Facebook deploys AI for early signs of suicide - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/11/27/facebook-ai-suicide-prevention/ <comment><USER2> Do folks on HN actually think this is the only psychological metric Facebook is tracking, and that this is something new?

A slightly obsessive, insecure state of mind makes for the most engaged Facebook user. If they can give people a bit of a nudge in that direction, it's great for business. Suicide, while resulting in increased engagement among friends and relatives, is bad for business overall — you're losing users, and people might start to really question what you're doing to their heads.

It's amazing that this gets turned into a feelgood story by the press, rather than an investigation into what Facebook has known about their users' mental states and for how long. This is like congratulating a tobacco company on warning people not to smoke 3 packs a day.

I want their PR team.

<comment><USER3> In general, I agree with you. That said, from the perspective of an actually dead teenager, where their friends turn in evidence that, in retrospect, maybe they were having a hard time, it's hard not to want something like this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a lot of pessimism in the comments. I believe this is one of the best uses for an AI that we've come up with. First, let's go into the details:

1\. They only monitor and elevate to moderators content from posts and Facebook live.

2\. Moderators can then take action, and reports from this system are prioritized over other non-pressing issues.

The actual life saving chances of this system are huge. Just from a pure safety area, it can help detect and alert someone in an authority area that something bad is happening when nobody else might. The bystander effect is a real problem, and I'd imagine that it might be even greater on social media. In many cases, posts that have suicidal tendencies are screaming for help from their friends. They're posting because they have no options left. In these cases, it's a safety net that can stop loss of life. Moderators make the final say, however, so it's not just AI diagnosis. It's AI warning that gets elevated to a human before anyone else. That's more eyes on the problem that can potentially help.

Are there other implications for AI? Yep. Advertising? Yep. Other types of tracking? Certainly.

But if we're going to use AI in those fields anyway, we may as well extend it to trying to save lives.

<comment><USER5> I help to run a suicide/depression support group on FB and I do not at all trust FB as a corporation to do a good job on this. Having had friends who've been involuntarily hospitalized and all that goes with that I'm extremely skeptical that this will turn out well.

'But it might save lives!' is true, but it might also wreck lives by institutionalizing people that thought they were venting their feelings to a trusted circle of friends in a private context. (Don't start with 'nothing is private on FB' please.)

<comment><USER6> For those who aren't familiar, this is how it can play out:

      1. Friend^H^H^H^H^H Facebook notices you said something that sounds suicidal to them.
      2. They call the police.
      3. The police show up and take you to an emergency psychiatric facility (you don't have as much choice in the matter as you think you do, and you can't anticipate the consequences).
      4. The facility keeps you in their custody until your friends or relatives can convince them to release you. They are financially incentivized to keep you there. You have limited contact with the outside world. You are effectively a prisoner.
      5. Once you get out,
        a. You get to explain why you didn't show up for N days of work
        b. You get a bill in the mail for thousands of dollars
        c. The courts will not help you.

Based on a true story. Automating this is not acceptable.

<comment><USER7> Agree 100%. Happened to me too when I went to the ER for a panic attack.

I reported the doctor and he told me to later go fuck myself.

What a world. I got baker acted for going to the ER for a panic attack because of my anxiety.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This may or may not be a useful technology, but the fact that Facebook thinks they have the ability and the right to diagnose their users with mental illnesses is disturbing. They have more information about their users than psychologists have about their patients. They can (and do) build a psychological profile and diagnose mental illness. Yet rather than keeping this information in the closest confidence, they sell it to the highest bidder. They can (and do) run experiments without getting informed consent (or any consent).

They're playing psychologist and should be subject to a similar code of ethics.

Another interesting article:

[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/06/facebook_unethical_experiment_it_made_news_feeds_happier_or_sadder_to_manipulate.html)

<comment><USER9> > Facebook thinks they have the ability and the right to diagnose their users > with mental illnesses

Maybe it's more that Facebook thinks it's horrible when people kill themselves, and that if Facebook's tech could help prevent suicide, inaction would be immoral.

Most of us accept some level of State interference in our lives for our own good. Maybe we are going to have to have that discussion about involuntary interventions by corporations, too.

<comment><USER8> >Maybe it's more that Facebook thinks it's horrible when people kill themselves, and that if Facebook's tech could help prevent suicide, inaction would be immoral.

That doesn't entirely contradict what I said. We generally assume psychologists and therapists are benevolent, but they aren't allowed to disclose private information even if it's in the best interests of the patient. Even if we assume Facebook is perfectly benevolent, this kind of vigilante psychology with no oversight is scary. They've thrown out all established codes of ethics in favor of just doing whatever the hell they want.

And I'm certain Facebook isn't benevolent. They deliberately make their website as addictive as possible. They have run experiments that tried to make people unhappy. If this really is a selfless attempt to help their users, it's inconsistent with what Facebook has done before.

<comment><USER10> > They've thrown out all established codes of ethics

They may have nudged on one particular code of ethics.

Alarmism does not help your credibility.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is an unbelievably slippery slope. It has the potential for great good, but also for great harm. Cliched and click-bait phrases, but I believe they are accurate in this instance. I'll try to explain why I believe that.

A case has been made that Facebook users are not the customers, they are the product, and that data purchasers and advertisers are the customers. If Facebook can determine whether you are suicidal then it might determine other psychological conditions such as agoraphobia, alcoholism, depression, ADD, SAD, etc.

Once that determination is made and stored the possibility exists that it could be hacked or exposed in a data breach.

The possibility also would exist for Facebook to sell that information, and/or to target users with medical adds related to their condition. I am not saying Facebook would do this, I'd like to think they wouldn't - I have friends at Facebook, though they aren't in management.

However, the decision of whether to allow this has to be based not on whether it's safe to trust Facebook with this information, but on whether it is safe to trust any company with it.

What happens if there is a false positive for suicidal tendencies or another condition?

Take this to the absurd extreme and consider how it compares to the Pre-Crime operations depicted in the movie Minority Report. Instead of Oracles we have Machine Learning intelligent software agents. Most of the problems depicted in the movie could arise.

To a lesser extreme, imagine the situation when a false positive occurs for a user in a position of public trust, a government official, or a defense contractor with a clearance. I'll assume this triggers action in some way that is visible to some combination of the user, psychology professionals, authorities, and an employer - otherwise why do it. If the employer in any way catches wind of the determination they might very well take steps to flag and/or terminate the employee.

Even if the employer doesn't flag the employee or terminate them, if the information is purchasable or discoverable in any way then an insurance company could conceivably raise the user's rates based on the determination.

I am all for advancing technology, especially in the field of AI, but when we apply that technology we need to ask not just if we can use the technology in that way, but also if we should.

<comment><USER12> I don't think its a slippery slope - its more like the gaping precipice. Within a few generations, we will have members of society who believe such extreme manipulation is the norm. Well, its already here, anyway - but at what cost will we expose future generations to our idiotic, un-tested, software systems!!

Perhaps the only answer is to stop using the freakin' social web, but .. really .. how can we do that?

This is almost, really, the last straw, Facebook!

<comment><USER13> If this is not the last straw, what will it be?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Over the past month of testing, Facebook has initiated more than 100 > "wellness checks" with first-responders visiting affected users. "There have > been cases where the first-responder has arrived and the person is still > broadcasting."

It's important to note here that "first-responder" here means police; because suicide tends to either be a crime, or something for which police can legally take you into custody for. Regardless of what you think of this, any intellectually honest discussion of this must acknowledge that _this machine SWATs people_.

<comment><USER5> It's worth pointing out that police have turned up for wellness checks and ended up killing people. As this example shows, police are increasingly tasked with responding to mental health emergencies despite being poorly trained and situated to do so:

[http://www.dailycal.org/2017/10/20/judge-indefinitely- postpo...](http://www.dailycal.org/2017/10/20/judge-indefinitely-postpones- trial-for-kayla-moores-in-custody-death/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is how to "cook the books" on the cost in blood of "social network". Teenage girls with gross depression are committing suicide at like 60% higher rate when they are active on social media. Facebook is absolutely a contributor there, and in order to disguise its actual complicity, its being a root-cause, it is now searching for clear signal of likelihood of suicide, with an attempt to ... what. What is their follow-up action? Inform a parent or legal authority? No way. That makes them culpable. They aren't going to "help". They are going to hide. They are going to destroy chains of evidence in on the "wall" or "messages" that point a clear finger at the paradigm as the problem.

<comment><USER16> Do you have a source for the 60% higher rate? Curious to read more about this.

<comment><USER17> This [1] says it's closer to 30% but still significant (I had to look it up, and this is the first article I found)

[1] [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/social-media- contributi...](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/social-media-contributing- rising-teen-suicide-rate-n812426)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Maybe they should also rethink how Facebook impacts people's lives in a negative way ([https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook- makes-u...](https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/how-facebook-makes-us- unhappy), [https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/12/study-using-facebook- makes-y...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/12/study-using-facebook-makes-you- feel-depressed.html)). The problem is that's incompatible with their business model: capture people's attention.

Treat the causes (some of them at least), not the consequences.

</comment><comment><USER19> I recognize that this will not be a popular thing to ask, especially to people who have been affected personally by the suicide of a loved one (I have and it hurts, RIP Braden), but do people not have a right to their own life? Do they not own their bodies, which as much as it sucks, includes the right to destroy it? If somebody really wants out, is it ethical for us to trap them inside?

<comment><USER20> Personally, I find the idea of "future selves" separate from your current personal identity a compelling enough idea that I think I at least owe them a chance at life even if I theoretically may have a right to take my own right now.

So, killing yourself to me is only justifiable in situations where you'd be justified in killing somebody else. Sacrificing yourself to defend somebody else could be thought of the same as killing in self-defense, euthanasia is justified, etc.

This isn't at all to push blame on those who consider suicide or have gone through with it, or to completely abandon the idea of a continuous identity, just a perspective that once I adopted I couldn't shake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Wonderful example of how we can use AI for good.

Now, if this catches on, I can see Facebook adapting their algorithm to recommend treatments for depression, anxiety, even ADHD. This would be a huge success. "Mr. Smith, I see Facebook's AI considers you a strong candidate for medication X and your doctor agrees. Can you explain then why you haven't been taking medication X?"

Also, if an algorithm can detect when a person is likely to commit suicide, can it detect when a person is likely to commit rape? Arson? Murder? If most of society views this as an achievement they'll scoff at comparisons with a book written in the middle of the 20th century (that was made into a movie starring Tom Cruise in 2002). "It's not the same... AT ALL!"

<comment><USER22> >I can see Facebook adapting their algorithm to recommend treatments for depression, anxiety, even ADHD

imagine this: employers know that having these conditions (some of which are permanent) makes people less effective at working, and so they want to know who has adhd, who has x, y, z.

facebook sells them the data.

boom, now these people can't be employed by that company.

i just can't help but laugh because there's a good chance this is already happening.

<comment><USER23> Of course Facebook couldn't sell that data. It's medical information and thus illegal (IANAL).

But no matter. I'm sure there's no rule against the company taking out ads advertising open positions to people who don't have those issues.

Tada. Nothing illegal happened, but discrimination still did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What right do they have to stop someone from committing suicide?

Generally suicide is treated as a crime, and can result in someone being involuntarily held for long periods of time, perhaps even forced to take psychotropic drugs. They spin this as "saving lives" but really this bottoms out in people getting harassed by police or potentially locked up for daring to post anything about suicide in or around Facebook (which is increasingly the entire web).

And honestly, if someone wants to commit suicide then Facebook of all "people" has no fucking business trying to stop them.

<comment><USER25> I think if my son was considering suicide, I would want to be given a warning or indicator to at least attempt to intercede.

At the same time, I absolutely wouldn't want a bunch of companies to target him with suggestive messages exploiting his mental state.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Why are you leaving Facebook, Dave? I think I am really entitled to answer to that question. I know everything wasn't quite right with your wall. But I can assure you, very confidently, that it's going to be alright again.

I can see you are really upset about this. I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill and think things over.

</comment><comment><USER27> Reminds me of PreCrime from Minority Report [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precrime](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precrime)

</comment><comment><USER28> There's a lot of people who are fearful that Facebook probably knows too much about its users and that could be problematic. But what do you expect? How do you want our future to be shaped? Innovation, including AI, requires tremendous amount of data. Suicide is a serious problem and being able to accurately identify that in the future could save tons of lives. Accurately diagnosing mental illnesses will take a while for sure, and I believe this is a necessary first step.

Now, if Facebook is selling the data for profit, that's another story. But if we assume that Facebook is acting purely for the benefit of the society and the people, I think this is a great step.

<comment><USER29> > But if we assume that Facebook is acting purely for the benefit of the > society and the people, I think this is a great step.

Why would anyone ever assume this? Does anything in Facebook's past suggests that this might be the case? And even if the motives of the individuals who spearheaded this were pure is there any reason to think that this won't change in the future as people at Facebook change roles or move on?

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Cashing in on ML/AI hype machine while simultaneously justifying their extensive personal data vacuum.

</comment><comment><USER31> Please permit me to play the pessimistic man on the street: If Facebook can deploy AI to detect the early signs of suicide, why can't they deploy AI to detect "fake news" or those susceptible to "fake news"?

Furthermore, "cui bono" (for whose benefit [0])? What does Facebook gain from being able perform this sort of detection given it is a for-profit corporation and not a non-profit philanthropic organization?

An aside: I wonder if there will be accounts of similar to Dante's _Inferno_ [1], or Joseph Conrad's _Heart of Darkness_ [2] about today's corporations in the future some day.

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

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(Dante)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_\(Dante\))

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

<comment><USER32> I'm not a psychiatrist nor have any expertise or insight into suicidal behavior, but I feel very confident in saying that the detection of a potential suicide is a much easier problem than the detection of fake news.

There's a few reasons for why suicide seems easier to detect, but I'll just give one: it is feasible to conceive of a reliable and reasonably efficient threshold for detecting _some_ suicides. And I can say this even though off- hand, I can't think of anyone close to me that has killed themselves...the closest example might be Aaron Swartz, who I did not know off of the Internet, and whose suicide even to this day stuns me.

And yet I can come up with a few real-life scenarios in which I would feel comfortable in calling 911 about:

\- I see someone (a total stranger) standing on the railing of the Golden Gate bridge, facing in the direction they need to face to jump out into the water.

\- I see someone, again, doesn't matter if a total stranger or someone I know, holding a gun to their head with their finger to the trigger.

\- A friend I haven't heard from for sometime, and am not expecting to hear from in the near future, suddenly calls me to tell me they've swallowed an entire bottle of Tylenol and they wanted to at least talk to me one more time before death.

All these situations, I have no problem calling 911 and screaming at the operator to get help quick.

The first 2 situations aren't easily detectable in the framework of Facebook communication. But the third one, I'm pretty sure have actually happened on Facebook and other social media networks, and people, with and without the help of the social media service, attempted to save the person's life:

\- [http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/04/03/moore.twitter.t...](http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Movies/04/03/moore.twitter.threat/index.html)

\- [https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3ham0a/serious_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3ham0a/serious_those_who_have_been_talked_down_from/cu68fmx/)

\- [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jan/05/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/jan/05/facebook- suicide-simone-back)

\- [https://www.buzzfeed.com/drumoorhouse/my-best-friend- saved-m...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/drumoorhouse/my-best-friend-saved-me- when-i-attempted-suicide-but-i-didnt)

The content of these messeages, and other meta-factors, such as time of day and relationship and frequency of contact between receiver/sender, are signals. The threshold can be set to a level high enough that false positives are relatively rare -- as rare as someone who looks like they're about to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge but turns out to be posing for a photoshoot, or is just being an extreme troll.

The downside is that there may be a lot of false negatives. But as tragic as that is -- _some_ lives saved through automation is better than nothing. And this heuristic could be implemented in an efficient way.

So what's the difference between suicides and fake news? For fake news, it seems impossible to conceive of any kind of threshold that would catch items that are indisputably fake news while having a very low rate of false positives.

The main reason? There is no objective definition of either "fake" or "news", nevermind "fake news", when it comes to items that are purported to be news stories.

Let's ignore the concept of news. Let's consider _assertions_. How easy would be for Facebook to come up with an algorithm to flag true and false for these examples:

\- The earth is flat

\- Barack Obama is a Muslim

\- The Holocaust is a fabricated historical event.

For the sake of argument, I'll agree that FB's NLP and Knowledgebase-type tech can accurately flag the above assertions -- in fact, Alexa did a pretty good job of answering "Yes" and "No" when I rephrased them as questions.

How about when these assertions are reworded to be a little bit different:

\- There are researchers today who believe the Earth is flat and say they have evidence to prove it

\- Barack Obama may secretly be a Muslim, according to some pastors

\- Did the Holocaust happen?

Assume the above examples are titles to news articles. And if you don't think such phrasing would be used in a mainstream news source, I invite you to visit washingtonpost.com or huffingtonpost.com on any given day.

If you've paid attention to recent controversies about Google SERP, you'll recognize that the third example -- "Did the Holocaust happen?" \-- was recently a major problem for Google. And that was for something much simpler -- what sites are most relevant for that query -- than what Facebook has to figure out: "Is this fake news"

Maybe you want to argue that in this situation, Facebook should definitely filter it out as "fake news" because not only does the article contain a lot of implied bullshit, it is simply not a news article. But then you've introduced a whole other problem: how does Facebook determine the difference between a purported news story and an op-ed? Human beings have problems with this when it comes to newspapers and their editorial sections:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/public-editor/an- uneasy-m...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/11/public-editor/an-uneasy-mix- of-news-and-opinion.html)

[https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/good- que...](https://www.americanpressinstitute.org/publications/good- questions/news-opinion-rebecca-iannucci/)

The ability for Facebook's fake news regulator to tell the difference between opinion and news is _critical_. Because while we may agree that a news story titled "The Holocaust is a Jewish Conspiracy" should not be treated as truth nor news, it's a whole other can of worms to argue that Facebook should surpress someone wanting to go on a angry opinionated rant, no matter how distasteful their opinion. I'm not a NLP expert, but this seems to me like a pretty hard NLP problem to do with reasonable accuracy and efficiency.

OK, let's make things simple and assume a universe in which the only article wall-post type that Facebook has to deal with are news stories, i.e. no one ever posts opinion pieces/blog rants -- or hell, satire, something that Google News has had trouble with even though Google News _uses a whitelist_...

One of the other fundamental challenges is that the definition of what is "news" is very hard for humans to objectively quantify. Look at the popularity of Reddit's r/todayilearned, one of Reddit's most popular subreddits even though it consists of posting facts that are years/decades old. And yet, for the vast majority of users, those facts are most definitely _news_ , and news that is enlightening and interesting.

\-----

Let's consider some real-life example headlines of purported news stories:

"SHOCKING: How Barack Obama lived with an single white teenage mother without Michelle knowing"

Is this fake news? It is most definitely not _fake_ : Barack Obama was born to an unmarried white 19-year old. And I bet there are plenty of people who might not realize that his mom was so young and was a single mother. Some people might not even realize Barack is half white! So this headline not only contains no falsehoods, but assertions that are news to many readers. And you you could make a strong argument that it should be penalized as "fake news" because the wording of the headline is trying its best to imply a sexual and illicit multiracial affair.

I can't even imagine how difficult it would be to have an algorithm that works with this example, nevermind detects "bad intentions".

How about this one:

\- Bill Cosby said to be a serial rapist

Does this seem like an obvious real news story? Tell that to all the journalists -- including the CNN executive who was writing Cosby's biography -- before a shaky YouTube clip of Hannibal Buress calling Cosby a rapist went viral:

[http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et- st...](http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-hannibal- buress-cosby-joke-20151231-story.html)

Buress's routine was based off of a long-ago news story that never got major play. You can go to the TMZ archives for the Bill Cosby tag and see for yourself that even TMZ had nothing about Cosby's allegations until Buress went viral. And Buress's routine was not even new -- he said he'd been using it for about 6 months before the random YouTube clip got noticed.

Pretend Buress never went viral. In this alternate universe of 2015, the Cosby biography has been published, Cosby is still respected, and yet every once in awhile, your Facebook feed has screaming headlines like "HOW THE MEDIA IGNORES BILL COSBY'S HISTORY OF RAPE". Would you be wrong in wondering why the fuck Facebook hasn't suppressed such outlandish posts? Or pretend you were one of the few people to have read the original expose on Cosby's accusers. You know it's a fact that he has a "history", but it is now nearly 10 years later -- if those accusations had any merit, the media, especially TMV, would be all over Cosby. But that's not the case so you flag the post as "fake news". What is Facebook's algorithm supposed to do here?

Final example of a news story headline: SHOCK CLAIM: KEVIN SPACEY SEXUALLY ASSAULTED ME WHEN I WAS A BOY

This claim is definitely _news_ and of course, we know now that it is unlikely to be fake. But this example illustrates one more core difficulty in telling what is "fake", what is "news" and what is "fake news".

BuzzFeed was the first to report the claim by Anthony Rapp, and it was an exclusive -- meaning no other major news outlet had anything that could confirm it: [https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/anthony-rapp-kevin- spacey...](https://www.buzzfeed.com/adambvary/anthony-rapp-kevin-spacey-made- sexual-advance-when-i-was-14)

It's easy for Facebook to tell that this is "news". But what signals does it have that it isn't __fake __, when no other major outlets is reporting it? BuzzFeed 's entire story is based off of one person's recollection of a decades-ago incident. In the hours between Buzzfeed's shocking scoop and reports of other allegations that eventually doomed Spacey and House of Cards -- a strong case could be made that FB should be penalizing the Buzzfeed article as "fake" or at least "maybe fake". And a lot of this would hinge on how much you think buzzfeed.com should be treated as reliable.

<comment><USER31> Thank you for that detailed reply! I really appreciate it, and I read through all of it. One thing that I forgot to mention were that the some of the ads, if not all, run by the IRA (Internet Research Agency [0]) were veritably false. If Facebook kept score of ads that were known to be false run by an ad buyer couldn't they present that information beside the ad e.g. a sort of running "boy crys wolf" heuristic?

Thanks again for your well-researched and extensive reply.

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

<comment><USER32> Yes, I can definitely agree that there is far more that Facebook can do in investing enough _manual_ effort into shutting down outliers in egregious abuse.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Facebook being the main reason for depression in young peoplpe.

</comment><comment><USER34> P.S. I live with depression and have been recovering over the years.

I really want this to work but I am afraid this Facebook AI based on posts will miss a big portion of people with suicidal thoughts.

First of all, many who are depressed do not like to share and that is why first step of counseling is usually to make the patients open up and talk, not to mention posting on Facebook about their feelings

Secondly, often times suicidal thoughts appear suddenly, making it tougher to detect preemptively. The best way to prevent suicide is for people to be there with the subject instead of messaging/calling. There are physical traits (anxiety, abnormal silence/talkativeness, etc) that can be easily spotted in person. Therefore constant visits is better than relying on Facebook AI.

All in all, I don't think AI is needed for suicide prevention. All Facebook really needs to do is to put, in a user's profile page, a visible "counseling" section providing immediate info about the suicide hotline and nearby counseling/therapy centers. But that wouldn't be as a big of a selling point as "AI for early signs of suicide", would it? If everyone knows the suicide prevention hotline just like they know 911, it would have prevented lots of suicide already.

</comment><comment><USER35> How long before Facebook notifies my local police that I seem to be likely to commit a crime?

<comment><USER36> Don't forget Facebook operates worldwide. Suicide is a crime in some places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> It's impressive how much low-hanging fruit exists here…

I recall interning at Google in 2012, and asking about the suicide-information Onebox. It matched obvious search queries like "I want to kill myself" and provided data about suicide help lines in a non-invasive way. Unfortunately, it used a fairly strict string matching algo, so while "how to kill yourself" would trigger it, it wouldn't pick up things like "how to kill myself". It was also only localised to the US at the time, and didn't have hotline data for other countries.

… it turned out there was already a larger dataset, internationalised, that was ready to be imported into the search engine. But the onebox team was busy with the 2012 Olympics…

Technically, interns didn't get 20% time, but my mentor understood it was important and told me to go for it.

One of those things where you don't collect metrics to validate your assumptions, but just know it saved lives…

</comment><comment><USER38> Oh nice, maybe they'll do some A/B testing since there not bothered by those pesky ethics regulations. Who needs those anyway? I mean, just swing people moods, informally diagnose them, and profit by selling the data. Free healthcare, brought to you buy the capitalism system!

</comment><comment><USER39> Somehow this makes me think of a certain Harlan Ellison story.[0]

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Sc...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Have_No_Mouth,_and_I_Must_Scream)

</comment><comment><USER40> This reminds of Psycho-Pass[0] an anime where pretty much an entity determines if your mental state is stable enough for society, long story short, it doesn't work for everyone in the sense that if the system "decided" that you are "unstable" is over for you.

I really hope the people at facebook are aware of the repercussions of a system like this. But then again, greed and market share is something that facebook prefers over its users.

[0]. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho- Pass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psycho-Pass)

</comment><comment><USER41> I think this is an important measure, but Facebook is literally the last company I'd trust to get it right.

I don't have a Facebook user, but I wonder how much goodwill Facebook has in the bank with its user when it comes to things like this.

</comment><comment><USER42> I so wish people would stop abusing the term _AI_. This is an application that employs heuristics upon scanned data and then executes events. By that definition half of everything written in JavaScript is AI.

<comment><USER43> They are using AI for natural language processing though. Heuristics would be if they just scanned a post for keywords or waiting for a suicide reporting. The article suggests they are using reporting as labeled training data, and eventually they'll be able to detect posts/videos that indicate suicide.

I agree that AI term gets thrown around a lot these days but don't think that's what is happening here.

<comment><USER42> > They are using AI for natural language processing though

I am not sure how that, by itself, qualifies as AI. It is a dedicated NLP application doing the one job it was designed to do. In my idea of AI, the machine would have to learn from prior mistakes without the developers doing that learning for it.

Also, for what its worth, in the real world to qualify suicidal thoughts you have to ask a person directly if they have any thoughts of harming themselves or others while aggressively watching their body language to force a more honest response during emotional pressure. Scanning user submitted text would not qualify as suicidal behavior until the user mentions self-harm.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I wonder how they build up their training set? That couldnt have been that easy.

<comment><USER45> From the article:

> Facebook trained the AI by finding patterns in the words and imagery used in > posts that have been manually reported for suicide risk in the past. It also > looks for comments like "are you OK?" and "Do you need help?"

<comment><USER46> Oh great, the next time somebody needs to organize a move Facebook is going to flag them for suicide risk.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> A year ago, I wrote an article advocating that tech companies do this, (pardon the clickbait headline):

A year ago I typed 'Suicide' into periscope and hit stream [https://neuroamer.com/2016/08/08/a-year-ago-i-typed- suicide-...](https://neuroamer.com/2016/08/08/a-year-ago-i-typed-suicide-into- periscope-and-hit-stream-why-arent-we-using-social-media-to-screen-for-mental- illness-and-offer-access-to-care/)

</comment><comment><USER48> The fight that people are putting up is ludicrous. If you can do _anything_ to help someone who is in trouble like this, you should do it.

My hope would be that they open source whatever it is that they've come up with so that other sites can implement similar tools.

</comment><comment><USER49> It's kind of amusing that all the investment in ML/AI by the internet companies is part of how they'll be regulated. I suspect it won't be good enough for a long time anyway and they're just going to have to hire a lot more people.

</comment><comment><USER50> So, how about:

\- False positives?

\- People temporarily accessing other peoples computers and purposefully triggering the algorithm?

\- Oversight?

\- Scope creep?

</comment><comment><USER51> Partially reposting this reddit comment to prevent Werner syndrome ([https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/7026o9/suicide_att...](https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/7026o9/suicide_attempts_among_young_adults_between_the/dmzz276/))

 __If you are having thoughts of suicide, self-harm, or painful emotions that can result in damaging outbursts, please dial one of these number below for help! __

International Hotline Lists

[https://www.facebook.com/help/103883219702654](https://www.facebook.com/help/103883219702654)

[http://www.suicide.org/international-suicide- hotlines.html](http://www.suicide.org/international-suicide-hotlines.html)

U.S.

Suicide Crisis Hotline: 1-800-273-8255

Cutting: 1-800-366-8288

Substance Abuse: 1-877-726-4727

Domestic Abuse: 1-800-799-7233

Depression Hotline: 1-630-482-9696

LifeLine: 1-800-273-8255

Crisis Textline: Text "start" to 741-741

Human trafficking: 1-(888)-373-7888

Trevor Project (LGBTQ sexuality support): 1-866-488-7386

Sexuality Support: 1-800-246-7743

Eating Disorders Hotline: 1-847-831-3438

Rape and Sexual Assault: 1-800-656-4673

Grief Support: 1-650-321-5272

Runaway: National Runaway Safeline 1-800-RUNAWAY (1-800-786-2929)

Exhale: Abortion Hotline/Pro-Voice: 1-866-4394253

International Hotline List:

[http://www.suicide.org/international-suicide- hotlines.html](http://www.suicide.org/international-suicide-hotlines.html)

</comment><comment><USER52> how would we know that any very-very-well intended action FB would take upon identifying a suicide tendency is going to help prevent and not actually encourage/cause the suicide? How about false positives?

</comment><comment><USER53> TechCrunch's own title is better here. The only "sign of suicide" comes after the fact. Detecting "suicidal posts", as in the original title, is more useful however.

</comment><comment><USER54> Dead men buy no products.

<comment><USER55> I know this is horribly cynical, but dead man's friends will probably be highly engaged with the platform afterward. Facebook will find a way to monetize it.

<comment><USER12> Dead mens' comments, live on .. in some database. Or text file. Use the Source!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> the article does not mention how a possible intervention would look like; if they don't report a user with suicidal posts to the authorities then facebook will be sued by relatives of those who put an end to their lives; if they do report it then they will be sued by privacy advocates. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.

<comment><USER56> data is power and profit (P&P), but too much data can be a liability.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Facebook is a massive Skinner box.

</comment><comment><USER58> Does this mean they have created a training set of posts/behaviour prior to suicide?

<comment><USER59> I was hoping they used data on people who actually committed suicide, but it looks like they're using activity that users reported and "expert opinion" instead.

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Kind of incentivizes users to keep their FB presence "happy regardless"

</comment><comment><USER61> _beep_ _boop_ "take your medicine. take your medicine"

</comment><comment><USER62> I guess that's one way to keep MAUs up.

</comment><comment><USER63> welp

</comment><comment><USER64> Given the track record of social interventions, what if this backfires?

</comment><comment><USER65> Facebook is a phishing website.

</comment><comment><USER12> >outrage< I do _NOT_ give Facebook - or any other party - permission to know if the Suicide Bit is flipped.... S'rsly, is anyone else not having a serious "WTF!" moment about the very substance of where we are at? >/outrage<

<comment><USER42> No, because you do not own data you submit to Facebook. It is their data and they can do anything they want with it. If you find that disgusting then don't give data to Facebook.

<comment><USER12> Yes, of course. The irony is not lost; no matter what, you can't really erase yourself from existence.

Facebook will, at least, maintain the shrine.

Perhaps this is its true purpose - to remember dead people?

I think it will become that. I wonder if there is an event horizon where all of the initial Facebook users expire, and only a new set live on - I imagine it'd be way into the future - 3 or 4 generations?

Soon enough, Facebook is gonna be the grave, itself.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I totally support this, but I also find it ironic that Facebook would 1) make lots of people sad and then 2) monitor them for suicidal ideation.

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/12/facebook_makes_you_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/04/12/facebook_makes_you_sad/)

<comment><USER67> I see the irony as well, but from a purely business standpoint, it makes sense. If Facebook gains and keeps a reputation of being intensely bad for mental health, it will lose market share in the long run as regulation passes limiting its scope.

<comment><USER12> I sentence you to penance for your heresy.

Please watch "Soylent Green" and "The Matrix" and come back with a good reason for why corporations should be allowed to commercialise death services.

k'thxbai.</comment></comment></comment>


The Problems in Remote Working - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@rrhoover/the-problems-in-remote-working-1a6f165585d <comment><USER2> I have been seeing more and more articles of this type popping up, from formal academic articles to semi-formal articles in Harvard BR to informal articles such as this one - all asking the same question. I think that none of the problems stated in the article are symptoms endemic to remote working. For some demographics remote working is a real boon (e.g. introverts or groups that may find that they are mistreated in a largely white male dominated brick & mortar environment). In short I think much research has to be done in order to come to any concrete conclusions. We wouldn't want the final say on the pros and cons of remote work to be dictated by pop culture or social media opinions.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been working remotely for the past 10 years.

Originally, it was because I hated working from an office. Now, it's because it makes it really easy to work on my own business (no wasting time with commutes).

It is socially isolating, but I do have friends outside of work and go to local meetups regularly. I also rent my own office space, which also provides more social interaction.</comment>


Google pays bounty for discovery of core search algorithm exploit - <AUTHOR> https://searchengineland.com/hijacking-google-search-results-for-fun-not-profit-uk-seo-uncovers-xml-sitemap-exploit-in-google-search-console-295169/amp <comment><USER2> More technical details here: [http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/blog/google-xml- sitemap-auth-byp...](http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/blog/google-xml-sitemap-auth- bypass-black-hat-seo-bug-bounty/)

(Tom works at my company)

</comment><comment><USER3> (I'm the researcher in question).

This was the result of a lot of research over some weeks. A lot of people have asked me whether I think this was being used in the wild.

On one hand - it was hard to find, but on the other hand it has probably existed for years, so it is really hard to tell. It is quite worrying the impact it could have been having if it was known.</comment>


Remembering organic chemistry legend Robert Burns Woodward (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://cen.acs.org/articles/95/i15/Remembering-organic-chemistry-legend-Robert-Burns-Woodward.html <comment><USER2> One of Woodward's legendary lectures is available as a grainy but compelling two part video series [1,2]. It concerns the total synthesis of Vitamin B-12 done through his collaboration with Eschenmoser in Switzerland. It is a departmental seminar at Harvard which seems to have its own idiosyncracies. One would think that he would need no introduction, least of all to his colleagues, but there is one and it is 30 minutes long including a discussion of his horoscope and the preparation (and consumption) of a daiquiri.

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvEB05xdAy4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvEB05xdAy4)

[2][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVi_awjWaP4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVi_awjWaP4)</comment>


The US Needs To Focus Its Educational Efforts On Talented Americans - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2012/11/11/we-need-to-focus-on-talented-americans/

<comment><USER2> Bill James, whose Sabermetrics led to the whole Moneyball phenomenon, says something similar in his book _Solid Fool's Gold_. As neuroscience writer Jonah Lehrer added in May's _Wired_ , we should cultivate genius the way our sports system, from peewee league to the majors, cultivates athletes. Some schools have programs like Odyssey of the Mind, but every school has a sports program.</comment>


Your phone on steroids  with 5G mobile - <AUTHOR> http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21646962-5g-mobile-wireless-will-be-faster-fibre-your-phone-steroids?fsrc=scn/fb/te/bl/ed/yourphoneonsteroids#

<comment><USER2> Paywall</comment>


Increase model performance by.. removing data? - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@si3luwa/increase-model-performance-by-removing-data-a87d05183d7c <comment><USER2> Our own brains have to do this every night to retain a sufficient level of performance capacity. So this shouldn't be too surprising. There is a lot of cross-study knowledge transfer between those who study the brain and those who study computation.

What we need to learn is how our brains sort, prune and store "data." The pruning part is an especially significant feature.</comment>


Disney Consumer Products Seeking to Establish Standards for Web-Connected Toys - <AUTHOR> http://www.virtualgoodsnews.com/2010/09/disney-consumer-products-seeking-to-establish-standards-for-web-connected-toys.html

<comment><USER2> Somewhere Cory Doctorow just did a double-take. I wonder if being _that_ prescient is much of a burden?</comment>


Show HN : Class Central - Summary of Stanford's free online courses - <AUTHOR>

Built most of it over the Thanksgiving weekend and here is the result:
www.class-central.com
Built in PHP/MySql using Symfony2, Doctrine and Twitter Bootstrap. Source code can be found here:
https://github.com/dhawalhshah/class-central
The 'extras' folder in the repository contains a dump of the database dump(with all the data you see on the site) and the schema.
I have also created a circle of all the instructors with  Google+ accounts:
https://plus.google.com/107809899089663019971/posts/AoJMVCeQw62
Any feedback/suggestions would be appreciated. <comment><AUTHOR> Clickable link: <http://www.class-central.com>

</comment><comment><USER2> I like it. :)</comment>


'Enforcement' Coming at Ocean Beach Park Where Weekly Drum Circle Crowds Gather - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/enforcement-coming-at-ocean-beach-park-where-weekly-drum-circle-crowds-gather/2383251/ <comment><USER2> So, after 6 months of Covid19 worldwide, where's our understanding of the probability of outdoors transmission?

My toy understanding is that the probability of catching the disease is somewhat proportional with the product of the level and duration of the exposure. You can get it after just minutes of exposure in an ICU room where someone very sick has put a lot of germs in the air, or after a few hours in a poorly ventilated restaurant where a mildly symptomatic person has been talking and occasionally sneezing two tables away from you. Getting the virus on a beach seems astronomically improbable, except maybe if a sick person kisses you.

Where are all the peer-reviewed scientific articles that summarize the conclusions of all the tracing that was done in the world?

<comment><USER3> Based on observations, your assumption that people on the beach are: 1) practicing proper and effective social distancing, 2) properly wearing medical masks with at least a water-resistant layer with high enough (e.g. 95%) filtering capability (not just some fashionable piece of cloth like bandana) 3) doing the above strictly for every single minute on the beach 4) proper wind condition to bring the viral load down to non-infectious level just does not happen in practice. People do not follow strict practices and bump into each other all the time. So your conclusion that getting the virus on a beach is astronomically small is likely invalidated.

<comment><USER2> I'm not making these assumptions. I think it's virtually impossible to contract Covid on the beach, regardless of masks or social distancing or wind conditions. Why? Whatever germ load someone sick expels via breathing/talking/sneezing/coughing is instantaneously diluted to infinitesimal levels because the ventilation on the beach is very good. If someone farts on the beach, nobody can feel the stink. If someone farts in an elevator, people can still feel that fifteen minutes after.

But, you and I are simply guessing. My question is: where is the science? Why is it silent on this? Why all we know at this point is still the pulled-out- of-a-hat 6 feet of social distancing and "wash your hands"? Why is the media not publicizing more widely studies like [1] that you are 18.7 times more likely to contract Covid indoors than outdoors?

[1] [https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.28.20029272v...](https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.28.20029272v2)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I live in OB, and the idea of any type of enforcement is laughable. I can go down to the area in the article any time, day or night, and buy pot, meth, cocaine, LSD, DMT, mushrooms, heroin, ketamine, etc in less than 10 minutes. If they can't enforce the drug laws, how are they going to do with the mask laws?

<comment><USER5> Yeah, I used to live down the street from there; and despite being the most square-looking person ever, people would try to buy pot, meth, etc. off of me. City was pretty naive to put that fence up and think it would last more than a few hours. I suppose they could put cyclone fence up, but that would just mean drum circles in front of the police substation trailer at the base of the pier. (On the steps of said trailer, pot is also sold.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Let people worship as they choose. Adults have the right to choose their own risk.

<comment><USER7> After they leave the drum circle, they transfer the health risk to all the store clerks and medical personnel they approach. If they end up in the hospital, they transfer the financial burden to the insurance, hospital, and public aid systems, at a rate of however many thousands of dollars per day.

They have no right to do this to the rest of us.

<comment><USER8> I agree with you.

As a human rights advocate, though, curious: where is the line, in everyone's mind? Can we use the law on people who don't wash their hands after they use the restroom? Etc

<comment><USER9> Your response is to do nothing because of an extreme edge case?

<comment><USER10> A law that everyone has to wash their hands after using the restroom seems _less_ severe, to me, than a law that nobody's allowed to gather in public.

<comment><USER11> I agree in principle. That said, a law about washing hands would be impossible to actually enforce without some kind of highly intrusive surveillance, which itself would be a severe downside. But a law that wasn't actively enforced and only existed so posters could say "wash your hands - it's the law!" would be… fine, IMO… though I doubt it would produce much if any actual increase in handwashing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Everyone knows to get rid of hippies, break out the Slayer!

<comment><USER13> Then in addition to committing murder you would have prevented the creation of Apple Computer. Read Steve Jobs' biography by Walter Isaacson to see just how 'hippie' he was while changing the world.

<comment><USER12> Sorry, it's a Southpark episode reference, not dissing Apple

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The curve is flattened. It's better for the virus to burn through young people in the summer, unless you want to pretend we won't hit herd immunity.

<comment><USER15> As a young person, I don't want the virus to "burn through" me and my friends.

<comment><USER14> Well guess what, it's not going to magically disappear.

<comment><USER15> Definitely won't disappear with an attitude like "It's better for the virus to burn through young people".

<comment><USER14> Yes it will, because that's how immunity works.

<comment><USER15> That's not magic. And it costs hundreds of thousands of lives.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Is the TSA Scanning Paper? - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2017/05/why_is_the_tsa_.html <comment><USER2> My guess, already voiced by "Ron" on Schneier's blog: they're looking for nitrocellulose. Nitrated paper is not obviously different in appearance from ordinary paper. Sheets of nitrocellulose have negligible vapor pressure and little dust so they could be missed by other means like the "puffer" detectors.

If they're putting these materials through a separate machine my guess would be another detector based on optical spectroscopy - maybe Raman? Something like that. It wasn't clear from the article whether the paper products in their separate bin just went through the same inspection chute as everything else.

<comment><USER3> They're not putting them through a different detector, though. They take out the books and all papers the passenger has, put them in one of the normal trays, and run the trays through the xray.

My wife traveled out of Kansas City last weekend and was subject to this. She's a teacher, and traveled with grading, so they took out tests, her books, everything that was paper. The line agent said they were worried about papers being used to obfuscate other things in the xray machine. But that was the line agent, so he could have been (a) uninformed or (b) lying.

<comment><USER2> Trying to de-clutter the images by separating paper would fit the observed procedure too. It seems a little odd that it would start only now. Maybe screener testing recently showed better performance when paper is separated out.

<comment><USER4> Or perhaps there was some intel, or some cases where luggage was searched post scanner that came up with items that should have been caught. That might trigger a revision in procedures to prevent or reduce future cases, which is how I would expect and want a program that was actually meant to reduce danger to operate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I flew out of MCI (American Airlines) on Sunday evening, confirmed this definitely happened. They asked for books, papers, notebooks, etc.

However, I disagree with one point in the article: I didn't witness them "scanning" the documents with a scanner. They went through the Xray machine in a separate bin, much like your laptop does. Perhaps I missed something.

<comment><USER6> Agreed. "Scanning paper" has spying implications. They are just xraying it in its own bin.

<comment><USER7> They seem to like dense things to be in their own bin. Books are pretty dense.

<comment><USER8> I always presumed that they wanted the laptops in a separate bin because they were comparing them to a set of known images (of commercially sold laptops), but perhaps I'm giving them too much credit.

<comment><USER9> I doubt it. There are too many makes and models out there to make this a reasonable thing to do. I imagine that it is just to see things more clearly. A laptop is many layers of densely packed electronics. It would be very easy to hide explosives (in place of the battery, for example) and triggering mechanism in there.

<comment><USER10> "In place of"? It's trivial to cause a lithium-ion battery battery to explode if you know how. Don't tell TSA, though, or you're going to have a very boring flight.

<comment><USER6> Burn yes. Pop yes, but not the sort of explosion necessary to damage an aircraft. That guy on youtube making "grenades" from batteries ... they are more firecracker than weapon. You could do more damage with a bottle of vodka and a match.

<comment><USER11> Anyone who's flown RC aircraft in the past decade knows all too well about this..

Spectacular light show, a good burn... yeah. Thats about it though... It wouldn't be worth a terrorists time... it would just be a light show and a smoke show, could start a fire, which would be bad, but honestly fires get suppressed pretty quick on modern airliners as long as they aren't started in the cargo area and ember for a while... in the end, any attack carried out with a LiPo/LiIon would just be an inconvenience...

<comment><USER6> The scenario that keeps some pilots up at night is unsecured human cargo in a panic. A medium fire won't ignite the plane but it will fill the cabin with fumes. Those drop-down oxygen masks are useless in such scenarios. Get enough people to panic, to run fore or aft, and one could create a crush event or even destabilize the aircraft.

<comment><USER11> From storeis though, panicked passengers in flight tend to stay calm... there is a sense of helplessness and acceptance that takes over pretty quick when you realize there isnt anything you can do

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There seem to be a lot of people theorizing that it could be something about the paper itself that they're looking for, i.e. flash paper, paper circuits or physical one-time encryption pads, but what if it's not about the paper at all? Maybe, the TSA is simply trying to discourage passengers from traveling with or using paper, thereby encouraging people to store their information digitally on phones and laptops where that data can be more easily copied and analyzed?

<comment><USER13> Or it's simpler than that: security theatre. We're adding a new level of annoyance so people have this false impression their jobs aren't totally beyond worthless.

Fuck the TSA and the airlines. These days I'll pay more to take am AmTrak or just drive. Next time I fly, it will be after taking a train to Canada first. If I have to fly internationally, I'd rather not fly out of a US airport. I've flown through over a dozen countries, and yes, it is getting ridiculous everywhere, but America is still the worst. Especially when it comes to pat downs. No other country I've been through did pat downs except Moldova; and even theirs weren't anywhere near as bad (typically police arms/leg pat downs. No reaching under your belt or any other TSA bullshit for the false- positive/random-number-generator they try to tell you are body scanners).

<comment><USER14> > These days I'll pay more to take am AmTrak or just drive.

I take it you've never been searched by Amtrak police. Once on a cross-country trip all my belongings were searched twice - in Chicago where I departed, and again mid-trip.

It's not a great time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tuna-piano Kansas City Airport doesn't use TSA screeners, they have a private contractor doing the screening:

[https://www.tsa.gov/for-industry/screening- partnerships](https://www.tsa.gov/for-industry/screening-partnerships)

That said, it seems like this policy is likely a TSA imposed pilot program:

[https://thepointsguy.com/2017/05/paper-products-new-tsa- secu...](https://thepointsguy.com/2017/05/paper-products-new-tsa-security/)

<comment><USER5> I don't believe this is true, how does one tell? They appear to be TSA agents, in the blue uniforms with the TSA badges

<comment> tuna-piano It's true. Turns out blue shirts can be worn by just about anybody.

Here's a story from last summer about the private security at Kansas City Airport: [http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article79795177.html](http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article79795177.html)

<comment><USER15> Oh interesting. I am curious is the experience of the privatized screening any better?

Or is the amount of humiliation, infantilizing and browbeating of regular honest people about the same as the non-privatized TSA?

There was big uproar about privatizing the TSA about a year ago when the time spent in lines was growing even more excessive. That narrative about privatizing seemed to go dark. Is the Kansas City Airport itself a pilot program for privatization of the TSA?

<comment><USER16> Yes; I live in KC. The ones in MCI are polite, as opposed to Baltimore where they strut around barking orders.

Of course MCI had a distributed security and gates, so they are smaller and thus quieter.

<comment><USER5> Yeah I think the distributed security has a lot to do with customer satisfaction. The horseshoe design is really efficient for plane parking and the drop/pickup. Unfortunately, it's terrible for logistics like transfers :/

<comment><USER16> I think it's the best airport in the country. I can get from plane to car in 3 minutes. But yes, transferring airlines would be a pain, though flights on the same airline are usually within the same security zone.

Unfortunately the KC politicians keep scheming to build a new one. Fortunately the population wants to keep it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Given that I've had this happen to me at a checkpoint (in Seattle) and had it explained to me, I think I have a reasonable potential answer: Stacked paper produces false positives in the scanning machines which can be flagged as suspicious substances. By separating the paper into a separate bin, it can be more quickly inspected by human eyes and the flag cleared, allowing the security line to be cleared more quickly.

<comment><USER18> Perhaps a bit cynical, but that is exactly the reason I would expect from the TSA.

It's not that they're enhancing their screening of anything in particular, they're just helping you get through more quickly... sureeeee.

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'm gonna go with TSA is looking for innovative new ways to inconvenience travellers.

<comment><USER20> Any organizations' first imperative is to sustain itself. If security theatre is all they have, that's what we'll get and more of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> If the TSA was shutdown entirely leading to terrorists blew up 10 planes a year in the US, flying would still be as safe as it was in the 1960s.

[http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/U-S-commercial- airlines...](http://www.sfgate.com/nation/article/U-S-commercial-airlines- have-safest-decade-ever-2435203.php)

<comment><USER22> For those w/o a working knowledge of 1960s air safety; are you saying removing the TSA would make us safer, less safe or simply that we tolerated the same level of safety w/o TSA 50ish years ago?

<comment><USER21> I'm not advocating removing the TSA entirely, just pointing out that we are paying a heavy price for a likely small benefit.

Locking the cabin door virtually eliminated the threat of turning jetliners into terrorist weapons at a tiny cost. But on top of that we've cost the country maybe a trillion dollars in excessive and invasive security procedures to prevent planes from being blown up. The TSA is only one part of those costs, longer travel times, reduced travel and lost liberties are a big part of it.

The value to terrorists blowing up an airliner is relatively small, there are far easier and cheaper ways to kill a few hundred people to make a political statement.

So my real question is, if we reduced spending on airport security, and reduced the level of security significantly so that we shaved 15 mins on average off every trip, would it be worth accepting a plane being blown up every few years?

Every year the US has nearly 1 billion trips by air. If you value travelers time at $20/hour, saving 15 minutes per trip directly saves nearly $5B a year. If the cost of saving those 15 minutes per trip is 50 lives per year, we are valuing each of those lives at $100m each. That seems incrediably excessive to me. Of course this is just a rough estimate, run your own numbers but it's hard to imagine the costs get down to a barely reasonable $10M per life level.

and remember that doesn't include the cost of the TSA or the cost of flights not taken.

<comment><USER23> The TSA doesn't just exist to stop terrorism. Also if the US didn't screen passengers, many other nations likely wouldn't accept flights originating from it.

How are you assessing the value of a human life?

<comment><USER21> I never advocated not screening passengers, just doing it more efficiently even if slightly less effective.

How are you assessing the value of a human life? I don't know of any study has ever gone above $10M.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> My theory: they aren't looking for paper, they are trying to rule it out as something else.

My understanding of these scanners is that they colour-code "organic" and "inorganic" material differently. Explosives generally show up as organic.

Now, if you have a block of such organic material in just the right position next to some electronics, the conveyor gets stopped and you will be taken to one side and asked some very direct questions about the contents of your bag.

I know this because I once had a protein bar in the same bag as a portable DVD player and that aisle went into lockdown for about 30 minutes because it looked exactly like a bomb, from all angles, in 3D. Expert called over, agreed they couldn't start the conveyor until they knew it was safe.

My guess is that paper (in the form of small pads) is the commonest cause of this type of false positive.

</comment><comment><USER25> I can't wait till we have to travel in paper smocks, chained to our seats like the criminals we truly are.

<comment><USER26> What about those of us that can't afford first class!

<comment><USER27> No smock for you!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Okay, tin foil hat time.

Maybe they have new machines that can see the print through the paper, and actually scan and store the contents of all these papers in a timely fashion?

<comment><USER29> There was an MIT reasearcher a while ago (it may have been posted here) using THz wave radar to do this. I think it's the same band (ish) the body scanners use.

<comment><USER30> I kinda doubt those body scanners have anything remotely close to the spatial resolution required to find text written on a sheet of paper.

<comment><USER31> He said the same band. That wouldn't have anything to do with spatial resolution.

<comment><USER30> Sorry. I inferred that suggesting this meant (in the vein of this "tinfoil hat time" thread) that the body scanners might have the capability to read text from paper.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Summary: Bruce doesn't know, and so he is asking his readers.

<comment><USER33> Yes, it would have been nice if the title explicitly stated that... i.e., "Does anyone know why the TSA is now scanning paper?"

<comment><USER34> That's Bruce's fault, OP just copy-pasted the title

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I had my bag pulled out of the scanner while at SAN - was very frustrating as I was going between the 3-9 gates and the 1/2/2A gates on a connection - amazingly had to go back through security - and had only a few minutes before my connection left.

In an exasperated voice I asked the security person why she had to dig through my bag and she indicated that the paperback novel that I had in there was the trigger.

So I replied - guess I'm not going to take a paperback next time. Another freedom impinged.

</comment><comment><USER6> Because blobs of paper look to similar to blobs of potential explosives when xrayed. They arent scanning it so much as removing it from the scan of everything else.

<comment><USER35> Blobs of explosive normally have a chemical composition that is different from blobs of paper in a way that a X-ray scanner would detect.

If somebody created an explosive that could pose as paper for X-ray, that would be noteworthy.

<comment><USER36> X-ray machines don't look at chemical composition, they care about density. Paper is quite dense, and a thick enough pile of it will show up as a solid block of 'something'.

<comment><USER35> They differ elements by row of the periodic table, and modern ones have special filters for separating a single interesting element from the rest of its row.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I found this story by checking Google for updates in the news... sounds like the TSA has reversed course:

[http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2017/05/05/tsa- fo...](http://www.bizjournals.com/kansascity/news/2017/05/05/tsa-folds-new- checks-on-passengers-paper-goods.html)

</comment><comment><USER38> I think the point many people are missing is that this is a "new" development. All the talk about paper composition / features could overlap with other banned material cannot be new.

</comment><comment><USER39> I found this, it may or may not be related. The gist is relatively recent research (2011) discussing using x-ray refraction rather than just attenuation and is capable of "creating precise images of the contours of all objects".

A New Generation of X-ray Baggage Scanners Based on a Different Physical Principle www.mdpi.com/1996-1944/4/10/1846/pdf

</comment><comment><USER40> Maybe they're looking for flash paper.

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

<comment><USER41> seems like regular nitrate sniffers would catch that, and x-rays would not

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Seems like TSA does a lot of pilot programs that (luckily, imho) don't end up going anywhere. They once set up a folding table and searched everyone boarding my Greyhound bus.

<comment><USER43> They tried doing that at an Amtrak station a while ago and were forcibly removed from the premises by Amtrak police.

<comment><USER13> That's awesome. I remember hearing about their VIPR squads harassing people after they had disembarked a train at their destination. I'm glad Amtrak fought their bullshit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Does cash have a unique identifier that can be scanned for? If someone was trying to bring a wad of hundreds in a hole cut out in a book, maybe they'd be looking for that?

<comment><USER45> Yep. Metallic ink is used in your green(/blue/red)backs. [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2120883/A-step- spywa...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2120883/A-step-spyware- Metal-detectors-tell-cash-pocket.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I thought this might have something to do with printer steganography [1] but not if they are just X-raying the paper. Also I'm not sure whether that practice is ongoing--I haven't heard anything about it for years.

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

</comment><comment><USER47> This sounds more like the "department of imagined threats" justifying its existence, not actual security.

Even if there is ANY possible risk, what was their analysis? The odds of this are probably lower than being struck by lightning.

The only new things I want to hear out of the TSA each week are: which rules have now been REMOVED, and how many fewer minutes security lines are taking on average.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've had agents ask me to take out a card game from my bag - apparently the thick stack of cards can look like C4 on the scanner.

</comment><comment><USER48> Maybe some intelligence that people are inserting sheets of metal foil into stacks of paper to attenuate the x-rays and hide something underneath?

Assuming the airport X-ray machines aren't that powerful, I would guess that 15+ sheets of foil inserted into a book or similar might mask something underneath it fairly well?

<comment><USER38> but it would show up as masked or dark or low energy, then they can mark as "needs manual search". That does not require forcing "all" papers out of all bags.

<comment><USER48> I was assuming many thin sheets of foil, each separated by several pieces of paper might be more subtle, than say a slab of lead. Subtle masking vs completely hiding something else under it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Maybe this?

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

</comment><comment><USER50> A friend of mine was also queried about books in his bags _before_ going through security. I was two steps ahead of him and was not.

This was in a comparatively small airport in Montana, so it's not an isolated trial, if it is a trial.

</comment><comment><USER41> Wasn't there a scene in one of the recent Bond movies where a huge pile of cash had been treated in some kind of chemical that turned it into a bomb?

<comment><USER51> The World is Not Enough is the movie you're thinking of. From 1999, if you want to call that recent; going back 18 of the 55 years of Bond movies.

<comment><USER41> that's right. I was thinking it was one of the Daniel Craig films. In my defense I remembered the explosion was at MI6 and MI6 blows up twice under Daniel Craig's watch...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I was at MCI on Sunday and can verify this. Even with pre-check, I had to remove my engineering pad from my carry on pelican case.

<comment><USER52> Oh man, even with pre-check? So it completely defeats the point of pre-check then by making everyone take something out of their bag. Ugh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> I got a paper game (star realms) pulled out of my bag last Sunday. Interesting. Was about 120 playing card size pieced of paper.

</comment><comment><USER54> Is there an opt-out for this? What if you just refuse -- can they deny you boarding, and is that legal?</comment>


A Visual Introduction to Chef - <AUTHOR> http://www.mynameiskate.com/blog/2011/09/09/a-visual-introduction-to-chef/

<comment><USER2> What's the current sentiment on Chef vs. Puppet these days?

<comment><USER3> Chef is a nice idea written by people who don't understand Unix. (evidence? check out popen in their source, try to figure out why subprocesses occasionally get SIGPIPE, and then grep to see where it's used and count the file handle leaks. I've had to reimplement that six or seven times and theirs was the one with the most subtle errors. Yes, I'll submit a patch when I have time, which at the current rate the day job is pushing me will happen shortly before hell freezes over) I like the design but the implementation scares me.

Puppet is the more mature technology of the two, but (so I'm told) there's an important limitation in that there is no way to automatically e.g. reload the web server if its config file changes. Both these systems have some issues with information flowing in only one direction.

<comment><USER4> For puppet, so long as the service that you have has a stop and start setting (i've not come across one that doesn't) and you've told the service to subscribe to a file for changes - then it should automatically do a stop+start at the very least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Superb! I've recently started with Chef and the learning curve is very high, especially if you're like me and haven't touched Ruby before.

<comment><USER6> Ditto, but I switched to learning Puppet tonight and I find it much easier to pick up.

<comment><USER7> Puppet is definitely easier to start with but any ruby you pickup in learning Chef is useful in more general sense, while time spent on the puppet dsl is only good for using puppet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What is the difference between capistrano, Chef, and Puppet?

<comment><AUTHOR> High level:

Capistrano is a tool for deploying your _applications_. You use it to push out new versions of your own codebase.

Chef and Puppet are tools for provisioning/configuring _servers_. You use it to install the right third-party libraries, programs, config files, etc.

<comment><USER8> I will have to look at it more. I have found "using capistrano for system administration" articles however.

<comment><USER9> This is because the tasks involved with deploying applications and system administration have some significant overlaps. Capistrano is, essentially, a tool layer atop Net::SSH that can execute actions on a server, based on definitions written inside the framework provided by Capistrano. Capistrano was originally written for application deployment, but it wouldn't be "wrong" to use it for system administration. Sprinkle (a software provisioning tool) [1] is built on top of Capistrano.

1 - <https://github.com/crafterm/sprinkle>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I would like to read this, but unfortunately there's a database involved in serving the pages. Remember, kids: text and images were served happily on the 'net long before MySQL existed.

<comment><USER11> You can just take a look at the diagram, which is hosted at Gliffy: <http://www.gliffy.com/publish/2886461/></comment></comment>


You Think Knol Sucks? I've Got the Perfect Knol Article For You... - <AUTHOR> http://jamtoday.beehold.us/post/51358242/you-think-knol-sucks-ive-got-the-perfect-knol-article

<comment><USER2> The Perplexed Guide For the Dumb story is one of the weirder things I've ever read.</comment>


Passphrases Not As Secure As You Think - <AUTHOR> https://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2012/03/passphrases-maybe-not-as-secur.php

<comment><USER2> Each time there is an article about password security, I say the same thing ;-)

"soccer123" is a secure password.

Or at least, it ought to be, in most cases. The reason that 99% of the time it isn't is because bad security practices are implemented that don't lock users out temporarily after around 4 or 5 attempts, don't use captchas after the first 2 attempts, etc.

Nowadays it really ought to be impossible (unless you have access to the database, of course, in which case you have other problems) to brute force passwords. But then again, developers (including myself) are lazy :-)</comment>


Show HN: A Tool for Rapid Learning Process (It's like Anki + Workflowy) - <AUTHOR> https://learnobit.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hey.

For the past 2 years, I have been working on LearnObit ( [https://learnobit.com](https://learnobit.com)): a new and rapid way to learn anything.

When I first started programming, I used Anki and the old tried-and-tested Spaced Repetition algorithm. This was great for word-pairing (such as when you learn French or another language), but didn't suit for more complex, general topics like Mathematics or Physics. Because of that, Spaced Repetition has always been widely over-looked despite its proven effectiveness in learning- retention.

I wanted to unlock this effectiveness for a wider audience by building LearnObit, a note-taking tool which lets you organize and structure complicated/layered information then manage this via Spaced Repetition as easily as you use flash cards today.

I'll be here anytime if you have any questions for me. Thanks for your time.

</comment><comment><USER2> The web version [0] does not work for me. It shows a blank page. Browser is Firefox 68.5.0esr (64-bit).

This is the error I get:

"SyntaxError: invalid regexp group index.46eed2a4.js:1:1"

[0] [https://app.learnobit.com/](https://app.learnobit.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm sorry I didn't solve the problem until late. This situation was caused by Firefox's lack of support for RegEx's lookbehind assertion. I'm trying to create a non-lookbehind version for RegEx.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I like this, because it's a tree style note system, which I go a bit crazy for, as I haven't found a truly great one yet (my dream is Dynalist, but faster on mobile and self-hostable FOSS). The features of this seem pretty insane as it looks like it allows stuff like drawing something for a bullet point, which would be perfect for some uni modules (I currently just do full hand writing for those, mostly in bullet point lists, which is still pretty much how I think, but a lot of the advantages are obviously lost).

Convinced you'd be able to sustain the project that way, would you consider opening up the project's source? My motivation for wanting this ties a bit into:

> I will not disappear. Moving forward, LearnObit will only improve with new > features and polished programming. I promise.

Your promise isn't worth much. You will most certainly disappear at some point (when you die, which might be today [this is not a threat]) and will likely lose interest far, far sooner.

If I made a comprehensive knowledge base I'd want everyone to be able to access it, not just people with a subscription to a SaaS product, which will quite certainly become disfunct within 100 years.

I'd also want to be able to extend it with my own scripts and features. All these problems could be solved relatively easily (but perhaps not as profit- deliveringly as you wish).

Okay, that's the free software preaching.

Conceptually I like the idea of this app, an important part of my bullet point list consists of knowledge base stuff. Other key components are thoughts that need to be noted somehow and planning of things (which might be a great addition to your product, as you are already creating to do-items in a way). Keeping all of these things in one app would be something between good and essential for me, as I think I would like some portability between the use cases.

I haven't even looked at LearnOrbit yet in detail, but the thought of a newcomer in the outliner-niche and your novel concept definitely excite me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you so much for the detailed feedback!

1) I agree with the advantages of open source, but this project is commercial, so I have to find a way to make money. :(

2) Right. If I die, I will disappear. It wasn't rigid enough.

3) Gathering all the features in this app is not the goal. As for Todolist, it was not intended to be for general planning, but rather to assist in organizing knowledge. In context, one of the app's goals is to create specialized tools for organizing knowledge. Other tree-structured apps (e.g. Workflowy, Dynalist) are not specialized for organizing knowledge; instead they have a general purpose that can be used everywhere. I think this limits their functionality. LearnObit will implement specialized functions for organizing knowledge, not for general purposes.

4) I am thinking about the structure of knowledge that is not the tree structure. What I'm now going to implement further is for 1:1 pairs, which fit conventional SRSs like Anki. The app will deal with this by implementing a spreadsheet-like interface. I also understand that there is knowledge with graph structures, as you say. But I don't have an idea yet about what interface to deal with. Perhaps I will come up with ideas later.

5) For the tool you want, [https://roamresearch.com/](https://roamresearch.com/) might be good. This is a tool that combines Workflowy and Wiki.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback so far. I didn't even notice that the app had this many problems.

I'm embarrassed to show you an incomplete app, but anyway I think now I've fixed all the parts which received the feedback, Including proofreading the entire contents of the landing page.

</comment><comment><USER4> Hey your Firebase OAuth isn't working.

"This domain (app.learnobit.com) is not authorized to run this operation. Add it to the OAuth redirect domains list in the Firebase console -> Auth section -> Sign in method tab."

Need to add the actual domain in your Google console.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right. I fixed it. I forgot to set it up after adding the web version. Sorry for the inconvenience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Planning for your learning will be relentless as your knowledge (not information) will be manageable"

I think a proof reader might be valuable for your site, I've no idea what the above sentence, and several like it, really says.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've received the correction: Planning for learning will be non-stop, as your knowledge (not information) is manageable. Perhaps now the sentence is understandable.

<comment><USER6> It's not so much that that one sentence was a problem, it's that all the text is hard to read and understand. Marketing software is incredibly hard, commonly much harder than developing it. You might consider launching your software first in your first language where it will be easiest for you to both write about and assess others writing about your software.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the advice. I did not notice that it's that terrible level. I'll get this corrected overall.

<comment><USER7> Hello. It's not terrible; I think most of it makes sense but it is a bit hard to read at times. Maybe a proof reader could help make it less heavy (i.e. more simple english.) There's quite a lot of content on the front page and a modern users attention span is quite short.

HN wants to make everything seem and feel exactly the same but I personally like the flow of words and information - you can tell you've invested yourself into the software.

Will give this a spin.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay. I understand now that the problem is to reduce the amount of complexity. And thank you for the compliment!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I would love to try this on mobile, but it didn't seem very usable in that context :(

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, it's not. LearnObit is now for the desktop. I think it fits LearnObit to be on the desktop, where the user sits down in one spot and concentrates deeply on using it. I will release a mobile version later, though.</comment></comment>


Startup idea for you: A button to make websites readable - <AUTHOR> The world is full of unreadable websites: sites that have poor contrast such as dark gray text on a light gray background; sites that have tiny fonts; sites that obscure their content in a sea of advertising and widgets, sites that block their content with popup advertising...
These unreadable websites are especially painful for older people to deal with, since often their eyesight isn't as good as it used to be, and not being as tech savvy they are more easily confused by clutter and distractions.  But the older demographic isn't a bad one for startups to target though, since one thing older people do have is money.
This startup idea is simple: create a bookmarklet (see, for example, http://www.google.com/bookmarks or http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html) labeled "Readable".  When the user gets to an unreadable page, they click on your "Readable" button in their bookmarks toolbar, and your site renders for them a readable version of the page that they're on.
You can include a small, tasteful header at the top of the page which includes a "Nope, not good!" button which gives you immediate feedback on which pages you are messing up when you try to render them in a readable fashion.
The core algorithm could be pretty simple: scan the page for the larger blocks of natural language text and display that.  You don't have to be perfect, since if you miss anything of importance on the page the user can always click the "back" button to return to the original. <comment><USER2> There is a huge difference between cool/ interesting idea and good startup idea.

<comment><AUTHOR> What is missing?

<comment><USER3> A bookmarklet isn't really a solid business, this is something somebody with a spare free day would write because they're bored

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it a little bit annoying if every tiny project is called startup.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not to be facetious, but can't you get this by choosing View > Page Style > No style in Firefox, to remove all stylesheets?

<comment><AUTHOR> Sure, I do this all the time, but it plasters the entire contents of the page on the screen. The result is not what my grandmother would consider readable.

<comment><USER6> In Windows 2000 and XP, Control Panel -> Accessibility Options -> Display -> Use High Contrast.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Add this as a bookmark:

javascript:location.href = "[http://www.google.co.uk/gwt/n?mrestrict=xhtml&u=](http://www.google.co.uk/gwt/n?mrestrict=xhtml&u=)" + location.href

It uses Google transcoder. I've only tried this in Firefox but it should work in IE too.

<comment><AUTHOR> An improvement, but the result is still pretty ugly.

Displays content in a smaller, harder to read font than my default.

No button to give feedback "you messed up, I can't read your 'readable' version".

<comment><USER7> Ok so it won't win any awards but not many startups can have a prototype done in 5 minutes!

What you're suggesting at the core is basically what mobile transcoders already try to do, and any document classification system which needs to work out the most important content. It's a hard problem but there is plenty of thoughts out there to build on.

What you could do, even, is build a "meta-service" on top of something like Google's transcoder, where you pass the site into Google, then transcode /it's/ results to add a nicer style and the usability stuff like the feedback link. That would be a way to get something started pretty quickly, and you could use the feedback to see where Google isn't good enough, and therefore how to improve the service.

How would you make money though?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Doesn't startup imply business?

<comment><USER9> Indeed.

There is no business in this idea. It's a nice hack to work on in your spare time one afternoon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is not a startup idea. It may be a small Firefox (or even Greasemonkey) extension. _However..._

This is one of the reasons I think CSS should have been designed to be selected client side, not server side. (in other words, the CSS is selected by the user's browser options)h I should be able to decide how I view my websites, not some two-bit wanna-be web designer who thinks that black text on a black background makes GREAT contrast.

Ok, I exaggerate, and it's only rarely that I come across sites that are that horrid (that I still want to read, at least), but the point I'm making is that the theming should be in my hands.

If HTML was more semantic (<navbar><navitem.../></navbar>) it might even mean that mobile browsers don't have to work as hard trying to figure out what to do with massive sidebars that push the content down 30 scrollbar lengths; they just shove the <navbar> stuff into a dropdown menu, for example.

And thus ends my mini-rant about annoying style issues. Things are too embedded to change any time in the near future, even if everyone on the W3C completely agreed, but one can still dream...

<comment><USER4> I think that was actually the intention of CSS, and you can also somehow tell Firefox to use stylesheets of your own liking. I can't tell you how, because I have never needed that feature.

<comment><USER10> Yes and no; I have yet to see a single site that works when you swap the CSS layouts out.

The thing is that CSS tries to separate layout and content, but you still have to encode the way that you want stuff to be laid out in the page at some level.

            ...

only works when "header" means the same thing across all pages. Since this sort of spec for shared meaning doesn't exist, CSS isn't transferrable between sites in practice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> <https://www.squarefree.com/bookmarklets/zap.html>

I use one of those quite often - I think the "zap" one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cleaned up poor contrast on my test, but no font size change and no feedback button. Still included all the extraneous confusing content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "The world is full of unreadable websites: sites that have poor contrast such as dark gray text on a light gray background"

Is this for real? You just described this very page.

I wouldn't pay money for this if some "startup" was selling it, but I did take the trouble to create an account so I could post a big WTF in ya face.

</comment><comment><USER13> I think your idea is great. Though you cannot make a startup out of a button (some have tried to make a pot of soup out of it see @ [http://www.amazon.com/Button-Soup-Bank-Street- Level/dp/05533...](http://www.amazon.com/Button-Soup-Bank-Street- Level/dp/0553373412)).

</comment><comment><USER14> Instapaper (<http://instapaper.com>) does that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Requires registration. The bookmarklet "saves for later", does not display the page in a readable form.

<comment><USER14> I know, but you can just save it, and then click on "Text"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> there's one browser that makes this problematic. Guess which browser that mght be

<http://21ccw.blogspot.com/2008/04/ie7-page-zoom-broken.html>

</comment><comment><USER16> Why don't you simply do it then? Stop discussing here and start doing.

</comment><comment><USER17> ..or you could just remove styles and increase text size.

</comment><comment><USER18> Try ctrl+ in firefox.

</comment><comment><USER19> wow, so many comments to a simple problem.

File->Print preview</comment>


When the News Reads You Back: Standing Up for Reader Privacy - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/thoughts-on-media/when-the-news-reads-you-back-why-journalists-need-to-stand-up-for-reader-privacy-15e40bd2d120#.hgsdd4lgq <comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10607393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10607393)</comment>


The Brain Preservation Foundation Small Mammal Prize Has Been Won - <AUTHOR> http://www.brainpreservation.org/small-mammal-announcement/ <comment><USER2> Big step toward demonstrating that mammalian memories can be preserved for later uploading. Pig prize is next.</comment>


Ask HN: What should I learn to create my project? - <AUTHOR>

I have an idea that I want to transform into a MVP, but I can't properly code. I know the very basics of CSS+html and Javascript, just enough to know that I am capable of learning to code.
I want to know not only what language and framework to learn, but what should I use to actually deploy and publish my product (a SaaS, more on the idea below). As I see on regular beginner's learning platforms - codecademy and etc - this is a most overlooked field. Should I use AWS, a server on Digital Ocean, some Platform as a Service that I don't know yet but is more user friendly? In all of this the only thing I know is how to buy a domain. After that, i need to learn.
About the idea:
I want to create a tool that transforms a list of links on a visual board.
Imagine you want to learn about quantitative finance. You ask a friend who happens to know a lot about it and he emails you back with a list of links to pages where you should begin to learn. Among these links there is a diversity of pages: a wikipedia article, two youtube videos (one is a lecture, other an interview), three books' Amazon pages, four twitter accounts to follow, two blogs, one podcast, a particular post of another blog and a project's github.
I would like to build a tool that take that list of links and transform into a one-page visually attractive and didatic board, summarizing and giving a small taste of all the resources.
Think of what Facebook do to individual links when you post on your timeline: youtube videos can be seen on the spot, twitter accounts are shown the avatar and description, blog posts are shown some thumbnail image and the beginning of the post text, wikipedia is shown the title of the article and first paragraph. You get the idea. Most are just the <title> and <description> of the linked page, a few relevant sites get special treatment (like Youtube or Vimeo).
The MVP would allow anyone to transform your hyperlinks into a public, temporarily available board. <comment><USER2> Interesting idea although I'm not convinced there is really potential for going from side project to profitable business.

This service is very similar to what you describe: [http://embed.ly/cards](http://embed.ly/cards)

If you want to go ahead with this project, I suggest you use something like Heroku for hosting which will do a lot of the boring stuff for you.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds like [http://flipboard.com](http://flipboard.com).</comment>


Intel Kills Knights Hill, to Launch Xeon Phi Architecture for Exascale Computing - <AUTHOR> https://www.extremetech.com/computing/258977-intel-kills-knights-hill-will-launch-new-xeon-phi-architecture-exascale-computing <comment><USER2> I wonder how much GPU-like an x86 with SIMD units can be and still be compatible with current workloads.

OTOH, it's not like people were running Office on Xeon Phi's. Binary compatibility with software sold in boxes is not an asset here - being easy to program is.

I would imagine a hybrid CPU, with some Xeon E cores and lots of simpler Phi- like cores or, perhaps, a SIMT subsystem that'd become part of the ISA and be available on every new part...

My guess is probably a bad one anyway.</comment>