Chipping Away at Moore's Law - <AUTHOR> https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3388515&doi=10.1145%2F3387945.3388515 <comment><USER4> Nanometer wars became marketing bullshit pretty much around the shift down from 22nm to 14nm and lower (2013-ish and later)

At this point, we should just be looking at IPC improvements at the same frequency/voltage and power consumption to see if there are any improvements.

And yes, sure, more cores are nice, but tons of useful software is still bottlenecked by single core speed. So is general computer responsiveness.

<comment><USER5> "general computer responsiveness" at this point is 100% on software/OS - <USER2> for example was perfectly responsive in the 90s on Pentium II class hardware (and you can probably find earlier examples with weaker CPUs like BeOS on early PPC, but these were just the first to come to my mind - someone will probably chime in below with Amiga anecdotes or something).

I refuse to believe at current high end intel/amd levels (i7-9 & ryzen 7-9) & even mid-range that lack of responsiveness is due to the CPU rather than windows/mac.

<comment><USER6> Sure it was. Back then screens had 16+ times less pixels (multiply it by 2-8 for text mode), Linux (the kernel) source code was still relatively small, and the games played had 10 2D levels of a few million pixels each.

<comment><USER5> I'm not talking about games, I'm talking general computer use responsiveness. the difference in computing resources between a pentium II @ 266mhz and modern-day CPUs is much bigger than 16x and even back then win95 was a lot slower than it should have been (we were saying basically the same thing - "why is this 266mhz PII not feeling any faster than my old 8mhz amiga?").

Again the "poster boy" for responsive interaction is probably BeOS - <USER3> original BeBox used dual ppc 603 CPUs at 66mhz: if you consider IPC, Mhz & number of cores a modern CPU probably has 1000x the computation power at its disposal & RAM is also generally 1000x more plentiful (we have as many GBs as we used to have MBs back then). I'll bet with GPUs the difference is even bigger.

<comment><USER6> Single 4k screen @ 60Hz requires transfer rate of 3840x2160x3 bytes 60 times per second = ~1.5GB/s just to copy pixels without any logic applied.

Typical RAM module (DDR-266) in late 90s could only provide ~2.1GB/s, leaving almost no room to perform any compute on a single 4k screen, and simply insufficient to run two of them.

PC66 of early 90s could only do 0.5GB/s.

DDR3, commonly used now in integrated GPUs does 13GB/s.

What I am getting at, is that the task to just copy pixels to a screen became proportionally harder as RAM progressed forward (26x faster per module since 1990, 6.5x per module since 1999 vs 60x more work per screen since 1990 (256 colors), 10x per screen since 1999).

And that is just screen rendering. Same happened to source code, documents, images, everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Anyone have up to date data on the progress of Moore's law through today? All the stuff on google looks like it taps out in 2015

[https://www.google.com/search?q=moore+law+&tbm=isch&ved=2ahU...](https://www.google.com/search?q=moore+law+&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwicu9nQ9O3rAhUxPH0KHRb0Ci0Q2-cCegQIABAA&oq=moore+law+)

<comment><USER8> 5 nm node products are being released to consumers this year so we're still on track. I think at this point the next node is always questionable because it takes a pretty big breakthrough in manufacturing techniques, resist chemistry, and node design to shave off another nanometer.

<comment><USER9> "Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years"

We are not on track, haven't been on track.

<comment><USER10> Do you have graphs for this? a quick search shows that at least in some sectors they're still doubling every 2 years

[https://www.icinsights.com/news/bulletins/Transistor- Count-T...](https://www.icinsights.com/news/bulletins/Transistor-Count-Trends- Continue-To-Track-With-Moores-Law/)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#/media/File:M...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count#/media/File:Moore's_Law_Transistor_Count_1971-2018.png)

[https://medium.com/predict/moores-law-is-alive-and-well- eaa4...](https://medium.com/predict/moores-law-is-alive-and-well-eaa49a450188)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Some things can't be wireframed - <AUTHOR> http://insideintercom.io/things-cant-wireframed/ <comment><USER2> Wireframes are maps, not models.

Author doesn't seem to know what a wire frame is. And doesn't seem to have any concept of how UI/UX should be done.

Wireframes are typically used for determining how much of each screen something will take up. After that you move to a Mock up.

You don't need to see video play to know that the video is going to be too small if the Logo is 1600x800 on the page.

A wire frame should be more like the pencil sketch or white board image that you use to talk about what is going to where, and to be used as a "map". It doesn't convey what things will really look like as much as give you an idea of where things are and how much real estate they take up.

Think of a wireframe like a relief map. It tells you how tall the hill is, and where the canyon is, not how beautiful it will be or what color. A blue print tells you where the studs in the building will go, but you get a better picture of how the building will look from a little Styrofoam model. They are both important, but they aren't the same thing.

<comment><USER3> The author's point is that for some projects wireframing may not be appropriate. I've had this experience on numerous occasions where let's say a full-color design comp or an interactive prototype would better serve the concept, which may be hard to grasp otherwise.

This is especially true when taking a design first approach, or when your project gains nothing by illustrating hierarchies, navigation, or other wireframe-able things.

<comment><USER2> The author either thinks the readers are either stupid and don't know the difference between a Hammer and a Screwdriver and why you can't drive nails with a screwdriver....

Or the author is stupid and was driving nails with a screwdriver and wrote this post to explain why they changed.

<comment><USER4> Or Drakaal is a gutless troll who wishes he could write articles that people cared or even talked about. That's also a possibility I guess.

<comment><USER2> I think you will find from my comments on HN, My youtube channel, and my interactions in volunteerism, with political movements, and law enforcement that I may be a Troll. But I'm not gutless.

-Brandon Wirtz

<comment><USER4> Respect.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure I agree with this. The article compares extremely low-fidelity wireframes with very high fidelity mockups. You don't have to choose between one or the other. Tools like Balsamiq allow you to create mockups that give a better approximation of the real thing with substantially less work.

I'm not saying you shouldn't create high-fidelity mockups, but get the usability problems solved first in a lower-cost environment. That could be as simple as a whiteboarding session or using index cards. You should be excited for a product/site not only based on how it looks, but what it does.

<comment><USER6> Mock ups (high fidelity) should actually precede wire frames and prototypes as a way of promoting a project in its very early stages to stakeholders. They are brainstorming outputs but don't really represent real design output yet, and must be promptly shelved after their internal promotional planning use.

The author is simply confusing interaction and visual design. The former involves wireframing, the latter almost always does not.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'm surprised there isn't more appreciation of DENIM: [http://dub.washington.edu:2007/denim/](http://dub.washington.edu:2007/denim/)

Wireframes you can click through.

</comment><comment><USER8> I agree with everything said by the author, but I think that mood boards help to fill the gap.

<comment><USER4> Interesting, I'd love to read a post on how you use Moodboards

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> My quick summary: 1) Bad example of a detail-poor wireframe that actually could have been good with actual content text and more precision. 2) Explanation that wireframe leads the design direction and sets its own limits of creativity. They constrain your execution to well-known paradigms and restricts innovation. 3) A vague point about alternative methods of user interaction that can't be wireframed and one must leave the comfort zone of traditional UX.

Ironically, the whole post seems to be a retrospective reflection on how Intercom.io COULD have developed their own product, but chose not to. [https://www.intercom.io/](https://www.intercom.io/) is a direct example of wireframe-driven design that fits into the same boxes that OP wants to break.

</comment><comment><USER10> Amen. The entire idea of having one person wireframe a layout and someone else "design" it is broken.

Designers aren't decorators. Give them a problem to solve instead of boxes to color in.

</comment><comment><USER11> this is the stupidest post ever. this post should be called some ideas cant be captured by some wireframing methodologies and tools, who are used by people who are dumb.</comment>


The NSA Reportedly Stole Millions of SIM Encryption Keys to Gather Private Data - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/02/19/the-nsa-reportedly-stole-millions-of-sim-encryption-keys-to-gather-private-data/

<comment><USER2> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076351](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9076351)</comment>


Show HN: Proxy Orbit – Rotating Web Proxy API for Pentesting - <AUTHOR> https://proxyorbit.com <comment><USER2> "We continually search the web for open proxy servers and save the working ones into our database."

They're charging for access to other people's open proxies, without the other people knowing. This seems... disingenuous?

<comment><USER3> And potentially dangerous, right?. What's stopping me from creating a bunch of MITM proxy servers and just waiting until someone using this service rotates to mine?

From the website:

> Using advanced proxy checking algorithms, we constantly monitor the quality > of our proxies removing those that are no longer working.

What are these "advanced proxy checking algorithms" and how do they verify the security or authenticity of an open proxy on the net? They seem to mention the availability of their service, "Our checking algorithm is aggressive to ensure the highest likelihood of the proxy working when it gets to you." But mention nothing about the security implications of the potential breach of confidentiality if a malicious actor were to set up an open server.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> "Free" proxies are mostly misconfigured corporate private proxies or malware. Reselling them feels even more fraudulent than using them.

</comment><comment><USER5> `&twitter=true` what about the other services? i wounder why one whould not just use domain names instead of going through the hassle of using a short name mapper?

</comment><comment><USER6> The website does not support IPv6, so I am guessing there are no IPv6 proxy servers either.</comment>


How Will DIDO Wireless Networking Change Everything? - <AUTHOR> http://highscalability.com/blog/2011/8/2/how-will-dido-wireless-networking-change-everything.html

<comment><USER2> > Using this new technology shared spectrum is not limited by Shannon's law at > all. They can get 10x what Shannon's law is possible. They have 10 radios > working, all at the Shannon limit on the same frequency and they do not > interfere with each other at all. They think they can get to 100x, 1000x, > they don't know what the limit is. They can do 100x what cellular does now > with the same spectrum. This means no more dead zones. No more drops.

The wireless industry is notorious for snake-oil salesmen. When you actually claim that your technology violates Shannon channel capacity, it doesn't inspire much confidence that you understand information theory.

From the description (this is just a guess), it appears that DIDO offloads channel characterization to a centralized server to reduce the computational requirements of the clients (similar to AGPS). MIMO techniques (like DIDO) do not violate Shannon capacity. They improve Eb/N0 by increasing gain through beam-forming and physical antenna diversity. In addition, DIDO appears to be using some form of asynchronous spread spectrum (even though they deny using CDMA, there are many other flavors), which allows all clients to transmit simultaneously by using orthogonal codes. Spread spectrum techniques also improve gain at the expense of bandwidth.

While they may have a good implementation, I don't see anything earth shattering here.

</comment><comment><USER3> >So, if there are 10 APs and 10 users all within range of each other, then 10 radio signals will sum together at each antenna of each user's device to produce an independent waveform for each device with only that device's data.

we all know that using 10 AP devices you can generate desired independent waveforms at 10 or less target positions in space. The question is whether it is possible for 11, 12, etc... Interference result is a linear combination of source waverforms. I.e a task sounds like "find M (with M less than N) vectors satisfying these N linear independent conditions"

</comment><comment><USER4> Can anyone explain how this differs from the MIMO radios what have been around for years?</comment>


Track iOS crashes with Hoptoad - <AUTHOR> http://robots.thoughtbot.com/post/1487918632/track-ios-crashes-with-hoptoad

<comment><USER2> It will be interesting to see if this causes any issues for people getting apps approved. If nothing else it seems like a very nice tool for doing Ad-Hoc crash reporting.

<comment><AUTHOR> There are currently Apps in the app store that have been approved using the iOS notifier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Does anyone know how this compares with Flurry's API to log crashes in iOS apps?</comment>


CAN bus reverse-engineering with Arduino and iOS - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@alexandreblin/can-bus-reverse-engineering-with-arduino-and-ios-5627f2b1709a <comment><USER2> Very nice and relevant to my interest. I have recently discovered how cool the Arduino and other programmable mircontrollers are. I now have to wrap my head around its programming with all the bitwise operations I see in C for projects I am interested in tackling.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This is really awesome stuff and a great writeup!</comment>


Dev.to is scraping whoishiring posts to spam their platform - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/aleattorium/status/1159834605685547008 <comment><USER2> I've emailed the sender and asked them to stop. If any of you continue to get these, please let us know at email@example.com.

In the future, it's best to notify us at firstname.lastname@example.com about things like this, too. We only noticed this post by accident.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Will do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't like it, but I can see where they're coming from. Because, technically, this would be a business opportunity; what if you get hired because you posted on their site?

So while this is definitely not the best way to get people on the platform, HN's wording is vague enough where they don't seem to be blatantly breaking the rules, just using some annoying community building tactics.

<comment><AUTHOR> I think I would be cool if it was an hiring agency or if it was a startup in the beginning, but being a developer community... They know it better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Tech startup's "the end justifies the means" motto right there, growth at all cost and lest I forget are you growing 20% month over month?, because you should to be valued as a unicorn.

<comment><USER5> Very true. But how do you protect easily scraped data that doesn't sit behind a portal/paywall and has value to somebody? Seems to be one of long-running mysteries of the internet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I stand on the side of the scrapers

<comment><USER7> I stand on the side of the spam button in gmail.

If confirmed, a story like this make never upvote an official post from dev.to in the future, and make me less prone to upvote stories hosted in dev.to .

(I have 3 or 4 site in my personal list of never upvote.)

(And if there is a repeated abuse, the mods make get mad and ban the site.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I only posted it here because I give dev.to the benefit of doubt. My guess is that the listing is a new business inside the community (has pricing) and they were experimenting

<comment><USER7> (I'm fine with a second chance. It depends if they repeat this next month, if they apology, ...)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Man Who Drank Cholera and Launched the Yogurt Craze - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/23/dominoes/the-man-who-drank-cholera-and-launched-the-yogurt-craze

<comment><USER2> It looks like from the Article that Metchnikoff had ADHD. According to the article He had a "preternatural ability to connect dots where nobody saw dots at all", and "he was in constant motion, always wanting to see, taste, and try everything, from studying how his father played card games to learning to sew and embroider with the maids."

How hard is to look back at great discoveries and try to identify if the discoverer or inventor had ADHD? It would be an interesting piece of research to try to work out what copping mechanisms these great ADHD'er used to ship the the product or spread the discovery. One of the issues with ADHD is the lack of ability to finish things.

<comment><USER3> It doesn't sound like ADHD to me at all from that blurb. It sounds more like a very curious person. When you have ADHD, your change in interests are measured in terms of minutes, not in terms of 'topics'.

The article also doesn't mention any other common symptoms of ADHD like fidgeting, inattentiveness, being easily distracted, signs of poor impulse control or... really anything!

Characterizing ADHD as simply being curious or having a lot of interests is like characterizing OCD as being mildly annoyed when things are out of line.</comment></comment>


Seamless Computing: Your Mobile as a Desktop - <AUTHOR> http://community.arm.com/groups/android-community/blog/2015/02/09/seamless-computing-your-mobile-as-a-desktop

<comment><USER2> Ubuntu is clearly taking the lead in this race. However, I am not sure this is the right approach to mobile/ubiquitous computing b/c phones brake, discharge or are lost/stolen. The best approach in my personal experience is to have terminals that connect to cloud computing services. The phone too can connect to the cloud in case a quick on the go edit/reply/action is needed. In this regard, current services already fill such need, Android and Google web apps for example. In other words, if you need to add all peripherals (screen, mouse, kb) and you most likely will also use the local LAN/WiFi (lower cost+ higher speed), then might as well add another CPU to that mix and don't depend on the phone.

<comment><USER3> There is another side to this. With "cloud" you trust remote party to process the data for you. With the mobile, you trust the local device. Even if the cloud means "an audited software, which you run on hardware you physically own, located at your housing" (which is rarely the case) I think it's still less safe than a device that does everything right in your hands.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've been yammering about something like that for ages: I want to arrive at my desk, place the phone by the screen and start working as I would on my laptop. However, I want this with my Linux desktop loaded up, not my Android one. Ubuntu did almost nail with the initial videos of Ubuntu phone but I never seen it take off.

</comment><comment><USER5> This sort of thing seems like it has interesting uses, but I doubt it will become mainstream.

Assuming your mobile device has adequate horsepower to run your desktop, the marginal cost of adding equivalent CPU, RAM and storage to the monitor you'd need on your desk, trends lower and lower every year, and is already pretty low.

</comment><comment><USER6> I've had something close to this for years with my N900 (circa 2009). It detects when I am at home or work (via WIFI), and mounts its file systems on my laptops via sshfs. I can run Debian apps on my N900, and have the laptop display the UI via X11. I'm hoping this will work even more smoothly when I get my neo900.

<comment><USER7> Is there anything stopping you doing this on current Android devices? You can run a debian userland without any trouble, and there's an X11 server available in the Play store (`x.org.server`).

I suppose the usability leaves something to be desired in the general case, but even all-in-one apks like `org.gimp.inkscape` go a long way to addressing this.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Blackberry's OS10 phones do a solid job providing this feature. HDMI out to a larger screen, bluetooth connected keyboard and mouse. They also have their Blend software for Windows/OSX which is somewhat the reverse, use your phone without actually using your phone.

</comment><comment><USER9> A few years back, someone (I can't recall the source) was prophesying Apple making a "laptop" that behaves like this, leveraging your iPhone's CPU. Basically a MacBook Air without the "computer".

</comment><comment><USER10> I would love to buy this, as a polished product.</comment>


The Knives of Class Warfare Turn Towards Tech's Plutocrats - <AUTHOR> http://techonomy.com/2013/05/the-knives-of-class-warfare-turn-towards-techs-plutocrats/ <comment><USER2> The 'knives of class warfare' aren't coming out because FWD.us supports a certain variety of immigration reform or because technology disappears jobs. The knives are coming out because as part of its lobbying, FWD.us supported some more traditionally conservative causes through two subsidiaries, Americans for Conservative Action and the Council for American Job Growth. Through these subsidiaries they did some television advertising criticizing Obama's health policy and supporting the Keystone XL oil pipeline. (I assume this political advertising was part of some sort of quid pro quo.)

You can be rich as you like as long as you don't go off the ideological reservation - for example, look at the entertainment industry, which outsources overseas as much as it can but consistently supports the right causes and donates to the right people. But support a conservative cause, for whatever the reason, and a lot of the press will try to make you as hated as Donald Trump or the Koch brothers.

The Daily Beast article was just a warning shot - I'm sure FWD.us got the message and won't do it again. If not, there's almost certainly more to come.

<comment><USER3> Donald Trump is hated because he's a pompous ass. He's got a loud mouth and is just about as crazy as Michelle Bachmann. Now, if he'd let his businesses do the talking for him he would simply be another conservative rich guy.

The liberal media hates the Koch brothers not the masses. If you said 'Koch' to the masses they'd say they preferred 'Classic' over 'Diet'.

<comment><USER4> The media conspires to take attention off the electeds who execute the Koch/Soros/untouchable's strategies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ever since the Jaron Lanier interview the other day, I can't get this idea of tech destroying jobs out of my head. The comparison between the relative value and number of employees between Kodak and Instagram was a stark (if cherry- picked) example of how the new tech economy concentrates wealth to an almost monarchic extreme.

Now obviously efficiency should on balance be good—automation should free people for higher pursuits—but when you look at the objective reality of what the democratization of distribution has really done for people, you see that despite being free from greedy middle-men sucking up all the value, it's tremendously difficult to actually make a living from the easy distribution we enjoy in the YouTube era. Technologists can still become millionaires relatively easily, but only by aggregating the effort of literally millions. The most elite social media celebrities are earning low six figures and there aren't very many of them.

I still believe in the idea that value is not necessarily always reflected in cash money, and that a lot of the automation that computers produce can help everyone, but as the privileged few I think we owe it the world to give some consideration to destitute and unemployable. Moving towards in the direction of socialist policy where a minimum standard of living is guaranteed is probably the right thing to do if automation is driving the economy, but at the same time I don't think it's a panacea, because people _want_ to work and feel useful, and even if the minimum standard of living is acceptable, the poor will still be resentful if their is an intellectual thought-worker class above them.

All of this has me really questioning how and where I want to apply my skills for the remainder of my career.

<comment><USER6> Markets discover correct prices. Technology drives up the value of some humans and drives down the value of others. We are already seeing entities fight to prevent the market from discovering the correct price for many sorts of labor. Expect this to increase. The resources being expended on this doomed to fail enterprise should instead be focused on turning the sorts of people whose value gets driven down by tech into the sorts of people whose value gets driven up by tech.

In other words: it is the industrial revolution and the price of crops is dropping rapidly. Do you institute price controls or figure out how to retrain farmers? It is worth noting that we STILL have price controls on crops left over from the last paradigm shift. I'm not optimistic about our ability to meet this one.

<comment><USER7> The problem has nothing to do with preventing the market from pricing labor correctly. The problem is that the very nature of web services and scale creates huge lottery winners. The Instagram founders weren't 1,000 times better than other programmers. The market didn't price their labor there. They were at the right place at the right time and were a tiny bit better or more connected or whatever than their competitors. And because of that they effectively won a huge lottery. Everyone else was lucky if they got rent money.

<comment><USER8> The market did though. Ignore the raw values and consider the amounts taken into consideration by the economic actors, expected returns, which have a probability component. As the chance of payoff for startups is low, a high payoff may actually be required to accurately price the market to draw the requisite amount of labor.

<comment><USER7> "Ignore the raw values"

You can't ignore the raw values and just look at means, aggregates and weighted probability functions when the problem we're talking about is inequality.

"chance of payoff for startups is low ..."

What you're describing is entrepreneurial risk, not the price of labor.

<comment><USER8> You have to though, because when people are considering what career path to pursue, they aren't looking at one scenario, they are looking at the expected scenario. For a start-up this means lots of long hours at low pay with a slim chance at making it big.

If you lower that big payoff, start-up employment then becomes long hours at low pay for a slim chance at making very little. If this were the case, no on would work in start-ups. You can't affect the "slim chance" part of the equation because no one knows what ideas will be successful.

I am talking about the price of labor, but in aggregate not an individual. This is what sets the incentives for the labor and incentives, not any set nominal value that may be decreed objectively "correct", are what the market sets.

Both responses also seem to object along the lines of the Labor Theory of Value. Do you truly believe that the price of a product (wages or otherwise) should be directly tied to the amount of labor going into said product?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author's central point of tech leaders needing to be sensitive to the overriding social issue of the time (jobs) is an extremely important one. You can wax philosophical about "disruption" all you want, but keep in mind that in the common parlance, "disruption" is a negative word. People don't want their lives and livelihoods "disrupted" and to the extent that such disruption is inevitable, they need to feel like there is a clear path from there to stability. This is a central point of conservatism that seems to be lost on both sides of the political aisle today: to a point, stability is a good and desirable thing.

</comment><comment><USER10> _..because the main reason it's [jobs leaving US] happening is a radical increase in automation and robotics driven by the very set of technologies so fabulously enriching Silicon Valley's .01%_

Not so sure, I was involuntarily involved in shipping my own manufacturing engineering job along with many of our production staff's jobs overseas and it was not due to robotics and automation. We had a lot of automation in our US manufacturing but when production went overseas the robots went away and were replaced with manual labor. Most of our US jobs were higher qualified with operators and engineers working alongside automated equipment but our partners in Asia found that the robots were more expensive than manual workbenches and that it was hard to find operators and technicians that could keep up with automated manufacturing.

<comment><USER11> Quality dropped then due to manual workbenches. Why was this operation shipped overseas?

<comment><USER12> Presumably, due to cheaper cost of manual labor versus robots. However, that will change as manual labors demand higher wages, making robotic manufacturing much more feasible again.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> We're moving towards a future in which "working" will be an optional activity.

If you can get enough farms/factories producing the widgets of everyday life essentially for the sum of the input commodity costs, energy costs, and some small overhead (and the free market/technology relentlessly drives overhead towards 0), you wind up being able to take care of everyone-- but you don't take care of everyone with jobs. You take care of the people by enabling them to not worry about the basics of life. You remove the survival problem from the game, and allow people to choose between living little or thriving through voluntary creative pursuits. Some people will certainly focus on the creative pursuits, and generate wealth that enables them to thrive instead of merely survive. But I have a feeling that a bunch of people will focus on their tennis game instead (which is fine with me).

I don't think most people yet realize that this sort of model is coming into humanity's reach. Most people are looking for ways to recreate the solutions of the past. But that's a horrible idea-- the past had problems because the solutions of the past create problems. We're almost on the verge of a technological/humanistic revolution in which everything will be changeable. But things won't change if we keep recreating the past (or, more accurately, if our ancient social structures keep trying to maintain control of the population by merely tweaking what are actually completely obsolete mechanisms).

I hope we can overcome the status quo and turn this world into a true utopia, instead of letting it continue to become yet another of the countless possible dystopias that are outlined by science fiction and other speculative fiction, and which have constituted the dystopian reality that most people ever born here have had to live through.

I'm very optimistic-- I think the hard part is mostly behind us. The social power structures (the institutions that use money, violence, and killing to control people) have not routinely killed scientist and engineer society- changers for probably several hundred years, at least in the West. Money is still used to this day-- e.g. the VCs (and other financial industry and government people) hold the capital-- not some science/engineering/humanist foundation headed by scientists/engineers/humanists. I think it's possible to work within these constraints though, and to have a significant impact.

<comment><USER14> > If you can get enough farms/factories producing the widgets of everyday life > essentially for the sum of the input commodity costs, energy costs, and some > small overhead (and the free market/technology relentlessly drives overhead > towards 0), you wind up being able to take care of everyone-- but you don't > take care of everyone with jobs.

Congratulations, you're a communist! (This is basically the communist manifesto, if you squint.)

(So am I, this is not sarcastic. Always good to find more here on HN.)

<comment><USER15> I'd say that quote means he is a utopian. Communism describes a particular methodology (e.g. abolition of private property) that is theorized to lead to said utopia. I'm not so certain he is a proponent of Communist methods.

<comment><USER13> Yeah, I think the "Communist methods" that were tried in Eastern Europe and Asia are generally horrible ideas. And those methods are now tied up with the philosophy for better or worse. I def. don't think those methods work.

America provides a stable foundation upon which new experiments may be conducted. I know it's critical to take care of and fix America within the system as much as possible so that it can maintain its stability. But I think the real value of America involves it being that stable foundation upon which different people can try different ideas. America is not as wed-to/obsessed- with the past as much as many parts of the world-- thankfully. As breaking away from the past is critical to the advancement of humanity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> For those of us who haven't done so yet, reading the original report that this post is responding to will be informative.

America's New Oligarchs—Fwd.us and Silicon Valley's Shady 1 Percenters: [http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/14/america- s-n...](http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/14/america-s-new- oligarchs-fwd-us-and-silicon-valley-s-shady-1-percenters.html)

</comment><comment><USER12> What America, and the world needs, is not jobs, but the ability to be free of the constraint of needing to finding a mean to live. One way to reduce the constraint is to reduce the cost.

Some of the biggest cost for the average American household is housing(34.1%), food(12.4%), and transportation(17.6%). [http://visualeconomics.creditloan.com/how-the-average-us- con...](http://visualeconomics.creditloan.com/how-the-average-us-consumer- spends-their-paycheck/)

Housing is mostly a regulatory or social issue. People do not need lawns or lot of space. There is a tendency for people to buy the biggest house they can afford. It's also because of zoning restrictions that prevent high density construction, and developer's disinterest in cheap housing. High standard building code obviously contributes to the cost of engineering and developing housing, but they are solvable through technological development. There's also the problem of the network effect and the economy of scale of high density constructions leading to more people emigrating to the city, increasing the demand for housing.

Food, on the other hand, are easily leveraged with technological development, especially with GM crops. Growing meat in factories will be much more efficient and ethical than growing complete organisms like cows or chickens. Food wastage is a major problem. In the US, half of the food is wasted. If somebody could solve the problem of food wastage, that mean a corresponding reduction in the food budget of the average American and perhaps the world. [http://www.foodproductiondaily.com/Supply-Chain/Half-of- US-f...](http://www.foodproductiondaily.com/Supply-Chain/Half-of-US-food-goes- to-waste)

In the future of transportation, electric will be the primary mean of transportation except rockets as they are much more efficient than ICE and have a lower total cost of ownership. The question is merely about how fast can we diffuse the technology. Governments around the world can help by taxing carbon emitting transportations as opposed to subsidizing the electric startups, which could be seen as political favoritism. We could also drive the cost down by making public transportation better and widespread, accelerating the development of self driving cars, and reduce traffic rush hours by implementing congestion charges.

Overall, the toughest challenge is definitely housing, because housing appears to be least amicable to technological leverage. However, if you can make headway into the biggest cost to the average household, our need to work in order to live will be drastically reduced.

<comment><USER17> "...developer's disinterest in cheap housing"

Developers want to build profitable housing. Housing that is currently legal to build is less expensive and less risky than pursuing zoning changes. In any expensive metro, developers build exactly as much as legal to build, and use excess capital to pursue speculative re-/up-zonings of unbuildable land. That option is only available to the biggest homebuilders.

Developers were happy to build NYCs slum tenements when they weren't quantity- constrained.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What technology is enabling/causing when it comes to jobs is removing the place in society for uneducated/unintelligent people. So the solution would be to start ensuring proper education, aimed at primarily at science and engineering, for future generations. Unfortunately, even if that were broadly applied, the effects wouldn't be seen by and large until the better part of a generation had passed.

</comment><comment><USER19> The truth is that the VCs have created absolutely none, zero of the wealth in Silicon Valley. _All_ of the wealth was created by the workers who built these companies. If there is anyone other than workers at these companies who create wealth nowadays, it is the users. The users of Facebook are creating the content of Facebook for free. The people working on Facebook are the ones who create the platform allowing them to do this. You can say the same with Google and web content. Google found a way to take the decentralized web, with contentual links thought of by humans, and centralize it in one place. People thinking how to contextually connect millions of web pages do the work, and Google crawls and amalgamates that.

And as is said here, and is true, it costs almost nothing in capital costs to start a startup nowadays, create an app, get a cloud presence etc. Wages are the main cost. The people doing the work create the wealth, either paid (infrastructure) or even unpaid (free content, free contextual links etc.)

jwz is someone who "hit the jackpot" with his options, yet even he saw up close what happens ( [http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name- to-se...](http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/11/watch-a-vc-use-my-name-to-sell-a- con) ). I would quote the relevant part of his blog post here, but all nine paragraphs could be quoted, really.

The main point is, the programmers create the wealth making the platform, and perhaps the people working for free uploading content like pictures, or getting their web sites crawled. The money goes to the VCs, and a little bit of it to the CEO and top execs. Even those that hit the jackpot at a Netscape don't really hit the jackpot. And these are the programmers who slept under their desks and made the killer product. What about the guy in the Midwest?

Organized labor allowed an equitable distribution of wealth. VCs are leeching off the US government, the universities of China and India, the high tech workers here etc. How is some heir putting his millions in some fund creating wealth? We create the wealth. The heir is a leech. Like the kids in the "Born Rich" documentary.

New technology can mean less hours for workers, more pay for workers etc. Instead it goes to the aristocracy.

Modes of production change and so does the organization of labor. Workers in Ancient Rome went on strike, and I remember the strike waves in the US in the 1970s. Things change over the millenia, but these notions labor will stop organizing circa now are silly. It hasn't stopped after all these millenia. We are the programmers, system/network/database admins etc. creating this wealth of all the people in the world, and as jwz points out, even when we hit the jackpot we get screwed. Production is changing but there will be a revival of organization, education and then agitation. What happened before in history will happen again. It's to the oligarchs advantage to tell us all these millenia of struggle have finally stopped in the past few years. It hasn't. And we are the ones in the most key positions to do something. I will quote one sentence from that link. "When a VC tells you what's good for you, check your wallet, then count your fingers"

<comment><USER20> If the wealth generated by the workers in Silicon Valley required capital as an input, for instance to pay Silicon Valley workers (who are among the highest compensated in the world), or to build the world's largest data centers, or to maintain millions of dollars of inventory for the COGS of hardware projects, then it's not accurate or even particularly meaningful to point out that investors haven't created value.

<comment><USER21> I don't think the OP doesn't understand this, I think hes simply arguing that the person putting up the money to do amazing things should get less of a return than the person DOING amazing things. Unfortunately that is not the case at the moment.

<comment><USER22> Unfortunately how?

Amazing person doing amazing things has an option to not take the money and have 100% of the upside of his amazingness.

What people seem to forget is that it's about risk.

VC investing is high risk. For every 10 investments, 1 is wildly profitable and the other 9 are failures or low returns.

For that reason the ROI for that 1 out of 10 success cannot be "fair" by your metric - VC has to make enough to cover the 9 losses and some profit.

What the amazing person gets from the deal is knowing that even in the likely 90% case of failure, he won't sink in debt to fund his work.

<comment><USER23> Venture capital investing is not the only method by which to mitigate the risks inherent to innovation. The university system, via tenure and grants, does a good job of facilitating innovation by mitigating the risks that individual researchers take--even when big capital expenditures are required.

Other systems can be envisioned: for instance, a basic income or a negative income tax would remove much of the risk that individual programmers, inventors and tinkerers face when trying to pursue their visions.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook now denying access unless EU users opt-in to tracking - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/johnnyryan/status/993827965594202112 <comment><USER3> Things like this make me very, very angry! So many missteps over the years. So many things bungled. So many dark patterns to fool users. Yet, where is the mass exodus of employees from Facebook? If you're still working in any company that Facebook owns in the technology or privacy or legal front, don't you realize what harm you're contributing to? And you're still ok with that? Don't you have a choice?

I'm appalled that thousands of people still work for this company by choice.

<comment><USER4> Even though you never hear the counterpoint on HN, it's important to remember that FB's behaviors are not necessarily objectively bad - people can have different views on these things.

<comment><USER3> I agree that people can have different views on these things for various reasons. But I don't see how "FB's behaviors are not necessarily objectively bad", unless one considers only the profit motive as prime without giving any thought to other factors. Can you expand on that?

<comment><USER5> Well, for one thing, nothing is objectively good or bad. Value judgments come from people, and people have widely varying perspectives.

For another, the reason there's no mass exodus from Facebook is that Facebook users do not perceive the company as harming them. They perceive it as a useful service for staying in touch with friends and family. The utility it provides outweighs privacy concerns, because most people do not care about digital privacy. They care that no one is watching them go to the bathroom or have sex, but they do not care whether advertisers can target them based on aggregated information.

<comment><USER6> > _nothing is objectively good or bad_

Just pointing out that this assertion is unjustifiably presented as fact.

<comment><USER7> can you expand on this? How is good or bad not subjective?

<comment><USER6> I'm not really interested in expanding directly, but if you're curious, answering that question is an entire field of study called _ethics_.

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

<comment><USER7> Thank you. Seems like you associate objectivity with popularity. Like in if all/most people consider something good/evil then it is objectively good/evil. I wasn't aware of this view.

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

"... and that what is truly good or evil can be determined by examining what is commonly considered to be evil amongst all humans."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is clear that FB does not plan to be GDPR compliant [1]

[https://medium.com/@bozhobg/facebook-doesnt-plan-to-be- gdpr-...](https://medium.com/@bozhobg/facebook-doesnt-plan-to-be-gdpr- compliant-7f775231c497)

<comment><USER9> Denial of service is a perfectly valid route to GDPR compliance.

<comment><USER10> Only if the personal data is necessary to provide the service. And "my business model makes it necessary" doesn't cut it. Otherwise you need consent, but you can't DoS if it's denied.

EDIT: removed wrong link.

<comment><USER9> I can't deny you service if you don't agree to my terms of service? That seems to fundamentally break contract law.

<comment><USER10> I'd phrase it the other way around: you can't impose certain clauses in the contract (in this case, an obligation to consent to certain kinds of processing of personal data). Laws forbidding certain contract clauses are nothing new.

<comment><USER9> So I'm _required_ to develop a bad version of my product for the small subset who don't consent?

Sounds a ton like the Windows Reduced Edition fiasco all over again but at a much more massive scale - forcing by law the development of a product almost no one wants.

<comment><USER10> You don't need consent for the cases when processing personal data is necessary to provide a feature for the user. For example, if you have a "find my friends near me" feature, you don't have to ask for consent to use the user's location for that purpose.

So there's never a reason why the product must be worse for any particular subset of users.

When you need to ask consent is when you're trying to use personal data in ways that aren't directly related to providing features for that user. Like, for example, ads.

And you can't develop a bad version to "punish" users who don't consent to those unrelated uses of their personal data, because then the consent wouldn't be freely given.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Just after that Terms screen I got three real consent screens (including one about ads tracking and one about face recognition). I think this screen is only about the TOS update.

<comment><USER12> Weird. I only got the facial recognition screen and the "accept ToS or delete your account" one.

<comment><USER13> I guess the option 'continue to use the service without tracking' was too hard to implement technically. Or maybe nobody thought of that.

<comment><USER14> > I guess the option 'continue to use the service without tracking' was too > hard to implement technically.

Given how deeply tracking is built into their business and technical model, I wouldn't be surprised if it really _was_ too difficult to implement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Believe me folks, just delete facebook. I've been so much happier since I did.

<comment><USER16> What about memes pages? that's the only reason I keep my account. Also, I don't even see adds with and Ad-blocker. What are they going to try to sell me, a meme page subscription?

<comment><USER17> They aren't trying to sell you anything. They are selling you to others.

They are selling you to not just advertisers but selling your _profile_ to companies that are able to use your profiled information to make their own decisions about things.

It's not just about advertisements. Imagine if you didn't serve a single advertisement and instead bought profiling information about people. You could use that profile information to make business or political decisions regardless of whether an advertisement was sold.

You could influence politics because you "know" your target audience.

Say, for example, the US presidential election or Brexit. Those are just the most high profile places for your profile to be used without ever having presenting advertisement to you.

Net neutrality is another one.

<comment><USER18> I've been (down voted) for saying this before: it is not just ads that they are selling.

The big money is going to be selling your _profile_ to everyone, including insurers - health, auto, home, etc. Good luck getting a good deal when they know how much you drink and the food you eat.

To the government - eventually that guaranteed Social Security and 401k will be means tested, and it appears you're spending on luxuries that disqualify you.the possibilities are endless.

And I know for a fact that there are more than a few HN readers who work for companies mediating this data.

<comment><USER19> > Good luck getting a good deal when they know how much you drink and the food > you eat.

That would go both ways, right? With the extra information, insurance companies would be _more_ keen on insuring those who behave in a way that makes insurance payouts less likely.

<comment><USER18> You'd think, right?

I wouldn't hold my breath, though. My car insurance was set at about $900/year by my insurer for 5 or 6 years. In that time, they never once lowered the price, even though I had one or two tickets expire, had a perfect driving record during that time, and my car lost about half its value due to aging.

Only when I finally decided to get a new quote from my credit union - <USER2> $400 for the year (less than half I'd been paying for years) - did my current insurer _offer_ to reduce to the close to that price which is what I would have been paying had I been a new customer with my current record.

In other words, corporations will find a way to extract the maximum possible from everyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is it possible to delete my facebook account without consenting to usage of my data? So can I access the delete page without consent?

<comment><USER10> You can try: [https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account](https://www.facebook.com/help/delete_account)

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Interesting. It seems like after the senate hearings, Facebook is trying to communicate to its users that sending them your data is a necessary part of using their services.

<comment><USER22> Yup. Perhaps this will eventually be a screen for the user to choose:

Button 1: Agree and proceed. Button 2: Set up credit card billing. Button 3: Close account.

<comment><USER23> The Average Revenue per User can be found in their earnings report (linked above by ihumanable): [https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2018/Q1...](https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2018/Q1/Q1-2018-Earnings- Presentation-\(1\).pdf)

For US & Canada this was $86.65 in the last 4 quarters.

For Europe this was $34.95.

Keep in mind they likely don't target ads using just one person's data: accuracy can be improved by looking at the data of similar people, and looking at the data of friends and family. It isn't as simple as offering a $10/month plan to keep your privacy, because they want everyone's data.

"Your data is worthless, everyone's data is priceless."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> GDPR doesn't cover enough of the population using Facebook to warrant such a change to their business model where you can use the service without them using your data. They believe they are entrenched enough to just require this (and likely are for many EU residents).

<comment> purple-again I'm really curious to find out if the GDPR privacy stance (I'm American, not well traveled, and with no non american social circle) is like the 'no JavaScript' community. Vastly over represented in the tech community and not really representative of the population as a whole.

In other words, are 99% of European citizens going to just click through what ever annoying prompts they have to in order to get to their facebook (thats what I would do) or is there an actual widespread cultural difference in the EU that would stop large segments from agreeing to this.

<comment><USER25> There are _so_ many people undergoing GDPR workplace training at the moment that I think people _may_ stop and think

<comment><USER26> So many people or so many people in the web service tech industry that frequents HN?

<comment><USER25> To give you an idea, I work at a school. Every member of teaching staff all of admin, site-services and IT have had GDPR training. Getting consent for photos, for school trips, referral to outside agencies is a substantial issue, as is leaving student records on desks, keeping files with PII on encrypted sticks etc.

This is a school.

<comment><USER26> That's interesting. So now a student can come back and demand you delete their permission slip for a field trip?

<comment><USER25> Schools collect data under several of the possible lawful bases

[https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general- da...](https://ico.org.uk/for-organisations/guide-to-the-general-data- protection-regulation-gdpr/lawful-basis-for-processing/)

In the case of a permission slip - the school already holds lots of info that the school collects under the 'Public Task or 'Legal Obligation' bases.

The slip then contains additional information that is only collect because the kid is going on a trip, but is necessary for the trip. This would be collected under the Contract basis 'If you want to go on this trip, the following info is necessary'.

If the school also wants to take photos of the child on the trip, for example, then the parent will be asked for consent.

So to answer your question, the parent (assuming the child is under 16) could ask for:

1\. The photo consent to be removed - in which case the trip must continue

2\. The info pertaining to the school trip to be removed (in which case the kid would no longer be going on the trip)

But they cannot request the core data that the school holds to be removed, unless they take their kid to another school.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Mark's attitude during the Cambridge Analytica issue very well reflected the fact that: Users are not going to stop using FB, so why bother much about bending the company rules, instead bend the users.

</comment><comment><USER28> Do you consent to this cavity search? (Required to board plane)

<comment> star-castle That's basically how it works in the US, yes.

<comment><USER29> Not just the US. Most of the western world has incredibly invasive security theatre in airports and train stations now.

<comment><USER30> Huh? When I get on a train in Germany, I open the door and step inside. The train station is usually even simpler.

<comment><USER10> Same at least in Portugal, Spain, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France.

<comment><USER29> I should have been more clear in my comment, I was referring to international high speed trains. Including mandatory registration of passengers and keeping the data for X years. Presumably these passenger manifests are also exchanged with other countries.

But even regional services include oodles of cameras, including on the trains. There's tracking of passengers and their destination. There are heavily armed guards/police/soldiers in many European train stations.

<comment><USER30> Hmmm...those trains I step onto are (a) typically high speed and (b) quite often "international", though the concept really doesn't make much sense in the Schengen Area.

Are you talking about the Eurostar service from London (I remember the Waterloo station, though I hear it has moved to St. Pancras). That's the only one I can think of that fits your description.

The Thalys from Cologne to Paris via Belgium is/was also simple walk on walk off with normal train stations.

<comment><USER29> The Thalys has security theatre with luggage x-ray in several locations, including Paris and Antwerp. It's currently not active 24/7, but it will be soon.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I doubt they released this without consulting the relevant data agencies in the EU. And TBH there is nothing shocking here, just a confirmation of what everybody knows is already happening.

I 'm also in the EU and this makes perfect sense to me: if you can't accept seeing some ads then you can't use the free service. I highly doubt people are willing to pay $5 cash / quarter to use it, but i would like to see FB giving that option, just to see how miserably it fails.

<comment><USER32> According to GDPR, you cannot make access to your service require opt-in to tracking, unless your service very specifically cannot work in any way without tracking. And no, your business model not working because you cannot track users anymore _is not_ the same as your service not working. Find a better business model.

Facebook would still work just fine without the tracking, as proven by the fact that you can switch off targeted ads and everything still works fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm actually much more interested in what Google collects about me. At least for me, it's somewhat transparent that Facebook tries to slurp up all they can, but it's much less clear with Google, that seems to try to downplay that they are in fact also, heavily reliant on your data.

Does anyone know if Google has made any statements on this?

<comment><USER3> If you'd like to see what Google has about you, you can visit [https://www.google.com/settings/takeout](https://www.google.com/settings/takeout) (or search for "Google Takeout"). Google has maintained and updated its own solution to export data it has collected from you, the user.

While I do trust Google more than I trust Facebook, I also actively avoid giving information to Google (through various practices).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> If websites are going to ask for consent to tracking or deny access to the service only allowing to take the data, delete account and leave, the whole thing will become meaningless. Users will just learn to blindly accept everything, as this is a huge annoyance to them.

<comment><USER32> The GDPR does _not_ allow you to make access contingent on PII data collection, unless your service cannot possibly work without it.

<comment><USER35> I'm not sure why you keep spreading this FUD. The GDPR applies to all personal data, not just tracking data, and Facebook is useless without your personal data. IOW, FB can make access contingent upon agreeing to data collection.

<comment><USER36> From my understanding user will have to consent both to personal and tracking data separately. So yes, users will agree to sharing the personal data - (name, age, gender etc), as this is essential for the service, in this case social network, to work. However, tracking data for ad purposes will need separate consent as this data is not essential for the service to work. Otherwise GDPR would be another dead letter, wouldn't it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> I'm pretty sure that's illegal under GDPR.

<comment> star-castle what? seriously? Do EU citizens have some kind of legal right to Facebook access, now? It's illegal for Facebook to not serve people they can't sell to advertisers?

I'd love it if Facebook were nationalized (or destroyed), but none of the coverage of the GDPR made it sound like it was going in that direction. I thought it was just another stupid "click here to acknowledge our cookies" rule that was going to spam up the internet.

<comment><USER38> There is no legal right to Facebook, but if Facebook wants to do business here, it has to abide by our rules. And our rules are very simple, you cannot deny service because the user doesn't allow tracking if tracking is not necessary for your service to work. And it isn't in this case, it's only necessary to deliver higher paying ads.

Since they are being selective on the users they accept based on being tracked, they are now on track for another EU fine.

<comment><USER39> It's disconcerting to me that under the GDPR, online businesses appear to be losing the ability to deny services to a user who knowingly, and with clear consent, chooses to take personal responsibility over the data they provide to said businesses.

Regardless of whether this is for the "greater good", this is deeply unsettling territory.

<comment><USER40> You're not allow to operate that way in most other businesses anyway. You can't sell leaded paint, even if clearly marked. You can't sell unsafe cars, even if you tell people that even low speed impacts will kill them.

There's a ton of stuff you can't do, even with clear consent, because otherwise people who lack the means to understand the compromises or afford the safer choices will suffer.

<comment><USER41> Those are safety/environmental issues. Showing you ads based on your preferences is not.

<comment><USER40> You could easily argue that tracking users behaviour is a safety issue. But fair enough, how about the loan business, you aren't allowed to charge overly high interest on loans. That's neither a safety or environmental issue.

<comment><USER39> Predatory interest rates frankly don't concern or particularly bother me. I think, for me, that only becomes a point of concern if a person is simply mentally unfit to make such decisions for themselves. In such cases the general guidance that someone else deemed fit should be responsible for that person's decisions applies, which goes back to the point you made earlier.

<comment><USER42> Even when those usurious, predatory rates are disproportionately charged to poorer people, who can afford to bear them less? Because that's how it works: price discrimination against the people least able to bear it.

But, hey. Why should I care, if _I 'm_ not getting charged those rates, right?

<comment><USER39> Given that a significant component to the determination of interest rates is risk, I don't think one could reasonably expect a non-public system of lending to operate any other way.

We're getting pretty off-topic though, so if you'd like to talk more, go ahead and shoot me an email (r at ovao dot la).

<comment><USER42> Risk management and predation are _categorically_ different things. If that's not an intuitively obvious notion, I'm not sure what more dialogue will accomplish.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I wonder how this will co-exist with

a) Tracking non-facebook users via Facebook icons on web pages, and

b) Storing the information of non-users such as photos other people take, phone books other people upload, etc?

</comment><comment><USER9> With how insanely in depth some of the restrictions are, I'll honestly be surprised if this isn't the route a lot of companies end up taking to GDPR compliance.

<comment><USER32> You mean completely flouting the regulations and muddying the waters by putting up ToS compliance popups that don't have anything to do with GDPR, in order to fool their users?

<comment><USER9> I simply mean having a contract indemnifying the company against GDPR, e.g. the user giving consent, to simply use the site.

Same as the cookie situation Europe has, but more so.

<comment><USER32> That is very explicitly not allowed by the GDPR. You cannot make access to your service contingent on opting in. The consent has to be given freely, otherwise FB will be in violation of the regulation.

Consent must also be given explicitly, you cannot have a pre-checked "yes" checkbox or an "accept and continue" button.

Consent can also be given in a legally binding contract. A website ToS is very much _not_ able to override the GDPR.

<comment><USER9> So you're saying I'm required to develop two separate versions of my product? One for the users I can actually make money off and another for people who opt to get my product for free against my will?

<comment><USER32> You cannot base your business model on violating the privacy of EU citizens. That's just too bad, you'll have to find a non-scumbag way to fund your endeavors. You can absolutely still make money off ads, but you cannot target them based on personal information.

You are of course perfectly in your right to block all EU IP ranges, if you think that's a better solution, although cutting off 500 million potential customers is a bit harsh.

In short, EU citizens have absolutely no obligation to support your flawed business model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Hopefully it will encourage some people to ditch FB.

<comment><USER45> > Hopefully it will encourage some people to ditch FB.

I know my reasons for wanting to ditch FB personally (I'm about 50/50 on that), but I'm curious as to your reasons for wanting others to dump it.

<comment><USER44> There was a good article about it, but Observer swallowed it.

Here is what remained: [https://web.archive.org/web/20151011192709/http://observer.c...](https://web.archive.org/web/20151011192709/http://observer.com/2011/12/in- which-eben-moglen-like-legit-yells-at-me-for-being-on-facebook/)

Basically, anyone using it, encourages more people to use it, thus causing further damage.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> So basically Facebook is saying that if we can't make money from you, you can't have an account.

<comment><USER47> Seems perfectly reasonable, doesn't it?

<comment><USER34> No, facebook desperately needs to keep users and keep tracking them, so they are abusing network effect monopoly into giving people a choice either accept any tracking facebook wants or lose all the connections and all the time you invested into the platform. Which is not much of a choice, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> If that means they will no longer track me if I'm not a Facebook user, I'm all for it!

</comment><comment><USER49> Facebook knows it is in the wrong. Facebook announced last year they weren't going to use Ireland as part of its tax dodging scheme. Otherwise GPDR rulings could just extract global money out of the Ireland tax funnel.

</comment><comment><USER50> Whats behind that Options link?

</comment><comment><USER13> Blackmail isn't opt-in.

</comment><comment><USER51> IIRC, the GDPR is very explicit about what constitutes valid consent, so things like pre-checked check-boxes aren't valid.

Is "consent" gained by a screen with only an "I agree" button even kosher by it?

<comment><USER52> It may be that FB's lawyers come at it with a more American view whereby it's legal if it complies with the letter of the law. I suspect the Euro legal system tends to build a fence around the Torah, so to speak.

<comment><USER53> It doesn't seem to comply with the letter of the law though, based on the requirement of "freely given, non-conditional consent".

<comment><USER47> What does it even mean to be conditional? Is the EU saying that FB has to provide their service to Europeans? Does the EU also require that businesses sell their services and products at a loss? Doesn't FB have some right to deny usage of their service to those who choose not to abide by FB's policies? Whether it's disapproval of tracking or behavior violations, it seems like FB should be able to say they don't want to provide their service to particular individuals.

<comment><USER54> They can choose to not provide service to EU citizens. If they provide service to EU citizens, then with that comes limitations on what rights the have under EU law to pick and choose which EU citizens they want to provide service to.

Nobody is forcing them to serve the EU market.

<comment><USER32> Their choices are to either be GDPR-complient, or to completely bar _all_ EU users from accessing Facebook. They cannot use tracking opt-in as a requirement for access.

<comment><USER55> American here; I just don't quite understand the premise. "Here is what you are giving us, and here is what you're getting in return" seems perfectly legit to me. If this interpretation of the law is correct, then the government is essentially saying the "in return" portion has to be eliminated. Which seems to be against the idea of trade.

<comment><USER32> One of the points of the GDPR is that you cannot make usage of your service contingent on giving up your privacy, unless your service very specifically requires the user to give up personal details in order to it to even function.

Strava is a good example, it does not work without GPS position, otherwise it cannot track your bike routes.

But Facebook does not require tracking to work. It does not require you to give them any personal details at all in order to work. It would work just fine even if everyone gave them fake emails, phone numbers, birth dates and even fake names. Thus they cannot make giving up privacy a requirement for using their service.

Besides that, this ToS update thing is absolutely _not_ GDPR compliant. It does not list the things personal data will be used for. It hides the opt-out (to the face tracking) behind a dark pattern small "options" text and makes the default action opt-in. The list goes on.

This is simply an effort from FB to muddy the waters and sow doubt about opt- in and GDPR consequences.

They _will_ have to provide _proper_ GDPR opt-in screens come the 25th, or they will be fined for non-compliance.

<comment><USER55> Thank you for the clarification. That makes sense, although I'm not 100% sure I agree that it doesn't need the information to function. It could be de- identified for the individual, sure. But to actually use the service you need to connect with others, whose identities you must know something about. By following pages or celebrities or whatever you indicate that you are interested in their subject material. So in order to properly use the application you must give up something.

<comment><USER32> Yes, but clicking "like" on a celebrity's FB page is not personally identifiable information. You cannot use to it discover the person's identity.

To connect to other users on a service, I don't need to know any personal details about them, only their chosen username, which can be completely random and have no relation to their identity.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Creds – manage API keys with GPG on the command line - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/joemiller/creds <comment><USER2> Nice, must have been a fun project! I'm not sure, though, whether it adds enough distinct functionality to warrant a project?

Lazy version:

        $ encfs $HOME/Dropbox/creds $HOME/.creds
        $ cat >~/bin/creds <<<'EOF'
        #!/bin/sh

        $CREDS=$HOME/.creds/$2.sh

        case "$1" in
        add|edit)
            $EDITOR $CREDS
            [ -f $CREDS ] && chmod +x $CREDS
            ;;
        list)
            echo $HOME/.creds/*.sh \
                | xargs -I '{}' -n1 basename {} .sh \
                | less -SRFX
            ;;
        esac
        EOF
        $ chmod +x ~/bin/creds

EDIT: lessen <pre> width

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems to be the same functionality that pass[0] offers.

[0] [https://www.passwordstore.org/](https://www.passwordstore.org/)

<comment><USER4> pass doesn't have a command to directly source contents of a stored password into shell variables. But it would be great to bring that functionality from this tool into pass.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Also consider [https://github.com/StackExchange/blackbox](https://github.com/StackExchange/blackbox)

</comment><comment><USER6> Dopesauce. I always welcome a new command line tool - it's the most effective place to do things.

</comment><comment><USER7> I wish there was an alternative to GPG or at least some bare-minimum implementation with a decent API. The only "libraries" are wrappers on top of the gpg executable.

Maybe there is an alternative that I don't know of?

<comment><USER2> Library? Do you mean something like gpgme?

[https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gpgme/](https://www.gnupg.org/documentation/manuals/gpgme/)

<comment><USER8> GPGME is a wrapper on top of the GPG executable. It also has a horrendous API. I'm still currently fighting with it just to simply encrypt/decrypt a tarball going to S3. It's really badly designed.

<comment><USER7> I know exactly what you are going though.

Don't look at the source code of GPG, it will give you nightmares.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Similar tool that use asymmetric GPG encryption: [https://github.com/boussouira/bash-pass](https://github.com/boussouira/bash- pass)</comment>


Ask HN: Have we passed the tipping point? - <AUTHOR>

Given the recent leaks that we have been graciously provided with by Edward Snowden, do you feel we have past a tipping point over the past few days?
Is it all hype that will vanish within a few days, or are you seriously considering one of the following?
- reducing usage of social/cloud services
- completely removing sensitive accounts (email) off third-party services
- migrating to self-hosted solutions rather than cloud-based providers
- increasing usage of encryption in day-to-day activity
I know some people who are deeply disturbed over the recent news, and I'm curious to try to gauge the feeling amongst the HN crowd. Feel free to share you thoughts and emotions regarding the state of the free web. <comment><USER2> A "tipping point" with respect to the public-at-large? I doubt it. I'd like it if it were, but I don't think enough people care. I expect (sadly) for the buzz about this story to have completely disappeared off the radar of mainstream media by next week, and to die down even online shortly afterwards - except among extreme civil libertarian types and people who _always_ get worked up over this stuff.

On a personal level, however, I'd say the answer is "yes". It won't be an overnight thing, and I can't say I'm going to abandon Gmail, G+, Facebook, etc. _completely_ , but I will be making changes in how I manage certain things. Probably the most significant will be using pushing for more use of encryption and services like Tor and I2P, both for myself and among my friends and acquaintances.

One of my goals is to start a new cypherpunk / crypto-anarchist meetup / group in the Raleigh / Durham area, and start doing things like offering sessions / classes to the public on "How to use Tor" and "How to use I2P" and "How to use PGP" etc. along with political advocacy.

</comment><comment><USER3> For some people, probably. It looks like the programs are supported by a majority of the population, however, even with the violations of privacy. Apparently nobody cares about privacy anymore, or they're so terrified of terrorists they're willing to hand over their rights.

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/most-americans- suppor...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/most-americans-support-nsa- tracking-phone-records-prioritize-investigations-over- privacy/2013/06/10/51e721d6-d204-11e2-9f1a-1a7cdee20287_story.html)</comment>


Auto Design Price - <AUTHOR> http://www.autodesignprice.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Auto Design Price new car reviews and car buying resources help you make informed decisions and to help you to make a smart purchase</comment>


What if Bitcoin had existed in the 1990s? - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2014/3/21/5534314/what-bitcoin-would-be-like-in-the-90s-video <comment><USER2> Unfortunately the idea of PKI wasn't in the public domain until the mid 90s, so bitcoin would not have been possible before that time.</comment>


Sex differences in personality traits in Asian elephants - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2019-03-sex-differences-personality-traits-asian.html <comment><USER2> well,I click the link because I didn't see the word:elephants.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find time? - <AUTHOR> I'm a on 9-5 job , 9:30 to 6 to be accurate! and I've been trying hard to work on my side projects, I'm really ambitious about them and i try to , at least , do a bit of work everyday.
In the mean time, I really like to learn and play with some new stuff, Improve my skills and actually feel I'm getting a better programmer. But obviously the side project I'm working on is a priority for me now.
But its frustrating , I don't have enough energy, when i get home, at best i can do 1 hour or so, which is a progress toward my goals, but very slow.
How do you find time to work on your ideas or side projects ? How you manage your time to learn new stuff ? <comment><USER2> I outsource the parts I don't want to work on.

<comment><AUTHOR> do you use any freelancing platform ? or do you do it locally ? For example for the front end ( design + responsive ), where i lack the skills and its the most time consuming part for me, it can be tricky to find right person for the job.

<comment><USER2> Right now I'm just testing out conversions. Seems to be going ok. I'm kind of a just good enough type. so, I'm focused on marketing to desktop users first. I have a response site but it's pretty simple. 1. bought responsive landing page for $13 with a button to click and google ads/analytics to test whether there is some demand. plus a wufoo form as the second page to collect leads.</comment></comment></comment>


Apple introduces new version of the most popular iPad starting at $329 - <AUTHOR> https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/09/apple-introduces-new-version-of-the-most-popular-ipad-starting-at-329/ <comment><USER2> It's pretty bizarre to release a new iPad supporting only the 1st generation Apple Pencil, no?

With the new iPad Pros, I would have assumed Apple was going all-in with the 2nd gen Pencil. But now both are supported by current iPad products, with the "most recent" iPad only supporting the 1st gen Pencil. So both Pencil models will be in stock, and only one will work with each type of iPad.

Does anyone else find that unusually confusing for Apple's product lineup? I wonder what the technical difference is that prevents using 2nd gen Pencils at the same price point (I assume it is a cost reason). Surely just including the magnetic charging apparatus in the new iPad would have been cheaper than maintaining two SKUs - unless they had a lot of leftover 1st Gen Pencils to sell.

<comment><USER3> The iPad Air released earlier this year also only supports the 1st gen pencil.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Looks like a nice mid-point with some of the pro features (keyboard, pencil) and it rounds out the line. They really do seem to be competing with the Surface Pro here. I find the two products fascinating (disclaimer I've got an iPad 9.7, iPad Pro 10.5, Surface Book, Surface Pro 4, and Surface Pro 6).

My use cases are "on the go, notes and and apps", this tends to be an iPad, and "portable office with some development" this tends to be a Surface Pro. I take pictures with my iPad and mark them up in Notability. The simple AR-Kit measuring apps are useful here as well. When I want a terminal / X session or multiple displays I use the Surface Pro. While I have the stylus for both, I sketch more on the iPad than the Surface even though in some ways the Surface drawing experience is better. I have yet to achieve the rapid fluidity they show on stage with either device, and I drew the line and buying a Surface Studio (mostly I do e-cad in my spare time with some mechanical for 3D printing).

The odd man out here is my Android phone. I would consider a cellular radio/blob that could pair with my iPad and provide simple phone/text service. If the Apple Watch is the wrist screen, it would be the 'ear screen' for me. I would want it to work independently for calls/text so I could just have it for contact, but it doesn't need the entire app ecosystem like the iPad has. Not sure if I'll see anything like that.

And I'm still looking for a sketch app that is something between Visio, Harvard Graphics, Sketchpad, and Solidworks. Maybe something like Sketchup with a better finger interface to go with the stylus. Or perhaps I just need to sit still and put in 10 - 20 hrs of solid work on one of them to get more proficient :-)

</comment><comment><USER5> Why is apple so tight with storage? 32gb-128gb is laughable even for 5 years ago.

</comment><comment><USER6> Also worth mentioning is that the 64-bit 9.7" 2048x1536 32GB iPad with Apple Pencil support has been selling at WalMart for $249 for almost a year now. It makes a good web terminal as well as sketch pad. I've found it convenient and useful for data consuming and light activities such as news reading, online classes, and sketching out political cartoons for my blog.</comment>


Electronic Arts named the worst company in America – again - <AUTHOR> http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/plugged-in/electronic-arts-named-worst-company-america-again-170932002.html

<comment><USER2> EA COO reply is quite epic, but definitely has its points <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5523060>

<comment><USER3> That is satire, not an actual response from Peter Moore, although it's not far off from his actual response to the tournament which can be found here: <http://www.ea.com/news/we-can-do-better>

I would have had a lot of respect for him if he actually released that satirical response although it would not have been very professional. The popular summary of his actual letter is "EA blames worst company win on homophobia"</comment></comment>


How expensive is TLS to deploy? - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/how-expensive-is-crypto-anyway/amp/?__twitter_impression=true <comment><USER2> Archived Link if it's still down [https://web.archive.org/web/20171228201620/https://blog.clou...](https://web.archive.org/web/20171228201620/https://blog.cloudflare.com/how- expensive-is-crypto-anyway/amp/?__twitter_impression=true)</comment>


Password Rant: password policies from a user's perspective - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQ7DBG3ISRY

<comment><AUTHOR> Although this video is meant for entertainment (and contains a lot of fluff), it does a great job of highlighting the problems users encounter when dealing with passwords.</comment>


Melbourne-based CI/CD platform Buildkite gets $28M AUD Series A - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/18/melbourne-based-ci-cd-platform-buildkite-gets-28-million-aud-series-a-led-by-openview/ <comment><USER2> Cool to see some Aussies getting some funding. But they should use that seed funding to pack the shit up and get the hell out of Aus. Else their software should be assumed to be compromised. Cheers Aussie gov for your shit laws allowing you to force backdoor and legally preventing employees or companies from disclosing it. It sucks. You literally can't trust any software from Aus anymore.

<comment><USER3> As someone who has either written, or reviewed every single line of code in Buildkite, I can tell you that there is no backdoor. If anything, we are constantly asking ourselves "how can we protect the customer from us in the unlikely event we were compromised". Also, with how modern software delivery works, it's impossible for an employee to make a change without someone noticing.</comment></comment>


Thoughts on C++ Graphics proposal - <AUTHOR> https://www.jeremyong.com/c++/graphics/2018/11/05/thoughs-on-the-cpp-graphics-proposal.html <comment><USER2> Agreed. Though everyone has said that any graphics API in C++ would be just for pedagogical and prototyping purposes, not to be used as a basis for serious work.</comment>


Getting Banned from Google AdWords - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@hhuuggoo/getting-banned-from-google-adwords-518d59d881c9 <comment><USER2> I don't really get the banned for life stuff. Especially with the complete lack of support.</comment>


Notes from the No Lone Zone - A computer scientist looks at ICBM security. - <AUTHOR> http://www.crypto.com/blog/titans/

<comment><USER2> Cool place. I visited it around 2000.

The actual silo is sealed in with glass because it's contaminated with rocket fuel. You can look into the silo from various levels but you can't enter. Apparently one drop of the fuel they used will penetrate your flesh and start destroying bone. They have photos of the Air Force guys in their "Rocket Fuel Handler's Outfit".

Normally I'm a big fan of Matt Blaze. But it kind of pisses me off that he implies that the museum needs to be justified on some liberal-arts, big picture basis:

        It's worth asking whether displaying this terrible artifact of our 40 years
         on the edge of oblivion for all to see really makes good sense.

I hate this crap. First of all, we are still just as much "on the edge of oblivion". Russia and now China have plenty of nukes pointed at us. We just don't talk about it as much.

Second, I don't consider it a "terrible artifact". It's an awesome engineering project. And it helped preserve the freedoms we have today.

Third, and most importantly, I don't give a fuck if there's some point or purpose to the place, or if it makes anyone contemplate anything. I'm an engineer and a hacker; as a teenager I dreamed of getting into one of these silos; I appreciate the effort that went into building this amazing thing, and I'm very grateful to the people who have preserved it.

To me, each airman who served here, and each volunteer who helps with the museum is worth 1000 of Barbara Kingsolver and her kind.

<comment><USER3> It's an awesome engineering project whose purpose is to kill tens of millions of people. This stuff has been technical catnip to several generations of scientists and engineers, but I think it's perfectly legitimate to step back and consider the moral element, even in a geeky article.

<comment><USER4> > It's an awesome engineering project whose purpose is to kill tens of > millions of people.

And your alternative is ....

> This stuff has been technical catnip to several generations of scientists > and engineers, but I think it's perfectly legitimate to step back and > consider the moral element

Yes, let's consider the moral element. You clearly think that this was wrong, so what was correct?

Note that these weapons worked exactly as intended. They were never used. Your alternative has to do at least as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> At the risk of being shouted at for recommending my own book, The Geek Atlas. This location is in there, as are two nuclear bunkers (one in the US where Congress would have hidden, and one in the UK where the Prime Minister would have gone). And there are other significant nuclear sites for people who are interested such as the spot where the Trinity Test was performed: <http://geekatlas.com/>.

</comment><comment><USER6> It is crazy to think how advanced these bases were by 1960s' standards and even crazier to think we didn't blow each other up! It's also kinda sad that so many of the silos fell into disrepair or were actively deconstructed. Hopefully I'll get a chance to visit one before they are all gone, if only to relive a small part of GoldenEye.

</comment><comment><USER7> My earliest introduction to the "two man policy" was the haunting opening scene of 'WarGames'. "Turn your key, sir."

<comment><USER8> Could anyone recommend any good movies dealing with nuclear war, or the threat thereof? I've always been fascinated by the subject.

<comment><USER9> Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

<http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057012/></comment></comment></comment>


Using Webserver Access Logs as a Database Storage System - <AUTHOR> https://ma.ttias.be/using-webserver-access-logs-as-a-database-storage-system/?hn

<comment><USER2> Why not just log directly to a scan_results.log file from your PHP script? Then you avoid the overhead of a database, but also avoid all the hackery involved in an extraction operation on your web server log files.</comment>


Apple Wins Patents for Inductive Charging, Scrolling, Rotating, Resizing - <AUTHOR> http://www.patentlyapple.com/patently-apple/2012/06/apple-wins-patents-for-inductive-charging-ios-scrolling-rotating-resizing-on-displays.html

<comment><USER2> Inductive charging sounds cool. I'm kind of over my stupid connectors breaking, or my kittens chewing them to smithereens.</comment>