comment><USER3> The <input> elements are not hidden, they are just drawn off the screen. So the browser would have to determine if the item is visible to the user, which is not trivial. Should autofill skip regular form elements that are just a little below the viewport?

Maybe some feedback from the browser detailing which datapoints were autofilled. I don't know...

<comment><USER4> > So the browser would have to determine if the item is visible to the user, > which is not trivial

This is not terribly difficult, browsers need to know what is visible because they have to actually display it. If an element isn't drawn it shouldn't be autofilled.

<comment><USER5> > If an element isn't drawn it shouldn't be autofilled.

So if a form is too long and you need to scroll, all those fields you can't see won't be auto-filled? Sounds pretty terrible IMO.

<comment><USER6> To me (as a non autofill user), the published bug sounds way more harmful than a little inconvenience.

<comment><USER7> It's not just an inconvenience – it's broken and unexpected UI behaviour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Wow, this seems like such an obvious attack vector that I just assumed it was somehow mitigated (somewhere, magically, I suppose). Does it even require the user to press the Submit button, i.e. could the site's JS trigger the POST request after the event of the autofill?

<comment><USER9> No need for a submit click. Presumably auto-fill triggers a change event on each affected input, but even if it didn't, an attacker could just repeatedly check for new content in the inputs. This means an optimistic solution (autofilling and then unobtrusively notifying the user what was autofilled) is not viable.

<comment><USER10> I don't think it does trigger a change for exactly this reason. I tried to build a Material login page a couple years back, where the placeholder became the label when you typed. I couldn't get it to work with autofill, because I couldn't find a vector to detect when autofill had happened. Here's a related issue:

[https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=352527](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=352527)

<comment><USER11> It doesn't trigger a change, but you can certainly poll for non empty strings: [https://jsfiddle.net/k91o1dw9/7/](https://jsfiddle.net/k91o1dw9/7/)

Edit: That is, for the purposes of this exploit. I understand it's ugly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This could be solved by improving the autofill UI to tell you all the data it is filling into the form, even if it isn't visible to you.

Currently, when I trigger autofill in Chrome, it tells me the full suite of information it can input for a certain profile (name, address, company, etc), but it doesn't tell me which bits of information are actually being used. Something as simple as placing checkmarks in this popup next to the information that is actually being used could communicate this better.

<comment><USER13> > _This could be solved by improving the autofill UI to tell you all the data > it is filling into the form, even if it isn 't visible to you._

Safari does this already

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> In case anyone is worried, most (all?) browsers do not autofill credit card information without the user explicitly clicking into the credit card field so there's no chance of a hidden field stealing your CC information.

<comment><USER15> This requires the browser to recognize it as a credit card field.

Suppose a form uses a non-standard name for the field (say a localized name), and a user enters it at a legitimate site. Any attacker simply has to find these non-standard names for auto-complete to fill this in.

I feel like I've seen a credit card autofill before outside of normal controls.

<comment><USER16> But then the browser won't autofill it, so what's the problem?

<comment><USER17> It will if the attacker uses the same custom name for his field. The attacker could try to suck as much data as possible by creating thousands of hidden fields having a lot of possible combinations for the names of these non- standard CC fields, and wait to get lucky.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I wrote about this a while ago: [https://medium.com/@stabbles/why-you-should- disable-autofill...](https://medium.com/@stabbles/why-you-should-disable- autofill-bf2e15c65b5c)

<comment><USER19> Also, malicious scripts can change the password input type field to a regular text field and grab it from there.

<comment><USER20> There's no need to convert the input type to get the plain text value of a password input. It just masks the input value visually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Firefox doesn't exhibit this behavior, but the site doesn't specifically state which browsers this affects.

<comment><USER22> Indeed, I'm really glad there is at least one popular browser not affected by this.

This is one of the many examples where a privacy-first approach pays off not just in terms of privacy but also in terms of security. In Germany we use the term "Datensparsamkeit" for this principle. Not sure if there is a well- established english term in the international community.

So why do other browers fill in these fields automatically? Why don't they wait until asked by the user? Because it is more "convenient" for the user? Moreover who benefits from that? Not the users, not the browser vendors, but all those websites with overly long registration forms. These confront their visitors with lots of irrelevant fields (birthday, gender, etc.) just for the sake of collecting data. Nobody would fill all that in voluntarily, but I guess more people will do so (perhaps accidentally) if their browser fills that in by default.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I found this [https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=132135](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=132135) which was created when someone noticed the issue happening to their honeypot input box. Looks like it was closed a while ago.

I saw this example doing the rounds on twitter. Hopefully the chrome devs notice the noise and move up the priority on fixing / addressing it.

<comment><USER24> > Chrome Autofill is specifically designed to help users quickly fill forms > that they've never filled before.

Browsers auto-guessing private data into arbitrary fields on never-before-used webpages?

IMO that's "Just because you _can_ doesn't mean you _should_ " territory.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is why I never put anything secret into browser autofill data. No credit cards, _no passwords_ , nothing I would not be OK with disclosing publicly, or already did.

Sensitive info belongs to a password manager which limits it to the domains the data belong.

Credit card numbers are a pain, though. I could put them to a password manager, and manually select to fill only that particular field when I need to. In reality I rarely buy things where PayPal or Amazon payment options are not available; I suppose Stripe offers a similar service.

<comment><USER26> > Sensitive info belongs to a password manager which limits it to the domains > the data belong.

So all that stands between you and being in this exact situation (or worse, since passwords) is your password manager's url comparison?

I refuse to use LastPass - the interface is horrible (probably because you're expected to use the browser extension). But I don't want my password manager anywhere _near_ my browser. I'd really rather have to take an affirmative action in order to release each individual piece of information so I know what I'm disclosing and to who.

<comment><USER27>
        your password manager's url comparison?

Better than manual url comparision! A surprising number of humans think things like www.goodcompany.evil.com are urls for "Good Company", and anyone can screw up and make mistakes checking urls (www.goodcomany.com).

<comment><USER28> Add Unicode and it gets worse. I don't trust my eyes to differentiate between Cyrillic а and Latin a. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack)

<comment><USER27> Browsers only display unicode in domain names if the TLD has restrictions on character sets that prevent homograph attacks.

See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack#Defending...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack#Defending_against_the_attack)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> This vulnerability was published (another article) over a year ago. I'm surprised Chrome hasn't fixed it.

I think this means browsers will never fix this issue. I won't be using auto- fill on untrusted webaites.

<comment><USER30> This is a _very_ old exploit. The earliest references I could find were from 2010.

As other comments have noted, it isn't trivial to fix completely, so I believe most browsers just haven't bothered at all, but have implemented some extra protection for credit cards (and of course, CVV numbers are never stored in the first place).

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I'd rather have only the field I selected autofilled and be given a secondary option to have every field (or maybe choose which fields) in a form autofilled. This bothers me in innocent, non-phishing forms too—especially when the designers don't put labels on the fields and only use placeholders, which I can no longer see after autofill.

<comment><USER13> Safari lets you choose which fields to fill in by clicking a "Customize" option that pops up, but I doubt any normal user will bother looking that far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Even as an experienced user it never crossed my mind that this might happen. Good catch

</comment><comment><USER33> LastPass prompts every time before autofilling your CC# into a form, so it might avoid this issue in that case.

I do believe it would still fail exposing your basic info, such as in this example, however.

<comment><USER34> Basic info is more critical than credit card numbers, at least in my country (Australia) where the issuer or merchant would be liable for any subsequent fraudulent transactions; at worst I would be inconvenienced a few days whilst a new card & number was issued. Compared to outright identity theft, that's minor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Yes! I always had this itch whenever I filled out a field and had the other fields pre filled by chrome. I actually thought that maybe there were type="hidden" that could have been filled and sent (although as someone points out those aren't but it isn't hard to hide an input with CSS). But the main point is: whenever I did that I was usually OK with sending out the rest of the information which either was outdated or I was consciously aware of it.

However, a lot of users might not have that conscience and might be giving out information which they didn't want to. It would be great to shame websites that were employing these shady techniques, but the solution must come from Chrome. Chrome devs: by default only auto fill one field and on the drop down have as the last option to do what you do now, so that you're sure that the user has consciously chosen to auto fill all fields * have a little disclaimer saying this possibility *. That way you get the best of both worlds with an extra key down

<comment><USER35> PS: and/or like someone said that happens in Safari: name the fields that you are about to autofill in the last choice to autofill everything

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> If I remember correctly, it has been reported several times in the past and Chrome doesn't care about it at all.

</comment><comment><USER37> Fillr autofill app requires users to approve every piece of data before autofilling a form. Makes it easy to know when a site is trying something shifty. Dashlane also lets you pick exactly what to fill. Native browser autofills have been battling phishing exploits since early IE days.

</comment><comment><USER38> I really with that browsers didn't autocomplete ever. I've had instances where they will happily auto-complete my entire credit card number. Usually, they'll only memorize the first 4 digits, but sometimes they memorize the entire thing.

<comment><USER39> You can disable it,

[https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/control-whether- firefox...](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/control-whether-firefox- automatically-fills-forms#w_prevent-firefox-from-storing-form-entries)

[https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/142893?co=GENIE.Pla...](https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/142893?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en)

<comment><USER40> For me it pops up a little box under the input asking me to choose if I want to autofill. I like this option because it doesn't autofill without permission but my info is still saved and easily accessible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> Complete tangent but... why is this a NPM package? There is no actual Javascript code in it.

<comment><USER30> It's not actually published on npmjs.org. Author probably just ran npm init out of force of habit. It's actually quite nice that they have their standard metadata & licence where it's easy to find.

They should probably have private: true in there though, to stop it getting published by mistake, since it isn't a component anyone could usefully import.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Just confirmed 1Password's AutoFill for identity is also vulnerable to this on Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER43> Was this filed against Firefox, Chrome, and EDGE? (it seems like the kind of PoC that you make to prove a point to browser vendors to get them to fix what should obvioulsy be fixed... if the user can't see it, no matter how that's been achieved, don't autofill that field.)

<comment><USER44> Firefox is not vulnerable.

Chrome was shown to be vulnerable like 7 years ago but nothing changed.

Closed source stuff like MSIE or Safari? No idea, ask a Windows os OS X user.

<comment><USER43> MS EDGE, unlike the now hopelessly outdated Internet Explorer, has an open issue tracker. And as Safari is literally just webkit, which also has an open issue tracker, there was no need to pretend to be better than Windows and OSX users by pretending they're on their own.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> And Chrome wants to ignore autocomplete=off ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11911116](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11911116))

<comment><USER46> Why not? Anyone who wants to steal your information would not try to disable autocomplete anyway.

<comment><USER45> You're right, following standard in regard to autocomplete=off will not prevent this attack.

I think I remembered of that because the direction of though that autocomplete should always be enabled appears as wrong to me. And this situation reminded me of this direction of though in the past case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> This is the reason I never use the autofill beyond more than at typechecker. I still explicitly write out what I want to place in the form, and the autofill helps me avoid typos.

However, I always found it odd how something so prone to this kind of attack could be deployed for all non-tech savvy browser users...

</comment><comment><USER48> I actually ran across this a while ago, but didn't think to call it phishing.

I was trying to create a honeypot for a front-facing web form, but because of the name I gave the honeypot field, some people's autofill information was filling out that field without them knowing.

</comment><comment><USER49> This is a very clever hack. I've tried in the past to adjust my HTML to disable autofill and it's not possible to prevent Chrome from aggressively doing it.

<comment><USER50> It's disabled if you do autocomplete=off in the attributes

<comment><USER49> Not in my tests, it continued to aggressively populate forms with autocomplete="off" set.

<comment><USER20> That would be because that attribute is for a different feature of the browser. The autofill that this method takes advantage of is more of an extension beyond the standard browser feature.

Besides, someone using this for a phishing method wouldn't use that attribute anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> The only thing I can think of is a separate prompt, that would ask "Do you want to autofill Name, Address, Phone..." etc.

<comment><USER22> That popup is not needed. Firefox does this simply through auto-complete. The user starts typing their email address, and voila, the browser completes it.

This is a nice example of a feature that is trivially accessible and yet unobtrusive.

(Alternatively, you can press the down-arrow on the empty field, which will open the auto-completion as well.)

<comment><USER52> Old Opera went one step further, where it would fill forms using a Wand button. This approach also was used for logging in.

IMO, much better way, since it works well in situation where your passwords are encrypted and browser is configured to forget master key after a while.

Firefox in that scenario will bug you about master password each time you go to page where such password is stored.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It even works in incognito mode (Chrome 55.0.2883.87 on Windows 8.1; tested against my bank's website).

</comment><comment><USER54> Saw the title of this, didn't even open the link, just thought "oh... Crap."

</comment><comment><USER55> Save forms data and especially save passwords have always seemed phishy to me.

</comment><comment><USER56> Yet more blowback from trying to be "user friendly"...

</comment><comment><USER57> Didn't work for me. Chrome 55.0.2883.87

</comment><comment><USER58> are there are api products or chrome-plugins to check / verify if a certain page is a phishing-attack ?

</comment><comment><USER59> I get 405 after submit.

<comment><USER60> me too, but just use the developer console to see the same (horrifying) results as shown in the gif.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> Genius.

</comment><comment><USER62> ok, let's try.

</comment><comment><USER62> ok lets try..

</comment><comment><USER63> Great state of the web

<comment><USER20> It's not the web as it's working as it should, this is a browser problem.</comment></comment>


Boy 'lived as a robot' for two months [video] - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22125682

<comment><USER2> For the record, BBC, living "as a robot" and "through a robot" are completely different things to me. I was imagining the 116th episode of South Park had come true.

<comment><USER3> Admittedly, it would have been way cooler if they had gotten Oculus to chip in a Rift prototype as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> By that metric, I am 'living as a computer' right now.

<comment><USER3> More like "living in an HN comment thread" or maybe "living on the internet". But if you did that, and only that, for two months straight, while confined to a small room you were unable to leave, then yeah, kinda.

<comment><USER5> We can condense that all really. We're all living as a series of tubes (biologically and metaphorically applicable).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Awesom-o!

[http://www.southparkstudios.com/full- episodes/s08e02-awesom-...](http://www.southparkstudios.com/full- episodes/s08e02-awesom-o)

</comment><comment><USER7> That's a pretty cool use case, unlike some of the suggested ones, like going to a museum. I'm pretty sure a website with images would beat that in pretty much all cases.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am AWESOM-O.

</comment><comment><USER9> Is the Anybot video stereoscopic? If so, is it usable with the Oculus Rift?

</comment><comment><USER10> Oh, this HN post _again_.</comment>


Facebook removes 1.5B users from protection of EU privacy law - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/facebook-removes-1-5-billion-users-from-protection-of-eu-privacy-laW <comment><USER2> > Facebook Ireland Limited in Dublin is believed to have been created largely > for tax minimization reasons.

From a Reuters article[1] on the same topic: "Facebook said the latest change does not have tax implications."

Is FB really going to get away with claiming Irish residence when talking about taxes while simultaneously claiming to reside in California for legal purposes (GDPR)?

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-privacy-eu- exclu...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-privacy-eu- exclusive/exclusive-facebook-to-put-1-5-billion-users-out-of-reach-of-new-eu- privacy-law-idUSKBN1HQ00P)

</comment><comment><USER3> > _Facebook has quietly altered its terms of service, making stricter Irish > data protection laws no longer binding on the vast majority of its users_

Was this made more feasible by the recent international corporate tax changes in the United States?

<comment><USER4> It probably has very little bearing. What's relevant here is which legal entity users have an agreement with. For taxation, it's which legal entity their customers have an agreement with.

It's always worth remembering facebook's users and customers are two entirely separate sets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What I find confusing here is that (as someone with zero legal background), I would have thought that if the user has a contract with the Irish subsidiary, that Facebook shouldn't be able to make a change like this without getting a renewed consent from the user.

I know that companies change and update their ToS all the time and maybe there's nothing different here, but in this case it particularly sticks out to me. Even if Facebook or any company "reserves the right to change their terms of service at any time", why does this not shred the notion that a user has informed consent?</comment>