Twitter's multi-million dollar US election pitch to RT - <AUTHOR> https://www.rt.com/news/407919-twitter-multi-million-offer-rt/ <comment><USER2> I know RT is not very trustworthy, but let me get this straight - Twitter was inviting RT to spend advertising budget during the US elections, like any other ad sales team would do (Facebook, Google etc.). Twitter got the budget, and RT started making ads on Twitter. Probably controversial, since you want to maximise CTRs etc. Then Trump won. Then everyone started wondering. Then they pinpointed Russian media for making social media ads during the elections. And now Twitter banned RT ads to get the "problem" off their shoulders. Isn't this hysteria? Aren't we putting too much trust that social media ads can really sway the election that much? Because it seems, as other commenters here pointed out, ads weren't as big of a problem as bots and fake accounts spreading propaganda tweets. Even more, how much respondents say that their voting decision was made because of social media ads or social media posts?

<comment><USER3> > _And now Twitter banned RT ads to get the "problem" off their shoulders. > Isn't this hysteria?_

I can't help but feel everyone in Silicon Valley is desperate to believe every narrative about the election except the version where Trump wins because he was the only one promising prosperity to people not located in major cities.

<comment><USER4> Your comment ties directly to the Democrat election strategy. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClytGvP_Qe4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClytGvP_Qe4)

"For every blue collar democrat we will lose in Western PA, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs of Philadelphia." ~Chuck Schumer

<comment><USER5> Philadelphia is quickly gentrifying and this has caused massive lines in voting districts in the recently gentrified neighborhoods. Where voting lines used to be 15 minutes long they are now 2+ hours. We've been trying to get them to split the voting district into two here in Northern Liberties for a while but apparently it's falling on deaf ears. These are by the way "well-to- do" young professionals so it's in the interest of both Republicans and Democrats to fix this.

Meanwhile 10 minutes away at Temple University you have 2 hour lines at polling close. If the dems want to win PA they need to get their voting district shit together in the city.

It would not have made much off a difference. The spread in the entire state was about 90k but when I saw the lines at the universities it made me wonder about the entire state.

I used to live in the suburbs of Philadelphia in a new "rich" neighborhood and the lines there are usually 15-30 minutes. Granted the population there doesn't fluctuate much.

<comment><USER6> This is the most common form of voter suppression in the US and we're doing absolutely nothing about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I was surprised when Jack said they'd be returning ad money from RT/Sputnik, because that's not really the election influence problem they have.

Political discussions on Twitter are flooded by obvious bot/content farm accounts like "BaldEagleFreedom983428" shitposting memes how Hillary bought CNN to take away your gunflags. Ban this crap.

<comment><USER8> Yeah but Reddit and Twitter both have realized their financial well-being depends on Monthly Active Users, and bots look like active users. They simply threw ethics away and gun straight for the capital.

The only reason Twitter did this was to make it look like they were doing _something_ to improve the platform. Twitter won't notice $2M from their balance sheets if it bumps their stock price a few cents, but they will notice the dollars off their stock price when they decide to stop lying about how much traffic from human beings they're actually servicing vs the massive bot infestation.

<comment><USER9> Bots cost them money for zero direct benefit so they do hurt profitability.

<comment><USER10> Twitter is under immense pressure to show a growing user base. Getting rid of the bots would likely cause month-on-month figures to actually fall, which would presumably be a problem.

<comment><USER11> They recently had a recalculation of MAU due to a misreporting -- users that used to have organic posts, but were now only sending out pre-scheduled messages, like ghosts in the machine.

How they handled that was to back-date all the reporting. Presumably bot traffic does not generate any additional advertising value, so re-fitting the number of MAU would increase the average ad reach/user value proposition. The importance is the trend, not necessarily the overall level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I'm not sure I see what RT is attempting to say about Twitter here. That they offered them promoted content, ad-buy discounts, custom emojis, etc, in exchange for an ad-buy of a certain amount. This doesn't seem like anything other than a partnership of some kind.

It doesn't say anything that RT should favour one candidate over another, in fact the presentation specifically promotes unbiased content and news.

<comment><USER13> The 'unbiased' bit in the Twitter presentation is bullshit, how can they determine how an organisation is going to use this system? It's wishful thinking at best.

Otherwise, to be honest I'm with you. Suppose it was revealed Twitter had offered the same deal to Fox News, CNN, PBS, the BBC, etc. In fact they probably did.

Is it now illegal or immoral for US businesses to deal with RT? Should US advertisers be banned from working with RT? US media organizations? US telecoms companies? Maybe they should be, but it certainly wasn't back then. We all know RT is a Kremlin propaganda tool, if we want to penalise RT then lets do that directly and explicitly and not blame Twitter for just being Twitter.

Now if subsequently Twitter has decided that RT violated Twitter's terms of service, that's a different issues, but you can't expect Twitter to know they're going to do that beforehand, or in general pre-emptively decide who they will or won't accept on the platform like that.

Edit: See emodenrockt's reply below. Couldn't agree more. RT are toxic, but we can't afford to twist our deomocratic and press freedoms in knots over them.

<comment><USER14> Personally I think we probably shouldn't throw out our fundamental protections of the press because we don't like RT's angle, especially when you consider that even if you're a liberal who hates RT you can be sure they'll turn around and use whatever precedent is set against left-leaning sources too. We're already seeing this with the hysteria about fake news being taken out on sources like Naked Capitalism and Truthout.

<comment><USER15> being a liberal doesn't have anything to do with it. RT is state propaganda of a dictatorship, not some legitimate news source with a left or right bias.

<comment><USER14> It is a legitimate news source though. If you're sorting news sources into all-good and all-bad buckets and uncritically believing or disbelieving everything they print then you're going to end up with a distorted view.

<comment><USER15> I have grown up in a communist totalitarian state and possibly as a result of that always consumed media with a critical attitude. There are no sources in the all-good bucket. The all-bad bucket is full of RT, Breitbart and other sources, because they have only one purpose. And that purpose is to further the agenda of their masters, not to inform their audience. That is the reason why it is not a legitimate news source.

<comment><USER16> I come from same background and have opposite opinion to yours. So you can see this is all personal biases and saying RT is not legitimate news is comparable to me saying CNN is state propaganda of US. Propaganda, by the way, is a tool used by all governments, not just Russia and North Korea but also US, China and so on. All have their own propaganda they are trying to push which favors their interests.

<comment><USER15> "I come from same background and have opposite opinion to yours. So you can see this is all personal biases" This is a nice example of a non sequitur.

"saying RT is not legitimate news is comparable to me saying CNN is state propaganda of US" It is comparable, so let's compare - both are statements, one of them is true and one of them is false. RT is not legitimate news, because made up stories are not news. CNN is not state propaganda of the US, because - as far as I know, please do correct me if I am wrong - it is not a state-owned, state-run, state-financed news channel. There is no US institution that sets the agenda of the CNN. Also, my impression from the American media landscape is that the media do shovel loads of (well deserved) abuse on president Trump - state propaganda would not allow that.

"Propaganda, by the way, is a tool used by all governments" Yes, but not all governments have the same legitimacy and the same aims. If you are looking for an American equivalent of RT, you won't find one; the closest you get is probably Voice of America, Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, which were instrumental for Eastern European dissent during the Cold War, but are not very relevant anymore.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Twitter's response (kind of):

>Asked to respond, a Twitter spokesperson said via email that the company would not comment "on our private conversations with any advertiser, even a former advertiser." A source familiar with the company's dealings with RT said: "These kinds of conversations are industry standard pitching for any potential advertiser. It's the job of any ad sales team to aggressively recruit and retain clients, and sometimes they use strong language in order to do so." The spokesperson also noted that only "a very small slice" of Twitter's communications with RT was being shown, adding that the Russian network's "motivations may not be full transparency of our advertising relationship."

[https://www.yahoo.com/news/twitter-cracks-ads-russian- news-s...](https://www.yahoo.com/news/twitter-cracks-ads-russian-news-sites- rt-sputnik-193434032.html)

</comment><comment><USER18> RT know how to troll.

Anyone who's visited, or is a resident of London recently might have noticed these ads on the tube or in the stations

[http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/rt-adverts-london- mout...](http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/rt-adverts-london-mouthpiece- tom-watson_uk_59e8615de4b0d0e4fe6d4ba6)

<comment><USER19> Propaganda has got a lot more interesting with the growth of the private sector.

<comment><USER10> RT isn't really private; it's a non-profit funded by the Russian state: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_(TV_network)#Foundation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RT_\(TV_network\)#Foundation)

<comment><USER4> Am I mistaken in understanding that BBC is similarly tied to the UK government?

<comment><USER10> The BBC is funded by a government-mandated tax, but has editorial independence. RT is explicitly a propaganda organ; its editor in chief has said as much. It's also aimed at foreign markets. It's more similar to VOA than the BBC.

<comment><USER20> Indeed, the BBC are of course totally editorially independent of the people who decide whether they continue to exist and at what scale. Also, I have a bridge in Westminster to sell you. (It's fairly well known here that they tend to be a mouthpiece of the Establishment and whichever party's currently in power.)

<comment><USER21> No it isn't. They are arguably currently at odds with the Conservative government over a range of issues. Do you know how strict the BBC's editorial guidelines are and the procedures they have in place to try and ensure impartiality?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The Kremlin is nothing if not reliably vindictive to those that it believes has crossed it.

Twitter better hope it has its story straight (and the paper shredders working overtime) because this looks to me like Putin's minions have been ordered to go right for Twitter's jugular.

I do hate to say this too, but maybe the Kremlin mouthpiece has a point here: many media organisations use ad spending to try to crowbar themselves into election narratives. The difference in the US is the sheer scale of it compared to most western nations that have strict limits on election spending, both domestic and especially foreign.

The US has limits of a sort but they're so huge and so porous this sort of thing was practically inevitable.

<comment><USER23> _> Twitter better hope it has its story straight (and the paper shredders working overtime) because this looks to me like Putin's minions have been ordered to go right for Twitter's jugular._

But for what purpose/to what end?

Bringing Twitter down would remove Trump's favourite method of communication.

Or is this retribution for Trump not being the Manchurian candidate/lap dog Putin wanted? If that were the case, I would expect Russia to expose whatever they're holding over Trump (peepee tape?) to get him ousted.

Trump already won the election, so taking out Twitter would only serve to reduce their ability to influence future elections.

I'm not denying this looks fantastically bad for Twitter, but the aim of taking down Twitter isn't clear to me. There has to be a net positive to taking down Twitter, but what is it?

<comment><USER24> > Or is this retribution for Trump not being the Manchurian candidate/lap dog > Putin wanted? If that were the case, I would expect Russia to expose > whatever they're holding over Trump (peepee tape?) to get him ousted

seriously?

if anyone is taking that level of master/puppet game seriously they probably _need_ to watch as many non-us media sources as they can..

news flash:

not everyone agrees with US global neoliberal policy! you don't necissarily need to have some shadowy organization behind those people deciding for themselves to express themselves, organize, etc.

<comment><USER23> _> seriously?_

Well, no, the peepee tape part is tongue and cheek.

However I doubt it would be difficult to dig up dirt on Trump. I don't think it's beyond Russia's ability to dig up incriminating financials on Trump/Trump Org. We are talking about a candidate who has steadfastly refused to release his tax returns.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Does this not make Twitter AND RT look bad? They've just proven something they and Trump have been denying.

<comment><USER26> Good and bad are obsolete, there is only confusion. RT don't care about being trusted, they don't care about credibility, they only want to undermine the credibility of everyone else. If nobody is credible, if no information can be trusted, then there is no truth and no lies, only gut feeling.

[https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n20/peter-pomerantsev/putins- raspu...](https://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n20/peter-pomerantsev/putins-rasputin)

<comment><USER14> Let's not get carried away

<comment><USER21> "they only want to undermine the credibility of everyone else"

It's reasonable to assume this is indeed one of the objectives behind RT, undermining western news media. In 2008 the Kremlin had TV-Novosti (RT is a brand of TV-Novosti) on its list of core list of "core organizations of strategic importance of Russia" for example. Just look at the guests they have on there to perpetrate narratives against governments and cultures they see as adversary.

From Liz Wahl who resigned from RT on air, blaming it for propaganda:

"They get these extreme voices on that have this kind of hostile toward the West viewpoints towards the world, very extremist. These are the people that they have on. And when I was on the anchor desk, they would instruct you to egg on these guests and try to get them, you know, rallied up, to really fire off their anti-American talking points. Listen, I'm all about exposing government corruption. I'm all about being critical of the government. But this is different. This is promoting the foreign policy of somebody that has just invaded a country, has invaded the country and is then lying about it, is using the media as a tool to fulfill his foreign policy interests. And RT is part of Putin's propaganda network and it's very, very troubling in the wake of what is going on in Ukraine today."

<comment><USER14> I mean clearly they broadcast a lot of anti-American stuff and their coverage of any story with Russia is suspect at best. But they have lots of real reporting and they're not just making stuff up. And it's useful to have a counterbalance to American papers, which are highly influenced by American intelligence services.

<comment><USER21> I agree counter balance is indeed healthy and I think generally, in the west, we are served a wealth of different viewpoints on any given issue, so much so that we can take it for granted. My point above was that RT, in the Kremlins own words, plays a core role in their wider global strategy and it absolutely plays a part in undermining the west.

For my own reference, could you supply some links to support you assertion that the American press is highly influenced by American intelligence? My perception of the US press is that this type of manipulation is really not prevalent on a large coordinated scale.

<comment><USER14> The topic is a hobby horse of Mark Ames, whose work I really admire. It's not necessarily on a "large, coordinated scale," but it's a mistake to assume it has to be to be influential.

<comment><USER21> Thanks for replying. I was however hoping for something more substantive though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I wonder why all the slides from this keynote show to be consisting of a single (or is it the first) page?

It's in window title, (1 страница)

File name is same, there's one page to be displayed, but content is different. Is it some feature of keynote where you have more than one screen's worth in one page, or is it shopped?

<comment><USER28> I'd take anything from RT with a grain of salt, considering the context. I'm not saying Twitter is in the clear, but it's in RT's best interest to make themselves look better.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> TL/DR from one of the slides >>

       U.S. ELECTIONS PROPOSAL

       Limited offer for @RT_com.

       * Innovation: exclusive closed betas pending availability with Periscope, TweetDeck, and Moments.

       * Brand awareness and engagement: customized emoji, video, bespoke customized solutions (e.g. AutoResponse, ScratchReel, Conversational Video Ad).

       * Content strategy: strategic support with content management and best practices, vision and concept, tailor-made execution.

       * Dedicated team: Twitter experts to focus on LIVE (editorial and publishing), curate content and provide strategic and tactical support during the U.S. Elections.

       * Efficiency and measurement: customized research solutions (Nielsen // Milward Brown).

</comment><comment><USER30> RT == Roasting Twitter

Jokes aside, it seems to me that Twitter has gone from bastion of free speech to global censor. This RT article is just another nail in the coffin of Twitter's credibility.

I think that if Twitter's leaders don't articulate a corporate morality and initiate a culture change at some point Twitter's investors are going to realise that they are betting against freedom. This will obviously impact share price and quite frankly a reason why I don't own any shares.

</comment><comment><USER31> I've been using Twitter exclusively for IT and tech over the last two years. Never been following anything political there.

Today, for the first time, a political ad from @diraalwatan (official account for Saudi ministry of defence) promoting war in Yemen sneaked into my feed:

[https://twitter.com/diraalwatan/status/924548374711463936](https://twitter.com/diraalwatan/status/924548374711463936)

I do and did tolerate the way Twitter takes actions in political ways lately, blocking accounts they consider to be fake news, state propaganda, etc. although I find it somehow controversive and very subjective. But having ads promoting war in Yemen just shocked me badly!

How it this ad even entering my feed?

</comment><comment><USER32> Those discounts feel really light for adland. Did RT get a lousy deal or a good one?

<comment><USER33> I think USA got a horrible deal, RT is a nation state, a million is nothing to them. Their GDP (Googled it) is 1.283 trillion USD (2016). [https://www.google.com/search?q=russia+gdp](https://www.google.com/search?q=russia+gdp)

Kudos to them for exposing twitter though.

<comment><USER34> Sorry to be a bit pedantic, but 'nation state' is not just a technical sounding alternative for 'major country'. It has a specific definition around national homogeneity, and in most people's opinions Russia is not a nation- state.

<comment><USER35> Thanks, this is a pretty interesting distinction I never realized. Now I want to go find a good modern political science book and learn more.

<comment><USER34> Other examples of things that aren't nation states (it's a matter of opinion but most agree) include the United Kingdom, and possibly the United States.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> RT is just Putin's propaganda machine and will act accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER37> "In marketing, there is war for attention. It's the only thing that matters. Attention, not impression" \- @Garyvee

This should be expanded to - And the only way to grab attention is push the most atrocious stories. People are nothing if not curious about stuff. Specially the ones which align to their world view.

<comment><USER38> Ahh, bullshit. People also love fatty, salty, and sweet food. Yet there's still market for kale and cod.

Similarly, there has been tabloid journalism since the printing press was invented. But there has always been, and still is, plenty of high-quality journalism.

<comment><USER39> Americans are fatter than ever right now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why does it matter if RT or Russia advertised for the US election? Doesn't the US notoriously have no restrictions on who and how much advertising can be done for elections? What's the difference between an American doing it vs a Russian?

<comment><USER41> >Doesn't the US notoriously have no restrictions on who and how much advertising can be done for elections?

I believe they have restrictions involving foreign ads for traditional media (newspapers, TV, etc). Just not for the Internet.

Otherwise, to be frank, I totally agree with you. Instead of owning up to the fact that most of the populace is really, really, easy to con, we seek blame elsewhere. Banning foreign entities from advertising in elections will _not_ prevent a similar outcome in a future election.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> This Twitter pitch deck looks suspiciously "off-brand Twitter."

Why not release the PDF of the deck?

</comment><comment><USER43> Barring the political implications, this is an interesting window into how much one can charge for advertising.

That's some serious market power.

</comment><comment><USER44> I think the real takeaway here is that advertising on twitter doesn't work for shit.

</comment><comment><USER45> can HN ban RT.com please? I just flagged this story

<comment><USER46> Why? This is an interesting part of the twitter/US election story. This is the source of this part of the story, linking to another site would be against the HN "rule" of linking the original source.

<comment><USER47> Agree - but there's middle ground here.

I would prefer a "do not link" or archived post for certain domains to prevent clicks on their page.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Guess this helped Twitter get into the black for the first time.

<comment><USER38> The story about Twitter's black bottom line is about Q3 2017, so I doubt that it's connected to the 2016 election.

<comment><USER48> it all helps though, and I imagine that if they (RT) spent large for the election and got their chosen candidate elected they would keep on spending to support him, see the numerous russian bot accounts following Trump or those that are being used to comment on BLM/flag protestors etc

[http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/](http://dashboard.securingdemocracy.org/)

<comment><USER49> Twitter have said they're going to donate all the RT ad money to external research on use of Twitter for things like this. They said it's $1.9m. Also the profit report seems to be based on a claim for next quarter, and presumably they've either costed that donation in Q3 or factored it into their Q4 prediction.

<comment><USER48> RT and Sputnik are not the only way that Russian money is getting into Twitter, either way my point stands that they received income from this source, courted money from this source and have now become profitable in part as a result of the money they have received from russian organisations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> I notice some bot/troll activity in the discussions. Mostly new accounts

<comment><USER51> [citation needed]

I see this claim constantly on Reddit. I'd love to see examples of these 'bots' and paid trolls that everyone is so privy to...

<comment> wu-ikkyu > I'd love to see examples of these 'bots' and paid trolls that everyone is so > privy to...

Here is a study with some examples:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/38wl43/we_used_sock...](https://www.reddit.com/r/netsec/comments/38wl43/we_used_sock_puppets_in_rnetsec_last_year_and_are/)</comment></comment></comment>


Salman Khan, math master of the Internet - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/12/13/BUKV1B11Q1.DTL&tsp=1 <comment><USER2> Khan did the obvious thing for someone trying to make good use of his time: he recorded his lectures so that he wouldn't have to repeat them. This allowed him to create lectures for most of the K-12 math and physics curriculum single-handedly and without government support in about five years. Khan is not a teacher by training nor, as far as I can tell, is he a member of the NEA (National Education Association.

How much would a government-backed program to deliver 35,000 lessons per day on any of 800 topics have cost? How much is government paying now to do the same thing? What would education be like if it was completely consumer driven with no government support? Khan is serving a market for free that is already being served by government for billions of dollars. In other words, an entrepreneur would have a hard time in education because the government is already giving away so much for "free".

My intuition is that there are great efficiencies to be gained in any industry that "benefits" from government support. Besides education, other industries that could benefit from innovation would be transportation (especially roads and bridges), health care, courts, corrections, and police.

The reason why more innovation is not happening in these areas is that government support is removing the incentive to be more efficient. The people performing these services are not rewarded for drastically cutting costs.

It could be the case that these industries are already operating at peak efficiency, but the fact that there is no obviously better way is not proof of this. Innovation is sometimes only obvious after someone with the motivation to look for it has implemented it. If someone had asked the department of education to make instructional materials for the entire K-12 math curriculum and deliver it to tens of thousands of students a day for 5 man-years of work, the dept would have said it couldn't be done.

<comment><USER3> I more or less agree with you, but the elephant in the room is that he is doing this all over a network that began as the government funded ARPAnet, which I think takes the libertarian utopian edge off of your point somewhat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Here is a direct link to his webpage <http://www.khanacademy.org/> he seems to have quite a variety of subjects

</comment><comment><USER5> Well this was the first time I've heard of Khan Academy, and wow they have a wide variety of topics and explained in a very simple manner. This is the kind of stuff, which makes me love Internet.

</comment><comment><USER6> There was a post on Reddit a few weeks ago, where someone asked "What is something you have learned completely via the internet?".

One of the replies was from a guy (Iamnotthatotherguy) who spent 2 hours each night, 4 days a week, dedicated to learning math online. He referenced the MIT Open Courseware courses, and the Kahn Academy as his primary sources. He spent 2 years on this schedule, and no claims to know most of the mathematical areas quite well. I think his goal was statistical learning and AI, and it sounds like he got there.

</comment><comment><USER7> FYI - this format was popularized by Academy123 (a Los Angeles area startup that was acquired by Discovery Education).

They used Win32 software running on Tablet PC's and captured a teachers voice and handwriting in real time.

At their peak, they had about 400 teachers working from home creating thousands of 3-5 minute mini-videos each day.

See some examples here: [http://www.nutshellmath.com/textbooks_glossary_demos/demos_l...](http://www.nutshellmath.com/textbooks_glossary_demos/demos_list_geometry.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> Not to be confused with the other Salman Khan, a Bollywood dance-meister: <http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Salman+Khan>

</comment><comment><USER9> I think his best work was in Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam with Aishwarya Rai.</comment>


Ask HN: Any ML projects that 'make world a better place' I could contribute to? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Two on Kaggle right now:

[https://www.kaggle.com/c/data-science-for-good-city-of- los-a...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/data-science-for-good-city-of-los-angeles)

[https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-unintended-bias-in- toxicity-...](https://www.kaggle.com/c/jigsaw-unintended-bias-in-toxicity- classification)

</comment><comment><USER3> I've also been looking around for something interesting to work on which will actually be helpful to other people. And it doesn't doesn't necessarily need to be ML related.</comment>


'Virtual Pharmacology' Advance Tackles Universe of Unknown Drugs - <AUTHOR> https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2019/02/413236/virtual-pharmacology-advance-tackles-universe-unknown-drugs <comment><USER2> When I see a paper like this one of my first thoughts is "What will Derek Lowe say about this?" He is a chemist in the drug industry and excellent writer. On his blog he regularly tears apart overhyped claims for how software searches for targets and automated synthesis of chemicals are going to find perfect cures for everything at the press of a button. His take on this paper is actually positive, though with some important caveats:

[http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/02/11/vir...](http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/02/11/virtual- screening-as-big-as-it-currently-gets)

<comment><USER3> I have been out of this space for a few years (transitioned to data science from drug discovery), but from my time doing in silico and in vitro work, a major issue with docking was rank ordering. His comments are right on the mark IMO. Especially this paragraph:

>Another point is that high-middle-low effort on the D4 case. The binding assay results compared to the docking scores are shown at right. You can see that the number of potent compounds (better than 50% displacement, below that dashed line) decreases as the scores get worse; the lowest bin doesn't have any at all. But at the same time, there are a few false-negative outliers with binding activity at pretty low scores, and at the other end of the scale, the top three bins look basically undistinguishable. So the broad strokes are there, but the details are of course smeared out a bit.

These methods can filter millions of compounds down to hundreds, but as an academic lab, it's still a herculean effort to synthesize hundreds of compounds. And out of those hundreds, you might get a couple that are active. This study is a combination hard work, yes, but also a lot of money and luck.

That being said, good for the team, and good for science. I have nothing but respect for Shoichet and Roth. Didn't ever cross paths with Irwin.

<comment><USER4> > I have nothing but respect for Shoichet and Roth. Didn't ever cross paths > with Irwin.

This makes me laugh since Shoichet was childhood friends with Irwin and they've worked together on almost everything together since 2000 when Irwin went to Northwestern to join his lab.

<comment><USER3> That is pretty funny. The more you know. I was just a grad student and met Shoichet at conferences.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Link to the actual article, not the press release;

[https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0917-9](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-0917-9)

</comment><comment><USER6> "The four structures of AmpC determined with the new docking hits are available from the PDB with accession numbers 6DPZ, 6DPY, 6DPX and 6DPT."

Are we in a situation now where, if I have a bad anti-botic resistant infection I can just order these molecules on the off chance that they will help me?

Can I order a toxin?

Or are these molecules just impractical to use outside of a lab setting

<comment><USER7> They only determined whether those specific molecules bind to the target. They didn't test if they are toxic, if they are able to actually get to the target, how stable they are under real conditions, into which metabolites they are processed in humans, ...

This is the very first step towards developing potential drugs, it's very, very far from an actual drug. And drug development wasn't the goal of this paper anyway.

And the idea behind this paper was to find molecules that aren't in any catalogue, so you would still have to synthesize them yourself or pay someone to do a custom synthesis for you.

<comment><USER2> I thought the point of the library of molecules used was the supplier (Enamine) has a systematic method of synthesizing the molecules they've listed. It appears that, in practice, they can supply 90% of the molecules they offer, synthesized on demand:

> Of the 589 molecules selected, 549 (93%) were successfully synthesized > (Supplementary Table 10 and Supplementary Data 11, 13)

I fully agree your main points.

<comment><USER7> That's still custom synthesis and not off-the-shelf compounds. No idea how expensive they are in this case.

<comment><USER2> About $100 apparently:

> Over the past decade, Kiev-based Enamine Ltd has innovated an efficient > pipeline to produce any of over a billion never-before-made drug-like > compounds on demand — at a cost of about $100 per molecule — by combining > any of tens of thousands of standard chemical building blocks with one > another using over a hundred established chemical reactions.

<comment><USER8> 'Per molecule' gives no real indication of cost, that appears to be a 'tooling' charge, to design the reaction chain. I doubt $100 will buy you any useful quantity of any research chemical, much less a custom mfg one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> as a computational chemist I must say end-use might differ significantly from these screening studies, it is more of a statement on current computing capabilities and a little bit of science icing

<comment><USER10> it's not even a statement of current computing capabilities if they used 1 CPU-day on 1,500 machines. That's a pittance.

<comment><USER11> Co-author here (AMA)--A large-scale docking screen of 116M molecules takes ~1100 cpu days on our cluster, working out to about 1 mol/sec, which is very fast for virtual screening. What this doesn't account for is this requires about 30 minutes per compound to precompute information (conformations, partial charges, etc.). So this works out to ~6M cpu/hours to prepare the library for screening, which is a substantial amount of computation. We're loading about 1M molecules a day and have a 2-3 year backlog of compounds to load from Enamine.

The good news is that once the library is prepared, it is quick to screen at more targets--and we make the pre-computed library available at zinc15.docking.org.

Interestingly, as the library grows a limiting factor is storing the library on disk. It is now ~20T. We've set up several mirrors around the world for groups that are actively using it. An interesting problem will be to see if preparing compounds for screening on the fly (e.g. with machine learning models) can overcome this limitation to keep up with library growth.

A big question for us is what will the return on investment in screening larger and larger libraries be? One of the take aways from this work is if docking has moderate enrichment, than screening larger libraries not only gives more hits but actually can increase the hit-rate for the top scoring compounds.

<comment><USER12> I know that docking using GPU is about an order of magnitude faster than CPU (see today's Schrodinger 2019-1 release notes, [https://youtu.be/K4AYdBvuOe4?t=90](https://youtu.be/K4AYdBvuOe4?t=90)). Is there a way of doing GPU accelerated precomputation though?

<comment><USER11> Hey Chris--We're right now using a mix of commercial and open source software like Omega, Corina, AMSOL, and Mol2DB. Probably the slowest step is generating the partial charges for each conformer with a reasonably high quality semi- empirical forcefield. I'm not sure if there are competitive (in terms of quality) GPU based methods, but if there were methods that were ~1000 times faster as can be the case for GPU based methods, it would definitely speed up the pre-computation or make on-the-fly prep feasible. Do you have any ideas of where we should look?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This is right up Zymergen's alley, at least when it comes to in vitro testing of these compounds.</comment>


Typescene Framework: Quick Start - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jcormont/typescene-framework-quick-start-f21c87b1f64d <comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, in this article I explain how Typescene works using a simple, practical example. I also go through some of the differences with other frameworks.</comment>


Surveillance Cameras - <AUTHOR> https://www.eff.org/pages/surveillance-cameras <comment><USER2> In Johannesburg, South Africa, where crime is high, privately run street cams are popping up to deter neighborhood crime. I'm not sure how effective they are.</comment>


The European Startup Market - <AUTHOR> http://avc.com/2015/10/the-european-startup-market/ <comment><AUTHOR> Interested to get any input on this quote:

 _European entrepreneurs have, for the most part, abandoned the approach of building domestic businesses in their home markets and are now targeting global customer bases from day one. That means the potential scale of European startups is as large as US startups._</comment>


Introducing the Keybase filesystem - <AUTHOR> https://keybase.io/introducing-the-keybase-filesystem <comment><USER2> About 4 years ago I was involved with a commercial software project attempting to do exactly this. What we built worked but it wasn't positioned in a way that interested our target audience (Enterprise customers).

First, bravo for making it happen in a way that is getting people excited. Second, I sincerely wish you the best luck in getting people to pay for it in a way that is sustainable for a business. We built a user interface that made truly secure group file sharing accessible to mere mortals and said mortals were uninterested.

About three months after we shut down the business Edward Snowden made his infamous leak(s) and it became obvious to me that commercial crypto products coming out of the United States would be met with extreme levels of skepticism for some time to come. Any remotely centralized solution to the problems of key distribution and encryption are probably dead on arrival because of the single point of jurisdiction/political failure. It really doesn't matter how open you are (unfortunately).

Two things really stand out to me about this implementation. 1) The trustworthiness of the key exchange doesn't appear to employ a mechanism that protects against a man in the middle. 2) They mention the possibility of in- browser Javascript crypto. These are not small issues. The people who _need_ crypto _require_ rigid, durable implementations that don't gloss over security concerns in favor of usability. Everyone else is just being trendy.

I wish you the best of luck.

<comment><USER3> I don't think Keybase is glossing over security at all.

First of all, you don't have to use the browser app at all. I personally don't trust Javascript crypto and hence don't do anything in the web app.

They're also acutely aware of the dangers of centralization and all the Keybase crypto is based on minimal trust. Check the documentation: [https://keybase.io/docs/server_security](https://keybase.io/docs/server_security)

<comment><USER4> Is it JavaScript crypto you don't trust, or in-browser crypto you don't trust?

<comment><USER3> I don't trust in-browser crypto and I'm skeptical of JavaScript crypto.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I've been using this for a couple weeks. Along with Zcash, it is the most amazing crypto-engineering project I've seen in years.

Imagine being able to share files on an ad hoc basis with anyone -- on any network. Share with someone based on Twitter, on Facebook, or email address.

Even better, all with cryptographic proofs of identity, strong crypto at every level, and open source.

<comment><USER5> Came here to say pretty much the same thing. It's slick and easy to use. It's actually the 'dropbox' I've always wanted and if they introduce a storage limit I'd pay.

[https://keybase.io/jgrahamc](https://keybase.io/jgrahamc)

<comment><USER6> Hi John, mind sharing an invitation?

<comment><USER5> Sent to email in your profile.

<comment><USER7> hi, could you please send me an invite if you have some left ? many thanks !

<comment> iso-8859-1 no email in your profile...

<comment><USER8> Hey! Any invites left? (Email in profile)

<comment><USER8> Got it :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Business Model?

> We're a long way off from worrying about this, but we'll > never run an ad- > supported business again. And Keybase will > never sell data. > [....] > > But, as stated above, there is currently no pay model, and we're not trying > to make money. > We're testing a product right now, and we'd like to bring > public keys to the masses.

I know a lot of people will see this as a pro, but honestly I see it as a huge negative. Raising capital doesn't mean that you "are not trying to make money". If you are not trying to make money, then you can't call it a "product".

<comment> grey-area This is my biggest worry about using this service. It looks great, but if they don't make any money, how can they keep it running for free in the long term? They should charge users money for storage, not give it away for free - hopefully they have a plan to do so soon but they should make that clear.

It would also be nice to be able to completely self-host, that would be really reassuring, not sure if it is possible but they could certainly sell that as a service and support it for businesses interested in running their own keyserver and encrypted file store.

<comment><USER10> Totally agree. I don't want to invest my time using a service that I don't trust will be around in 5yrs. Would love to pay a few bucks a month for this service to help alleviate that fear. Making money is a good thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wonder if you can _tail_ a file, to create an ad-hoc encrypted messaging channel like:

        Read your messages: tail -f /keybase/private/yourname/inbox.log
        Send a message to someone: echo 'Hi, friend!' >> /keybase/private/yourfriend/inbox.log

And I wonder how it handles filename collisions? Guess I'm going to need to play with this a bit later. :)

<comment><USER12> It works to repeatedly append to a file on one machine and `tail -f` it on another. Even an encrypted file. It just works.

As for collisions, a "conflict" is handled as you would expect on file syncing services, although all conflict resolution has to be done by the clients! (Even in the unencrypted public folders, the resolution of the conflict has to be signed. And in the encrypted case, obviously the server has no idea.) This is one of the many things that had made KBFS a large and interesting project.

If you really wanted to use KBFS as a transport layer, you could avoid the conflict entirely by each device claiming a file to write to, and each one in a folder can monitor the others' files.

<comment><USER11> > As for collisions, a "conflict" is handled as you would expect on file > syncing services

I'm not sure what to expect though. Does it rename subsequent files by appending _##? Or does it overwrite? Or does it allow 2 files with identical filenames, like Google Drive (at least on the web) does?

<comment><USER12> Oh I see, sorry for not fully answering. Keybase does not merge files or anything source-control like that. In fact, if that's what you want, you can actually init a bare repo inside of Keybase and clone into and out of it. We do this all the time as we're dogfooding. It's cool that every push is signed automatically, and every pull or clone is verified.

The conflict resolution Keybase does do is simple and much like what Dropbox does. The clients will determine a winner, and the loser will be written as something like `Keybase Logo.conflicted (sjs382's imac5k copy 2016-02-04).psd` Note in this case 'imac5k' is a guaranteed unique device name for sjs382, due to the way our merkle tree of key announcements works.

By the way, the conflict resolution of a single file is one case in a fairly large list of possible conflicts. What happens if you remove a directory on one machine, but add a file to it on another? And so on. The conflict resolution flow is designed to protect you from data loss above all else.

<comment><USER11> Awesome, I'll be sure to play with it soon!

Thanks for the answers and thanks for the awesome kbpgp.js!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> On the page it says it is "open source Go". Does that mean that, at least theoretically, I (or another independent provider) could build this and run my own personal keybase server? If so, that would really excite me. The one thing that really keeps me away from most cloud storage and sync services is lockin. I just am not willing to be come super dependent on a service that is building their business around proprietary lockin rather than providing an excellent service.

<comment> grey-area Yes it's pretty straightforward. You can even do something much simpler if you want to self-host and just want a sort of encrypted dropbox for yourself.

I recently did a little proof of concept hackathon entry (gopher gala) for a very similar idea which works with keybase.io for keys or your own server - [https://sendto.click](https://sendto.click), which is also open source. This is far simpler of course but there's no reason in principle you couldn't just compile the client yourself, write your own client and use their server, or just write your own client and server, using the same golang crypto libraries, which are here for pgp:

[https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/crypto/openpgp](https://godoc.org/golang.org/x/crypto/openpgp)

It doesn't have to be quite as complex as the keybase tools, though I'm sure they have reasons for every decision and have thought hard about the way it all works, the crypto libraries they've based it on are open source and relatively straightforward to use.

My one hesitation about using keybase.io would be their business model and whether they'll be around in 5 years. They might have the best intentions but if it doesn't make money, and/or is bought by a large corporation, all bets are off on how the service will evolve or whether it will continue to exist. I'd love to see them start charging money and have a sustainable business model.

<comment><USER14> I wouldn't be too hesitant to use it. I think it depends mostly on being able to verify everything that they verify. Which they already encourage you to do: leave signed signatures in profiles so that people can verify them independent of keybase.io

<comment> grey-area I do use keybase.io and will be trying this out, I just worry about depending on a company with zero revenue in the long term.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Maybe it's because I am not a keybase user, but can somebody explain this product in human terms? I am not an idiot, and it does sound interesting, but the post is too long and I just want to know what makes it unique compared to dropbox, etc. in one sentence.

<comment><USER16> This is DropBox with secure digital signatures and end-to-end encryption integrated into it in a easily accessible way.

<comment><USER15> what confused me was how they say they are not a sync service. I am still confused.

<comment><USER17> Dropbox synchronizes files between your computer and their servers. Keybase stores the files on their servers and only downloads/uploads them "on demand". Think of your web browser accessing gmail.com versus running something like Thunderbird that downloads your mail locally.

As a benefit, it's much simpler to implement - you don't need to work as hard to handle conflicts where two people made incompatible changes while offline. However, it will be slower for bulk operations and will require an internet connection.

<comment><USER15> so if i understand correctly, the model is more like the old megaupload/rapidshare/etc.....so what's new? Is it that they provide multiple ways of sharing tied to social media, compared to public/private/password protected mode of sharing for those aforementioned services?

<comment> grey-area What's new is transparent client-side public key encryption with a database of verified keys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Is this all centralized?

How about something completely decentralized, but permanent:

[https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)

[https://youtu.be/HUVmypx9HGI](https://youtu.be/HUVmypx9HGI)

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS)

<comment><USER19> 30 second caveats:

\- You still have to host yourself, since you don't get free hosting.

\- Not encrypted, so you gotta add the encryption in yourself.

<comment><USER18> Not true. IPFS is encrypted and with pluggable PKI too!

[https://youtu.be/HUVmypx9HGI?t=3210](https://youtu.be/HUVmypx9HGI?t=3210)

And you do not have to host yourself once your content is distributed. That is what makes it permanent!

<comment><USER20> You don't have to, but unless someone decides to "pin" it it might just disappear at any time. So you better pin it yourself or find someone reliable to pin it for you.

<comment><USER21> > or find someone reliable to pin it for you.

The Internet Archive will eventually be the "pin" of last resort.

<comment><USER22> And/or someone will make a business out of pinning files.

For public files, I hope that there will be several organizations organizing multiple long-term pins of files.

<comment><USER21> That's the best part! Anyone could be paid to pin!

Home users with enough bandwidth and storage. Existing CDNs. New cloud storage entrants (Backblaze).

Literally anyone with an internet connection and storage would be able to securely serve your content.

EDIT: I just saw your profile :) Thanks for the work you do at the IA!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Your app will encrypt just for you and then awake and rekey in the > background when that Twitter user joins and announces a key.

Isn't this the weak link in the chain? If you can convince the client that you're the person the data was encrypted for, it will re-encrypt it with a new key and send it to you, thus making the encryption useless. What's the protection against this, other than "don't worry, we won't introduce bugs"? (I'm not saying Random Twitter Troll will do this, but couldn't "the government" compel Keybase to re-encrypt your content with a key they have?)

What does the encryption add here that a server controlling access doesn't?

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure about that either. The weakest link seems to be a national security letter to Keybase where they distribute a backdoored version of the FS driver to Alice, and adds the key of Eve to all messages also encrypted to Bob.

However, Keybase can't just broadcast "Eve on twitter is Bob!" \- the client gets that announcement and links you to the tweet that claims it, where you audit the twitter handle, key fingerprint, etc.

<comment><USER25> If the NSA is your adversary model, Keybase isn't for you. If the NSA is your adversary model, NO system involving any central servers is for you, unless they only act as a dumb relay. Since Keybase is also the provider of your proof that another party is who they claim to be, they will always be suspectable to a government adversary. If you want to be NSA-safe, you can't trust any third party companies code, and that just leaves you DOA.

tldr; this isn't for the NSA adversary model

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ryan-c I would be _really_ interested to see how they're making the filesystem cross platform if they're supporting Windows. I see in their 'hiring' page they mention FUSE which would give Linux and OS X support.

<comment><USER26> I too am very interested in if they are currently supporting Windows and/or if/when they plan to. I was hoping this blog post would have at least mentioned it in passing.

<comment><USER12> We are testing a build for Windows that uses Dokan. Early results have been very positive. It's an important feature of KBFS that it can run on Windows.

<comment><USER27> Hi Chris, the very first versions of Boxcryptor for Windows some years ago also used Dokan. Our experiences have been really bad and as the user base grew so did the number BSOD reports caused by Dokan (v0.6 back then). We are now using the commercial driver CBFS since 3+ years and are really happy with it. Hint: As development at Dokan has picked up again with Dokany, I don't know anything about its current stability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> You can seemingly host static files on keybase.pub, too. Makes it a viable alternative to github pages for hosting static sites:

[https://akenn.keybase.pub/index.html](https://akenn.keybase.pub/index.html) (not mine)

<comment><USER28> Those are some good looking dolphins ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is beautiful. I don't understand the dependency on the block chain: what's the forking attack we're concerned about here?

<comment><USER30> It's a public accounting of everyone's keys. All participants can review the blockchain to confirm the accuracy of their own public key. Three-letter agencies can't fork the blockchain and replace a key from the perspective of one participant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> How do you actually download this update?

It has a link at the bottom -> "latest download (possibly without the filesystem)"

I'm guessing that means not all of the OS builds have it enabled yet?

<comment><USER32> I'm confused about that as well. I am a Keybase user for a while now, but I have no Keybase folder even though I downloaded the latest client.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> When reading this I though, is this how the next "web" will look like!? Having the world mounted at file system level and content streamed or pushed on demand.

What about a public key block-chain where "mining" is storing and serving data!? A system with baked in hosting/browsing, identity (public key) and micro-transactions (web-money).

<comment><USER34> I agree! Exciting, right? :) At risk of showing you something you've already come across:

* [https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)

* [https://ethereum.org/](https://ethereum.org/)

* IPFS project lead interviewed at Ethereum conference: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7VjUKCdfpg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7VjUKCdfpg)

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Simple use-case I cobbled together after reading this:

Show HN: Signed Blogs with Keybase.io file system [1]

It's ugly as anything (no stylesheet), but just wanted to demonstrate what I think could be an interesting use.

[1]([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11039145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11039145))

</comment><comment><USER36> Unfortunately you just need to hack keybase and serve malicious code. It doesnt matter if its signed if my malicious code tells you the signature verification succeeded.

Client side needs versioned code to make this harder. Including signed, versioned javascript code, automagically.

This will also make alterations of web sites code a lot easier to detect.

</comment><comment><USER37> I love that if you're logged in, it'll say

You can now write data in a very special place: /keybase/public/fsargent

Very cool.

<comment><USER38> How did you install a client that will do that? Mine doesn't have fs support.

<comment><USER39> fsargent loves that if you're logged in, the linked keybase web page says...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This is really cool.

Since this is a filesystem that streams data on demand, how does it behave under poor network conditions? I'm also curious how much data it caches locally, e.g. if I'm on a laptop and lose wifi for an hour, how much of the data in the keybase filesystem can I reasonably continue to access?

</comment><comment><USER3> This is an awesome announcement and got me totally fired up.

Unfortunately, I wasn't even able to log in to my keybase account on a new computer. Judging from the 1,000 outstanding issues on their Github, it seems like Keybase should first be focusing on fixing the bugs in existing software before rolling out new products. [0]

As for the substance of the filesystem, it would be nice to have some concept of named/shared groups. So I could create a "company" folder and then add people to it over time instead of having to create a whole new shared folder each time we add someone new. (And having to manually copy over all relevant files.)

[0] [https://github.com/keybase/keybase- issues/issues](https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues)

</comment><comment><USER41> I hate begging but I've been in the keybase queue for at least a year and would like to finally see what it's all about. I'd appreciate it a ton if someone could shoot me an invite: [removed] Thank you very much ashishchaudhary! :)

<comment><USER42> same here :)

<comment><USER43> I can send you one, I only need your email.

<comment><USER44> May I get one? Email address in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> This is really cool, but I'm not clear on how to actually install it.

Or is it only available to a limited set of users?

I see there's a "keybase fuse" command that might be related, but there's no docs for how to use it.

<comment><USER46> You have to join, since they're still in alpha they let you wait - I just signed up and I'm user "#19177 in the alpha queue"

<comment><USER47> Some of us had keybase.io accounts for a while now ;). I think we have to wait until the client packages are updated with kbfs support.

<comment><USER34> On Ubuntu, mine wasn't auto-updated to get KBFS, but I found pre-releases that work:

[https://s3.amazonaws.com/prerelease.keybase.io/index.html](https://s3.amazonaws.com/prerelease.keybase.io/index.html)

<comment><USER48> I came here to find this. Upvote for you sir.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Why is centralized crypto with a freemium biz model so welcomed? Remember Snowden? Remember parse?

<comment><USER50> "Centralised Crypto" in what sense? Unless I'm very much mistaken, your private key never leaves your control - signing/encryption is done client- side.

<comment><USER49> They are the trusted source for my public key.

<comment><USER51> Are you talking about the announced file storage service here? Or about the "drudru claims to be foobar on Twitter" service?

The former should be good - that sounds like a smart client in front of a dumb server. The latter is a different problem and as far as I'm aware the service is merely aggregating proves - and can link to those. Verify them?

<comment><USER52> The client verifies the proofs!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> >If that person hasn't installed Keybase yet, your human work is still done. They can join and access the data within seconds

Good luck getting people to do that.

Edit: I guess if the audience for this is technical people, then the kind of person who follows them is likely to be the kind that would download it, but that's a very small market. There's a far greater barrier to getting people to install software (with little tangible gain) than getting them to sign up for your website.

<comment><USER24> It's also a little bit hard to "join and access your data in seconds" when signup is still essentially by invite only...

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> A monetization idea: let people create folders that others need to pay to access and take some % of the payment (useful for companies distributing movies, games, etc.)

</comment><comment><USER55> So slightly tangental but keybase has been around for a few years now, right? I haven't been able to figure it out but are they only afloat due to investment funds? Do they have any monetization plans? I setup a profile but I'm curious what the company ends up turning into. Perhaps the money made from providing paid upgrades to this filesystem can give them enough profit?

</comment><comment><USER56> so assuming one trusts the model, would it work to have something like:

I have a /me/private/yourwebsite.com set up to be shared between me and your particular site, the link is set-up when I sign up

when I log in your site, it would look for this directory to be there, in this directory there will be a file with a password hash, the server would load it, and validate the hash of the typed in password against the hash I provide, once the login is successful it would remove this file

this would basically mean that I could have single-use passwords for any site as it would be trivial to have a browser add-on that generates a random password and corresponding hash when I want to log in somewhere, it types the password in the password field on the page and puts the hash in the keybase directory corresponding to it, and alert me if the site does not remove the file after the login.

<comment><USER57> I actually wrote something like that for Keybase before KBFS was announced: [https://github.com/jzila/kb-login-ext](https://github.com/jzila/kb-login-ext)

The approach you detailed is the way to go once the filesystem is in the wild. Such power!

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I have 9 invites and I do not particularly want to trawl through all of the existing comments to find people who may or may not have been invited since having posted their comments hours ago.

So, reply to me here or email me (wanda {at} teknik.io) and I will send you an invite. First co-- actually, first noticed, first served.

<comment><USER59> I'd like an invite if you have more to spare. (johnsonwesleyt {at} gmail)

<comment><USER58> Done.

<comment><USER59> Excellent. I'll pay it forward if I get any invites myself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Podcast interview with Keybase founder Rick Krohn which discusses this among other things: [http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/?s=keybase+](http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/?s=keybase+)

</comment><comment><USER61> Just was granted 5 more invites (Thanks Chris!) if anyone else is late to the party.

Please either reply with an email address or have one visible in your profile if you want one.

<comment><USER62> I'd love one! I've been really excited about this project for over a year but still in the invite queue :(.

<comment><USER61> equivrel - you get my last one.. just sent it, enjoy!

<comment><USER62> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> Very excited for this, just waiting for an official build unless someone has actual instructions for building Keybase with kbfs-beta support on linux.

</comment><comment><USER64> This is fucking awesome. I've gotta try it.

</comment><comment><USER65> Plenty of invites over here if anyone would like one

[https://keybase.io/simonjgreen](https://keybase.io/simonjgreen)

EDIT: all gone for now, but see [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11037629](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11037629) for more

<comment><USER66> Have also 8 invites :)

EDIT: All gone.

<comment><USER67> Can you send one? For mail, see my profile -- I didn't see an email in yours.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I've been using keybase and their copy really seems to make sense to people that do not understand encryption. I've been able to get more of my friends using PGP recently due to this. I'm hoping that the file system will get more people to migrate away from dropbox, etc.

</comment><comment><USER69> This is a pretty cool system! Sounds ideal for e.g. sharing passwords, API keys or other credentials.

</comment><comment><USER70> I've got invites (9) for Keybase that are collecting dust if anyone wants one. Email in profile.

WOW: That happened fast, I'm all out of invites now... 2 minutes after posting emails started coming in and within 3 minutes I was out. Sorry if you didn't get one...

<comment><USER71> All invites gone!

<comment><USER72> Could I get one? New to HN - is there a PM page....?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> I have 8 invites if any other stragglers (6 hours after the story was posted) are still reading. I'm heading to bed but will send them during morning coffee, GMT -5. (please make sure your email is in your profile)

<comment><USER74> I would greatly appreciate an invite as well (ben[at]jelled.com).

<comment><USER74> I would greatly appreciate an invite as well. Edit: got one, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> Are there any invites floating around yet? I'd love one, email address is in my profile. Very interested in developing other tools against Keybase, with mruby or Elixir.

</comment><comment><USER76> I am so excited for this project. I have been waiting for an invite for close to a year. Can anyone send me one? EDIT: email: jsrjenkins @ [google's email service].com

</comment><comment><USER77> This looks like a really well thought out implementation that ought to fit a lot of use cases.

Put myself in the alpha queue this morning. I'll look forward to testing it out.

</comment><comment><USER78> Does anyone still has a spare invite? I've been reading hacker news for a while now but I made an account just to ask :D (email adress on my account)

<comment><USER78> Edit: got one (two actually) thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> lemon_party.jpg is a nice touch.

<comment><USER80> Haha, don't look it up at work friends

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> I'm a little confused, where are the files hosted?

</comment><comment> ryan-c Random unrelated keybase question: I generated new subkeys with GPG recently - how do I update my keybase account? The master key has not changed.

<comment><USER82> I think you're looking for:

      keybase pgp update

<comment> ryan-c That does not work - I have to log in with the command line client, which fails because I it doesn't have GPG sign with the correct key. Edit: Managed to get it to work by restoring a backed up keyring from before I updated my keys.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER83> Is there any difference between this and [http://tresorit.com/](http://tresorit.com/) ?

</comment><comment><USER38> Has anyone managed to get this up and running? I'm running the Go client on Linux and no dice.

</comment><comment><USER84> Looks very cool, trying it now. I think this will help keybase take off. Congrats on shipping!

</comment><comment><USER85> I would really like an invite, hopefully some are still left!!: kishoresurana |at| gmail.com

</comment><comment><USER86> Any idea how to get this working on Arch? The latest version looks to be about 2 weeks old.

<comment><USER87> How about the "keybase-release" package from AUR?

<comment><USER88> Considering keybase-release[0] was "Last Updated: 2015-11-03 22:36", community/keybase is a lot more recent, but still from January, so not recent enough.

[0]: [https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/keybase- release/](https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/keybase-release/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> Very exciting project! I'd love an invite if anyone can spare one. Email in profile.

<comment><USER89> Realised my email actually wasn't in my profile :O still hanging out for an invite though

<comment><USER61> invite sent, check your email. :)

<comment><USER44> May I get one? Email address in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pretty late here, but does anyone have any invites left? Super interesting project!

Email in my profile :)

<comment><USER8> Thanks!!

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> I would be interested in an invite if someone has one available (address in email).

</comment><comment><USER91> Appreciate an invite - vcsekhar DOT parepalli AT gmail DOT com ; Thanks in advance

</comment><comment><USER92> Sounds really interesting. Anyone have an invite, they would like to share?

</comment><comment><USER93> I'd love an invite if anyone has any: firstname.lastname@example.com

<comment><USER94> Sent one. Enjoy.

<comment><USER95> Me need one too, thx :)

email@example.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> Is there a way to make a public folder writable to multiple users?

</comment><comment><USER97> Hi. Does anyone still have an invite? I would love to try it out.

</comment><comment><USER98> Any more invites? k e n c o o p at g m a i l . c o m Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER99> If anyone still wants some, I can give out three invites.

<comment><USER100> I'd go for an invite if you hae some still. Email in profile.

<comment><USER99> Sorry I took so long, looks like you already have an invite, so I won't send you another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER101> This is awesome. Never knew such a product was in works

</comment><comment><USER102> Also an invite would be appreciated. Email in profile.

<comment><USER102> Email: [my username here]@ymail.com

</comment></comment><comment><USER103> I have 2 invites if people are still looking for one.

<comment><USER104> I'd really appreciate an invite if you still have any. It's wild to see just how in demand these are right now.

<comment><USER103> Yeah I still have all 2, I just need an email.

<comment><USER105> I'd love one. Keybase has always been a fascinating service to me. m {at} sftw.ninja

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> got 2 invites to give away. next 2 replies to this comment will get the invites (fifo). good luck! make sure your email is in your HN profile.

<comment><USER107> Can I have the other? Username @ gmail

<comment><USER106> yep, sent.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER108> I'd love to give this, and Keybase, a try if anyone has an invite they would be comfortable sharing.

tomkinsc@ _[google 's consumer email service]_.com

<comment><USER109> I just sent you one.

<comment><USER44> May I get one? Email in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> Would anyone mind sharing an invitation? I've been waiting in line for close to a year.

My email address is visible on my profile.

Thanks in advance to the HN community!

<comment><USER35>
        > My email address is visible on my profile

No it isn't :)

<comment><USER110> I realized that I updated my profile in a different tab and forgot to hit save!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER111> Have signed up for the waiting list for months but looks like I'm still in line. Anyone care for an invite? firstname.lastname@example.com Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER112> Looking for an invite. thanks!

<comment><USER113> Sent one

<comment><USER114> If there are invites left, I would like one (email in profile).

<comment><USER61> __Just checked profile, email was not found. Took a guess though and sent an invite to the email listed at:[https://github.com/stepvhen](https://github.com/stepvhen)

If that's the wrong email then let me know where to send it. __

<comment><USER114> Ah I thought it was there. Good guess, I got the invite. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER115> I also have invites if anyone needs them, reply or find my email in profile.

<comment><USER115> Whoa, this blew up. If you emailed me after 2:19pm PST I'm out of keys (did FIFO for them). If I get more I'll keep sending.

</comment></comment><comment><USER116> I would love an invite in anyone has one. Email in my profile. Thanks!

<comment><USER117> I sent you the invite. It should be in your inbox. :)

<comment><USER118> Have one left? I'd like to join as well :) Email is in bio -> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> Looks amazing. Would love to try this if anybody has any invites.

</comment><comment><USER120> Late to the party, would really appreciate an invite.. Cheers!

</comment><comment><USER121> I've got a few Keybase invites, email me if you want one!

<comment><USER122> I got some invites left, ping me if you want

<comment><USER44> May I have one? Email is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER123> Y'all got any more of them invites?

<comment><USER113> Sent one if you still need.

<comment><USER124> I'd like an invite too, please.

Edit: GOT IT, thanks!

<comment><USER61> [x] invite sent. check your email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> YES.

</comment><comment><USER125> can someone pass along on invite please. chaitanyamannem@googles email service(gmail)

<comment><USER113> Sent

<comment><USER126> I would like an invite if you still have a keybase invite available. Much appreciated. immistyle AT hotmail.com

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER127> go max!

</comment><comment><USER128> Hello,

What can you provided over and above yubikey?

<comment><USER129> Seriously?</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Intellectual entertainment that's also not demanding? - <AUTHOR> After coming home from my Dilbertesque day job each day, I've found the ultimate antidote is to find something really inspiring from an intellectual point of view in which to engage myself in.
The problem however is that I'm usually mentally spent by the end of the day. I don't have the energy to sit down and read "The Origin of Species". So it has to be something that's, ironically, also not mentally demanding.
Does anyone have suggestions for blogs/games/entertainment whatever that fulfills this criteria? Stuff like zoomable fractals or xkcd comics, for instance.
Just need some reminders that intelligent life can be found on Earth. <comment><USER2> John Batchelor show podcasts.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hyperdimensional Neptunia, of course.</comment>


Super Platforms Will Be Impossible to Break Up - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/futuresin/super-platforms-will-be-impossible-to-break-up-238cba3c81d5 <comment><USER2> I don't agree with this. Humans are capable of leaving incumbents for something better, safer, more convenient, more provate, etc.

Our current value system is the cause of this evolution of tech. Changing value systems of the youth will drive the future - as it did with the current generation)</comment>


Git remote branches and Git's missing terminology - <AUTHOR> http://blog.plover.com/prog/git-remote-branches.html <comment><USER2> tl;dr</comment>


Battle: Internet Engineer vs Physicist. Which side are you on? - <AUTHOR> http://h30565.www3.hp.com/t5/Feature-Articles/A-Contrarian-Worth-Listening-To-Caltech-Professor-John-Doyle/ba-p/1864

<comment><AUTHOR> From the article: John Doyle, Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems at Caltech, has maintained for years that this analysis was not just wrong, but so "comically wrong" to anyone who knew anything at all about Internet architecture that "most engineers thought it was a hoax." As Doyle explains, "The irony of the claim is that the Internet is incredibly robust to physical challenges—but it's terribly fragile to more sophisticated, software attacks that leave the routers intact but send unwanted packets and malware to the users."</comment>


Cofounders - <AUTHOR> http://blog.spreedly.com/2009/12/22/cofounders <comment><USER2> Whenever co-founders bust up, there is inevitable trauma to the business of the startup no matter what mechanism is in place to assure that one particular founder (or a faction) has the final say. In this sense (as recognized in this post), it is the people who matter more than any particular mechanism.

Having represented countless founders over many years, I have seen all sorts of startups succeed even though they lacked a mechanism for ultimately determining control and relied instead on shared governance. This is by far the norm and not the exception and simply signifies that most people manage to get along and tend to resolve their issues most of the time when it matters even though they theoretically could get ensnared in deadlocks.

I have also seen the classic bust-ups and fights over control, and these truly _are_ a mess - hence the advice in this post to put a control mechanism in place if possible can prove helpful, at least if co-founders are willing to cede final authority to one among their group. The bottom line in this respect, though, is that most founding groups are _not_ willing to cede such authority in this manner - I think this has less to do with founders failing to think the issues through than it has to do with basic human psychology. It simply is not easy for those starting a venture on comparatively equal footing to elevate the status of one above the others. In turn, in cases where it _is_ obvious that there is one dominant founder, this normally is reflected in that founder's getting a disproportionate share of the equity and unilaterally controlling the company in that manner.

That said, this is a thoughtful post that will help founders to think through and deal with this issue.

By the way, a common method used by a still small minority of founders to give control to some over others is the Class A/Class B common stock approach (popularized by Google) by which all common shareholders have identical rights except that the B holders get a 10x voting advantage for their shares (or any similar variation on this theme).

</comment><comment><USER3> There are many ways to skin a cat. Assuming the equity amongst the co-founders is equal, I think the methods used to resolve conflicts are mainly dependent on the co-founders dispositions.

For me personally, I believe there has to be a willingness from the founders to put the customers' needs first. If I truly believe I'm working with my equals, then their opposing views are just as important as my own.

Assuming there are four founders and there is a conflict then I'd suggest the founders get in the same room and talk about the problem first. Make sure everyone agrees on what the exact problem is. Assuming there is still a conflict then brainstorm on possible solutions. At this point if there is still a conflict and the vote is 2-2 then I'd suggest flipping a coin. Trying one of the solutions is more valuable than both ideas combined. The insights the founders will receive from attempting the solution should make it obvious which solution is best.

Lastly if conflicts are cropping up on a consistent basis, if the general mood of the group is negative, if people are going off on their own and/or if there is a strong belief in the group that not everyone has the customer needs as the primary focus, then quit. Use a shot-gun[1] clause to resolve the issue of how to buy out a partner and move on. It is easier said than done.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_clause>

</comment><comment><USER4> This makes me think that the advice about 50/50 cofounders -- that you want somebody who complements you, not somebody like you -- is especially good.

If you're the tech guy and the other guy is the business guy, you _have_ a conflict-resolution method in place for most things. You have final say on tech, he has final say on business. So you'd expect the difficult/troublesome decisions to be the ones where you've got equal say, like "do we sell for this amount of money?"

<comment><USER3> For me an ideal fit would be someone who is like-minded with a constrasting skill set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm still trying to work out how two people can bring the same passion and direction to a project. I can find people with similar worldviews and complimentary skillsets but with cofounders having the same goal and the same energy seems the most critical point.

OT but I like how this blog gives a clear link and description to their product (something which annoys me on other product blogs where all links point back to the blog itself). I actually clicked through and am interested in using their product thanks to this good post and the easy link + description. I still need to investigate further but the reasonable price to take the hassle of subscriptions off my mind sounds good.

</comment><comment><USER6> 50/50 is the worst ratio in business.

<comment><USER3> What makes you say this? Do you feel co-founders are analogous to a marriage?

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sounds like the article reinforces the same checks and balances that the U.S. government is based upon, why the supreme court has all those judges and terms of elected officials are staggered. The founders force themselves to seek the middle ground. Pretty Good.

</comment><comment><USER8> This part resonates: "having a known resolution mechanism in place encourages everyone to resolve disputes informally"</comment>


10 Awesome Theorems & Result - <AUTHOR> http://www.algorithm.co.il/blogs/computer-science/cryptography/10-awesome-theorems-results/ <comment><USER2> So glad to see "Stokes' theorem"! Back in college, I devoured the books "A Course in Mathematics for Students of Physics" by Paul Bamberg and Schlomo Sternberg that covered exterior calculus. It was awesome to see kirchoff's laws in circuits, flux and loop integral laws in electromagnetism all take the same form.

</comment><comment><USER3> My favorites:

\- Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange - I really do find it wonderfully counter intuitive that you can have two systems agree on a secret value while communicating completely "in the clear" - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exch...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffie%E2%80%93Hellman_key_exchange)

\- That you can implement recursion in the untyped lambda calculus - the best known being the Y Combinator (!) <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed_point_combinator>

</comment><comment><USER4> There was a thread on Quora recently asking what the most beautiful equation was [http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-the-most- beautiful-...](http://www.quora.com/Mathematics/What-is-the-most-beautiful- equation), which while it is obviously the Einstein field equations was nice to read through in a similar vein.

</comment><comment><USER5> My favorite was always Fubini's theorem in 3D calculus the result of which is basically "meh, it doesn't matter which order you integrate"

</comment><comment><USER6> I'd count among my favourites:

* the Schroeder-Bernstein theorem in set theory

* the fact that the axiom of choice is equivalent to the statement that every set is well-ordered: how can something so intuitively correct and something so intuitively wrong be equivalent?

* the general notion of dualism in category theory. Two for the price of one!

* the ways fixpoints can be used in TCS: the Y combinator (heh), and the Kleene and Knaster-Tarski theorems. The best part is that they're all intuitively the same.

<comment><USER7> Excellent choices. (The aforementioned sentence does not require use of AoC ;)

In fact, the moments he describes in #3 are partly why I'm currently pursuing a Math and not a CS degree.

<comment><USER6> As a guy pursuing a CS degree, I'm compelled to be a constructivist (what use is a proof if you can't get an algorithm out of it?) and reject both AC and the well-ordering theorem. Find me a well-ordering of the reals and then we'll talk. :)

edit: speaking of proofs and algorithms, how could I forget the Curry-Howard correspondence. It just makes so much sense.

<comment><USER7> eh eh :)

About an hour after taking a set theory exam it dawned on me that a proof I gave is correct iff the continuum hypothesis is true. The distance between a Fields medal and a F was never so small :)

edit: you made me wiki it. Funny, I don't seem to know/remember it. Thanks, seems interesting :)

Regarding theoretical proofs... What's the point of an algorithm if you don't propel its use through a viable product? I'm currently (concurrently with the studies) in a CS research position and it is a difficulty for me... Don't get me wrong, I love my job, but for me if there is any downside then this is it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Facebook Cull - <AUTHOR> http://newstilt.com/notthatkindofdoctor/news/the-facebook-cull

<comment><USER2> _But now I'm down to the lucky 35, I can speak more freely about my personal life. Details of my family, my travels and my thoughts that were too sensitive to broadcast to just anyone are now fair game._

Until Facebook decides at some point that those too should be public. I try my best not to post things on Facebook that I care about keeping at all private. At some point I don't think they will be anymore.

(related: [http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-further- reduce...](http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-further-reduces- control-over-personal-information))

<comment><USER3> _I try my best not to post things on Facebook that I care about keeping at all private._

This should be the attitude for putting anything online. If it's posted online I find it best to just assume that it is, or will become public at some point and base if it should be posted on that.

<comment><USER4> I try to do the same, but sadly without seeming rude and asking friends to remove you from photos or leaving you out of messages, you leave it to chance.

For instance, I've never put a photo of myself online, yet Facebook has me tagged well over 300 times from going out to bars with friends. I'm ok with my friends seeing these since they actually know me, but I can't control the privacy settings on their albums -- only whether or not people can get to those photos from my page.

I don't walk around with the uneasy feeling that, at any time, I could be photographed and unknowingly put online... but I still think about it from time to time.

<comment><USER5> Why are you bothered about people seeing you in photos?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If you do plan on removing friends rather than using FB lists and organizing permissions based on lists, I would suggest going to <http://www.facebook.com/friends/>

It allows you to click X next to each friend rather than going into each individual profile to remove them.

<comment><USER7> Specifically, the list including all your friends, and none of your other 'connections':

<http://www.facebook.com/friends/#!/friends/?filter=afp>

I thought I'd try this out to see how it felt. Using only the criteria "do I care about what this person is doing today?" I managed to axe 122 people, and don't feel bad about it at all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I chose to cull facebook instead. No regrets.

<comment><USER9> I think this has become the "I don't even own a TV" among those who don't even own TVs.

But basically same for me. I rarely go to facebook anymore. But new messages get emailed to me, and they have that neat feature where you can just reply to the email and it posts it to facebook. No need to even visit the site!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I use the same tri-level distinction- Facebook for people I know and talk to regularly. Linked-In for People I know through Work. Twitter for everyone.

I also use twitter as my base-level feed; It inserts into Linked In and Facebook, so people don't need to pay attention to all of them; The public things trickle up.

I believe that Facebook would prefer that we solve this problem by using friend-lists. With lists, you can say "Push this update only to members of my family", or "Only show this to my D&D Buddies"

While I've experimented with that a bit, too many things are too granular, where they are only showed to all-friends, or nothing.

For now, having the firewall of separate services serves me well.

<comment><USER11> I've been trying this for a while and intend to write a nice post about tweaking friends' lists on Facebook. In summary, I created two lists:

1\. One for people who "can see everything" (that's the name of the list actually) and that's where I keep my closest friends. They have access to everything I share.

2\. Another for people who "can't see anything" (again, that's its name) and that's where I keep people who I can't avoid adding as friends but I don't want them to see anything I share, think big company's partners who wouldn't like me to reject them.

Everyone else is not on a list and they can see my profile and photos but won't see my status updates. There's people from school days whom I have no connection besides that and don't deserve to keep them updated on my life but I still want to keep their contact.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've done this recently as well. That, or I've hidden status updates from various pseudo-friends. It's nice to reconnect with that person from high school... for a while, but then I really don't want to hear about their personal lives. Perhaps we need multi-level friendships in Facebook, as in, friends vs. acquaintances? Though I guess if someone friends you and you only "acquaintance" them, things could get ugly.

<comment><USER13> You can actually define groups of friends and then set permissions based on those groups.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> No matter how close your FB friends I suggest not posting anything you wouldn't say in a public forum. Electronic communications can come back to bite you, friends can share your posts and FB saves literally everything. Note, this advice isn't limited to FB. It applies to email as well.

<comment><USER15> Reminds me of some advice from my intro to law class in college: The "e" in e-mail stands for "evidence".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> At first I read this post and thought it was a pretty good idea. Upon further consideration, I reconsidered this comment:

 _It was a surprisingly hard thing to do, but now I'm left with 35 people that I actually know: people I'd actually talk to in the real world._

Personally, if my Facebook was:

Family: over 35 - my mom, stepdad, stepmom, 3 siblings, about 10 aunts and uncles, 3 grandparents, about 15 cousins, and 2 in-laws

Might-as-well-be-family[1]: about 15 more

Friends I enjoy hanging out with... weekly: probably 10 more, monthly: maybe 20 more, a few times a year: at least 40 more

People I rarely see but chat with occasionally when I see them on Facebook: another 30?

That means that my culled Facebook list would still have at least 150 people. Once you have that many friends, what's a few more even if you don't know them that well?

I'm not in any way trying to brag about how many friends I have. In my experience this is pretty much standard for people in the 18-28 age range (I'm 26). It seems to me that the author's "lucky 35" being that small is the exception, and for most people such an exercise would be mostly pointless.

For me, Facebook isn't only for "people I'd actually talk to in the real world," anyways. It's also interesting to check out the profiles of people you knew several years ago but never talk to anymore, just to see what they're up to these days and maybe post "Hey, longtime no see! Glad to see you're doing well :)" messages on their walls.

And when it comes down to it Facebook is all about being social. Part of that is photo-sharing: if you want to tag -- or be tagged by -- someone you see occasionally (we all party sometimes, right?), you have to be friends with them. Ditto if you want to invite them to your next big party, or suggest they check out a small band that you enjoy. And it's pretty awesome when you can make your status "driving out to <interesting place 6 hours away> this weekend, who's with me?" or "looking for a ride to <hometown 2+ hours from my college town> Friday" and be reasonably likely to get a reply.

I agree with the idea of having a special network for your closest friends and family. I just think that if you're using Facebook for that, you're vastly under-utilizing its potential.

[1] My closest friends, past roommates that I still care a lot about, my ex- but-longtime-girlfriend's family, extended-extended family, etc.

</comment><comment><USER17> You can hide people from your news feed. You can also make a list of friends and the default publishing privacy setting so only that list can see things. There is no need to break the connection.

With the type-ahead in composing messages and the search, you don't need to look through a list of friends.

Also, if you never pay attention to people, the algorithms on various parts of the site will make it so their content doesn't bubble up as much, even indirectly. An example might be the games presented in the gaming dashboard <http://www.facebook.com/?sk=games>

</comment><comment><USER18> Sounds liberating, but still too much politics I think. I prefer to just rarely rarely post to Facebook.

<comment><USER19> Same. Facebook's a giant, constantly-changing mess. I use it to contact people whose email I don't have and for nothing else.

I would fix his public-vs-private status dilemma by having a public Twitter account and a friends-only Twitter account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> I think there's some irony in only allowing comments with FB connect.

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell I did this from the start.

Facebook: Friends. People I actually know in real life LinkedIn: Work colleagues and acquaintances Twitter: Random geeks who want to follow tech stuff

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't need to cull anything because I never allowed Facebook or myself to build such a fake list of friends and relationship to begin with. However, even with only close family in your list, FB (or any other service besides the email service you trust) is not worth sharing anything that is of private nature. Ultimately, FB is as same as any other place on the internet.

I use FB's private nature of service for close family and friends only to email them as it is convenient.</comment>


Poll: Which Text Editor Do You Prefer? - <AUTHOR> http://gopollgo.com/which-editor-do-you-prefer-emacs-or-vi

<comment><USER2> Options:

\- Emacs

\- Vi

\- Other

Is that another joke about how cool vim and emacs are and how other editors suck? Again, seriously?

</comment><comment><USER3> Notetab.com</comment>


Show HN: I made video marketing platform to help you grow your email list. - <AUTHOR> https://tryprosper.com <comment><AUTHOR> I'm currently building Prosper (tryprosper.com) as a side-project. Video marketing platform to help you grow your email list.

Prosper: Video is eating the world, people are consuming videos more than ever. It's time to change how you ask for an email address. With video popups, show your face behind your business and get more people to give you their email address without being annoying

</comment><comment><USER2> Oh, nice.. now we will get annoying video popups... (as if we don't get that already...)

</comment><comment> Pete-Codes Looks interesting! Think I will experiment with this for No CS Degree</comment>