Apple unhappy with apps that secretly record screen using Glassbox tech - <AUTHOR> https://solutionfactory.in/apple-is-unhappy-with-apps-that-secretly-record-your-smartphones-screen.html <comment><AUTHOR> Can't link to original article on TechCrunch and peers because of new "guce advertising" redirects e.g.:

[https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=xx...](https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers?sessionId=xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)

The App Analyst posts on e.g. Air Canada collecting card details via Glassbox are good:

[https://theappanalyst.com/aircanada.html](https://theappanalyst.com/aircanada.html)

</comment><comment><USER2> More generally, I'd like to see companies be forced to disclose a list of third party integrations/companies that are used to build apps.

But even disclosure isn't necessarily enough because most people simply don't care or understand those details. Universal standards need to be applied to activity data anonymization, security, and consent.

It's actually somewhat surprising to me that the tech industry hasn't more aggressively self-regulated. The situation reminds me of how the ESRB was established, or how the motion picture industry self-censored after something like the 1930s.

These industries understood that if they didn't address complaints that governments would eventually write regulations for them. And you already see the results of the failure to self-regulate: the tech industry could have already saved itself a lot of work by avoiding laws like GDPR and CCPA in the first place.</comment>


No Experimental Evidence for the Significant Anthropogenic Climate Change - <AUTHOR> https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.00165 <comment><USER2> The title seems way overblown. The actual paper observes that cloud cover went down at the same time as temperature went up over the last few decades, and so perhaps the temperature went up because cloud cover went down rather than because of anything humans did. The IPCC has one correction factor for clouds, but they argue for another.

It doesn't ask the question "why did cloud cover go down?" Perhaps they are both anthropogenic.

<comment><USER3> > The actual paper observes that cloud cover went down at the same time as > temperature went up over the last few decades, and so perhaps the > temperature went up because cloud cover went down rather than because of > anything humans did.

It does more than that. It predicts that for every 1% decrease in low clouds, the temperature goes up 0.11 C. They also used all available data (25 years) of cloud cover.

The correlation is very high. Figure 3 shows this.

> It doesn't ask the question "why did cloud cover go down?" Perhaps they are > both anthropogenic.

Perhaps, but it's entirely unproven that co2 affects low cloud generation.

I get that dumping a large amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and hoping nothing will change seems scary. But so is converting a large portion of land into farmland and cities, drilling into tectonic plates for geothermic energy and oil (which seems to correlate with earthquakes forming nearby), etc. And keep in mind it's a trace gas. We're talking about parts-per-million here.

With 8 billion people on the planet, we are going to be making changes to the environment regardless. It's important to understand what we are doing, and not blindly try to stop co2 production, when something else could be much more problematic.

<comment><USER2> They only show a correlation between cloud cover and temperature. There's no evidence for which causes which. If causation runs the other way, then that for every 0.11C increase in temperature, clouds decrease by 1%.

The problem with this line of thinking is that, when you do something to a system, usually lots of properties of the system change. So you can always say "Look, properties A and B changed at the same time right after we did X! So maybe A caused B, not X."

<comment><USER3> > There's no evidence for which causes which. If causation runs the other way, > then that for every 0.11C increase in temperature, clouds decrease by 1%.

What sort of evidence are we talking about? We don't have a another exact copy of Earth so we can't perform a controlled experiment by somehow inducing low clouds to form in one and not in the other. But if you need this sort of proof then how can you turn around and justify the belief that CO2 is definitely causing climate change?

Even NASA would disagree with you ([https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=54219](https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=54219)):

 _Clouds play a complex role in the Earth 's radiation budget. Low Clouds reflect much of the sunlight that falls on them, but have little Effect on the emitted energy. Thus, low clouds act to cool the Current climate._

(Note the paper is specifically referring to low clouds)

> The problem with this line of thinking is that, when you do something to a > system, usually lots of properties of the system change. So you can always > say "Look, properties A and B changed at the same time right after we did X! > So maybe A caused B, not X."

Sure, but also, when you make changes X1, X2, X3, ... Xn, you can't just arbitrarily say that X1 must be the cause and X2 .. Xn are not.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Move over, small-time Bitcoin exchange startups–Wall Street has arrived - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/move-over-small-time-bitcoin-exchange-startups-wall-street-has-arrived/

<comment><USER2> Don't know if it's good or bad. While certainly it's good news for Bitcoin and its adoption, I wonder what's gonna happen to all those exchanges that are currently working and serving customers honestly (not MtGox). Are they gonna just die in an evolutionary process? Or would, for example, Bitstamp compete successfully?</comment>


Ask HN: Just found a patent covering my project, anything I can do? - <AUTHOR>

I've been working on a sensor system that solved a problem we had at school.  I designed the hardware, wrote the firmware, and am now building a small webapp for handling the incoming data.  It seems to solve other people's problems too so there was some interest in developing a business around the idea.  Recently I found out the concept of the sensor system is covered by a rather broad patent held by a large company.  They received the patent about a year ago.<p>Can anyone here comment on my options in this situation?  Am I looking at legal problems if I start a business around this idea?  What if I open source my work, would that matter?  Could I develop the systems as a contractor?  Could I sell kits?  Thanks for any help. <comment><USER2> Be sure to read the claims of the patent, carefully.

You can think of the words and phrases in a given claim as the elements of an AND statement (or the input leads to an AND gate): If the claim returns TRUE when what you do is used as inputs, then that claim is infringed.

The different claims in a patent are like the input leads to an OR gate: It only takes one infringed claim to make you liable.

A claim can be infringed, even if Claim Element X is missing, if X is deemed present by an "equivalent." The analysis there can be complicated, so I won't go into it.

Concerning patent validity, a patent is presumed valid; the burden is on the challenger to prove invalidity. This has to be done claim by claim.

The courts have held -- wrongly, in my view, but there you go -- that proof of invalidity requires clear and convincing evidence, not just a preponderance of the evidence.

Concerning open-sourcing, kits, etc.: Someone who intentionally induces infringement by another can be liable for the other person's infringement. There's also the concept of contributory infringement, which I won't go into here.

There's no fair-use doctrine in patent law the way there is in copyright law. (Some people have argued for a fair-use exception for experimental scientific research; I don't recall offhand whether this is an established doctrine, but I don't think it is.)

Usual disclaimer: Don't rely on this as a substitute for legal advice, YMMV, etc., etc.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Brazo, your question is very broad...

US is the first to invent jurisdiction, that means if you started working on your system before they filed for this patent, you are the first inventor, and at the least, you have the right to continue with your business.

If you are not the first, you should get someone familar with IP (intellectual property), ideally a lawyer, to look at that patent for you. Read their claims (not their patent body) carefully to see if it covers what and how you want to do it. Sometimes the patent may read a certain way - because that's what a good lawyer does: draft very broad description for the patent, but their ability to enforce may be limited to a certain way of doing things, or certain results, or certain combination of properties and functions of the sensor system.

Also look into the patent history to see if the patent family is alive. If they have filed a continuation applicaiton, for example, since this issued patent, then the family is alive, which means they will have the scope of adding claims, based on their patent body, if they notice that you are working on their space.

If everything reads right on to what you want to do, check the prosecution history of the patent - the back and forth argument and evidence that this large corporation did with the patent office in order to get this patent allow to see if there are holes in their argument. This will help you figure out where you fit in the deal.

In short, get someone who is familiar with IP to check this for you. Until someone reads that patent and do due diligence on it, will be hard for anyone to say.

That's just the IP part. There is the business decision which believe it or not is separate. If all fails on the IP side, maybe approach this company for a licensing opportunity.

Best of luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great comments, thanks. You and others have pointed out the need for an expert in IP, which I agree with. I will try my university and then maybe consider other advisors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You will only have legal problems if your product is successful. Until then Large Company won't notice you. I say finish the project and try and develop a business around it. You already designed the hardware and wrote the firmware, don't abandon that hard work. You have nothing to lose, because odds are, the business will fail (no offense, it just difficult to make a hit product in your first try). In the event that you turn this project into a profitable business, make sure you save enough to cover the legal fees to fight the patent. But really, be proud of yourself if you actually make it that far.

tl;dr don't worry about it until you are making money

</comment><comment><USER5> Did you develop it in collaboration with your university? Although bringing them in would cut massively into money you could make, if you just want to bring this guy to market (as I gather from your "open source" attitude), you could use their legal department to help investigate.

My second piece of advice is to not take legal advice from the internet. Unless that advice is "seek a lawyer".

<comment><AUTHOR> That's an option I'd forgotten, thanks.

Of course. Hah, but also consider this is HN, not the internet proper.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Consult a lawyer for legal advise and start your search for prior art now, don't wait until a patent dispute arises. A lawyer may be able to work out a royalty deal that is agreeable to all parties or he may be able to invalidate the patent with prior art. Either way having legal council is your best option for dealing with legal issues.</comment>


Ask HN: Space travel start-up ideas?  Crazy or obvious next step? - <AUTHOR>

With Virgin Galactic taking reservations and the New Mexico 'Spaceport America' nearing completion, it seems to me that we are nearing a new era of private space travel.<p>What impact will private space travel have on society and how can we, as entrepreneurs, be a part of that change? <comment><AUTHOR> Here are some of my thoughts (sorry, I wrote them word vomit form):

1) Concierge services -- Early space travelers will undoubtedly be wealthy and have numerous needs, from planning how to get them from their home to the nearest Spaceport, to scheduling training exercises to prepare for their trip.

2) Airport logistics -- Virgin Galactic is already planning 3 flights per day at the Spaceport America in New Mexico. Spaceports will get busy and technologies to manage busy spaceports will need to be developed.

3) Online booking -- As providers emerge and flights become more common, people will want to look online to learn about the various space travel offerings that are available to them (and price shop).

4) Freight/science travel -- While tourism is clearly the sexy side of space travel, it stands to reason that there will likely be a significant industrial need for this service.

5) Maintenance -- Space travel wears heavily on the equipment involved. As more companies offer private space travel, new services and technologies will be needed to maintain their fleets.

6) Post-flight -- Early civilian space travelers will belong to an exclusive club of thrill seekers that have similar interests. There are countless services that could be targeted at this group, from private club memberships, follow-on adventures.

</comment><comment><USER2> I think that taking off on one side of the Pacific and landing three hours later on the other, while spending some time in space, in zero g, would be an amazing product that could, conceivably, scale a lot.</comment>


Our Medical Data Must Become Free - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/our-medical-data-must-become-free-f6d533db6bed#.avkp2wb88 <comment><USER2> The phrase "medical data should be free" is a trojan horse. Your medical data is yours and should always be your own -- unless you yourself say otherwise for specified used of specific parts of your data. Otherwise, due to market forces and financial constraints, your data will be turned against you before anything else.

The quality of medical care for the majority of people doesn't depend on the freedom of your data but on the quality of communication between doctors and patients and between health professions. These are low tech problems though for which you cannot get much research funding.

<comment><USER3> I agree. Medical data must not be free in any way, shape, or form. It would only be used to drive up the price of delivery in the form of fatter profit margins.

> "Otherwise, due to market forces and financial constraints, your data will > be turned against you before anything else"

Currently, it's using "manufacturer coupons" for meds, given out at your doctor's office and then filled at your local Rx to skirt around HIPAA. Each one has a unique serial number for a reason.

Research data, on the other hand, must be more free - but there are no standards for anonymization of patient data prior to release.

<comment><USER4> I agree, would be fantastic to have equivalents of ImageNet for different types of medical images - high quality, pref labeled anonymised data sets where the data set size is sufficiently large to train high quality networks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The same should hold for medical literature. I was only able to investigate current best practices for an intestinal problem my wife has because my company pays to get behind paywalls of publishers. Because of those articles I was able to identify the type of dysfunction my wife probably has, the most advised treatment and a drug that recently came back to the market after being banned for poor reasons for years. Granted, one of the doctors knew most of these things but the physician we had spoken to before really had not read literature in a long, long time. I understand this can be difficult given how busy they are, but at least make sure patients themselves are able to access such truly vital data.

Due to this literature I was even able to prevent the nurse from administering morphine which I suspected (it was indicated in literature) would have made the pain much worse. I asked him stick to antispasmodics and the attack (Sphincter of Oddi Dysfunction) has never been so mild. It's crazy if you think about it.

<comment><USER6> Today, my dad was prescribed a drug released on September 2015. But papers explaining the "exciting results" were behind paywalls.

Do you know if medical researchers publish papers on a personal website as well? Are they forced to not make their research public?

<comment><USER5> I think they hardly do, they could get in trouble. You could try this: [http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/i-can-haz-pdf-academics-tweet- secre...](http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/i-can-haz-pdf-academics-tweet-secret-code- word-get-expensive-research-papers-free-1525241)

I'd like to share but I have seen often that a cover page is added with an IP address which can lead to problems for the sharer, perhaps meta data is also added about the download? One can only hope researchers will once avoid closed journals. I think they should, especially when they are paid by public money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> On a related note I recently had some lab work done and was _dumbfounded_ when the nurse looking after me told me I could now sign up on their website[1] and access my results as soon as the tests were finished being analyzed. Sure enough, less than 24 hours later I was able to log in and see the results of all my tests (or download a pdf) and whether they were in the normal range or not. The site even has trending built in so you can plot results over time for repeated tests.

Being able to print out your results and take them with you to the doctors so you both are on a level footing with respect to _your_ health information is very empowering.

If you're a Canadian in Ontario or B.C. I heartily recommend using their labs[2].

[1] [http://www.lifelabs.com/](http://www.lifelabs.com/)

[2] not affiliated, just a happy "customer".

<comment><USER8> Kaiser Permanente in California has a website with all records. I went there to get a blood test and the results showed up on the web site over the next few days.

I could check the values myself for abnormalities even before talking to a doctor which was very nice.

<comment><USER9> This is becoming relatively common these days. As hospital systems switch to more-advanced EHRs, patients are often asked to sign up for a web-based account. From my experience, most hospitals are either going with products from Cerner or EPIC, and both offer this function (and even the ability to read physician notes, etc.)

<comment><USER10> Just a note--this is a requirement for Meaningful Use stage 2, which means it's pretty much the case everywhere these days. (And it's Epic, not EPIC.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember just a couple years ago Microsoft and Google both had "health" portals that would allow you to aggregate data from various providers. After some time though it became clear that doctors and insurance companies were to beholden to their own products to allow such a platform to aggregate results. Thus the platform failed as not enough opportunity was given.

And to quote this article: [http://mobihealthnews.com/11480/10-reasons-why- google-health...](http://mobihealthnews.com/11480/10-reasons-why-google- health-failed) "As much as we'd like to think it isn't the case, the fundamental driver of most (not all) behavior in healthcare is the reimbursement scheme... To understand the impact, I'll exaggerate to make a point—your healthcare provider doesn't care about you unless they can see the whites of your eyes. Why is that? Today's flawed reimbursement scheme only compensates the healthcare provider for a face to face visit."

Thus until a broken model of healthcare is fixed in many many ways we will be stuck in the same old model for years to come.

</comment><comment><USER12> Obama threw a bone to the software companies by creating HIPAA AND the electronic medical record law. HIPAA prevents people from sharing data on a platform that is not CCHIT compliant. The law mandating EMR (or else doctors and hospitals get paid less if they cannot show they are using it) is a big profit center for software companies. It's not the medical industry driving this data jail, it's the software companies. It goes all the way back to Microsoft who showed that you can become a trillionaire if you create a product that requires 'licensed specialists' to service and maintain.

<comment><USER13> To be pedantic, HIPAA was signed into law in 1996. Obama obviously had nothing to do with that. Technically the HITECH act was signed into law by Obama, in Feb 2009. But that was only a few weeks after he took office.

The Affortable Care Act _is_ largely thanks to Obama. And it did add new regulations related to HIPAA and HITECH. But the core principals that you mentioned were already tehre.

<comment><USER3> Just adding some links to support the above comment - HITEC was part of the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" [1] following Hurricane Sandy. Additional clarifications for internet-enabled devices was released by the FDA in early 2015. [2]

[1] [https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ5/html/PLAW-111pub...](https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/PLAW-111publ5/html/PLAW-111publ5.htm)

[2] [http://www.fda.gov/downloads/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulation...](http://www.fda.gov/downloads/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/GuidanceDocuments/UCM263366.pdf)

<comment><USER14> > HITEC was part of the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009" [1] > following Hurricane Sandy.

No, Sandy was in 2012. HITECH was part of the ARRA, more commonly known as "the stimulus package".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Heres something I wrote a while back on healthcare data integration[0]. Yes, this is a real problem. Yes, it's worse than you can imagine. No, I don't see it getting much better in the short term. Given enough volume from the people it should change.

Disclaimer: I used to work on these problems at a major academic medical center.

[0] [http://siculars.posthaven.com/health-data-integration- regula...](http://siculars.posthaven.com/health-data-integration-regulation- and-incentivization)

<comment><USER16> >If a system stores data, the vendor will provide an API and/or SDK, with accompanying documentation, such that authenticated requests may create, read, update or delete that data programmatically as appropriate.

I almost feel like you're overstating the current state of the market here.

Yes, things are very bad as they stand today. Interop is _nowhere_ near where it should be. There are definitely vendors that do their best to wring out as much lock-in as possible (e.g., Epic), but most systems can be integrated through HL7 messaging and --increasingly-- CCD exchange. I'd say that the biggest issue with it right now is that most vendors treat integration as a (very expensive) value-add rather than core functionality. The situation could be better, but the problem today has as much to do with legacy systems that are going to take a long time to integrate or replace as anything, IMO.

I do find it interesting that you talk about healthcare taking a page from social media because that's essentially the direction the market is already headed with HIEs. I'm most familiar with McKesson's RelayHealth because it's what I've worked on, but HIEs can be thought of as Facebook for healthcare. Patients can connect to their providers, messages can be sent between provider and patient, and clinical data can be shared to the patient or to other providers that are appropriately linked (like with a referral).

From what I've seen, industry reaction to HealthKit has been pretty lukewarm. I'm not optimistic about Apple establishing themselves as a particularly strong presence in the larger healthcare space.

And, FWIW, the HITECH has lit a fire for both facilities and vendors both to get their act together on this front by tying Medicare reimbursement rates to use of both EHRs and interop with HIEs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Patient portals are being rolled out all over. Give 5 years and they will be everywhere I think.

The only problem I see with giving someone complete access to their records would be the ability to edit those records. I think that's a barrier we will never be able to overcome which means a trusted source will always need a copy.</comment>


The Rails 3 router: Rack it up - <AUTHOR> http://yehudakatz.com/2009/12/26/the-rails-3-router-rack-it-up/

<comment><USER2> There was a talk by Yehuda Katz where he predicted that most plugins that modify the router in Rails 2.3 will either be unnecessary in Rails 3 or reduced from 200 lines to 2.

With what I've seen so far this seems to be absolutely the case and shows how much one can gain from switching to a clean architecture.

</comment><comment><USER3> It's really great Rack is used so heavily in the router, it really makes Rails more modular, and demonstrates the value of Rack.

I'm looking forward to some of the same ideas being applied to server-side JavaScript / JSGI.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have been occasionally building Rails 3 and trying it - can't wait to switch work projects (probably do this a month after official release). There is obviously a lot of talent on the rails dev team and it shows with the willingness to keep improving the architecture.

</comment><comment><USER5> I am very much looking forward to release.</comment>


Google Glass Now Works With Actual Glasses - <AUTHOR> http://recode.net/2014/01/27/google-glass-now-works-with-actual-glasses/ <comment><USER2> I took apart my Glass, added magnets, and have it attached to my eyeglass frame. Thing with mounting this on to frames is that you actually spend a lot of time micro-adjusting Google Glass.

This is all the real problem.

The real problem is just that Glass is boring. The UI is also really awkward. Voice recognition is pretty decent but saying ok glass ten thousand times a day is annoying.

Google still sucks at devices. Though they have the best VR compared to Siri. God, does Apple suck at voice.

<comment><USER3> "God, does Apple suck at voice."

I've found Siri getting better recently, for my reasonably strong Northern England accent. Significantly fewer misses than a year ago at least.

<comment> k-mcgrady It's pretty accurate for me too with my northern Irish accent. There are only a couple of words it has trouble with (the most common being 'hour' which is annoying when setting timers) and I just adjust my pronunciation slightly when using those words with Siri.

<comment><USER3> I've found that if I don't change my pronunciation but correct the word when it's underlined blue it gets more accurate, I'd assume Apple does a certain amount of training based on it, but I think most people aren't willing to train it too much.

I like using it when I'm cooking though, so it gets a lot of "Add a timer for 25 minutes" "Remind me I need more tomatoes tomorrow" and so on.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> And it still looks like a Segway for your face.

<comment><USER5> I think they need to move the majority of components to the neck like LG does with their bluetooth headset[1]. The less bulky and attention grabbing the better it will be when they launch for mainstream users that just wants them for their utility (early adopters may prefer them as they are now for conspicuous consumption reasons however). A second benefit is that Glass apparently has abysmal battery life. Bringing them down to the neck would allow for a much larger battery.

1\. [http://www.amazon.com/LG-Wireless-Bluetooth-Stereo- Headset/d...](http://www.amazon.com/LG-Wireless-Bluetooth-Stereo- Headset/dp/B0052YFYFK)

<comment><USER4> I would probably be ok with slightly bulky frames as long as it looked fairly symmetrical. My current frames are 3/8" tall and 3/16" thick on the sides, and I think it could go up to 1/2" x 1/4" without looking strange. Put the battery on one side, the electronics on the other. The only remaining problem is integrating the optics directly into the lens.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Wouldn't putting, even a fake copy of glass on the other side to make it look symmetric, be more aesthetically acceptable?

<comment><USER7> A battery pack maybe. But then you would either have to hide a cable in the bridge (An vital area for frames) or have a gaudy cable around the back of your head.

<comment><USER8> Rainbow cable FTW! [https://www.modmypi.com/image/cache/data/GPIO/ribbon- cables/...](https://www.modmypi.com/image/cache/data/GPIO/ribbon- cables/raspberry-pi-gpio-cable-rainbow-800x800.JPG)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> One of the things they mention is you get to choose the frames, then mount the Glass on to them, but you can't remove the Glass and use them as normal frames. So the usefulness of the glasses themselves are heavily reduced, as you'll inevitably have situations where you can't wear Glass so you need another frame to swap for. Can't say I'm overly impressed with the idea.

<comment> k-mcgrady >> "One of the things they mention is you get to choose the frames, then mount the Glass on to them, but you can't remove the Glass and use them as normal frames."

Why can't you remove it again? I read on another site that it was simply held in place by one screw (which you put in yourself after you get the frames home). If it's a screw I would think you could just unswear it again.

<comment><USER9> He means that you can't just easily remove Glass when you are doing things like entering public restrooms or a movie theater. Sure, you could bring along the special screwdriver and sit their unscrewing it, but I don't think that's practical in most situations you might want to remove Glass from your head.

You can remove your glasses, but many of us who wear glasses can't easily get by without them. So, that if we really want to wear Glass in public attached to our glasses, we have to bring two pairs of glasses with us everywhere.

<comment><USER10> #FAIL. I am in the explorer program and was initially excited to see these frames. The few times I've taken Glass outside, I try not to behave like a glasshole (I remove it before going to a public restroom, in restaurant/theatres, etc.). My prescription is pretty high so I cannot function without specs. How could they make such a bad product design decision?

<comment> k-mcgrady >> How could they make such a bad product design decision?

Maybe they made the decision so you can't take them off. If people realise they can't ask you to take them off or you won't be able to see, they may not say anything and it will normalise the use of Glass in situations people are currently uncomfortable with it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wear regular glasses and use sunglasses that cost less than $5 US that slide between my glasses and my face: [http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00012K3N6/](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00012K3N6/)

I think these would work with Glass.

</comment><comment><USER12> Just wait until this technology can be embedded in contact lenses for the real controversy

<comment><USER13> You mean Sight? [https://vimeo.com/46304267](https://vimeo.com/46304267)

(I have no doubt that one day the real product will be named exactly that.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How hard is it to get Glass right now?

<comment><USER15> Still hard, unless you know someone. One of the reasons it's hard is that invitations aren't transferable. I have one, but am unwilling to spend $1500 for something that will probably just be a novelty (especially when a Recon Jet would make a lot more practical sense for my needs), so the invitation will go unfilled.

<comment><USER16> Actually, you can give the invitation code (as long as you haven't clicked on it in the email) to anyone else and they can use it.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Sed to C translator written in sed - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/lhoursquentin/sed-bin <comment><USER2> Nice! In the why part you speculatively mention better speed. Do you have any concrete benchmark results?

If fast, the tool would be very useful for my work where I run an anonimization sed script with hundreds of transformations on millions of lines that takes hours to run.

But even if it is not fast, this is a fun project.

<comment><USER3> Not the author, but I see that

> _no pattern /hold space overflow checks, currently both limited to 8192 > bytes as per the POSIX spec requirement. Going over that limit will most > likely cause a segfault._

> _The C code is very rough around the edges (by that I mean dirty and unsafe, > for instance allocating everything on the stack without checking any > overflow), I 'm still working on it, but contributions (issues/comments/pull > requests) are also welcomed :)_

Thus, so far it's just for fun, not suitable for profit yet.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep that's exactly right :) !

To clarify my statement POSIX requires _at least_ 8192 bytes for the pattern and hold space, and I chose to allow at most 8192 bytes here, which indeed means that this will prevent working on really long lines or storing entire files in the hold space for instance.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> wow--impressive!

the core is here ([https://github.com/lhoursquentin/sed- bin/blob/master/par.sed](https://github.com/lhoursquentin/sed- bin/blob/master/par.sed)), and it's 600 lines of beautifully commented sed

</comment><comment><USER5> So it can translate itself?

> Translate the translator (par.sed) with itself:

Yes! Congrats!

</comment><comment><USER6> And for the other direction (C->sed): [https://github.com/shinh/elvm](https://github.com/shinh/elvm)

</comment><comment><USER7> Genuinely very cool. Nice work.

</comment><comment><USER8> Now one for Awk and Python please :)

<comment><USER9> There's already an awk-to-C compiler [1], even if it seems to be unmaintained. Python has a couple of them, more or less constrained, including Nuitka [2].

[1] [http://awka.sourceforge.net/index.html](http://awka.sourceforge.net/index.html)

[2] [https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka](https://github.com/Nuitka/Nuitka)

<comment><USER8> I mean awk-to-Python transcompiler, it would be useful for datascience. I wonder if it's possible to use awka to create such thing.</comment></comment></comment>


Thanks to Twitter, I'm creating my own Twitter - <AUTHOR> http://statsheet.com/blog/thanks-to-twitter-im-creating-my-own-twitter

<comment><USER2> "stat.us" was also the initial name for twitter: <http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360/>

However, I think the name "twitter" is a better description for the way the service is being used now and "stat.us" seems just right for your idea.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Very cool, I didn't know that!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Please look into supporting the OpenMicroBlogging protocol. It is a attempt to build a next generation open standard that would allow for federation with other microblogging services. Ideally there should be more public pressure for Twitter to adopt this as well.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is just _how the world works_. Someone builds a generic solution for everyone, then lots of vertical markets receive personalized attention. I think it's a good idea really. This kind of initiative will allow the users of these concepts filter out a lot of noise.

Consider MySpace, then Facebook, then linkedin --> trending to focus. Now you have ning which gives even more vertical focus.

Good luck Robbie.

</comment><comment><USER5> This is great to see. Twitter really left you with few options. One huge advantage with rolling your own site is you can do everything that Twitter hasn't done. Due to either scaling or their community (depends who you ask) there is a lot that has been left to be desired with Twitter.

As an aside: I recently had a historic sport stat question come up and couldn't readily find the answer. _Did Michael Jordan ever go scoreless in the second quarter during his career?_ I'm sure the information is out there. But I couldn't find it in a usable or detailed enough way to answer my question.

<comment><USER6> Sports events with an authoritative source can have problems with Twitter: <http://twitter.com/MNBikeFestival/status/2111645285>

_Did Michael Jordan ever go scoreless in the second quarter during his career?_

That is the sort of question that Wolfram Alpha was created for, but it doesn't look like NBA stats are covered yet, just NFL and MLB scores, and not yet in sufficient detail: <http://www.wolframalpha.com/examples/SportsGames.html>

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Perhaps the sports leagues were leaning on them. The NFL, et. al. seem to think they own the rights to any account of the games. I could easily see them thinking you are poaching on their IP (I've always thought these were absurd claims).

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Just to be clear, I'm building a real-time service for sports information. It will have some of the attributes of Twitter, but it is NOT a simple Twitter clone.

<comment><USER8> _It will have some of the attributes of Twitter, but it is NOT a simple Twitter clone._

Are you actually going to have a business model then? :)

<comment><AUTHOR> :-) It's all part of the grand StatSheet Network plan. stat.us will be integrated into statsheet.com heavily and may be integrated into the upcoming StatSheet subscription service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Have you looked into Laconi.ca

Seriously, though I am not sure how you jump from reporting from sports events to chit chat among users? Maybe a simple blog would do it for you?

</comment><comment><USER10> As someone who loved the StatTweet service this past college football and basketball season, it's a shame to see that Twitter has done this and refuses to communicate effectively with you. Best of luck with <http://stat.us/>, I'll be certain to check it out.

And let me also plug the OpenMicroBlogging/Laconi.ca platforms. They are an excellent step forward for a standardized API with all these similar services out there.

</comment><comment><USER11> The motivation driving this guy is inspiring. I can't wait to see what you're going to do.

</comment><comment><USER12> me too at <http://oopdate.com> :) in my spare time and may be sometimes ...

</comment><comment><USER13> It'd be neat if there was a unified interface for several different "like- twitter" applications. Using twitter's current API as a de facto interface to fulfill.

</comment><comment><USER14> Oh please spare us and dont!

</comment><comment><USER15> Yeah! Take that, Twitter! Let's see you compete with this! This...sorry, what is it again? Social networking for dogs?</comment>


Using imagemagick, awk and kmeans to find dominant colors in images - <AUTHOR> http://javier.io/blog/en/2015/09/30/using-imagemagick-and-kmeans-to-find-dominant-colors-in-images.html <comment><USER3> This is much easier using the LAB color space. I wrote an algorithm using the LAB color space several years ago to achieve something similar:

[http://i.imgur.com/M6Oo6dp.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/M6Oo6dp.jpg)

Will open source it soon, perhaps.

</comment><comment><USER4> There is an improvement that can be made here. There is no attempt to find the brightest colour. If you look at the dark image, the brightest colours (red) stand out over and above the dark colours. Using this knowledge is an illustration technique. Notice how the red stands out on one image, a small blue line on the other?

This particular algorythm and others that I've seen don't take this into account. Depending on the image, you could also take into account the lightness and darkness to find the dominant colour however small amounts in the image.

<comment><USER5> Hmm. I wonder if converting to HSV first would change the results.

<comment><USER6> HSV is a terrible color model for any human purpose. (To be honest, for any purpose whatsoever, unless it's required for backwards-compatibility with legacy systems.) HSV, like the RGB model it is a trivial derivative of, has dimensions which are not closely correlated with any color attributes relevant to human perception.

Instead, use a model such as CIECAM02, IPT, CIELAB (from the 70s but not too bad), or Munsell (basically a big lookup table, from experiments done in the 40s).

<comment><USER7> I am not sure what you are getting at here.

The models you propose are not what most if any designers use as the purpose is not to manually select best color combinations (there are other ways to do that) but to approach colors a little more structurally.

Whether you calibrate your perception to understand one model or the other doesn't seem to be relevant.

I am glad to be taught something I didn't know, but for now it sounds more like a theoretical claim than an actual useful one.

<comment><USER8> I think the parent was referring to the lack of properties like perceptual uniformity in RGB or HSV colour spaces. Check out the "Advantages" section on this Wikipedia page: [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_color_space](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_color_space)

<comment><USER7> You but in this context it seems wrong, but maybe thats just me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I wrote a small Go tool[1] that extracts a color palette from an image using either median or mean quantizer.

The quantizer code[2] is well documented and worth reading if you're looking at doing this in Go.

[1] [https://github.com/andrewgleave/color- extract](https://github.com/andrewgleave/color-extract) [2] [https://github.com/soniakeys/quant](https://github.com/soniakeys/quant)

</comment><comment><USER10> I was expecting a step by step decomposition of the process. I'm a bit disappointed.

</comment><comment><USER11> To find k dominant colors using kmeans and then replace all the colors with their closest dominant color, try this - [http://github.com/krishnanraman/colorquantization](http://github.com/krishnanraman/colorquantization)

50 lines of Scala with lots of comments. I threw in some example images as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> Does the while (1) {...} loop always terminate? I am not entirely sure about it and would like to hear some opinions. What if the first guess is already the best possible solution? Could there be any pictures that cause trouble? I.e. ones that consist of 4 (equally spaced) colors only.

</comment><comment><USER13> I read the same article as the guy and was also discouraged by using PIL. Python 2 vs Python 3 just makes life hard for people not used to Python. Maybe someone should do something about that.

I just went ahead and implemented the code in C++ instead.

<comment><USER14> It's mostly a solved problem nowadays – Pillow exists as much better and Python3-compatible PIL fork.

<comment><USER13> I wans't talking about just PIL - I was talking about Python 2 vs Python 3 in general.

EDIT: And I'm not talking about development only. I'm talking about download small scripts and being able to run them seamlessly as well.

<comment><USER15> Just pick one and use it. If it is a long project pick python 3. If you actually use python you'll barely notice the difference.

EDIT If the script uses a well formed #! this isn't too much of a problem either.

<comment><USER14> > EDIT If the script uses a well formed #! this isn't too much of a problem > either.

He does have a point, though: Dependency management in Python is a pain in the ass. Virtualenvs aren't really a solution, distribution packages are usually horribly outdated, …

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Couldn't this be achieved with imagemagick's builtin blur + histogram?

<comment><USER17> Don't know if this is the best way to do it, but reading a bit[1] as well as looking at comments above about color spaces, I came up with:

      #shell:
      for space in sRGB RGB HSV LAB
      do
        # I think it should be possible to do this without writing
        # tiff-images to disk in-between -- but having a look at the
        # resulting images next to the original is actually quite nice
        # gives some idea of the differences colorspace makes:
        convert akira_800x800.jpg -quantize $space +dither \
               -colors 4 akira_lab_$space.tiff

        echo "Histogram in $space colorspace:"

        convert akira_lab_$space.tiff -format %c histogram:info:-

        echo
      done

Output:

      Histogram in sRGB colorspace:
      123498: ( 5811, 4253, 6632) #16B3109D19E8 srgb(8.86702%,6.48966%,10.1198%)
      110248: (17780,16101,19392) #45743EE54BC0 srgb(27.1305%,24.5686%,29.5903%)
       47520: (34608,35255,34146) #873089B78562 srgb(52.8084%,53.7957%,52.1035%)
       47534: (47890,19471,10567) #BB124C0F2947 srgb(73.0755%,29.7108%,16.1242%)

      Histogram in RGB colorspace:
      182611: ( 45, 40, 51) #2D2833 srgb(45,40,51)
       76221: ( 93, 86,100) #5D5664 srgb(93,86,100)
       36583: (139,119,124) #8B777C srgb(139,119,124)
       33385: (218,125, 74) #DA7D4A srgb(218,125,74)

      Histogram in HSV colorspace:
       94957: ( 30, 13, 51) #1E0D33 srgb(30,13,51)
      128709: ( 56, 52, 80) #383450 srgb(56,52,80)
       37291: ( 60, 31, 10) #3C1F0A srgb(60,31,10)
       67843: ( 78,155, 87) #4E9B57 srgb(78,155,87)

      Histogram in LAB colorspace:
      133802: ( 42, 41, 60) #2A293C srgb(42,41,60)
       74332: ( 51, 72, 87) #334857 srgb(51,72,87)
       42436: ( 88, 33, 27) #58211B srgb(88,33,27)
       78230: (151,117, 89) #977559 srgb(151,117,89)

In fact, it became a bit of an obsession, and the hack evolved a bit:

[https://gist.github.com/e12e/7990e56f48ceff5506d7](https://gist.github.com/e12e/7990e56f48ceff5506d7)

I'm not sure if it actually does the same thing as the script in the post - but here's a sample output:

[http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://gist.githubusercontent...](http://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://gist.githubusercontent.com/e12e/7990e56f48ceff5506d7/raw/d5d65b3ea49d09a9234b94c2e43d6263b6524cbf/index.html)

Maybe someone with more knowledge of imagemagick can improve on the pipeline etc.

[ed: Just noticed that the sRGB output for "RGB" values is different enough that my script doesn't consider them to be RGB values (well, they're not) - <USER2> the line for sRGB is blank in the html. Still think it's interesting to see the difference between RGB/HSV/LAB.]

[ed2: Changing the number of colors to 3, to better compare with op, op's algorithm clearly chooses different colors. Not sure which is "best", but just FYI]

[1] [http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/quantize/#extract](http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/quantize/#extract)</comment></comment>


Seven-Dimensional Cross Product - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-dimensional_cross_product <comment><USER2> I feel like Geometric algebra / clifford algebra is something more people should know. It makes N-dimensional vector algebra easier and more intuitive.

<comment><USER3> could you recommend a good source to pick it?

<comment><USER4> What is your background/perspective? For introductory motivation, check out [https://www.shapeoperator.com/2016/12/12/sunset- geometry/](https://www.shapeoperator.com/2016/12/12/sunset-geometry/)

And perhaps follow up with the GA for Computer Science book, or if you like (or want to learn about) Newtonian mechanics, try Hestenes's book _New Foundations for Classical Mechanics_.

For people with a mathier background, I would recommend [https://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5935](https://arxiv.org/abs/1205.5935)

<comment><USER3> thank you, this looks interesting. The parent comment caught my eye since I'm pretty comfortable visualizing linear algebra with 2D arrays but struggle beyond that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm always perplexed when just a raw wikipedia article is posted here with no context or commentary about it.

<comment><USER6> This is definitely a bit niche, but at first blush it's highly bizarre that you can get a natural cross product operation in three dimensions... and not again until seven. And then never again after that. It's a peculiar and interesting (if not very useful) fact that is probably within reach of a sizable chunk of the audience here.

<comment><USER7> See, now that you've said it, it really is quite interesting.

But would that insight be plainly obvious to most? I highly doubt it. I have an MS in an engineering discipline, and this was not obvious to me until you said it. Maybe I'm just dumb (I kid - I would have picked up on this while in undergraduate or grad school, when I could really throw my weight around in mathematics, but like anything else, linear algebra is a muscle that wastes if you don't flex it) but really there should be some commentary associated rather than a raw article - the parent comment is totally right.

I could link HN to pentation or the Ackermann function; they're interesting, but useless without context.

<comment><USER8> Cross products are taught in high school. And I'm sure by college, a good amount of people are aware that four dimensional cross products are not possible. And like me, most of them probably thought four and higher dimensional cross products don't exist. So when I saw 7-dimensional cross product, I got pretty interested.

<comment><USER7> Convex optimization is also taught in high school. Organic chemistry, biochemistry, discrete math, probability, and statistics too. I fail to see your point.

<comment><USER8> My point is that cross products are really really really simple and for some reason you have this notion that cross products are something complicated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> In 3D the cross product can be understood as follows:

-You define the cross product as the area of the parallelogram formed by two vectors,

-Draw a normal to it,

-Use some convention to decide on which side the normal should stick out such that when you reverse the two vectors being multiplied, the resultant vectors is multiplied by -1.

In more (3+n) dimensions there is a problem with this approach. The resulting normal vector can point in any one of (n+1) dimensions. The intuition here is try to draw of normal vector to a line in 3D space. You can do it in 2D space, but in 3D space there is a _plane_ that it normal to the line.

So we need to decide what direction should the vector point in inside this 1+n dimensional space. It seems like any convention will do. We could solve the orientation problem in 3D after all. But it seems like any convention you try has the property that when you break vectors _a_ and _b_ into parts and perform the cross product operation on all pairs of parts (one part from each vector _a_i x b_j_ ) and then sum it up the result isn't equal to _a x b_.

This article is saying a working convention can be given in 7 dimensions (n=4), and no other dimensions. Which is nuts. If anyone has any insight as to why I'd love to hear it.

</comment><comment><USER10> "it is the only other non-trivial bilinear product of two vectors that is vector-valued, anticommutative and orthogonal"

</comment><comment><USER11> This' something really intriguing to me. Coming from a physics background, this immediately takes me to electrodynamics where the pillar of half of classical physics, namely Maxwell's equ, is built on cross product.

<comment><USER12> The 7d cross product is almost certainly not useful for physics. It's not uniquely defined! e_1 x e_2 can equal any of the other basis vectors.

The cross product in physics is the wedge product. (which is also featured in 'geometric algebra', as another commenter mentioned, though I would contend that GA is the wrong approach). It produces area vectors from two vectors, and happily extends to any dimensions. For instance the electromagnetic field tensor is a bivector (F = d_u A_v - d_v A_u) which is basically a 4d curl of the 4-potential A, and has bivectorial components for each (uv) plane in spacetime.

<comment><USER13> > I would contend that GA is the wrong approach

I just said GA gives the most elegant formulation in another comment. What alternative do you suggest? Seeing that you mention the wedge product and bivectors, may you be thinking in something based in differential forms?

I'm fascinated by GA, although I have not had the chance to use it heavily yet. I am very interested if you know something better.

<comment><USER12> I think that the wedge product is fantastic and the geometric product is basically useless -- it has no geometric interpretation, complicates things massively, and conceals intuition wherever it is used. So I'd argue that 'exterior algebra' (which is the language used by differential forms, plus the exterior derivative) is basically the right framework for physics.

(The reason the geometric product is used in GA is that it's the extension of complex/quaternion multiplication to higher dimensions, and allows for inverting (non-zero-norm) multivectors . But I don't think that makes it worth including. It's not true a priori that inverting vectors is useful to physics, and it only really makes sense when they're being used as linear transformations -- in which case you can just use linear transformations explicitly.

<comment><USER4> Not using the geometric product is sort of like working as a chef but not allowing yourself any knives with blades between 3 inches – 15 inches long. Only a paring knife, a hatchet, and a machete. Yes, it is _possible_ to accomplish everything you wanted using a confusing mishmash of other abstractions (the raw numerical data turns out basically the same), but it's really really inconvenient in comparison.

> _it has no geometric interpretation_

This is ridiculous. The geometric product is thoroughly "geometrical".

A more accurate translation of your sentence is "I ajkjk have not personally thought enough about it to visualize a multivector".

<comment><USER12> I have no problem visualizing multivectors, and have studied them extensively. What I have failed to find any intuition for is the general geometric product of two multivectors (without restricting to a particular grade). If you have one, I would love to hear it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is this interesting primarily because of the noted correspondence with octonions?

<comment><USER15> It's a very notable algebraic structure because it "works" only in a specific number of dimensions instead of belonging to an infinite family, but it doesn't mean that it is more useful for practical or theoretical purposes than boring wedge products. For starters, you'd need a specifically 7-dimensional problem to solve; the 3-dimensional cross product is much easier to "sell".</comment></comment>


We're building a dystopia just to make people click on ads (2017) [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.ted.com/talks/zeynep_tufekci_we_re_building_a_dystopia_just_to_make_people_click_on_ads/up-next <comment><USER3> I remember reading an article (somewhere) years ago that criticized Silicon Valley for spending so much money to hire bright people to design a better way to click on ads. I thought that was a real dystopian future.

Now Facebook is finally dying... I haven't been on it in ~6 months. People are paying for more and more subscriptions. Nextcloud is becoming a better and better replacement for Gapps. DuckDuckGo is good enough I can 'google' for 95% of my stuff on it. Firefox is now competitive with Chrome. I think we are better off now then we were a few years ago.

<comment><USER4> > Now Facebook is finally dying…

Doubtful. Facebook is not just facebook.com, it's the whole package of FB Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc. People may uninstall the mobile app and limit their Facebook access to their laptops or desktop computers (that's a popular response among my colleagues), but I don't even know anyone who has actually deleted their account — aside from the folk who never had one, like me.

I also get the impression that usage of Facebook and related services differs greatly from country to country, and from demographic to demographic. This article¹ from 2014 on WhatsApp usage isn't joking; In countries like mine (the Netherlands) not using Facebook-owned WhatsApp (like me) is rather exceptional. If I had kids they would miss out on basically everything (playdates, birthday parties, changes in schedule for sports/scouts/etc.; not to mention becoming social recluses because all their peers (or their parents when they are younger) are on Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp) if I kept refusing to use Facebook's offerings.

Facebook is not going anywhere soon (although I wish it was).

1: [https://www.wired.com/2014/02/whatsapp-rules-rest- world/](https://www.wired.com/2014/02/whatsapp-rules-rest-world/)

<comment><USER5> Facebook is "dieing" as much horny guys acting inappropriate towards women has been "solved".

Basically, not at all unless you live in some strange activist bubble that has nothing to do with the real world.

All this really did was create a nice buying opportunity yesterday in FB stock.

<comment><USER6> You're probably right, though I'm sad about that. For a lot of people FB use seems almost like cigarettes. I mean, not that order of magnitude, but same idea. Doesn't really matter what bad news comes out because it's so habit forming.

The bad news has to be truly existential to make a real difference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Late to the party as usual, I think this speech underestimates the will of companies to do what's described. Most cynical actions are powered by money and harm anonymized/faceless groups that "hey, they were suicidal anyway". The simple fact is: you cannot dislike, remove or train networks to get what you want – you eat what is served instead, liked or disliked. Your opinion is not an argument of targeting function, only attention is. My youtube feed was full of crap until I removed all suggestions. (Did you know you have to remove it 3-5 times for it to not show up again?) And still, it presents that toxic whatnext thing, which my inner self often treats no less than disgusting. I CANNOT find the content I really like with all the searches and smart ordering. I only get it from random articles by pure chance.

The only way to take control of it is to make modern tech available to wide public as in next-next-done, not as a github-link. The internet and all its power is still here for us from the start, but heck most turn into companyname zombies because everyone already is and _that's the easiest way to communicate_. Instead of spending time on ultra-asynchronous scalable tech, could we stop and think of small businesses and just people who want to publish and exchange content in their small volumes?

The Web Suite consists of a simple but overcomplicated browser app, instead of a full platform to create, publish and manage the content with few design hints to not turn it into myspace. Until that changes, we all, no matter #deleted or not, will swim in crap that is pushed by so-called media giants (media jerks in my view). Removing yourself from everywhere doesn't help, as it doesn't help to be healthy in mental asylum.

</comment><comment><USER8> The moment when I dropped facebook, was the time they start manipulating my timeline. One day I realized that they don't show me things in their posting order, but they were moving them around. I remember using a bookmark ending with .com/?sk=h_chr to beat them, but I gave up when I realized that this is cat and mouse game, and they will continue these shady practices.

[1]: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/02/facebook- apologises-psychological-experiments-on-users)

[2]: [http://time.com/3951337/facebook-chronological- order/](http://time.com/3951337/facebook-chronological-order/)

<comment><USER8> 15m 34s, Zeynep says: "as a public and as citizens" [1]

And HERE is the problem.

Facebook sees us ONLY as Product (our data) that can manipulate/buy/sell - <USER2> treat us accordingly.

Advertisers see us ONLY as Consumers they can sell to - and treat us accordingly.

Politicians see us ONLY as Votes (not voteRs) they can snatch - and treat us accordingly.

And we let them.

[1]: [https://youtu.be/iFTWM7HV2UI?t=934](https://youtu.be/iFTWM7HV2UI?t=934)

<comment><USER9> Okay, so what is to be done about it?

<comment><USER10> Start with the politicians. Vote out anyone who doesn't support campaign finance reform. Then we can make our government a little less sociopathic.

<comment><USER11> Start with your attention. The impact will be even bigger than your vote. Avoid services altogether that abuse you, even if there's some benefit you gain out of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This was a great speech she wasn't trying to say all algorithms are evil or that machine learning is evil, but despite it having good consequences it can just as easily bring about a great evil. Not only do we have to be aware of hidden biases in machine learning that could be doing unethical things, but we need to be aware of the great power and effects these algorithms have on those they are being used on and how they can be used to manipulate.

Near the end she states, "Many of these ad finance platforms [e.g. Facebook, Google] boast that they are free. That means that we are the product that's being sold. We need a digital economy where our data and our attention is not for sale to the highest bidding authoritian or demagogue."

<comment><USER13> Shame that CS people seem among the least interested in ethics, as it's just such a bummer when you have to consider anything else but technical solutions. It's why the field really needs the humanities.

<comment><USER14> I'm doing my Masters right now and taking a look at the job market / discussions about it. I'm stunned to see people talk about Palantir etc. as if it's just a thing you need to do to get enough money to live comfortably and not the enabling force that is bringing about next-gen warfare with more capacity to kill than all previous technology combined. People go into "defense" because planes flying themselves is cool but that's where their consideration ends. I really wish more people thought about what their efforts enable, directly or otherwise. Like it or not, we are all connected, and there are causal relations between your actions and the harm (or benefit) of others every day. Try to minimize that harm.

<comment><USER15> I have a good friend who just finished his Master's in CS and considered taking an internship at Palantir. I was very apalled at first how he could even consider to work for a company that are obviously the 'bad guys'. He comes from one of those countries your president considers a sh*thole and scoring that internship polishes his CV enough so that he can get a stable and high paying job which will allow him to stay and not have to go back there. Can't really bame him....

<comment><USER16> Yeah, how could you blame someone for hurting people if he benefits from it? I don't see it either ...

<comment><USER15> You know, I'm inclined to agree with your sentiment. I just think it might be more nuanced. At least to me my friend's suffering is more immediate. Whatever work he would have done there is multiple layers removed from me. I'm not saying that this is ok, but I feel it's just human. Luckily the story ends with him getting a nice internship at another company that's less problematic.

<comment><USER16> Well, yes, rationalizing individual behaviour that in aggregate leads to authoritarianism, totalitarianism, genocide, war, ... is "just human". Just as building power structures that add sufficient indirection that allows individuals to use those rationalizations is "just human". And tribalism ... yes, definitely "just human".

But is any of that really a justification for anything? Yes, things are more nuanced, some things are worse than others, sure, but that doesn't really make "but he is my tribe, and he benefited from it" a good justification, does it?

<comment><USER15> I have to agree again. What you point out is correct and I hope to be able to act accordingly. My personal take-away is still that these kinds of ethical ponderings are a bit like 'first-world problems'. I have the luxury that I can accept or deny any job based on my personal moral values. If the alternative was to have to go to some place where my life is significantly worse, I'd probably think twice too.

<comment><USER16> Well, yes, it is understandable what motivates the individual, and depending on what exactly you are weighing against what, it might even be justifiable-- but then, the reason why some (actual) shithole countries are shithole countries is essentially this sort of attitude, as that is essentially the rationalization for corruption. I guess the point is that evil institutions do not usually come about due to evil people, and when they do, they are not sustained merely by evil people, so, if we don't want to have them, concentrating on evil people won't do shit, we have to concentrate on the actual cause, and the actual cause are those perfectly understandable, human decisions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> If anyone wonders how we got to this point, I think that is understandable. Here are a few thoughts:

It's easy to overlook how much _advertising works_. We each have a limited supply of bandwidth for perceiving the world we live in. The result is a high demand for undermining that perception and using it to manipulative ends.

Authoritarian dystopias from books and films usually illustrate _force_ because _force_ is more immediately graphic. It also reflects the dismal state of a dystopian existence. _Manipulation_ would look a lot different. Fear of _manipulation_ is a fear of knowing someone else is _trying_ to manipulate you.

We don't regularly notice evidence of brands and companies _trying_ to manipulate us, but most of us understand they are incentivized to.

I have worked in advertising for almost a decade and the truth is much worse. Although individuals who work at companies may be on your side, they get paid to spend their days doin _what the company tells them to_. Even managers and CEOS may be great people but when they go work, they are an employee. They have a duty to the company. And, the more efficient and skilled we get at manipulating members of society into behaviors which direct money our way, the employees will remain _working for the company_.

Are the employees immoral? Not from the perspective of the family they support. And whose opinion is more important? The family's. It's pretty simple that we cannot expect individual decisions to compete with those of the profit-motivated companies they work for.

<comment><USER18> > _Are the employees immoral? Not from the perspective of the family they > support. And whose opinion is more important? The family's. It's pretty > simple that we cannot expect individual decisions to compete with those of > the profit-motivated companies they work for._

We could expect more on a social level, though.

I still don't fully understand how did we get to the point when marketing became a _respectable occupation_. Something young people dream about being part of, when they learn to be a graphic designer, or a programmer, or a media person. I guess it's the consequence of how much money the industry makes.

But looking at it from the top, we're literally celebrating the profession that's meant to exploit and hurt other people. If I came to you, as a friend, and did to you what half of the adtech companies do to people at large, I'd get - rightfully - punched in the face. And yet we tolerate that happening at scale.

<comment><USER19> Marketing has an important function that improves people's lives: it helps to find products and services that match people's needs.

<comment><USER20> Do you think this function is impossible to achieve without marketing?

Do you think marketing is the most effective way of achieving it?

And do you think the trillion dollar marketing industry that exists is really creating trillions of dollars of value for consumers?

<comment><USER19> 1) It is possible to find products and services without marketing.

2) Whether marketing is the most effective way -- depends on the product/service and on the audience.

3) Yes, generally trillion dollar industry - really creates over trillion dollars value for consumers.

If it was not the case - consumers would not use it.

<comment><USER20> >If it was not the case - consumers would not use it.

Consumers don't use it, producers do, and consumers have no choice about that.

What value does the consumer get out of it that justifies the producer spending billions on advertising?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The average American has maybe 3-4 hours of discretionary time per day. They choose to spend an hour of it on Facebook. The newsfeed algorithm could be optimized to do anything -- Facebook's own experiments show that they can make people happy or sad. They choose to maximize their own revenue. There is immense potential to improve the lives of their users, and they choose to sell an unimaginable amount of human potential for what amounts to 30 cents per hour.

</comment><comment><USER22> Just imagine one day, some algorithms completely take control of/help us decide what we eat, who we date, where to travel, who we talk to or make friends with, what job offer to take, what subjects to study in school, what startup ideas to invent.

Then imagine that 100 year later, the original developers of these intricate algorithms retired, passed away, complex system got maintained by automated tools and programs, and the outcome of these algorithms become more and more obscure.

Eventually, the complex machines and A.I. algorithms will be looked as mysteries to our grand grand grand children and they will study them as we're studying nature today..

<comment><USER23> > what job offer to take

... or be offered.

Part of Google Cloud Job Discovery is letting seekers find jobs ... the other is getting the "jobs in front of the right candidates." Does this sound familiar? It seems like another opportunity for an individual seeker to be put in an algorithmic jail, with opaqueness and little recourse we usually expect from Google.

<comment><USER24> > algorithmic jail

Not sure if that's succinctly prescient or absurdly reductionist. But it would certainly describe the age we have entered.

<comment><USER25> Literal algorithmic jail is coming, too, as in: prison sentences handed out with humans completely out of the loop. This will so obviously and inevitably happen it doesn't even seem worth typing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> A friend of mine had this idea that there's a path towards Facebook's AI learning to actually kill people. If they take a certain approach to machine learning (which they may or may not), the following could happen:

A machine learning algorithm might notice that when someone commits suicide, there is an uptick in activity on Facebook that follows the event. It may determine, then, that a "suicide" event is "good".

If they try to use feeds to drive more long-term site activity, the algorithm could learn a correlation between certain types of feed posts and suicide. In other words, if a user's feed starts to look a certain way, they will be more likely to commit suicide. The algorithm could then see this as "good" because it is also related to the spike in overall activity, and promote these kinds of feeds.

It then becomes a feedback loop where the algorithm is triggering people to commit suicide.

<comment><USER27> Yeah. It's even simpler than that. I saw a similar post on HN a few months ago theorizing that Facebook's machine learning algorithms could very plausibly pick up that controversy generates activity, and promote controversial topics more and more to the point of optimizing for divisiveness and extremism.

And most people here are slowly realizing that it's not just a theory... it's likely already happening. We're on the early years of acknowledging that it's happening. 5-10 years from now, some article will come out about how Facebook has been manipulating our world view for decades and people will link back to these posts and say "Duh, we've known about this for ages".

Hey, to the people who work at Facebook, Twitter, Google et al, it's your responsibility to make sure this stuff isn't happening. The company you work for has no path to fix these problems on its own, this stuff needs human supervision and intervention, and hyperawareness of what kind of damage is caused by manipulating people en masse.

<comment><USER28> The humans in regular medias already do that.

You always see more bad news than good on CNN, but I'm pretty sure there are more good things than bad to report.

<comment><USER29> CNN can't do it on a personalized basis.

If Facebook's AI knows that you hate nothing more than anti-vaxxers, it could choose to show you seemingly-randomly that your great aunt has liked an anti- vax page.

I'm not sure if that would ultimately help drive engagement but I'm sure it's something they've studied.

<comment><USER28> That's a good point. And it avoids general outrage against big entities or concepts, instead people just fight each other more.

<comment><USER25> Which is ultimately the goal of the folks in charge. The 1% win when they can get 49.5% to think the other 49.5% are ruining everything, and vice versa.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I really like her commentary and glad she is getting more attention.

I think the issue is the magic of free and the irrationality of humans. Free creates irrational responses. People will use a lot of a thing if its free even if its bad rather than dealing with the perceived loss of paying 2 cents for something better.

So as long as no one figures out how to make micro-transactions cognitively easier than free stuff then free tech will prevail. And payment will be harvested via information and attention.

The dystopia we are building is not because we want free stuff, but because we are too lazy to make the choice about spending 2 cents.

I am trying to change that with oalrus.com but we shall see if i mange to build a large enough of a list of alpha users to give the network a chance.

<comment><USER31> I don't think people are averse to 2-cent payments. I can imagine a scenario where I regularly spend money on the Internet besides Amazon. I don't know _how_ much I've spent on Steam, for instance.

What people are guarding against is optimization. I don't mind paying 2 cents. I _do_ mind paying 2 cents and then becoming marked for upsell and becoming subject to a full-fledged marketing campaign, or having some recurring 2-cent payment be changed to $20. Cognitively, I know that I am no match for the kilonerds out there trying to extract money from my wallet. So the only move is not to play.

<comment><USER30> Fear of uncertainty makes sense and something I haven't thought about too much in this project. Sad that the modern net has created such a 'gotchya' impression. I would think that this comes from everyone promising free but actually desperately looking for revenue somewhere.

I feel like this is solvable with smart policies and good institutional culture. One thought that I had was that a user commits to depositing say $2 to use for micro payments for the month, but doesn't actually get charged until the end of the month. This delays the pain point of spending money (thereby reducing it) but also may minimize the sensation of risks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So funny to see these posts here and getting votes - wasn't too long ago (literally months) that practically anything against the ad ecosystem was impugned. Granted, it may not be the same people speaking or talking, but what of you, dear lurker? Have you finally changed your mind on the value of these platforms?

</comment><comment><USER33> The previous system of TV + commercials wasn't perfect. It's often mocked and criticized for over romanticizing products (from daily health to polluting cars to cigarettes). But these era seems worse because it's disguising it's aim behind "real" ads (because they don't coat the product in glamour, because they use "more data") but in the end it's as bad if not worse as before; just a web based reincarnation of the same needs to make money.

</comment><comment><USER34> The problem is much deeper: in the roughly 25 years of WWW we have not really figured out better ways than ads.

In the fourth quarter of 2017, Facebook had 2.2 billion monthly active users, ad rev was 12.779B thus if active users on average paid somehow a little under two dollars a month, it'd be the same. I am not saying, by far, that a flat fee is realistic, I am just showing there's a lot of room for improvement.

<comment><USER35> you point out something important. for-pay models don't properly deal with income disparities. you can be sure that for a portion of current 2.2b users $2 a month for access would be a significant chuck of their income.

<comment><USER36> What's the benefit to Facebook for catering to such people? Presumably, advertisers can only sell cars to people that can afford cars. Or is this where Cambridge Analytica comes in? Then the equation stops being about selling _things_ and becomes selling consensus. Maybe that was the plan all along.

<comment><USER37> The cool "starving artist" types putting up their events/content on Facebook is what makes it valuable to the rich people they want to advertise to. So it's not as simple as just keeping the people who can afford to pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> It's not just about viral videos. People in general is being educated to trade being with possessing in the pursuit of an immediate short time satisfaction (which is sad because someone could take away what you have but not what you are). So it makes perfectly sense to me that driving people into sadness, paranoia etc. in many ways (news, music, movies etc.) could also be not just exploited but willingly planned for business reasons. This goes beyond the obvious "someone could invade the country -> buy more weapons" or "the big one quake/tsunami/plague etc. is coming soon -> amass food and stuff"; if people is being driven into thinking their life is miserable or they're in danger, most of them will seek immediate gratification by buying more of this or that.

</comment><comment><USER39> *to make bots click ads

</comment><comment><USER40> And because United Nation don't get the flag on the point that it goes against the evolution of Humanity.

</comment><comment><USER41> This is the only reason why I would support dropping net neutrality. If the ISPs charged more for content, we could potentially see an ad free future!

<comment><USER42> Net Neutrality is about taxing content, not charging for it. Right now everyone (you, your neighbor, Netflix, Facebook, Google, ISP themselves) already pay to move bits between each other. ISPs want the ability to extort money from end-nodes of the Internet who they don't currently have any direct business relationship or physical connection with.

Right now it's all just bits come across their network from peers _but_ if they can start blocking traffic from specific sites, like Netflix, they can also make deals to ensure that doesn't happen. Maybe even make those bits move a little bit faster.

In no way does this lead to an ad free future. It would probably lead to more ads as content providers would have additional costs to recoup that they don't currently have.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: New Year Project suggestions - <AUTHOR> I'm looking for project suggestions for the new year, something spanning 1-3 months.
This is what I'm considering, any suggestions would be appreciated:
1. Automated Stock Trading algorithms (Quantopian or other)
2. Arduino / Pi project (suggestions welcome)
3. Website/app: dating, music, photos, social, finance, etc. Suggestions welcome.
4. Data Analytics project using Machine Learning against a public data source (Astronomy, City Data, etc.)
Please share any experiences with such projects.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> 4\. Exposing corruption - and making it more transparent - in South Africa by ruling government using public accounts and news data sources. They are robbing that beautiful country to the ground.

</comment><comment><USER3> Hi Nikhil, Do you have a personal email address?

<comment><AUTHOR> hey, you can email me at email@example.com and we can connect.</comment></comment>


Get Up to $7500 in AWS Credit with Product Hunt Ship Subscription - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/ship/aws <comment><USER2> They have hidden important info about the validity of the AWS credits. So it could be many years or it could be just 1 year, as long as you're subscribed to Product Hunt's Ship.

<comment><USER3> I'm interested in knowing more about details - where you able to locate them?

<comment><USER2> Hi, it was just a comment from @jakecrump representing Product Hunt's Community Team, he confirmed they are valid only for 1 year after activation: [https://cards.producthunt.com/cards/comments/589842](https://cards.producthunt.com/cards/comments/589842)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Just to add. $7,500 in AWS credits is for the Super Pro plan ( $199 / month paid for year)

$5,000 in AWS credits is for the Pro plan ( $59 / month paid for year)

$0 in AWS credits is for the Basic plan ( $0 / month)</comment>


Why Race Relations Are Getting Worse in America - <AUTHOR> http://www.nationalreview.com/article/439431/race-relations-getting-worse-america-why?target=author&tid=997024 <comment><USER2> I'm not sure the article answered it's own question, or provided any evidence that things are actually getting worse but it's hard to tell as it felt like the author was dancing around what he wanted to say, like it was going to be a hard pill to swallow for his audience.

I liked the bit where it said that white people were on one side of the argument and cosmopolitan, better educated white people were on the other side. Which seems, since <adjective> white people are a strict subset of white people, like a very obscure and convoluted way of saying that stupid and/or racist white people are on the Republican side of the argument.

I'm assuming this is supposed to be a wake-up call for the non-racist, non- stupid Republicans to up their game so they don't lose power for the next generation due to demographic changes and pandering to a slowly dying base. But I think it's far too timid to be heard over Trump's bluster, even for the National Review reader.

edit: hah, didn't notice there were reader comments at the bottom, oh well, this definitely didn't reach the people it was supposed to reach. They think this article is liberal propaganda.</comment>


Marty the Robot – Programmable walking robot for kids - <AUTHOR> https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/marty-the-robot <comment><USER2> I've known the developers behind Marty for years - and this is an incredibly well-engineered bipedal robot! With onboard WiFi or an RPi; and Python, Scratch, C++, ROS - it's a bit like the Turtlebot for humanoids.

Fun fact, back in March I had the pleasure to share the stage with a handful of Martys at the Edinburgh International Science Festival dancing away...

</comment><comment><USER3> I bought an mBot kit to make with my 6 year old cousin recently. It was fun, but the default software was pretty limited, and the scratch programming environment was not actually that easy to use for a beginner. Had to drop into C for any sort of multi-tasking, and the documentation was mostly in Chinese.

Marty looks great, backed. Looking forward to playing robots in 2017!

<comment><USER4> Hey, another Robotical engineer here, thanks for your support!

We're planning (read: really want to but might not have time to do everything initially) to target a wide range of programming environments, with Scratch as a _really_ basic level; This would make Marty a kinda smart toy, being able to do logo-like things but not much more. The more complex approaches will of course allow a lot more to be done with Marty.

The control board itself is going to have a fair amount of smarts, with an ARM cortex M4 - but that'll be running our firmware, so playing with that would require somewhat in-depth mbed experience. We'd expect most people to use the i2c or serial interface to hack with Marty, by writing their own code on a microcontroller, RasPi or BeagleBone, and packing that in with our board. As it's all open source, adding to the firmware will be possible, just not the most beginner friendly thing.

As for the WiFi functionality, we're looking at the ESP8266, (not final but unlikely to change) and building a C++, Python and ROS ([http://ros.org](http://ros.org), serious robotics stuff, very cool) set of APIs to use with Marty.

tl:dr; Two types of control, _standalone_ with an _added_ raspi/arduino/other microcontroller, and _wifi-connected_ to a program running on a computer (scratch, python, C++...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Google is working on similar concept. But Marty is more advanced with 2 legs. Educational toy market combined with programming is drawing lots of interest as a trend. [https://goo.gl/photos/cogjHRCsm11RJaad8](https://goo.gl/photos/cogjHRCsm11RJaad8)

</comment><comment><USER6> Anybody have more info regarding the control board?

<comment><USER7> Hey there, Robotical developer here!

What would you like to know in particular?

Edit:

To add more generic info, as it is shown in the video we have quite a few prototypes and we are now working on the final design of each piece of hardware (including the control board).

<comment><USER6> Hi!

I read the description (did not watch video) and wanted to know more about the actual hardware (chip used, GPIO, power consumption, etc).

Project look great, btw. :)

<comment><USER4> I wrote a bit more detail here [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903939](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11903939) but

Still very alpha, specs currently are STM32F446RE (ARM M4), ESP8266 (WiFi, for control from a computer, phone...) and an accelerometer on-board. 9 channel servo control with current sensing, JTAG/USB for programming, i2c and serial interface for talking to it from an arduino, raspberry pi or other microcontroller. We're not expecting to have much GPIO free, and as I said, the firmware it's running is kinda complex, so we're not expecting most people to change it.

<comment><USER6> How much weight does the frame support? Does the weight need to be centrally located? I'm thinking this would be very nice with one of those small touchscreen displays attached to it.

<comment><USER4> It's fine with a reasonable amount of weight - I'd have to ask Sandy how much weight Marty can take before he physically can't move, but a touchscreen should be fine, and won't disrupt his walking ability much. Of course you could re-plan his walking with the weight taken into account, but that's quite complex. We'll probably have standard mounting holes on top of his head, so should be a nice and easy hack :D

<comment><USER6> If you keep answering I'll keep asking! :)

How many degrees of side-to-side motion can the frame take before it falls down? I'm thinking of getting two of these, putting a touchscreen on each one, and having them play joust. The objective would be to touch a dot displayed on the other players touchscreen. The things I come up with...

<comment><USER4> Well I like the sound of getting another one...

By side-side motion I'm guessing you mean a tipping force - and the the answer would be that he's pretty hard to shove over, at the limit of his lean he's stable, 10 degrees tilt and he'll fall. From fully upright, you need a bit more of a shove - having just pushed one over. Sandy says they can tip themselves if you wobble fast enough.

We're guessing you were thinking of something like this --> [http://i.imgur.com/Cmmwu5A.jpg](http://i.imgur.com/Cmmwu5A.jpg)

<comment><USER6> Yes, exactly. This platform is very affordable and would make a great introduction to a sumo-type robot competition using bipeds. But not shoving robots around a la RoboOne, but hitting a target drawn on a touchscreen. Its something Ive been tinkering about for a while.

I appreciate the answers. Best of luck with the project!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Yes! Ordered for my kids (a.k.a. myself)</comment>


WordPress Theme Boilerplate – Build Tools Included :) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/MozaikAgency/wp-theme-bootstrap

<comment><AUTHOR> Built for the team at the company where I work, this theme bootstrap has built in build tools that include Browser-Sync for automatic refresh-less style injection, SSASS/SCSS support for CSS pre-processing and Webpack for modular AMD/CommonJS/ES2015+ JavaScript support. It also comes with tools to help make teamwork easier, combining configurable eslint and scss-lint for controlling JS/SCSS style across projects.

It is constantly being improved and worked upon to better fit a teams needs and any feedback would be awesome, thanks.</comment>


Show HN: UK Weather Visualisation - <AUTHOR> http://uk.temperature.at/

<comment><USER2> Did the Norwegians take back the Shetlands ? nice visuals tho

</comment><comment><USER3> As another poster said the other day, Ireland isn't part of the UK.

Other than that though, good work.</comment>


Visual Explanation of Google AI's SimCLR Paper - <AUTHOR> https://amitness.com/2020/03/illustrated-simclr/ <comment><USER2> Isn't this just a rehash of metric learning?</comment>


Python Hunter – a flexible code tracing toolkit - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/ionelmc/python-hunter/ <comment><AUTHOR> Hunter has now a bit of everything (process attach, variable diffing like in pysnooper, env var activation, breakpoints, thread support and an api to build stuff on top) but without going overboard with overenineering (like serialization, storage or sql). For most intents and purposes it should replace every other tracer tool.

There's also a work-in-progress cookbook with unusual stuff: [https://python- hunter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cookbook.html](https://python- hunter.readthedocs.io/en/latest/cookbook.html)</comment>


Fighting Covid-19 with GCP – quarantine tracking system - <AUTHOR> https://getindata.com/blog/fighting-COVID-19-Google-Cloud-quarantine-tracking-system <comment><USER2> Great article! Incredible how fast did you manage to implement fully working application.</comment>


Exthouse – Analyze the impact of a browser extension on web performance - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/treosh/exthouse <comment><USER2> I'd count that as yet another evidence that the recent move from Google to reduce the power of ad-blocking extensions cannot be justified by «performances concerns for their users» as they said earlier, since µBlock Origin has zero overhead in this benchmark.

<comment><USER3> The fact that µBlock Origin is fast provides exactly zero evidence about other extensions abusing the WebRequest API resulting in battery drain, disclosure of private information like account credentials, and a bad user experience because of an apparently slow browser.

<comment><USER4> The webRequest API is not going away, they are just removing the blocking ability. Likewise, so far I have also seen "exactly zero evidence" that the blocking ability of the webRequest API is causing all the issues your are mentioning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Interesting, but I'm currently running 61 extensions in my Chrome non-private sessions, without noticeable impact, so I'm not overly concerned that extensions affect performance.

The thing that bothers me about extensions is that I have usually no control whatsoever over what information any extension might think they need to phone home about. A tool that logged this per extension would seem more useful to me. Not sure if this is even possible?

<comment><USER6> I have a lot of extensions in my browsers, and I'm not at all confident about their performance impact. What tells you that your extensions don't have noticeable impact, if you haven't looked at a comparison like this?

<comment><USER5> What I mean is that most sites load within a reasonable time frame for me, i.e. I don't usually have any 'oh, this is slow' feelings when browsing. When it happens it's close to always my connection that's at fault, or the odd site that simply is too heavy. That's all.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hopefully more tools like this encourage extension developers to think about performance.

</comment><comment><USER8> It gives uBlock Origin a score of 100 in the Screenshots, but does this actually translate to 100% performance compared to page load without extension?

<comment><USER9> From what I can see in the github chart it results in zero change compared to not having the extension.</comment></comment>


Definitive data on what poor people buy when they're just given cash - <AUTHOR> http://qz.com/853651/definitive-data-on-what-poor-people-buy-when-theyre-just-given-cash/ <comment><USER2> "...studies that surveyed whether respondents reported.."

In other words, in these studies, they gave poor people money and then _asked them_ what they spent it on, with no objective monitoring of actual spending. Is anybody surprised that the recipients did _not_ report that they increased spending on alcohol or tobacco?

This is a definition of "definitive data" with which I was previously unfamiliar.

<comment><USER3> When a scientist reports some new finding, the standard is not whether the government has been objectively monitoring their actual experiment. Instead the same assumption is in play: most people tend to tell the truth.

Between the two contexts of science and poverty, the social and economic incentives toward misreporting are objectively higher in the former than the latter.</comment></comment>