Ask HN: How important are networking events? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on a startup. I have a day job, so I have very limited time. My co-founder and I are in the Bay Area, and there are a ton of meetups and networking events around here. We've been to four in the last couple of weeks. The first was wonderful, but I found the next three depressing.
I'm pretty good at maintaining my own internal reality distortion field, but a few hours in a room with a bunch of dressed up guys selling things to each other, and the field starts to falter. I look at their elaborate projects and ours seems terribly small. I have difficulty talking about what we're doing. It just feels yucky.
Technical events are much better, but I feel out of place there as well, because I'm usually the only (or almost only) woman in the room, and that out-of-placeness also messes with my mindset.
I often feel like my time would be better spent locked in my room developing. On the other hand, I see the benefit in getting to know interesting people and being exposed to ideas I might not have discovered on my own. If going to these events gives us some fresh perspective, or a few good contacts, then it might be worth it.
What do you think? <comment><USER3> "Technical events are much better, but I feel out of place there as well, because I'm usually the only (or almost only) woman in the room, and that out- of-placeness also messes with my mindset."

First, to hell with other people. Also, not to diminish the feeling you have from being the only woman in the room, but anecdotal experience tells me many people in such settings feel like they're the odd person out, for all sorts of reasons.

But see if you can exploit this oddity. A lot of people at such events get tired of hearing the same stuff from the same sorts of people. If you're different, make the most of it. (Yeah, I know, giving advice is easy.)

I've been to a lot of tech events, have spoken at geek gatherings dozens of times. If you are looking to get hired by another geek, it can work well. If you are looking for customers, less well, since they typically do not attend software conferences and such. OTOH, I've had people get in touch with me because they've seen that I've given talks, written articles, and so on, and they use that to estimate my skills.

Plus I've met many smart people dong interesting things, so the brain-boost from attending the right gatherings is a big win.

Myself, I hate anything that is explicitly a networking event. I hate schmoozing, I usually hate small talk. So I avoid them. :) But at some point it's important to get face time with the non-geeks with whom you want to do business. When I have to do it I try to think of it as a game, or as some sort of performance art.

<comment><AUTHOR> So it sounds like it's a matter of testing out a variety of events to find the right ones.

What do you do to make it a game?

One friend suggested creating a character who enjoys whatever it is the event requires and pretending to be her (or even him). I haven't tried this yet, but will.

I also realized a few days ago that I'm seeing the crowd as me + everyone else, where "everyone else" is a single entity which knows a lot of things that I don't. I have to keep reminding myself that to any given person, I'm part of "everyone else".

These things help a little. The odd-one-out feeling comes from somewhere way down deep though, it (or whatever causes it) filters my words and behavior before they even get to my conscious mind. I don't think it's something anyone can just turn off, no matter how irrational it is. It can be quite frustrating. There must be ways to work around it though.

<comment><USER3> "What do you do to make it a game?"

Um, I sort of pretend to be a social person:)

I was never much of a people person, but I earned my way through school working at hotels, and had to deal with people all the time. I learned a few tricks, mostly around the idea of having a public personae.

I also learned that people like to talk about themselves, so I see how long I can go without using the words "I" or "me", and pretend like I'm interviewing people. (Sort of; enough to keep the conversation moving before it becomes yet another monologue by and about James.)

'I also realized a few days ago that I'm seeing the crowd as me + everyone else, where "everyone else" is a single entity which knows a lot of things that I don't. I have to keep reminding myself that to any given person, I'm part of "everyone else".'

It seems that most people, most of the time, are thinking more about themselves than about you or anyone else in the room.

I know what you mean about that deep-rooted odd-one-out feeling. If it's any consolation, there seem to be quite a lot us odd-one-out people. Also, if you keep pushing yourself, that feeling tends to fade, at least somewhat. If noting else, if you make repeat visits to various events, you'll make friends and acquaintances, and it gets easier.

Years ago I would never have imagined myself being the sort of person to lead a rock band or organize social gatherings or give talks to hundreds of people. But I've done it, and while I'm still geeky/gawky in the process, I've learned a hell of a lot.

I'm seriously tempted to go check out Toastmasters, too, to improve my public speaking and general social skills.

<http://www.toastmasters.org/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Go put yourself in front of potential customers - they are the ones who are going to make or break your product.

As about those events, I am sure you can find some good ones - <USER2> check out TiE <http://sv.tie.org/TGS/EM/viewevent/viewEventPT?id_event=3990> I know that's an old event, but they have a large member base and you'll very likely run into many "doers".

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, that looks like a good group.</comment></comment>


Best free hi-resolution photos in one place - <AUTHOR> https://stoxel.com/ <comment><USER2> "Get 40 exclusive free, hi-res photos delivered to your inbox every week"

Do I _want_ 40 new, random, hi-res photos _emailed_ to me every week? Um, no thank you.</comment>


Creating a backdoor in network card firmware - <AUTHOR> http://esec-lab.sogeti.com/dotclear/index.php?post/2010/11/21/Presentation-at-Hack.lu-:-Reversing-the-Broacom-NetExtreme-s-firmware

<comment><USER2> Awesome. How about using the gathered knowledge to write free firmware for the network card?</comment>


As a conservative Twitter user sleeps, his account is hard at work - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-a-conservative-twitter-user-sleeps-his-account-is-hard-at-work/2017/02/05/18d5a532-df31-11e6-918c-99ede3c8cafa_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_trumpbot-820pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.2bcead7c88a2 <comment><USER2> Why can't Twitter block this? It's really not much different than email spam. Twitter could pretty easily find duplicate posts and remove them.

More and more, I wonder why Twitter is so popular. I never really "got it". If I want news, I can go to a news website/aggregator. If I want memes, I can go to Reddit/Tumblr. If I want to talk to friends, I can use Facebook. Twitter always just gives me a headache.

<comment><USER3> Why should this be banned? It's not the same as spam, since you have to subscribe to someone to see their tweets.

<comment><USER4> These tweets leak into search results. Or, maybe you want to think of it as "Twitter allows them to leak into search results."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The automation in the conservative botnets on Twitter is kind of astounding. I had the misfortune of being replied to by one of the typical UltraMAGA2016 accounts on Twitter. A few replies, retweets, and favorites of that tweet showed up in my notifications. Then nothing for 5 days. Then on Sunday at 1am, a specific botnet picked it up and began retweeting and favoriting with a vengeance. A few every 20 to 70 seconds. This continued for a few hours and then stopped. Looking into the accounts, they all followed each other and retweeted and favorited things the other accounts posted. The vast majority were unused for any other purpose (no personal or work tweets of any kind, no retweets of anything outside this network and one adjacent). And over half of them were egg accounts with names similar to the account that initially replied (style of UltraTRUMPMaga, MAGATrump4Eva, etc).

</comment><comment><USER6> >To reach beyond his own 78,900 followers, Sobieski adds a few more adornments, typing #MAGA to surface the tweet to the president's supporters online and ".@realDonaldTrump" in hopes of getting the attention of Trump or those who track messages to him.

One of Trump's favorite tactics is to appropriate negative phrases like "fake news" to dilute its bite. Why don't his opponents borrow from his notebook and co-opt those hashtags to drown them out?

<comment><USER7> >One of Trump's favorite tactics is to appropriate negative phrases like "fake news" to dilute its bite When has he done that and it hasn't been fake news?

Do you think that fake news is just right wing news that is false or can false left wing news also be fake news? Hypocrites.

<comment><USER8> The parent comment makes no reference to right wing news, or even any judgment on the fakeness of left or right wing news.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Twitter used to be amazing. I found real friends who shared common affinities and got freelance work on a regular basis.

But now, twitter is full of political nonsense and bots. I had an "ultramarathoner" tweet "lier" at me the other day.

Honestly, HN is the closest thing to early-twitter that I know about for chatting about interesting stories.

</comment><comment><USER10> To each his own ! I brutally prune the list of people I follow ; if I feel someone is spamming or retweeting garbage, I get rid of them. However, some people may not be so unforgiving and that is ok : they are probably the ones clicking on links in sponsored tweets.

<comment><USER11> Most of this guy's followers are probably bots and other spammers.

The problem arises if/when this noise is weighted equally with humans when it comes to deciding what is "trending".

<comment><USER10> You raise an important point I had not considered. Bots could skew trending metrics to favor spammers. That could get them more media coverage which could lead to influencers trying to get in on the coverage by re-tweeting spam. And the spammer succeeds.

Unlike Google which mercilessly penalizes content farms, Twitter probably does not have the intellectual wherewithal to combat spammers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Most modern media operations have been doing this for a long time. There are dead simple tools that do everything for you, like Buffer: [https://buffer.com](https://buffer.com)

</comment><comment><USER13> Sounds like he's using tweetboss</comment>


The growing need for human robot-minders could juice the remote workforce - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-next-hot-job-pretending-to-be-a-robot-11567224001?mod=rsswn <comment><USER2> This will probably result in very few jobs. The number will decline as the technology gets better, too. The USPS's first machine sorting system had tens of thousands of people keying in the ZIP codes as envelopes went by. Then that was automated for machine-addressed mail with specific fonts. Then for all typed and printed ZIP codes. Then for all typed and printed full addresses. Then for clearer handwritten addresses. Now there's just one national center where a few people look at images of illegible addresses.[1]

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with- illegi...](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/us/where-mail-with-illegible- addresses-goes-to-be-read.html)

<comment><USER3> Right, but in industries that are not replaced (like mail), you're forgetting about the effect increased efficiency will have on demand. A counterexample would be when looms increased employment in textiles. Less people were needed per item, but it was so much cheaper to make textiles that the increased demand ended up employing more people in textile mills than ever.

<comment><USER4> This is fascinating. Can you please point me somewhere I can learn more about automation increasing employment? When I google it I just get a bunch of highly political pieces about robots stealing jobs.

<comment><USER2> There's a classic book from almost a century ago, "Chapters on Machinery and Labor", which lists the three usual outcomes from mechanization. It's still relevant.

The "good case" was typesetting. The introduction of the Linotype enormously increased the volume of material printed and created more printing and typesetting jobs.

The "medium case" was bottle making. Hand-made bottles were expensive, taking a trained group of about five people to blow a bottle. Machine-made made bottles were cheaper, and required far fewer people to make. Cheaper bottles increased demand for bottles, but, overall, employment in bottle making was about the same or less. Also, much of the labor was now low-skill machine tending - putting in sand, taking out bottles. Only a small number of bottle- making machine experts were needed.

The "bad case" was the stone planer. Brick buildings used to have stone lintels over doors and windows, and there was an industry of big guys with chisels hammering out those things. The stone planer was simply a big steam powered planer for stone slabs. This required far fewer people. But it didn't increase demand for stone lintels, because they were a minor building component, not significant enough in cost to increase demand for brick buildings.

<comment><USER5> Link: Chapters on Machinery and Labor George E. Barnett

[https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674280892](https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674280892)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I hope they do not start using remote controlled cars on highways.

A car going at 60mph (~100kmh) travels at 26m/second. 4G has a ping of ~70ms* on top of the time from the cell tower to the operator's computer.

However, I found quite a variance in pings when browsing on the phone, anywhere from 200-300ms at times (maybe due to changing the tower).

So round trip might be at 600ms. Then we account for variance in bandwidth, human reaction time etc. All in all we might be looking at a delay of at least 1s. Guesstimating, of course. That's still 26m of a 2 ton vehicle going at 100kmh without oversight.

* According to [https://www.4g.co.uk/news/4g-injecting-new-lease-life-online...](https://www.4g.co.uk/news/4g-injecting-new-lease-life-online-gaming-mobile-broadband/)

<comment><USER7> Latency could be significantly reduced with 5G, but would still be a problem if the operators are in other countries.

But, I think the bigger problem is coverage and reliability. Relying on mobile networks for this type of life-or-death functionality strikes me as extremely dangerous, and that would remain true even if we increased reliability by a factor of three.

<comment><USER8> quick internet search says 5g is mainly a range of 1K, usa is 9.834 square km, yes this doesn't cover areas that have no roads but lets call it 1/4, that's still around 2.2M towers you'd have to add to make this feasible. Plus all the support infra. But hey at least we'll have power everywhere so we can put super chargers at every one of these towers!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> It's a lot easier to dehumanize a person when you are sitting behind the screen of Twitter / Instagram / UAV (unmanned air vehicle), pushing buttons...

When you rob someone of their humanity, then you too lose your humanity, making us all robots that can be disposed of anytime...

<comment><USER10> When have we not been seen as disposable. The common man has been reduced to just a cog in the machine, with the exceptions being our concerted fights for what little protections we have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> _...remote operation could allow companies to outsource driving, construction and service jobs to call centers in cheaper labor markets._

This terrifies me. The speed of light RTT from the west coast to India and back again is around 100msec. This is on the order of human reaction time. Real world latency we are talking way more than that. I get wacky routes to India traversing most of the world, so I get pings >400msec from the US to India. 400msec is more than enough latency to kill you. Teleop is a silly idea for big fast death machines on wheels (cars), especially if there's significant latency in the teleop.

<comment><USER12> Not that I think it'd necessarily be a great idea, but you could probably get a decent bounded latency by using dedicated / leased lines, which is e.g. good enough for remote robot-assisted surgery in some places.

<comment> a-priori The Earth is 134ms around at the speed of light. That's how long it takes to communicate in real time with the other side of the world (your antipode). No technology or routing policies can change that.

This sort of real-time control would probably have to be done on the same continent at most, because of purely physical limitations.

<comment><USER13> I think it's worth introducing to the discussion that human reaction time to an unanticipated stimulus is somewhere around 150-250ms. The ~140-150ms practically achievable latency over a hemispheric arc in real world IP networks is already fairly close to the limit imposed by the human element. However, latency in IP networks is measured as RTT while human reaction time to a stimulus is given as the one way path latency. The more accurate comparison would be between the ~70ms one way path latency of the optical terrestrial network with the same 150-250ms of one way path latency for the human to react to a directly applied stimulus. At the extreme of the range of human factors and accounting for the differing scale, human factors are responsible for up to 80% of the reaction latency.

<comment> a-priori But if you're talking about having human operators in the loop then any communications latency would be in addition to the reaction time of the operator.

<comment><USER14> What if you make it an anticipated stimulus? E.g. have operators grouped by event kind.

<comment><USER15> What if it saves a ton of money (for me) and only kills afew not me's.

//The real argument

<comment><USER14> I strongly believe no one has to die.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Isn't that what some companies claiming to be AI/ML champions are doing when they are actually "employing" real humans through MTurk and the likes to do the work.

<comment><USER17> Yep. One of the earliest examples of this I can recall is the VoxSci voicemail to text message fiasco that unfolded over ten years ago.

They fraudulently claimed that they had some kind of machine learning system that enabled them to quickly, accurately and privately convert voice mail to text. The reality was that they had a call centre in India manually transcribing.

[http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163511.stm](http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8163511.stm)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> There is some version of this that creates a dystopian future where AI software companies shed liability by outsourcing ethical decisions to armies of contractors.

With AI currently set up as the "next big thing" this article is just another version of the "Natural Language Processing" and human augmented AI, that is being used by almost everyone to "fake it until you don't need humans any more" (see Apple, Amazon, Google listening to our audio as a backup for Siri, Alexa, and Now). A necessary stop gap.

I think there is a big opportunity to look past the stop gap and talk about technologies that are going to 10x the things humans are already good at (creativity, empathy, intuitive problem solving, ...).

<comment><USER19> I don't think "the contractor did it" will get very far, either in court or as PR?

Though, there is legal indemnification which could be used to get a contractor (the company) to pay when there is a screwup. But that's a matter of contract negotiations between companies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> My 2c, instead of building autonomous cars/robots which work in our current cities, we should just redesign our cities to cater for these new ideas. We could have an autonomous delivery system with current technology if we just put aside some dedicated space for them to operate. No fancy AI, just good old fashioned sensors and control systems. Put roughly pallet sized tunnels under the roads, and it doesnt even have to encroach on public space. Way less problems in the long run IMHO.

<comment><USER21> i agree, it's ridiculous that not all subway trains are automated yet

<comment> semi-extrinsic Why is it ridiculous? If you look at Transport for London as an example, the organization employs 25,000 people, of which 3,000 are train operators, with 600+ trains. The salary + indirect wage costs for those people is on the order of $250 million per year. Which I think is pretty cheap, compared to what you'd guesstimate for CAPEX and OPEX for an automated system.

Now they are actually in the process of automating the trains, which has been criticised by many as a vanity project. Certainly it has not been shown that it makes financial sense. And it has been decided that they will retain a "captain" aboard the train, for safety reasons, as someone has to lead passenger evacuation in case of an emergency. So the total salary savings will be essentially zero.

Fully level-4 automated may makes sense for new builds. But for retrofits, you can't satisfy the overall requirements without a human physically present.

<comment><USER22> Germany is thinking about automation, but for cost saving. (it might increase) but to be able to put more trains on one track and behind each other..

<comment><USER23> Yes, by always stopping in the same place, lines can be painted at entries and exits to speed up station flow.

If you want to erect barriers to increase safe station capacity, you need that too.

Finally, the automated trains will have smoother acceleration and braking, reducing wear and tear on the trains and tracks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That remote controlled car idea is stupid. So many things can go wrong. What if the connection gets interrupted?

And perhaps the most important thing - when there is a human driver, he is also responsible for his own life, so he will drive very carefully.

This is a shit idea and it will fail.

<comment><USER25> I don't think anyone is recommending remote controlled cars. It's about having a fallback to handle edge-case scenarios (e.g. toll ways, construction zones), likely at slower speeds, as AI is already quite good at reacting rapidly to sudden movements. The collusion avoidance will still be enabled while operated remotely, so a failed connection, can just result in the car pulling over and waiting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's interesting the effect that uber, amazon a gig working have had. Where "traditional jobs^" are created, the immediate expectation is that this will be uberified... More like selling icecream during summer tourist season than working in trucking.

^Traditional in the "standardized job that 5k people do for us."

</comment><comment><USER27> Who will be held accountable when one of these robots inevitably harms or injures someone? Since these sorts of robots seen to be semi-automated, does this effectively abstract away any real responsibility? Can robots only be responsible for nothing more than an "unfortunate accident"?

</comment><comment><USER28> This reminds me of "god of the gaps" idea where the receding domain of things doesn't show a clear line of stopping. It seems more like a limitation of the current implementation as the opportunity but watch out for the next version.

</comment><comment><USER29> I don't see how replacing dozens of people with one robot and a human 'minder' is at all, _juicing the workforce_. Its just more automation.

</comment><comment><USER30> Concerns about ping assume all tasks will require real-time control by the human. Realistically, a supervisory system will have the human identifying hazards and gaps in the autonomous system's sensory capacity.

Quick-reaction collision avoidance will be controlled by radar (77 GHz etc.) or lidar.

</comment><comment><USER31> It would be an interesting proposition to have the option to drive yourself or to seamlessly switch it over to autonomous driving monitored by a remote driver for $0.0X per minute.

</comment><comment><USER32> It appears the automation/AI revolution that was going to render millions jobless was smoke and mirrors after all.

<comment><USER33> They just realized it's not that much more expensive to give these jobs to foreign workers instead.

<comment><USER34> which is worse over time - developing automation to take over certain jobs or staffing certain jobs with offshore contractors?

<comment><USER35> That depends on where you want the money going: everybody involved in developing and maintaining automated systems at home and abroad (high-skilled labor) or everybody involved in controlling drones from afar (low-skilled labor). Of course, the amount going to either group will be drastically different depending on a multitude of factors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> There are actual startups that are "pretending to be robots", so the title is off: This article is about legitimate remote-operations work, and it's a really great thing, not something to be ridiculed as the title makes it. Some of them like postmates or remote driving seem like typical VC silliness but others could be lifesaving, like , imagine a remote-controlled da-vinci surgical machine.</comment>


A Vacancy Has Been Detected (2019) - <AUTHOR> https://kellysutton.com/2019/06/19/a-vacancy-has-been-detected.html <comment><USER2> That email seems very human and reasonable and it did its job perfectly. It warned the student of a potential outcome and the student was able to act on that warning. The alternative of somebody moving in one day without warning would be the real fail case and that didn't happen.

<comment><USER3> At risk of sounding like a jerk, I agree and think this whole reaction is overblown.

A vacancy has been opened up. That will trigger numerous consequences across the system. Yes, every time you observe such consequences, you will be reminded of its cause -- the roommate's death. But it's unrealistic to expect every other subsystem not to do anything that reminds you of that death, which, as far as I can tell, is the extent of this email's "wrongdoing".

"Woe is me, how dare you, the housing system, refer to my roommate's death as just another vacancy." Come on, now.

<comment><USER4> What's overblown? Did you read the actual post?

It literally came down to, and I paraphrase, "and this experience taught me the lasting lesson that software will interact with human beings in a variety of contexts and situations that we may not anticipate. We should be thoughtful, to not hurt people who interact with our software in ways we didn't bother thinking about".

That's not a bad idea.

<comment><USER3> Doing it so thoroughly that you purge any reminders of someone's death _is_ a bad idea.

Even knowing this happened, I don't see how it should have been done differently. Eventually you have to do something about the vacancy. Communicating to the author about the vacancy will remind him of the death. It's unavoidable.

It's "overblown" to expect everyone not to communicate to you in any way that calls back to your roommate dying.

>Did you read the actual post?

Yes.

Edit: To put it another way, let's say this email was sent how the author would have preferred. Next semester, then what? They have to keep adding a blurb about sympathy for the roommate's death, every time the vacancy is mentioned? Eventually you have to accept that "no, the world isn't going to keep dancing around this".

<comment><USER5> > I don't see how it should have been done differently

The automated email should have been sent to the building coordinator who could have acted on the automated request to assign a new roommate or not as appropriate. At the very least, there is a vacancy halfway through the year for a reason. How many of the possible reasons might benefit from considerate handling? Sometimes impersonal centralisation works well, and sometimes not.

<comment><USER6> So all vacancy notifications should be sent to building coordinators who are responsible for personally notifying tenants? What if they forget or do it tactlessly?

The system worked as intended. Part of emotional maturity is learning to cope with "cosmic indifference." It's not a defect to engineer out of day-to-day life. Or if it is, it falls at the bottom of my list.

IMHO this request reflects a mind-boggling level of privilege.

<comment><USER7> > Part of emotional maturity is learning to cope with "cosmic indifference."

Well said.

If anything, the email should be simplified: "The system will be assigning you a new roommate within the week."

Not made to sound like a human wrote it. Not branched into some insincere if(prevUserHasDeceased){comfortCurrentUser()} template.

Just a matter of fact from an indifferent computer doing its job.

Not because the world doesn't need empathy, but to keep it in a mode in which we don't expect it. Just like you don't get mad at your dog when it waits for your deceased partner to get home, nor at their cellphone's low-battery chime for not knowing it won't be needing a recharge, nor at the stoplight for not knowing you're late to the wake.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's a terrible situation to be in. The correct answer to this is, by definition, thinking about User Experience. But unless it's actually rigorous it's just as bad, or worse, than not having it.

I use Expensify at work. It's clear that thee UX team consider a 'cutesy' UI to be a higher priority than a functional user experience.

Many workflows are horribly broken (race conditions, dialogs with missing pieces, broken links). And it's CRUD for expenses, how hard can it be?

And then infantile messages like "whoops! Looks like something's up with xyz" and emojis everywhere. Messages like "relax, your expenses are done" with hammock pictures. It's infuriating after I took hours to input a dozen receipts.

I'd rather have a precise functioning tool. Tell me which receipts had which issues, or what needs my attention.

I'm all for minimising human discomfort, but sometimes the cure is worse than the disease!

<comment><USER9> And Expensify is even worse for the administrators. One of the worst admin experiences in SaaS.

<comment><USER10> I've never used it, is it worse than concur?

<comment><USER9> I would say concur is worse for submitters and Expensify is worse for admins

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Part of the problem is the uncanny valley of emails that look human-written, but aren't. Nobody expects, eg, a piece of hospital equipment to display empathy when a patient dies. It can just beep and display HR 000. But people expect an email that's not obviously a form to be composed with empathy for the receiver.

So you can improve it with either more empathy or more automated-form design.

<comment><USER12> Yes. I think it would have been much less offensive if the "Go Lions!", "Dear XYZ", the explanation of not enough rooms, and "Sincerely, Your Friendly Campus System" had been removed.

"A vacancy has been detected in your room. You may be reassigned a roommate. Visit foobar.com/roommate-assignment for details, or get in touch with the campus housing team at 1234567890."

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Sorry for your loss (Kelly) ... I was also a (Nittany) Lion and had a similar experience but it wasn't software based. In my second year, a good friend of mine was killed in a car accident. She was a year ahead of me (and not in a STEM curriculum) but we ended up having three BDRs (Basic Degree Requirements - now GenEd at PSU) together that semester. In all three of those classes, no one told the professor what had happened and, knowing I was her friend (we sat together, worked on group projects together and left the room together), they naturally asked me where she was. That was a pretty tough question for an otherwise macho (the term at the time) 19 year-old to answer. I grew up pretty stoic (PA Dutch family - non-Amish) but here I sit 30+ years later and tear up a bit recounting this time of my life.

<comment><USER14> There are some cultural groups in North America where, in a time of crisis like this, Standard Operating Procedure is to bring food and company and let the affected person chose when or if to talk. You just sit and do something else, and if they need anything you're there, and if they want to talk about it they can, but they don't have to if they don't want to.

It comes up as a joke trope in some movies, but I grew up around that sort and it's not inherently bad. It has a way of avoiding scenarios like the one you illustrated.

I recall I was fairly young and we lost a family pet, and every time someone tried to console me by bringing it up it was like a doctor palpating an injury. Yes, we know it hurts, why are you touching it!? It felt a bit like it was happening all over again. It felt, to be honest, a bit cruel.

If I had been in your situation, at that age, I might have written it down on a piece of paper, so I only had to get through admitting they were gone the one time on someone else's terms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I notice the author doesn't even pitch any improvements like writing their ideal version of that email.

Because I think they, too, know that they are making an impossible ask. They may have even tried but realized it's too sheepish to encode some one-size- fits-all Hallmark card into an automated message of a system that simply informs you that it will be assigning you a new roommate.

"Condolences!"

"We [, the developer who wrote this automated message 2 years ago,] are sorry!"

I think the opposite approach is better and more sincere: remove all half- attempts at sounding human from automated notifications, no pretense or deceit. Just a computer doing its job under the same expectation of empathy and understanding as your electric toothbrush.

</comment><comment><USER15> It's hard for me to think of a situation where a dorm-room vacancy- notification email to a student would be a good idea. I can think of only sad situations that would produce a vacancy, in addition to the one in the article (for example, someone having to quit or pause college due to a family crisis, or running out of money to pay for college, or flunking out.) At best, this kind of email should go to a college employee to look into the matter, not to a student occupying the room.

This aspect of their system was not designed with much empathy in the first place. Dorm rooms should not be treated as warehouses to be filled with inventory. At the very least a manual override was available.

<comment><USER3> >It's hard for me to think of a situation where a dorm-room vacancy- notification email to a student would be a good idea. I can think of only sad situations that would produce a vacancy, in addition to the one in the article (for example, someone having to quit or pause college due to a family crisis, or running out of money to pay for college, or flunking out.)

Not true, this happened to me because my roommate found a different dorm hall he preferred and requested a move to it. (Similarly, deciding that you'd rather be in an apartment off campus.)

Hey, maybe that was, in part, driven by how he couldn't stand me. Still, not something I'd call "sad".

<comment><USER15> Thanks for the additional example of a vacancy situation. In this case, I literally meant it when I said "I" can only think of sad situations", which is why others' examples are helpful.

My main point is that this a dorm-room vacancy involves changes in human relationships, such changes are often likely to involve strong emotions, and as such should be handled much differently than say, a notice that says the cafeteria will close half-an-hour early on Friday. There are cases where the remaining roommate is even happy to have their roommate leave (for whatever reason), but it's still best to initially approach the situation with extra care, just in case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> This is a log output message. The problem with logs is that they are first and primarily written _for_ the developer. _I 'm_ writing the alert for the condition _I_ need to know about. It's only as an afterthought that they are revised to be read by not-developer and bear some semblance of communicating an event or status. This is why most logs, especially the debug kinds, are inscrutable. Devs may eventually put in logs for other people, but unless thought is put into who will consume the log and what the expected actions would be, the original logging text remains.

The human who wrote the automated text was probably coding toward identifying vacancy. Aha! Vacancy detected! What's more natural than coding that into the alert message? That person is probably not thinking about the death of a student, a less frequent event than graduating, moving, whatever.

I get what the author is trying for, there _are_ actually heartless automatic messages involving actual death or traumatic events. This is not those. I'm not thinking about how to not inadvertently hurt someone's feelings when I'm writing logs, it's first written in a very confined objective for me.

</comment><comment><USER17> I think the title of the post is slightly misleading. The title is in the passive voice

> A Vacancy Has Been Detected

Whereas the email is in the active voice

> We have detected a vacancy in your room

The active voice sounds a bit more personable and less robotic.

</comment><comment><USER18> I think a nice, less charged example of this was given by Tom Scott's video on being called regarding STI results - an automated system couldn't give him his results and so transferred him to a human with the delays and brief panic that entails.

[https://youtu.be/LZM9YdO_QKk](https://youtu.be/LZM9YdO_QKk)

</comment><comment><USER19> This is why systems like this ought to have reason codes, each reason code should have a different friendly message sent to the user.

<comment><USER20> "Your status is CODE 444: DEATH OF ROOMMATE. Please report to the campus housing administration so that your dead roommate may be replaced with a live one. Go Lions!"

<comment><USER21> > CODE 444

I think a '410: Gone' might be better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This is a sad situation because of a death taking place. That said, I do not personally believe there is anything wrong with the email other than the wording. Automation exists in all parts of our lives and sometimes an outcome like this will occur.

</comment><comment><USER23> This is a similar story about automation mishaps. It was posted here and I heard the story on NPR.

[https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired- me](https://idiallo.com/blog/when-a-machine-fired-me)

</comment><comment><USER24> Did they add a death bit and a test?</comment>


How Y Combinator Schools Tech Startups  - <AUTHOR> http://origin-www.fastcompany.com/magazine/134/fast-talk-startup-school.html?#

<comment><USER2> Jessica wishes the world to know she is 8 months pregnant in that picture, not just fat.

<comment><USER3> Looks like my plan for my all-black outfit to have a "slimming" effect backfired :)

<comment><USER4> Everyone can recognize the glow.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> That has to be one of the shortest, least informative articles I've ever read about YCombinator.

Budget cuts at FastCompany?

<comment><USER6> Well, if you weren't familiar with YC, it's informative - perhaps informative enough to go find out more.

I did think the use of the "schools" verb in the title was a bit odd (Means something less positive to me).

<comment><USER7> Though it is a little inaccurate; the article is dated too recently to miss that Boston is right out.

Perhaps it was built awhile back, and just recently published?

<comment><USER6> Well judging from the pg's 8 months pregnant comment, it would place it (the photo at least) 3 months ago... Which would have been before the announcement.

(Although, when I said schools, I mean it's use as a verb, not the two different locations).

<comment><USER7> I just recognized that I missed this reply!

What I meant to call as inaccurate is that the article is dated 18 March and describes the two locations; post-announcement publication.

Your consideration of the word "schools" was not at all being indicted.

Your dating of the picture was some nice cross-referencing!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> That all-orange room is snazzy, and it shows up in all the photographs. What is that spiky wall made of?

<comment><USER9> Go Kate! (the architect).

Also wishing there was more meat to the article.

<comment><USER8> Is there a link to info about the architecture somewhere?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The article was a bit short so is there anything to be understood about YC from the photo where Jessica and Trevor are sitting up in the front and Paul is standing way in the back?

</comment><comment><USER11> Did anybody not know any of these 80 words yet?</comment>


Workers on Samsung factory site battle police in Vietnam - <AUTHOR> http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/workers-on-samsung-factory-site-battle-police-in-vietnam-1.2490281 <comment><USER2> Google Translate: [http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=vi&tl=en&u=ht...](http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=vi&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fphunukieuviet.vn%2Fphap- luat%2Fcong-nhan-dung-do-voi-bao-ve-samsung-thai-nguyen-8-nguoi-chet.html)

English article from "The Hindu": [http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/workers- building-s...](http://www.thehindu.com/business/Industry/workers-building- samsung-factory-run-riot-in-vietnam/article5557754.ece)

<comment><USER3> The Hindu article mentions 4 injured, but not 8 dead. Is there another source on the 8 dead figure?

<comment><USER4> This is the best source I can find.

"11 people were injured, 5 of them seriously"

[http://www.thanhniennews.com/index/pages/20140109-11-injured...](http://www.thanhniennews.com/index/pages/20140109-11-injured- over-brawl-in-samsung-plant-in-northern-vietnam.aspx)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ah, so its workers building the plant, not the workers manufacturing their products.

<comment><USER6> It's not good publicity either way...

<comment><USER5> No, not at all. Like the other article linked by nodata, companies are moving from China to Vietnam because its cheaper. Seems a little greedy.

<comment> at-fates-hands >>>Seems a little greedy.

Which actually benefits us as the consumer. Would you prefer a less greedy corporation that goes where the most expensive labor is which then increases the cost of production which then increases the cost of the products you buy from said company?

Greed is what keeps prices low, and competition high.

<comment><USER7> If they assured me that the extra price goes to ensure a better standard of living and better working conditions for their third-world workers, then yes.

<comment><USER8> How nice that you can afford to pay extra to ease liberal guilt. Do you think that the poorest in your country can afford to pay extra too?

For the relatively monied -- and software developers usually count among that number -- it's easy to argue that companies are too greedy, and that companies shouldn't use exploitative labour. For the lower class, paying extra so that someone in the third world can enjoy a better quality of life isn't an option.

<comment><USER7> So you say that multinational corporations shouldn't compete on ethics? I thought you neoliberals didn't chastise anyone with respect to their choices in commerce.

Yes, this is systemic. Are you trying to convince me that the situation isn't fucked? For all the claptrap about how the economy isn't a zero-sum game and that the tide lifts all the boats and so many other platitudes, there's no denying that the quality of life of most people in the world is nothing but a point in a gradient of declining living conditions, everyone benefiting from the labor of people with fewer options who have to work and live worse than them.

Anyhow, how much do you think it would raise the cost of the things you use, just to ensure safe working conditions at factories? For jeans, it's a paltry 90 cents.

[http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/07/10/bangladesh-factory- saf...](http://hereandnow.wbur.org/2013/07/10/bangladesh-factory-safety)

Yes, the poorest in my country would probably have to think twice before spending even 90 cents, hell tell that to the homeless. The vast majority of the poor here probably wouldn't mind, given that it's a mere drop in the sea of debt they are drowning in, and that's a problem with many facets, on its own.

But there's quite a lot of room for diminishing the unfairness of this scheme, even if the solution feels even cosmetic at times given the broader problem of exploitation and inequality.

<comment><USER9> _no denying that the quality of life of most people in the world is nothing but a point in a gradient of declining living conditions_

I won't deny it, but I find it hard to believe. In any case, the poorest are better off, even if the middle class is declining (700M out of extreme poverty in just 20 years).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> YouTube: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__-i61Wn3CM](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__-i61Wn3CM)

</comment><comment><USER11> I just watched the grapes of wrath last night for the first time. Amazing movie. It was released in 1940, just a year after the book.

I guess some things will never change, unfortunately.

I hope someone gives these poor workers the decent wages and decent lives they deserve, and soon.

<comment><USER12> > I guess some things will never change, unfortunately.

I feel this way too sometimes, but if you step back you realize things change all the time. In America people banded together into worker's unions which fought tooth and nail to be treated fairly. Unions in America clearly have some shortcomings, but it did manage to move the needle from Grapes of Wrath style living to a more equitable and humane existence for workers.

Clearly these workers (and elsewhere in Asia) are starting to organize. Perhaps they too can enjoy a larger portion of the fruits of their labour.

Of course, the downside of constant change is things can get worse too and it's often very difficult to know which direction makes things better and which direction will makes things worse. Indeed, most won't even agree on what is better and what is worse.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Not really, those companies they won't move out as quickly as expected, they know what's gonna happen soon, China will need them again as soon as some real estate bubbles burst.

</comment><comment><USER14> Hope this doesn't push the release date forward.

(edit: Irony, people. Irony.)

<comment><USER15> Without clues such as facial expression, tone of voice and knowing who is it that you are talking to irony is indistinguishable from a normal statement. You could try to exaggerate to the point that it would be ridiculous for a sane person to assume you are serious, but it's not reliable.

Avoid Irony/Sarcasm on the internet.

<comment><USER14> Yeah, I think I need to use an explicit "/s" tag.

No one can read how hilarious I am in real life when it's in the generic font.</comment></comment></comment>


Defcon Voting Village report: bug in one system could "flip Electoral College" - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/09/e-voting-researchers-warn-of-hack-that-could-flip-the-electoral-college/ <comment><USER2> Seriously.. voting should be paper and pen only

<comment><USER3> Coupon books are used in France. One coupon for each candidate. Voters privately choose a coupon from the book at the poll site and put it in an envelope. They're distributed and counted by volunteers very quickly and there are checks for integrity. A final count is ready for the evening news. There is a full paper trail. Very hack-resistant!

<comment><USER4> In America, it's common to be able to vote on 20+ items in a presidential election. Plus, each state is responsible for conducting its own elections.

<comment><USER5> So we would have 20+ tickets and you'd put them in your respective bin for whatever elected position or proposal. Then each bin can be counted later, smaller locations could just have the volunteers count each bin sequentially, larger locations could have each bin be counted by it's own group.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The actual report itself is discussed at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18112172](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18112172) .</comment>


Whose house is of glasse, must not throw stones at another - <AUTHOR> http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/whose-house-is-of-glasse-must-not-throw-stones-at-another/

<comment><USER2> This article is part of a series, which examine performance problems in high- speed internet connections. Unfortunately, in addition to being split over several pages, it is written in one of the most rambling and verbose styles I've ever seen. The best single explanation is found not in the submitted link, but in < [http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/introducing-the- crimi...](http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/introducing-the-criminal- mastermind-bufferbloat/) >

My background in networking isn't strong enough to fully understand the problem, but here's an attempt:

\--

When using a fast Internet connection, in the 20+ Mb/s range, throughput and latency for common residential use cases are both far worse than expected[1,3,4]. The problem is masked from most users because Windows XP is missing a feature required for maximum network performance, and because most American residential Internet connections are slow. As more users upgrade their operating systems and connection, significant performance will be lost.

The problem occurs due to excessive buffering, combined with the TCP window scaling feature. When a network stack with support for TCP window scaling is allowed to connect to a fast link, the link is saturated. Normally the dropped packets should signal the stack to back off, but buffering in the stack and local switch combine to cause massive latency (on the order of 10-20 seconds) before packets begin dropping. This latency, which the author terms "bufferbloat", is responsible for the performance degradation.

The author goes on to diagnose and correct excessive buffering in various nodes; his described fixes are beyond my understanding, but indicate that altering his Linux desktop's TCP queue parameters is sufficient to correct many cases. Similar fixes to OS X and Windows can likely be applied by their respective developers, once they become aware of the problem.

\--

The articles, in order:

[1] <http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/10/02/first-puzzle-piece/>

[2] [http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/browsers-and-tcp- revi...](http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/browsers-and-tcp-revisited/)

[3] [http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/home-router-puzzle- pi...](http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/11/29/home-router-puzzle-piece-one- fun-with-your-switch/)

[4] [http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/home-router-puzzle- pi...](http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/home-router-puzzle-piece-two- fun-with-wireless/)

[5] [http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/introducing-the- crimi...](http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/introducing-the-criminal- mastermind-bufferbloat/)

[6] [http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/whose-house-is-of- gla...](http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/06/whose-house-is-of-glasse-must- not-throw-stones-at-another/)

[7] [http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/bufferbloat-and- netwo...](http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/07/bufferbloat-and-network- neutrality-back-to-the-past/)

[8] [http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/bufferbloat- mitigatio...](http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/bufferbloat-mitigations/)

[9] [http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/bufferbloat-and- conge...](http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/09/bufferbloat-and-congestion- collapse-back-to-the-future/)

[10] [http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/mitigations-and- solut...](http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/13/mitigations-and-solutions-of- bufferbloat-in-home-routers-and-operating-systems/)

<comment><USER3> Thank you for that. Can someone post a fix here, if any, for whatever OS they know? I couldn't detect one in that monster of a post...

<comment><USER4> I've been using such a thing since about October of 2002 in linux. Its based (well it was at first anyway) on a quick little hack called "wonder-shaper".

<http://lartc.org/wondershaper/>

I put it on the linux box that was routing my ISDN (don't laugh) and magic happened.

I was then compelled to study the deepness that is LARTC and found much enlightenment.

The path lies at <http://lartc.org>

<comment><USER3> Thanks for that, it's even included in Ubuntu. I'm just not sure if it will work if I install it on all my computers individually, because I don't have a router running Linux (pity me).

<comment><USER5> Indeed. It would be nice if dd-wrt or a variant supported a wonder-shaper sort of fix..

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> A quick read shows that this is hardly novel. If I missed something, please point it out.

The issue is simple: broadband providers/modem manufacturers/... want to advertise the largest download speeds they possibly can. To do this, they add large buffers (such that they can always fill the pipe with bits).

However, they overdo this: by the time you've buffered a second worth of data, new data can't get through the router in a timely fashion. This means that VoIP sucks (one second latency), TCP sucks (it sends a limited amount of data before waiting for ACKs - note the recent "Google floods clients with 12 TCP packets at once" post on HN), and you may get random drops as well.

The solution is to rate-limit your outgoing internet connection to just a little less than the actual rate, and do queue management on a competent device (e.g. any unixish system should do). Prioritize VoIP, Quake, TCP ACKs, etc, and deprioritize BitTorrent/FTP/anything with the appropriate QoS bits set. Google for a guide relevant to your favourite implementation (netfilter/pf/...)

<comment><USER2> I believe the author is discussing excessive buffering in the local hardware and OS, not the ISP's. He specifically calls out Intel and some Linux drivers as known causes. Additionally, he demonstrates that changing OS buffering parameters corrects the problem in many cases (going from 1-2s latency to 30ms).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The conclusion summs that article up much better than the title: "All broadband technologies are suffering badly from bufferbloat, as are many other parts of the Internet."

It's a little over my head -- any TCP/Networking experts want to chime in?

<comment><USER8> _Normally, TCP waits for the buffer to exceed the maximum segment size before sending any data. This creates serious delays when the two sides of the connection are exchanging short messages and need to receive the response before continuing. For example, the login sequence at the beginning of a telnet session begins with the short message "Login", and the session cannot make any progress until these five characters have been transmitted and the response has been received. This process can be seriously delayed by TCP's normal behavior when the message is provided to TCP in several send calls._

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmission_Control_Protocol>

Basically, there's a bunch of large TCP buffers between you and the rest of the internet, which can fill up when you're trying to transfer large amounts of data. When these buffers are full, important packets get queued up for long periods of time, causing latency. This is why running something like bittorrent causes your ping time to go up.

It's especially a problem when uploading, because upload speeds are often capped at a tiny fraction of your download speed, so it takes much longer to drain the buffers and get to the important packets.

See also this post:

[http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/introducing-the- crimi...](http://gettys.wordpress.com/2010/12/03/introducing-the-criminal- mastermind-bufferbloat/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> A google search to better understand blufferbloat turned up exactly 0 entries.

<comment><USER10> > _... blufferbloat ..._

Did you try removing the "l" from "buffer"?

<comment><USER6> Come on, that kind of snark isn't helpful. And no, removing the l does not seem to result in significantly more useful Google results.

<comment><USER10> I was serious; "bufferbloat" finds 27,000 results, a far cry from zero. I figured it was a spelling error.

Only upon seeing this comment did I check the results, which unfortunately do seem to (nearly) all point back to these articles. I'm unsure if the remaining ones (a fair amount can be found by adding "-gettys") refer to the same thing or not, but there are a few other mentions, especially if you add a space.

<comment><USER11> I think it is because Jim Gettys coined the term very recently. It seems likely that he is the very first person to discover this phenomenon.

Although there is a small chance that someone else also discovered it independently but came up with their own phrase to describe it -- a word that does not show up when you search for "bufferbloat".

The word "bufferbloat" is OK but it is not quite on target, imho. I don't have a better suggestion, but I think a better alternative is out there somewhere. Such a word would convey, not just the notion of bloatage, but also the notion of bits getting stuck in the comfortable expanse of modern, obese, buffers, fed at a rapid rate by modern hardware (and TCP stacks) on clean pipes.

Grasping at metaphors, I'm thinking of dampeners like bit potholes, quicksand, flypaper, speed bumps, bit tarpits...

<comment><USER10> "bit tarpit" has a nice ring to it. Or maybe "bithole". Though I'm now inescapably, _desperately_ trying to come up with _something_ legitimate that includes "tubes"...

edit: Tube Torpor!</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


How to Run SQL on PDF Files - <AUTHOR> https://rockset.com/blog/how-to-run-sql-on-pdf-files/ <comment><USER3> For some reason, when clicking this link, I've expected SQL database running inside PDF files. Which considering how PDFs can embed JavaScript and that Emscripten exists (and that PostScript itself is Turing-complete if you want to go hardcore), may actually be doable.

<comment><USER4> I briefly looked at running Javascript inside PDF a couple of years ago - <USER2> think this is possible under the spec, but no major renderers allow it.

Could be wrong.

<comment><USER5> PDFs that work in Chrome's PDF renderer:

A calculator:

[https://pspdfkit.com/images/blog/2018/how-to-program-a- calcu...](https://pspdfkit.com/images/blog/2018/how-to-program-a- calculator/calculator.pdf)

A game of breakout:

[https://github.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf- experiments/raw/maste...](https://github.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf- experiments/raw/master/breakout.pdf)

The PDF specification is hundreds of pages.

<comment><USER6> I wonder if running PouchDB would count... since it's an offline / online database.

I'm wondering if having a PDF that would have data that could self-update if there's an internet connection.

Anyone wanna collaborate on something like this?

I wonder if having a PDF like this that showed you how your stocks of choice are doing would be interesting.

<comment><USER7> Would would be the advantage of this over a website/PWA?

That it's more portable? It's more document-like/printable?

<comment><USER6> Self-contained, no need for internet unless you want it to update, is forward- compatible with future PDF readers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> So the tool is being used to extract text and then a regex is used to extract the relevant fields/values. Seems that pdftotext[1][2] with awk can do the job on your local machine without uploading your docs.

1\. brew install pkg-config poppler (on mac)

2\. sudo apt-get install poppler-utils (on Debian/Ubuntu)

<comment><USER9> Analyzing the text is the problem. Not extracting. Are there any good open source libs out there?

<comment><USER8> Sure. But the tool posted here doesn't do that. It merely extracts text, and the "analysis" is a couple of regexes that are tailor-made for that particular pdf. Awk can do that much and a lot more.

If you want to extract tables from a pdf, there's Tabula[1], but it isn't automated to run over the whole pdf - you've to do a manual rectangular selection around the table you want to extract.

1\. [https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula](https://github.com/tabulapdf/tabula)

<comment><USER10> Indeed. Many years ago, I "ran SQL" on a couple decades of Usenet newsgroup data. Extraction and manipulation involved a bunch of grep, sed, tr and awk (and millions of tmp files). But, as with PDFs of utility bills, it was very specific regex.

<comment><USER11> Hey, Kshitij from Rockset here.

With Rockset you can avoid ETL when it comes to extracting and manipulating the data. Also, the main value here is that you can join this data with other data sets that are in JSON, CSV, XLS or Parquet formats using SQL to help in analysis.

<comment><USER10> Maybe you could add modules for extracting and manipulating data from popular sources. Such as the most popular social media. Also Amazon, Craigslist, Ebay, etc. And the main search engines.

There are _many_ people who want usable data from such sources. And your service wouldn't be doing any scraping, so you'd probably be OK legally. But IANAL, so do check.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> [https://rockset.com/pricing/](https://rockset.com/pricing/) \- free tier looks pretty good but I'm not sure I'd be comfortable uploading bills and other documents here.

<comment><USER6> I'm sure they take 'your privacy and security seriously'

<comment><USER13> Doubly so after an incident.

<comment><USER14> but they have [Standard encryption] and [Field masking]on the free tier! surely that means something?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> What do you do if you don't want to upload your stuff to somebody's server?

</comment><comment><USER16> So it extracts the metadata and converts the PDF to text and puts that automatically in a BigQuery table (with some custom functions).

I was somehow expecting to have the parser automatically recognize patterns in the PDF and maybe try to name them (and let you rename them), kind of what advanced web scrappers do.

</comment><comment><USER17> If the author is reading, I'd love to see more info on how you trained the system to understand the text content of the PDF. And how regular/structured do the PDFs have to be to work?

<comment><USER18> Not the author, there is no training here, its using pdf to text (there are various libraries to do that) and then using a regex pattern to extract the relevant information.

Since its regex only techies would be able to do that in that case they can just write their own script instead.

<comment><USER11> Hey, Kshitij from Rockset here.

You are correct that Rockset is doing text extraction for PDF but the main value here is that you can join this data with other data sets that are in JSON, CSV, XLS or Parquet formats using SQL without doing any ETL.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This is a confusing feature. Converting PDFs to text is already a trivial technical challenge, so it's not a product differentiator. What is a product differentiator is converging indexing(index and store all the things) used by Rockset. This PDF feature seems like a distraction.

Also, I uploaded my PG&E bill to Rockset and got an empty result set...maybe I'm using it incorrectly.</comment>


Reproducible Polymer Single-Molecule Junction for Well‐Defined Current Signal - <AUTHOR> https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/anie.201903717 <comment><USER2> Some background: [https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-05/tiot- hsc0527...](https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-05/tiot- hsc052719.php)

Anybody more up to speed in this field of work able to offer some insight into what we as consumers can expect down the line from this development?</comment>


Suicide rates among America's young people continue to soar, study shows - <AUTHOR> https://edition.cnn.com/2019/06/18/health/suicide-rates-teens-young-adults-us-study/index.html <comment> radford-neal This seems worrying. Some years ago, there were similar stories, but on investigating it seemed to me that what was happening was that adolescents were reaching the adult suicide rate at an earlier age. That's not necessarily something to worry about - if they grow up faster (and why not?), it's unfortunate but inevitable that they will get the downsides of adulthood along with the upsides.

But the story says that "Among teens 15 to 19, the suicide rate was 8 per 100,000 people in 2000 and then increased to 11.8 per 100,000 in 2017. Among young adults 20 to 24, the suicide rate was 12.5 per 100,000 people in 2000 and then rose to 17 per 100,000 in 2017". So the 15-19 year-old's suicide rate increased to about the old 20-24 year-old's rate, while the 20-24 year-old's suicide rate went even higher.

It would be good to know the rates at finer age bins, though, since there is a significant change in life after high school, and then after college (for those to attend), which might help identifying the problems.</comment>


Q: Setting User-Agent Field? - <AUTHOR> http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.java/browse_thread/thread/6923c024ed392c85/88fa10845061c8ba

<comment><USER2> Took me a minute for the penny to drop.

Lawrence Page asking how, in Java, to identify his "web robot" as, presumably, google.

Nice bit of history.

</comment><comment><USER2> Now I'm interested to know about the "Serious Security Bug" he reported in javascript, which you can see in his profile, but leads nowhere.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah I was wondering about that too. Searched around awhile but the comp.lang.javascript archive doesn't appear to go back that far. I think Google is just keeping the Page post up there for posterity's sake.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Classic. I did already see it here on HN a few months ago.

</comment><comment><USER4> This is awesome!</comment>


I'm having trouble learning - <AUTHOR> http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/151229/im-having-trouble-learning

<comment><AUTHOR> Memory lane with "To Get Your Hands Dirty"</comment>


The IBM 3800 Continuous Forms Laser Printer (1976-1991) - <AUTHOR> http://www.digplanet.com/wiki/IBM_3800 <comment><USER2> I remember being an FE at the time and having to work on these beasts. FE uniform at the time was a dress shirt and tie, and working inside one of these things resulted being covered in a cloud of toner dust in most cases. I'd buy oxford dress shirts almost in bulk, because the day you worked on a 3800, you went home and threw the shirt out.

<comment><AUTHOR> I worked in a shop with _two_ of these, side by side. I don't remember toner (except for the rare spillage) so much as the fog of thousands of tiny bits of paper dust.

It was generally a low-maintenance job: pull the printed stack periodically, separating individual jobs; every 20 minutes or so, feed a new box of paper and tape-splice new to old; separate individual jobs in the printed stack; listen to the gentle white-noise shuffle of paper swimming through the tracks.</comment></comment>


Is it possible to control cancer without killing it? - <AUTHOR> http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/15/transformation-3?utm_source=tny&utm_campaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=twitter&mbid=social_twitter

<comment><USER2> Wow. The kind of cancer reported on in the article is the kind a good friend of ours who lives across the country where we used to live was just diagnosed with this year. When we heard the news a few months ago, we weren't sure that she would still be alive by now. But she is, and just celebrated a birthday in apparent remission from her case of leukemia. Patients with adult-onset acute myelogenous leukemia (ALM) used to have much less hope of survival.

<comment><USER3> Indeed, the article describe certain patients with Pancreatic Cancer whose disease was halted for several hundred days. Time that they were glad they got and with more time, might give them more treatment options yet.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Any financial advisors on HN? - <AUTHOR> Looking to connect with financial advisors to understand the pain-points around client management and develop a useful solution. <comment><USER2> Micheal Kitces <[https://www.kitces.com>](https://www.kitces.com>) writes about technology for financial advisors.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Had a look at this website and tried to reach out but still waiting back. I'm afraid that he'll charge me consulting fees just to have a chat.</comment></comment>


Apple is making corporate 'BYOD' programs less invasive to user privacy - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/10/apple-is-making-corporate-byod-programs-less-invasive-to-user-privacy/ <comment><USER2> An obvious solution is to carry two devices: one for work, on which the company can install whatever corporate spyware they want, and one for personal use. There's no way I'm letting my employer administer or install unknown programs on my personal laptop and cell even with this enrollment option.

This has nothing to do with trusting or distrusting Apple. It's due to avoiding complexity: having to think about a zillion cases of what the employer can and can't do. I don't want to study a 30-page security whitepaper and 300 pages of documentation that probably come with this new enrollment thingie. But if I have two devices--with physical separation--I don't have to think about all sorts of security and privacy gotchas.

Buying a cheap extra work phone and carrying two phones is not _that_ big a burden. Plus you can turn off the work phone during personal time, and turn off the personal phone during work.

<comment><USER3> I agree in general. And I do not get the BYOD thing. As another commenter said, an employer should provide the tools necessary. Or live with the constraints.

I am in another camp. Until recently my employer had a policy of treating our devices somewhat like private devices. We are provided with the device, are allowed to use them at home at will, are full admins. We are only requested to encrypt the harddrive. My employee never had access to my data if I did not provide it to them.

So now two situations changed. Clients of ours force us to use endpoint management to ensure different "security" standards (some not as secure as I had before). Also we got bought by a bigger company and they have rules and regulations for their ~470k employees. These mean we will get some hefty spyware on our devices while still being officially allowed to take the devices home with us, use them privately and so on.

Well. I am not so sure, I will do this in the future. I am not willing to introduce spyware that also scans all devices within the network to my home network. I do not want some admin on the other side of the world to be able to download any file from my device. Or to upload any file onto my device.

So I will probably buy another computer (not having owned a private laptop for quite some time) to use at home. Same with my mobile phone.

On the other hand - I hate to carry two devices with me. For me separating out private/freelance stuff onto one machine and corporate stuff onto another makes things more complicated. And I know convenience kills security.

Sorry for my rant, without providing much to the discussion. I mean - it is my work device and my employer is within their full right to install whatever they wish - once the works council agrees.

<comment><USER4> what company has 470k employees?

<comment><USER5> My guess is that he is talking about Accenture

<comment><USER6> I'm also curious about this, I'm guessing DHL because he's in Germany but Accenture matches up too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This is nice and all, but I really wish that Apple would allow some real multi-account functionality. Especially for iPads, but also for iPhones.

When I hand my phone to my kids to play a game, I don't want them to have access to my email / text messages / contacts etc.

It's ridiculous that a 1000€ device is restricted to single user mode.

It's even worse for iPads -- they are perfect devices for sharing in the family, but only a single person can use them for Email / iMessage / Whatsapp / Facetime / ...

But I don't have any hopes that Apple will fix this. They want everyone in the family to own their own set of iDevices.

<comment><USER8> The function is there, just not enabled for end users. Enterprise and Education can use multi user switching on iPads, plus a whole lot more.

<comment><USER9> Doesn't that work by deleting your profile and downloading the new one? It doesn't save the profiles on-device like desktop computers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is a welcome step. I moved (back) to iPhone recently and one thing I miss from Android is Work Profiles that can be turned on and off and act as pretty much a separated user. It sounds like this is slightly more limited than that, but it's a good start. At least being able to easily turn work stuff off on the weekend is a huge deal for work life balance (and I feel a bit uncomfortable when my work stuff is effectively not isolated from my personal stuff.)

<comment><USER11> > This is a welcome step. I moved (back) to iPhone recently and one thing I > miss from Android is Work Profiles that can be turned on and off and act as > pretty much a separated user. It sounds like this is slightly more limited > than that, but it's a good start. At least being able to easily turn work > stuff off on the weekend is a huge deal for work life balance (and I feel a > bit uncomfortable when my work stuff is effectively not isolated from my > personal stuff.)

Did Android do away with work profiles recently? I used to have one and then following an update from the Enterprise, the apps were commingled and there was no way to explicitly "turn off work".

<comment><USER12> I'm using Android (Pixel 3), and the work profile works for me. IMO it is much better than having to carry two phones.

<comment> john-radio Is it something different than just a separate local account?

<comment><USER13> They allow your workplace to remotely administer your work account without giving them full control over your whole device.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Apple also noted that one of the big reasons users fear corporate BYOD > programs is because they think the IT admin will erase their entire device > when the enrollment ends — including their personal apps and data.

Yes. This is a true thing that users fear. It tends to happen because they're using phones that don't allow any more constrained option.

It's nice to see iOS catching up with Android in this.

<comment><USER15> I've had InTune and also some VMWare device management installed on my device in the past, and during installation you do get a warning that your admins will be able to delete everything on your device.

It kind of makes sense for them to do that if your device is stolen, but I still just don't like handing over control of my device like that.

They typically also enforce other annoying policies, such as not allowing rooted devices, not allowing swipe patterns and requiring a PIN/password. The VMWare one even required that _all_ browsing went through their shitty browser app (and presumably they got all my history).

Again, some of this makes sense from an enterprise point of view, but as a user it's annoying and feels invasive.

<comment><USER14> Oh, it definitely feels annoying and invasive. Without sandboxing, the options are invasive MDM (because that's the only kind possible) and no MDM at all.

I once watched an employer go from unwilling to adopt MDM to requiring it for accessing substantive systems on personal devices. The CEO lost his phone, and suddenly appreciated what MDM was good for.

Users were given a choice: MDM, sandboxed if they had a device with modern technology, or no significant access on personal devices. A lot of users had phones that didn't offer sandboxing, so myself and several others found ourselves explaining quite often that there literally was no option available where remote wipe wasn't possible. If they didn't like that, well, they didn't actually _need_ access from their phones, so...

Anyway. I'm quite glad Apple is starting to actually catch up a bit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I am not a wealthy man but there is no way I'd sign up for using any of my employer's comms infrastructure for personal use or use any of my personal equipment for business use.

I don't live to work and there's no reason to hand over any more info about my personal life than necessary.

</comment><comment><USER17> It feels like an over engineered solution for a simple problem. If Apple were instead to add multi-users support to iOS then it would be as simple as having a work identity with dedicated apps and segregated data, and a personal identity as such, invisible to IT.

<comment><USER18> The problem is that most MDM solutions want to take over your device. At my employer, the MDM solution literally takes over your entire device. I've installed the solution on an iPhone, and a Samsung Galaxy S8 (with and without Knox) with the same result. Unfortunately, the result is I carry two phones instead of one.

I think Apple's solution to the problem might work. As long as the companies data is separate from mine, what I do on my phone is private, and basic functionality like screenshots are available on my phone, the solution looks good to me.

<comment><USER19> > I think Apple's solution to the problem might work.

It might. As long as IT/Security can be convinced that it fulfills their goals. That doesn't seem like a sure thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > Using the per-app VPN feature, traffic from the Mail, Contacts and Calendars > built-in apps will only go through the VPN if the domains match that of the > business.

Shame that Apple doesn't take this one step further and do it system-wide.

<comment><USER21> Given their commitment to privacy as a selling point, it would be nice if Apple provided an integrated VPN service (say included with the upper iCloud tiers). For now I'm on the waitlist for Cloudflare's offering - their DNS works fantastic.

<comment><USER22> VPN's are not a privacy panacea. Hiding your internet traffic from e.g. your ISP comes at the cost of divulging it to the VPN provider. Apple has been very clear that they don't want to be in a position where they would have to turn over sensitive information about their users to authorities, a position they can avoid by not providing such a service.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Will Apple employees will be allowed to use this program? They're notoriously paranoid about maintaining secrets. Wonder if their IT department would give up the control.

<comment><USER24> I worked for Apple about 5 years ago, and there almost everyone I interacted with carried an Apple-owned iPhone that was specially setup for running internal in-development software. This was Apple's way of getting those builds tested by a large number of people before they went out.

There were a few (software) restrictions placed on the devices, namely that you had to have password lock turned on, and a password complexity policy. But after that they really did not interfere at all. When I left I reset that phone myself, and then bought a new iPhone and used the backup (not including OS) of that phone off of iCloud (of course minus the Apple email account they just turned off, and a couple of Apple-only apps I was using).

Other than some basic access controls on systems (especially around iOS sources), and a lot of prototype-asset-tracking (I ran a lab with a lot of that), Apple really does trust their developers to do the right thing. If they trust you to have the information, then they trust you not to share it without a lot of big-brother monitoring.

And there really is very little in the way of an IT department at Apple as you would normally think of it. They provided the network and the printers, but setting up your own computer was usually up to you and whatever help you got from your team (who really were the ones who knew what you needed for resources).

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I've experienced law enforcement raiding offices and confiscating technology for evidence collection. They will return the devices but not for years. I don't want anything work related on my personal device.

</comment><comment><USER26> BYOD is also a driver for dual sim phones, which Apple has finally introduced (they have been common in China for some time). When Apple announced them the us press discussion was all about international travel.

</comment><comment><USER27> finally.

it's a thrice-removed description, but at a surface level it sounds better than android profiles, at least for work/home device sharing.

for sharing with family members (parents/kids, eg) it doesn't sound so awesome. hey, if it means kids have to have their own tablet, well more power to apple then!

</comment><comment><USER28> I wonder if this lays the groundwork for multiuser support in iPadOS at least?

<comment><USER8> Groundwork has been there for years, called 'Shared iPad' \- but its for Education use only... Via an enterprise or education MDM solution you can restrict and configure the iPad in many, many different ways; again, its not for the consumer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Apple is the only major player moving in the right direction when it comes to privacy. I'm so glad we have them!

<comment><USER30> I could be mistaken, but I think this is a somewhat weaker version of Android for Work, which shipped about two years ago, I believe (couldn't find the exact date). Perhaps Apple is doing something that AfW isn't already doing, but it's hard to tell from this article, which doesn't mention AfW at all.

<comment><USER31> I'm not sure of the differences between AfW and this either but I don't think it matters in the big picture. Instead, I see this as just one step in many that Apple has taken in designing their products around user privacy, when possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Ah, so this is why they killed all the other MDM based school management apps. Well played Apple.

</comment><comment><USER33> As someone who has managed 10k endpoints, BYOD is a very niche solution. The security threats that any company with data worth stealing has is non-trivial. Those folk in this thread moaning about corporate spyware, are living on another planet. Nobody has the resources, or the motivation to spy on anyone. When Oracle, Adobe and Microsoft come a knocking, knowing what is installed and being able to uninstall it save a $1 million, easy.

<comment><USER34> There is some motivation. Imagine you're Tim Apple and you wake up one day to find The Verge has a front page story detailing all of your secret Apple Car technical details and plans through 2022 courtesy of a "source with firsthand knowledge of the project". I don't doubt for a minute that Apple has a corporate security team with the empowerment and resources to dig through employees' personal iMessages to find the leaker.</comment></comment>


Candy Japan 2015 Year in Review - <AUTHOR> http://www.candyjapan.com/2015-year-in-review <comment><USER2> I think someone else mentioned this in another post about this. Thought it was a great idea so I'll repeat it here:

To prevent fraudsters from using you to authenticate their stolen credit cards, set it up so that every purchase automatically redirects to a 'order successful' page. After seeing that a few their credit card numbers all seem to work on your site, the fraudster will realize they can't use your site to test and move on. In the back-end, turn on manual approval of each purchase and let through the ones you deem legitimate.

Should a legitimate customer mistype their credit card info, send them a follow up email with a link to the order page briefly explaining to them the situation and asking them to enter their details again.

(If there's some issue with this method I haven't thought of, let me know.)

<comment><USER3> Best reply, but... How often is a typo made (1:1000?), how much time for support staff is needed and how many lost orders due to a ~24 hour delay in some orders being placed. Also, easy to flood the system with bad orders that need to be manually sorted, like a fake order DDoS.

<comment><USER4> If a typo is made 1:1000 times Candy Japan would have had.. 2? At this small scale it's probably worth it - the loss of a customer isn't as big a problem as loss of physical goods.

<comment><USER5> Not to mention that you can verify the Luhn checksum on CC numbers and immediately catch ~90% of all typos (and 100% of single-digit typos). Don't even need a server call.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The initial post was just a draft I had neglected to make private, and wasn't finished (but thank you xixi for posting). I didn't spend the whole year solely battling CC fraud. I now wrote about other things that happened in 2015 now, so go back and refresh to read that part.

<comment><USER7> FWIW, I initially found Candy Japan via the HN post discussing the fraudulent activities [1], and have been a happy subscriber for a few months now.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10237697](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10237697)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Interesting to read about those fraudsters. Really annoying when you're a small business. I remember reading something similar from Gittip[0], and also mentioned on the linked blog post, jsbin[1].

I wonder what other small startups are using to detect / prevent this kind of fraud?

Are there any good services in this space? and why won't recurly/stripe et al bundle this in? (or maybe they do, and I just don't know about it...?)

[0] [http://blog.gittip.com/post/35057426257/stolen-money-on- gitt...](http://blog.gittip.com/post/35057426257/stolen-money-on-gittip- part-1/)

[1] [https://remysharp.com/2015/09/17/jsbin-toxic- part-4](https://remysharp.com/2015/09/17/jsbin-toxic-part-4)

<comment><USER9> All I can talk is from my personal experience, but as the founder of a startup that sells physical goods online, we've had no issue with fraudsters. At all.

Granted, we are quite small and our volume of sales is not massive (Hey! Small startup with very little funding and mostly bootstrapped here), but still, I was expecting some kind of issue with this by now. Or at least people trying to get stuff for free.

For the record, we use Stripe and PayPal for payments, don't know if they do anything on their end.

<comment><USER10> FYI You're actually more at risk than CandyJapan if you're shipping physical goods based on successful Auth and/or offer a low pricepoint item. Even without catching the uptick in orders, CandyJapan likely would be able to see some chargebacks or fraud advice before the bulk ship date (2x a month I believe).

One thing i've learned in my short time in the industry, fraudsters are great at finding weak merchants for card testing and triangulation schemes. What was 4 days worth of work for this fraudster, cost CJ thousands in fees, multiple days. How many late nights have been devoted to cleanups like this?

Also, a lot of payment processors are offering complex fraud solutions (ipGeo, proxyPiercing, device fingerprinting, etc) for pennies per Auth. definitely worth asking your processor and your processor's processor for more info. Beats being the lowest common denominator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> FWIW, as someone who has the same problem with fraud folks at $DayJob you really do need to go with a service to deal with that sort of thing unfortunately.

We use an internal tool from our parent company but yeah, you don't really have a choice but to assume a good chunk of your customerbase will try to cheat you.

Similarly, as long as the checksum is valid you should "complete" the order and handle follow up with issues [e.g. Card declined] at a later date. This can just be automated via email, with a 24 hour delay.

Honest typos won't pass the checksum, fraudsters will and the delay in the "failed authorization" also helps a good deal in discouraging such activity.

</comment><comment><USER12> See the recent article on [hoverboards @ Buzzfeed]([http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/steal-a-credit- card-...](http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/steal-a-credit-card-buy-a- hoverboard#.cvExv7nxM)) and [responses here @ HN]([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10727371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10727371)) - I believe they mention options to help with fraud detection but it's not clear how useful they are. Sorry.

<comment><USER13> I'm actually in the same space selling "hoverboards" and have been massively hit with fraudulent transactions. Luckily we realised fairly quickly and enforced draconian fraud checks, we're missing out on potential sales but the Buzzfeed is article is the alternative.

I'm not sure which processor Candy Japan uses, but you can usually request to implement advanced fraud rules and strict settings that require Zip/postal code to match exactly.

<comment><USER6> Thanks, next year I want to get back and try to fix the situation. I fell back to PayPal only and have been losing customers since.

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure how strict you should go, we have gone to the absolute maximum - and have to deal with customer service issues / abandoned checkouts daily. But even requiring the ZIP code to be correct made a big difference.

We're also using shopify which has helped quite a bit with their built in fraud analysis (Not 100% but I think it's either signifyd or kount providing the data).

Alternatively, you could use Paypal Pro to negate the account requirement?

<comment><USER6> I'm considering a bit going to some platform like Shopify, because I'm writing way more Python doing my own platform anyway. Integrating some solution would be just a few clicks if I were on some platform that they already support, instead of another API integration.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> As someone who deals with several hundred thousand dollars a year in online credit card fraud, I would advise you to check out sift science or Kount. It's easy to integrate and is vastly superior to the checks you have and the other suggestions in this thread. We have killed numerous credit card rings with this. They typically go somewhere else that's an easier target now.

</comment><comment><USER15> Before people suggest bitcoin--and I love bitcoin--it probably wouldn't solve this guy's fraud problem. Yes, it would stop the fraud, but there are simply too few people willing to pay in bitcoin.

<comment><USER16> Wouldn't bitcoin give rise to the opposite problem - consumers paying bitcoin now shoulder all the risk of buying from a bad vendor.

<comment><USER17> I think there are bitcoin escrow payment systems.

<comment><USER18> The Bitcoin protocol supports multisig transactions. You can use it to implement escrow by including a third party public key and require 2 of 3 parties to sign the transaction.

<comment><USER16> So the mechanics are somewhat supported directly by bitcoin, but, how does the bitcoin customer get their money back even if the escrow company agrees that the terms of the sale weren't met? (added [1])

And then you still have a question of whether the parties agree to a mutually trusted escrow service to actually administer the signoff. I imagine that credit cards are somewhat partnered closer to the customer/card holder, but with bitcoin escrow it could be either the vendor or the customer?

Not meaning to criticise here, just a walking through unfamiliar territory.

Edit: Partially answered my own question (example 2 at link [1])

[1] [https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contract#Theory](https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Contract#Theory)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> >Growth backtracked. We are now instead back to 750 subs and the trend still hasn't reversed. Very far from the goal of 1500 I had set.

I guess 11 hours on the front-page of HN must work wonders for subscriptions (I just subscribed, too), wonder what the actual numbers are

</comment><comment><USER20> Is this why Amazon waited a day before alerting me that my card was declined (bad month/year)? Almost missed a shipping window because of it.

</comment><comment><USER21> What happens with the fraud? Does the charge back affect the seller or the bank? Sucks if the former. What do other people/companies do about this? Surely all the CC frauds in the world haven't chosen to gang up on one tiny seller of niche candy from Japan...

<comment><USER22> beyond the cost of the actual purchase ($5 is pretty insignificant), card processors charge high fees per chargeback, and too many chargebacks (IIRC >1% of transactions) can get you kicked off and blacklisted from any reputable card processor for life

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would Stripe be a way around this problem or do they not take on the risk of fraudulent cards?

<comment><USER24> They don't. Even if you use Stripe you are still responsible for spotting fake transactions, and if you let too many through Stripe can actually ban you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Probably, one criminal found this site, then told others about it, who adopted it.

I wonder if the techniques for promoting adoption can be used in reverse, to deter adoption?

While keeping it familiar and convenient so as not to deter customers.

</comment><comment><USER26> You should enable these services for the credit cards:

Verified By Visa -> [https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business- tools/...](https://usa.visa.com/run-your-business/small-business- tools/payment-technology/verified-by-visa.html) MasterCard SecureCode -> [https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/consumers/features- benefits/...](https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/consumers/features- benefits/securecode.html)

<comment><USER24> Not everyone is from US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'm curious, why not use Stripe? I have heard nothing but good about them, and since you are willing to use Pay-Pal, I am assuming you are willing to use other 3rd party processors.

If you have your own merchant account and have implemented the code by hand or through a library, you pay all sorts of fees, sign up fee, fraud chargeback fees, percentage of charge, statement fee, monthly fee, etc. Both Strip and Square offer simple integrations, simpler than Pay-Pal IMHO, and I assume they have the capacity to deal with fraud better.

<comment><USER14> Been using Stripe for years. There is no more fraud protection there than any other merchant credit card account.

<comment><USER28> Serious question (I haven't used a merchant credit card account): do regular accounts come with _any_ fraud protection? The reason I ask is, I was sent a link to this a while ago, which seems to say that Stripe does do fraud protection:

[https://stripe.com/docs/fraud](https://stripe.com/docs/fraud)

<comment><USER14> It's hard to say, Stripe (or any other merchant account) may be blocking some charges, but you really don't have visibility into why a charge was blocked.

Regardless if they are blocking a lot or a little, they all let way too many fishy charges go through. They are just not incentivized to police fraud because in e-commerce its _you_ who are on the hook for the charge back, not the bank or credit card company.

You cannot rely on your merchant bank (Stripe or anyone else) to do your fraud protection. You will get eaten alive.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> I think Facebook or Twitter logins would go s long way to solving credit card issues. A credit card purchase backed by a 10+ friend FB account is unlikely to be a scammer. Legit Facebook accounts probably sell for more than the cc being tested.

<comment><USER6> They would probably just start generating FB accounts, because a similar thing happened when I started requiring valid email addresses: they just went ahead and generated a bunch of gmail/hotmail accounts to use.

<comment><USER29> Generating Facebook accounts in bulk is not easy. I'm not suggesting that it's a panacea, but if you're looking for something to indicate a real purchase this would be strong. If someone logs in with Facebook and has 10+ friends then I'm going to say they are 99% legit. Plus you can look at their profile manually if you're in doubt. Of course you also offer email but those orders get more scrutiny. HN is an echo-chamber of hate for Facebook login but the real world (and I suspect your target market) does not share this.</comment></comment></comment>