Reject Google Nest or Amazon Ring Corp Surveillance and a Dystopic Future - <AUTHOR> https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/google-nest-or-amazon-ring-just-reject-these-corporations-surveillance-ncna1102741 <comment><USER2> Disclaimer: Apple employee, but not working on anything related to this.

You can achieve a privacy focused solution by doing the processing localy. I am looking forward to more HomeKit Secure Video compatible hardware becoming available. The idea is to process the video feed locally on an Apple TV or iPad, and then send notifications to your iPhone. An encrypted video can be uploaded to iCloud upon detecting some motion.

Also... with the photo library available on the Apple TV, I guess face detection in the video feed might be possible in the future.

<comment><USER3> Hmm... this is interesting. I would like to learn more about how this works, given apple's history, my guess is they won't advertise such solutions until they have either developed their own camera, or have struck some deal with a 3rd party. I'd still likely plunk down the inflated price if their privacy model was _actually_ proven.

I've looked into flashing a CFW on a cheap Xaomi ip camera, running ZoneMinder and a NAS for storage and backups and whatnot, and while setting all this up is pretty trivial, I feel like I'd be better off just paying for a commercial system rather than administering my own. But then you look into the security practices in such systems and well, lets just say, off the shelf isn't really a great option either.

<comment><USER4> I used to work at a startup that built products for parents of infants and toddlers, such as "smart socks" to monitor babies' vitals, and was involved in the late-stage development of their smart baby monitor camera, which released last year. (A quick web search of certain terms above should give you a good guess as to which company I'm talking about.)

They—and dozens of other companies—use off-the-shelf commodity components from the Chinese corporation Aoni, and their camera is essentially the device linked below, but in a different case: [http://anc.cn/ip-camera/smart- wireless-cube-camera/smart-wir...](http://anc.cn/ip-camera/smart-wireless- cube-camera/smart-wireless-cube-camera-e966-g0109.html)

Check the specs, as well as the general appearance of the thing from the front.

While inspecting the traffic coming in and out of this thing, I saw it making a ton of requests to really weird Chinese IP addresses and uploading a lot of data. It was encrypted, so I couldn't tell for sure what it was, but it presumably was video footage. I raised these concerns to others on my team, but besides a "huh, weird", none of them seemed to care enough to investigate further or properly escalate it. I was just a temp, so I didn't have the pull or influence that full-time employees had.

It was really concerning to me that this stuff wasn't properly addressed, but instead was swept under the rug, despite the fact that it's going to be pointed at babies and toddlers. There are some real disgusting folks out there who _will_ take advantage of this, if they haven't already, especially since it has the same two-way audio that "Santa" used with the Ring cameras.

(If any of my former co-workers are reading this, I genuinely don't mean you any ill will in particular. But the company really needs to fix those issues, and not simply re-case commodity camera systems from surveillance states. There's _obviously_ a backdoor, and if Aoni/China can access it, so can the aforementioned disgusting people.)

<comment><USER3> Yeah, this is pretty much my understanding from reading reddit threads and tutorials for running custom firmware. Even if you disable whatever 'cloud' option your hardware ships with and run off, say, an SD card, your data is still being dumped somewhere in China if you allow your device to talk outside of you LAN.

It's a pretty sad state of affairs when there are no real viable options for consumers if you care about security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I am seeing increasing numbers of these types of articles, but I don't know how I feel. First of all, many of them, like this one, seem to conflate two separate issues: poor security practices and then the dystopic, surveillance concerns. I don't see the two being particularly related.

I absolutely agree that Ring products should have better security features like required 2FA. But I'm not sold on the idea of our society becoming a surveillance state because people have video doorbells. It seems like a stretch and one that is born out of a tendency for people to see all technology as "the thing" that will be what ends our society and ushers in a 1984-esque dystopia. I'm skeptical.

I don't have to be convinced that I shouldn't be trusting Amazon or Google with my best interests. But I don't see how security cameras, or at least the video doorbells, are more dangerous than all of the other things we've just already accepted, like constant tracking of our positions via smartphones and our online browsing habits.

Perhaps I'm wrong, I suppose time will tell.

<comment><USER6> _" First of all, many of them, like this one, seem to conflate two separate issues: poor security practices and then the dystopic, surveillance concerns. I don't see the two being particularly related."_

Since the poor security practices have led to people getting spied upon and harassed, those poor security practices are clearly related to dystopic surveillance concerns.

The article also directly addresses larger issues than poor security practices. Two examples:

 _" And Amazon's surveillance doorbell cameras are just the start: The company is selling a multitude of other gadgets equipped with microphones, cameras and sensors, all designed to gather enormous amounts of data, which Amazon refines -- like crude oil -- into power and profit. Alexa, the company's "home assistant," is constantly listening and explosive investigations revealed that Amazon employees have also listened, via Alexa, not just to private conversations, but also to deeply intimate moments such as couples having sex or kids singing in the shower. Amazon even marketed its microphone-enabled Echo Dot Kids directly to children."_

 _" Amazon devices aren't just giving hackers and Amazon employees an eye or an ear into our homes. The company has also partnered with more than 600 police departments across the country to tap into the surveillance network its customers are creating for them, developing a seamless process for government agents to request footage from tens of thousands of Ring cameras without warrants or any judicial oversight."_

<comment><USER5> > Since the poor security practices have led to people getting spied upon and > harassed, those poor security practices are clearly related to dystopic > surveillance concerns.

Typically, these dystopias generally imply state surveillance on an unwilling or unsuspecting populace. Yes, hackers can gain access to your indoor security cameras, but that only affects people willingly installing security cameras inside their own homes and adhering to bad security practices. Doorbell cameras aren't compelling targets for hackers, which is why all of the stories we hear are about cameras installed in someone's bedroom. And I don't see how this differentiates Ring's products in any way from having your bank account hacked, or your email, or any other personal data. Problematic and worth consideration? Yes. Dystopic? Not really.

> "And Amazon's surveillance doorbell cameras are just the start: The company > is selling a multitude of other gadgets equipped with microphones, cameras > and sensors, all designed to gather enormous amounts of data, which Amazon > refines -- like crude oil -- into power and profit. Alexa, the company's > "home assistant," is constantly listening and explosive investigations > revealed that Amazon employees have also listened, via Alexa, not just to > private conversations, but also to deeply intimate moments such as couples > having sex or kids singing in the shower. Amazon even marketed its > microphone-enabled Echo Dot Kids directly to children."

Entirely valid complaints, _regarding Alexa devices_. Its unrelated to Ring, and especially doorbell cameras. Unless people are having numerous and long private conversations in front of their doorbell, it seems again like those concerns don't apply here.

> The company has also partnered with more than 600 police departments across > the country to tap into the surveillance network its customers are creating > for them, developing a seamless process for government agents to request > footage from tens of thousands of Ring cameras without warrants or any > judicial oversight.

Can someone verify this? Because I was under the impression that customers had to opt in. And regardless, I still fail to see what people might be concerned about regarding doorbell cams. They aren't capturing anything that isn't readily available.

Perhaps these are arguments against putting Ring security cameras in your house, but I still am not seeing the end of the world scenarios these articles are prophesying resulting from doorbell cameras.

<comment><USER7> The biggest problem with door cameras is they're 24 hr survellence of the houses across the street without their permission or a court order

<comment><USER8> Do police require a warrant to surveil a location from the street (or some other location)?

<comment><USER9> No. Anything they can see from the street, they can watch. The gray area AFAIK is what a drone can see from the street, but at higher elevations. That said, you and all your neighbors can file a complaint.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> People seem all too willing to trade their privacy for inexpensive convenience and novelty. Although they probably don't view it that way.

In any case, Google, Amazon and the like are chipping away at peoples desire for privacy and soon, I imagine privacy will be viewed as a quaint notion from the past. All this just to sell us more stuff.

<comment><USER11> I use Ring. Convenience and novelty were not the reasons I decide to buy it. I did it because of its advertised feature: security.

<comment><USER10> Well, you know what has been said about purchasing security and giving up liberty...

<comment><USER5> Thats only applicable if you believe that owning a Ring doorbell requires giving up some portion of your liberty. I have failed to be convinced that it does.

Also, if you are going to make an argument, I would hope it would be more substantial than a pithy argument from 300 years ago. Otherwise, you fall into the same category as those who argue against climate change/evolution using bible verses.

<comment><USER10> We'll see if in another 20 years the government and law authorities have easy access to things like our Nest and Ring in the name of security.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I own a couple of Arlo cameras that I bought 3 years ago. They still offer free cloud storage because I'm an old customer, so it's kind of a good deal. I only turn them on when I'm out of town. They have a separate router, so it's a little bit harder to hack than Ring.

I wish, however, there was an affordable DIY solution to home cameras. And yet, I still couldn't find a setup that is completely open-source and/or provides me enough freedom. Has anyone started digging into this?

<comment><USER13> Zoneminder is open source. A little hard to setup just right, but has a lot of potential.

<comment><USER14> Zoneminder is pretty good, all things considered. It was my go-to NVR before I switched to the Unifi ecosystem.

I guess the one drawback (when I was using it) was that it didn't record audio, and that its UI was relatively unpolished. Having said that, setting up motion sensing on the cameras in Zoneminder was far better than a lot of other solutions that I had tried.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Convenient" is the new c-word.

"Because it's convenient" is the main excuse I hear for excessive plastic packaging, disposable everything, taking a 3 hr drive instead of a 4 hr train/transit ride, posting to Facebook instead of your own blog, placing voice-"activated" spy devices in your home.

I'm coming to despise that word.

<comment><USER16> I had bought an Echo Dot sometimes back. I had decided I'll use it judiciously. After I acceded my past recording (all of it) on Alexa app and heard some of them I just packed it away.

I also have a Smart TV. Of Vu brand - [https://www.vutvs.com](https://www.vutvs.com) \- quite famous in India and apparently a California company. I don't even know whether they listen in the background. I tried looking for documents related to that and talking to the customer care but they were clueless. They would get stuck at repeating "do you want to schedule a repair?".

<comment> cbm-vic-20 > I tried looking for documents related to that and talking to the customer > care but they were clueless. They would get stuck at repeating "do you want > to schedule a repair?".

No company is going to train their first-, second- or even third-line support to answer a question being asked of 0.00001% of their customers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I like my Eufy Cam. The video lives on an SD card in my house. NSA probably still watches it, but at least it's not every other Google/Amazon employee.

<comment><USER12> Never heard of that before. I love it. Thanks!

<comment><USER18> Eufy IIRC is Anker's video line, could be wrong.

The baby monitor they make is actually pretty great. 2.4Ghz propriety not- WiFi. I was pretty impressed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> What I don't understand is why people are putting internet connected cameras INSIDE their house. How do indoor cameras, that catch somebody already inside your house, make you safer? Why not just get door and window sensors? Outdoor cameras make a bit more sense but a hacker could still use info about when you are home or similar against you.

<comment><USER20> > why people are putting internet connected cameras INSIDE their house

\- To monitor the animals in the house

\- To get alerts if a smoke alarm goes off

\- In case of break in, to capture the person's face and get a notification

\- Access historical and real-time feed to check when <event> happened

\- Etc

In an apartment with no other security system, a single indoors camera can do these. (In a house, you're better off with a complete security system since you have control over both indoor and outdoor configuration of your residence.)

The alternative is time consuming and potentially less secure, though much more fun to play with:

\- Set up a raspberry pi-based camera system that can be scaled to multiple cameras and sensors

\- Set up an raspberry pi NextCloud instance for the cameras to save their feeds to

\- Set up an ML algorithm to recognize faces, animals, and types of noises

\- Set up a Twilio instance to send SMS notifications

\- Set up a mail server to send email notifications

\- Set up a back up system in case the sdcard on one of the raspberry pis gets corrupted

\- Set up a Home Assistant instance to control the cameras etc

\- Set up an Auth mechanism for your residents and guests to control the IoTs

\- Harden any systems that are exposed to the internet as a result of this set up

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Getting a vpn, using a niche browser and binning your smart phone are the only ways you get privacy. Complaining about nest and ring is "picking out a natt and swallowing a camel".

<comment><USER22> Exactly what google and amazon would like you to believe - that it's a case of black and white, and privacy is supposedly impossible to achieve.

<comment><USER21> Respectfully, can you have meaningful privacy with a (mainstream) smartphone? How? On a desktop you could tor everything I guess, but on an android/iOS device, everything down to the keyboard is compromised by design...

<comment><USER22> You're absolutely correct and that's not an excuse to compromise or abandon privacy universally.

<comment><USER21> I mean, it is though isn't it? If Google know where I am at all times because of my phone, and they have all my selfies, what privacy am I actually losing because they know what time I got home from my doorbell which took a picture of me? If the same phone is listening constantly to me incase I use voice commands, what privacy am I losing by having a nest do the same thing, but only when I'm home?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The fact that this is coming from one of the massive, OG news networks is pretty surprising. And refreshing

</comment><comment><USER24> > In his book "1984," George Orwell imagined that Big Brother-type > surveillance would be imposed on us by a violent state

as predicted by william gibson, corporations are becoming more powerful than states and the oppressive state in 1984 is more likely to be a corporation as time progresses

also the "violent" is redundant as "state" already includes some form of violence

<comment><USER25> The largest corporations have been more powerful than small states for centuries. The Dutch East India company, the United Fruit Company, various mining conglomerates. DEI was straight up put in charge of nations, complete with a military force. UFC had governments overthrown and didn't even try to hide it. They're better at PR now so their machinations aren't as proudly displayed, but if a major natural resource company wants to operate in a small, less-powerful nation, they're going to get their way, just as they have for centuries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It really seems like there's a viable niche for a privacy focused line of digital assistants, cameras, doorbells, thermometers, etc. Honeywell, for example, seems to do well with their learning thermostat. You'll never own the bigger market, but there does seem to be an opportunity.

<comment><USER27> The niche of people who actually care about privacy is vanishingly small, and I would hazard a guess that it overlaps strongly with the niche of people who would buy a raspberry pi to tinker with.

At this point, we're better off rolling our own with cheap CMOS camera modules, IR LEDs, 3d printed enclosures, arduinos, and rpis. Perhaps there's room in the market for a few people to do this as a side hustle, and sell completed boxes with software for those who don't have time to build their own, but likely not much more than that.

Alternatively, any decent A/V store will still sell you wired cameras and base stations that don't connect to the Internet at all. Then your inconvenience is fishing coax or cat5 through the walls of your house.

<comment><USER26> _" The niche of people who actually care about privacy is vanishingly small"_

You could market to adjacent fears, like "being hacked", "your videos go to the police", etc.

Companies like Lifelock seem to do well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Dear NBC editor: It's "topic" but "dystopian".

<comment><USER29> both dystopic and dystopian are synonyms.

btw did you know that grep (as in the unix tool) is in the dictionary? it even says it comes from the operating system.

<comment><USER28> "Dystopic" [sic!] may lead to misunderstandings. Also the article above states that it isn't an actual word.

You can't even pronounce it. People will only hear "this topic" or something like that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Huh.

I think there's a market for an upgrade that uses recognition software to see the home owners, then omit them from tracking.

Only the bad guys get 'tracked'. Sounds better.

</comment><comment><USER31> How is this a dystopic future? Unlike a telescreen, you're not forced to put a Nest in your home.

<comment><USER25> Maybe not, but many of your neighbors, the police (via ubiquitous public space abuse), every store, every mode of public transportation, and an increasing number of automobiles are all pointing cameras at you, whether you like it or not, and companies like Amazon in particular are actively seeking to aid law enforcement access to all these devices. It's not like you can opt out just because you haven't installed one in your own home.

<comment><USER31> >neighbors, the police (via ubiquitous public space abuse), every store, every mode of public transportation, and an increasing number of automobiles are all pointing cameras at you

Can be regulated, it is regulated in many places already (like, you can't store recordings for more than 15 days, or you can ask for your images to be removed).

>companies like Amazon in particular are actively seeking to aid law enforcement access to all these devices

Good.</comment></comment></comment>


Republicans didn't just strip away Internet privacy rights - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/no-republicans-didnt-just-strip-away-your-internet-privacy-rights/2017/04/04/73e6d500-18ab-11e7-9887-1a5314b56a08_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-e%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.2e22e83989b4 <comment><USER2> The original title is clearer: "No, Republicans didn't just strip away your Internet privacy rights".

The leading "No," makes it clear that it's denying that Republicans took away rights; without it, the "just" suggests it's saying Republicans did _more_ than "just" take away privacy rights.

The underlying problem is, of course, the English language. "just" can mean either "immediately prior" ( _just_ now) or "merely" ( _just_ a friend).

<comment><USER3> Yes, the title should be changed to the original. Thanks for pointing it out!

<comment><USER4> This really should be unflagged, and the title should probably indicate the FCC Chairman is the author: "FCC Chairmain: 'No, Republicans didn't just strip away Internet privacy rights'"

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Pai's logic is flawed in so many ways.

 _But in 2015, the FCC decided to treat the Internet like a public utility, taking away the FTC's ability to police the privacy practices of broadband providers._

The decision to treat it like a public utility had almost nothing to do with privacy or "policing the privacy practices of broadband providers" and almost everything to do with rekindling the war on Net Neutrality.[1].

This move -- like pretty much everything else this administration is doing -- was done to appease and strengthen _oligopoly_ power. It will ultimately hurt small upstarts in the "ISP /broadband delivery" category[2] (who vehemently opposed the stripping of this legislation), _and_ it will make it orders of magnitude harder for small upstarts whose business may only benefit or scale with "neutral" access to the internet.

In oligopoly situations there are few, if any, choices available to switch to when said provider oversteps is bounds and decides to just start charging everybody more based on the kind of traffic they request... "because it can". Everything to do with everything on the Internet is going to get astoundingly more expensive very soon.

Pai does not understand small business. And it's worth noting that this is probably because he worked for Verizon as an attorney. Though despite his government appointment, he does not seem to have switched his mindset away from that to the best interests of the American people in mind with his policy agendas.

[1] [[https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/2015021...](https://www.techdirt.com/blog/netneutrality/articles/20150219/07100630069/fcc- commissioner-ajit-pai-is-leading-incoherent-facts-optional-last-minute-war- net-neutralityfor-american-people.shtml) [2] [http://bgr.com/2017/04/03/twc- charter-merger-fcc-rules-ajit-...](http://bgr.com/2017/04/03/twc-charter- merger-fcc-rules-ajit-pai/)]

<comment><USER6> I've got to say that my Comcast home internet is already bordering on "not worth the money" if it gets any more expensive I will cancel it and just use the free wifi that is available at almost any cafe or coffee shop.

<comment><USER7> With a VPN of course ... right?

<comment><USER6> I probably would not. Anything work related is already done over ssh, so effectively that's a VPN.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "Others argue that ISPs should be treated differently because consumers face a unique lack of choice and competition in the broadband marketplace. But that claim doesn't hold up to scrutiny either. For example, according to one industry analysis, Google dominates desktop search with an estimated 81 percent market share (and 96 percent of the mobile search market), whereas Verizon, the largest mobile broadband provider, holds only an estimated 35 percent of its market."

How hard is it to change your search engine? How hard is it to change your ISP?

<comment><USER8> It's easy to add a VPN.

<comment><USER9> Easy-ish. I just went through the process of setting up a VPN on all of my family's devices, and mobile devices were a bit of a pain.

Plus now I'm paying $10 a month for a basic level of privacy that the previous law made free. I can afford it, but it's still obnoxious.

<comment><USER8> Sad but true.

Still, there are other advantages. With some work, you can make it very hard for websites to find out who you are. And you can change personas easily. And have many of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Pai is an unapologetic partisan hack.

 _In short, the Obama administration fractured our nation's online privacy law, and it is our job to fix it. We pledge to the American people that we will do just that._

Gee, I can't help notice you don't have a replacement plan on the table. Kinda like AHCA. Kinda like every other "repeal and replace" initiative you guys have put forward only to pull a bait-and-switch and stop after the "repeal" half.

That the WashingtonPost even gives him a platform to spew this garbage does more harm than good.

</comment><comment><USER11> I clicked on this expecting to hear the reasoning behind this legislation explained in layman's terms. Instead I got another rant about the liberal media. I wish we as a society could find a way past the issue of media bias. It pollutes every issue and makes public discourse a lost cause.

<comment><USER12> All media is necessarily biased because it can't show everything. Ideally we'd weight what we consume by its truth value and build up a multi-dimensional picture of reality.

We're living with a president who believes that reality is defined by what's on TV, and that by controlling the narrative, you can control what's perceived to be true.

In this mindset, truth in media is irrelevant. What matters is the story the media tells, and if it's in your favour it's good, if it's not it's "biased". Since all media is biased, it's easy to tell the "bias" story; you just pick out the bits of the story that are missing, or overly stressed, or the tone, or whatever.

It's an easy game to play.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's starts with an almost reasonable argument that the FTC would be more competent at enforcing privacy policy violations, only to segue in, what amounts to "If Facebook can sell your data, Verizon should get to too!"

He rationalizes this by claiming that user-action data (search, post, etc) is more valuable than browsing data.

Nothing in this article justifies the change in any manner that benefits consumers. In fact, it explicitly states the change was all about helping ISPs make money.

</comment><comment><USER14> Wow, the article itself is a spin piece like the ones it claims came out recently. Saying that ISPs should not be regulated because Google or Facebook isn't is totally disingenuous. Everything HAS to go through your ISP, there is not choice. They even claim there IS choice in ISPs which is blatantly false for a lot of people, and very limited for everyone else.

The ISP should provide a way to route and transfer data and nothing more. They are not a content provider and they are not an ad provider - but they want to be. What they really want is to implement MITM attacks to gather data and ad- injection for additional revenue. We shall have to overcome that in the near future too.

</comment><comment><USER15> This should not be flagged.

Even if you consider the argument flawed or disagree with it for other reasons, it's REALLY important to hear viewpoints from those in a position to set policy.

</comment><comment><USER16> Interesting YouGov poll on this: [http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/tabs_HP_Online_Privacy_...](http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/tabs_HP_Online_Privacy_20170330.pdf)

Particularly interesting is how it breaks down along party lines. There is almost no difference between Democrats and Republicans on most of the questions.

83% of Democrats and 84% of Republicans are very or somewhat concerned about the privacy of their information online.

82% of D and 84% of R say no to ISPs sharing personal information without permission. 8% of D and 8% of R say yes to it. The rest are not sure.

72% of D and 72% of R say that the FCC's privacy rules should be allowed to go into effect. 80% of D and 75% of R said that Trump should veto the bill to overturn the FCC's rules.

The age and race breakdowns were also interesting, with older people more concerned about privacy than younger people, and whites more concerned than blacks or hispanics.

</comment><comment><USER7> Why was this flagged? It was #3-4 when I commented and now _poof_ it's gone. What is the point of the flag function if no editors/admins review the submissions? Wouldn't a downvote suffice and also prevent malicious flagging?

<comment><USER17> I'm a little surprised by that, myself.

I'm normally one to push for keeping political stuff off of HN, but that's when it's not related to the tech industry.

But this would seem like exactly the kind of political topic that should be discussed here...

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> How much validity is there to the FCC's statement that privacy regulation of the internet should be left to the FTC, and that the FTC had existing privacy regulations?

<comment><USER19> Close to zero. The FTC privacy regulations were struck down by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals last year in _AT &T Mobility v. FTC_, in which the court ruled only the FTC had no authority to regulate activities of entities with common carrier status, even for activities for which they are not common carriers. So, even leaving aside the Open Internet Order reclassifying broadband as a common carrier service, ISPs that are telcos and for that reason have common carrier status are immune to FTC regulation.

That ruling was the _reason_.The outgoing FCC majority adopted the privacy regulations it did late last year; they were replacements for the FTC orders that were struck down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Can't read, seems to be behind a paywall

</comment><comment><USER21> This author is trash and should be ashamed of themselves. Downvote it to hell but at least I'm honest with myself about what's going down. Changing your ISP is harder than changing insurance, that is to say it's often impossible. Tip for republicans, you can say you don't care, you can say you didn't want it to happen, but don't deny the reality of what happened. That just makes you look stupid.

<comment><USER4> The author is the FCC Chairman.</comment></comment>


Will Bigger and Cheaper Save the Tablet Market? - <AUTHOR> http://insights.dice.com/2015/09/08/will-bigger-or-cheaper-save-the-tablet-market/

<comment><USER2> This is silly. The 'tablet market' is not in need of saving, it's just reaching market saturation - these things are markedly tougher and longer- serving than laptops, and most people that want a tablet now have one.

Netflix and Chrome continue to run just fine on my 5-year-old iPad, and that's all I use it for - I'd consider that remark extremely market-typical.

</comment><comment><USER3> So if you marketing types are reading this ... I would have replaced my iPad 2+ with a retina 12" iPad had it been announced, instead I bought a Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 Pro (with the really convoluted name and cute little projector) because it had a decent large screen. I use it for all my reference books at my work bench. I got a look at the replacement, and would buy it in a heartbeat if it had a 12" 4:3 ratio screen, but its only got a 10" screen. Why? Because I want my entire library accessible on my tablet. I've invested in scanning my books and magazines, reference documents already come in PDFs, and more and more of my magazines are available with iPad apps, (SciAm, Economist, Science News, WSJ, NYT, Etc.) it is the "killer app" for me, and it has me using my tablet every day. The occasional game or video is there too, and I've got all my music streaming from it when I need tunes.

However, because of that, and the lack of internet connectivity in many places, I choose "additional storage with SD card" over "name brand" if the features are otherwise equivalent. My selection criteria are screen => document capabilities => extra storage. And for a variety of reasons I'm fairly price insensitive. I was hoping Amazon would do a 'fire HD+' tablet with a 12" screen and the book friendly aspect ratio, but so far they have let me down.</comment>


Little Sound DJ: A Game Boy Music Sequencer - <AUTHOR> https://www.littlesounddj.com/lsd/index.html <comment><AUTHOR> This popular Game Boy sequencer recently became free, so it's a great time to try it out. It's a Game Boy ROM so you can compose in an emulator on on real hardware.</comment>


Unified Field Theory That Nobody Can Disprove - <AUTHOR> http://unifiedgravity.com/UnifiedGravity/Publications.html

<comment><USER2>
      "Disprove"

Methinks somebody doesn't know how science works.

<comment><USER3> Seriously. I keep seeing "science" articles with that word in the title. Quite frustrating.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How long until you became "ramen profitable"? - <AUTHOR> So you quit your job to run your own company. Would you please share how long it took you to become "ramen profitable"? I'd love to hear other details, like how many products you tried out, whether you decided to go back to working for someone else, or any other aspects of the experience that might be of interest.
I was inspired to ask the question after reading this "I Quit" 1-year anniversary post: http://www.emadibrahim.com/2009/03/09/i-quit-1-year-anniversary/
Thanks! <comment><USER2> Eleven months from empty text editor to 'ramen profitability'. Only one product was developed but about four others were considered before I focused on a clearly defined market filled with customers who were willing to pay for software.

The position I started from was zero debt and about two years of comfortable living expenses saved. That turned out to be essential.

Contract work was offered and was very tempting to accept, but I knew if I took it I'd find it difficult to focus on product development -- so I passed it up. Once you have a steady income (whether from a salaried job or from contracts), it's very difficult to go back to working for zero dollars per hour and an unproven idea you think might work one day.

</comment><comment><USER3> About 8 months. And another 6 months, or so, to one (modest) salary profitable (meaning: enough for one person to live normally, without money concerns). We're probably at two salary profitable today, though it's a bit weak for a Silicon Valley engineer salary, and my co-founder has a family and a mortgage (in the valley).

We were actually selling software within a month or two of starting the company, as we were starting from a mature Open Source project and so didn't have a ton of code to write, so we hit the ground running pretty fast.

</comment><comment><USER4> I worked on my project (a pretty large web game) for a year before we launched it. Money started coming in right away. We had coverage on wired.com which was a nice spike, but I only got confident enough to start withdrawing a regular salary after another 12 months.

So technically 24 months, which is longer than the other posts I'm seeing here so far.

</comment><comment><USER5> I left the previous startup last January (was there about five years). Between travels I did a few projects:

\- Contract app development. \- Wrote some graphics code for fun (real-time voxel renderer). \- Wrote a web app as an experiment (web clippings tool).

What I learned: Contract development is not for me. Writing code for myself is much more satisfying, the graphics project was really a lot of fun. From the clippings app (clipng.com, it works and I use it but it could use some polish) I learned that working on your own is a lot harder than working in a team. At the same time, finding co-founders is really difficult.

In January I decided to join up with a seed-stage company whose CEO I met at a networking event. They have a good business model but needed someone to take over engineering and get the product shipped. So far that's working out well from a business standpoint and it has me at ramen-sustainable cash flow. Total time to sustainable: 1 year, 2 months.

Right now I have four ideas in-queue that I think would make good businesses but finding a co-founder is my first priority. If anyone reading this is in the Bay area and looking a project let me know.

</comment><comment><USER6> Today was the first day of our first billing mo. with our first customer. Our second customer will place us clearly in the realm of "Ramen Profitability".

It took four ideas, a co-founder revolving door, one false start and copious amounts of luck to get here.

Altogether, 11 months so far. While working the day job. I'm constantly exhausted.

</comment><comment><USER7> I didn't quit my job until I was ramen profitable and then some. However, the ramen profitability went away after a while. Things can grow as well as shrink. My second business is not yet ramen profitable.

</comment><comment><USER8> Started doing web app development consulting to learn the ropes shortly out of college with my cofounders in Nov 03. Started the design for buildasign.com in July 04 as one of our hopeful projects to turn into a sustainable business (a product rather than service business is what we were aiming for). Soft launch and slowly increased advertising starting June 05. Got our first manufacturing garage space in Nov 05. Paid ourselves for the first time in January 06. Things went well from there.

So I was full time for 2 years before getting paid beyond a just-survivable amount from consulting and hosting.

</comment><comment><USER9> You should make this a poll, and don't forget the "I'm still not ramen profitable" option that most people will choose :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea! Any idea how to convert this post into a poll?

<comment><USER10> I don't know about converting. Just go to <http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll> and link to your new post from this one (unless there really is a way to convert it to a poll).

<comment><USER11> here I made one: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=508886>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I quit my job to work on NewsCred in July 08 (8 months ago). Hope to be Ramen profitable with 6 people in the next six months (we have a B2B side that is not apparent from our consumer website). Will definately post with details when that happens. It's tough, but no question one of the best decisions of my life.

<comment><USER13> Six people? Wow! Are you stateside?

<comment><USER12> We're pretty distributed. 2 people in Geneva (Switzerland), 1 in NYC, and 4 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. My cofounder just moved their from Sweden to start up our office there and take advantage of cost efficiencies.

<comment><USER13> Wow! I am really interesting in learning more about your international startup experience.. especially in setting up an office in Bangladesh to take advantage of cost efficiencies. Perhaps that'd make for a good story to submit to HN =)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> It took me 3 days. I entered a market with products in the $10.000 range, and sold my product for $900. I had my first sale within 3 days (actually, it was the second, the first sale was the guy who gave me the idea in the first place {because he needed it}).

This was after about 4 months of work, though.

</comment><comment><USER15> _So you quit your job to run your own company._

I did? News to my bosses. ;) I've had a day job for the entire duration.

I started being consistently ramen profitable about 28 months after starting. (Last October-ish.) In February I hit my next milestone, which was "sales > salary". I'm hoping to hit "profits > salary" sometime before the end of April.

I've only ever had one product. I've tried making two others in the interim, but they got put on the back burner for a variety of reasons. Someday.

Stuff of interest: I don't know what you find interesting, but my blog is in my profile if you want the whole story. If you want to skip to pretty graphs see <http://www.bingocardcreator.com/stats> .

</comment><comment><USER16> Never at the rate I am going :-/

</comment><comment><USER17> About a year, give or take.

</comment><comment><USER18> Not yet (+189 days).

</comment><comment><USER19> Five months.

</comment><comment><USER20> 9 months</comment>


Ask HN/PG: How often does karma average get updated? - <AUTHOR>

Now that the average karma is in the top bar, how often does it get updated? I recently had a comment's score deviate significantly from my current average, but my average did not change (difference was significant enough that I think it should have affected my average by at least 0.01). Thus I'm assuming it is only updated periodically (obviously, I'm also assuming it's an average per post; please correct me if this is wrong). <comment><USER2> I don't know. There's a background process that runs every 45 seconds and picks a random loaded user to update the average of. Empirically, not more than every couple days, at best.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting approach. Thanks for the clarification.</comment></comment>


Source of the famous "Now you have two problems" quote - <AUTHOR> http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247#comment-3085 <comment><USER2> That guy again!</comment>


Why I use Windows 8 - <AUTHOR> http://owened.co.nz/why-i-switched-to-windows-8 <comment><USER2> Windows 8 boots faster because Windows 8 lies to you when you "Shutdown." Windows 8 actually hibernates instead of shutting down for real; and you can get the same effect by enabling hibernation on Windows 7 (or disabling "Fast startup" on Windows 8).

I'm also very surprised it took 20 second to boot in Windows 7 with an SSD. I have an SSD (an M4 specifically, on a SATA-3 connection) and Windows 7 never took 20 seconds to boot (with a UEFI "bios"). Closer to 10~12 seconds I would say.

I've been running 8 now for weeks and my biggest complaints are, firstly that they removed tons of "desktop" software (e.g. Picture Viewer, Media Player, the Games, et al) and secondly that they removed DVD playback (and even if you purchase it, it still only works in Media Centre).

Metro is something you can ignore. I will say that most Metro apps like the built-in Mail app are just horribly bad. So bad in fact that they're beyond use in some cases. Hopefully third parties can do useful things with Metro, because right now it doesn't have many use-cases.

<comment><USER3> _Windows 8 boots faster because Windows 8 lies to you when you "Shutdown." Windows 8 actually hibernates instead of shutting down for real; and you can get the same effect by enabling hibernation on Windows 7_

Incorrect. This is provenly false. Windows 8 _boots_ faster from a cold boot than Windows 7. It really does. The memory footprint is much smaller. The runtime environment is much more optimized and snappy.

You can tell Microsoft has cut out lots of cruft and optimized critical code- paths, especially with regard to boot.

Hibernation which you refer to is a different feature, and provides you with the same session and programs and state as you had running before, just like a normal sleep would do on a laptop, except it will survive a flat battery. It does so by persisting your entire RAM to disk for reloading on boot. This is completely different from booting which would give you a new, empty session.

So if you end up with an empty session, it's provenly not hibernating, it's booting. And boot is much, much faster.

On all system's I've had, hibarnation, designed to save time, has only caused _increased_ latency for shutdown/sleeping/hibernation, and similar increase in boot times since not only Windows needs to load, but all that persisted state must be restored as well.

On machines with more than 4GBs of RAM this leads to horrible performance and I've permanently disabled the option for the OS to use this due to the performance issues involved.

On Windows 8 I've kept the defaults and things are just flying.

<comment><USER4> "This is provenly false"

Citation needed.

<comment><USER3> OP claims that a Windows 8 uses a feature which without exception causes 1. extra IO workload, 2. reduced performance and which 3. persists entire sessions to 1. reduce IO workload, 2. increase performance while at the same time 3. session is not persisted.

I point out how this argument makes no sense.

I don't think I'm the one you should target with "citation needed".

<comment><USER5> Hibernation over shutdowns massively improves the shutdown and startup times of my work PC.

Primarily because I have SQL Server on it for development - the services have a extremely long shutdown and startup time, which doesn't need to happen for hibernation.

<comment><USER6> Interesting. I rarely bother to keep MSSQL loaded because it starts so quickly...

      PS C:\> (Measure-Command { Start-Service MSSQLSERVER }).TotalMilliseconds
      1127.5208

Alternatively, if you want SQL Server to start automatically without materially impacting startup performance, why not set its startup type to "Automatic (Delayed Start)"?

As for shutdown, while it depends on how you're using it immediately beforehand, I've never seen it take more than a few seconds on a development box.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Seems like he's apologising for using Windows 8, and that we don't really care.

</comment><comment><USER8> He's pretty much spot on.

My encounters with Windows 8 so far have lead to literally zero interaction with Metro other than for searching for stuff and starting programs for the first time which it's quite good at.

Win+X is my start menu.

<comment><USER9> This is super nice. Thanks!

With all of these options, I have to wonder why they wouldn't include a link to Network Connections.

It's the one thing that I seem to always need to change, but something that is always like 8 clicks to get to it.

<comment><USER8> Just hit start -> type connections.

<comment><USER9> No luck :(

<http://i.imgur.com/6EWJO.png>

EDIT: Ok, I see that I have to also click settings. Thanks!

<comment><USER10> Win+W lets you search Settings directly instead of Apps. You can also press if after you've already typed your search term. (In case you don't want to reach for the mouse)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for this - very helpful :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've had those combined file operations on nautilus for quite some time, the pause button is nice though

</comment><comment><USER12> Yes, good points, and good for Microsoft. But a sleeping Mac wakes up in about 2 seconds. And OSX had the copy dialog nailed down before. Not sure about multi-monitor support. I really wish Microsoft would make a real competitor to OSX in terms of perceived quality.

<comment><USER8> My Lenovo T61 does the same and has done since I bought it a long time ago.

There is perceived quality and actual quality. OSX has perceived quality, but little actual quality. You'll experience that if you have to deal with projectors, other monitors and hotdesking regularly - it's utterly frustrating. Windows - seriously just plug it in and it works.

When you see a Windows "workstation class" machine (Dell Precision) with an uptime of over a year on a trading desk with 6x 1600x1200 monitors off the back of two Matrox cards, you'll understand what I mean. They just don't go wrong.

<comment><USER13> Weird, every time I've used projectors and monitors with a Mac I've never had any problems, but had significant issues getting a multi-monitor setup to work. Granted, this was way back in the XP SP2 days so maybe the situation is improved.

<comment><USER8> It did suck a bit on XP. Vista pretty much fixed it all to be honest. It's pretty much perfect in Windows 7.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> the file copy/move/delete dialog combination was something that BeOS did 10 years ago. I always why Windows never picked that up...

<comment><USER8> I agree. It's one of the easiest wins as well and one I've campaigned about for years.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Oh and when is tab file browsing coming? Windows 10? Dude these features are available in other OSs since long time ago. I still don't see why I would go back to use Windows (be it 8 or any version) at all. There's no coming back, Microsoft is outdated.

<comment><USER16> I don't think tabbed file browsing is necessary, but you're right, Microsoft is waaaay behind.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I wonder if he's thought of using Classic Shell to get rid of the metro interface: <http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/>

<comment><USER9> I've used 8 for about a month now, and I don't miss the start menu at all.

It's just a lot of un-necessary clutter. If you want to start a program, if click start and type the first letters of the application.. done.

If you want to dig through a giant list of apps, that option is still available, but it's much nicer that it's not the default.

I think the things like the Classic Shell will help the elderly and those resistant to change, but for any power users, the new interface is an improvement.

As far as metro, I never use it either, so I don't see it as an issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> What antivirus software you're using?)

<comment><USER19> I am not OP but i use win 8 for my primary OS too and i don't use any AV. IIRC, win8 had some built-in virus protection. Also my usage is primarily pro and don't use thumb drives etc on my workstation. Also my internet habits and chrome protect me from internet side of things.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Look Busy fills your work calendar with secretly fake events - <AUTHOR> https://lookbusy.app <comment><USER2> I think the fact that this was actually made speaks to the fact that a lot of people are no longer able to do what they were actually hired to do. While I hope that not a lot of people will use the app, I do hope that i sparks some conversations about how our time is spent while at work.

</comment><comment><USER3> For sure this will burn you at work eventually if you use it. That said, if you need this, maybe you need to actually brush up your CV and find a job that doesn't destroy your productivity with meetings :)

<comment><USER4> I respond to all meeting invited as tentative as I have no clue if I'll get scheduled pulled into a different meeting at the same time.

Is there such a job where you're not inundated by meetings?

<comment><USER5> Any job where at least some of the work you do is so important that no one can justifiably tell you not to do it for any reason except to fire you. There are a variety of professional services fields where this is the case. IDK about the software world.

<comment><USER6> I know a couple guys working as quants on trading desks that never ever get bothered between market open and market close. The downside is that they can't get lunch or anything, but the tradeoff is probably worth it. Research quants on the otherhand get bothered constantly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > Your co-workers won't schedule conference calls and meetings

Were it so easy.

<comment> jon-wood I'd say 75% of requests for meetings I get conflict with something already in my calendar. Nobody bothers checking it before just flinging something in at a time that's good for them, despite everyone's calendar being visible to everyone else in the company, and having support for finding a free slot.

<comment><USER8> > everyone's calendar being visible to everyone else in the company, and > having support for finding a free slot.

As someone who is often trying to schedule C-level people in meetings, I can honestly promise there is no such thing as a "free slot". Eventually, one offers a decent meeting time and let the invitees sort out their own priorities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is hilarious!

The screenshot graphic on the home page didn't show up in my web browser but the apple store listing shows what it looks like.

I've known people that would use this so I expect they'll sell quite a few.

Made me laugh thinking about them.

</comment><comment><USER10> Ha-ha, but am I the only one who thinks we've reached peak-passive-aggressive here? If you can't make a meeting, or don't think you have much to contribute, just decline like a grown-up and don't attend it. My calendar is usually booked 100% all days but I pick and choose which ones to attend, and it's never a big deal.

</comment><comment><USER11> Almost all orgs will allow you to set your calendar to private, showing only "busy" or something similar. Just do this and make the fake meetings yourself.

<comment><AUTHOR> that's way less fun

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> That reminds me [http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html)

Maybe there is no need to create fake items. Maybe one should schedule calendar items "Making X", "Implementing Y", "Researching Z"... for own best hours everyday and leave a couple of acceptable gaps for meetings?

<comment><USER13> I actually do this. I usually block out early morning for on hour at start of day for (Assessment and prioritization of projects), then I have one 2 hour block a day (that changes and is already scheduled for the week) thats assigned to dedicated project research. Other users simply see i'm booked during those periods and it makes it easy for me to plan around having a block of time for hard tasks.

No one has complained yet and in fact I even put down lunch breaks in there now to. It's cut down on excess meetings I have to attend and more importantly i'm able to have some control over time with projects where it may take an hour to get really into it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> This is brilliant and I love it. Fortunately, I'm in (U.S.) academia, so other than one colleague, nobody tries to use outlook etc. calendars at me, but if they did I'd buy this in a hot second.

</comment><comment><USER15> Square's appointment service has a similar feature where it can block off appointment slots so customers can't book. Presumably a fake-it-til ya make it feature.

<comment><USER16> I assume this isn't to look busy, but to accommodate for meetings or other reasons one might be unavailable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> This is a very funny idea. Would be nice to see more options for customizing event titles in the future.

<comment><AUTHOR> Author here - let me know if you have any suggestions, it's easy to add more :)

<comment><USER17> It would be nice if the user could specify a title that will be used for all events.

I'd absolutely use this to block off some time for project work, and I have no reason not to label the events honestly ("Blocked off" or "Project X").

<comment><AUTHOR> That's easy enough, e-mail me at email@example.com and I'll add you to the beta list

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Seems like a great way for this app to access your calendar data ;)

</comment><comment><USER19> This sounds like a gag gift version of Clockwise which is awesome and maximizes the blocks of time you have to focus. I get the gimmick but meh

</comment><comment><USER20> Next up: room hogger books meeting rooms with fake reasons so I can spend all day doing quiet meditation.</comment>


Face.com API shutting down - <AUTHOR> http://face.com/

<comment><USER2> It's their API, and they can do what they want with it - but I'm not entirely sure shutting it down is entirely in line with "we love you guys [API users], and the plan is to continue to support our developer community", which is what they posted on their blog when the acquisition was announced.

A lot of people took this to mean the API was going to keep running.

<comment><USER3> When a company is acquired (I speak from experience) the first thing its people are told is, nothing is going to change for you, we bought you for what you do, and we want you to go on doing it, with the support of our sales organization, or words to that effect.

This isn't strictly a lie, because the person who says this genuinely believes it. But the problem comes from, he doesn't stick around to follow through. Maybe he gets promoted. Maybe he's the "acquisitions guy" and he's gone onto the next juicy startup to tell them the same thing.

The guy you actually end up working for doesn't care about your startup. To him, you're just employees of the firm who got hired a slightly different way than the Graduate Trainee Fast Track Programme he came in on, and it's not that he resents you as outsiders or anything, he just doesn't see why you shouldn't be treated and act the same as everyone else. And since you work for him now, you vote either way with your feet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For those who're looking at implementing a similar service, you should first start by looking at this project from researchers at UC-Irvine: <http://www.ics.uci.edu/~xzhu/face/>

This work was just presented at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), the leading conference in vision. This paper was an oral presentation (< 5% submissions are), and having worked in this space, this is the real deal -- their results are incredible, and I've already heard that they are indeed reproducible.

Normally, face algorithms operate independently, in a sort of pipeline: face detection ("where in the image are the faces") -> pose detection ("which direction are the faces looking?") -> fiducial detection ("where are the eyes, nose, mouth, etc. on each face?") -> alignment ("warp the faces to make them have a more similar pose") -> recognition ("what is the identity of each face?").

This method does the first three in an integrated way (face, pose, and fiducial detection), and with many fewer training examples than most commercial systems (including face.com and Google's Picasa) achieves really impressive performance. This is a huge deal, because normally more training data = better performance, and also because by doing all three steps together, the numbers reported are much less optimistic than they normally are in such papers (which always assume that things "upstream" happen perfectly).

The need for less data matters especially for open systems, as many are suggesting to build in the comments here, because sharing images of faces runs into copyright and privacy issues. As a company, you can collect a large dataset of images and if you never share it with anyone, then it's okay to use for training your algorithms. But if you're building an open consortium/system, then almost by definition that requires the training images to be shared, which is a big problem because now you're limited to a very small set of available data that is cleared for such use.

As far as code, there is Matlab code available on the linked page, but it's not clear what their license is. By default, I would assume it's "for research purposes only", but the paper goes into some amount of detail on the method which would allow people to reproduce it from scratch if they are worried. The approach itself is quite similar to the traditional "flexible part model" that is the basis for most top-performing object recognition methods (co-invented by one of the authors of this paper, btw), and the modifications to deal with faces are not very complicated.

Face recognition is still very much an unsolved problem, and while the face.com guys had some interesting approaches, it is not clear that they were necessarily the right way to go. And a large part of getting recognition right is getting all the previous steps right, so building on this work would be a good place to start.

Also, one way of building a recognition system ("whose face is this?") is using verification ("are these two faces of the same person?") as the key inner loop. If you take this approach, then you should pay close attention to the results on the Labeled Faces in the Wild (LFW) benchmark, which is the current de-facto standard that vision researchers evaluate on: <http://vis- www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html>

Since this is my area of expertise, I'm happy to answer any other questions that people might have.

<comment><USER5> You should see <http://www.biometrycloud.com> They seem to have a good aproach to facial recognition.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I literally just finished a hardware project based on the face.com API. I want to be furious but I guess you cant blame them for creating such a great product. I knew it must be too good be true, and free forever. It sucks though because this was just a side project for me and I'm not sure it's worth the time to develop my own OpenCV system.

I'll be checking out the alternatives and resources you guys are posting though, HN is great!

Fuck you facebook...

<comment><USER7> If you're looking for some work in this area please send me an email through my site, <http://mastermatchmakers.com>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> That's a big bummer! I was going to run a project on their API in about six weeks. :(. Also surprising given their announcement at acquisition they would support existing developers. Anybody knows of a replacement? How hard is it to set up opencv? And how well will it work? I assume for the 60 million they must have some pretty good tech at face.com.

<comment><USER9> Take the occasion to start using open source software that you control instead of a fragile web API controlled by someone else.

<comment><USER10> Face detection is one of those things that gets better the more examples you have. There's an incentive for it to centralize.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _sigh_. I had just ported over one of my sites to their API and was superhappy to have it back online (it was offline before when I relied on opencv but then the only host supporting that shut down).

And only a 30 day notice? For shame. Are there any worthy alternatives? Maybe even some I can pay so maybe they stick around longer?

</comment><comment><USER12> Wee! Time to work in an open solution. I just bought "face-alt.org" (launchrock ready soon)

My idea is start with a similar API for face detection using Viola-Jones OpenCV algorithm fork (available in GitHub) and reduce the false positive/negative rate.

NO business-model, only donate for AWS service cost.

"Nature makes its way"

</comment><comment><USER13> Welcome to the wonderful world of closed source with "Open APIs".

</comment><comment><USER14> I so needed this service. When I heard the news they were acquired by Facebook, I knew it would come to that. It's really a shame. Facebook is starting to worry me. If they start to buy and digest every innovative service out there, thus preventing others to innovate in the process, they start to look more and more like a black hole and it's scary.

<comment><USER15> I don't know. I think this will spur innovation that facebook couldn't possibly buy all of. People will be more likely to avoid building a core experience around a free service and instead either; innovate on their own and learn what is needed if it is really their dream or use an established open source platform if a sufficient solution exists. One downside to some open source projects is that they are meant to be flexible to a lot of use cases so you get a lot of subjective bloat with respect to your use case. But in the early stages, if the api is only a side show but main enabler to the key idea, it's still worth it to ignore the "bloat".

Our society/economy is currently not advanced enough to support free services nor are there many options to hide/divert costs sufficiently as not to matter. Eventually any free service must come to an end.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> We can feel the pain -- I know a lot of people who are using that API. I've won a few hackathons using it myself.

Thankfully, we're making an -- eventually open-source -- alternative to Face.com's REST API:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4211271>

<comment><USER6> I signed up for your beta. What features do you plan on offering? Even if you give your code away for free, I bet you could charge some money for access to an easy to use REST API for whatever you come up with.

<comment><USER16> It's going to be a freemium model--unlike Face.com which didn't even have a paid option. I think there could be some advantages to having an openly developed algorithm in the background, mainly so you could embed the project where a REST API would be unwieldy (low bandwidth / low connectivity environments).

<comment><USER6> That sounds good, I think freemium is the way to go. When I first found face.com I thought to myself that I would have no problem paying for their service. I am definitely interested in your project. And I think developing in the open will be hugely helpful.

For my purposes though the REST API is what's more useful since my problem is not connectivity or bandwidth but processing power. Right now my software is running on a Raspberry Pi which can just barely run motion for capturing the pictures, I would need a real computer to run a full OpenCV install. That is why the face.com API suited my needs so well.

Are you planning on offering facial recognition along with the face detection or just focusing on face detection for now?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> We developed a GPU-accelerated fast face detection using Viola-Jones. If there is enough interest we can expose it as a web API. Contact me if you interested.

</comment><comment><USER18> Should be a good opportunity for some new guy to come out with a Face recognition API. I was doing some work and we compared their recognition results with some of the opensource toolkits and also with our own proprietary algo. Face.com's recognition rates were not that extra ordinary. So lets see if someone takes advantage of this opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER19> that's so bad. I know many products empower their products with face API. Now they are shutting down their core feature. It made me understand that we shouldn't rely on commercial stuff and build technologies upon open source software once again. At least this way, things keep running instead shutting down because of business choices.

</comment><comment><USER20> TL;DR: don't build upon other companies APIs.

<comment><USER21> I disagree, at least for startups using infrastructure like this.

A startup testing some sort of hypothesis about a product or a market should get it out in front of people as soon as possible, and that should include using things like this. If they shut down, they shut down.

By that point, if you find some sort of product/market fit, you can always build your own face recognition, or switch to an alternate provider. If your product is a bust, then who cares if the API is gone?

Either way, there's no sense in a startup spending time building anything until it becomes the very highest-value thing they can do. There should be too many novel, risky hypotheses to test to worry about testing the one like "our team can build an adequate facial recognition service."

<comment><USER20> Point taken, if you have a plan B, why not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I had a demo of this api in a few weeks. luckily face.com is allowing developers to extend access beyond the initial date it has set forth. to apply go here: <http://developers.face.com/extension-request/> you have to be logged in.

</comment><comment><USER23> I'm a research scientist at Cognitec. We've been around for over ten years now (just celebrated our tenth anniversary in June).

If you're interested in face recognition, I suggest checking us out. We offer an SDK rather than an API usually with a two month free trial. More hassle, but less worry that an API will suddenly shut down with no warning.

</comment><comment><USER24> My thoughts on 3rd Party APIs - Can't Live With or Without Them <http://syedasifiqbal.com/post/26722039475/3rd-party-api>

</comment><comment><USER25> But what will we do without [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gnmngbknombiopoggi...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gnmngbknombiopoggilgiebonllnndhp) ? :-(

</comment><comment><USER12> <http://signup.face-alt.org> launchrock-site Up!

Meanwhile, I'm already working in the first REST API iteration for face detection using OpenCV.

<comment><USER6> are you planning on doing just face detection or actual facial recognition?

<comment><USER12> I need a face detection API ASAP but I hope add facial recognition soon. This project is free and open to everyone who wants contribute it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> There's another alternative which claim to do face detection (not recognition) and more coming up soon <http://sightborg.com>.

</comment><comment><USER27> i see face.com is giving extensions to devs who ask for it (i did, thanks @face)

i hope it'll be back on graph, too good to let go...

</comment><comment><USER28> it was only a matter of time they would do. If a company is sold off, they would no longer support their existing API users

</comment><comment><USER12> It's time to make an alternative face.com

<comment><USER29> There is an alternative from Betaface, and it is also free for non-commercial apps: <http://www.betafaceapi.com> <http://www.betafaceapi.com/service.svc/help>

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Do you know any good alternatives?

</comment><comment><USER31> I have to remove and Android and an IOS because of the api shutdown. Kinda sucks.

</comment><comment><USER32> eggs and basket analogy applies here.</comment>


Prototype augmented reality display with per-pixel mutual occlusion capability - <AUTHOR> https://www.osapublishing.org/oe/abstract.cfm?uri=oe-25-24-30539#Abstract <comment><USER2> A.) God bless Thor labs and all of their fanciful lab snacks. Saved my life on a few occosions.

B.) I've had a few beers so if you're not in the mood for a minor AR-centric rant, this comment isn't for you. For the love of god, virtual-to-real object occlusion (i.e. a l Flying elephant looking like a solid in front of my buddy sam) is 1% of the occlusion problem (and really IMO, is not going to have hardly any affect on the overall success of AR in the nearterm. What does matter is dynamic real-to-virtual object occlusion (i.e. waving my hand in between my eye and the flying elephant without my hand dissappearing behind the elephant). This problem hardly ever gets attention, but in addition to narrow vert/horizontal FOV, it's the leading culprit for giving users a lackluster and less valuable AR experience.

Secret letter to magic leap: please please please have that problem solved before you release your product. If you occlude, reality will exude (as long as you have total FOV filling your frames that is). If you don't have these figured out. I don't want your product (and I bet nobody else will either). On the other hand, have these features, and you will see exceptional adoption.

<comment><USER2> _a flying_ effect</comment></comment>


Ask HN - What is the best way to reach out to Enterprise/SMB customers? - <AUTHOR>

Let's say we are working on an application for small businesses & enterprises.
Now we want to approach various businesses to sign them up as our customers.
What is the best way to do so?
Which forums are the best place to get in touch with them?
I am sure many entrepreneurs here must have done a lot of leg work. Any advice/help will be very helpful. <comment><USER5> Here are my 2 cents:

When you have product/market fit -> you'd do the 'traditional' thing - <USER2> Gartner reviews, trade shows, marketing etc - All that requires big money - significant investment

The interesting part though is when you are in the early/seed stages - <USER3> that's the hard problem to solve for. You are iterating, trying different things - perhaps testing different verticals.

The way we've solved that at Kormox is doing it through 'insiders' - we'd build a spreadsheet of target companies (say 300, focused on a specific vertical), then identify who we'd want to talk to (say, Johnnh Smith, CIO) - then, identify internal people in the company that have nothing to do with the CIO but you have a good change in getting 10 minutes of their time. We particularly used alumni networks - e.g. Wharton, McKinsey, Stanford GSB, etc etc.

Then you reach out to those insiders asking for 10 minutes of their time - <USER4> to sell anything, rather to get their advice/pick their brain on how you can reach out to relevant person to get opinions on your startup (you can mention you think Johnny Smith would be the right person).

It has worked really well for us. Typically those insiders would do an intro - and Johnny Smith would be happy to meet with you in that way.

We've been able to do this at scale pretty successfully.

<comment><AUTHOR> @PabloOsinaga - thanks. Getting connections via alumni is a cool advice. I wish there was a social network to connect with Alumni.

Also, do you think that contacting Fortune 500 companies will be a better way to go. If not, do you know where to find a list of SMBs that we can target?

<comment><USER5> Not sure - it really depends what you are trying to do. The problem we are attacking at Kormox is really a 'Fortune 500' one - which requires an enterprise sales cycle. But I am not sure what you guys are up to...

<comment><AUTHOR> We are building a knowledge management platform that complements Box.com. Box.com is providing solutions to SMBs as well as Fortune 500.

I am not sure where to get a list of SMBs that we can talk to - to get initial reviews & feedback. Will look around.

Again - thanks a lot for your advice.

<comment><USER6> Just a thought, might Box.com have an SMB list they share with their partners/add-on developers?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> _Let's say we are working on an application for small businesses & enterprises._

If that's what you're saying, then you've already failed. The fact that your application is for both SMB and enterprise customers means you lack customer- based focus and probably don't know who your customer is. Pick a smaller sub- set of customers and focus on that.

<comment><AUTHOR> The app we are trying to build is a complement to Box.com (that offers solutions to SMBs as well as enterprises)

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> You've probably looked already but I think there is a lot of good advice on enterprise sales on the smart bear blog

<http://blog.asmartbear.com/>

From what I know (mostly reading rather than personal experience) selling the Small business and selling to enterprise are very different and require different approaches. Ie, SEO and a landing page with pricing and sign up vs. a sales team, no pricing anywhere on your site and long sales cycles. You may need to pick whichever one you think you can be most successful with at first and concentrate on that.

<comment><AUTHOR> @robinwarren thanks a lot for the link!

I agree that selling to SMBs and Enterprises are very different approaches.

We are still in the customer development phase ([http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/what-is- custome...](http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/11/what-is-customer- development.html)) and really want to "get out of the building" to start learning about whether our assumptions are right.

I am not really sure how to approach the organizations. Is face-to-face a better option or online networking is better?

<comment><USER9> I don't think it's hard. Have a think about the kinds of customers you would like and then make a list of companies that match your assumptions. Phone them up and say you have a new product that might be of interest and could you come and show it. Maybe 10% will be interested. Go and visit them and listen hard to what they do/don't like about your ideas.

You'll learn one of three things: a) your product could be a good fit for them with some iteration or b) your assumptions about the types of customers you want is wrong or c) your idea stinks.

Deciding between these is up to you :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, great advice.

However, phoning them up generally connects us to their customer helpline. What is the best way to reach the right person within that organization of >50 people?

<comment><USER9> Don't phone customer support, phone the main switchboard and ask the name of the person in the relevant department. If you're building a sales tool then ask for the head of sales. Depending on the size of the organisation you might get batted down to a lower level but it's up to you to hustle upwards once you're there. The main thing is if you're looking for validation then get the product in front of the people who will be using it, not their procurement or IT department. Get the target users emotionally engaged and then they will help you run the gauntlet of pricing and tech with the other departments.

<comment><AUTHOR> @iand - great, thanks for your advice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If you have a product that fits on a Gartner "magic quadrant", figure out what analyst writes it and get real friendly with that person.

Otherwise, you need a way to sell to the Executive level folks (ie. sell like IBM and Oracle). If you operate in or have access to the social stratum of corporate bigwigs, use that. Otherwise, you can hire $$$ salesfolk who have that access, or target mid-level managers and play the procurement game.

If you are interested in government... Find a lobbyist with a clue.

</comment><comment><USER11> It's hard to give a blanket answer.

Some organizations have had very good success with marketing channels such as SEO, cold calls and trade shows. I can also tell you stories of people who are very disappointed with the investments they've made in all of those channels.

</comment><comment><USER12> Enterprise... try to get a positive review by Gartner or CIO Today. Expect sales cycles measured in months if not years. There's a reason not a lot of small startups sell to the enterprise, it's like trying to pick the apples at the top of the tree. You're just starting out, go for the low hanging fruit and establish some good customers/references.

</comment><comment><USER13> Patio11 had a sort of talk on this recently, but I'll recap what I think is perhaps the most relevant to this situation:

Start with 'small enterprise'. If you have even one smallish company that you can get in the door in, use that as a resume booster for a slightly larger company, and keep parlaying that success, each time seeking a slightly bigger customer than the one you just landed.

As ams6110 mentioned, don't expect a short sales cycle, and factor that into the cost of your product. Also, the sales process if VERY high touch. If it's an expensive product, expect to have to schmooze clients with dinner and repeated meetings with growing audiences. Don't mistake progressive meetings and schmoozing for progress. Do understand the cost of buying dinners and hiring sales people to chase one big customer for 6 months at a time with the expectation of not landing the customer.

Simply put, it's elephant hunting. You have to be very patient, invest in very expensive tools, and will likely come home empty with each expedition. This is also why Enterprise software tends to be so expensive, in that it has to recoup all the costs from failed sales on every successful sale.

Lastly, expect to be nickeled and dimed (especially if you're talking federal enterprise), and don't expect to be paid promptly.

<comment><AUTHOR> @bmelton - I agree. We are going to first target the small enterprises. Thanks for you advice.</comment></comment>


Microsoft's Windows 7 Blog: Our Next Engineering Milestone - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/2009/01/30/our-next-engineering-milestone.aspx <comment><USER2> I enjoy ragging on Windows as much as the next guy, but this post reminded me how much of an accomplishment Windows really is. Few software projects need to deal with such a huge range of compatibility issues between hardware and software dating back nearly twenty years. Certainly no easy task.</comment>


Show HN: Puzzle Tradr – A classifieds website to trade puzzles - <AUTHOR> https://www.puzzletradr.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Before I dive in, I wanted to wish everyone well during these tough times. I hope you and those closest to you are all staying healthy and safe.

Hi Hacker News! I'm a first time Show: HN poster here with a lightweight MVP for trading puzzles.

Given the amount of time we are all spending indoors and with puzzle sales through the roof, I thought it would be useful to build a classifieds site for trading puzzles locally or across states in the US. It is mainly inspired by friends and family who post puzzles on their Instagram stories non-stop and this NPR article: [https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live- updates/2020/0...](https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live- updates/2020/04/13/833346707/with-people-stuck-at-home-jigsaw-puzzle-sales- soar).

I've tried to keep things as simple as possible for this initial launch - stripping out a lot of functionality from the Classima WordPress theme. My hope is that I can gauge interest and gather some tangible feedback before sinking more time into it.

If you're curious about the under the hood stuff and costs, check out the info below: \- WordPress 5.4.1 (hosted on SiteGround). $0.99/month for the first 3 months! \- Classima theme (Classified Listing PRO). $40 \- Google Domains. $12 \- Logo from Hatchful by Shopify. Free

Huge shoutout to my sister and buddy Alvin for their time spent testing/giving feedback. And of course, my girlfriend for her encouragement and push to get it out as soon as possible.

I'm all ears for constructive feedback or improvements, so please let me know what you think :)</comment>


Improved user experience needed to save Symbian - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2010/07/improved-user-experience-needed-to-save-symbian.ars

<comment><AUTHOR> The criticism to ars that I have is: Selling a rundown house is going to be an uphill battle, even if the plumbing is the most amazing in the city.

It could be as much as hiring more front-end developers and having those developers dictate how multitasking should work, etc.</comment>


Ask HN: If a previous startup failed with your same idea, is that a bad sign? - <AUTHOR> The app we are currently wanting to develop has competitors, but none of them have any traction on the app store. Hardly any downloads or reviews.
Is this a sign that no one wants this type of app or is this a sign that they failed due to not enough people knowing it exists (bad marketing)?
Also, what percent of a startups (let's say app company) success is reliant on marketing? <comment><USER2> > Is this a sign that no one wants this type of app or is this a sign that > they failed due to not enough people knowing it exists (bad marketing)?

You tell us. This is your niche, you should get to know it better than any of us do. Use the apps, see if they have issues. See if there is interest for a better app than what currently exists.

<comment><USER3> Was about to say almost the same thing. Without knowing the market, the app, the competition, the question can't be answered correctly. However, I would not take that one or two apps failed as a definitive sign there is no market. There could have been other forces at play such as timing, budget, quality of app, marketing, etc.. that all resulted in their failure.

As for the second question as to what percent of an app startup's success is tied to marketing? The answer would be 100%. That marketing can be as simple as telling your circle of friends and convincing them to tell their friends, but it has to start somewhere. A basic website, reaching out to bloggers/reporters, telling friends and family, that is all marketing. Without some form of marketing it will never succeed because nobody will ever hear about your app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There are many, many reasons that a startup may have failed (or is failing) and there still may be a product-market fit.

Some products & markets require you to go out and get users more than others, and they may not have done that.

It's on a case by case basis, just be sure to get validation for your project. Make sure that you're making something people actually want, and if they want it, how much they will pay for it. Can't stress it enough how important it is to go out and talk to potential customers, ideally hundreds, and figure out if they'll pay and tell their friends about it.

Marketing is important -- having a good landing/marketing page, getting press, etc. But at the end of the day the product is what will create retention. Looks get the first date, but your personality is what will get you the 8th date.

</comment><comment><USER5> We can't really answer this question for you. You might spend some time reading startup post mortems. They typically include some analysis. Then, in cases where they get real discussion here, read the discussion. Don't assume that the people who failed know all the reasons they failed.

Edison made thousands of light bulbs that didn't work before finally making one that did work. There are a great many ways to fail. Their failure does not necessarily indicate anything about the odds of your product. It depends on a great many factors. Given that you have not linked to your thing or theirs and haven't even told us generally what you are making, this question is just way too vague. And perhaps that is part of your problem generally.

</comment><comment><USER6> > _Also, what percent of a startups (let 's say app company) success is > reliant on marketing?_

This really depends on the vertical. Generally speaking, the less reliant on paid marketing you are, the better. Truly excellent apps market themselves. If you're entering into a niche vertical however, having to deal with marketing will probably be an unavoidable fact of life.

As far as competitors, it's almost always a bad idea to fret over the competition even if they're established. In this case they clearly aren't, so your only worry is whether to take heed of the fact that all of your potential competitors are basically dead on arrival.

As the other comments say, this really boils down to your judgement. Check out the other apps yourself, see how similar they are to your own execution ideas. If they're identical, you may have a problem.

</comment><comment><USER7> I think the bigger issue is just relying on an app. Most apps are a few dollars. You will not be able to sustain a steady paycheck with this kind of business model.

Apps should be a freebie (not literally free in all cases, but cheap) that is merely a hook/marketing channel for your business.

</comment><comment><USER8> Does your app do something useful or is it a game? If it does something useful, do you or your company find it useful? Do you use it? Have you found earlyvangelists? Why do they like your product better than the competition? I put together this free risk calculator [http://stts.us/StartupRiskCalculator](http://stts.us/StartupRiskCalculator) that asks you to rate 9 strategic risk factors. The accompanying article explains each in more detail. The above questions focus on the first and most important factor, but the other 8 may be of use as well.</comment>


Can India replace China as world's factory? - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-52672510 <comment><USER2> I hope it does not, definitely not along this route.

"Some Indian states have stripped away laws that gave labourers basic protections"

I feel really sad that press reports this instead of strongly protesting/criticizing such measures. It does feel like we have not learned our lessons and continue to place corporations ahead of people even after this pandemic.

<comment><USER3> What do you mean by reporting this _instead_ of criticizing such measures? They can't criticize without reporting what it is they criticize, and they do criticize it:

"India has to follow better standards. These are white board ideas drafted on Powerpoint by bureaucrats who are completely divorced from the reality of global trade."

<comment><USER2> "But such decisions could become counterproductive and hurt rather than help", it makes me feel that they are only worried because it could hurt that plan but not as an intrinsic concern to uphold the rights of people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> No;

China is exporting inexpensive and good quality goods;

India cannot do that due to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant) Leadership and [https://archive.vn/YXDP8](https://archive.vn/YXDP8)</comment>