Edge of the Creative Commons (2013) - <AUTHOR> http://blog.brentlaabs.com/2013/12/the-edge-of-creative-commons.html <comment><USER2> Internet Brands tried something similar with WikiTravel (also CC). When they bought the popular wiki and slapped their ads all over it, some contributors forked it as WikiVoyage. IB sued. It was eventually settled in favor of WikiVoyage.

[http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/16/wikimedia- internet-...](http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/02/16/wikimedia-internet- brands-wikivoyage-settlement/)

</comment><comment><USER3> TV Tropes is total crap now. I also departed around the time of one of the big censorship debacles, and honestly, don't miss it.

PS. thanks for indirectly sharing a link to All The Tropes (linked author's fork of TVTropes) too; might have a poke around there.

<comment><USER4> Can you expand? What happened with the censorship? As a casual, occasional browser I don't know where to start looking.

<comment><USER3> They've had a couple of rounds of deleting anything that might be considered sexual, NSFW, or controversial reference or language, as well as renaming articles. This is to make the site more attractive for advertisers because the admins want moar moniez.

It's also worse on tvtropes than most wikis because there is a very limited revision history on most pages (might be the weird software they use rather than admin-imposed), and anything that falls of the end of it after long enough is gone forever.

<comment><USER5> I'm still mad about them going and removing all the monster girl quest articles during that spiel. That was pretty much the end of tvtropes for me.

<comment><USER6> Trying to learn about that game so I could understand a good fanfic was what alerted me to the problem, and not surprisingly the first fork of the site I looked at, back when it was announced on HN (can't find the link, unfortunately), the front page (Wikimedia) highlighted that title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is 6 months old, so it doesn't seem like it went anywhere. Probably because the greater internet has no motivation to oppose moving content to a non-commercial license.

<comment><USER8> I think it speaks to a different mindset from what we as programmers are used to.

Licensing is a pretty big deal for us. Virtually every programmer has some sort of opinion on GPL vs BSD vs public domain vs whatever. Open source projects can live or die because of their license.

Wikis are basically open source projects with natural language instead of code. But I get the impression that few wiki contributors care that much about licenses.

If I had to guess, I'd say that it's because code is more modular and flexible. If you write a useful open source library, the license you put on it can have huge implications for what products end up using it. There's no wiki equivalent to e.g. large quantities of BSD code being used to build a smartphone that sells hundreds of millions of units.

<comment><USER9> I'm a programmer and at the risk of sounding like an idiot - I have no opinion on licensing and could not tell you a single thing about any one license. Are there really that many people knowledgable about different licenses?

<comment><USER10> Nah, you're not an idiot. There's a tendency on HN of people saying "all programmers" to mean "programmers who live in Silicon Valley, use open source tools to write web apps funded by ad eyeballs, and put all their code on Github". Witness the countless posts about "why should I interview when I can point to a Github account", or that article yesterday about "articles every programmer should read" that had something about SEO in it (and then the replies from people unable to see why that was silly), etc.

<comment><USER8> That's kind of funny, since I'm nowhere near Silicon Valley and don't even identify with that crowd, I rarely do any web work, and write plenty of proprietary code. (Ironically, web apps are an area where you can generally get away with not knowing anything about open source licenses, since you're not redistributing the programs you make.)

I merely observe that programmers generally use third party libraries, and that doing so requires at least a basic understanding of the license terms.

Maybe there are a lot of people out there writing code who never touch external code?

<comment><AUTHOR> _(Ironically, web apps are an area where you can generally get away with not knowing anything about open source licenses, since you 're not redistributing the programs you make.)_

Except if you happen to use something under an Affero GPL license, in which case you really should know about it.

But yes, those project are rare.

<comment><USER8> I hadn't heard of that one. Is it actually enforceable? I was under the impression that the GPL didn't require opening server code, not because it was missing something, but because server code doesn't get distributed and thus doesn't fall under copyright limitations in the first place.

<comment><USER11> You find a library on the Internet somewhere. What entitles you to copy it onto your machines? Copyright does not allow to do this, so you are reliant on a license to give you permission to do this. GPL gives you permission to do this, as long as when you distribute any modifications of it, you also pass along the source code. AGPL gives you permission to do this, as long as you give the source code to all of your users should they request it. If you can't meet the conditions, than you don't get the rights acquired by the license, and you fall back to default copyright, which says it's illegal to have copied the library to your own machines in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm the founder of a wiki so I know some of these legal issues better than most (although, of course IANAL). Typically how this is supposed to work is: Wiki's terms of use say

(1) Users own the copyright to their contributions (authors always do; TVTropes appropriating this is not right)

(2)Users grant wiki a non-exclusive irrevocable license to do use the content in any way Wiki likes, including specifically a right to distribute it under CC.

That's where author of OP felt cheated. He wanted to contribute because he felt the content will be licensed CC-BY-SA but Wiki changed it. But this is fine. Author owns the copyright to his personal contributions so he can always publish it under any license he wants. (like he did in his blog post, where he declared all his contributions to be available under CC-BY-SA). The only wrinkle is for someone to be able to find specifically the author's contributions. If the author built upon someone else's work, the result might still be fine to use under CC-BY-SA because at the time the original work on the wiki was under CC-BY-SA. But any edits after the author's contribution are off limits for CC-BY-SA.

Wiki is legally within its rights to change the licensing of its content.

<comment><USER13> No. The text below the edit page reads:

> TV Tropes by TV Tropes Foundation, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons > Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions > beyond the scope of this license may be available from > email@example.com. Donation of text is irrevocable and appreciated.

While not explicit, this implies that the editor should make it sure that the contributed text can be legally merged to the existing CC-BY-NC-SA license (for the obvious reason). This clearly does not include a relicensing grant and you are not permitted to do so.

Actually, I've had a similar cause in another Korean wiki similar to TV Tropes (Rigveda Wiki). In this case the wiki temporarily condemned that its mirroring website does not have a legal right to do the mirroring, and pointed out that the mirroring website has ads attached. A funny thing is that, the wiki itself was licensed as CC-BY-NC-SA and also had ads! While it is debatable if website ads are considered commercial activities or not, the same logic directly applies to the wiki, but the wiki admin replied that it (thinks that it) has a relicensing right when I've asked for that. :(

<comment><USER14> "Donation of text is irrevocable" seems to be the only thing that implies a license from contributor to TV Tropes. It's pretty vague and I certainly wouldn't want to sue claiming a license with that to back it up.

It's also unclear whether that text existed before the switch to CC-SA-NC. Obviously it was updated, but was just the license changed? This is significant because contributing under CC-SA to someone using it commercially is possible. Contributing under CC-SA-NC to someone using it commercially doesn't make any sense, so they would need to have another license.

<comment><USER13> Good points. I don't know if the edit page had a mention about irrevocable relicensing back then though (the Wikipedia description seems to suggest that it wasn't the case).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What about the attribution clause? If I copy an article from a CC-BY-* wiki, am I expected to cite every contributor? That doesn't seem reasonable. How does Wikipedia (CC-BY-SA) deal with this?

<comment><USER8> I'm curious, why would it be unreasonable to cite every contributor to an article you copy? They are the ones who made it, and it only seems reasonable to me to give credit where it's due.

<comment><USER16> Because the list can be huge. It's not unlikely that the list of contributors is longer than the article.

<comment><USER8> Storage is cheap, and you can stash the list away somewhere that doesn't interfere with the main content, so what does that matter?

<comment><USER17> What is the difference between stashing the list away somewhere out of sight and providing a link to the Wikipedia page whose history contains the same information? Particularly since storage is _not_ cheap in every medium (e.g. requiring my one-page flier to attach 3 pages of attributions doesn't make sense) and if you're resorting to a link regardless...

<comment><USER18> If you're making a one page flyer with enough copyrighted information from Wikipedia to require onerous attribution, you're doing it wrong.

<comment><USER17> I don't see that this is the case, at all. A single paragraph that has been edited enough times could be the work of an unbounded number of contributors, since it is always a derivative work of the earlier versions. If that single paragraph, modified for format, makes up the bulk of your flier then you should clearly include attribution somehow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> In trying to "fix" this problem have TVT potentially made themselves liable for all the content posted there? They now assert "ownership" of all the content. In order to be protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act courts have held that they must not be "information content providers"[1], but TVT asserts full rights over all the content, including relicensing and use without attribution.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communicatio...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230_of_the_Communications_Decency_Act)

</comment><comment><USER20> It seems that contributors care about availability of the content most, licencing issues less so. There are mirror tropes wikis so I don't see a problem. Clone that data and run your own version if you like.

[http://tropes.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page](http://tropes.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page)

That move is a bit scummy, but then they are in the business and best business is one that delivers profit at least cost.

my 2c

</comment><comment><USER21> I generally don't find TVT interesting, but I'd love to hear more about these tropes that make these kind of people uncomfortable.

<comment><USER7> Well, they have anime, so why not hentai? And if they have hentai, why not extreme hentai like incest? And then you end up with a "Heartwarming" trope where someone sleeps with their mother.

[https://web.archive.org/web/20110118061340/http://tvtropes.o...](https://web.archive.org/web/20110118061340/http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BoysEmpire)

I think porn examples are banned now.</comment></comment>


The greater your weight, the lower your IQ, say scientists - <AUTHOR> https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1531487/The-greater-your-weight-the-lower-your-IQ-say-scientists.html <comment><USER2> Correlation != Causation

These types of studies are excellent for drawing a hypothesis not a conclusion like "obesetiy makes you dumber"

My theory -- people eat more and excercise less due to some sort of stress. Stress that prevents engagement in activities that promote cognitive capacity or possibly even cause neural damage. But again,only guesses.

The less we have publications containing only correlative conclusions,the better(imho)

<comment><USER3> Maybe... but my mental sharpness increased as soon as I started exercising and watching my diet. I was stress free before and after 45 lbs of weight loss. Maybe it has more to do with eating meat, fewer carbs, or the exercise, rather than weight. My impression of mental sharpness is in terms of programming, and also how many typos I make, and how much energy I have to shape sentences when posting comments.

I wouldn guess the main reason is that I'm sleeping better, breathing properly at night.

Edit: I'd say sleep is definitely one bit of causation behind the correlation right there, but I don't know how big it is.

<comment><USER4> Yes.

My non-professional opinion is that oxygenation is the key.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, I'm gonna flag this. Mind you, my BMI is in the underweight range, but articles like this are total bullshit.

They read with particular intent, and it's important to understand what the intention is of publishing garbage like this.

It's on par with studies about how scientists tend to not be religious. Or how black people tend to be poor. Or how women tend to be less ambitious than men.

If you want to call fat people stupid, just fucking do it. But this is tabloid-level trash that doesn't belong on Hacker News.</comment>


Convore vs Banterly - Beaten to the punch - <AUTHOR> http://bitdrift.com/post/3449584110/beaten-to-the-punch-convore-vs-banterly <comment><USER2> Look at what makes you different. The twitter integration is brilliant, it means you can have much faster, realtime conversations bouncing off twitter. That's your angle.

Make the 'Share on Twitter' button more... meaningful. What it really does is open up a chat room for all your twitter followers to join. I don't want to 'Share' it, I want to open my chatroom up to the world on twitter. Not sure how to word that :)

Can you imagine celebrities getting on board with this? It's perfect. 50 Cent would love this, celebs of that ilk on twitter already spend much of their time bantering with fans and this allows them to do it faster. You just need ONE of those twitter celebs to tweet a link to their chatroom and you've got yourself 10,000 new users.

It's twitpic for chatrooms.

Promote it to celebrity tweeps, hard.

<comment><USER3> Ladon, that's brilliant. I tip my hat to you, sir!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The culture/community of your product is as important as the tech. Myspace held out for a very long time because, for a while, their product was focused on a different set of users than Facebook. Convore -- right now -- attracts a lot of programmers, designers, startup junkies and other tech folks. There is plenty of room and the market is far from decided: 14 y/o girls (not kidding), moms, music fans, sports followers or whoever else.

There are also a lot of really good ideas that you can apply this technology toward. To me, the most uninspired way to attack this space is to try to make your site a one-stop portal for chat. There are a lot more possibilities if you can bring the chat to other destinations, or allow people to integrate chats with their sites.

You should be aware that being in the startup universe tends to make your worldview myopic. You're hyperfocused on the hundreds of users Convore might have and right now that looks like they are miles ahead. Zoom out for a minute and realize that there are millions of users to be won before this game is decided. You are both still at the very _very_ early part of the curve.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your feedback! Very well put.

As we've been working on Banterly for the past few months, we've had a lot of the same thoughts. That's a big part of the reason we decided to focus our product on the Twitter community first. Our hope has been that as people discuss topics around various #hashtags that they will have a way to take the conversation to a deeper level rather than overwhelming their followers with @replies.

The comparisons to Convore are more at a feature level and prompted because many of our original ideas were geared toward giving the IRC community something more "up-to-date" (though it's hard to say whether or not open source programmers currently using IRC will ever really leave for anything else anyway).

<comment><USER5> The hard part about being a solo founder -- you take body-blows like this and you can get hung up on the competition. You need to guard against trying to match Convore feature-for-feature-- definitely stay the course and execute on your core vision. Good luck!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Keep going, nothing has changed. A startup beat you to the punch, not a multinational behemoth (e.g., Google obsoleting Kiko). You both have zero revenue and face the same challenges. A million things could still go wrong for both of you.

They got some good press so you're going to quit? Whatever motivated you to start still applies.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why the hell would you want to stop your project over the miniscule adversity of a pseudosimilar, vaguely-defined and -implemented platform that hasn't even gained traction yet?

If that's enough to make anyone quit a project, I don't think the startup scene is for that person.

For what it's worth, your project looks a lot more interesting. (Aside from the Flash.)

<comment><USER8> Yeah...on the one hand you want to keep your head down/keep the blinders on/trust in your gut and just plan on plowing through any obstacles that stand in your way. On the other hand, you want to try to keep your eye on the competitive landscape enough to make sure that you're not going heads down into a wall or that you're spending your time on the project that has the best chance for success.

<comment><USER7> I think any entrepreneur owes it to him- or herself to consider what "competition" actually means. You shouldn't assume it's a zero-sum game, and only one company can exist. If you look closely enough, you'll also see that competitors don't mirror each other as much as you would think, and they leverage their differences to their advantage.

Launching at the same time as a competitor creates more static in the press. I remember when the movie "Deep Impact" was announced close to "Armageddon". I thought to myself "Jesus Christ, this is too much". I don't think that whichever was the last one to hit the big screen was riding the coat tails of the other, or that the earliest one deserved my attention or money more than the last one.

Should Pepsi have called it quits, because they knew that Coca Cola were doing a coca beverage? Of course not. A competitor can be a pain in the ass in some ways, but it also makes for a great way to analyze your market and customers without looking inwards, which can be very difficult for anyone. If they gain traction, you'll know that there's a market.

If they die, you'll have their example as a cautionary tale; if you don't have a lighthouse to navigate by, navigate around the ship wrecks ahead of you.

I think he's annoyed that Convore launched a similar project _and received some good press and community love_ (as little as it is outside the distortion field of the Valleysphere of Techcrunch and HN).

I always think of ReadWriteStart's mantra that "the early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese".

"Is it important to be the first one out with the 'same' idea" is one of the many inane theory-crafting discussions that serve little other purpose than discourage people from launching.

<comment><USER8> Good points...there's so much that goes into making the decision to go forward on any project. Competitors are just one thing to consider. There are maybe other more important things like does this solve a pain point? For example, do people really feel the pain of trying to hold direct conversations on Twitter? Would they prefer to have a real time discussion? If so, how many people would potentially use this type of app? How big is the market? Etc.

p.s. second mouse gets the cheese...hilarious

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Definitely continue developing! I believe this space is wide open. With the death of Google Wave, I've been looking for good, free, persistent chat. Something like Campfire, TalkerApp, and others. I think XMPP integration, a nice API and embeddable content would be good things to work on.

<comment><USER10> We're working on that right now. We have persistent XMPP based chat with embed support. Try it out, my email is in my profile if you have any questions.

<http://onehub.com/try/beta>

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> In the scope of your story, I have two words that come to mind:

Market. Validation.

Building something revolutionary and brand new is a long, painful path of combatting misunderstanding and selling people on something they don't even know they need yet.

Regardless of who else they see in the market, now you've got something you didn't have before: a known market, and the validation that someone else saw value in that market as well. Let them do the hard work of teaching people why this solution is needed - and then come in with your distinct vision and value to show the people that are now looking that you're an option they should consider.

A quick anecdote from a recent experience I had with the company I recently started working with - we produce <http://www.postmarkapp.com>.

I've been friends with the founders for a long time and know their vision and capabilities for building a great company very well. But unlike our other product <http://www.beanstalkapp.com> \- Postmark laid in a relatively new marketplace. The challenge wasn't getting people to use our product, it was getting them to realize why they needed our product in the first place. That's a high barrier to climb, and the team was already doing a remarkable job before I joined.

3 weeks into my first month, another little company - you might have heard of them, they're called "Amazon.com" - introduced a "competing" service to Postmark. Now THATs about a monday morning.

Much of the internet, including some folks on HN, predicted our demise. But the more we taked about it, the more excited we got. Amazon just entered the market we were looking to serve. We know that our style of serving our customers fundamentally differs from AWS, so we'd compete on that edge. Markets are big, and diverse. You don't need the _entire_ market to be successful.

And Amazon had just opened the door for many of our potential customers that don't fit their market to discover us instead, without us having to do anything new.

Conversations with customers in the last month have confirmed this. The very things that had us wondering "what does this mean" on day one of the SES launch have helped us hone our focus on how we serve _our_ market.

Great ideas don't make great businesses - great markets make great businesses. Amazon saw what we'd already seen, and validated it.

There's 4 ways to enter a market and win.

1) First 2) Best 3) Cheapest 4) Luckiest

If you can't be one, you've always got the other 3 to try out.

<comment><USER12> great model for ways to enter a market and win!

also:

5) Ruthless-est

For example, I'd argue Microsoft was a combo of 1, 4 and 5, and perhaps 3 -- with respect to OS's. But definitely 4 (the IBM/MS-DOS thing) and 5. In contrast, Apple's goal has been 2. Google was clearly not 1 with respect to web search, instead, 2.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Building a business isn't about 'a punch'. It's about hard work, day after day for a long time.

Convore has got a nice UI, they haven't really got traction yet, and there's space for _tons_ of chat like services. They're nothing new, they've been about for decades and they'll be around for decades yet.

Right now Convore have something like 200 users online. That's not unachievable by any means...

Keep going and listen to your users.

</comment><comment><USER14> The people who will ultimately make such a service successful haven't heard of either of you yet.

It's not a winner-take-all market — in fact cozy separate spaces could be preferred.

So: full speed ahead. Perhaps keep an eye on each other for novel discoveries of user-pleasing features, perhaps shade your marketing towards users/regions the others haven't yet emphasized (so there remains the chance you find an adoption-gusher first).

</comment><comment><USER15> I like the concept of Convore -- if it were an internal product, or a product I could run within my own firewalls, I think it'd make a brilliant enterprise tool.

What I dislike about Convore is the same thing I dislike about Quora, Digg, et al., in that it caters to far too large a population.

There is generally great conversation, but I cringe every time I see a question like "What is a function?" or something equally inane.

</comment><comment><USER16> Not sure if this is due to the sudden traffic spike, but discussion pages keep on reloading. It is near impossible to post comments before the page refreshes.

</comment><comment><USER17> If I were in your shoes I would Ignore the echo chamber, listen to your customers, find a unique market niche and go really fast.

</comment><comment><USER3> You know, at first blush I would want to throw in the towel as well, but on second thought you really might consider making a proper go of it. The idea has now been validated by a lot of smart people, and frankly you've got a solid MVP going. I'm leaning toward the general sentiment of comments on here. :)

</comment><comment><USER18> FWIW I like your name better :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We do too. :-) Naming websites is one of our least favorite things to do, so we consider ourselves lucky to have one that fits our idea so well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> You should allow URLs to be converted to links, and eventually similarly with images and videos. This could be really, really sweet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually--we already do this, as long as the URL is the only thing posted in the comment. The next step, parsing URLs from comments, is on my TODO list. :-P

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just tried this, tweeted about it, and the interface crashed...

looks really awesome. keep going.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about that. Should be fixed now. Drop by at <http://banter.ly/bitdrift/bugs> and let me know if you run into any others.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Build a team beyond yourself and forge ahead.</comment>


Helm Values Schema Generation - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/karuppiah7890/helm-schema-gen <comment><USER2> We use Cuelang instead for many many reasons, 'cue export' provides sophisticated merging and correctness guarantees. 'cue import' will turn existing config / schema formats to Cue and if you are really adventures, try cue get to do the same to Go

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm checking out Cuelang! :) Thanks for mentioning about this. In fact, I have noticed that there are lots of tools around configuration management now a days, though I have not tried any of them really. For example - [https://github.com/open-policy-agent/conftest](https://github.com/open- policy-agent/conftest) . Let me give Cuelang and others a try and also, I wouldn't try to reinvent the wheel. My aim was just to provide values.json.schema if people want to use helm's feature. Looks like there are external standalone tools that can help with config validation for any DSLs. Nice

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Planning to use Helm (github.com/helm/helm) v3's values.schema.json feature ? You can generate it instead of writing it from scratch</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage your dev database among multiple developers? - <AUTHOR>

My co-founder posted this question on Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133639/how-do-you-manage-databases-during-development) and got some good advice.  I wanted to get the HN community's take on the question and see if there were any other thoughts:
In your agile startup, how do you handle a multi-person development team where each developer is making changes to the DB schema and everyone needs to have a current copy for local development and testing?  What SCM strategies do you use and/or what software to replicate the database?  Do you have a central development database?
Thanks for the thoughts! <comment><USER2> Database replication will always fail. What you need to do is treat database changes no different that software changes. Developers should make modifications to there local database (they are running local right) and then as they complete their work. The need to script the DDL and DML. This way, the changes can be versioned and applied in sequence to existing environments as well as new environments. The root of all change in a system should always be versioning, to try to manage it any other way is inviting trouble.

</comment><comment><USER3> My employer uses .NET, but we use the "Rails" model for databases. We have population and migration script directories (for each database) which each contain numbered .sql files. Everything in SVN, update to latest, make your changes, make a migration script, commit script. Repeat.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link to Stack Overflow question & thoughts:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133639/how-do-you- manage...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3133639/how-do-you-manage- databases-during-development)

plus the other similar thread on Stack Overflow:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/988426/how-should-you- bui...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/988426/how-should-you-build-your- database-from-source-control)

<comment><USER4> I got some good responses when I asked a similar question on SO a long time ago:

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6371/how-do-you-manage- da...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6371/how-do-you-manage-databases-in- development-test-and-production)

Bottom line: script all your changes to the DB schema, and check the scripts into version control. If you need mock data, write a script that loads it into the DB, and check that into version control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Liquibase:

<http://www.liquibase.org/>

The contents of our personal development databases are not synchronized, just the schema. Each developer has enough mock data to run our app for development purposes.

At a previous job, all developers shared a single development database. It was a huge pain, and I don't recommend that practice.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the link - interesting - Liquibase seems very much oriented towards the Rails style migrations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> One option is to have your code manage the database schema it needs rather than managing the schema externally. You would have some kind of initialization routine that checks the schema and creates anything that it needs. This probably makes a little more sense if you are using some kind of OR mapping scheme so you don't have to duplicate data (some OR mapping tools can do this for you).</comment>


Ask HN: Are we idiots for launching a travel newsletter? - <AUTHOR>

We are thinking of launching a daily travel newsletter, hanging the elements you might expect (pictures, stories etc) around the hook that it is actually a realistic, endless holiday rather than disconnected information.
It fits squarely within pg's "broad but shallow" crater - ie, the opposite market demand shape from "nearly all good startup ideas".
As part of our market research we've put out a survey. If you're interested in travel, and can spare 10-15 minutes, all of the questions are at surveymonkey.com/s/TravelNewsletter
The key question that the HN audience may be better qualified to answer is #11 - "Are we idiots for launching a travel newsletter?" More tactfully, based on your experience, what traps can we avoid / opportunities can we embrace to support early traction.
Or hit us with your "middlebrow dismissal", we're grown-ups. (Despite the similarities, we're not related to hackertourism.com or peteford's current front page post.)
Background - this is being built by me and kerno, two Aussies who met in London while spending a few years travelling. My background is more business than coder, kerno is better balanced, and while I'm experienced with email newsletters and sales neither of us has specific travel industry background.
[Edit: We're about the drop off the New Page, and it doesn't look like we'll make the front page. So I wanted to say thanks for everyone who read this, whether you checked out the survey, left a comment, or not.] <comment><USER3> Hi, as a sign of support from somebody who is about to launch a travel website, I filled up your survey. You are not idiots for launching a newsletter, email marketing is still a big deal. But your question is like asking if you are an idiot for launching a website. You either execute something well or not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Zalew, and good luck with Rootka.

<comment><USER3> thanks, good luck you too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I happen to work at a company where more than 50% of our traffic comes from a daily newsletter. There are many niche newsletters that do quite well. DailyCandy, Thrillist, Groupon's newsletter all come to mind. There are also a lot of niche newsletters that do well and are not fast growing, VC funded etc. User acquisition and monetization are both very straight forward.

However, saying "I'm making a travel newsletter" is ridiculously broad. If you could elaborate a bit more on what you want to do, then I might be able to give more concrete advice than a handwaving "yes it's possible."

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks John. To elaborate (as far as we know at this point):

> Think a travel article that discusses how to spend a weekend visiting the > Christmas Markets in Vienna

> We would have that as the sole newsletter content - ie, not one of a dozen > stories in the newsletter

> It would also fit within a larger narrative - the previous day would end > with a flight from Rome to Vienna; the next day starts with a flight from > Vienna to Oman

> Where possible, we would tell the story of a local giving us the experience

> Links from the newsletter would come back to our website, but also onwards > to more information about the destination or itinerary specifics (some > affiliate links).

> Definitely not a daily deals type newsletter - there's a market for that, > but we are content people

So user acquisition and monetization are the keys, as you point out. We have some early thoughts (social media, especially building reputations in travel forums, and SEO for the former; advertising, affiliate or most likely direct, for the latter). But launch early and learn has taken the place of "first research for months".

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> No. We launched a travel magazine. Travel is a pretty hot start-up spot right now and there is a lot of money to be had. Giving people good content and travel companies a great way to reach customers is a great idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> Not at all, travel industry is huge. A newsletter is a great way to build customer funnels for other paying services. Good luck!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm also happy to answer any questions / explore thoughts about our process and business model, given those tend to be some of the more grounded concerns that get raised when people pitch an idea rather than their launch product.

</comment><comment><USER7> I am a former mitary wife with an immigrant mother. Both those populations seem to travel a fair amount, but often very budget-minded. "Travel" of the vacation type tends to be a luxury item. Luxury items often fare poorly during recessions. Let me suggest you think on positioning this to be resilient in the face of that. One thing which does well during recessions is cheap, escapist entertainment. So perhaps try to appeal to not only actual tourist types but also people who want to imagine getting away. Pictures are likely your friend in that regard.

<comment><AUTHOR> Wonderfully well articulated Mz, thanks. We had the realisation that most people only read travel newsletters when they're thinking of travelling - <USER2> problem for engagement rates.

Your description about "escapist entertainment" (rather than a pure travel guide) focuses the solution. Picture importance is also a good tip - not my forte, so kerno has been slowly explaining it to me!

<comment><USER4> This is a great angle. I can imagine a lot of people in cubicle land that would look forward to a daily escape. And then forward it to their friends. Or save the email to read when they actually go to Vienna.

If you're focused mostly on email, then make sure you have archived newsletters online. Good for SEO, another point of engagement, and conversion source.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> yes

<comment><AUTHOR> And the constructive feedback begins. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894990></comment></comment>


How Imran Khan Swapped Wall Street Career to Snapchat and Earned $150M - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-ipo-executive-imran-khan-career-money-made-net-worth-2017-1 <comment><USER2> It can't be just me that's thinking... what do execs like this actually even do in terms of adding value to the business? Not just skills wise, but also how is his compensation worth more than an SRE being called out 3x a night to keep prod alive? Is there anything he can do that isn't replaceable by an average reasonably literate engineer?</comment>


Time series and objects: hybrid DB - <AUTHOR> https://objectbox.io/time-series-database/ <comment><AUTHOR> ObjectBox has released a new feature optimized for time series data, creating a hybrid database for Object & Time Series data on restricted devices.</comment>


Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/09/science/natural-selection-may-help-account-for-dutch-height-advantage.html?mabReward=A7&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&region=CColumn&module=Recommendation&src=rechp&WT.nav=RecEngine&_r=0 <comment><USER2> According to Wikipedia [1], Dinaric Alps (i.e. the Balkans) is the area with consistently the tallest men and women alike.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#Average_height_aro...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height#Average_height_around_the_world)

</comment><comment><USER3> In the digital era natural selection seems to gain a preference for persons that able to reach high blades in the server rack.</comment>


Is it a bad time to learn Python? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/p/1852949d147e

<comment><USER2> Python is so big and diverse that you won't get any clear answers to this question. In fact I don't believe that anyone could possibly give a definitive answer.

The fact is that Python is not a single language (PyPy, IronPython). Like Linux, there are many competing Python distros to choose from. Many of these distros target scientific users on the surface, but they include components that are more generally useful such as NumPy for scaling systems to huge amounts of data.

In my opinion it is not a bad time to learn Python because, at minimum, if the Python core team stops everything tomorrow, there are thousands of packages that you can use with Python, and there are some 20 years of development work built into the latest 2.x version. You can leverage all of that by learning Python.

Sure you could use Clojure instead, and again be leveraging a huge ecosystem of packages and some 20 years of development effort (JVM mainly). Your choice.

Or you could go for cool and pick a new language with few users and few packages available. That is not necessarily bad. It makes for a more exciting life and those new languages will likely evolve to have ecosystems as big and complex as Python or the JVM.

Python is one of the first non-functional languages (i.e. not LISP, not Haskell, not Erlang) to include functional features such as lambda, iterators, generators. At this point these features are generally considered the correct way to write code rather than writing "for" loops. Read the docs for the itertools library to see what you can do with this style of programming. You can write monads in Python if you wish.

I suggest that you try to implement a minimum viable product (MVP) using Python 3.4. Yes it is beta now, but it will be in a release version before you finish your final product. More importantly, spend a week or two doing this and at the same time, look around at available packages that you MIGHT need, and see if they are available in a 3.x version. If you run into issues with this, then after your first week or two, you will need to decide whether to continue working with Python in the 2.7.6 version ( and fix your code to conform) or whether to leave Python altogether.

If you don't actually try to build something in Python for a week or two, then you won't have enough info to decide. Part of the decision is the hunt for packages that have already implemented some function and the hunt for answers to questions on StackOverflow. To really judge this you need to use the language. And the same thing goes for any other language that you might be considering.

The experts cannot help you. They know too much about their favourite language and they are highly skilled in using that language. You need to make this decision for yourself, and not just blindly copy the expert's decision.

And finally, consider what happens when a person who knows virtually nothing, asks for an expert opinion. They will get a huge number of possible answers and something like 90% of those answers come from a person with average skill or lower in the tool that they recommend. They seem like an expert to you because you don't know any better. The end result of this, repeated a few dozen times, is what gave the world PHP.

Do you want to risk falling into this trap? [http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- de...](http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

</comment><comment><USER3> No.

While it might be a shame that Python 3 is getting adopted so slowly, Python itself is in no way under fire. They're not the first language to have molasses-like adoption of new versions, and they won't be the last.

People most likely stick with Python 2.x because it works, and it's one of the best programming languages for quick prototyping (scripty stuff) ranging to highly optimized stuff (numpy, cython, pypy,etc).

R is new and R is cool, but what about D? or what about Go? What about Rust? Whenever I start new projects, I struggle with this, then ultimately go with python because for most things, it's truly "Fast Enough", and many of the higher level concepts that it gently leads you into (generators, lazy evaluation) don't bash you over the head (as much as I like Haskell, it is not an easy thing to learn).

</comment><comment><USER4> Yes and no. Yes because of Python 2.x. and yes because it is an imperative language which got stuck in the 1990's.

No if you want to write quick and dirty scripts or just learn OO-ish (OO - object oriented) programming language. OO-ish fashion is coming to an end. Im writing OO-ish because Python is not fully OO language.

Yes because of new languages like Rust, Clojure, Go. A lot of programmers moved to Clojure because of it's simple syntax and a lot of libraries which can extend language without waiting (sometimes years long) for a committee. Just look at [http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1tyawn/what_are_feature...](http://www.reddit.com/r/cpp/comments/1tyawn/what_are_features_that_other_languages_have_that/) \- this shouldn't be happening. Python version: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1017621/why-isnt- python-v...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1017621/why-isnt-python-very- good-for-functional-programming)

In my opinion Python has stalled as a language and there is no future for it maybe except for some quick dirty scripts.

Lisp was and still is a safe bet. Languages come and go, fashions change, but in case of Lisp it is a matter of a few macros and a library to catch up. Other ex-fad languages need a committee and long years to evolve.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I convert a list of startup ideas into a single, strong vision? - <AUTHOR>

Hi HN, I'm the CEO of a small startup in the midwest (this is a throwaway account)
I'm in the process of quitting my moderately successful company to start anew. I made the choice once I realized that 1) I'm no longer learning new stuff every day by having to meet new challenges and 2) my current startup has created a great brand but is catering to a small market: After six years in business, it will not grow much further without a large change in product strategy. I would rather put it under different management than bet the company on satisfying my urge to start from square one.
For my next startup, I'm currently looking at the ebook space or doing something having to do with daily deals, following the groupon craze but for a different market segment. I also have an urge to go into the app space, developing games or this idea of an awesome social weight-loss app I have.
My general problem is that I generate too many business ideas: I have a list of 50 or so put together during the last two months. I'm passionate about each of them for a day or two and I need to convert that day-long enthusiasm into a long-term passion.
My current idea of solving this problem is to let it sort itself out. I'm betting that I'm in the middle of a process that will end up with me churning my ideas down to one single vision. But here's the question: is there any way I can hedge this bet? Have you been in a similar situation and/or have any suggestions on how to put the process on fast-track?
I'm grateful for any suggestions, including "shut the fuck up and stay with your current company, dimwit", if that's your sentiment. <comment><USER2> Apologies for quoting PG yet again, but "always produce" really is what I do to find my way through my ever-changing ideas:

 _Sometimes jumping from one sort of work to another is a sign of energy, and sometimes it's a sign of laziness. Are you dropping out, or boldly carving a new path? You often can't tell yourself. Plenty of people who will later do great things seem to be disappointments early on, when they're trying to find their niche.

Is there some test you can use to keep yourself honest? One is to try to do a good job at whatever you're doing, even if you don't like it. Then at least you'll know you're not using dissatisfaction as an excuse for being lazy. Perhaps more importantly, you'll get into the habit of doing things well.

Another test you can use is: always produce. For example, if you have a day job you don't take seriously because you plan to be a novelist, are you producing? Are you writing pages of fiction, however bad? As long as you're producing, you'll know you're not merely using the hazy vision of the grand novel you plan to write one day as an opiate. The view of it will be obstructed by the all too palpably flawed one you're actually writing.

"Always produce" is also a heuristic for finding the work you love. If you subject yourself to that constraint, it will automatically push you away from things you think you're supposed to work on, toward things you actually like. "Always produce" will discover your life's work the way water, with the aid of gravity, finds the hole in your roof._

<http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> This is great advice, thank you. It aligns very closely with my own ethics, but worded in a different way and very clearly put. "Walk the talk" seems to be another fair abbreviation of the concept.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Currently working on my first startup (40-50 hours per week, along with a 9-5); One of the biggest takeaways Ive learned in the last 12 weeks is the importance of building an idea iteration framework. I made a conscience decision to develop an outline while building this product (from coding, to team development, communications, marketing etc) so that I can plug essentially any future idea into this framework quickly, and easily so I can have a "product" coded and ready for releae in about a month.

I dont have my notes with me but essentially, any current code can be modified to fit any new idea (login/billing/graphics/hosting/backups etc) with a few database table changes, any new code that needs to be written for a future idea will only pertain to the idea itself.

Any future ideas we may have, the only part I need to code up is the business logic to implement the idea, which depending on the complexity can be implemented in 3-6 weeks with little hassle. I would suggest getting a framework detailed out, keep good notes, and just plugin your ideas one by one.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'd start by really looking at that list and start scratching off the bad ones. You can probably get down to about 5 or 6 in a few minutes. Then get down a shitty first draft of each one and figure out which one people seem to like the most.

</comment><comment><USER5> The single best advice I can give you is to do what you know best.</comment>


Regex You Can Read: Why This Is Different and You Are Not Your Users - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@savolai/regex-you-can-read-why-this-matters-1414a4409ae5#.6t6qwhifk <comment><USER2> Discussion of the previous article: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11700725](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11700725)

My feeling about regex's is that the difficulties lie mostly in building a mental model of automata and not in syntax. The syntax beyond the ordering of arguments between the /'s doesn't matter much. People find regular expressions difficult because they are sophisticated mathematics.

<comment><AUTHOR> The thing is, people don't find regexes difficult for any single reason. It depends entirely on context, the goals you're trying to achieve, and your skill level. The whole point about this article is that the real issue is regex experts making assumptions about novices' experience based on their own experience.

It depends a lot on what level of learning you are on. My hypothesis is that beginners are learning the individual commands and stumble on the escaping and the context. You don't need the mathematics for the mundane everyday simple matching that goes just a tiny bit beyond replace "a" with "b". The popularity of the original article seems to support the hypotheses that to the bulk of novice users (vast majority of whom probably are not HN users) the visual syntax approach would be helpful.

-OP/author

<comment><USER2> A few years ago, when VerbalExpressions hit HackerNews I became interested in regexes [enough so that I did a Racket Port and put in some time on a building a more complete model]. VerbalExpresions is still popular enough to hit Hacker News from time to time.

Anyway, I bought the O'Reilly _Mastering Regular Expressions_ and looked at some StackOverflow questions and bought Ullman's _Introduction to Auomata_ and took his _Coursera_ course and in general thought about the nature of regex's [and regular expressions] off and on.

What really highlighted the nature of regular expressions was thinking about regex generators. They popup from time to time and their purpose is to take a set of inputs and produce a regex that matches them. The problem is that given strings [x,y,z] the two best regex's are * and x|y|z. Any system that produces some other regex is by definition more difficult to understand than regex's themselves.

Now circling back to novice users, simple code that iterates over strings with a loop or comprehension is probably going to be less prone to bugs than using regex's because regex's are so powerful.

It's also going to be simpler to understand because the tools are familiar and purpose built and the abstractions of the code can be matched to the abstractions of the business logic. What makes regex's hard is that the abstractions are mathematical and intuitions about regex's rely on mathematical intuitions about automata [and in the case of Perl type regex's not simply finite automata due to backtracking and capture].

Please don't misunderstand me, I think the article is a neat piece of work. Even though I think that simplifying regex's isn't really possible because of mathematics, the article may introduce someone to the idea of using them. Because regex's are immensely powerful, that's a good thing.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your kind words.

You still don't see the point though. I am _not_ simplifying regexes one single bit. The regex syntax is quite simply broken. It is fragmented as hell, and its escaping and context rules stem from a time when all we had was ASCII. This might have been acceptable in the eighties, yes?

These have _nothing_ to do with whether or not underlying regex theory is mathematically deep or not. I am not touching the theory. It's simply the syntax that is broken. You can go exactly as deep with Regex UCR as you can with traditional regexes. It's the same regex. You just don't have to torture yourself while doing it.

We need to move forward from the single-eyed view that everything must be done in text, even if it means wasting countless hours in man hours and loads of cognitive processing. We need that energy for fruitful work. You are currently just advocating bureaucracy.

Your looping example is yet another example of a theoretist making enormous assumptions the context of usage. How do you write a loop in the search/replace field of a text editor or an IDE? How does proneness to bugs matter one single bit if you're just using the tool to avoid a bit of manual work? Which [warning, hypothesis:] seems to be mostly what regexes are actually used anyway.

<comment><USER3> > _and its escaping and context rules stem from a time when all we had was > ASCII._

My keyboard still only has ~ASCII on it, so having to input anything else is a huge barrier to entry.

Regex syntax sucks, I'll be the first to agree with that, but it's more of an annoyance. If I write some regex to match ips(obviously not properly, but quick rough match):

      ([0-9]\.){1,3}[0-9]{1,3}

My thought process isn't "open paren, open bracket, zero" etc, it's more of "Ok, I have a 4 groups of 1 to 3 numbers separated by dots, which can be written as 3 groups followed by a dot followed by a fourth group" and my hands translate it the rest of the way into text.

Knowing exactly which character to use may have been a hindrance the first few times I ran into regex, but the real difficulty is in knowing what to match and how to match it. Providing that info to your computer once you know it is the easy part, even if the interface is horrible.

It's like driving a car or a bike. You don't think "Ok, time to move my hand to move the steering wheel to the right and that will turn the wheels which will then the car to the right", you just need to turn right and your subconscious takes care of the rest.

Improving the syntax would be like trying to improve how well/safely you drive by changing the steering wheel. Sure, it might help a little bit, but that's not really the difficult part of driving well, just an interface to it.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok. Please actually read my posts, make an honest attempt to understand what I am actually saying, and come back. If this comment of yours still seems relevant to in any sense of the word, please do tell me, and I will try to rephrase or answer any questions you may have. Would that be ok? Thanks.

<comment><USER3> Ok. I did read your posts, especially the one I replied to, and it does in fact seem relevant. However with that level of snark, I'm just gonna drop out of the conversation here as it's unlikely to be productive. Thanks.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry. Perceived snark was completely unintended.

What I have thought to have repeated here starting from the actual blog post, is that it is completely natural for you to perceive that the escaping is just a nuisance. You are an expert user who has already overcome the initial pain, so you can't feel it. That initial pain is exactly what I am trying to help users overcome.

The pain wasn't a prohibitive barrier for you, but you can't really deduce anything from this fact. _This is why your perception about your own experience of using regexes is not very useful to this discussion_ about whether Regex UCR is useful to its main target group.

The title of the post was You Are Not Your Users, remember? You are an expert on the tool - that does _not_ mean you are an expert on every use of the tool, of all of the people on this planet, who would use the tool, if only it wasn't broken _for them_. It also doesn't mean that only difficulty of the usecases you find relevant, like matching parentheses, are the only valid criteria for these users to evaluate whether regexes are useful for them.

You bias, as you mention, seems to make it difficult to perceive this. There's nothing wrong with that, of course - that's what most of reddit was doing too.

As more and more people are accustomed to modern user experiences, more and more of even developers will not want to go through stone walls just to get a simple matching task done. They require quality from their tools. Also, as many people will never become experts, the initial pain will just repeat on, and on, and on, and on.

Correction: brudgers and Tiksi - As you may have noticed by now, I did not notice I was talking to two different people, and my comments reflect this. Apologies for the confusion.

<comment><USER2> For what it's worth, I am not an expert on regex's. A few times a year I might write a very simple regex for something that would otherwise require a lot of tedious repetition.

They're just another thing I find intellectually interesting and my comments are based on my struggles to learn them as a non-developer.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How To Build a Naive Bayes Classifier - <AUTHOR> https://www.bionicspirit.com/blog/2012/02/09/howto-build-naive-bayes-classifier.html

<comment><USER2> Nice and clear explanation. Would be good if you could explain how to fit this to some other general problems</comment>


Zuckerberg: Privacy anxiety is fleeting  - <AUTHOR> http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-20066789-93.html <comment><USER2> Zuckerberg doesn't misunderstand privacy, he misunderstands people.

<long_story... It was the summer of 2004 and I was anxiously awaiting my freshman year of college. Facebook had just been opened to schools beyond the Ivy League, and I distinctly remember being jealous of friends who were headed to USC in the fall, as they received .edu email addresses before many of the rest of us, and were consequently able to register "thefacebook" accounts first. I attended a smaller private university in Southern California, and Facebook went live on our campus roughly six weeks into that first semester.

It felt as if everyone—geeks, football players, rich white girls, international transfer students; seriously, _everybody_ —holed up in their dorm rooms for the next week to play with their new vanity toy. And this wasn't the Facebook you all obsess over now: no apps, no statuses, no pictures, no official pages, no high/junior/elementary schoolers, few adults, really a different thing entirely. But it was enthralling.

I've seen every every major change in Facebook's offering since then, and Mark's right; Every time they've added, removed, or otherwise tweaked a feature, people have become "outraged," formed groups often numbering in the hundreds of thousands to express said outrage, then promptly gone back to not giving a shit and commenting on each other's pictures.

As a marketing/decision science wonk, I can relate to the expectation that people don't actually know what they want, and if asked explicitly to describe what they want, they're almost universally wrong. I get it. I also understand moving forward with features like personal photo uploads paired with user- generated metadata despite pushback from users. It was a year before the iPhone and two years before Android, how could they possibly be expected to understand...yet.

Nevertheless, I think this experience may have warped Mark's approach to his product and the feedback of his users. After a dozen instances of the feigned outrage/complacency/acceptance cycle, why _wouldn't_ Mark (or any other Facebook employee) meet any criticism with "Don't worry, guys. You'll get it eventually." The user base keeps growing, most press coverage is glowing, and investment is flowing. What's the problem?

The problem is that as increasing numbers of people and businesses sink increasing amounts of time and money into this thing ("this thing" being Facebook specifically but also Internet identity/socialization/lifestyle in general), each feature, each policy decision has increasingly significant consequences in the real lives of real people. The problem is that "Should 16-year-olds be able to join our nascent social network?" is a fundamentally different problem than "As we continue to insist that we _are_ your de facto identity on the Internet, do we have a responsibility to provide robust and usable tools to give our users some _hope_ of controlling that identity?" Yet the response from Facebook hasn't changed, and it unfortunately amounts to "Cool it everybody, we've got this covered. You'll get it eventually."

On the topic of privacy on the web, Eric Schmidt famously claimed: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Pardon the expression, but _fuck you, Eric._ You were born in 1955. You do not and cannot understand what the experience of living a life on the Internet entails. If there were pictures of you from every party you attended in high school and college, presented such that your dopiest, most uncouth acquaintance had carte blanche to append whichever moronic comment first came to mind to the permanent record, and the company maintaining the system repeatedly defaulted your privacy settings to "make sure everyone on earth sees _this_ shit," there is no question in my mind you'd be singing a different tune.

Mark thinks his users' immature preoccupation with privacy is fleeting. If that is truly the case, it's one more reason I think Facebook is fleeting. There seems to be this bizarre assumption that Facebook, as the social network which has to date been the most successful in attracting "normal" and old people, will remain the 800 lb. gorilla til kingdom come. Sorry to disappoint, old folks, but you'll all be dead soon and I don't much care where you post your status updates until then. Insofar as my generation is concerned, I've been a geek among normies my entire life. I went to private, Catholic, rich kid schools for nearly two decades, where I played sports, hung out with jocks I sometimes tolerated and rarely trusted, spent my weekends acting hopelessly awkward around the ladies from our all-girls Catholic "sister" schools (yes, this part of my personality fortunately improved in college), and went home at night to listen to Devo and Invisibl Skratch Piklz records, try to teach myself object-oriented programming, and talk to my Internet friends.

I've observed hordes of people who would insist vehemently that they're "not a 'tech person'" adopt and bail on AIM, adopt and bail on MySpace, and now they've all adopted Facebook. Perhaps Mark thinks there's something special about his creation which has drawn the attention of people who would otherwise be completely disinterested. That his product is so compelling/entrenched that it almost doesn't matter which decisions he/his company makes or who bitches about it, they'll come around eventually. I'd argue that there are more dyed- in-the-wool Internet citizens born every day, and with a much more sophisticated, internalized awareness of "how2internet" the only inherently compelling quality of Facebook is that the people they know and care about are already there. Facebook is far from a perfect product, and any competitor with a marginally better feature set, or shinier chrome, or just some dumb luck could signal the six-months-to-ghost-town countdown for Facebook like MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal and (fill in the blank) before it.

Given that assessments of Facebook's privacy controls and policy have grown more frequent and more scathing, one needn't look far to find opportunities to act as the disruptor in the continued evolution of our identities online.

Oh, and Mark, sweetie: if privacy concerns are _soooo_ 2002, why's your profile on lockdown, bro? You got something to hide? Your unwillingness to chow down on your own dog food doesn't exactly instill confidence in the integrity of your position. Perhaps your investors, advisors, or ad-buyers have their own incentives to chip away at the privacy of your users. Or maybe you just need to kill privacy yourself before you'll be willing to take a seat at the table.

(edit: Changed double hyphens to emdashes. Oh, iPad.)

</comment><comment><USER3> You have to wonder whether a guy who says this sort of shit has ever read or watched _any_ dystopian fiction.

1984, Brave New World, THX-1138, Fahrenheit 451, Brazil, all of these are premised on societies where the majority of people are getting by, and are only passively inconvenienced. The problem is that the minority of people who object or deviate from society are crushed by the mechanism of the state (whatever that happens to be).

Privacy anxiety is an ephemeral screen on deeper fundamental issues about fairness and justice in society. Zuckerberg may be right that incorporating further privacy eroding features into society will be easy, but that doesn't make it _right_.

Regardless of what you think of Google, i at least give them credit that they recognize that the tech they build has scary implications, and that there are lines that they are not supposed to cross (at least, Eric Schmitt has said this a number of times). Zuckerberg does not seem to have any such compunction.

<comment><USER4> Relates to an earlier discussion on the role of liberal arts, I think: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2580176>

And, now that I think about, as Z is a college drop-out, maybe the role of higher education in general.

The ideas presented in all of the works you cite are ones someone focused on an engineering degree or a tech business to the exclusion of all else might have been exposed to in a broad education. And not just that, but the kind of training that teaches you to think more broadly, in terms other than the metrics that Z seems to restrict himself to.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I came set to fight, but... He's right. People really do just give up their privacy that easily. Take it away a bit at a time and eventually they get used to it. Facebook has proven it.

There will always be those who won't stand for it... But there's not enough of them.

My real problem with Facebook and privacy isn't that it allows you to give it up, but that it takes it from you and then let's you opt out of it.

Giving things up should always be opt-in.

<comment><USER6> "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission."

<comment><USER7> I would argue they've received neither.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> He could be right. But I think he's cutting the cycle off short. To me the cycle is this...

* People worry about a new feature

* The feature sticks around and people do get more comfortable with it (this is where Zuckerberg ends)

* At some point the initial fears are realized and people become eternally disenchanted with the feature

So for example he mentions the Wall.

* People were nervous about the Facebook wall at first because they thought putting so much information about themselves in one easy to locate place was a bad idea.

* People got more comfortable with it because it was forced on them and nothing bad happened.

* Now what I'm starting to hear is more and more companies are requiring applicants to friend them when they apply for a job. Every person who told me an employer asked for access to their Facebook page has also told me they regretted some of the things on their wall and would be wary of it in the future.

So I see a backlash at the end of the road here. One Zuckerberg (understandably) doesn't want to face.

<comment><USER9> I know it's not exactly helpful to tell those people "don't work for such an employer" but nevertheless: Don't Work For Them.

<comment><USER10> Also dont forget to ask for a picture of their wife, of the employer/interviewer. They may tell you its not work-related, but a profile of you is related to the position, you tell them you want to know how the wife looks since thats related to who and what type of interviewer/employer you are getting. Before they kick you out, ask if his daughters have good teeth and/or boobs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Facebook profits from your lack of privacy.

That's why he's an advocate of you giving it up.

It's really as simple as that.

<comment><USER12> I came here to post the same thing. Zuckerberg is only saying this because his buisness depends on it. Anyone who can get people to listen to them can report on people's opinions as a way to influence other peoples opinions. Considering the way the way the media echo chamber hangs on his every word, hes trying to create a self fulfilling prophecy.

People anxieties aren't fleeting after every update, what is fleeting are peoples assumptions that they can be open on facebook. These days, almost every time I take out my camera someone will inevitably asks me not to put the photos on facebook (not that I would anyway). Some friends have quit drinking because they know that if a picture of them drinking in their free time, which they are allowed to do could still ruin their career.

Facebook isn't making people more candid, its making us self-censor. That self censoring is moving from facebook back to the real world. Its very troubling.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's this kind of thinking that turned Facebook from a fun way to share with friends to a glorified contact book for me. What is there that I would want to share with my drinking buddies, mom, a person I met on a plane, coworkers and 16-year-old niece simultaneously?

</comment><comment><USER14> I 'deal' with it but progressively develop less brand trust and dedication to Facebook.

Facebook Like tracking my movements forced me to install Disconnect in Chrome.

</comment><comment><USER15> This attitude is exactly why I will never have a facebook account. He sees the _protests_ as a problem, not the degradation of privacy.

Yes, people adapt when they feel they have no choice, but that doesn't make it right.

<comment><USER16> altly.com for the win!

<comment><USER5> It's a little early to declare them a winner when they haven't yet proven they understand the privacy problem. They haven't even launched and tried to show that they understand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think Zuckerberg really misunderstands the importance of privacy to people. Zuckerberg says having more than one identity "is an example of a lack of integrity." This implies that wanting to selectively show only pieces of yourself to certain groups is a "lack of integrity." Yet that assertion is laughably false as we all do this very thing every day. The job interview scenario proves this and it's only one of many scenarios in which you carefully include or omit aspects of your online identity to influence the perception others have about you.

This is just human nature. Call it social politics, call it whatever you want, but human beings are not profile pages and will never be.

Facebook should be working with me to help manage my online identity, instead of acting like my privacy concerns aren't real.

<comment><USER18> Yeah, I'm in the midst of discovering the horror of having my parents/extended family on Facebook. I now have to filter all of my dumb comments against "will mom call me to see if I'm ok" and stupid jokes have to be checked for grandma- appropriateness.

No one presents the same face to the entire world. If Facebook _really_ wants to be a bigger part of my online/social experience, they'll acknowledge and start acting on this fact.

<comment><USER19> >If Facebook really wants to be a bigger part of my online/social experience, they'll acknowledge and start acting on this fact.

Well, maybe. If Facebook gets your parents and grandparents all playing Farmville, but loses (just) you, Facebook comes out ahead.

<comment><USER17> But isn't that a testament to Farmville rather than Facebook?

My grandma is on Facebook because I am and others she knows are. This is ultimately what sustains Facebook's success: The network effect. It's the "cool" thing to do. It's where everybody is, so you need to be.

Despite that, the network effect is very volatile. It's not something you can easily sustain. MySpace was where everybody was at one point too.

Facebook is fooling themselves if they think privacy isn't one of the areas they need to innovate.

<comment><USER20> "Everybody" isn't cool.

Cool is taking a hard, miserable lifestyle and through persona making others yearn for it. The starving artist is "cool," Facebook is populist tripe.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> am I the only one who finds it ridiculous that a guy who has never had a real job, who drops out of college, has no family of his own presumes to understand the importance of privacy?

</comment><comment><USER22> True, but we haven't yet witnessed the _consequences_ of giving up so much of our private information to Facebook (including but not limited to our Web browsing patterns, unique identity, and social graph).

When access to our private information becomes _systematically abused_ for power and profit, then people will be more than anxious about what they've given up.

</comment><comment><USER23> Privacy is not fleeting. I put harmless public information in FB, even though its private. If I have to fill a field I don't want to, I enter fake data. Like my birthday? 1/1/1970. Fake some of your profile info, joke schools and jobs. I don't rely on fb knowing these things, so why not take a piss in the data pool?</comment>


ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/platform/amp/2018/1/26/16932350/ice-immigration-customs-license-plate-recognition-contract-vigilant-solutions <comment><USER4> One of my clients does license plate reading and tracking. They have hundreds of tiny customers, and a handful of VERY LARGER customers, so I can say with 100% certainty, there are hundreds of agencies across the USA already doing this.

For fun, I tracked my rental car from Georgia to Texas after a vacation a few months back to see how often I hit one of my client's customer's cameras. It was a lot. I saw myself hit toll booths, go under over passes, and parked at a service station. About 25 hits that my account had access to (probably hundreds or thousands that I didn't have rights to see).

<comment><USER5> IIRC there's an episode of _Jay Leno 's Garage_ that features a cop with a license plate reader. He can sit on the side of the road and every car that passes is scanned and checked for warrants. The answer comes back about as quickly as the speed reading on a radar gun.

What they don't tell you is that all those plate numbers are going into a database, time- and location-stamped.

<comment><USER6> In Saskatchewan, Canada, they no longer require yearly insurance stickers on plates because the information is automatically checked by plate scanners on cop cars (to the best of my knowledge).

The officer will still require proof of registration when pulled over.

<comment><USER7> We've had this since 1997 for car tax stickers in Finland when they decided it was easier to just install a computer in every cop car that has the db. Same db also has info on insurance and inspections and also the check has been recently made automatic on the camera when previously the officer had to manually enter the plate.

I wouldn't be surprised if the data about the scans goes the other way too.

Proof of registration was made electronic in 2016 and again checked on the computer.

Driving a car isn't a right but a privilege so I'm on with this.

<comment><USER8> >Driving a car isn't a right but a privilege so I'm ok with this

That's an interesting perspective. I get it in the sense of safe driving - <USER2> you are swerving all about the road, you shouldn't be on the road - but it doesn't work so well for registration and tracking. Bare minimum, people should have a right to get around. So much of what people want to do in their life is beyond walking distance, that some method of transport is necessary to get there. This isn't a political right, but rather a pratical right - something that people need to be able to do to live a full life. At the extreme, house arrest involes banning a person from going anywhere, and is clearly a (perhaps necessary) breach of their rights. In particularly rural areas, banning someone from owning a car would amount to banning them from going anywhere. So I think it makes sense to say someone has a right to own a car.

We ban poor drivers from the road merely because other rights are more important than driving is. For example, my right to safety is more important than your right to drive. If your dangerous driving puts my safety in question, than you should be taken off the road. However, if you manage to drive without infringing other's rights, than the government shouldn't be able to stop you from driving.

<comment><USER9> The difference is that the roads are built by the government and are government property. The government can quite reasonably control what happens in its property without implicating peoples' rights in the same way as when its regulating what happens on private property.

As to rural areas—people who live there make a choice to live somewhere that requires them to travel on government property to get anywhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I said this before, and i will say it again.

Call your representative and voice your opinion. Donate to eff and aclu or any other civil and digital liberties organizations, to help them protect our privacy and rights through legal means.

Privacy evasion is slippery slope and it only gets worse.

Take this as your daily or weekly reminder to do something, even if that something is donating just the price of a coffee.

<comment><USER11> I am feeling pessimistic man. We had a few decades of privacy and human rights progress post World Wars. But with Terrorism on the rise there is no way for privacy or human rights to make a comeback. We will see increasingly clever ways to water down laws we already have in place.

<comment><USER12> >Terrorism on the rise

Terrorism in the US isn't on the rise (unless we're counting white supremacists marches, which the media doesn't) but the powers that be and their cohorts are still milking the teat and our fears from 9/11 on this stuff. People who have no reason to be scared of any of this also won't stand up to it ('I'm not a criminal so it doesn't matter...'). Also funny that when/if another attack does happen, it will be those of us in blue cities (NYC, LA, SF, etc.) sacrificing our lives even if we're against this stuff and the system as it is.

Fear is a business and some people are making bank. Osama would be proud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yet another piece of evidence that the US is turning into an authoritarian state - as, to be fair, others do too (especially China!), but the US have the unique advantage of being the technologically most advanced civilization.

In earlier times, when situations got too authoritarian, there were rebellions and revolution. With the level of militarization in police and military and the abilities made possible by today's technology (the Gestapo or the Stasi would have done anything for this kind of power), it is very well possible that a revolution might simply be made impossible or crushed before it even begins, as you can simply single out and eliminate potential "leaders" based on AI analysis of what people do... and what people think, as they post it on Twitter, Facebook or their own "private" cloud space.

In addition, the future of AI is already showing its first signs - <USER3> governments around the world have not shown _any_ interest in planning for the inevitable millions that will lose their jobs or for the social unrest caused by this. Quite to the contrary: governments and right-wing parties are "looking back in time" and promising their citizens that they will bring back the "good old times" and snatching up the votes of the Frustrated Old White Men - and are very successful at this.

Scary indeed.

<comment><USER14> To quote madam secretary, "at this point, what difference does it make".

People have been more then willing to give up their data to FB, Google, Apple, etc. The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in theory represent the voting public.

It'll be interesting to see what the outcome is. Will the public demand the government regulate industry as well as ask it to rein in its own capabilities, or will they just get used to it and accept it?

We'll have to see. Some technologists, libertarians and interestingly an intersection of right wing and left wing ideologies will oppose this for different reasons, but in the end, I think they will be a minority in total.

<comment><USER13> > The only difference is this is captured by governments --who at least in > theory represent the voting public.

Actually I trust a megacorp like Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook more with my data than I trust the state.

The state can arrest me based on that data. The tech giants not, and they are fighting like hell that the government does not get access to that data (as that would compromise trust, and by that their business model). Given the massive amounts of money involved, I have no doubt who will win that fight.

<comment><USER15> Anything Google, Amazon, Twitter or Facebook store on you is available to the government. If they want to get hold of it to get something to arrest you with, all they have to do is ask. While they may push back on some requests, there's actually very little they can do with FISA/NSA requests, they're almost always complied with.

I've heard them grumble about mass surveillance laws, but I haven't heard about them openly defying them, or using any of their substantial lobbying muscle in Washington against them. If they _really_ cared, they could encrypt a lot of communications data, and simply not store things like real names, GPS co-ordinates and IP addresses as soon as they're not necessary to provide a service. The data wouldn't be as profitable, though.

If it makes you feel any safer, your license plate data is already being sold to private companies who want to build a file on you for profit.

From the EFF[1]:

> _Vigilant Solutions ' subsidiary Digital Recognition Network, along with > MVTrac, are the two main companies hiring contractors to collect ALPR data > across the country. The companies then share the data not just with law > enforcement but also with auto recovery (aka "repo") companies, banks, > credit reporting agencies, and insurance companies. Data collected by > private entities does not have retention limits and is not subject to > sunshine laws, or any of the other safeguards that are sometimes found in > the government sector._

[1]: [https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers- al...](https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-alpr)

<comment><USER16> The difference is that, the government has to _ask_ for the data, they can't just casually sift through the universe.

(I'm assuming that FISA courts, at the very least, won't agree to a warrant for "all of your data on everyone forever")

<comment><USER15> > _" all of your data on everyone forever"_

As far as we know (which is as little as possible), they can get all the data on you as an individual, if you're on a data retention list. This is outside of data you generate happening to hit certain search terms

I qualify for such a list; I was/am a subscriber to _The Linux Journal_ , an 'extremeist publication' according to the NSA, at least at the time of the Snowden leaks.

Am I still? It's illegal for me to know. But it's reasonable to assume that the maximalist approach to data collection is shared by the government and Google et al quite happily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Taking a quick look at Vigilant Solutions has been interesting. Yet another Israeli mass surveillance company started by ex 8200 IDF 'graduates'.

The founder Adi Pinhas may ring a bell --- he also founded SuperFish!

Worth noting that the EFF have been on ALPR tech for years. Signing up for their emails has given me opportunities to contact representatives regarding ALPR legislation and decisions I would have never heard about otherwise.

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aeff.org+ALPR](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aeff.org+ALPR)

<comment><USER17> The same Superfish that US-CERT warned us about here: [https://www.us- cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2015/02/20/Len...](https://www.us- cert.gov/ncas/current-activity/2015/02/20/Lenovo-Computers-Vulnerable-HTTPS- Spoofing)

And US-CERT is a part of DHS, just like ICE.

<comment><USER15> Yes

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is it possible to fight back by poisoning the data? Is it legal to set up a display by the roadside that shows randomly generated license plates, filling their automated cameras with garbage data? Or is their data collection smart enough to recognize a non-car, either technologically or by filtering everything through a Turk-like equivalent?

<comment><USER19> It would be ideal if you chose the fake plate numbers from the population of actual plate numbers used by corporate plate-tracking vehicles, just in case one encounters its "namesake" \-- you might trigger some highly entertaining edge condition. ("Um, wait, that's... _me!_ WTF?")

<comment><USER18> Maybe, but that would be incredibly easy to filter out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wasn't there a Supreme Court case a while ago that ruled it illegal for the government to put a tracking device on your car? Given this recognition technology, could someone challenge the visible license plate requirement as an illegal tracking device?

<comment><USER21> Plate scanning is against the spirit of the law; it's a workaround for not being able to place a tracking device on your car. Unfortunately, since your car is in a public place, and your plates are in the open, I don't think place scanning will be ruled unconstitutional.

Of course congress could always pass a law making it illegal, but both our major parties have authoritarian with regards to privacy.

<comment><USER22> > Unfortunately, since your car is in a public place, and your plates are in > the open, I don't think place scanning will be ruled unconstitutional.

The question GP asked was a bit different:

> could someone challenge the visible license plate requirement as an illegal > tracking device?

In other words, in a world where plate scanning is ubiqitous, have license plates become a tracking device? And if they are a tracking device, is requiring them unconstitutional?

<comment><USER21> Oh, that makes it more interesting. A workaround to that (thought not as effective) would be face scanning. It wouldn't be as effective because I would imagine it would be more difficult to get a consistent scan of an object inside a car.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> It would be nice to see voters react to these sorts of technologies (whether they're provided by private companies or not) the way people reacted to the idea of being filmed via Google Glass when they went to a bar on a Friday night.

<comment><USER24> Of course they won't. The same group of anti government people are very pro hard on crime/ pro police.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, also love cops and firemen voting Republican - you know, tough on crime, small business - while also pulling down taxpayer OT pay and pensions. Is there any metric showing they Republican party is actually good at enacting crime-fighting policies or are they just good at funding crime fighters? Seems more like the latter.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> The Frog slowly boils.

<comment><USER26> I thought of lobsters or crabs, but yeah. It's slow and not getting much attention.

<comment><USER27> Too bad the end result is not likely to be as tasty as crab or lobster.

<comment><USER10> It will be more like an episode of black mirror.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I decided to get my garage queen back on the road after 10 years. The tabs being expired, I went down to the DOL to get new tabs. They claimed that the auto records were purged after 7 years, and that there was no record of my car in their system. I needed to present the original title to prove the car existed and was mine.

<comment><USER29> Title issues can be... interesting. I've had major headaches trying to title a boat purchased in a state that doesn't have boat titles in a state that requires them for registration. Eventually, you can lay everything out before a judge/magistrate, and they can rule that your vehicle indeed exists and belongs to you.

<comment><USER12> Don't want to be that guy, but I have read where blockchain might make this easier in the future. I'm sure given the money hose that someone is trying to work on this.

<comment><USER30> A database can also do this.

<comment><USER12> True. It's odd that titles of cars, boats, etc. aren't already in one but it seems laws vary by state.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I remember reading a paper on confusing road sign recognizers by adding certain bits of noise to the sign that completely baffled the recognizer. I wonder if one could do this to the license plate which would still look normal to a human but be unreadable to an AI.

<comment><USER32> Most plate cameras rely in part on the reflectiveness of the plate. You can definitely modify a plate to be mostly illegible to these cameras but easily human readable.

<comment><USER27> Given that most cameras are sensitive to IR (but human eyes are not), it seems like you could also wire up some super bright IR LEDs to obscure the plate too. Hmm... idea for a new license place 'holder'...

<comment><USER17> Wouldn't it be better to use IR to saturate the camera?

I think they use IR to 'light' up the plates at night, otherwise the exposure time would be too long to pickup a license plate.

Should make your car invisible to dashcams too.

I want an IR detector for my car, so I can know when I'm getting hit by one of these things. Not that it will accomplish much.

<comment><USER27> Yes, 'saturate' is the word I wanted to use. Basically, the light source(s) are pointed at the camera, and it is unable to make out anything near the light source(s) as a result.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> d--b Anyone care to comment on the legality of the whole thing? Why are people allowed to snap pictures of my car and store them in a database?

Do roads come with Terms of Service these days?

<comment><USER21> In the US, anything you do in a public place is considered fair game. The inside of your car does require consent, a warrant, or probable cause.

<comment><USER19> ... except for objects in plain view.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Another selector for potential metadata drone strike in the future… largesse abroad tailored to domestic needs!

</comment><comment><USER34> One solution is to purchase your car from and register it to a front company. This way they can still track license plates, but not easily associate them with owner names.

</comment><comment><USER17> New license plates in my jurisdiction are $59... Maybe something to do every few years...

<comment><USER10> You can buy car and keep it license plate free legally for sometime. I think this is what steve jobs was doing.

New license plates wont help as it needs to get registered with the state.

<comment><USER35> California allowed a grace period to obtain a license plate for a newly- purchased car, and taking into account the allowed time to file for a plate, and time to issue and mail it to the car's owner, this could stretch out to a few months.

However, California's laws are changing due to a case in which someone was hit and killed by a car that couldn't be identified for lack of plates. Beginning January 1, 2019, all cars sold in California will be required to have a license plate attached at time of sale (for new cars which don't yet have a permanent plate, dealers will be able to produce a temporary plate).

<comment><USER10> Great info, thanks for sharing. This is the bill mentioned: [https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201520160AB516)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Disgusting development and a horrible example of how destructive technology can be.

This reinforces my belief that engineers and scientist need to go through mandatory ethics classes throughout their education.

<comment><USER37> Who gets to determine what is considered ethical?

<comment><USER38> In general, the individual engineers do. The point of ethics training is to recognize that you have ethical obligations that extend past your job responsibilities, and that when your ethics conflict with your work tasks, it's not your ethics that should compromise.

For some of us, that might mean not working on a project that we could reasonably foresee would result in the deportation of children who don't speak Spanish and have only ever known this country to some foreign country. For others, it might mean not working on projects that assist women in obtaining an abortion.

Obviously, there's no "class" that settles the differing ethical boundaries we all have (though better ethics education would allow us to recognize the huge subset of ethics that we tend to share). The point is to tune in to our own ethics and not let the noise of professional life occlude them.

As a field, I think we've allowed ourselves to simultaneously believe that we're doing the most important work that's being done this century, while at the same time believing that we're powerless to shape the outcomes of our labor. But that's not true at all: if you believe the former, then it's likely that we have immense power over the latter! So, I think the point of the root comment on this thread is well taken.

<comment><USER39> _For some of us, that might mean not working on a project that we could reasonably foresee would result in the deportation of children who don 't speak Spanish and have only ever known this country to some foreign country. For others, it might mean not working on projects that assist women in obtaining an abortion._

Unfortunately it seems a lot of engineers either don't have much in the way of ethics, or truly believe what they're doing is good. See all those willing to implement things like invasive telemetry, DRM, and walled gardens, for example. The "security" argument is pervasive and very convincing to those who don't realise that it's also a way for companies to enforce more control over its users.

This also brings up another point: if you had to choose between not working on a project that goes against your ethics (leaving others to drive it toward its undesirable-to-you goal), or work on it but silently subvert it (as in subtly break it or otherwise impede its progress), which one would be the more ethical thing to do? In other words, "do everything you're told, just some things better than others"? Maybe I'm just optimistic, but the existence of jailbreaks, rooting, and flaws discovered in DRM schemes really make me want to believe that the latter exist.

<comment><USER38> People have different morals and ethics. I don't have a problem with DRM, for instance, and even if we debated to the point where I had to concede some theoretical problem with it, it'd be pretty far down my list of ethical priorities.

I'm not commenting to advocate for the notion that people should get an ethics education so they'll all turn out to be good Democratic Socialists. I'm saying, our field would be better off if people recognized that their ethics intersect with the field heavily, and they should do this work mindfully.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>