Ask HN: Does Web Traffic Always Equal Income? - <AUTHOR>

This is a follow-up to a post I did a few months ago. I didn't listen to you guys then so I thought I'd ask the question again and hopefully get a better answer :)
I have a technology management blog. Post stuff about agile, programming, management, and other stuff I like to write about. As part of that, I do articles on all sorts of crazy stuff. Whatever I find interesting.
A while back I posted about a female pole-vaulter, whose name will go unmentioned, because she was becoming an internet sensation. Just a cute girl who somehow became popular because of the vagaries of the net. I thought it was an interesting story about how the internet changes the nature of celebrity.
Over the months, however, Google has started ranking my post higher and higher in search results. A while back I asked you guys what to do about it. The best answer I got was to use robots.txt to tell Google to ignore it. I was tempted to do that but didn't. Laziness I suppose. But I also didn't like the idea of censoring myself. As much as I dislike the idea of posting cute-girl-pics-for-traffic, I dislike the idea of being forced to pull stuff from my blog even more.
Now I'm reaching the critical mass point. I received an email from my ISP saying that my traffic is going to go past my limit this month, and it's mostly all this one article. WebAnlyzer shows 89,000 hits on this article up until yesterday. That probably translates into 20,000+ or so visitors. And the number keeps increasing.
So I'm spending the afternoon researching what other sites with this person on them are running as ads, hoping to find something that will "pay the rent" as it were, to keep this article up.
Here's the question: is there any hope here? Does high traffic automatically mean income? Or put another way, are there situations where you can have boatloads of traffic and not make enough to pay for the bandwidth? Do eyeballs really mean all that much every time? <comment><USER2> traffic does matter, the more traffic you get the more options you have.

5-10K uniques/day? Congrats you can get into the premium CPM networks.

1m uniques a month? Congrats you can start direct selling your advertising, without getting hung up on.

5m uniques a month? Congrats you can get into premium Google adsense, where they custom build your adsense units that will look like they belong on your site(meaning users will be hitting those links by mistake).

10m uniques a month? Congrats, you can probably raise some funding to pay yourself a fat salary while you hemorrhage money.

40m uniques a month? Congrats you are twitter, and you'll get a CNN article when you decide to change your homepage font from 11 to 12 pt.

200m uniques a month? Congrats you are Facebook, you can raise a ton of money at 1 billion plus valuation.

Basically there is nothing wrong with having excess traffic, you can always figure out a way to monetize it. i.e. how college humor started threadless tees to sell tshirts.

But traffic isn't everything, you can have a finance blog with 3,000 visitors a month, and be making 6 figures, just because the niche ads for your site are $20 cpc clicks, and $100 credit card offers.

<comment><USER3> Generally I agree, except for a couple points:

 _5-10K uniques/day? Congrats you can get into the premium CPM networks._

Not all traffic is created equal, so just hitting those numbers won't get you a decent ad deal.

 _1m uniques a month? Congrats you can start direct selling your advertising, without getting hung up on._

Again, depends on the site. 1MM/month is not the big deal it used to be. 1MM to a tech blog would be a big deal, 1MM to a meme photo site is not.

 _i.e. how college humor started threadless tees to sell tshirts._

BustedTees, not Threadless, but your point remains. (BTW, I think you meant e.g. instead of i.e., and you should always follow either with a comma)

<comment><USER2> Actually 5K is the official requirement for Tribal Fusion: <http://www.tribalfusion.com/publishers/siterequirements>

But yeah if you are in a very saturated niche or mediocre(lolcats) niche, you might need much higher numbers to get in.

And yeah quality always counts, but 1 million uniques should be a good enough point to start selling ad space. You may not get the top of the line advertisers, but you should be able to get some.

Yeah you right, I meant to say Busted tees that's it, got them mixed up.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the link to the TF specs. They specify 5k/day, which is more than it used to be (150k/month as opposed to the 70k/month as I'd remembered it).

My math was wrong anyway so I edited that out, but you were definitely correct. My apologies.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Quality of traffic matters a lot. iJigg gets over a million uniques a month. But most of it is from Thailand and thus, we barely breakeven. I know sites getting a fraction of our traffic and making few times our revenue.

So yes, traffic means income. But that is super oversimplification. User intent behind your traffic matters a lot.

</comment><comment><USER3> _Put another way, are there situations where you can have boatloads of traffic and not make enough to pay for the bandwidth? Do eyeballs really mean all that much every time?_

Bandwidth is really cheap, so even the worst monetization can cover a $10/month shared hosting account. But that still doesn't mean its worth your time.

For example, I used to own FakePosters.com (not affiliated with the current owners). It started as an SEO experiment, but the traffic grew to several million uniques a month with very little work on my end (StumbleUpon can push _way_ more traffic than most people realize).

Sounds great, but unfortunately these type of visitors just don't click on ads. The site easily covered its $10/month shared hosting bill, and made about $150/month at its peak, but 1500 bucks a year is hardly worth the time it took to run, not to mention the dubious legality of posting photos you don't own a clear copyright on. So I closed the site after 1 year and sold the domain off for $1k. I'm happy with the way it worked out, but I don't plan on a repeat performance.

So if I were you, I'd move to cheap shared hosting and move on. 100k hits is nothing your ISP should be complaining about.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm paying $30 a month for 50GB. If I understand you, it sounds like I should be shopping around for better hosting.

<comment><USER5> Just a cheap $20 linode account will give you 200GB. you can offload the pictures to a slice or amazon S3 and you should be better off than the $30/mo. It is a bit apples to oranges because I don't know what the specs are on your current hosting.(like how many domains they give you, the speed of the actual data center connections to the outside world, redundancy, etc....)

The slice way is probably not for everyone because you will need to setup and manage the server but for the easy route you can offload the large images to S3 and that should be fairly cheap for that.

<comment><USER3> That would work, but I'd probably go even cheaper and get a basic HostGator account or something similar (~$10/month). Really depends on what your needs are (you won't get SSH with shared hosting, but you'll have all the bandwidth / disk space you need).

But 100k pageviews a month is nothing, and no host should be giving you a hard time about that. If you're hogging the CPU, that would be a more reasonable complaint.

In general, its always a good idea to reevaluate your hosting. Chances are there's a better deal going, much like cable or phone service, and its a good fire drill to change hosts now and then.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Yes, but the level of income varies dramatically.

I've worked on sites that generate on average from $0.001 per visitor ($1 RPM) all the way up to sites with less volume but generate much higher revenue per visitor ($1.25).

My guess is the type of traffic you are talking about here is the former unfortunately. In other words, you may have been able to monetize those 20k visitors at $.01 per visitor (or maybe a total of $200). If you are getting over 2,000 visits per day, you can throw AdSense on the page and see how much you make.

What types of sites make lots of $$ per visit?

Generally product related sites, coupon sites, sites that sell something, etc.

</comment><comment><USER7> Quality of your audience is key. You can always grow the subscriber base later, but you can't increase the quality too easily or at all. Look to serve a valuable demographic or niche sector. Someone here said banking. Women is another. Techno geeks like ourselves are another. Sports fans are another. The really high end and rich are another. Urban is another. General spray and pray traffic is just complete shit on a cpm basis. You need a lot of volume.

I would say that Email Newsletters are the most valuable. Thrillist gets $270 cpm for a dedicated video email. Their normal ads in the emails are somewhere around $30-$60, so lets say $45 average. If you have 10,000 monthly subscribers, you could do the following. Numbers used are for a smaller newsletter who can't command a CPM like thrillist:

One weekly "dedicated" email (4 per month) at $100 cpm- 4x100x10 $4000 Ads half filled at $30 CPM, 20 emails a month, so 10 opportunities due to half filled- 30x10x10- $3000

That's 7,000 per month off of 10,000 subscribers. 10,000 subscribers isn't terribly difficult to achieve. You can live pretty comfortably off of that.

</comment><comment><USER8> If the traffic has a direct relationship to something you are selling; then yes. Only you would know this. Conversely, there so many traffic generating sites that send visitors to your site in hope of gaining reciprocal viewing from other users that it's impossible to tell the "real" reason someone visits a particular site. Traffic means nothing unless it is controlled traffic that you generate for a particular reason; whether it be to read an article or to sell a product

</comment><comment><USER9> The obvious answer: try a few different options and report back here on how it went. Put ads on that one page. See what happens.

Then try an affiliate link for related books or stuff from Amazon. See if it works better.

Don't do anything that you'd feel bad about. I'm guessing that your goal wasn't to profit from such traffic. That's why I'm saying to just put ads on that one page, not your entire blog.

</comment><comment><USER10> I think hight traffic means income certainly, if you have good blogs you can generate income through Affiliate marketing, advertising, and adsense as well, but you just require to familiarize yourself with those areas and you will make good income out of it, even be able to quit your job in the couple of months.

</comment><comment><USER11> Ah yes, Allison Stokke. Not only is she cute, she's actually very good at pole vaulting.</comment>


The Tools We Use Everyday - <AUTHOR> http://www.spacesofplay.com/2012/02/the-tools-we-use-everyday/

<comment><USER2> I vote we change the name of this website to Hacker "News".

</comment><comment><USER3> good combination of nice tools</comment>


Database timeouts - <AUTHOR> https://brightinventions.pl/blog/database-timeouts/ <comment><AUTHOR> Without a carefully considered timeouts our application can become unresponsive easily. In this post I focus on configuring various timeouts related to interaction with database, specifically on relational databases. The principles and practices however can be applied equally well to other types of databases.</comment>


Beating the compiler - <AUTHOR> http://www.roguelazer.com/2015/02/beating-the-compiler/ <comment><USER2> > What's the point of micro-optimizing a 3ms function call when each request > spends 8 or 9 seconds inside the SQLAlchemy ORM? Well, sometimes it's nice > to practice those optimizion skills anyway

I have a different opinion on those 3ms optimizations:

"It all adds up"

Stopping at one 3ms optimization is not going to move mountains. But doing that 10 times is already 30ms. Imagine that you found 100 micro optimizations. Now we are talking!

So keep calm, optimize on. This is how compilers get better over time.

<comment><USER3> I'm a massive fan of this sort of 'large-scale micro' optimization. There's a big difference between premature optimization, and having heaps of little sticking points in your project.

One of my favorite examples is Ubuntu - they run their 'One Hundred Papercuts' program [1], which is about fixing and optimizing little things that on their own would never get fixed, but together they are more than the sum of their parts in terms of user experience.

[1] [https://wiki.ubuntu.com/One%20Hundred%20Papercuts](https://wiki.ubuntu.com/One%20Hundred%20Papercuts)

<comment><USER4> My favourite recent example was SQLite, where hundreds of micro-optimizations led to version 3.8.7 to be 50% faster than 3.7.17.

[http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.db.sqlite.general/9054...](http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.db.sqlite.general/90549)

<comment><USER5> Here's the associated HN discussion thread: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8420274](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8420274)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Note that the Python code is not limited to 32 bits and will automatically promote to bignum (aka long in py27).

        >>> l=[0xffffffff, 17]
        >>> sum(l)
        4294967312

C based code will silently overflow/truncate, giving 16 in the example above. The author handwaved all this away, but it does show the usual tradeoffs between right/robust answers and fast answers.

<comment><USER7> Signed integer behaviour is undefined on overflow in C.

<comment><USER8> But not on specific compilers with specific settings on specific machines like were used for the benchmarks results. Execution time is also undefined by the C standard.

<comment><USER9> "Undefined behavior" is a specific term used by the C and C++ standards. What you're describing sounds more like "unspecified behavior", something _entirely_ different.

 _Undefined_ behavior allows for aggressive optimizations where the compiler assumes the integer overflow can never happen, leading to such wonderful bugs as this:

[https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30475](https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=30475)

Some compilers may offer specific settings, such as fwrapv, which give you a way to define the behavior of integer overflow. (Although last I read fwrapv was broken.) I see no mention of any such specific setting in the article. If you've spotted one I've missed, please call it out more specifically.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The first instance of 8 way unrolling

        loop:
            acc += A
            acc += B ...

was inefficient because each add instruction is dependent on the one before it. The CPU has to pause constantly to wait for the result in acc in order to continue.

The correct way to do this is to have 8 accumulators (or whatever the loop unrolling depth is) and then to sum those together at the end. This helps to keep the processor's pipelines full.

        loop:
            acc1 += A
            acc2 += B

        acc = acc1 + acc2

The author's use of SIMD instructions is even better still, where multiple variables were used. However intrinsics would have been far more readable.

For further speed improvements, streaming intrinsics (since all reads are only done once, and never written to) could be useful. Also OpenMP for multithreading would be a good fit here.

</comment><comment><USER11> Of course, the next step is obvious - work out why the compiler didn't do a four way avx unroll, and then submit a bug fix to clang to make it do that. That way all of your future code benefits from your single micro-optimization.

It's also possible that you find out that if you enable --generate-for-haswell or some other arcane compiler flag, it'll do it for you.

<comment><USER12> All the author had to to was to add '-march=native' or '-march=core-avx2' to the compiler command line: [http://goo.gl/H4f62I](http://goo.gl/H4f62I)

<comment><USER13> Clang 3.7.0 (experimental) + -march=skylake gives you AVX512. zmm all the way, baby! 256 bytes processed in the inner loop!

<comment><USER14> But what gives me a Skylake CPU?

<comment><USER15> A time machine, or a job working at Intel? :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The reason to use intrinsics and inline assembly (actually, the latter is pretty rare these days, intrinsics being much more common) isn't only about beating the compiler.

When you're relying on the compiler to vectorize, you run the risk of a subtle, innocuous change to the code breaking the vectorization -- and this will happen a lot. Also, when you target multiple compilers, it's very difficult to get reliable performance across all of them, unless you do the vectorizing yourself.

Not to mention, compilers tend to do great on simple test cases like these, but totally barf as soon as the loop becomes more complex (Try adding some conditionals to the loops some time... It's not that these loops can't be vectorized, it's just that the compiler doesn't know how).

To get the best performance out of vectorization, it's mostly about organizing the data so that it can be easily vectorized. If you've gone through this work, it's fairly pointless not to take the extra effort to guarantee that you're getting the performance you expect.

<comment><USER17> Rather than inline ASM, wouldn't it be better to have a maker that says "error if this can't be vectorised"? Something analogous to Scala's @tailrec

<comment><USER16> Again, inline ASM is pretty rare these days (when we do use it, it isn't for SIMD). Intrinsics are much more common.

The big issue (aside from convincing MSVC to implement it ;) with your suggestion is that, unlike TCO, vectorization isn't really a boolean. There's a range of what vectorization might mean (you can vectorize code and do a bad job with it, only marginally beating out the scalar code), so you'd still need to check the generated code for the situations where you care.

And honestly, it's not worth the effort. Vectorization shouldn't be as scary as it is for most programmers. Once you get the hang of how to do it, it's not bad at all. We write a lot of SIMD code at work, and 'difficulty of writing SIMD code' isn't a big issue for us. Honestly, it's kind of fun, a bit like solving a puzzle (an optimization puzzle, something like SpaceChem or Infinifactory).

Now, a situation where it might be a win is if you have a lot of different platforms you need vectorized code for... but in my experience you're probably better off doing it by hand unless this is a huge number.

<comment><USER18> Writing SSE code using compiler intrinsics is indeed a fun puzzle, but it has huge drawbacks: 1) it's Intel-specific, and 2) it's a maintenance risk unless everyone in the shop knows how to write and maintain SSE code. Unfortunately nobody else at my job knows how to do it, so I am not allowed to check any in :(

<comment><USER16> > it's Intel-specific

Most platforms offer intrinsics.

> it's a maintenance risk unless everyone in the shop knows how to write and > maintain SSE code.

This is understandable, but not the case where I work. If you need to be writing SIMD code and this is the case, then you need to hire programmers who can do it. That or convince them to learn, as (again) it's not that hard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Er. Author missed a crucial point of "just" using PyPy: for me it's over 24x speedup over standard python (if you run it enough times for JIT to warmup). Know your tools

<comment><USER20> For that matter, his numpy code, which wasn't described until the comments, was terrible. Unlike all the other versions, it included a complete reallocation, conversion and copying step, which accounted for almost the entire processing time.

People in the comments who tried a reasonable numpy version found it to be around the same speed as the unoptimized C version.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> On the general topic of how much we can rely on compilers, even using old and well-understood languages (C++), consult Mike Acton:

[http://www.slideshare.net/cellperformance/gdc15-code- clinic](http://www.slideshare.net/cellperformance/gdc15-code-clinic)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rX0ItVEVjHc)

<comment><USER22> C++ is well-understood? I don't get that impression from people who know it.

<comment><USER23> C++ is well-understood to not be well-understood.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> "Our problem will be a very simple one: sum a list of n integers. To make this fair, we will assume that the integers all fit in a 32-bit signed int, and that their sum fits in a 32-bit signed int."

What if my list is: [2000000000, 2000000000, -2000000000, -2000000000]

<comment><USER25> It will wrap around both ways and correctly return 0. At least it does on my compiler, I never remember what is part of standard C and what is accident of implementation.

But it won't work for {2000000000, 2000000000}, as stated in the article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why stop at -O3? If you're going to compare with vectorized asm, you can get the compiler to use avx vector instructions in its optimizations. Add -mavx to your flags and the vector instructions will show up there as well.

</comment><comment><USER27> >>Cray 6600

Should be Seymour Cray's 6600, as it was sold by CDC [1]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600)

</comment><comment><USER28> Is there a library with "optimal" implementations of functions such as these?

<comment><USER5> OS X and iOS have Accelerate.framework: [https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Accele...](https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Accelerate/Reference/AccelerateFWRef/)

In particular, see vDSP_sve and vDSP_sveD which compute single-precision and double-precision vector sums respectively.</comment></comment>


These Are Not Your Grand Daddy's CPU Performance Counters (+ Rootkit Detection) - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfIoKgw65I0 <comment><AUTHOR> PDF: [https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Herath-T...](https://www.blackhat.com/docs/us-15/materials/us-15-Herath- These-Are-Not-Your-Grand-Daddys-CPU-Performance-Counters-CPU-Hardware- Performance-Counters-For-Security.pdf)

Excerpt:

"Rootkit Detection Using PMCs Any code that executes triggers PMCs – Rootkits execute code

● With interrupt on PMC overflow we get EIP/RIP

● If EIP/RIP not in a known module we got a suspect

● We solve the problem of differentiating between data and code since we get EIP/RIP

● Suspect can be dealt with by using standard methods..."

etc.

A lot of other good stuff for performance programming, too... (Mike Abrash would be proud...)</comment>


Did NASA Accidentally "Nuke" Jupiter? - <AUTHOR> http://enterprisemission.com/NukingJupiter.html <comment><USER2> This is ridiculous tinfoil hat bullshit - a radioisotope thermoelectric generator with encapsulated pellets is NOTHING like a "fat man" design atomic bomb.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely right, Rich Hoagland as author alone is a big warning, i just posted it to have confirmation from some guys who know better that this is BS.

Is this allowed here?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Nope. The Galileo spacecraft only carried 7.8 kilograms of Plutonium. That blue smudge is about the size of planet earth. There's no way that amount of plutonium made a cloud that big.</comment>


Ask HN: Is the state budget crisis a reason not to move to California? - <AUTHOR>

For a techie considering moving to the US and trying to choose a place to settle are California's budget crisis & high unemployment enough reason to avoid moving to the state?
My natural choice would have been the Valley but I hear there is a net outflow of Californian residents, the already in-bad-shape schooling system is due for some cost cutting,  and that there is a big chance taxes will increase.
If the idea is to balance living in a tech hub vs. raising a family where would you choose to move to? Given the economic situation, would New York or Massachusetts be good alternatives to being in or around Silicon Valley. <comment><USER2> What do you want to do?

If you have some lazy habits, generally just want a nice place to work, and to afford rent, a car, good food, and to play xbox, I might choose elsewhere. Or maybe not.

If you have an idea and some drive, it's an utterly fantastic place to live. Sure, in some places the rent is a little high and the burn rate in general can be large, if you're able to network and work your ass off, it can be perfectly doable.

I like SF quite a bit. I'm not sure I could live here for 10 years (I'm grew up in northeastern Ohio), but for the time being it's definitely where I want to be and I've been pretty satisfied so far. Good people, good nightlife (in most places, NOT the valley), and good work environments.

Oh, and good coffee. That counts too.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's an interest perspective.

The truth about California: [http://www.marketwatch.com/story/story/print?guid=3229293A-F...](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/story/print?guid=3229293A-F67D-11DF-8066-00212804637C)

</comment><comment><USER4> At least have a look at Austin, Texas.

Texas isn't everyone's cup of tea, but the startup scene down there is starting to look very interesting.

<comment> wh-uws What's it like there do you have any experience?

I'm about to graduate from college and I know I want to be in a tech center and I've interned in silicon valley before but I'm a southern boy at heart.

<comment><USER5> I have been in Austin for 13 months now. The market for all dev languages appears really good, if you take into account the amount of people hiring at local user groups and all the recruiter emails that I get. There are also one or more tech events on most nights of the week, so networking is super easy and the events are fun.

You mentioned being a Southern boy; I am from Chicago and I would say that it does not feel like a "southern" town here, so keep that in mind. It is urban, don't be fooled by the "Texas" thing.

Anyway, people are real friendly, tech jobs appear plentiful, and there is a very good nightlife. The housing is expensive for Texas, but probably not compared to other states. The "no income tax" thing helps, as well.

<comment> wh-uws Thanks and I'm from Atlanta so while I'm decidedly southern I also like to have a city to be in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> You can always come join us in the great white north of Montana. The tech community is small and pretty tight knit. We'd be happy to have you. More persuasive material here <http://bit.ly/hghtmI> and here <http://vimeo.com/17564571>.

</comment><comment><USER7> The Economist has a cautiously optimistic view on California's future: <http://www.economist.com/node/17631115>.

Also, a net outflow of residents should dampen the high cost of housing.

</comment><comment><USER8> Don't give up on California yet. Amazing place.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm going to ask the same questions as others - are you looking to start a company, and if so, will you need a steady supply of local talent, or will you need to find employment in the tech industry ?</comment>


Computers with humanlike capacity to remember - <AUTHOR> http://www.engineeringnews.co.za/article/dev-2009-04-24 <comment><USER2> Am I the only one that things memory is the _last_ human attribute we want our computers to exhibit (selective, inaccurate, temporary, etc.)?

Seriously though it is an interesting concept, the idea of applying contextual memory to software, I just wish the article would have had more references, examples, etc. (in other words, "meat").

There is definitely creative power in the human mind's ability to create "memories" when it associates things based on context rather than the way they actually happened.</comment>


Revea.ly / 1st URL magnifier / I Just Launched It - <AUTHOR> http://revea.ly/

<comment><USER2> Interesting idea. I think I'd much rather interact with this service via a browser plugin or something that makes it more painless to get a peek at where I'm about to be redirected. Any plans for such a plugin?

<comment><USER3> I know that I've seen one around recently ...

One for firefox: <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13140/>

One for chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/limjcpdphjbhdldh...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/limjcpdphjbhdldhiahblmfadfaciaok)

Other web services which appear to already do this (I'm sure that I could find more if I spent a bit more time on google - they're generally described as url expanders): <http://unfwd4.me/> <http://www.clybs.com/urlexpander></comment></comment>


Video: Chrome OS Shows up on $174 ARM Unit at MWC - <AUTHOR> http://www.thechromesource.com/video-chrome-os-shows-up-on-174-arm-unit-at-mwc/ <comment><USER2> ChromeOS/Chromium has been running on various ARM boards for 9 months or so now. Here's an early build on iMX5 (ARM Cortex A8, equivalent to the OMAP3)

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfCEoSwaDJU>

About that time I asked Freescale if they could point me to a build that I could test with on my iMX EVK. After much hand-wringing I eventually got my FAE to admit that Google didn't want Chrome running on these kind of systems - only laptops.

I see these demos every MWC and then see the industry do something different.</comment>


Why Products Suck (And How To Make Them Suck Less)  - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/06/why-products-suck-and-how-to-make-them-suck-less/ <comment><USER2> Don't take a feature request at face value, translate it into a request to fix a problem.

Customers will always solve your problems poorly. If they didn't they would be in your business.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'd say that sucky features don't lose you customers, they lose you time. My users have never (to my knowledge) quit in disgust over a poorly implemented feature, but they complain a lot about them and send me support requests if they're confused. This means I'm often re-explaining the same things or dealing with the same problems over and over. You spend your time either supporting or fixing it.

</comment><comment><USER4> 3 and 5 are corollaries, and probably the most useful points in the article. It's so easy to get caught up implementing customer requests, especially when they wave money at you. It's much harder to stick to your guns and/or distill their requests into feature sets that do what they _actually_ want, rather than what they asked for.

</comment><comment><USER5> I enjoyed this: "The fastest racecar can't move if the gas-cap gets stuck; your product is only as good as its worst component." It reminds me of Dave McClure's "something in your product sucks, find it, kill it" (paraphrased).

</comment><comment><USER6> Have these guy ever applied to YC?</comment>


A Sucker Is Optimized Every Minute - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/magazine/a-sucker-is-optimized-every-minute.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> Worth referencing: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning- machin...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/13/planning-machine)</comment>


Selling 150 Early Release Wired in Signs - <AUTHOR> http://blog.wearewired.in/2015/03/10/selling-150-signs/

<comment><USER2> I'm doing the hardware design on this project, and having a lot of fun doing it. We're excited to have the signs out there for people to start using!

</comment><comment><USER3> I've used on of these. Really helps _that_ guy get a hint and leave you alone when you're trying to get work done.

[http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt- interrupt-...](http://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt-a- programmer/)

</comment><comment><USER4> This would be great if you need a way to 'close your office door' in an open layout office. Nice work.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Simple battery powered light that you can use to tell your coworkers to leave you alone when you need to focus.</comment>


Show HN : Lokenote.com test - make and share local notes - <AUTHOR> http://www.lokenote.com

<comment><USER2> Interesting concept. I started in the SF bay area in the US, and did not see anything. Then I zoomed out all the way, and Australia lit up with notes :-)

Do you plan to add a timeline? It can be interesting to see opinions about a place over a time period.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> powered by mongoDB + node.js under the hood.

I actually wrote my own KeyVal over Postgres in js. It worked fairly well, but got better perf with MongoDB which I found quite sane and easy to use.</comment>


The Venture Capital Secret: 3 Out of 4 Start-Ups Fail - <AUTHOR> http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443720204578004980476429190.html

<comment><USER2> Seeing all these dubious me-too startups appearing on techcrunch every day, this doesn't exactly surprise me.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> _If failure means liquidating all assets, with investors losing [all] their money, an estimated 30% to 40% of high potential U.S. start-ups fail, he says. If failure is defined as failing to see the projected return on investment—say, a specific revenue growth rate or date to break even on cash flow—then more than 95% of start-ups fail_

\--Summary of the Data. What is you're standard?</comment>


An unexpected social trick I learned running out of business cards - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@matteoc/an-unexpected-social-trick-i-learned-running-out-of-business-cards-at-the-worst-time-ca57272286db#.9b80cpmuj <comment><USER2> Interesting and creative, but this guy is reading _waaaaay_ too much into what cards people pick. My guess is that in reality, most people don't give a crap because they're going to put the contact info into their phones and then throw the card away.

<comment><USER3> Coming from Europe, I found it weird in North America that I get asked for business cards all the time but it's been 15 years since I got asked for one in Europe.

The US Border is bizarre, I get asked for a card when I cross almost all the time - like it's some sort of equivalent of a passport that proves I'm really on business. They had a sense of humor failure when I offer to email them one, so I stopped doing that and just got some cards so I can give them, and whoever else asks, one.

<comment><USER4> Business cards are a big part of culture in some places. In Japan, it's "an essential part of Japanese business ettiquette."[1] This is true to the degree that a show about a Japanese man who crushes business cards to get a reaction was invented. [2]

1: [http://www.linguist.com/services-japanese- card.htm](http://www.linguist.com/services-japanese-card.htm)

2: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuT2EjdnFU4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuT2EjdnFU4)

<comment><USER5> > This is true to the degree that a show about a Japanese man who crushes > business cards to get a reaction was invented.

This is not at all "a show about a Japanese man who crushes business cards to get a reaction."

The clip you have linked is labelled as being from "Gigazeus" which is apparently a comedy tokusatsu (like Power Rangers) show. Since I was confused as to why there were other clips with the same person that didn't seem to be from this show, I wasted some time researching this and determined the following:

There was a series of dumb comedy tv shows that were supposed to be lessons in how to make people angry. In these shows, this actor (Shinichi Usui) was supposed to be a professor, who demonstrated how to make people angry by disrespecting them. The person who directed these shows then went on to direct the show the clip you have linked is from, and apparently brought on the same actor to do essentially the same thing but as a different character.

This was simply a short gag on two different shows directed by the same person that was more about the silly facial expression made by the actor than about the actual destroying of the business cards.

I have taken the time to write a reply (to this comment that is arguably only tangentially related to the original link) that is arguably unnecessarily detailed because misinformation about Japan and Japanese TV shows seems to be so prevalent on the internet. In particular, I want to dispel the idea that the very idea of crushing business cards is somehow so shocking to Japanese people (more than it would be in other countries) that there would be a reality show just about someone crushing business cards.

<comment><USER4> I stand corrected, and would edit my comment if I could. Thank you for teaching me about Japanese culture. (although I'll reiterate that business cards are still very important in that culture)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use the multi-image Moo cards, and have a bunch of them out on my table at conventions. They're _great_. Usually taking a business card is a throwaway thing. But when there's a bunch of different images to choose from, some people will get involved in it, and pick an image that they really like.

Some people just grab the first one that comes to hand, sure. But some people will spend a couple minutes looking at _every single design_ and picking the one they like. Do you know how precious that is in the environment of a comic book convention? Someone is engaged with my _promotional materials_ , in an environment where _every square inch_ is filled with someone's promotional materials.

<comment><USER2> I can see the value of that when someone engages in the designs, but I think the engaging thing there is the choice, not the designs themselves. I'd be curious to know if you could create the same effect with cards that are exactly the same, but simply with different background colors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> @giacecco does something similar, but as a freelance data scientist, each of his business cards shows some graphic of a project he has worked on. He asks people to pick a card, then he tells them about the project they chose. Works really well

<comment><USER8> Now _that_ makes sense and serves to anchor himself in their mind. So now when I find his card days or weeks later, I'm more likely to remember him and what he does. And that's the point. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> While i think this social trick is clever, there are circles or perhaps industries where - as some other comments denote - recipients will not keep the cards; opting to simply enter the info into their phones, etc. However, i can definitely see in some other industries that are skewed more towards the social - such as but not limited to real estate, etc. - where this would work as a great ice breaker, or at least a method to keep some conversation continuing. Either way, I think this idea is pretty cool especially for how easy it is to do. Kudos to @matteoc!

</comment><comment><USER10> I assume the author is greatly exaggerating how predictable people are. Otherwise, I'd like to know what happens when he offers his cards to, say, an LGBT programmer working in finance.

<comment><AUTHOR> That would expose his "dominant" passion and maybe also the mood of the moment ;-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> this feels about as charming as a stranger approaching with heavy insistence to show a magic trick no one wants to see

</comment><comment><USER12> I have cards... but rarely with me... if asked I just say, 'No, do you?' Then take their card, if they don't have one we trade email addresses, I have a way to contact them to follow up. I used to hand out a lot, but no one called, then maybe that's just me...

</comment><comment><USER13> American Psycho jokes start in 3, 2, 1, ...

<comment><AUTHOR> In fact I did not mention my business card holder ;-)</comment></comment>


AI Chat Bot in Python with AIML - <AUTHOR> http://www.devdungeon.com/content/ai-chat-bot-python-aiml <comment><USER2> This looks very interesting. Is there somewhere to see this in action?</comment>


Dark mode feature is overhyped - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/dark-mode-isnt-the-answer-to-our-screen-problems-1b9db4ef06fb <comment><AUTHOR> Look about your work environment. It is possible that your light environment is just not good. I used to have photo sensitivity and frequent headaches at a previous work. Then, I realized that the cause was bad light conditions. It was not that I was in the dark, but for example sun light was coming from a window at 90 degrees with my screen. And despite being sufficient light in total all around, it was like that the direction of my screen where I was looking was the darkest.

</comment><comment><USER2> Don't know about anything else, but it simply looks better to me - staring at a darker screen feels easier on my eyes than a highly white, lumnious one.

And if anything, that leads me to look at my devices even more!</comment>


Ask HN: Bait and switch after long, arduous job search for SWE, any advice? - <AUTHOR> hey HN, I was bait and switched into product support after thinking I had finally scored my first software engineer job. Happy to go into the details but that about sums it up. I was hired in a batch of about 10 in this particular location, and I have another coworker (fresh ivy league grad) in the exact same situation.
What are my options? I'm a career shifter and this search has been difficult to say the least. I'd like to think I'm a good candidate (math/cs graduate from a target school, made it to the hiring committee at G (didn't pass due to one meh round), ~15 years in a technical role), but the bay area job market for junior SWEs is brutal.
I don't think this is going to resolve well, our boss has said there is no reassignment; and while we are scheduled to talk to an exec, I'm certain she's going to toe the company line. Any advice? <comment><USER2> What exactly do you mean by bait and switch? Is your job title "SWE" but your tasks are support-oriented? Is the salary lower than expected?

<comment><AUTHOR> yes, exactly. There is no coding aspect to the job, but title is SWE. Salary is not an issue, it's what was agreed to.

They are claiming the 'client solutions' paragraph (one of many subcategories of SWE listed: backend, front end, etc.) in the description is the classification of this role. We think that the term, in the context of SWE, meant more along the lines of turnkey software solutions for clients, not product support (basically help desk, but for fortune 100s).

<comment><USER3> Sounds like it's time to coast for a while, recharge your energy, then go back on the job market. Now that you're currently employed as a SWE your resume will look better.

<comment><AUTHOR> so in the description of responsibilities and achievements under the job title, won't it look bad if they aren't related to software engineering in any way whatsoever?

I thought that would be a huge red flag. Am I mistaken?

<comment><USER3> Just don't talk about that, or spin it by saying that you're looking for a job that will challenge you. Ultimately it can't be worse than having no job.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Central Heating May Be Making Us Fat - <AUTHOR> http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/central-heating-may-be-making-us-fat/ <comment><USER2> There is no central heating here in Sydney and there are plenty of fat people around. Isn't it obvious that you burn more energy to keep you warm when you feel slightly cold? Was this really research we needed?</comment>


How to negotiate a part-time offer with startup? - <AUTHOR> I just got offered a contract-to-hire position with a tech startup ( < 10 people). I was sent an informal offer over e-mail which said 10-15 hrs/wk for $45-$55/hr. I asked if I could raise the time commitment, however the hiring manager said that he has a max monthly limit for payment.<p>My ideal scenario would be $60/hr for 20 hours, especially since this will be a 1099. This is based on a previous contract which was $60/hr with a compensation limit. I'm going to wait until I get the full contract to negotiate. How would you proceed? <comment><USER2> If the hiring manager has a max monthly limit for payment, what are you hoping for? Looks like there is no room for negotiation.

Can you sign another contract in parallel to compensate?

<comment><AUTHOR> It seems that way right now but I'll wait to see what the written contract says. I anticipate it'll have their max monthly limit. If not, I'll see if I can learn what it is.

Yes, I can seek another contract in parallel to compensate. However, my priority is a full-time job as I'm changing careers. I've been building my resume/portfolio through contracts/freelancing.</comment></comment>


Tesla rolling out Autopilot to cars built since Oct, limits Autosteer to 45 mph - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/21/14347698/tesla-autopilot-hardware-two-autosteer-limited <comment><AUTHOR> Hope they make sure their drivers are aware: _" The car will not have Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB), where the car can apply the brakes in an attempt to avoid or reduce the severity of a crash."_

<comment><USER2> It's all confusing. From another part of the article: "TACC allows the vehicle adjust its speed based on the car ahead, decelerating or accelerating as needed."

So... it will decelerate, unless you are about to crash, then it will just chime?

I guess it all makes sense because, also from the article: "Though new Tesla cars have superior hardware (according to Tesla, at least), the software that runs on the system is still being worked on. "</comment></comment>


Plan on using an ATM again? This is how your info can be stolen - <AUTHOR> http://www.commbank.com.au/personal/apply-online/download-printed-forms/ATM_awareness_guide.pdf

<comment><USER2> This problem could be avoided by designing the machines to be as visually _simple_ as possible. Remove all unnecessary features and homogenize what remains. This would have the incidental perk of making them look much better.

If this isn't enough, a photo of the machine could be shown on the screen and the user asked to verify that the real thing looks identical.

<comment><AUTHOR> good point. complexity is sometimes the worst enemy of security

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Be careful about PDFs too: <http://www.google.ca/search?q=site%3Amilw0rm.com+pdf+reader>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> explains why BOA attaches all sorts of funny devices on their ATM machines. but i think your neighbourhood/nightclub atms are perfect targets for these criminals. ugh

</comment><comment><USER4> Hmmm. I didn't wait for it to load. <\-- See that? That's my initial comment, then I thought better of it, came back and waited for the thing to load; and I'm glad I did. It was a very informative and fast read. It should be made into a web site. PDFs drive me nuts.

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't a greater risk that someone sets up a fake ATM machine to trap your PIN + card information?

</comment><comment><USER6> I like my bank. Good ol' CommBank

</comment><comment><USER7> crap, kept refreshing, now i have 4 on my desktop...

<comment><USER7> ok, great article, how is this not everywhere in html form?</comment></comment>


Microsoft CEO defends US military contract that employees say crosses a line - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/25/tech/augmented-reality-microsoft-us-military/index.html <comment><USER3> I can never understand those protesters. If they can sabotage military in all countries, that may be good. But they must know it is impossible. They know their kind of activism has zero effect on Russian and Chinese military (imagine Huawei employees sign a letter of this kind, which will never happen). So they are volunteerily sabotage U.S. military to help the Russians and Chineses. I'm not sure how they get their head around.

<comment><USER4> > I can never understand those protesters

In my opinion, the potential for the technology that microsoft could develop for the military is just as dangerous if not more so than chlorine gas, which was used in WW1.

You should watch this video [1]. It is about Einstein and Fritz Haber (who was the father of chlorine gas). Einstein was horrified at the way Haber was so casual about mass murdering people.

Speaking for myself: I have never and will never work on any weapon technology that is meant for killing other people. If I was at MS and someone asked me to do that I would raise hell like these people and absolutely refuse to do it and quit.

There is no reason or need for an arms race on super high end weaponization of AI between the US, Russia, and China. That is super dangerous and crazy talk. We need peace in this world, not more high tech weapons.

I support the action of the protesters at MS 1000%. Hope that helps you understand them.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWFe253TYmA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWFe253TYmA)

<comment><USER5> Sure - but it's not like all the world's militaries aren't already using Excel and Word and Powerpoint to enable more effective killing of people - <USER2> makes the Hololens game stuff "weaponisation" categorically worse than all of the other military use of Microsoft products?

(well, maybe not Powerpoint - I suspect it doesn't make the military more efficient at their objective either...)

<comment><USER6> specifics: you can use an iron bar to kill someone, but that doesn't make an iron bar a weapon.

putting a hololens on a soldier serves only a single purpose: to increase their "lethality" as the US military puts it

i'm certain that if the contract was for medics, there would be no issue

<comment><USER5> You can use a knife to spread butter on your toast, you can use a pistol to compete at target competition, you can use a shotgun to hunt ducks, you can use an automatic weapon to, ummm, get your jollies at a shooting range or whatever (that's not my preferred source of entertainment, but if someone else enjoys doing that safely and it's not hurting other people, why shouldn't they?). You can use boots to walk in a park, or to walk into battle.

There's a continuum from boots thru iron bars thru to assault rifles. (And, I guess, thru to Predator drones and nuclear weapons.)

I'm questioning just where the hololens fits on that continuum.

I guess selling them to the army makes them "for killing", but is it really "for killing" like an automatic weapon (which many people would choose not to be employed making, and would rightly be upset if their boss sprung that on them)? Or is it more like selling iron bars to the army (which even if they don't directly beat whoever we've always been at war with this week to death, are still obviously going to be used in some small or large part to "increase their lethality" (or at least enable it, I suppose)).

Would it make sense for an iron factory worker to get upset his boss lands a deal with the army and sells them iron bars? The feels kinda precious to me. Sure an end-of-the-bell-curve pacifist could object, but I think most people would say that's about the pacifist rather than the iron factory boss. Would that be different if the iron factory boss was already selling sheet iron and iron filings to the army? I kinda feel it would.

Does it make sense to people who work for the company who makes hololens to protest their boss selling them to the army, when that company is already selling other products (Windows, Word, Excel, pretty much every enterprise MS product) to almost every western military in on the planet? Again, at least to me, it feels kinda precious. It seems like end-of-the-bell-curve pacifism, from people who's living has previously been made working from a company who's _other_ products earn profit from the military, but "my project" is a pure as the driven snow and now all of a sudden I've got blood on my hands...

<comment><USER7> If I made boots, and the military asked to buy for their soldiers, I would say no. I understand the basic need for a military, and I understand their need for boots. I accept that someone else will supply them with boots instead. But supplying military is not what _I_ want to spend my time and energy on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Honestly, I agree with Nadella here. They built a technology which happens to be useful to the military (and has many, more numerous, non-military applications), and the military (understandably) wanted to use it.

Protesting selling Hololens to the military here is like protesting contributing to Linux because the US DoD uses it. Should we all boycott Linux because of the lack of an anti-military-use clause in the GPL?

<comment><USER9> Is the contract simply "selling Hololens to the military"? My understanding was that they already had contracts in place to sell them to the military for training purposes and have done so for many years. I was under the impression from other articles that the employees are upset over the request for "targeting ... capabilities" to be embedded into the devices.

Edit: Upon reading their 'letter' it appears they take most issue with the use of Hololens to 'increase lethality'. I would argue that even the use of Hololens for training purposes (as they have done so in the past) would increase lethality anyway (as training of any kind might) and they apparently had no issue with it before. Even then, the military doesn't _need_ Microsoft to do it, they could pay any of their contractors to implement it.

<comment><USER6> yup exactly: if it was for medics, there would be no problem

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Little do the protesters know that the actual tools of war are PowerPoint and Word.

No mission is launched without first planning and revising using those tools.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's interesting that some on this thread have raised the problem that protesting military technology hampers you compared to your potential adversaries. This is a topic covered in-depth in Dan Carlin's Hardcore History episode "Destroyer of Worlds" [1], which talked about the development of nuclear weapons after WWII.

One point of contention was the morality of developing the hydrogen bomb and people will ask the question "what if our enemies have it and we don't?"

On the other hand, anyone having a particular capability greatly increases the chances that everyone will have it. The US thought the Soviets would take 20 years to develop the atomic bomb. It took 4 years thanks in no small part to espionage efforts by the USSR. Part of the reason why this worked is people who didn't want a world where only the US had nuclear weapons. It would be too dangerous.

So for any military tech that US companies develop consider how likely that is to stay in their hands and not be stolen by China.

On a personal level I support employees holding their employers accountable. If you think you're absolved of moral responsibility for what the company does let me ask you this: why then aren't the lawyers who work for patent trolls or the price gouging executives at Big Pharma or those who worked for Big Tobacco?

[1] [https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the- destroyer-...](https://www.dancarlin.com/hardcore-history-59-the-destroyer-of- worlds/)

<comment><USER12> >It took 4 years thanks in no small part to espionage efforts by the USSR. Part of the reason why this worked is people who didn't want a world where only the US had nuclear weapons. It would be too dangerous.

I believe the technical term for these kinds of people is "useful idiots". How exactly was the world made a safer place by Joseph Stalin having a nuclear bomb?

Try this thought experiment, at the end of WWII the Soviets have the bomb and the United States does not. Does Russia wait 20 years for the US to develop the bomb? Or do they attack as soon as the are able?

Which part of Stalin's morality guides his decision?

<comment><USER13> > How exactly was the world made a safer place by Joseph Stalin having a > nuclear bomb?

Consider that General McArthur was advocating nuclear strikes into China in order to change the course of the Korean War. Would that have been vetoed at Presidential level if only the USA had nukes?

And what would the USSR have done in 1962 in response to US nuclear Jupiter missiles being deployed in Turkey and Italy? Instead of countering with missiles on Cuba they'd probably have been provoked to attack.

<comment><USER14> If the US only had nukes in the Korean War, they might not have needed to use them. China would probably have backed off at a stern warning. Something like "That big troop concentration heading for the border? In 12 hours, they better be further away, or they all die."

And in 1962, if the US has nukes and Russia doesn't, that's going to provoke Russia to launch an attack? "These people have weapons way bigger than we do, so let's attack them?" No. That's insane. Khrushchev wasn't insane.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm sorry, but why is no one commenting on the fact that 100 employees signed? A quick search shows that Microsoft has 134k employees (not sure if that includes contractors). but less than .1% of employees signed. All these media headlines say "employees" like its a significant fraction, but its 100 employees according to the article. To me it seems like media grabbing at a headline that would generate clicks.

</comment><comment><USER16> Social Credit Kill List [1]

> In 2014, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden said in a public debate, > "We kill people based on metadata."

> According to multiple reports and leaks, death-by-metadata could be > triggered, without even knowing the target's name, if too many derogatory > checks appear on their profile. "Armed military aged males" exhibiting > suspicious behavior in the wrong place can become targets, as can someone > "seen to be giving out orders." Such mathematics-based assassinations have > come to be known as "signature strikes."

1\. [https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics- features/how-...](https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how- to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/)

</comment><comment><USER17> "We made a principled decision that we're not going to withhold technology from institutions that we have elected in democracies to protect the freedoms we enjoy..."

Wow! This is really a nice way to present his argument, which captures how I feel about this issue.

</comment><comment><USER18> Though there are important issues with protesting, right to work, and ethics that are being brought up, the technology is not all that new. The DoD has had _similar_ capabilities to the Hololens for nearly 15 years at this point, almost 80 if you think of HUDs as a general idea.

The BraveMind [0][1] project has been around sine ~2005 and has been shown to help with PTSD. USC's work with the DoD has even been shown on PBS's _Frontline_ [2].

HUDs themselves, arguably a primitive form of AR tech like the Hololens, have been around since the early bomber sights of WW2[3]. I'm sure we all remember _Top Gun_ 's use of HUDs.

Honestly, from a tech perspective, the Hololens is only innovative due to it's size, weight, and customer support. The DoD generally proclaims preference for Off-The-Shelf parts and equipment due to many factors. The Hololens is just an iteration of an idea and procurement process that has long been in use.

[0][http://ict.usc.edu/prototypes/pts/](http://ict.usc.edu/prototypes/pts/)

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

[2][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRL0TzrNtVc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRL0TzrNtVc)

[3][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head- up_display](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-up_display)

</comment><comment><USER19> Either you're in the war business or you aren't. It's a genuine choice.

</comment><comment><USER20> Hololens found its killer app.

</comment><comment><USER21> Did they protest Flight Simulator?

<comment><USER22> Or Office?

<comment><USER12> What about Bob?

</comment></comment></comment><comment> a-dub if this whole "we're cool now!" pr schtick is gonna work, i think they need to back it off a bit.

it's a little bit much....

can't they come up with a new and fresh identity to try and attract employees and developers rather than s/goog/us/? it seems a little... obvious? (and perhaps counterproductive?)</comment>


CIA agent: Everything the US thought it knew about Saddam Hussein was wrong - <AUTHOR> http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4044216/CIA-agent-grilled-Saddam-Hussein-says-thought-knew-man-WRONG.html <comment><USER2> this article... there's probably a reason it's published by the daily mail on sunday and self-authored.

This leaves more questions than answers and doesn't really make.a point.

<comment><USER3> ... because he's hocking a book.

<comment><USER2> i kept looking for the amazon link but i didn't see it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Iraq having wmds will probably be looked back as the start of fake news peddled by the mainstream media outlets.

<comment><USER5> That wasn't fake news. Fake news is knowingly spreading news which is either a hoax or likely to be a hoax.

Reporting information from a credible government source based on facts in evidence, is simply reporting. The facts supplied to the reporter might be wrong, or their conclusion might be faulty, but as long as it's based on evidence and in good faith, it's not 'fake news'.

<comment><USER6> _as long as it 's based on evidence and in good faith, it's not 'fake news'._

Infowars passes that test.

It's the _job_ of the press not to take things at face value. That's why the US has laws protecting the press, so it can go up against the government. If they are not doing that then they have stopped being journalists and started being paid propagandists.

<comment><USER5> _sigh_ , if you consider "Soros-funded radicals want civil war" (infowars front page currently) a good faith statement, then we're working from different axioms and can't have a real conversation.

<comment><USER6> I believe that _they_ believe it, which means they _are_ acting in good faith.

<comment><USER5> I don't believe they believe it, and that means we're at an unarguable impasse without starting to bring evidence in.

<comment><USER6> You think they're purely in it for the clicks? If so, how is that distinct from a "real" newspaper (whatever that means these days)?

<comment><USER5> I do. I start from the assumption they're reasonable men like me, then compare their ledes to the evidence proffered in the story, and the strength of the conclusion.

Infowars fails that test for me, and as a crosscheck, people who have earned my trust. The New York Times passes that test for me, and people who have earned my trust.

I'd forgotten we're not supposed to do political arguments on HN (which I suppose really everything is), so I concede, you win the argument and the internet points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Maybe some more clarity on the "Russian's hacking DNC" is warranted, in light of the CIA track record.

<comment><USER8> The headline doesn't really match the conclusion. While the interrogations added and corrected information, in the run up to the Iraq war of 2003 the CIA analysis was dismissed and a tiny subset cherry picked to create a pretense for war. It is the nature of intelligence that you will collect a large body of information, and some of it will be false.

<comment><USER9> This article, written prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is pretty damning of the Bush administration and to some extent separates then CIA Director George Tenet from the CIA in how intelligence was being handled.

edit. Here's the article: [http://prospect.org/article/pentagon-muzzles- cia](http://prospect.org/article/pentagon-muzzles-cia)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Saddam had actually believed 9/11 would bring Iraq and America closer > because Washington would need his secular government to help fight > fundamentalism. How woefully wrong he had been

That was an interesting thought if you take the war on terror at face value. But as he said, he did not listen to what was actually going on and being said. The war was never about terror.

<comment><USER11> It was reasonably clear out here at the time that going into Afghanistan wouldn't deliver a clean, glorious war that would ensure Bush's reelection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Hilarious, this is the worse piece of journalism I have seen in a while.

Saddam was a US backed 'bully', and as soon as it no longer suited them they took him down on false pretenses.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r42oejmpkgw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r42oejmpkgw)

[http://www.globalresearch.ca/gulf-war-documents-meeting- betw...](http://www.globalresearch.ca/gulf-war-documents-meeting-between- saddam-hussein-and-ambassador-to-iraq-april-glaspie/31145)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_support_for_Iraq_during_the_Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_war)</comment>


How Not to Pitch to a Startup - <AUTHOR> http://particletree.com/features/how-not-to-pitch-to-a-startup/# <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=487311></comment>


Transcribing the Phyllis Diller Gag File - <AUTHOR> https://transcription.si.edu/phyllis-diller-cards <comment><USER2> It's basically all typeprinter font and expertly scanned, what exactly is the issue in using even basic OCR?

<comment><USER3> The Smithsonian is transcribing other, much more difficult works. Such as the cursive lab notebook of a historic astrophysicist[0]. I am ridiculously jealous that they are getting this sort of crowd-sourced help to clean data.

Compare to hampanda.com (from Deepgram, YC W16)

[0] [https://transcription.si.edu/transcribe/8634/ECOFD](https://transcription.si.edu/transcribe/8634/ECOFD)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Interesting project, but so many design problems with the approach to involve users.

Use OCR first, then use humans to verify.

Next, present a task right up front that anyone can help with -- draw people right in. Don't make users "look for work" and minimize/eliminate the need for training.

For example: "If there's a date shown, enter it here ______" (with an option for "no date").

Or, "Correct this text as it appears on the card: ________"

Or, "Is there an attribution/credit mentioned? If so, enter it here ____________________"

etc.

</comment><comment><USER5> If you're ever in Washington D.C. you can view Bob Hope's joke file at the Library of Congress where there's a special exhibit on him.

Hope's career started in Vaudeville, then radio, the movies and finally TV. Interestingly he did several movies with Phyllis Diller and she was on a lot of his TV specials.

[https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/bobhope/jokes.html](https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/bobhope/jokes.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> It is a nice peek at the hard work behind the scenes that goes into being a successful comedian.</comment>


NSA Reports to the President's Intelligence Oversight Board - <AUTHOR> https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/declass/IntelligenceOversightBoard.shtml

<comment><USER2> Date posted: December 23rd. Enough to tell you the NSA would love this, as pathetically obfuscated and incomplete as it is, to be ignored.

<comment><USER3> That only tell how much their mentality is despicable. That a private company releases things they don't like on friday is one thing. But that an administration whose stated goal is to work for its citizens uses this kind of tactic is really low. And obviously just imagine for two seconds if they could also hide stuffs, lie, censor... ohh wait...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> From the most recent report ([https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/IOB/FY2013_2Q_IOB_Rep...](https://www.nsa.gov/public_info/_files/IOB/FY2013_2Q_IOB_Report.pdf))

>NSA/CSS is developing a tool to automate submission of mission compliance incident reports across the NSA/CSS enterprise. The [REDACTED] will become the Agency's central tool for reporting potential mission compliance incidents and will provide a streamlined management process, a central repository, and metrics data to support root cause identification and trend analysis.

I'm rather surprised they've been in existence for this long but apparently do not yet have a centralized way of submitting and tracking misuse and leakage incidents. Even small organizations dealing with data that's not nearly as sensitive usually have systems in place to do this.

I interpreted this to mean they don't even seem to have a centralized internal incident response team at all? Or if so, perhaps a very small one. It almost sounds like they're just relying on managers and analysts to report incidents to their Office of the Inspector General by "good faith".

It's possible I'm wrong and they do have an existing system for this, but it's just mostly restricted to pen and paper instead of a database.

Either way, that doesn't sound like a good thing to me. An organization like the NSA should have some of the strictest oversight and compliance requirements imaginable, not this ad hoc "whoops one of my subordinates emailed TS data to some random people, sorry about that" via a phone call.

<comment><USER5> > mostly restricted to pen and paper

This is almost certainly correct. Paper and fax-based processes form the backbone of government agencies, compliance-wise. They've been trying to fix this for a _long_ time but the quality of the big, default government software contractors leaves much to be desired. Imagine the healthcare.gov debacle, except by definition outside of the public's eye and much smaller in scope.

<comment><USER4> That's what I figured.

For an organization dedicated almost entirely to computer systems, though, you'd think it would make sense to track system misusage incidents with... a computer system. At least if you want to be efficient.

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately 'governments' and 'efficiency' don't seem to go well together.

<comment><USER7> I've only worked at four different corporations and even I know that 'private corporations' and 'efficiency' don't necessarily go any better.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to get rid of emails - <AUTHOR>

Idea - "git for e-mail" with a few tweaks.
Problem with e-mail: • It's static, boring, and incriminating.
• You cannot edit once you've sent, so you send another, thus clogging the inbox. • It's a hassle to configure clients
Solution:
Create new protocol that supports the features below.
Versioning - allows you to make changes to a message once it has been sent, but keeps a copy of the history from the time the recipient first read the message. Changes to messages invoke an "unread" notification.
Unsend - like AOL did in the 90s. If someone hasn't read the message delete it, otherwise it's too late! If someone hasn't seen the change you made to a message, then that can be undone as well.
Messages - several different types: text, calendar events, interactive todo list, geolocation information, and files. More kinds may come out as the spec is updated.
Security - configure your server and client to send hash of message contents to third party server to make sure content is not harmful or spam. From this point anyone can have a trusted server as long as it passes a security check by a third party server — kind of like SSL.
Privacy - disable message cloning (forwarding). Password protection? Who knows...
Why different types of messages?
• To make parsing your inbox WAY faster • …does there need to be anything else?
I suppose this could also be used to create spontaneous social networks, which would take off the pressure of following or friending someone.
Wanna collaborate? tweet to @sbussard <comment><USER2> This sounds like google docs to me.</comment>


6 Things to ask when interviewing for a remote job - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@daspecster/how-to-interview-for-a-remote-job-f6282ee0365d#.1e4uk7ntm <comment><USER2> I _really_ like the article but I'm really not sure about:

>> Chat works so well at communicating with the team that we're all available 24/7/365

We're fully remote at my job - no 2 people are in the same state in the whole, small, org. And I think we work well.

But people sign off at 6:30 in their own timezone by and large - and while they'll check slack as much as they'd check email, slack is not going to cut for 24 hour access.

And it shouldn't - we don't want a culture of no downtime at all. If it's an emergency use their pager* - which yes does get expensive for foreign employees but really the company is fine picking up those charges.

Even if you are remote quality of life matters - and people's timezones, and schedules should be respected.

* Note that everyone does have a "pager number"\- including our support reps. But most people haven't been paged in more than a year. We consider this to be the right way to do things.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah sorry if my GOOD/BAD wasn't clear. But I was trying to convey that if that's the kind of response a company gives then you should take it as a warning. I've had companies say things like that in interviews when I asked them questions about remote communication and I think it means their management has not matured yet.

<comment><USER2> Looks like I got the wrong end of the stick on this one :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> haha, I'll take the blame, I probably should format it better.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3>
       "How many full time remote people do you currently have working for you?"
       GOOD: "We have about 25% of our workforce remote."
       BAD: "You would be the first one and really, we just listed remote to get
       more applicants. Are you open to relocation?"

I thought it was just me that happens to. And employers never cease to be amazed when candidates react poorly to it. Shout out to the liars at DataBricks who played this game with me.

</comment><comment><USER4> > _If there's drawing we have an app that we use where anyone can draw and > anyone can see what's being drawn._

somebody had success with such draw apps? this is a missing piece for us

<comment><USER5> With close to a decade of remote work experience under my belt at companies that are more than 50% remote (GitHub) down to being the only remote guy, I have concluded that some things are best left in the physical world...

There is an actual whiteboard on my wall and a webcam on a stand. When I want to whiteboard something, I get up, switch camera angles, and literally draw it out. I have found this to be far more productive than any whiteboard apps out there.

For something more interactive, Google Draw isn't awful, but it's not a pen and paper.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for commenting! That's true, I do have a whiteboard within arms reach in my home office. Sometimes I'll take a picture of it and send it along when talking about a problem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on what it's like being remote when a team is partially remote - say, 30% are remote - vs when a team is fully remote.

I've never worked remote in either situation, but I'm kind of inclined to think that being remote on a fully remote team is much, much better. I would think that a partially remote team would have a hard time fully committing to using remote work flows and tools, and the remote workers would inevitably always be a little out of the loop. Of course, if you're cool with that, and are happy with something more like a consultant role then maybe that's fine. If you're looking for a bigger or more central role in the org, then you'll have a hard time being remote in a partially remote org. Does that perception seem accurate? Or do I have the wrong impression?

<comment><AUTHOR> In my humble experience, I've found that there are two paths that seem to be traversed and work. 1. It doesn't matter how many people work remotely but everyone is committed to participating and communicating through distributed means(chat, email, etc). That usually works pretty well. 2. Depending on the company culture, you'll need to have different amounts of the work force remote to get critical mass of adoption.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was surprised at the quality of this article given the clickbait title.

As an anecdotal case, I recently started working remote most days of the week at my job, and it's been dramatically successful compared to the occasional days I'd do it at my last job. So far as I can tell, the reasons are subtle:

* Hipchat/slack integration: My current job does exactly what is listed in the article: even when sitting next to someone, we rely on the IM client for most conversation. Meanwhile, at my previous job, Such tools were rarely used: IM or email, you'd expect a 24 hour response time, so most questions were handled in person.

* Hours. My current job has remote offices, but only spanning a 3 hour time difference. My past job had offices in Seattle, Detroit, and two areas of India (Pune and Bangalore), so a 12 hour time shift was normal. This made ANY remote action difficult, so teams got more insular, so coordination took more time.

* Lots of Remote-ness. My current team is spread across 4 cities. My previous job had everyone local, except for several people in Pune, India. Thus, the difference to my team in having me work from home rather than office is very little: only one person would actually be in the same office as me anyway.

* VPN. My current job has VPN feel exactly like being there. My previous job had VPN be extremely slow, and some crippling dependencies. We had some workarounds, but basically working remote felt like something you suffered through, not something sustainable.

* Monitors/Home Office. My wife recently redid my office, and as such I have a private space to work from at home, and can plug my laptop into a preferred mouse/keyboard/monitor. This makes me much more productive than I'd be before.

<comment><AUTHOR> > I was surprised at the quality of this article given the clickbait title.

Thanks!

Great reply btw. I think there really is something to remote work once everything starts working together. But it's definitely a more than one ingredient cake.

<comment><USER7> Hope that didn't come off as more insulting than complimentary - I thought the article was great, and the title is fine and accurate.

It's just that certain publications have set low expectations for certain title types :/

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem! I appreciate criticisms and perspectives as long as they're constructive! Titles are really hard for me so feedback is good. Thanks for reading it!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The title may be a bit misleading, "What questions to ask when interviewing for remote job" would be a better description.

Would have been helpful to explain _why_ some answers are bad, why they show a bad "fully-remote" environment. Otherwise good post. The 1st item is very important: being the first/only fully remote employee is really tough.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, I agree. I updated the title here, but I just need to pay more attention to titles+content in general I think. I'm trying to get back into blogging so I really like this feedback!

Also, I totally agree on the being the first employee is a tough one. I've done that 2 times now and it's not easy.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There was a good comment about how I used the terms "perk" and "dream" that was made. ([https://medium.com/@martinb3/i-think-you-ve-come-up-with- som...](https://medium.com/@martinb3/i-think-you-ve-come-up-with-some-great- specific-examples-about-evaluating-jobs-for-being- remote-85b1fa5d9ee7#.7t35m0j4l)) I agree with this. I could be wrong but I think a lot of people view it that way. I had hoped that the article would bring the tone around to make it sound less like a "dream" or a "perk" and more like a work environment decision. Either way excellent point!

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Now that I'm back off the top page, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone! I really enjoyed the dialog and hopefully we can all talk more next time!</comment>


NimbusVid: Stream encrypted video from the cloud in the browser (Chrome only) - <AUTHOR> http://www.nimbusvid.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Firefox does not yet support the functionality needed to make this work but it is being implemented.</comment>


GnuPG Fundraising Rally - <AUTHOR> https://gnupg.org/donate <comment><USER2> I'll happily fund however much it will take to get them to religiously follow SemVer. Because there are soooo many breaking changes in patch releases that it's nearly impossible to keep our automation pipeline around gpg2 working consistently.

<comment><USER3> Out of curiosity: what kind of automation? Signing artifacts?

<comment><USER2> Creating keys, certifying keys, signing artifacts, publishing keys, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I just set up a recurring donation for what I think is fair given my (very small) use of GPG.

I can't help but cynically wonder how much funding GPG would get just from the various journalists in this donation video making a decent salary who claim that GPG is indispensable for their work.

Another case of free software tragedy of the commons.

</comment><comment><USER5> I understand the need to fund things, but could someone illuminate for a end consumer of the software what requires 15k euros a month development for GnuPG? Yes new cyphers/PRNGs/hashes come online, but it doesn't seem to be moving as quickly as other internet infrastructure (GnuTLS, X.org, SSL, NTPD) products.

It seems like things that were sponsored by major organizations because they saw the good in having their name associated with a product or service in favor of getting the "internet at large" to pay for things that have become ingrained as "But it's free so why should we pay for it?"

<comment><USER6> Useful spending of that money would be UX issues, making the horror that is using this stuff bearable.

Usability is atrocious and if you do not use it all the time you have to google the simplest things (for which the results are mostly outdated or wrong or bad practice so you have to be careful with which explanation you follow) which the software itself could explain to you.

<comment><USER7> I'd generally agree. Although I think this is rather something the people behind Enigmail should figure out. The vast majority of gpg users will never interact with it over the terminal, probably.

<comment><USER6> You're right. Not only GnuPG but everything around it (mostly email clients) are in dire need of a UX overhaul.

Presenting such a complicated technical topic only in it's purely technical form is not enough imho. Clear and concise explanation for each and every action and item that gets displayed (and the whys!) would do wonders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> There are also translations to German, French and Japanese:

[https://gnupg.org/donate/index.ja.html](https://gnupg.org/donate/index.ja.html) [https://gnupg.org/donate/index.fr.html](https://gnupg.org/donate/index.fr.html) [https://gnupg.org/donate/index.de.html](https://gnupg.org/donate/index.de.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> I hope they spend some of that money on the keyservers, they seem to be down every time I want to grab some gpg keys.

<comment><USER10> Keyservers are hosted by volunteers as part of a distributed pool of hosts:

[https://sks-keyservers.net/](https://sks-keyservers.net/)

And the pool's automated management infrastructure prunes misbehaving hosts pretty quickly (e.g. not responding, out of sync, etc). See "servers in the pool" and "servers currently not in the pool" here:

[https://sks-keyservers.net/status/](https://sks-keyservers.net/status/)

<comment><USER9> Well I'm just reporting the reality that the keyservers are down when I want to use them, almost without fail.

I suspect that gpg isn't trying multiple servers in the pool but only trying the first A record it finds. I've had to edit hosts to select a functioning key server in the pool many times.

<comment><USER10> Before I learned about the SKS Keyservers pool, I had my "keyserver hkp://pgp.mit.edu" in my ~/.gnupg/dirmngr.conf, and that never failed for me unless I was in a strangely firewalled environment. Maybe try that?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I was wondering, how do they sustain such an effort ? I mean, working on GunPG is not exactly a simple task (I guess), so how do they fund themselves ? I understand the donations campaigns, but when that money dries off ? I read that the main dev had to work on other things not related to GunPG. Does it mean that we do have somebody working on GunPG with a sheer level of pragmatic altruism (i.e. working for close to nothing as long as he can feed its family) ? I'd like to know what it feels like to work on GnuPG from the inside...

<comment><USER12> The project was on the brink of collapsing a few years back, there was a ProPublica article back then that shed some light on what you're asking.

[https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email- encrypti...](https://www.propublica.org/article/the-worlds-email-encryption- software-relies-on-one-guy-who-is-going-broke)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I wonder if they've reached out to news organisations like The Guardian and NYT. Also, perhaps human rights charities could make reasonable contributions once someone explains the importance of the project?

</comment><comment><USER14> Should I fund improvements to Signal instead?

<comment><USER15> Both GnuPG and Signal are great projects, but GnuPG has a different use case from Signal.

You should, ideally, try to fund improvements to both projects.

<comment><USER7> > [...] Signal are great projects

If I may derail this thread even further: I find XMPP+OMEMO even better. The security concept is basically identical to Signal but users don't have to rely on particular servers and a widespread adaption would end the problem that people who use different servers/clients can't talk to each other.

Also, there are great apps for XMPP. For desktop user there is Gajim[0], for Android there is conversations[1] and the apple folks have ChatSecure [2].

[0] [https://gajim.org/](https://gajim.org/) [1] [https://conversations.im/](https://conversations.im/) [2] [https://chatsecure.org/](https://chatsecure.org/)</comment></comment></comment>


Clearview's App Used by Justice Department, ICE, Macy's, Walmart, and the NBA - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/clearview-ai-fbi-ice-global-law-enforcement <comment><USER2> "Reporting this story was surreal. Numerous organizations initially denied that they had ever used Clearview. We then followed up, and those same orgs later found that employees had signed up and used the software without approval from higher ups. This happened multiple times."

[https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1233151964881416192](https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1233151964881416192)

</comment><comment><USER3> I know it's been brought up before, but again, I would love to know the mental gymnastics Peter Thiel has done to rationalize backing this. The same Peter Thiel that sued Gawker for violating his privacy.

<comment><USER4> This is not an equivalency.

You freely put photos of yourself on the internet and they use them. Don't like it, don't publish it. This is 95% of what's going on here.

Gawker took private information on Peter Thiel that he did not want public, and had not made public.

Hulk Hogan was worse - "at trial he claimed that the videotaping was without his knowledge or consent"

I think it's great a company is doing this openly. Do you think the TLA aren't? We also know private Russian companies have been doing this for years. This is a good move towards privacy.

<comment><USER5> Uh, not so much. Hogan's situation was worse, to be sure. But Thiel's PROFILE PICTURE on a couple of sites was him, shirtless, on gay cruises. Saying that "he wanted that private, not public" flies in the face of pure common sense.

Apropos of that, courts have long held that billionaires have reduced rights to privacy due to their "overwhelming influence on public affairs and events".

That's why Thiel backed Hogan's lawsuit (and to my mind, interfered unfairly), and was not able to sue Gawker.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That NPR story on this is very informative. Clearview actually has a list of all journalists and they programmed th journalist's photos into their application flow. They automatically block and even take away the license of the individual that is talking to the reporter.

<comment><USER7> Any chance you have a link?

<comment><USER8> The Daily podcast has an episode on this called "The end of privacy as we know it" [https://pca.st//episode/3af9bbfd-6992-429c-9b54-c646b288aef1](https://pca.st//episode/3af9bbfd-6992-429c-9b54-c646b288aef1) which discusses the reporter's info being masked and the police officer who worked with her having his access revoked.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The amount of retail and mundane consumer businesses on here is really disturbing:

Best Buy, Equinox Gym, Rite Aid Pharmacy, Home Depot, Kohls Department store?

What is going on? What possible use cases do these companies have that require facial recognition searches?

<comment><USER10> For retail businesses, it's likely related to loss-prevention and shoplifting.

<comment><USER9> Could you walk me through how that would work in practice though. Aren't these searches manual? How would this be an effective tool in something concerned with real time like loss prevention?

<comment><USER11> It doesn't really take a stretch of the imagination to come up with something. Ever seen Minority Report? They used retinal scans to ID shoppers to provide them with targeted ads, just replace that with facial recoginition. For the security/loss prevention aspect, stores have cameras on all of the entrances. The facial recognition systems could ID known shoplifters/return scammers/etc and alert security for "closer" scrutiny.

<comment><USER9> But it's not a real time system. You have to have a target and do a search. From Clearview's homepage:

"Clearview is an after-the-fact research tool. Clearview is not a surveillance system and is not built like one. For example, analysts upload images from crime scenes and compare them to publicly available images."

Do you imagine Rite Aid and Equinox Gym which are not exactly bastions of technology are developing sophisticated Minority Report type systems?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Looks like Californians and Europeans can opt out of something (if you upload a photo ........ )

[https://clearview.ai/privacy/requests](https://clearview.ai/privacy/requests)

<comment><USER13> Opt-out is not legal under GDPR.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I buy groceries at my local Walmart neighborhood market and they recently replaced the self checkout kiosks with NCR systems that video your face while checking out.

Seems to me that I need to use a spare bag to cover the camera, or wait in line for a human next time I go shopping.

<comment><USER15> You don't think the human-operated registers will eventually also have cameras next to them?

<comment><USER16> I don't know, but I certainly hope not. If this happens I don't know how I can shop.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Is there a news site that actually shows the leaked list of clients?

</comment><comment><USER18> Breach consumer trust at your own peril.

At some tipping point I could see HIPAA-style mandates come into force for general data.

<comment><USER19> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Act)

Took effect this year.

<comment><USER18> I'd hope to see something like this at the national level, but state level is a good start.

<comment><USER20> Maybe it's petty but I kind of like the idea of it being a morass of 50 different privacy laws so that a company has to tiptoe through a global minefield to sell data about me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm curious if we're entitled to royalties when our likeness gets used. Anyone know one way or another?

<comment><USER22> Probably not. Only if it's a photo that you own the copyright of, and you didn't divest that copyright when you gave the photo to a site that had a reshare clause in its terms of use.

<comment><USER23> Didn't Harrison Ford trademark his face? Then they have to pay him to use it on toys and mechanise?

<comment><USER24> Could I trademark someone else's face and claim royalties? It seems like a legal stretch, or at least indicates a legal reality I can't support. Unless he has secretly had so much plastic surgery he designed it.

<comment><USER25> > Could I trademark someone else's face and claim royalties?

To get a trademark, the mark you're registering has to be actively used in commerce. There are other laws that come into play if you're using someone else's likeness in commerce.

The entire purpose of trademark is to prevent consumer confusion (for instance, to prevent one company from using another company's logo on their products).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The only relevant response to this is to remove all pictures from Linkedin, Github and social sites - and only publish pictures on sites we control our self where we claim 100% copyright for all pictures. May be we could offer these pictures for sale to 3rd party use, for a small fee of few hundred million euros per picture. If someon scrape them and use that information commerially, and we somehow discover that, it's just to send them an invoice and see them in court.

</comment><comment><USER27> So much for "our only customers are law enforcement"

</comment><comment><USER28> Are there any examples so far around gross mis-use of this data? Building a large list of potential suspects and/or getting some direction for further study based on a face match sounds very useful, but sending a swat team to someone's house and ruining their lives based on a terrible match on a crappy picture is a whole other side of the scale.

I understand why a company collecting this information is annoying / frustrating, but it was also inevitable, was it not? EDIT: Example, LinkedIn just got told by a court that they must allow crawling. A quick crawl of profiles and photos would yield a beginning of one of these types of databases, etc - one it's on the web, you have to assume it can be used for facial recognition.

Either way I am happy that people are recognizing the import of what they post online - even if it's just a picture.

<comment><USER29> Yes Clearview has been abused as specified TFA.

Also Clearview itself has been found breaking the law repeatedly.

[https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/14/class-action-suit- against-...](https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/14/class-action-suit-against- clearview-ai-cites-illinois-law-that-cost-facebook-550m/)

<comment><USER28> Thanks

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> At what point are end users responsible for data they publish globally, such as instagram images?

</comment><comment><USER31> But but China. America really needs a mirror sometimes. Maybe the VP copying the Chinese health care PR handbook should be another warning.

</comment><comment><USER32> Stop using your real names, use pseudonyms and drop random incorrect pieces of information. These companies can detect you based on writing style alone!

</comment><comment><USER33> So it was just a list of customers that was leaked? Sounds like a CRM hack or something.</comment>


Will European supermarkets act over Paraguay forest destruction? - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/andes-to-the-amazon/2017/sep/01/will-european-supermarkets-act-over-paraguay-forest-destruction <comment><AUTHOR> tl;dr: A Manhattan-sized area of Paraguay's tropical forest is felled every fortnight to meet European demands for charcoal and beef. _</comment>