U.S. Customs Officer Harasses Defense One Journalist at Dulles Airport - <AUTHOR> https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2019/10/us-customs-officer-harasses-defense-one-journalist-dulles/160380/ <comment><USER2> This shit keeps happening. The feeling that govt workers can act corruptly because this is tacitly allowed at high levels of the govt. After trump is gone this will take a long time to recover from. If it happens to you, you need to report it, which could be damaging, but its the only way to stop it. Force these bullies to see its not acceptable. I pray it's not acceptable.</comment>


Huge spike in App downloads? Don't get too excited - <AUTHOR> https://www.cultofmac.com/311171/crazy-iphone-rig-shows-chinese-workers-manipulate-app-store-rankings/ <comment><AUTHOR> I have a free very niche iOS App which has been free. Recently, I saw a big spike in downloads, almost all from China. Turns out many other providers of free Apps have been seeing the same thing. The most plausible theory I have found is the one mentioned in this article: a commercial click-farm that is using free downloads to "normalize" the look of the fake users. I have reported my concerns to Apple, but I also decide to charge 99c for my App. This will eliminate the bogus downloads (I have no interest in being a participant in a fraudulent activity), and for the few paid downloads I do get, I will have the satisfaction of knowing that the downloader shares one of my passions.</comment>


Show HN: First Two Weeks on Mac - <AUTHOR> http://technow.info/2013/05/my-first-two-weeks-with-a-mac/

<comment><USER2> I'm in the same boat and just ordered a new iMac.

My old dell laptop was 32bit and going forward w/Win8 you need 64bit. Going to use VMWare Fusion 5 to run Win8 in 64 bit.

Your post didn't mention it but how are you booting windows on your Mac?

</comment><comment><USER3> You can configure two finger click on the trackpad to work as a right click. It's in system preferences.

<comment><USER4> I am pretty sure that is the default configuration for two finger click on the track pad.

For those new to Mac, make an effort to learn the track pad gestures. I actually found that I abandoned the mouse all together in favor of the track- pad. It was not a conscious decision I just found that as the gestures became reflex, it was more efficient to use the track-pad. The big ones are two finger right click and two finger scroll. The two finger scroll is far more efficient than the scroll wheel on the mouse.</comment></comment>


How I Built A $600/mo Product In One Day - <AUTHOR> http://www.kpkaiser.com/mindhack/how-i-built-a-600-mo-product-in-one-day/

<comment><USER2> I'm intrigued that you have that many buyers on wpplugins.com. Are people signing up for your support contract, or is that really 40 purchases in the first month? Do you expect this volume to continue, rise, or trail off?

In any case, I had a reasonably successful plugin a while ago that I still get occasionally pestered to update... I'd be a lot more motivated to do so if I thought I could release it to a marketplace and net a few hundred a month.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'd say go for it. One major problem I had in the past was not taking into account the effects of growth over time.

The Wordpress marketplace is growing. Even if you've only got x amount of sales immediately, you can iterate, build stuff to sell back to your customers you've already acquired, and generally grow with compound interest.

No matter what you build, entropy will be built into your product. You can't ever sit on something and expect growth without continual effort. That's another major illusion I've struggled to deal with.

Takeaway: It takes the smallest snowball to begin rolling along and building momentum.

<comment><USER2> I know that in the general case, passive income is a pipe dream, but it's just particularly frustrating with Wordpress how you have to be always chasing the API and fixing breakages every point-version.

My plugin was particularly bad, I supposed, since I was manipulating the admin interface with JavaScript, so every time they tweaked pretty much anything, it would fall apart.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> You took us from concept to implementation to actual usage. Along the way you included just the right amount of implementation info (your use of google alerts) and pointed out why you made some choices (wpplugins vs. other). Well written.

I shall second Jun8 - need more articles like this.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm mostly curious what the revenue curve is on this project - was the majority of the earnings within the first week? How do sales dwindle when using this route?

Either way - great job and very informative.

</comment><comment><USER5> Very nice step by step instructions from zero to product. We need more of these.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the support. I'd love to go into more depth if anyone's got any questions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Hasn't contnent avalanche been out for years? Www.contentavalanche.org has a 2007 copyright and I know I've read about it on some "guru" sites.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually, I came up with the name, and only found out later that it had already been a product. Woops, stuff happens when you build and launch in a day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> How can you say people might be pirating it, if you say that wpplugins.com requires that plugins are released under GPL?

In fact, I am wondering how this works. Are plugin authors providing support as an value added service?

Otherwise, what is to stop someone crazy enough to buy all the relevant plugins and release them on their own site(pay or free) ?

</comment><comment><USER8> Insightful, thanks. Please drop us a thread/article in a few months, so we may see the sales curve.

</comment><comment><USER9> Very informative and motivating at the same time! Thanks for sharing.

</comment><comment><USER10> i'm curious when you submitted to wpplugins.com. i wrote them off as dead after my plugin sat pending for a week last month. they didn't respond to my emails, either.</comment>


Building Your Own Gmail in a Day - <AUTHOR> http://sendgrid.com/blog/building-your-own-gmail-with-temboo-and-sendgrid/

<comment><USER2> Nifty little app, but in no way comparable with a service the scale of Gmail.

So a better title might be, "Doh! What's above the hood != what's under the hood."</comment>


Why Doesn't Flu Tank Economy Like Covid-19? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-doesnt-flu-tank-economy-like-covid-19-11586511000 <comment><USER2> In these threads people often ask if we're over-counting deaths to covid-19.

It appears we're probably undercounting them. [https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1245852365464449025?s=20](https://twitter.com/b_judah/status/1245852365464449025?s=20)

</comment><comment><USER3> De-paywalled: [https://archive.is/js5bL](https://archive.is/js5bL)

</comment><comment><USER4> because we don't outlaw the economy and put everybody under house arrest for the flu.

COVID isn't hurting the economy at all.

Turning off the economy is hurting the economy

<comment><USER5> What would millions dying do to the economy?

<comment><USER4> Nothing much, since 98% of those "millions" would be folks already above age 75 and with 2+ serious underlying conditions.

Only around 10,000-20,000 otherwise-healthy would die even in the worst case.

The economy would barely notice.

On the other hand, locking everyone in their houses has created 20% unemployment in three weeks.

Another 20-40% will lose their jobs in the next month -- and now they're starting to talk about 18 months as the "minimum" amount of time for these house arrests.

Meanwhile, farmers are being forced to destroy their crops, dumping milk, smashing eggs, and plowing under vegetables -- all while the store shelves are bare. 20% of American meat processing has been permanently closed already.

We are looking at 100 million or more dead due to starvation in the coming year, all because they frightened you about a moderately-dangerous virus.

<comment><USER5> >Only around 10,000-20,000 otherwise-healthy would die even in the worst case

>Nothing much, since 98% of those "millions" would be folks already above age 75 and with 2+ serious underlying conditions.

This is at odds with what actual experts say and actual reality as observed by people on the ground now.

Non-mitigation was projected to result in 2.2 million fatalities in the US and to date 46% of fatalities are under 75. This would be 968k under 75. We would in fact lose 75k under 44. 23k under 34.

[https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial- college/medicine/s...](https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial- college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI- modelling-16-03-2020.pdf)

[https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/COVID19/index.htm)

>American meat processing has been permanently closed already.

How is it "permanently" closed?

>We are looking at 100 million or more dead due to starvation in the coming year,

Where are you getting this number? The labor required for our agricultural industry is much smaller than the total labor pool. Why are you assuming that we can't reasonably discover enough people to keep this minority of our economy functioning enough to keep everyone from starving? We could run the sector with the military if we had to if the alternative was everyone dying. We can also run it with people that have already had the disease and come through it. On the one hand you predict that almost all young people come through it just fine and on the other you are predicting that we can't find enough young survivors of covid to run the minority of our economy for our population to survive. Which is it?

We cannot make life and death decisions based on your unsupported and unsupportable fancies we have to deal with real numbers, projections, and models.

In reality letting it "wash over us" like you and the president want would have killed millions including far more of otherwise healthy folk than you imagine. Digest more information and come to better conclusions.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Redfin buys Walkscore - <AUTHOR> http://blog.walkscore.com/2014/10/look-back-look-ahead/#.VEglzIee9TL

<comment><USER2> [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=redfin+buys+walkscore#!/story/fore...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=redfin+buys+walkscore#!/story/forever/0/redfin%20buys%20walkscore)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well, well, shouldn't the system do searching for me ;)</comment></comment>


Ask HN: My Verizon iPhone - Network or coincidence?  Searching... - <AUTHOR>

My Verizon iPhone arrived Monday.  Tuesday, I had to reboot because "Searching..." along top wouldn't go away until I did so.  Today, this has happened three times.  The phone will NOT re-establish connection with the network on its own.  The only way I've found to do it is to recycle.
Called Verizon today and asked if this was a coincidence, or if network was having issues.  He stated coincidence, and had me reset connection via *228.
Twenty minutes ago...lost signal again, for third time today.
I've been a long time Verizon customer and I've had other phones work without flaw from my home (where I've been all day).  I gave up my droid and am definitely second guessing this decision - for reasons more than one.
I am totally in love with the responsiveness of the iPhone touchscreen.  But I definitely need a phone too and was hoping the connection issues were tied to AT&T - a company I would never switch to and is why I gave android a try to begin with.
So, I guess time will tell.  Do I have a defective phone, is Verizon network having a temporary glitch, is Verizon network suddenly being bogged down by all the activations or is this simply a coincidence that will disappear in a day or two?  Time will tell, but I'm curious to know if anyone else on Verizon with iPhone is having same issue. <comment><USER3> This happens to me on my ATT iPhone often, at which point I have to reset it. I always thought it was bad luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> It can't be right...often during the day I won't look at my phone at all - <USER2> it could be down for hours without me knowing. That's not good, as I can't go hours without being available via phone. AFAIK, the problems w/AT&T were largely related to dropped calls - not inability to make or receive them. Hopefully it is just a bad phone! Thanks for your affirmation.</comment></comment>


Engineering management lessons (2014) - <AUTHOR> http://www.defmacro.org/2014/10/03/engman.html <comment><USER2> Having just spent a couple weeks on a pretty hard engineering problem, after having done more "architecture" stuff for quite a while, I would definitely add one thing to the Do's:

* Protect your engineers' attention.

As a manager you are the primary firewall between the world of distraction and the world of getting shit done. Most places these days have institutionalized some amount of distraction -- the various recurring "ceremonies" \-- but anything beyond that, it's essential that the manager can protect the engineers from being distracted when they're working on hard problems.

(I've been pretty lucky in this regard throughout my career, but now that part of my job is to live among the distractions it's really been driven home.)

Also:

> You're the one who makes hiring and firing decisions. Everything that > happens on your team is your responsibility.

This is, to put it gently, not quite true in larger organizations.

<comment><USER3> > Protect your engineers' attention.

Can you elaborate on "attention", and what does "protecting" it look like? (I've seen this reasoning used to keep developers out of requirements gathering, for example.)

<comment><USER2> I've never been an engineering manager so this is my perspective as a software engineer:

My attention is my ability to concentrate on what I need to do right now -- not what the company needs in a broad strategic sense, not what the stock is doing, not what might be on the horizon in a few weeks. All of those things are important to me but my attention can only be on one at a time. And I think the reality of serious software engineering is that sometimes you need to concentrate on the code and not on the other things.

Protecting my attention means knowing when I need to be in the "zone" (asking if you aren't sure); giving me plenty of warning if I'm going to be involved in things like requirements meetings; totally insulating me from any corporate politics except where I've asked to be informed or it directly affects me; and escalating appropriately (HELO phone?) if I'm too busy to answer e-mails/chats.

I absolutely think you want engineers in requirements meetings, but I also think that if you have an engineer who should be in the requirements meeting and she's super busy implementing that autonomous social-graph API then hey, move the meeting.

<comment><USER4> I am an engineering manager, formerly a dev, so I know what you mean.

I have a rule that I'm the gatekeeper to my group's time. My people know that if someone tries to contact them directly (unless as part of an ongoing project/conversation), they're to direct that person to me, where I can set expectations appropriately. It doesn't happen much anymore.

I see part of my role as a liaison between my group and the rest of the company.

My people don't fight fires, there's a team for that. I'm sorry that you don't feel like your issue gets the attention it deserves over there. Those guys are swamped. Pinging my team directly is not the appropriate resolution.

Usually, what happens is someone from some other group (sales, support, services) will come to me to ask a question. If I don't directly know the answer, I'll throw the question in a Slack channel. My ask of my team is that they check that before they head out to lunch, head home, etc., because it's usually a 5-minute investigation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The single most important thing in engineering management is hiring only the best. The best have two key characteristics: strong technical skills primarily in aptitude but also in technical knowledge, and a great ego-less attitude. It's at least as important to test for ego than for technical skills.

Most of our "engineering disasters" were related to lowering our bar for hiring. Some "engineering disasters", though, i should note were related to inexperienced product development - so if you're a first-time product leader, get an experienced mentor.

<comment><USER6> The replies are all playing word police and missing the point. Hyperboles are great for getting a point across, except when they're taken too literally.

OP means you should be raising the bar for hiring at your org.

<comment><USER5> Thanks! Yes, exactly what I meant. "The best" is according to your organization's criteria in terms of skills, attitude, etc. for your team. In my experience, when we've started lowering the bar (after interviewing umpteen candidates and eager to just hire someone), we always had problems down the road and usually big ones (i.e. none of those candidates are any longer with us).

I'm not talking about the mythical 10x engineers or anything like that. It's your bar for what skills fit into your company. If you have no bar...you've got much bigger problems than management...

That said, if you lower the bar a bit in hiring, do not lower the bar in expectations. See if that person who you weren't that confident in can catch up fast. Some candidates work very hard and make it. Those who aren't are apparently fairly quickly...you have to let them go.

Incidentally, there is no real "best" when it comes to engineers -- I've found there are two ways to think about the engineers you need: specific skillsets and brilliance. Someones you need someone who really knows a particular technology or area and can do that very well even if that person isn't generally super-capable. Such a person is often much more efficient than any new-comer will be even after several months of training. Then there's certain work that requires learning or general brilliance (which is probably learning fast if I had to define it...).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Managers should get good at RTS games. A lot of the same principles apply -

* production vs process - you can spend resources on improving process(usually tooling) to improve production but this isn't always an easy knob to tune and can have diminishing returns. "Automate all the things" is how I know you don't know what you're talking about.

* DOTs - damage over time can be brutal, question every meeting and email that hits your team. Similarly- Engineers need large blocks of time to find flow and be effective(aka void rays). That 15 minute 2pm weekly check-in may seem trivial but you're pretty much nuking an afternoon's worth of productivity.

* macro vs micro - you generally need to spend time on both. Even Sr. engineers can benefit from occasional guidance because you should know more than them(see below). (knowledge != intelligence)

* bottlenecks/'stage III' production - you can have too many resources on something.

* Some resources are much better at certain tasks than others.

* situational awareness - know the executive roadmap, your roadmap, your internal customer's roadmaps, know 'the theory of how engineers are working in your org' and the reality. Know every project in your code repository. Know about most other possibly relevant open source technologies. Mostly this is just a lot of listening and reading. Be Omniscient

* 'strats/build-orders' \- similar to the above, know how the industry/competitors solve the same problems your org has (but don't necessarily seek to copy them)

That said, treating people like RTS units is also a good way be disliked and ultimately be ineffective so you have to do the whole empathetic human thing.

</comment><comment><USER8> It's pretty simple: engineers are professionals. Professionals make mistakes, but are most effective when allowed to own up to them without consequences and learn from them.

In a good software team, a single developer's "big mistake" gets fixed by the whole team. I guarantee nobody on that entire team will make that same mistake; nor will they hold anything against the offending developer unless there's a pattern.

But in short, empowerment is the most effective leadership style in this environment. It's not appropriate for all employees (specifically newer folks who need a bit more hand-holding at first) but for professional workers like engineers, it's really the only way to go -- especially if you have senior technical employees who have decades more experience than their manager.

</comment><comment><USER9> Strongly disagree that an engineering manager shouldn't code; that is the shortest way to lose the respect of the team. Don't get me wrong; you need not be the "best" or the expert in all areas, but you do need to stay on top of technical developments both within and outside your organisation.

<comment><USER10> There's an easy way to accomplish this: Commit yourself to 95% reading of code and 5% writing. Through great code reviews, spread your knowledge through the company and make others as good as you. Has the added benefit of making the stack more homogenous. (I still code review 50% of all commits relating to the data model - SQL & API interfaces myself)

Then about the 5% - this is high prio, high visibility fixes where you bring in your extraordinary expertise in some domain. Believe me, that's enough to stay respected. Your time is much better spent at sparring systems architecture & high level design, hiring and building well-oiled teams and discussing the business needs with the rest of the company.

Isn't as fun, Doesn't feel as good, but it helps most the long run. The alternative is a high performance coding monkey that gets a tiny area of the company right - and the rest of IT goes wild and rewrites core APIs in the latest three hype language because "we needed to get rid of technical debt".

The 44 lessons of the OP are distilled gold from years of experience, I rehearse them every year and can recommend them to any aspiring tech lead.

<comment><USER11> Code reviews by a dude who codes only a little and has formal power are pure hell. It is tricky when he is wrong, he can force you to do things that cause trouble and so on and so forth - all that because writing and reviewing code are much different and he is gradually out of touch.

<comment><USER12> It sounds like you've run into some bad apples, likely due to "promoted too early" syndrome, which is unfortunately pretty common. In my experience, code review by senior engineers is extremely valuable whether or not they're currently writing much code.

<comment><USER13> That's why coding managers is dumb.

The army figured it out. The Officers are in charge, but the sergeants get shit done. In engineering, your leads/supervisors are the sergeants.

Officer quality varies between complete shitbird and Julius Ceasar. Either way, the army marches.

<comment><USER14> Sound like tech leads are sergeants and project managers are officers.

<comment><USER13> That's where the analogy breaks a bit. Where I work, PMs don't "own" people, just deliverables.

Their main weapon is pestering you.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Question: It says at point 8:

> Don't supervise the quality and volume of people's work.

And I agree with the argument following that sentence. On the other hand, 2 points above that it says:

> Do enforce behavioral and performance standards. Fire bullies and > underperformers.

So how else _do_ I recognize underperformers without taking note of quantity and quality of people's output? Surely I can't just take someone else's word for it (and by the point a peer complains about this it's probably too late already anyway?).

<comment><USER16> If you require metrics to determine whether an employee is productive in a team, then that is a red flag (to me) that you need to communicate more. Talking to people is a far better way to find issues than looking at metrics.

I'm highly sceptical of managers that are focused on measuring metrics.

<comment><USER17> This would be a pretty nerve-wracking position for an employee. Sometimes it takes a long time to hunt down a single-line change to the code to fix a bug.

<comment><USER18> I believe it's the responsibility of the person hunting down that one-line change to communicate to their team what was involved with tracking that down. Everyone can learn from a single person's deep dive. An engineer shouldn't feel like they're doing something risky for their career by carefully working through a hard problem with unimpressive code results.

If the engineer can't convey why it took a week to find that one-line, they should work on their communication skills. A good manager can help set expectations for an engineer who has underdeveloped soft skills.

I just spent a week and a half tracking down a bizarre issue in a 3rd party library and filed a fix for it. It was simultaneously frustrating and fascinating, but I never once was worried that the team didn't support my effort because I kept the team in the loop during daily standups. I've also been lucky to have excellent managers who believe in letting the engineers work.

<comment><USER19> Agreed. If it takes a week to make a line change it'd be very unusual IMHO if the entire team were not aware by that point of some the challenges involved. It may even warrant a short presentation on the technical challenges and how the issue was tracked down or solved; good learning opportunity.

On the other hand, if somebody is constantly disappearing for a week+ with a low complexity ticket, gives cagey standup updates, and then submits a PR that looks like it was thrown together in an hour.. That's a red flag that needs attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "Don't make decisions unless you have to. Whenever possible, allow the team to explore ideas and make decisions on its own."

Spot on, a good leader does not make all the decisions. It is counter- intuitive to popular culture, but this is stop on.

I would go on to say minimising your decisions, also helps to spend more time on a key decision when it is really necessary.

<comment><USER21> A variation on this is not swoop in and make discoveries that the team is very close to finding - let them enjoy the thrill (even if you have to nudge them a bit in the right direction).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> The emotional side of management goes so much deeper than what's covered by this list. Develop a vision and a strong sense of purpose in your engineers and they'll develop a mindset of building the future instead of maintaining the present. Foster a "we're all in this together" atmosphere and your engineers will develop a fanatical drive for success - either we all succeed or we all fail, it's not every man for himself.

The deep emotional drive is also what causes startups to succeed where big companies fail, despite their massive resources.

</comment><comment><USER23> I always say management is they easiest job because you only have four things to do, and I'm sure your team has more than that to do:

1) Provide Air Cover

2) Provide resources

3) Provide direction

4) Get the F __* out of the way

Don't over think it. Empower your teams, trust them. They'll make mistakes just like you do. It's not how bad you F* Up it's how well you recover.

Originality in mistakes is the best I can ask for. Let's learn, progress and do better together.

I've been in tech for 35 years, if you think you've seen it all, you haven't and neither have I, so let's figure it out together and get some S*t done.

<comment><USER24> Wow, that sounds like a lazy shitty manager.

Every engineering team has problems they can't deal with on their own, either because it's out of scope, it's high-level organization, or whatever. A GOOD manager spends a significant chunk of their week ACTIVELY fixing problems. Not getting-the-fuck-out-of-the-way!! They should help clear the way. They should help fill gaps in the team, plan, or execution. Talk to other teams and see if everyone's on the same page. Make sure everyone agrees on priorities. Make sure your team's work integrates with what everyone else is doing. Be aware of _everything_ going on around you (esp with other orgs, etc) so you know how it all fits together and your team doesn't waste time.

Don't just listen and nod during 1:1s and then give some off-the-cuff suggestions. Don't just "get out of the way". And you don't need nearly that much Air Cover when you're team is aligned with the rest of the company, so make sure THAT happens instead of trying to "protect" the folks that happen to report to you.

If a great team's manager can't point to what they ACTIVELY DID to get the team to success, they're disposable.

<comment><USER25> Sad truth is that coding and problem solving and getting your hands dirty is low status work. I've had managers that new the application they were responsible for, and could speak coherently about technical things.

I've had managers who couldn't demo the apps that their team worked on.

Which one is better to work for as an engineer? The technically savvy one. Which one has higher stature and seems to be more highly regarded by his superiors? The non technical one.

In other words, that "lazy shitty manager" is probably playing the game better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I am learning a lot about engineering management through turmoil, and I think the most important lesson for me is to avoid doing too much.

There are many things that can often use improving, especially at smaller companies. Process, architecture, deployment system, reduced meetings of team, optimizing the SLM software...it's easy to get overwhelmed, especially if you have a large team, or in my case, doing the job of a tech lead and engineering manager. It is a lot to swallow. Prioritizing the most important points on what is being tackled and communicating why is very important.

</comment><comment><USER27> This is a fine list and there's nothing too controversial that people would disagree with.

That said, I only counted 6 items out of 44 that's specifically _" engineering"_ related. (5, 7, 10, 12, 14, 15)

The other 38 bullet points are _universal_ lessons that also apply to _non- engineering_ managers such as a director of a creative team in an ad agency, or project supervisor of a construction crew, or a showrunner in charge of scriptwriters for TV episodes, etc. Empower your team and make decisions when necessary, etc.

</comment><comment><USER28> Did I miss something? I see nothing on this list that touches on mentoring or growing. I do see a line about firing underperformers. I've heard a metric that it costs between 2.5-5 time annual salary to replace someone. Sometimes an under performer is just in the wrong role, or on the wrong team; when this is the case they probably know it. Ask them!

</comment><comment><USER29> I read this recently and found it very insightful because whereas most software management essays seem to have an agenda of advertising the author as a great person to work with, this one seems like a pretty straightforward dump of lessons learned.

</comment><comment><USER30> Sadly, exactly 50% of engineers are below average, so hiring the best all the time is unsustainable. Thinking that you hired the best, however, is sustainable.

The art of managing relies on the capability to get work done by all kinds of engineers. The talent is rarely universally allocated. Some very 'bright' ones will never properly finish the work. Some 'slow' engineers may have remarkable attention to details.

<comment><USER31> 50% are below the median. I am not sure 50% are below average.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I guess it varies by company, but my job is more about managing the team's exposure to outside forces. I work with product and client teams to make sure we're delivering the right solution and we're promising something achievable. That's at least half my job.

</comment><comment><USER33> \+ a meta-point: Learn these through experience, not in a classroom. Having managed engineers in industry and also gone through a masters program in engineering management, 90% of what makes me a decent manager/leader/coach today can be attributed to the former.

<comment><USER34> The dirty secret is that 90% of all formal education is a waste of time, and is just signalling hoop-jumping.

<comment><USER35> I thought it was helpful when I was doing it the first time. I saw things it made the human capital and self assessment courses much more useful to everyone when I could ask meaningful questions. So really I see leadership masters being helpful when you're first attempting to manage not later or before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "When you do X, it makes me feel Y."

I saw this phrase several times in this article and the linked article on "non-violent communication," but I don't think it's a particularly productive phrase.

Consider the possibility that no one can "make you" feel anything, and that you are ultimately responsible for your own emotional state. For example, you can't command me to feel happy or sad. My emotional response is something I'm a party to, in combination with my own unresolved fears and insecurities.

Instead, I suggest phrasing it in the present tense: "When you do X, I feel Y." That is observational and avoids any accusation or blame, so you can focus on the core issue at hand.

</comment><comment><USER37> Prior discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8406507](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8406507)

</comment><comment><USER38> Big Companies have management who cash in at the expense of young exploitable engineers.

Personally I'd like to see the top management get fired.

</comment><comment><USER39> Number 11: you are probably talking about _authoritativeness_ and not authority</comment>


Ask HN: What are some old talks (10+ y) that are still relevant to watch today? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> The Mother Of All Demos is an absolute classic: [https://youtu.be/yJDv- zdhzMY](https://youtu.be/yJDv-zdhzMY) [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos)

I also very much enjoy Feynman's talks. Here's one on imagining physics: [https://youtu.be/4zZbX_9ru9U](https://youtu.be/4zZbX_9ru9U)

For computer science in particular, I highly recommend the first lecture in the SICP series, especially on the naming of so called "computer science": [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Op3QLzMgSY)

</comment><comment><USER3> Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ji5_MqicxSo)

</comment><comment><USER4> I know this is a parody, but it still seems pretty relevant: MadTV apple iRack Iraq war parody - [https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xcjLEwZqcQI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xcjLEwZqcQI)

</comment><comment><USER5> What fields(s) are u talking about, specifically?

<comment><AUTHOR> Mostly anything related to computing in general.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> This Warren Buffett speech is really great:

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


Foxconn, other Asian firms consider Mexico factories as China risks grow - <AUTHOR> https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mexico-china-factories-exclusive/exclusive-foxconn-other-asian-firms-consider-mexico-factories-as-china-risks-grow-idUSKBN25K17X <comment><USER2> This would be great for Mexico, if such moves actually materialize.

Perhaps the most interesting thing I read in this article:

"Foxconn Chairman Liu Young-way told an investor conference in Taipei on Aug. 12 the world was split into "G2" - or two groups - following Sino-U.S. tensions, saying his firm was working on "providing two sets of supply chain to service the two markets."

"The world factory no longer exists," he said, adding that about 30% of the company's products were now made outside China and the ratio could increase."

</comment><comment><USER3> Still waiting on that Wisconsin factory they promised...

<comment><USER4> I will take any excuse to post this article. Government subsidized corporate property development (thinking also of sports stadiums) is a rip off [https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/12/21217060/foxconn- wisconsi...](https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/12/21217060/foxconn-wisconsin- innovation-centers-empty-buildings)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The stuff will still be sourced from China and robots will just knock it together (like CKD kits in the motoring world) in Mexico ... don't think this is what Trump had in mind.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you manage passwords in your organisation? - <AUTHOR> How do you share passwords of common accounts? Like let's say there is a common email like email@example.com, how do you share access to this account to multiple people (sharing plain text password via different mediums can be the worst)?
Do you use password managers like LastPass or 1Password or any other third party provider? Have you or your fellow devs written custom password managers suited to your use case?
This can also be about your personal management of passwords. Just curious to know the sane way of doing this, especially considering that mismanaging this can screw up later. <comment><USER2> 300 comments last year on a similar question "Ask HN: What is your password management solution?" [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776620](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14776620)

We use 1password.</comment>


There's No Good Reason to Trust Blockchain Technology (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/theres-no-good-reason-to-trust-blockchain-technology/ <comment><USER3> Bruce's take can be summarized like this: with a blockchain, you're choosing to trust code and cryptography instead of a person. And when immutable code does the wrong thing, you can't trust them to fix it like you could a person.

This is a good take, and underappreciated - but there's a larger point being missed.

In high-social-trust situations, there are fewer benefits to blockchains. In low-social-trust situations, people aren't a good option. Bockchains provide an entirely new and welcome option for that scenario.

Relatedly, there are different kinds of distrust: mistakes and attacks are one, but platform risk is another that blockchains can alleviate. Putting it another way: I trust Twitter/YouTube/PayPal to generally work without issues, but I don't trust them not to change their offering in an exploitative way or become rent-seekers.

<comment><USER4> > In low-social-trust situations, people aren't a good option. Bockchains > provide an entirely new and welcome option for that scenario.

We've been handling these set-ups very well for millennia. You find a trusted intermediary. These days, for better or worse, globalization has created more and more of them.

<comment><USER5> Iran and Venezuela would disagree, or any country the US government has banned from the international banking network. The fact that one country can unilaterally block bank transfers between third parties solidifies the need for non-politically centralized banking.

<comment><USER4> Because allowing the transfers enriched those in power, helping keep the leadership in place and the people down. For the record this is something you can vote on and change, because it's a group decision. Unlike all those poor scammers who keep getting blacklisted from exchanges and such.

Secondarily, crypto is no panacea here. You can't solve the initial distribution problem. How do you decide which individual gets how many coins to start?

If you ignore that issue, and if you can only trade within the country the total amount of crypto and the total amount of local currency remains the same meaning the total net welfare has not improved. If you can trade outside the country a myriad better options exist.

Crypto doesn't help here either, it just purports to through magic of the blockchain. What's necessary isn't magic beans that live in computers but for the locals to rise up and overthrow their local governments and institute proper monetary and fiscal policy.

Concrete example: why don't people use bitcoin in Venezuela (separate from the fact a single transaction costs a few weeks wages)? It's been 11 years and were still waiting like skeletons for op to deliver. How did the Petro change the situation there?

<comment><USER6> People actually use Bitcoin in Venezuela [0], not en mass, but still, it provides some very useful escape hatches for a part of the population.

0\. [https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048](https://www.bbc.com/news/business-47553048)

<comment><USER4> Part of the population solves none of the problem, as I outlined. The monthly minimum wage is 1 bitcoin transaction fee. It's only the wealthy that can afford to use it in the first place. It's doing nothing to increase the total welfare of the system.

I never disputed that a select few couldn't benefit from it, it's not a good general solution, though.

<comment><USER7> Then use dai? Much lower fee. When ethereum scales to thousands of transactions a second, it will be the top solution.

<comment><USER4> That does not solve the initial distribution problem.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So far I haven't seen a usecase that absolutely needs a blockchain either. I mean one that can only be addressed by a blockchain and will fall apart without it. But many people have used it as a general enough hammer to hit every nail they can find with it. As last it as people make money on it, even hypothetical money, it's going to stay popular.

<comment><USER9> Buying drugs/murders on the darknet and getting untraceable ransoms from your cryptolocker malware are at least two solid use cases. One could argue evading currency controls is a 3rd.

The problem is that there's been no new uses found for blockchain after the initial uses discovered.

<comment><USER10> Blockchain isn't completely anonymous though. Bitcoin, for instance, can be and has been deanonymized to catch criminals. The entire concept of a blockchain is create an extended ledger, which isn't exactly an idea focused on privacy.

<comment><USER11> That's not an inherit limitation of a blockchain. Monero exists. It actually delivers on privacy where bitcoin couldn't.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> This article is from 2019 but I discovered it only recently by accident.

Bruce Schneier makes the case against both cryptocurrencies and Blockchain technology, as I understand it.

I think it should get some more attention, because it makes a very good case, centered around the topic of 'trust'.

<comment><AUTHOR> I noticed that this article has been discussed on HN a while back:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19097613](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19097613)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Store your private key on a paper wallet all you want, but what are you going to do during a tiger kidnapping? People look at me weird when I bring this up, but know nothing about real security. I could advice some ISO certified procedures to keep your money safe but your family is going to be the weak link. Go read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote to get an idea on what could go wrong.

</comment><comment><USER13> A large chunk of the arguments tend to assume Proof of Work as the consensus mechanism which isn't a flaw inherent in blockchain (eg. could have Proof of Stake, etc.)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think the point is more that whatever tech you use, you eventually still have to trust humans or an organisation.

There are always inherent risks that you just can't reduce with tech.

<comment><USER14> Yeah but if I can trust them in 10 seconds with very little effort on my part, I can be much more nimble with my strategy. If i can quickly verify the validity and source of primary data, I can make decisions on that data without hesitation. The value is in automating the trust, having a tiny little notary saying yes this is true, go ahead and make evidenced based decisions. Now of course we could do this with other tech, but I find the standardization of this trust mechanism to be the substructure of new business building tools and services around this quick trust, much faster than they can build them around trust accumulated by institutions, governments, notable individuals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is a misunderstanding of the concept of "trusted third parties".

Incredibly, yes, you have to rely on the software that you use to perform tasks to perform them. But this is not the same as placing another person in a mediating position where they can choose to betray you.

Confusing these two senses of "trust" results in an intuitively appealing but entirely mistaken family of arguments that aren't the gotchas people think they are.

The Very Short Introduction book on Trust covers different senses of the concept of "trust", including the ones I mention here, in a readable and compact way that I highly recommend.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Yes, bitcoin eliminates _certain_ trusted intermediaries that are inherent > in other payment systems like credit cards. But you still have to trust > bitcoin—and everything about it.

.... which is very tolerable to me.

Right now, it is more expensive to use blockchains do to both the novelty and specialization of it. As that becomes more ubiquitous it doesn't.

Whether we are talking about FX spreads to and from fiat currencies, or onchain transaction fees due to congestion, these all get better due to pressure and competition. A reason to improve. A permissionless ability to develop the improvements.

Even in things people pretend not to care about (after they lose money) like token sales, it costs token sale issuers more money to list on a random Asian exchange, than it costs to list on the Nasdaq. When the permissionless nature of the technology should mean the opposite is true. More competition and it fulfills that.

<comment><USER17> For how long will blockchains be considered a novelty? We are 1 decade after bitcoin release.

<comment><USER16> Enterprises are just moving away from their private blockchain to public blockchains, pretty much just this year, following Ernst & Young's Baseline framework.

Outside of the private sector, the regulatory frameworks specifically for blockchain technology have only begun to been ratified over the last 18 months, with the key market under the US Federal Government just getting providing clarity to financial institutions last week, at the Office of the Comptroller.

The metric you are referring to is a misattributed S-Curve of adoption that has condensed for a few select technologies over the last century.

Bitcoin is not the primary area of development for industry use of blockchains. There are various virtual machine technologies proliferating that bitcoin does not feature.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm not technical enough to disagree with Bruce. I'm also not an international law lawyer, fixer, intermediary, etc, to agree or disagree with how we have been trusting intermediaries for thousand of years and why this is impossible to replace.

The way I see it is that blockchains and smartcontracts have the potential to replace treaties, lawyers, corporate intermediaries, etc in an increasingly multipolar world where treaties would serve as a legal protocol to regulate transactions.

Maybe it is naive (I'm still trying to workout how this can ever happen if nation-states actively oppose these desintermediations) but I do think that privately orgs and people could benefit from technology that helps them transact with less middlemen.

In a world where China/Russia/etc is trying to avoid exposure to US money/laws maybe this could serve as alternative?

</comment><comment><USER19> Bitcoin is really about power and control, not about trust. In many aspects it's a rebellion of coders against the MBAs and lawyers.

</comment><comment><USER18> China has been trying to reduce dependency on USD. They would probably wish that the world use Reminbi to deal with them but world won't trust China's money (I also understand that China way of regulating it's currency also prevents it from propagating out of China) so, how about China adopting some neutral stablecoin like DAI for certain Dealings?

</comment><comment><USER20> I think about Bitcoin (and similar systems) primarily as a long term store of value.

I think they are a pretty fundamental innovation in that space.

What are good alternatives? Gold, cash, or ETFs have substantial drawbacks - especially in situations where property rights are insecure and inflation runs wild (or just eats up savings at a somewhat moderate pace, as is the case in many developing countries).

Of course Bitcoin is also a human system, eventually, but what you are trusting is an emergent, non-hierarchical order which should be more resilient than hierarchical systems. The technology facilitates the emergence of such a system.

I actually think the flawlessness of the technology is not a necessary condition of Bitcoin's success. If bugs are found then consensus in the social system can emerge which can minimise damages

All of that being said I think the use case for blockchain is probably quite narrow.

<comment><AUTHOR> > All of that being said I think the use case for blockchain is probably quite > narrow.

Name one, I dare you.

Name something that really matters. That will offset all the damage they do.

<comment><USER21> Funding niche software projects by using tokens. For example, Unitrade launched a token to fund development of a project providing advanced tools for Uniswap, a decentralized exchange [https://unitrade.app/](https://unitrade.app/) [https://uniswap.org/](https://uniswap.org/)

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) that are new and experimental forms of company formation. See DXdao [https://dxdao.eth.link/#/](https://dxdao.eth.link/#/)

Compound, a large player in the Decentralized Finance (DeFi) space that allows anyone to borrow against their crypto holdings [https://compound.finance/](https://compound.finance/)

The craziest part of Hacker News is the near universal opposition to cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. It is not going away, and governments are finally bending to reality and accepting it, rather than banning Bitcoin and similar outright.

There is no better way that a developer can earn outsized riches than blockchain and cryptocurrency. You are solving tough problems in difficult, constrained environments and are rewarded extremely well for doing so by a global group of investors involved in this alternative financial system.

But please, if you don't like crypto, just build whatever SaaS bullshit an MBA is telling you to and take your 0.1% equity for busting your ass. I have spent years in the extraordinarily interesting world of blockchain and have been rewarded extremely well in terms of personal growth, education, and financial rewards.

<comment><USER22> > There is no better way that a developer can earn outsized riches than > blockchain and cryptocurrency. You are solving tough problems in difficult, > constrained environments and are rewarded extremely well for doing so by a > global group of investors involved in this alternative financial system.

You are not rewarded for "solving tough problems" or anything else related to creating actual value. It's FOMO driven gambling, scams and enabling organized crime that gets money into the crypto ecosystem.

<comment><USER21> > But please, if you don't like crypto, just build whatever SaaS bullshit an > MBA is telling you to and take your 0.1% equity for busting your ass. I have > spent years in the extraordinarily interesting world of blockchain and have > been rewarded extremely well in terms of personal growth, education, and > financial rewards.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Are blockchains truly decentralized when a small central group of developers control their codebase? Sure, you can choose not to use the latest version, but then you're likely not going to be part of the main network.

<comment><USER19> Interesting what would happen if FBI (silently!) takes over the github bitcoin repository and starts pumping out a version spying on all transactions.

<comment><USER24> Transactions are already public.

<comment><USER19> names, addresses and SSNs of transacting parties are not public

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> blockchain - the wrong answer to any problem

<comment><AUTHOR> Indeed, blockchain: an answer to a question asked by nobody.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> but the USPS just filed a patent for a voting system based on one: [https://heraldsheets.com/us-postal-service-usps-files- patent...](https://heraldsheets.com/us-postal-service-usps-files-patent-for- blockchain-based-voting-system/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Well that nullifies all Bruce's arguments, right?

<comment><USER27> Not if the transactions can be deanonymized as it has happened to Bitcoin.

<comment><USER28> That didn't 'happen' to Bitcoin. Bitcoin was designed that way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I work broadly in financial markets. BC was talked into the ground thankfully ending 2018. Haven't heard squat since.

I was genuinely interested particularly on aspects of dis-intermediating custody banks. But it doesn't take long to realize a few things about bonafide public BC:

\- the random guy adding his/her node to the network will need to catch up on serious data amounts or just take somebody's snapshot "as word". Can you boot strap your new node with a snapshot. Should you? Well, what are you going to do about getting all the back data in?

\- nobody is going to put private financial/trading/whatever details plain text on a block. so it'll have to be encrypted. so what are we really verifying? you're verifying what my copy of PGP produces? whatever gibberish I post to the block? I don't want to disclose from/who/when/amount/shares/bank- info/exchange/stock symbols .... nothing ... but regulators may need to see data un-encrypted ... so now what? Send regulators data the old way? While I do CAPEX the new way? C'mon.

\- The data has to be represented somehow. Since BC brings nothing to that party ... BC will wrap Swift, FIX, Omego, or by exchange or by regulator reporting format ... so BC is a crap load of work to fix nothing about the domain. And even that is a simplification. There's lots of little gotach's in data reporting between all the counter parties.

\- throughput is an issue on BC

\- just the idea that any joe can add a box to the network and start looking at financial data ... it's a non-starter ... although we can argue you can get some visibility from exchange data ... but traders might use BC to help settle and that may require a heck of a lot more detail that what NASDAQ provides

\- BC isn't a currency. A currency has to do certain things including being universally accepted in the country, have near constant value day to day. Whatever that is BC doesn't do it.

\- Another thing I find jaw dropping about the BC mentality is the insistence the unshakable foundation of the blockchain insofar as its non-deprecation and on the computers to apply the same logic and/or verification and xfer fees without human interference or bias. To date BC is pre-pre-pre-neophyte status. You start bringing in serious economic pressures, 1-offs, crashes, bailouts, disagreements and I'll bet some or all that code will fail/falter in human hands leading to code changes leading to forking. Today's money system didn't start this way. It was beat into today's shapes through problems, mistakes, and here and there some good ideas. So will BC. I seriously doubt the immutability of the rules governing blocks.

Now you can back off public, decentralized ... into private block chains with shared or not shared keys and the like ... or just point-to-point block chains between trusted and distinguished entities ... but very quickly ... so what are we really doing here?

BC is used it seems to me for speculation, buying small potato things like coffee or for the coolness factor or hiding. I'm not seeing serious industrial use cases.

Now, there are two areas that I might see BC useful for:

\- things like ownership, proof of (say houses) \- maybe voting

-

<comment><USER30> All that and you still think housing records should be on a public blockchain? What happens if someone steals my private key? Do they now own my house? If we rely on public records and the legal system to sort it out then why have a decentralized and immutable database in the first place?

<comment><USER31> > All that and you still think housing records should be on a public > blockchain? What happens if someone steals my private key?

Then you lose your house.

Here's the alternative: someone steals your house, and they didn't have to steal your private key first. It happens every few years. Usually the victims have been overseas for a while.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> And there are many good reasons not to trust Blockchain evangelists.

</comment><comment><USER33> I just lost some respect for Bruce Schneier.

<comment><AUTHOR> But do you have any decent counter-arguments against his case?

<comment><USER14> He does talk about the standardization aspect as a plus to blockchain, the question is, do we want a bad standard now or a better standard never?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Yea, no. Blockchains are still a technology in their infancy but the need for them is clear. Rampant money printing is eroding the value of money - <USER2> cannot trust Central Banks to preserve what little wealth we may have.

And then we look at negative interest rates appearing, commercial banks beginning to show signs of stress like they did in 2007/08 and its clear we really can't trust them either. If you think you can, then ask the people of Lebanon what happened when they tried to withdraw their cash. Or Venezuelans. Or the Greeks a few years ago!

No view on Bitcoin or any particular coin actually, but long term I am a firm believer that Blockchain today is like the Internet in the 80s - it aint perfect, but it aint going away either.

<comment><USER35> > Rampant money printing is eroding the value of money - we cannot trust > Central Banks to preserve what little wealth we may have.

The point of central banks is to ensure a stable value of currency.

Given that we've (in the US, at least,) had very low inflation for the past 20 years; central banks are doing their job well.

<comment><USER36> Depends on where you look for your inflation. Some people posit that real estate, education, health care, and (now) the stock market are the sinks for inflationary money policy.

<comment><USER34> Exactly, all the money that's being printed and every asset class going higher yet the typical measure of inflation seems to stay low - I would bet the measure is wrong. In fact, it does not matter if I'm right or wrong about this, fact remains that if you're an American today and you try to go on vacation almost anywhere you'll find EVERYTHING feels expensive outside of the US.

Why is that? Well the value of the dollar is at multi-month lows and heading lower vs almost any other significant currency.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Car theft by relaying signals from wireless keys - <AUTHOR> http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/27037/page1/

<comment><USER3> _Car thieves of the future might be able to get into a car and drive away without forced entry and without needing a physical key, according to new research that will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium next month in San Diego, California._

Sadly but this future already is in Russia for a long time. This google translated article [1] from 2006 is about different code-grabbers. There is different car insurance price depending do you have additional not so easy breakable wireless alarm installed.

[1] [http://translate.google.ru/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl...](http://translate.google.ru/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=ru&tl=en&u=http://www.autoreview.ru/archive/2006/21/ugon/)

</comment><comment><USER4> So, the attack starts out with the car stopped, and some sort of equipment to amplify the keyless entry signals to the car and vice versa, so the car thinks the key is within range. The car starts, and they drive away from the amplification system. What happens when the car drives out of range of the key while it is running? Does the engine just turn off, or does it keep going until you press the engine off button? I wish I had a car to experiment with... but on the other hand I'll stick with the old fashioned keys, even if those are rather easy to get past too.

<comment><USER5> > What happens when the car drives out of range of the key while it is > running? Does the engine just turn off[...]?

Would be nasty. Imagine the car key running out of battery on the motorway.

<comment><USER6> The key doesn't have a battery. It's usually RFID.

<comment><USER7> On my Lexus it's both active and passive RFID. If you start the car and the key is 'active', you have to keep it in the cabin, or the car starts complaining (I've not been brave enough to drive with it not in there...).

If you start the car with the key as passive (ie: dead battery - you have to hold it on the ignition button to be detected), it recognizes the difference and doesn't complain.

<comment><USER6> Just because it's "active" doesn't mean the FOB needs a battery for the RFID to work. The car could periodically check for the key.

If your RFID required a battery, and required that it constantly be on, then the battery would need to be replaced often. Couple this with your car potentially shutting off in the middle of the highway and you've got a very unsafe car.

I know for certain that VW keys do not need the battery for the RFID to work. The battery is only used for remote lock/unlock. Perhaps other cars are different, but I'd consider that a design flaw.

edit: forgot to mention that my VW does not even have physical locks except for the glovebox. A dead rfid battery, if it had one, would mean i was stranded. I'm actually not sure what happens if my car battery dies while the car is locked.

<comment><USER7> The fob battery does die fairly often (replace it once/twice a year?).

My car has no _visible_ physical locks - there's a small notch under the drivers door handle you can pop off a piece of the handle using the fob, and then there is a physical lock you can get into the car with (no way to open the trunk until you turn the car on).

I've had to do this a few times :)

Like I said, you can still use the key to start the car, but if the battery is dead, you have to hold it up to the start button.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This comes after e.g. the KeeLoq debacle: see [http://dblp.mpi- inf.mpg.de/dblp-mirror/index.php?query=keelo...](http://dblp.mpi- inf.mpg.de/dblp-mirror/index.php?query=keeloq). Summary: cryptographically securing remote car keys/garage openers is an improvement (older products just broadcast the password), but badly implementing outdated custom algorithms is... not as useful as the car industry seems to hope.

I'll stick with "real" keys for a while yet.

<comment><USER9> Do they still sell new cars with traditional keys?

<comment><USER8> If you look at e.g. [http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/3series/sedan/2008/all...](http://www.bmw.com/com/en/newvehicles/3series/sedan/2008/allfacts/equipment/exterior.html) and click the second icon under the image, "comfort access" - this seems to be optional. And we're not talking a thirty-year old Skoda here.

<comment><USER9> Ah. I was just thinking of keyless entry (which is definitely standard on that BMW), rather than the keyless start.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a protocol flaw. The design assumes that proximity (signal) implies authorization, but the researcher proved this isn't always the case. The protocol should at least provide assurance that authorization really comes from the person who has the key fob. Old style physical keys do that, and so do key fobs with buttons.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm confused. The article seems to be about the ignition key mechanism, yet claims no trace of forced entry, which is unrelated. Surely you need to unlock the car doors and disable the alarm/immobiliser before you can drive off with it? Or are we assuming people leave their cars unlocked?

Also, once you've driven the car away, you'll have to find another way of starting it in future; relaying still needs some kind of physical access (albeit at 8 metres distance) to the original key.

(I'm aware of broken crypto in some wireless keys, which is purely an implementation issue - you can make these secure. That's not what this article is about. Quote: _The attack works no matter what cryptography and protocols the key and car use to communicate with each other._ )

<comment><USER12> The "keys" in question are the ones that magically unlock the car when you are "close." The attack is a "man in the middle" attack that basically fools the car into thinking the owner is nearby when he isn't, so the car unlocks and enables the ignition.

Apparently, once the ignition is enabled, you can drive off without needing the key "nearby" (interesting experiment, I'll have to try that next time I get a "keyless entry" rental). Once you can drive off, the car is pwned - <USER2> can strip it for parts (chop shop) or fully defeat the key/ignition security away from prying eyes.

<comment><USER11> Oh, I see. All the wireless car keys I've seen need a button to be pressed to unlock the driver's door.[1] I'll have to watch out for buttonless keys when buying a car next, it seems a pretty unsafe concept in itself, e.g. loitering hijacker getting in the car before you do/with you, etc.

[1] You usually need to press the button a second time to unlock the remaining doors. There's also often a separate button to independently unlock the boot. A typical procedure is therefore: open boot with the relevant button, put shopping inside, close boot, take trolley back to the stand, walk back to the car, unlock only the driver's side, get in, lock door with button from the inside, drive off.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This could be fixed with an on/off button on the fobs, no? It takes some of the convenience out of the fob, but it would still be somewhat easier than fiddling around with a physical key, though quite a bit of convenience is lost.

Another way would be to attach the key to something like a smartphone. The car finds it location via GPS and stores it on a server somewhere. If the fob receives a signal from what it thinks is the car, it asks the smartphone to confirm its location is near the car's location. The fall-back in case the smartphone is out of battery or the car did not post its location would be this vulnerable method where the fob simply responds if it has received the message from the car.

</comment><comment><USER14> Surely car design/manufacture is _much_ harder than implementing proven crypto? The mind boggles. Crypto is a solved problem as far as protecting passwords goes. How can such huge companies continue to get it wrong?

If I made cars, I'd make sure I'd solved this problem on my products, then buy some TV adverts showing thieves in carparks bumping other manufacturers locks wirelessly with ease. Perhaps backed by graceful classical music. Try and make it look like the advert was bought by my rivals and aimed at car thieves.

Although that might be asking for it...

<comment><USER15> > Surely car design/manufacture is much harder than implementing proven > crypto?

No crypto is broken in this scenario.

<comment><USER14> Keeping track of your secrets is as essential a part of a crypto implementation as the algorithm used. As I understand it, they could have used something like this: [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Socialist_mil...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Socialist_millionaire)

EDIT: I understand now, having read more carefully, about how this particular MITM attack works. Nasty. The only solution would seem to be to give up some convenience.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I bet a lot of wireless keys are insecure because someone's pointy-haired boss told an engineer it would be cheaper to implement the device by _leaving out the challenge-response_.

Untold Billions are probably lost every year by someone in charge ignoring something learned by freshmen undergrads.

<comment><AUTHOR> The described attack would quite happily work even if there was a challenge- response system. It works by effectively extending the range of the key, automatically unlocking the car _using the key_ even though the key is so far away the owner won't notice you stealing the car.</comment></comment>


AI That Can Write a Fake News Story from a Handful of Words - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-14/the-ai-that-can-write-a-fake-news-story-from-a-handful-of-words <comment><USER2> HNers may prefer reading about this from OpenAI itself: [https://blog.openai.com/better-language- models/](https://blog.openai.com/better-language-models/)

I suppose you could also read about this system from the system's own output, but that would (for now) be less productive. :)

</comment><comment><USER3> Where is the link to this software so others can try it?

Without that, this goes in the fake news bin itself.

<comment><USER4> "Because of its potential to be misused for creating disinformation, OpenAI said it had chosen not to make the most powerful versions of its algorithm available for public use nor was it publishing the source code and training data used to create the software."

From: [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-14/this- arti...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-14/this-article-is- fake-news-but-it-s-also-the-work-of-ai)

This link was in the original article, and contains a fake news story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Gee did they model it from Harlequin books?

</comment><comment><USER6> Perfect for a Dwarf Fortress newspaper</comment>


Why Online Marketplaces Are Important - <AUTHOR> http://andreyfradkin.com/why-platforms-why-now

<comment><USER2> I'm excited by the prospect of Online marketplaces. I think an interesting area of discussion though is that many of the examples you highlight around inefficient use (garaged cars etc) are a result of wealth creation. Prior to surplus's created via wealth creation it was not really viable to exclusively own so many things. Thus - like fat royalty - these things almost became a status symbol. That's why I find AirBNB so fascinating. People are willing to share idle space in their home.</comment>


Haskell: (Slow but certain) Advancing insight - <AUTHOR> http://stmu.co/programming/haskell/2013/10/29/advancing-insight.html

<comment><USER2> good introduction to haskell. Might be interesting to use this as an alternative to lex</comment>


Ask HN: What other good mail providers are out there? - <AUTHOR>

Just read this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3581613
There were a couple of providers mentioned, but nothing seemed to stand out as being better than GMail.
I've been using GMail since (approximately) 2004 and I've not come across anything better. I need to be able to send email from my domain. I want decent spam filters. And a way to pick up email from my phone. And a decent UI.
Other than that it can be ad-supported (as long as the ads aren't too obtrusive) but I don't want to pay anything.
So what else is out there?
Edit: I started a new thread because the other one was about moving away from Google. I just wondered what else was out there. <comment><USER2> does this really need a separate thread?

anyway, as i said there, when i looked a while back, runbox seemed best - <http://runbox.com> (screenshots - <http://www.runbox.com/features/email- services/preview/>)

but if you are not concerned about privacy etc then i think gmail is the best there is.

</comment><comment><USER3> Unfortunately the only real competitors are MS Exchange and Kerio, both require your own hardware and are expensive to licence

</comment><comment><USER4> This really doesn't need a new thread.

</comment><comment><USER5> Zimbra is pretty nice</comment>


Compression Benchmarks: brotli, gzip, xz, bz2 - <AUTHOR> https://www.opencpu.org/posts/brotli-benchmarks/ <comment><USER2> "It's weird how there are like two alternate realities of data compression.

"There's people who actually know WTF they're doing. (eg. encode.ru & the DCC's and so on). In that world you have compressors like PAQ, Nanozip, lzturbo, tornado, CCM, ZCM, Zstd, LZ4, BMF, BCIF, gralic, etc. etc.

"Then there's the mainstream world, where people still think gzip is state of the art (or ooh real modern bzip2), and they invent new things like brotli and webp and seem to not pay any attention to that alternate reality where the experts live. They sometimes do good work, but it's just a little odd."

\- Charles Bloom, 10-02-15 ([http://www.cbloom.com/rambles.html](http://www.cbloom.com/rambles.html))

</comment><comment><USER3> There are standard corpuses for compression / decompression. Against a specific README file isn't interesting.

Give me the full results against the standard corpuses (in different sizes).

The biggest fallacy of "compression results" is non-standard data sets.

Edit: spent years in image/video compression under Langdon, involved with JPEG2000, etc.

<comment><USER4> Do you know a current good comparison?

<comment><USER5> [https://quixdb.github.io/squash-benchmark/](https://quixdb.github.io/squash- benchmark/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The published results aren't consistent with the general understanding that xz is faster than bzip2 while compressing better even at the lowest settings.

Xz beyond the lowest compression setting quickly enters the realm of diminishing returns, but when even the lowest setting compresses better than bzip2 and is faster in both compression and decompression, there is no reason to use bzip2.

The opencpu post completely ignores the compression setting dimension, presenting an incomplete picture. Xz is shown as consistently the slowest by a wide margin, even relative to bzip2. This is unexpected, xz will be faster in both compression and decompression than bzip2 when using a compression setting appropriate for comparison with bzip2 compression ratios.

<comment><USER7> Also xz upstream defaults to single threaded. However xz decompression scales pretty much linearly at least up to 4 cores - I wrote a parallel pxzcat to prove that:

[http://git.annexia.org/?p=pxzcat.git;a=summary](http://git.annexia.org/?p=pxzcat.git;a=summary)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> > Hence we can conclude

By testing on _one_ file. Furthermore, Brotli "cheats" by having a static dictionary including english words, so it doesn't make sense to compare against general-purpose compressors on the COPYING file.

<comment><USER9> Its job is to compress html, so at the very least the html-related dictionary contents make a lot of sense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> They are testing compression on a 6849 byte file full of English text. (GPL)

This is a terrible comparison test - first of all, it's biased because of Brotli's built-in dictionary, and the file size is so small that the compression performance might well be overwhelmed by the startup time of each compressor / decompressor. Consider that the compression level of bzip2 (the 1-9 parameter) controls a search block size of 100k-900k - so the input file is far far smaller than even the smallest, worst compression setting.

There are several good example file sets to try compression with, they should be used if you want to do any kind of comparative general testing.

<comment><USER11> The article explicitly states that it is trying to find out which algorithm is optimal for small text-based documents that are common on the web, such as CSS, JS, and HTML.

The best compression algorithm for small text files might be very different from the best algorithm for large amounts of general data. If your browser needs to decompress 100 separate files in a fraction of a second, startup time does matter.

<comment><USER10> Fair enough, but if you want to compress CSS, JS and HTML then why not test it on those?

It also depends upon how you are supplying the compressed data. For static files, the compression time might not even matter - the web server can cache all the compressed versions and the compression performance is minimised.

For dynamic data (e.g. the output of a PHP or whatever), you might also want to test how well the compressors handle streaming data, e.g. feeding parts of a page piecemeal into the compressor and directly sending the output to the client packet by packet. Some compression systems handle this extremely badly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Brotli decompression is at least as fast as for gzip while significantly > improving the compression ratio. The price we pay is that compression is > much slower than gzip.

Is it as fast as gzip or slower?

<comment><USER13> Fast decompression, slower compression.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Would have been useful to do this against Snappy and LZ4.

Both are quiet popular in the Big Data space.

<comment><USER15> Brotli is a "strong" compression algorithm so it's obviously going to be much slower with much better compression than "light" algorithms like Snappy or LZ4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What's the Weissman score</comment>


Canada is spending $1 billion on security for the G8 and G20 Summit - <AUTHOR> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/ottawa-notebook/budget-watchdog-wants-to-pore-over-1-billion-summit-security-bill/article1583131/

<comment><AUTHOR> This could possibly lead to an early election, thats how bad the situation is right now.

For the love god, keep all these G summits at the same venue every year, or lease the UN building.

What is wrong with these politicians? We are spending more on this summits security (which is only 3 days) than we spent hosting the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

<comment><USER2> _This could possibly lead to an early election, thats how bad the situation is right now._

Nonsense. Why would the Liberals and NDP force an election which they would lose?

 _We are spending more on this summits security (which is only 3 days) than we spent hosting the Winter Olympics in Vancouver._

It's all a matter of what you count. I imagine that this $1B includes a lot of capital costs for equipment which will continue to be used for decades.

<comment><AUTHOR> Actually most of is to get legs on ground in fear of anarchist protests. The Olympics was an investment, not this. Now looks like the auditor general is getting involved to find what caused the spike in the security budget. again, more cost.

very frustrating!

but the idea of hosting these large events at a permanent location seems pretty economical to me. :S

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I hope the G summiteers like insects.</comment>


Google and the FTC - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.Blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-choice-ensuring-economic.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-choice-ensuring-economic.html <comment><AUTHOR> i think the biggest offender is google places, the marketplace provider(google) should not hardwire its inferior product (google places pages - basically a scrapper site) into its marketplace (google search)</comment>


Steve Jobs Talks about ATT, Flash, Gizmodo, Google, etc @ D8 (video) - <AUTHOR> http://www.loopinsight.com/2010/06/02/video-steve-jobs-at-the-d8-conference/

<comment><USER2> There should seriously be a graduate class devoted to watching Steve Jobs speak. I'm watching this and I know he's full of it.

Hypercard was as big as Flash? Come on!

But as I watch him I'm totally buying it. Even though I know he's full of it. I KNOW IT. Yet I watch him and I'm shaking my head going "Yeah, I can see your point". Amazing

<comment><USER3> Was Jobs saying that, in terms of market-share of like platforms (as in other frameworks that filled the same niche), that Hypercard was as big as Flash?

<comment><USER2> I can't see how he could mean it in that way but here's the transcript verbatim so you can make your own decision...

Jobs: An even more popular development environment was Hypercard and we were ok to axe that.

Mossberg: It wasn't more popular than Flash was

Jobs: In it's day sure it was

Mossberg: On your platform right?

Jobs: No, No, No, No, No. Hypercard was huge in it's day because it was accessible to anybody.

To me it seems like Mossberg was trying to give him the opportunity to hedge or to clarify the statement and Jobs didn't take it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Is the full video available anywhere or will it be? Damn these clips!

<comment><USER5> I don't mind the clips, it's the D8 Intro music that makes me want to kill.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Lemme go watch these on my iPad....oh wait...they're all flash...

In all seriousness, his whole explanation on Flash is one I wish he had given originally. It's simple, makes sense, pragmatic, etc. _Miles_ better than "thoughts on Flash".

<comment><USER7> I watched the clips on my iPad here: <http://video.allthingsd.com/></comment></comment>


A back-projection algorithm to extract 3D volume from shadows - <AUTHOR> http://jack.minardi.org/software/whats-in-a-shadow/

<comment><USER2> This result (the shape that can theoretically be reconstructed from its shadows) is called the Visual Hull. See [http://pdf.aminer.org/000/293/374/the_visual_hull_of_curved_...](http://pdf.aminer.org/000/293/374/the_visual_hull_of_curved_objects.pdf) for the original paper.

Awesome writeup and experiments. Especially like the crossed-eyes stereo image.

</comment><comment><USER3> Space carving is a similar idea [Kutulakos and Seitz, 2000]: [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kyros/pubs/00.ijcv.carve.pdf](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~kyros/pubs/00.ijcv.carve.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> Very interesting. I knew I was not the first to think along these lines, I just was not sure what terms to google for prior research.

<comment><USER4> You may also enjoy [http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~smr/papers/rt_model/rt_model.pd...](http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~smr/papers/rt_model/rt_model.pdf)

[http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/proj/3dscanning/](http://gfx.cs.princeton.edu/proj/3dscanning/)

Or you might find some things of interest in my article collection [https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/315/articles/index_no_im...](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/315/articles/index_no_images.html)

(No doubt Dropbox will disable my public links soon. I wish there were an easy way to mirror my Dropbox folder to S3.)

<comment><USER5> Another good paper: [http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/awf/turntable/...](http://research.microsoft.com/en- us/um/people/awf/turntable/fitzgibbon98a.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I too casually obsessed with algorithms for extracting geometry data from photographs. Here's a Javascript experiment/demo from a few years ago. [http://francoislaberge.com/labs/normal_mapping/me/](http://francoislaberge.com/labs/normal_mapping/me/)

I'd always meant to make a writeup about it. I thought your article was great. Email me sometime if you continue to geek out in this space.

<comment><USER7> Very cool. Any info on how you created the normal maps for the pictures of faces?

I can see how you'd do it for a 3d object you can easily render out various ways, but I'm a bit puzzled by the photos.

Edit: Ok so I found this: [http://www.zarria.net/nrmphoto/nrmphoto.html](http://www.zarria.net/nrmphoto/nrmphoto.html)

Seems easy enough, except for the 'standing still' long enough to capture a live model lit from multiple angles in the same pose. Is that the key? Was it all that difficult, and did you use any particular techniques?

<comment><USER6> That article essentially captures it, I just wanted to write up a more intuitive explanation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This seems a bit like various volume rendering techniques, except with the objects having no transparency (like they would in a typical tomographic reconstruction)

See: [http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=378484](http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=378484) and [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomographic_reconstruction](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomographic_reconstruction)

Very cool for a simple implementation, and considering that the author doesn't appear to have dug deep into existing work.

<comment><USER9> Maybe we're using different terms or definitions here --- but for me "volume rendering" is a clearly separate domain from "extract spatial information from 2D imagery"..

<comment><USER8> edit: The above comment [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6123729](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6123729) is more correct than I am I think :)

Extracting the spatial information is a subset of the same problem, I think. Things like tomographic reconstruction use either multiple rays through the same object or parallel rays through the object at different angles, but this gives density through the object and from that the volume and its shape. If you consider the same problem where you have no density or 100% density, you get the spatial information from multiple 2d objects.

I ran into this when playing with IDL ages ago: [http://northstar- www.dartmouth.edu/doc/idl/html_6.2/VOXEL_PR...](http://northstar- www.dartmouth.edu/doc/idl/html_6.2/VOXEL_PROJ.html) and learned about the rest from the references there.

I'm not really savvy on the problems though so the math could be totally different and unrelated, but I think you can accomplish the same thing with either method.

<comment><USER10> My research group actually implemented the tomographic approach 14 years ago[1] (and in realtime![2]) It worked pretty well

[1] [http://www.disp.duke.edu/~dbrady/imaTutorial/papers/science6...](http://www.disp.duke.edu/~dbrady/imaTutorial/papers/science62599.pdf) [2] [http://www.disp.duke.edu/~sfeller/Publications/spiecr76-13.p...](http://www.disp.duke.edu/~sfeller/Publications/spiecr76-13.pdf)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> There is a lot of research in the Computer Vision literature on this topic and its generalization. One particularly prolific researcher on the subject is Jan Koenderink[1].

Or search for "Shape from Shading" or "shape from occluding contours"

[1][http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~decarlo/readings/koenderink- perce...](http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/~decarlo/readings/koenderink-percep84.pdf)

<comment><AUTHOR> That paper is great. I see people are thinking my thoughts before I was even born. I am going to have to spend a weekend reading through all this new material.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here is an implementation of a similar idea: [http://www.vision.caltech.edu/bouguetj/ICCV98/index.html](http://www.vision.caltech.edu/bouguetj/ICCV98/index.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> You can do this with uploaded photos (not shadows) online using Autodesk 123D Catch:

[http://www.123dapp.com/catch](http://www.123dapp.com/catch)

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of the Hough transform and the Radon transform.

Edit: Hough

<comment><USER15> The Radon transform was the first thing that came to my mind, too[0].

It does the same thing, but more rigorously and flexibly. Imagine instead of just looking at the shadows (which are essentially a binary 'this is part of the object/this is not') and reconstructing the surface ad hoc like OP did[1], you could also apply it to a translucent object and reconstruct its interior as well.

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

[1] Not to criticize OP here. It's cool to solve problems from scratch as practice and I don't think the Radon transform is common knowledge.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> May I plug shamelessly my yt video of voxel carving and coloring. I am currently working on my master thesis where I build a 3d scanner with a turntable and a camera:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1lQid08a3k](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1lQid08a3k)

<comment><USER17> This is pretty much what I did for my Masters, in 2000.

I also applied a triangular mesh to the surface, extracted textures for each triangle, and then tried to optimize edge flips to minimize blurriness in the resultant triangles.

<comment><USER16> Yes, the linked video just shows the first step of the whole scanning process. I'm optimizing the 3d reconstruction based on texture correlation and estimate true depth for each surface point via cross ratio from four known points. Depth estimation from calibrated images via cross ratio is particularly interesting (imho), since it seems that it hasn't been done before.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Being a crystallographer, this appears analogous to transforming Reciprocal space -> Real space in X-ray diffraction crystallography.

Only, in this case the negative space (from a shadow) is the raw data instead of diffraction spots. So no Bragg's law or Ewald's spheres involved here, but fascinating nonetheless!

</comment><comment><USER19> One could probably do backprojection with the otherwise useless Leap Motion controller and get 3D reconstructions of your hands... or other things.

</comment><comment><USER20> marching cubes is a beautiful algorithm</comment>


Ask HN: What are pride's effects on communication and how to overcome them? - <AUTHOR> I have recently experienced multiple situations where pride, or the desire to make myself seem like I am fully capable and/or know more than I do, has gotten in the way of my ability to effectively communicate. For example, I do not ask for a time extension on a deadline when I could have used it. <comment><USER2> Knowing this about yourself is half the battle. Good for you for now trying to address it. I've had to fight off this tendency a great deal too. The effect of "pride" will always lead you to a fall, sooner or later.

Perhaps the best way to overcome pride is to study the neutralizer for it, humility. This as opposed to learning about all the many negative effects pride causes.</comment>


Ask HN: I've got a question about Facebook and Twitter integration - <AUTHOR>

I've got an e-book that I'm writing and I want to offer it on my website for $5 to download. Now I know there are some people that won't want to pay for the e-book so I want to give them an opportunity to download the e-book in exchange for sending out a status update on facebook or a tweet saying that they just downloaded the e-book.
My question is: is it possible to integrate facebook and/or twitter into a website and let the user download a file only after they send out a tweet or status update? I have some experience with PHP but would probably have to hire someone to do the work for me.
I feel like it should be possible to check to see if they update their status/send a tweet, I'm just not quite sure how to go about doing it.
One problem I can see with this distribution model: how would you prevent people from creating a new account to send the status update/tweet if they do not want to bug their friends about an e-book they just downloaded? <comment><USER2> There's no way to prevent people from making fake Twitter/Facebook accounts to get your book.

Perhaps you could make it so that people have to have a certain amount of friends/followers to get the book for free.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's what I was thinking but I want to hear from someone that's worked with integrating facebook/twitter into their site.

also, does anyone know exactly how the integration would work? do the services set a variable to true once the update/tweet goes out that you can then go check to make sure the tweet went out or the status was updated?</comment></comment>


A Cute Internet Star Flirts. All He Wants Is Your Password - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/21/arts/music/hacked-by-jack-johnson.html <comment><USER2> So now that we have a pattern lending legitimacy, I guess it would be pretty convenient for the next person that hacks a celebs account to get a lot more milage out of his hack.. Didn't he just put an extra incentive out there for everyone to attempt to hack celebrities even more as an 'amplification' method ?

</comment><comment><USER3> Absolutely love it.

Adults telling kids about not sharing passwords and how the world will fall in if they do.

So what do they do, share passwords.

Adults have been so propagandized about not sharing them it's actually a good/funny act of defiance.

<comment><USER4> Are you... are you trying to suggest that there is nothing wrong with sharing passwords with strangers?

<comment><USER5> Well there was this guy from my hometown who shared his facebook password to strangers on parties. You never knew what would appear on his facebook account after weekends.

<comment><USER6> You could argue that's smart as long as you don't use Facebook to log in to anything else. He can say whatever he wants and now one can be sure it's him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It sounds hip and rebellious; but imagine some day in the future when some hot-sounding very real looking person pulls the same when there actually is no actual human on the other end. Though still nascent I can already do a little bit of that myself with people who move ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnATwZgmI2I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnATwZgmI2I) \-- a whole new ironic twist to "Reality" :)) and voices that were hijacked like the Terminator did in the movies ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akuwibl-0BM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Akuwibl-0BM) HAL and SAL -- both me) or ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lBrtdCpXw0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lBrtdCpXw0) \-- both the pictures and voices of the guy and that sexy Lydia girl are me) or ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqk17F2kghc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqk17F2kghc) \-- same deal with the voices) or ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEzPb9YAeo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EEzPb9YAeo) \-- keep your panties on girls that's not Tom Jones nor any male human at all). There are others who can undoubtedly go much further than that with much more sophisticated results. But even with what you see here you already have the baseline for bona fide Artificial Reality. So when that Tom Jones clone or souped up hot Lydia chick comes around asking you to give up your password be careful ... for it might be me or someone more advanced than me in disguise. (And by the way, thanks for the idea. :))

</comment><comment><USER8> It's all fun and games until somebody with less noble intentions hacks his account to access all those passwords. I'm sure somebody's working on it.

</comment><comment><USER4> Wow. Next time a friend gives me their key to get into their house, I really hope they don't call it breaking and entering.

</comment><comment><USER9> he should ask them to install aggressive adware - the ultimate fan experience

<comment><USER10> I dunno, ransomware's probably more flirty in situations like these.

      hey baby, you stole my heart. give it
      back or i'll never decrypt your system.

      <3 <3 <3 <3

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> "but most of all, samy is my hero

<comment><USER12> Wasn't that a JS injection and not anything to do with passwords?

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Kids these days.

<comment><USER14> Haven't changed from old ages...when they had just posters to watch all day long

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Find his personal cell number, add it as a 2FA and then send him your password.

</comment><comment><USER16> Oh boy... Will those people, at least, change their passwords after that?

<comment><USER13> Why would they? What if he comes back to post another video?</comment></comment>