The Internet and the Third Estate - <AUTHOR> https://stratechery.com/2019/the-internet-and-the-third-estate/ <comment><USER3> > "China is building its own internet focused on very different values, and is > now exporting their vision of the internet to other countries. Until > recently, the internet in almost every country outside China has been > defined by American platforms with strong free expression values. _There's > no guarantee these values will win out._ A decade ago, almost all of the > major internet platforms were American. Today, six of the top ten are > Chinese."

(Quoting Zuckerberg)

I'm pleasantly surprised to hear Zuckerberg articulate this thought. It's something I've thought about a lot over the past decade or so. At one time it seemed investable that key American values like free speech would become universal. We thought our engagement with China and the Middle East would hasten adoption of our culture and values. That future is far from certain now. Americans need to think really hard about what kind of world they want their kids to grow up in.

<comment><USER4> > I'm pleasantly surprised to hear Zuckerberg articulate this thought.

I'm pleasantly surprised that people are waking up to this problem, but disappointed as hell that what they are waking up to is not the problem - <USER2> rather, the disruption of the status quo.

To the rest of the world, American values, media, culture, etc, being the dominant shaping force on the internet (And before that, through literature, television, film, etc) was cultural imperialism, that has shifted discourse, starved local culture, and, in short, was Americanizing the world. [1]

Americans now feel threatened by China's cultural weight being thrown around in this space. Okay. You don't like China using the same mechanisms that you used in the past, to broadcast and spread your mono-culture.

But instead of taking a moment to self-reflect, about whether it is good for the world to have an 800-pound cultural gorilla warping discourse, culture, and media around the world...

... We are upset that _we_ stopped being that gorilla! It's more than a little hypocritical and peevish.

[1] Talk to a Canadian sometime, and ask them about Canadian culture, versus American culture - in the media sense. You'll find there to be very little of the former left, despite the government's best efforts to promote, and develop it.

<comment><USER5> The difference is that with American cultural values the freedom to criticize them remains. The option exists to say "I don't care for the US's culture or values".

I fear the concept of an internet where posts are censored and police arrive at your door for the wrong opinion.

<comment><USER4> The option also exists to say "I don't care for China's culture of values", you just have to not worry about selling your media there.

You're speaking from an incredible position of privilege - from the point of view of a net exporter of culture. Countries that were net importers of culture never had this concern.

Nobody in Germany would care about this sort of thing, for instance, because, I am sorry to say, nobody outside of Germany consumes German culture. Nobody in Germany needs to tailor their speech to not offend China, because nobody in China cares to listen to what they, their films, or their sports teams have to say.

This whole thing is uniquely an American problem - and you're discovering what it feels like to have your culture be shaped by the orthodoxies of a foreign set of values. It sucks, but that's how the rest of the world has had to operate for a long, long time.

<comment><USER6> _nobody outside of Germany consumes German culture_

Everyone in the world that listens to electronic music would like to disagree with you.

<comment><USER7> House and Techno are from Chicago and Detroit respectively.

<comment><USER6> Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter would like to have a word with you.

<comment><USER8> electronic music != house or techno. kraftwerk early stuff does not sound like house or techno.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Thompson has recently been on a tear. Two of his recent articles (this and China Cultural Clash [0]) are some of his best writing yet. Actually, I'd say they are some of his best _thinking_ yet.

Whether you agree with him or not, I think it is clear that he is asking the right questions, at a time when most people are not. More than even asking the right questions, I think he is seeing much more clearly, and forwardly, than is common.

I'm not sure I agree with all of his framing. For example, I'm not sure I agree that the invention of the printing press directly lead to nation states 450 years later. However, there is definitely more than a nugget of truth in his framing of the future, here. I think hindsight will judge him quite well, in more than just technology.

[0] - [https://stratechery.com/2019/the-china-cultural- clash/](https://stratechery.com/2019/the-china-cultural-clash/)

</comment><comment><USER10> Another great piece. The world is changing, in the same way that the printing press caused change, people to break away from the control of the church. For many years it has been American views of freedom of the press that had a lot of sway in the world.

> And then China is building its own internet focused on very different > values, and is now exporting their vision of the internet to other > countries. ... There's no guarantee [American notions of free speech] ... > values will win out. A decade ago, almost all of the major internet > platforms were American. Today, six of the top ten are Chinese.

> We're beginning to see this in social media. While our services, like > WhatsApp, are used by protesters and activists everywhere due to strong > encryption and privacy protections, on TikTok, the Chinese app growing > quickly around the world, mentions of these protests are censored, even in > the US.

Scary to think that China can force censorship here via TikTok. I'm not a tiktok user, but that's terrifying. Hidden, defacto commercial censorship.

(edited to remove the > on the last thing above, that was my comment)

<comment><USER11> There is hidden and overt censorship. I actually find it absurd that we allow our children to use social media software developed by a hostile foreign power.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ben Thompson continues to amaze. Pointing out the pointlessness of controlling the impact of tech by limiting Facebook's influence is important. Authoritarian China's biggest advantage is its ability to pick winners and multiply their impact by leveraging how decisive their decision making can be. Where this fails is at finding local maximums. The winners China picks will be the best of what's available right now, which for a while has often been a Chinese clone of what's working in America, adapted to local preferences.

America's startup culture and competitiveness is our biggest advantage, and so I wish the US and EU would do more to force tech. companies to fight it out instead of picking winners by regulating the industry and controlling what Facebook and Google can do. Instead of just putting cumbersome regulations like the GDPR around user data, also dictate companies above a certain size have to have open APIs and easily exportable/programmatically accessible user data. Obviously this must be balanced by granular controls, but how can upstarts be incumbents when the data moats are so large. The APIs of Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. are pretty abysmal and continue to become worse with no punishment. Yet, that programmatic access to data is probably the only way an upstart could compete outside of a complete paradigm shift.

<comment><USER13> > America's startup culture and competitiveness is our biggest advantage

It's not an advantage against China though when they can do both of:

\- Block US apps from the Chinese market \- Encourage wholesale copying of the best features from US companies

If I were to start a FB clone of <insert any social app> in the US, it would fail miserably. China can ban the US version and simultaneously fund a clone for the Chinese market. Combined with the fact that Chinese networks (e.g. TikTok) have full access to the US market, this makes competition very asymmetric.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The "fifth estate" usage as referencing bloggers long predates any recent social media apologia.

Wikipedia article history shows the reference already by 2009:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fifth_Estate&oldi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fifth_Estate&oldid=308845816)

It cites Stephen D Cooper (2006). _Watching the Watchdog: Bloggers as the Fifth Estate_. Marquette Books. ISBN 0922993475.

It's possible that there are yet other estates to be discovered:

[https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102989723532565277](https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/102989723532565277)

And of course there was the 2013 film of the same title:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Estate_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fifth_Estate_\(film\))

</comment><comment><USER15> Generally I think Zuckerberg is correct, Facebook is very powerful no doubt. But that power is vested upon by it's users.

There clearly was a lot of misinformation going around during the 2016 election and at some point we have to look back on ourselves and ask: "why are we so gullible"? There is a balance between Facebook moderating it's platform and controlling speech and I think we are near that line.

Labeling articles as misleading or doing some fact checks along with making sure that there are no bots and extreme hate speech is near the limit of my expectations of what a platform should do in terms of moderation.

</comment><comment><USER16> > Europe's Three Estates

Wikipedia says the same in the context of the press as the fourth estate, and I think it's wrong, at least from a German point of view.

While it is correct that the medieval Estates (or "Stände") were the nobility, the clergy and the people, nobody has ever called the press the fourth "Stand".

The press is the fourth "Gewalt" (or "Power"), and that is a clear reference to the three powers in the state: the legislature, the executive and the legislature.

It's interesting how those two trinities mix with the press in different languages and societies.

<comment><USER17> > nobody has ever called the press the fourth "Stand".

Because unlike in the UK, the press as a Gewalt in a political system with Gewaltenteilung (division of power), appeared only after the society divided in estates (Ständegesellschaft) ceased to be. It's a timeline issue.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I find it incredibly ironic that Mark Zuckerberg claims that the 5th estate he helped create has no gatekeepers. In fact, Facebook finds itself the largest gatekeeper of speech the world has ever known. How our society deemed it fair and prudent to allow a private corporation to 'moderate' and prioritize billions of communications a day... that I'll never understand.

</comment><comment><USER14> There's a glaring issue with Ben Thompson's essay, in that so far as I'm aware there is _no_ independent US tradition of "estates" independent of either Continental or British European formulation. Rather, there are the three _Constitutional_ branches of government, the legislative, executive, and judicial. One can find informal references to fourth (and occasionally higher) _branches of government_. But not "estates" as such, within the US.

Otherwise, you _will_ find frequent usage of "fourth estate" in the traditional European sense, almost always referencing the press.

See:

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

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22united+states%22+%22fourth+esta...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22united+states%22+%22fourth+estate%22&ia=about)

I'm trying to decide if this is a major or minor flaw with Thompson's essay. Either way, the claim without reference suggests a sloppyness or lack of diligence, which calls into question his larger points.

And there are certainly questions to be asked. The claim that the so-called Fifth Estate is free of gatekeepers is specious, as Jon Evans pointed out at TechCrunch (posted yesterday to HN: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21306086](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21306086)): Facebook isn't free speech, it's algorithmic amplification optimized for outrage.

Whether the gatekeeping is one of blocking specific types of content, or amplifying others to the point that unwanted messages are completely drowned out really doesn't much matter. Attention, individual or collective, is finite, and whatever means are used to deny it, the end effect is the same: a message is lost.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's an excellent read and gives me much to think about. In particular, I need to reassess my understanding of Facebook's role in political discourse.

</comment><comment><USER20> >It's also a framing that is, appropriately enough, uniquely American; in the United States, the first three estates are commonly thought to be the three branches of government: the executive, legislative, and judicial.

The author of this article may have misunderstood it this way but I guarantee that this is not commonly thought in the United States.

<comment><USER14> In the US, the press is occasionally referred to as the _fourth branch of government_ (after the legislative, executive, and judiciary). Occasionally others are proposed: lobbyists, special interests, the intelligence services.

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

<comment><USER20> That's a different term used to mean entirely different things.

<comment><USER14> My point is that Ben Thompson seems to have confused the terms "fourth branch" and "fourth estate" in his essay.

Which is not among his better ones.

The usage of "branches of government", the three Constitutional ones (leg, exec, judicial), and various others generally posited as a fourth, or occasionally higher, branch. See:

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

I'm entirely unfamiliar with a notion of _estates_ in the US independent of Continental or British traditions. That seems to be a novel creation, or mis- remembering, of Thompson.

DDG finds nothing aside from the European usage under fourth/fifth estate, specific to the US:

[https://duckduckgo.com/?q="united+states"+"fourth+estate"&ia...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q="united+states"+"fourth+estate"&ia=about)

<comment><USER20> Estates are real and they aren't branches of government - more like divisions of society. I agree regarding the confusion in the essay.

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

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The discussion of the press reminds me of the propaganda model of media [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model)

</comment><comment><USER22> > The third concern is what has dominated the news cycle as of late: > Facebook's decision to not fact-check any posts or ads from politicians. > This is largely being framed as aiding President Trump in particular, which > is probably both true and also an unsurprising complaint from the Second > Estate used to having monopoly control over fact-checking.

Does he mean the American second estate, i.e. the legislative branch? Or does he mean the Nobility?

And what does he mean by Monopoly Control?

And what is he trying to imply with the word "unsurprising" here?

<comment><USER23> I think he means the European second state, the one after the church-backed monarch state, i.e. nation state. (I also think his use of the nth-state analogy is slightly is confusing).

I think he is referring to the media establishment's (i.e. TV news) monopoly over fact checking. and it's unsurprising because of course they would like to keep that same power they had before the internet

<comment><USER22> Isn't the media the fourth estate?

I can't find any way to interpret this excerpt such that it makes sense.

How does anyone have "monopoly control over fact checking"?

And I also can't think of a way to favorably interpret that statement, given that I consider fact-checking to be an integral component of any information dissemination system.

Like many of Ben Thompson's articles, I find his ideas here compelling, but I also find myself feeling like he's an industry apologist and it clouds his thinking/makes him myopic.

<comment><USER12> I think he made a logical leap based around the US political parties and wealthy elites' influence over the fourth estate - sanctioned political debates on CNN, sources of information with perceived authority such as Fox News, etc. While I also think it's explained poorly, there may be a connection here to his point about the largest advertisers (politician and large corporations) who fund the media which is meant to check them.

<comment><USER22> That seems like a lot of hand-waving to me.

> this was the context for Edmund Burke's remarks in 1787 that "There are > Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there > sits a Fourth Estate more important far than they all."

There's this quote early in the article about the Fourth Estate being the most powerful, and yet by the end I'm supposed to assume all these things to accept this claim that "monopoly control" of the Second Estate exists on fact- checking?

What I actually see is an article where someone started with a conclusion (that some sort of free-market/libertarianism/lassaiz-faire/whatever brand of let tech companies do whatever they want is The Way) and then spent a lot of time thinking about how to reach it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> > The third concern is what has dominated the news cycle as of late: > Facebook's decision to not fact-check any posts or ads from politicians. > This is largely being framed as aiding President Trump in particular, which > is probably both true and also an unsurprising complaint from the Second > Estate used to having monopoly control over fact-checking.

> The broader issue is that the third concern and first concern are so clearly > in direct opposition to each other. If Facebook has the potential for > immense influence on politics, why on earth would anyone want the company > policing political speech?

Maybe because they're fact-checking lots of other things to promote themselves as a platform you can find facts on? I don't know, I'd think if there was any ostensible non-partisan shared value in a democracy, it'd be a desire for factual information. Spun and biased, sure, but fundamentally factual. (In reality, I don't think this is true anymore, at least from the head of the executive branch and his sycophants, but this shared value is not irreparably broken nationwide.) If Facebook isn't going to fact-check anything, then that's one thing, but if they're going to fact-check some things, it's far from unreasonable for them to fact-check political ads.</comment>


Survival of the richest: The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/11/survival-of-the-richest-the-wealthy-are-plotting-to-leave-us-behind.html <comment><USER2> > _They are simply accepting the darkest of all scenarios and then bringing > whatever money and technology they can employ to insulate themselves_

It sounds to me like all they're really talking about is feudalism. So if they are convinced that this is the future, then all they need do is look to examples from the past on how to be lord of a fiefdom. It will probably involve building a castle and employing an army.</comment>


Linked lists with wait-free reads in C++ - <AUTHOR> http://concurrencyfreaks.blogspot.com/2014/10/linked-lists-with-wait-free-reads-in-c.html

<comment><USER2> The Userspace RCU [1] library might also be interesting for wait-free linked lists and other RCU aware data structures.

[1] - [http://lttng.org/urcu/](http://lttng.org/urcu/)</comment>


IEEE brings white space Internet one step closer, we almost felt a twinge - <AUTHOR> http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/27/ieee-brings-white-space-internet-one-step-closer-we-almost-felt/

<comment><USER2> I'm certainly not the only one who read that and thought "y'know, it'd be nice to set that up in the first world". If you can provide 22 Mbps connections to a large area wirelessly, you have a business model, right? Plus, it requires laying/leasing almost no cable.

<comment><USER3> You have a pretty marginal business model, because each customer gets less than 1 Mbps and thus is not willing to pay very much. And as cheap as the towers are, they're still expensive enough to eat up your revenue.

<comment><USER2> >because each customer gets less than 1 Mbps

I don't follow? Each tower can presumably broadcast multiple access points.

<comment><USER3> Press releases always quote the total sector bandwidth, and at long range there tend to be a lot of customers per sector. Due to the narrow channels and good propagation, 700 MHz white spaces may end up being worse than 2.4 GHz.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bookshop swaps Kindles for real books - <AUTHOR> http://www.reghardware.com/2011/01/25/microcosm_kindle_swap/

<comment><AUTHOR> While I don't think he'll get very many takers - except maybe people who were given a Kindle for Christmas - this strikes me as a great way of marketing to people who are in the market to buy paper books, but might have bought them from a larger retailer (or Amazon!) instead.</comment>


Show HN: Panini AI – A platform to serve ML/DL models at low latency - <AUTHOR> https://panini.ai/ <comment><USER2> This claim (3x faster than TF serving) and the metrics on the site (~500 predictions per second vs ~200 for TF serving) seem more a function of scaling than any technology.

Given that you can horizontally scale model prediction infinitely the only sensible way to compare is to include price.

I agree that this looks compelling while it is free! But will it be price competitive later?

And if price competitiveness is claimed, then how is it possible? Yes, you can do the whole spot instance thing, but that is difficult to make reliable enough at scale.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, both prediction for TF serving and panini serving was done in a single thread in the same specification machine. We used a simple model for image classification of CIFAR dataset. Roughly, 500 predictions were made for panini and 200 predictions for TF serving.

You can always download the entire panini in your own private server and not pay anything. Ie. used Helm to install in your own kubernetes or DockerHub. For now, We're making it free for models under 2GB. Our main goal is to make it usable and we don't want cost to be a factor.

<comment><USER2> So you claim that TF Serving (written in C++ I believe) has over double the overhead compared to Panini?

This seems surprising. What makes it so much faster?

Edit: Unless of course you are hitting the cache for a lot of the predictions?

<comment><AUTHOR> Optimized TF serving would perform similarly to Panini however, it's really hard to find good documentation on optimizing TF serving compilation parameters. Panini automatically finds the right batch size to maximize the throughput and it adaptively changes. We also have a technique to reduce bound tail latency. I would love it for you to try it and provide me some feedback. Thanks

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Is it actually 3x faster, or does it just scale more?

In other words, if I had a model that previously took three seconds to get a response from would this platform respond in one second?

<comment><USER4> We changed the title from "Show HN: 3x Faster Than Tensorflow Serving" to what the page says, which is less baity.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER3> That's definitely an improvement, but I'm hoping someone from the Panini team will step in and clarify regardless.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is so fishy looking on many levels!

It is very hard to believe that deploying your models on GKE is going to be cost saving for anyone involved.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, you don't have to deploy in GKE and it's not GKE that makes it faster. We also give you option to deploy in your own private Kubernetes via Helm or private server via DockerHub. GKE may not be the right option for you depending on your application. Your feedback would be very valuable to us. Please tell me why you think its fishy? We're always tryiing to make it better.

<comment><USER3> It sounds super fishy, especially since you won't answer the question above confirming whether you're talking about latency or throughput.

Google has also dumped a lot into tensorflow serve, so if you are outperforming it by that much it would be great to know how.

<comment><AUTHOR> Sorry, I should've been more clear. Both predictions for TF serving and panini serving was done in a single thread in the same specification machine. We used a simple model for image classification of CIFAR dataset. Roughly, 500 predictions were made for panini and 200 predictions for TF serving. The graph on the website is for throughput. I'm planning to write a medium post soon regarding the benchmark test. There are many other projects getting higher throughput compare to TF serving. I've heard TF Serving could be optimized to make it more efficient but making it more optimized is not documented properly. We're planning to make it open source if there is enough interest from the community!

<comment><USER6> What is your business model if your platform is free? Either that price has to change, or you plan on making money on the same thing all other free services run on: data.

The site isn't very upfront about it, which is the sketchy part. Other than that, it looks much more straight forward than other options (I did watch the youtube tutorial). I like the idea, just question the motives.

<comment><AUTHOR> Our platform is free for the beta users to try it with limit of 2GB per model. We are just starting and we haven't decided on our business model yet.

If a user downloads panini to their private server and use it that will always be free since there is not infrastructure cost for us. If you're deploying it in our website we will be charging you to pay for the infrastracture cost.

Our main goal currently is to find out if people find this product useful and if it's worth for us to spend more time working on it. Thanks for watching the YouTube tutorial and if you have further questions, please contact us. Thanks

<comment><USER6> Fair enough, thanks for answering.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Renegotiating Rate with Consulting Firm - <AUTHOR> A local firm is in dire need of developers, but has a terrible reputation as a sweat shop. I took a position at $X an hour for a consulting agency (W2) working on location at the sweat shop. After being on the job for about a month, I discover that other developers of similar or less experience are making 10-15% more on their hourly rate than I am.<p>So the question is; what's the etiquette for asking for a raise in these situations? When signing on I did haggle a bit and got a little better than the initial offer, I had no way of knowing how much room there was to negotiate. The rate I'm currently at was a significant raise for me, but I also don't want to leave any money on the table.  Has anyone else dealt with this? <comment><USER3> You need leverage. That's how you improved the initial offer on signing - because there was the implicit threat you'd not sign. To get another raise you need a credible alternative gig, and to be prepared to walk. You also need to have proved your worth, so they want to keep you.

<comment><USER4> Also, timing. It's best to ask when you have a big responsibility on a project that's just starting up.

And... confidentiality... While compensation transparency is hip these days, I suspect it's not so popular at less 'enlightened' firms. I would make it clear that any raise you get, and your pay rate in general will not be shared.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I look at it like this, your employer thinks "fair" is paying employees the least amount the employee will accept. Negotiating a higher rate doesn't change the nature of that relationship. It's still an arms-length labor versus management context.

In my experience some employees actually like that kind of relationship. Others don't. Decide on what's really valuable to you.

Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER6> You're saying you had significant raise in the rate w/ this contract - <USER2> this as leverage; i.e. do your best at your current role, but passively seek other possible jobs, where you'll be able to kick-off negotiation at least +20-30% from your current rate.

</comment><comment><USER7> work there for about 6 months get a big win on a project then jump.</comment>


Thunderbird 3.1 adds extra spaces to e-mails for four months. Chaos ensues! - <AUTHOR> http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla_messaging/topics/tb_3_1_inserts_space_at_the_start_of_a_sent_message_discussion_of_bugs_in_mozilla_thunderbird

<comment> mike-cardwell This could be the most trivial bug I've ever read about. I like how some of the people commenting are treating it as some sort of major catastrophe.</comment>


This Anime shows what we expect from Google Glass in 12 years - form & function - <AUTHOR> http://glass-apps.org/google-glass-anime <comment><AUTHOR> can you imagine such glasses on 3 years old children?</comment>


Brian Eno: What is art? - <AUTHOR> http://www.factmag.com/2009/01/01/interview-brian-eno/ <comment><USER2> Excellent interview. More than any other figure in music, this guy has managed to not only stay relevant over the years, but really continue to create innovative music. I'm about to begin reading the recently released book Another Green World which I'm pretty excited about.

<comment><AUTHOR> I've not been too excited about most of his recent music, secretly hoping I suppose that he'll wake up one day and make another Warm Jets or Tiger Mountain kind of album.

On the other hand, as big of a fan as I was of the Ramones, I think I stopped buying their albums after about the 4th one. It was pretty much the same stuff, over and over.

But Eno certainly keeps after interesting ideas, asking good questions, and avoiding the rut of getting old.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are clones profitable investments? - <AUTHOR>

Many clones are coming out (Quora, Instagram, Groupon, etc.), I also know VCs founding them.<p>Do you think they could be a profitable investment? <comment><USER2> You mean clones of existing business models? If this path wasn't profitable, Burger King/McDonalds/Jack-in-the-Box couldn't co-exist. I've been really confused by this pervasive idea that seems to be going around that the only way to make money, is to think of something no one has thought of before. If that was true, Google/Starbucks/KrispyKreme/Facebook wouldn't exist. People that create new markets tend to make far less, than people that expand/perfect existing ones.

</comment><comment><USER3> I definitely believe that clones could have a profitable investment, but the hardest part is actually making it come true. Most people don't embrace change too willingly. "Oh another facebook?" even if you mention the small extra features that you have that the original site doesnt.

If you have a good sized number of people who could genuinely use your product (better if its a specific niche), then it would really help. I'd say do thorough research, ask friends and family, and definitely ask a few not so close friends as well for input (close friends and family will try your idea just because they're close to you, not always the best advice).

</comment><comment><USER4> None of the companies you have mentioned have reached any sort of critical mass. Clones in those environments probably have some sort of edge that allows them to gain traction in market segments the biggest companies can't touch.

Take Groupon. For relatively low-margin services, the vig is too high to use it (an OPEN forum discussion suggested that in some circumstances you may end up receiving 10% of retail, so you should either have 90+% margin or hope that yo get repeat customers), and that leaves an opening for companies with a smaller vig (e.g. LivingSocial)

</comment><comment><USER5> The clone can be profitable if you are able to make it appealing enough to a specific niche, because you can then have hyper targeted content and ads. I wouldn't think an exact clone of Quora or Groupon would work, but a version tailored to a specific Groupon niche would be able to have deals more targeted than a general one, and a Quora clone could have ads that appeal to the questions on the pages that are niche-specific. Also, look for ways to mutate and twist the existing version, not just simply clone it completely.

</comment><comment><USER6> There is lots of room for non-primary players in some of those spaces.

A few of them are going to be "winner takes all", but for lots of those segments, there will be many players.

</comment><comment><USER7> Question is "Can you do it better?".

<comment><USER8> That sounds way too absolute. The point is "can you add value?". This doesn't require you to be "better" all across the board, you just got to have a reason why people would choose you instead of your rival. Lots of businesses are basically only different from each other due to the branding (and often the target demographic).</comment></comment>


Data from Experian breach found on the internet - <AUTHOR> https://www.timeslive.co.za/sunday-times/news/2020-09-13-data-from-huge-experian-breach-found-on-the-internet/ <comment><USER2> Given the amount of personal data now being held not only by credit companies, but also big tech, it seems like the liability for data breaches needs adjusted.

If a companies main asset is their data, that means that you can ascribe a value to each person's data that they hold. If your data is stolen, they should be on the hook for value of that data to each of the people whose data was stolen.

They need to stop being able to value the data at the cost of credit protection service on the liability side while booking value significantly higher on their assets ledger. This would encourage them to be much more careful in both protecting the data and mitigating breaches versus the current blase approach.

<comment><USER3> Data is a copyable asset. Most other assets are not.

Any copyable asset is worth zero as long as any copy is in the hands of someone likely to make more copies.

<comment><USER4> There is a lot of case law regarding digital media, such as movies, tv, books, etc, stating that the digital version doesn't lose value despite the ease of copying it.

It's an interesting conundrum that "big business" claims that personal data being copied doesn't necessarily have value, but entertaining data does.

<comment><USER5> It all makes sense if you accept that the purpose of modern intellectual property law is to protect the wealth of the rich from the people they exploited to get rich in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The Experian South Africa CEO has hilariously said [1]: We were not hacked, a clever criminal convinced us to give him our data

[1]: [https://mybroadband.co.za/news/security/364636-we-were- not-h...](https://mybroadband.co.za/news/security/364636-we-were-not-hacked-a- clever-criminal-convinced-us-to-give-him-our-data-experian-sa-ceo.html)

<comment><USER7> Isn't that even worse? Now they would be complicit as they freely gave the data away vs having something stolen. You used the word hilariously. Were you be sarcastic, or did this person mean the statement as a joke?

<comment><USER8> I think the "hilarious" part is how disconnected from reality the CEO must be if they think their quote somehow makes the situation better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "Breached data still breached" \- The only new thing in this article is that someone was stupid enough to believe Experian when they said the data had been "recovered".

<comment><USER10> Reminds me of this: [http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html](http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html)

Try to pay for something with a spider drawing attached to an email, ask for the drawing back afterwards ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> All information will become public on a long enough timeline.

</comment><comment><USER12> Credit bureaus are required to adhere to CCPA now in California. It might be worth making the request to opt out or delete your info:

\- [https://experian.com/ccpa](https://experian.com/ccpa)

\- [https://www.equifax.com/personal/my- privacy/](https://www.equifax.com/personal/my-privacy/)

\- [https://www.transunion.com/consumer- privacy](https://www.transunion.com/consumer-privacy)

</comment><comment><USER13> 'The personal data of millions of South Africans, "stolen" in one of SA's biggest data breaches earlier this year, has been discovered on the internet, despite assurances that the information had been recovered.'

Technically speaking, how do you go about recovering data stored on any amount of copies?

</comment><comment><USER14> Time for my $0.39 check or a year of additional credit monitoring in exchange for my credit history and personal information.

<comment><USER12> Will this change in California now that there's stricter privacy laws? Looks like the fines are much higher:

> \- Companies that become victims of data theft or other data security > breaches can be ordered in civil class action lawsuits to pay statutory > damages between $100 to $750 per California resident and incident, or actual > damages, whichever is greater, and any other relief a court deems proper, > subject to an option of the California Attorney General's Office to > prosecute the company instead of allowing civil suits to be brought against > it (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.150).

> \- A fine up to $7,500 for each intentional violation and $2,500 for each > unintentional violation (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.155).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Ac...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Consumer_Privacy_Act#Sanctions_and_remedies)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24346674](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24346674)

</comment><comment><USER15> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24368557](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24368557)

<comment><USER16> The convention on HN is to link to previous threads only when there are interesting comments there. If readers click on a link like this and don't see that, they'll be disappointed and sometimes come back and downvote the link.</comment></comment>


Rosetta probe discovers sinkholes on comet surface - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2015/07/rosetta-found-sinkholes-comet/

<comment><AUTHOR> Paper from Nature (free to read): [http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14564.epdf?referrer_acc...](http://www.nature.com/articles/nature14564.epdf?referrer_access_token=0Czga70gIvFNLu2CTBfp79RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0MEVlMDt4ZEI0nZQMRTxBAxtcgUtjuVPCiS7xFbekHm24IigdsayuFqUz3GkxQog7pEVg52PvcShLsnU9wPETHtV1ac1J1n_JQpHMvE5XFA4ENPXJUQFUo_FU49X7i8kFCV7IEnIAcaXK8QdsXy4bw9&tracking_referrer=www.wired.com)

</comment><comment><USER2> The "eggs" remind me of the round stones found in glacial mills

[http://www.gletschergarten.ch/Garten.4.0.html](http://www.gletschergarten.ch/Garten.4.0.html) [http://www.igsoc.org:8080/journal/1/9/igs_journal_vol01_issu...](http://www.igsoc.org:8080/journal/1/9/igs_journal_vol01_issue009_pg488-490.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER3> I keep wondering if Philae is going to be blown off the surface by something like one of the geysers that they mention in the paper.

</comment><comment><USER4> Plot twist: They really are dinosaur eggs, launched as debris from Earth during the impact that wiped them out.</comment>


Online calculator for explainer video costs - <AUTHOR> https://explainervideopricing.com <comment><USER2> great website, simple to use and transparent pricing.

</comment><comment><USER3> so helpful, good initiative.</comment>


Technical Debt Is a Good Thing - <AUTHOR> http://logz.io/blog/technical-debt/ <comment><USER2> >Knowing when to release a feature and go into technical debt is one part art and one part science.

let Ward Cunningham itself explain what he thinks about taking shortucts and calling it technical debt [https://youtu.be/pqeJFYwnkjE?t=3m17s](https://youtu.be/pqeJFYwnkjE?t=3m17s)

<comment><USER3> Love the distinction he makes between technical debt (the codified difference of past and present understanding of the way the system should work) and just sloppy code.

In the regard, you can almost say that technical debt is inevitable since understanding of the problem and solution will likely evolve over time with more experience and user feedback.

<comment><USER2> Exactly and that why it's a powerful metaphor of how software development works, especially when explaining iterative programming.

I'll always take a stand when I see it to justify bad practices, bugs and sloppy coding.

Elsewhere in the video also explains why it's not about low quality code: because you need to have a good design and codebase for it to be refactorable, to maintain your development speed as your understanding of the domain/technology grows.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Summary: "Technical debt is not inherently evil. Putting a stop to all development just to fix all the technical debt doesn't make sense: instead, deal with it gradually."

<comment><USER5> Mr Goodwrench said "You can pay me now, or you can pay me later". Like maintaining a car, technical debt is always more expensive to pay later. It should be minimized, and what gets through the sieve should be dealt with as soon as possible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Doesn't work with JS off. Renders as a blank page.

<comment><USER7> Turn off CSS too, works fine.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is not good, it is inevitable.</comment>


Writing Space Invaders in Go - <AUTHOR> https://sausheong.github.io/posts/space-invaders-with-go/ <comment><USER2> Great stuff! But I actually think implementing Space Invaders is much easier if done as a true "bitmap". An array of bits in memory. Rather than a sprite sheet.

Animation is just flipping the bottom rows. Collision detection is pixel precise. Rendering effects can also be optimized.

But the draw to bash shell looks like its running at high frame rate. Could this usher in a new dawn of terminal gaming?

<comment><AUTHOR> You're probably right, I'm just mucking around with various things, didn't really thought too much about optimizing the code. The frame rate on the terminal is basically as fast as iTerm2 can display the image, I can't really control it (except maybe make it slower). It looks rather fast on the GIF because I cut down the number of frames in the GIF, but the actual game runs more reasonably.</comment></comment>


Star Wars' adorable, impossible droid is real: Our impressions - <AUTHOR> http://www.polygon.com/2015/9/3/9255447/star-wars-bb8-sphero-impressions <comment><USER2> Searching for BB-8 on Apple's website results to an XML Akamai Player beacon config.</comment>


Google's official statement on today's phishing attack - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/03/heres-googles-official-statement-on-todays-fast-spreading-phishing-attack/ <comment><USER2> Why not simply link directly to the statement?

[https://twitter.com/googledocs/status/859878989250215937](https://twitter.com/googledocs/status/859878989250215937)</comment>


Brain hardwired to respond to others' itching - <AUTHOR> http://exactlyscience.com/archives/11160.html <comment><USER2> Blogspam of

[https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/brain-hardwired-to- respond-t...](https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/brain-hardwired-to-respond-to- others-itching/)

with author credit removed. Original also has a 3' audio piece.</comment>


Show HN: I made a neural net that analyzes privacy policies - <AUTHOR> https://useguard.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi guys!

So as basis for my thesis on AI and NLP I've been working on a RRN-based text classifier that basically reads and analyzes privacy policies. It understands that "we don't share your data with third parties" is privacy friendly while "we may share your data with anyone" is a potential threat.

I've then created this website with a bunch of analyzed services to showcase the most relevant info about each service along with other interesting stuff like recent data breaches or instructions to delete your account in said service.

Happy to answer Qs about the tech behind, it'd also be great to hear your feedback on what the site lacks and possible improvements!

<comment><USER2> Oh my god thank you so much for doing this !

I think its better (for me as a user) if you don't boil things down to a score as different people expect different things when talking privacy. It would help if you could simply highlight the potential problematic clauses in different privacy statements along with some reason why it might be problematic.

<comment><USER3> I don't agree. I just looked in my password manager, and I have roughly ~220 accounts across the web. If I want to go through that list and see which website rank well and which rank poorly, and I want to do that in under two hours, that gives about 30 seconds per service.

In other words, giving a single score plus a two-sentence highlight is probably about the right amount of information.

<comment> m-p-3 Or make the rank adjustable to some personal criteria that matches different privacy expectations.

<comment><USER4> This would also be helpful in determining how to weight (or not) user feedback in the training portion. I just tried it out (the 10 questions) and there were at least a few I thought, "huh, I know some others would disagree with me on this" because I value X and they value Y more.

Having scores that weight X more than Y would give me more accurate scores, while seemingly also giving other people more accurate scores at the same time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The "game" (training) that asks you to analyse "privacy threats" is a bit strange. It feels like it takes two random excerpts from a privacy policy and asks you to compare them, but with this, it feels like it is missing some global information, you are just looking at local details.

Eg one policy might be disclosing what they do (but its actually relevant to collect data, eg password manager) while the other just says "no we don't collect anything". In this case one feels like its a better option, but its not exactly the same situation, its missing some context. I feel like this could potentially bias ratings.

I'm not sure if you could add in extra information with some of that global information, eg the type of service, classifying different "parts" of the privacy policy etc.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, it's not comparing like for like. Feels like the system is trying to collect training data from users.

To elaborate on your last sentence, context is critical in assessing whether a clause is pro- or anti- privacy. Is the collection of information critical to the provision of the service? What is collected, and how much? And so on.

<comment><USER7> Agreed with parent and gp. I gave up with the 10 questions, as the sentence comparisons were almost comically incomparable. I fear your model is going to be a random number generator.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I'm trying to help teach the AI, but some options don't have to do with privacy at all.

For instance, I got (option A):

      The Games Press Web site can, optionally, store a Cookie on your computer in order to automatically log you into the site on each visit.

and option B:

      Back to Top ^ NO THIRD-PARTY BENEFICIARIES There shall be no third-party beneficiaries to this Agreement.

It would be great to have a skip/flag option for cases like these.

Edit to add:

Some other notes:

      - Mozilla, a tech company I consider ethical, is right down there with Netflix, LinkedIn and Waze
      - The box under "Sentence Breakdown by Risk Level" is empty when my ad blocker is enabled (Adguard on iOS Safari)
      - Telegram, a company I also consider ethical, has a score of 105%—is this an oversight?

<comment><USER9> And sometimes you get two privacy friendly policies and I'd like to say "equal".

After a few of those I picked one at random and then it puts me onto some kind of 'Game' which made me feel they were trying to train me instead of vice- versa. The game didn't respond to clicks so I closed the app.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I went to the homepage and ctrl-clicked a company card (Mozilla) to open the details in a new tab. Instead, the site jacked my ctrl-click and instead tried to navigate to the link in the same tab. Middle-clicking does not work at all.

It then went to an error page instead of loading the details for Mozilla, but while it's an interesting idea I'm not sure how useful it is. I don't usually create an account on a website unless I have to do so, and the privacy policy is nonnegotiable. So why would I want to check what their privacy policy is?

I only give personal data to websites when I have to (e.g. to services that work or school use) or if I already trust the company to not do anything shady with it (Mozilla has done some sketchy stuff but I believe they won't leak my passwords).

And for websites where participation is more optional, like HN or Reddit, you don't usually need to give much personal data anyway.

Edit: the website is fully working now. Mozilla has had one security breach where emails and hashed passwords were leaked, in 2014. At the bottom the sentence breakdown is 2.5/12/22% concerning/mild/friendly. Meanwhile Reddit has no breaches, but keeps your messages forever and shares data with ad companies. Their sentence breakdown at the bottom is 3.3/23/9%. Overall, the AI rates Mozilla at 33% and Reddit at 41%. That doesn't really make sense to me.

I would really like to see more details about the privacy policy sentences on the website. If 2.5% of Mozilla's privacy policy is very concerning and 12% is mildly bad, I would like to see the actual sentences to know the risks. There is a button to view the full annotated policy, but clicking it says to send an email to you. Edit: this seems like a bug, it shows a few sentences in a WebKit-based browser [Falkon] but in Firefox it just shows the chain link icons.

Finally, I took the A/B test from Guard, and quite of a few A/B choices seemed to not really have anything to do with privacy. If the dataset is kept the same, then I think a different test format would be to rate each A and B snippet as:

\- Not about privacy

\- Good for privacy # only if the other one is not about privacy

\- Bad for privacy # only if the other one is not about privacy

\- Better than [A/B] # only if neither is not about privacy

Anyway, the data itself may be somewhat useful to me if I want to learn more about a company's privacy practices. But for normal people, I think it would be helpful for the website to also explain why privacy is important and why people should care.

<comment><USER11> More and more websites are so advanced that they can't even use an <a> tag anymore. Instead they do some convoluted onclick-scripting that breaks all standard behavior and accessibility functionality.

<comment><USER12> I think this is mostly a problem of the tools used. An anchor tag by definition is an inline element, so it shouldn't really be a giant box that's clickable, so you default back to an onClick.

onClick in popular frameworks just means left click and nothing more, which makes sense, except for that use case of opening in a new tab with middle mouse button or right clicking etc. So you have to add a lot of logic to support all that.

If you break the html spec and make an anchor tag a block element then you have to deal with catching and stopping the event from it otherwise it would work as a normal link but you actually just want to change state in your JS app.

So I think tools like Angular, React, Vue etc. should get a better way to create links on website that just change state .

<comment><USER13> Styling an anchor as a block element has never violated the spec, and HTML5 deliberately added support for wrapping anchors around block elements because people had been doing that anyway, even though the browser wasn't required to make it work as intended (but it now is).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Hi. A related project that takes a more human-powered approach is PrivacySpy ([https://privacyspy.org](https://privacyspy.org)). Would be neat to see how these tools intersect.

PrivacySpy is open source, community run, and more about grading policies on a standardized rubric (as opposed to entrusting that to ML), so these tools might complement one another.

(Full disclosure: I'm a contributor to PrivacySpy.)

<comment><USER15> Another one: [https://tosdr.org/](https://tosdr.org/)

<comment><USER14> ToS;DR is great, although it's more focused on terms of service so if you're looking for privacy-only info, you'll have to cut through a bit of noise.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Analyse LastPass. Even without ML it's clearly saying they spy on everything you do and share it with anyone they want. I'm surprised they get recommended so often given their privacy policy.

[https://www.logmeininc.com/legal/privacy](https://www.logmeininc.com/legal/privacy)

</comment><comment><USER17> Hmm, I was trying to go through your A/B options but it didn't seem to register any click. So I started clicking repeatedly. Then, it processed those clicks on the first 7 items, giving you bad data. FYI.

<comment><AUTHOR> This just hit the frontpage so the server might be a bit overloaded, I'm sorry. Trying to resize resources right now. Thanks for the heads up, in the long term (ideally) noise shouldn't be a huge problem in a sufficiently large dataset (or at least I'm already expecting some noise haha)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> This is interesting, but I wonder what a boilerplate privacy policy would score. Given the clustering of scores between 30 & 50% for what read like "our lawyers pulled the standard policy and billed us for 4 hours of minor tweaks", it seems like some of the most effective privacy advocacy would come by challenging the most common "dangerous sentences" in court.

</comment><comment><USER19> Hi there. This is really neat. It reminds me of a talk I listened to recently on digital privacy, where the guy was using the price of "privacy products" as a way to measure how much people value their privacy. This seems like it would be one of those.

Did you find that there's one single variable, like length or the presence of certain words, that the system relies on heavily?

</comment><comment><USER20> This is a good tool, but the execution of the website is disappointing.

1\. Only showing excerpts of the highest threat levels. Trying to view the less severe threats asks us to email in. If you're willing to volunteer the information, why the hoops?

2\. "Play a short game to continue using this tool" ensures I'm not going to share this with anyone. Putting a stranglehold on users is _never_ the way forward. I might have volunteered my time if I were at home and browsing through. I can't when I'm quickly flicking through during taking a five minute break from looking at work. But it's left me with a final negative impression before being unceremoniously blocked off.

</comment><comment><USER21> Holy Crap , Tinder shares your profile with potential employers ( or rather companies contracted by those employers).

So glad I gave up on online dating a long time ago.

But really this is amazing.

The next step would be be to have a lawyer write a small opinion piece on the most popular sites.

</comment><comment><USER22> Cool tech and good use of NLP. but isn't the privacy policy system entirely broken? It's like driving on unmarked, unpaved roads, why don't we have a global template that's list in the beginning a checklist that is human understandable/comprehensible quickly like \- Do we share your data : (Y/n)

Etc

Without something like that the problem is the companies could change the wordings and the neural net could not detect until trained again which is potentially more dangerous!

It's time we get some standard for user web privacy policy docs like gdpr

</comment><comment><USER23> Tinder and Mozilla have the same score of 33%. I don't agree with that. Tinder willingly shares very, very personal data along with your contacts (assuming without said contact consent).

<comment><USER24> Keep in mind that it's analyzing their privacy policy, not their actions. Who a company specifically choses to share the data with and how often they do it is likely not considered.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hello!

[http://www.privacyparrot.com/](http://www.privacyparrot.com/)

Made a similar project many moons ago and is still kicking along. Thanks all on HN for the feedback.

<comment><USER26> I used it as recently as a month ago! Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> Hello, if the webmaster for this site is reading this, your `change.org` file is getting a Content-Type of `application/octet-stream` instead of `text/html`, which is giving me (in firefox) a prompt to download a file instead of displaying the page.

The problem is probably with your type mappings: [https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#typ...](https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_core_module.html#types)

</comment><comment><USER28> You're doing incredibly noble work. Ive bookmarked the site and will make great use of it. Thank you for working hard to protect data privacy, I hope you never stop.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you for these words :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This is great, I've been wanting to do a project like this for a while.

Would be great to get some insight into your data collection/labeling and model design process.

<comment><AUTHOR> Some of the process on gathering the data to create the labelling dataset is described here: [https://useguard.com/experiment](https://useguard.com/experiment)

But most probably I'll be publishing a paper later this year detailing all the details and process :)

<comment><USER30> Very cool idea! One question I couldn't seem to find the answer to on your site was are the policies featured on your a/b training exercise distinct from the polices that the ai grades? For example will a user going through your a/b trainer ever see a snippet from the Instagram privacy policy?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, initially it will all draw from the same dataset, so a user in theory could definitely see all services' snippets. But, to increase statistical significance in the data it gathers, I've restricted the initial amount of items in the test so _right now_ this will not be the case (otherwise, I'd be dealing with circa 3,500,000,000 different pairwise comparisons hehe)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> To the creator:

I actually just went through the trouble of resetting my Product Hunt account (I haven't been on there in a long time) just to give you that upvote!

Thank you for this! Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER32> Great work. Thank you. If I may, don't show bad scored results in the first page. Bad advertising is still advertising, and we all assume they are all bad anyway. I understand the surprise people have a first but the next step is finding good apps. Alsi sort by grade and search by name is a must.

Again, thank you for your time and work.

Edit: telegram had hacking news this year, search for "Telegram voicemail account hijacking"

</comment><comment><USER33> The need for things like this is partly why I quit my job 6 months ago to start my own company (in profile). We need to start building companies and products that provide valuable communities and services (like social networks) without the need for ads/privacy violations. My belief is that the issue is largely related to incentive misalignment (users != customers).

Congrats on the launch!

</comment><comment> VvR-Ox Though it's nice you built this I'd wish we wouldn't need it because of governments who do their job and protect the people they were originally intended to serve.

How long can we keep up arming us in the battle against powerful and rich entities who steal our data and buy politicians to have direct access to the process of law-making?

</comment><comment><USER34> Hi, I like what you did. I am a trained German lawyer working with NLP at a Computer science faculty. I would like to talk about this with you, as I am very interested in this topic. Also, I ve been working for the German Data protection Agency...

</comment><comment><USER35> Letting people doing the training without any knowledge and context seems to makes no sense.

How do you ensure, that it isn't a bot, or an army of bots?

What is the neuronal network doing?

How do you unsure your personal integrity, those of your team members and the overall integrity of your 'system'?

</comment><comment><USER36> Where is Facebook? I guess that would be one of the most interesting policies to analyze.

</comment><comment><USER37> I'm slightly puzzled that Telegram is scoring more than 100%. What am I missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> A bug in the scoring algorithm that I need to fix

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great website. Quick note - your site doesn't functions without javascript. Having enabled it and trawled through it I see no reason to require js to be enabled. Adding a non-js fallback would be great.

</comment><comment><USER39> A great idea. Some ideas for features:

\- Keep a timeline of privacy policy changes, being able to compare scores between 2 versions.

\- Subscribe to notifications for changes in score.

\- Browser extension that shows you the score on the site.

</comment><comment><USER40> I will join the chorus of great work. I love it. It may even make some people more privacy conscious ( very few people read those -- usually the ones who wrote it ).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :) I've read some recent research and looks like this is actually measured: only 0.001% of all internet users start reading them (and even a smaller amount of people likely finish reading them). On top of it, if you had to read all the privacy policies you accepted only on the past 5 years alone, you would have to use 3.040 hours of non-stop reading. Crazy. Love your privacy-oriented username btw! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Love the "biggest threat" for Telegram!

</comment><comment><USER42> I love the work, and it is directly applicable to the work I am doing now. Have you published your thesis?

</comment><comment><USER43> I own the domain policies.dev and would be happy to hand it over to this project if you're interested.

</comment><comment><USER44> what if you took this idea and used it to normalize privacy policies into a normalized form?!

</comment><comment><USER45> Great site! Would be nice to have the option to submit scandals as some seem to be missing.

</comment><comment><USER46> I get ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR

<comment><AUTHOR> Some other user reported that same thing this morning but I couldn't find any explanation to this err. It basically works for everyone except for these two precise cases. One idea I have is that you might be behind some sort of firewall that's blocking my website (because in the past either the IP or the domain got flagged by some antivirus company and now some business networks block it) – might this be the case?

<comment><USER47> I'm not an expert but I wonder if this error comes up in the case of the HTTPS handshake not being able to agree on a protocol -- one side of the transaction is trying to insist on a crypto protocol that's out of date or a little too fashion-forward?

Just a thought.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> This is really cool, what prompted the idea to combine the two?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Last semester I did a bootcamp on Artificial Intelligence and I had to do a final project. Last year I started becoming concerned about digital privacy when I discovered Facebook had an updated copy of your phone contacts including nicknames [1] (which basically means strangers at Facebook know the names I call my GF). I later found out this was explicitly said in FB's privacy policy. So when I did the bootcamp and discovered how powerful RNNs are to model the complexity of the English language I came up with the idea.

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661735](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16661735)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Telegram has a 105% score? Is that expected or a bug?

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be pretty close to 100%, though, they seem to be super privacy friendly!

<comment><USER18> Yep, I read their policy. I just wasn't sure if extra credit existed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> offtopic: Is it worth using producthunt for games? Or do we concentrate our efforts on platforms like steam, appstore and play store?

<comment><USER50> Why are you posting that to this thread? I know you said off topic, but usually when someone says that, it's still related: e.g. if the parent comment mentioned something tangential, or I could imagine if the link was to producthunt and you wondered about games on that platform... are you hijacking this thread for a completely unrelated question that you want to ask the HN audience, or is there a connection I'm missing?

<comment><USER49> They are on producthunt.

<comment><USER50> Ah I missed that top banner, must have automatically scrolled past it. Fair enough; thanks for responding.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Great work! Would also work as a browser plugin.

<comment><AUTHOR> This was actually one of the ideas to evolve the project! Another one is making an app that protects your digital privacy from these threats, kinda like an antivirus but for privacy threats instead of viruses ([https://useguard.com/blog/future/](https://useguard.com/blog/future/)) Would love to hear feedback on what should this project become next :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This'd be great for contracts too. E.g. an NDA.

</comment><comment><USER52> This is amazing! How would you categorize this?

</comment><comment><USER52> This is amazing, how would you categorize this?

</comment><comment><USER53> How are you better than Firefox Monitor?

</comment><comment><USER54> Very creative project! Congratulations!!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is great but like tosdr.org before it, what does it tell people they already don't _assume_ to be true? I use tosdr only to often keep ignoring what it's telling me.

Also, I'm not sure if a majority care abt privacy when the value delivered is super high. They submit to the will of the service provider, as if it was the cost of doing _business_ without realising they could either look for alternative or exercise stricter control over what they share and how [0].

To that end, I like tools that let users take action in addition to showing what's wrong rather than simply point it out. Actions can include:

\- Replace: Push the users towards alternatives and help them seamlessly take their data elsewhere.

\-- Help change their usage behaviour. Most digital-wellbeing / internet de- centralization tech fall under this category?

\-- Translate / Pipe data exported from one service provider and import it into another. For instance, it is tiresome to move away from wordpress to ghost.org; or from WhatsApp to Signal. Emails work great.

\- Reduce: Hand-hold them as they grasp various privacy and security settings on offer and exercise them, as appropriate.

\-- JumboPrivacy does this for popular social networks.

\-- PrivacySettings Firefox plugin _for Firefox_ is another example.

\-- Plenty write blog posts to help others navigate arduous settings across popular web properties, and expect nothing in return.

\- Restrict: Provide tools that let them control what the services can and cannot collect.

\-- Application sandboxes like firejail / sandboxie, firewalls like Snitch / LuLu, DNS based content blockers like pi-hole, in-browser content blockers like uBlockOrigin are some examples.

[0] One of the first questions folks asked after an exodus-privacy (which is super nice and something I use every other month) presentation at fosdem was, 'What can I do now that you've exposed what apps on Android do with the permissions granted to them and the SDKs they embed?' exodus-privacy, as great as it is, doesn't let you take action but presents a nice overview of the dangers to your privacy due to the app you've installed. Instead, you might end up having to independently discover and install Blokada or AdAway or Pi- Hole or NetGuard or XPrivacyLua or microG or GrapheneOS or...

</comment><comment><USER55> Very cool! Reminds me of [https://tldrlegal.com/](https://tldrlegal.com/) and [https://fossa.com/](https://fossa.com/).</comment>


Eliciting the Patient's Agenda: Analysis of Recorded Clinical Encounters [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11606-018-4540-5.pdf <comment><AUTHOR> Times change: when I was an intern in the ER at Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Hospital in 1974-75, "5 minutes or 5 problems — whichever comes first," was our guideline.

<comment><USER2> That's really interesting - I've never heard that.

I only work ED these days and only a few shifts a month, but I love the interview. And I also hate the interview.

When I have worked 60 hrs a week it's easy to develop compassion fatigue: it's just so hard listening to story after story and allowing someone to just tell their story.

I want you to tell me in your own words, and I want to know what the root cause was that lead you to the department, and how long that bit went on for, but if I don't cut you off and prompt you for some really weird specific details that aren't necessarily going to roll out of your mouth. You're the 70th patient this month and I'm currently juggling 4 stories around in me head at once - I can't get too involved with you.

So - there my experience anyway

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A while ago I joined my girlfriend for a few doctors' visits because of chronic pain. I definitely noticed that with most of them it's really hard to get a word in. You go in, they ask what the problem is, barely listen for a few moments, order tests and then proceed with what they want to do. It feels like the patient is just a thing that needs to be processed as quickly as possible.

I don't recall a single visit where there was a real exchange between patient and doctor.

</comment><comment><USER4> > clinicians elicited patient concerns, the clinician interrupted the patient > after a median of 11 seconds (interquartile range 7–22; range 3 to 234 s). > Uninterrupted patients took a median of 6 s (interquartile range 3–19; range > 2 to 108 s) to state their concern.

I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from this. On one hand, I find that people who interrupt me make whatever I need to say take much longer. On the other hand, I feel that patients would be shy when answering, if they were asked broad questions, and therefore take less time to answer, possibly hoping for more guiding questions to follow.

</comment><comment><USER5> Most medical advice is designed to minimize liability, not actually help patients. Doctors don't need to listen, and can't.

</comment><comment><USER6> The fundamental problem I see is that doctors treat patients as threats to be managed: They will take too much time, they might sue, they will misinform you, they tire you out (per another comment). That's not a healthy attitude and it doesn't lead to productive relationships.

My experience with doctors is that they are unprofessional: Their communication skills are poor, causing potentially dangerous misconceptions (someone mentioned a secret 5 minute rule; what if critical info is in the 6th minute?), and a lack of understanding on my part (they barely listen so they don't know the question and therefore don't answer it); they are disrespectful, often treating patients like mentally challenged children (5 minutes and that's it, and we won't tell you there's a time limit), have no regard for patients' time[0], and won't return phone calls or emails; they are often sloppy and often unprepared, which I know from personal experience[1] and from the fact that hospital errors are a leading cause of death (at least in the U.S.).

Doctors behave as if they are the only ones challenged by constrained time, by communicating with clients, and by weariness at the end of the day. But every other profession, from lawyers to accountants to IT consultants, has the same problems and deals with it. My lawyers and accountants master communication skills, respect clients, and are productive. I want to say: Grow up, be a professional, I don't give f- that you're tired and busy, so am I. Every other profession manages.

[0] I'm busy too; I have people waiting for me too; how about if I make you sit around for an hour in the middle of your day? Doctors commonly schedule patients to come before the doctor will be ready, to make sure the doctor doesn't have to wait - as if their time is more important than mine. They fall behind schedule every day, making patients wait - after the third day, you learn and adjust your schedule; after three years, it's just complete disrespect for patients' time. One doctor I had to see regularly for awhile would schedule me at 8:15 and wander in at 8:45 with a bagel, coffee, and reading the news. Another schedules his entire day at the same time in the morning, and patients just sat around the waiting room all day; after 2 hours, I asked others and the nurse, found out what was going on (and that it was his standard procedure), and left; the woman waiting for hours in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank and nurse apparently didn't have that option.

[1] Just off the top of my head: Seeing a doctor for a second opinion on a serious back problem. When the doctor walked in, opened the file, and started reading, I told myself she was just refreshing herself. Her advice was for the wrong problem in the wrong part of my back; when I tried to tell her, she didn't listen and when she finally realized it, she just tried to cover for herself.

<comment> just-to-reply I'm sorry you have had bad experiences with physicians.

But not every other profession has the same problems. I have been on call for 12 days in a row where anyone who tells my answering service they are a patient of our office can call anytime to ask any question, no matter how ridiculous, for free. Today I have returned calls to a patient who is pregnant but concerned that she does not feel enough pregnancy symptoms and someone whose temperature is 99.8 and is concerned.

I am almost always in the office before my patients arrive, often as much as two hours, doing charting. I am signing forms to get people FMLA. We don't charge for filling out these forms. Do you think your lawyer would?

Frequently patients are late, but then still want to be seen. So either I make the late patient angry, or everyone else behind them is angry.

How many lawyers get called all night long? How many accountants are at their place of business in the middle of the night?

I have a nurse to return phone calls, but it seems that hardly anyone can have a voice mail that it set up, and due to HIPAA regulations we are advised not to leave any personal messages anyway. So we pay a whole office full of people to play phone tag all day.

Sometimes I am late, but sometimes people are unexpectedly trying to die. Sorry I never met this lady who has 2 liters of blood in her belly, so I didn't know she was going to come to the ER with her ectopic pregnancy today, and inconvenience you. We do try to call and reschedule, but again can't always get through.

<comment><USER6> I know your frustrations, because I see the same things in IT and other professions. The difference I see is that doctors seem to think they are a special case (in this and other things) and helpless to manage these issues; the truth is that they are a common case and that there are solutions that other professionals commonly use and are expected to use.

All that you describe is common for IT professionals (support and system administrators), and sometimes with just as much on the line or more (large amounts of money, careers, and sometimes even lives). I know some who have been on call for years in a row, and when they travel outside of cellular coverage they rent a satellite phone. They have no nurse to return calls; when someone calls (or a system sends an automated alert), they logon and get to work.

They work all hours; all-nighters and 7 day workweeks are common. One sysadmin I know estimates one all-nighter per month. When a deadline is approaching, you can count on 100+ hour weeks. Just read HN to hear people talk about it.

Their customers (users) have the same absurd requests, same demands, same communication problems, etc., though of course about different topics. For example, some send ambiguous problem reports and don't respond to attempt to clarify - but if the problem isn't fixed, money will be lost and you know who will be blamed!

Their scheduling problems are the same: Unpredictable issues arise and always at the worst time. That means they have to schedule with a large margin for error.

> How many lawyers get called all night long?

I know many who do. First, some have clients in many time zones around the world and most have clients around the country (in the U.S., the latter means a 5am-6pm minimum workday on the west coast). More often, they are working on urgent projects and must respond ASAP to the other attorneys and clients working on the issue lest they delay everyone else or, worse, fail to contribute value and influence the outcome.

As for accountants, in the U.S. ask them what tax season is like.</comment></comment></comment>


Square API Leaves Apps Vulnerable to XSS Attacks - <AUTHOR> http://zenincognito.com/squareups-api-not-escaping-json-outputs-a-quick-note-on-unsafe-apis/ <comment><USER2> They can't really do it because they have no idea where the data will be used. Depending on where your app puts the data different types of encoding must be done.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Begs the question how can they leave the apps unaudited. 6 months on the store after someone raising this issue seems just lazy or careless on square's part.</comment>


Why CAPTCHAs have gotten so difficult - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/18205610/google-captcha-ai-robot-human-difficult-artificial-intelligence <comment><USER2> When using the TOR Network, they take literally ages to finish.</comment>


A friend of mine gave me this link, what does it mean and is it CQC material? - <AUTHOR> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1KYzuxSAKBbQhfVP200_4QdWMXYlUA2FwP339Sfilw3Y/edit?usp=sharing <comment><USER2> > "tY1WKT...EEdLVw=="

Pretty sure it's base64!</comment>


WhatsApp ties NSO Group's hacking operations to America in new court evidence - <AUTHOR> https://tech.newstatesman.com/security/whatsapp-ties-nso-groups-hacking-operations-to-america-in-new-court-evidence <comment><USER2> I say grant them their wish. Foreign nation state operatives hacking in plain sight in the US, in active war zones? Treat them as the enemy combatants, terrorists even that they want to be recognized as.

<comment><USER3> NSO Group is an Israeli operation, i.e. working with Mossad, so there is a slim chance of the US treating them as an "enemy combatant".

<comment><USER4> I woudn't count on that. There's a chance they're at least indirectly funded by the US, since the US pays several billions every year to Israel, both in military and economic aid.

[https://ifamericansknew.org/stat/cost_of_israel.html](https://ifamericansknew.org/stat/cost_of_israel.html) I've no idea of the reliability of that site, however the author was a former US Foreign Service officer.

<comment><USER5> Almost all of that is in the form of credit to be used to buy American military equipment and services. It's as much a subsidy for American arms contractors as it's aid to Israel, although yes it is both. Still, it's not cash and they can't just spend it on whatever they like.

Furthermore regarding the linked article, how is a loan guarantee just thrown in to the total. Unless Israel actually defaults on every single loan every year the cost of that is close to zero. Is that really a reasonable assumption to make? So now who's lying.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> They even used for the attacks there own servers in the us!

"NSO says "our clients do the hacking, not us".

almost like

"Kim Dotcom says "our clients do share movies, not me".

</comment><comment><USER7> NSO seems to be making an argument that arms dealers typically make. Perhaps they could point out real examples of defensive uses. Otherwise, enough. Hafsiku lehitamem.

</comment><comment><USER8> Didn't Facebook try to buy exploits off NSO Group just recently?

<comment><USER9> That was alleged in court but no evidence has been provided publicly. I do not see the relevance here though, FB being gross doesn't make NSO any less gross.

<comment><USER8> It is a bit bold that WhatsApp (owned by FB) is throwing accusations about NSO Group even though they allegedly attempted to buy exploits from them.

<comment><USER10> not if their intent was to fix zero days that nso discovered.

I mean, companies pay out bug bounties, this doesn't seem that much different

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Is there a way to find out if your phone has been infected by Pegasus malware?

<comment><USER12> Out of date info, but it was once valid. Relevant because Pegasus malware is a product of NSO Group.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/4zpkkm/release_p...](https://www.reddit.com/r/jailbreak/comments/4zpkkm/release_pgcheck_tools_to_check_if_your_device_has/)

[https://github.com/z448/pgcheck](https://github.com/z448/pgcheck)

[https://info.lookout.com/rs/051-ESQ-475/images/lookout- pegas...](https://info.lookout.com/rs/051-ESQ-475/images/lookout-pegasus- technical-analysis.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm very skeptical that any nation state group is foiled by leaked ip addresses or language identifying strings left in code. Both seem like such obvious red herrings that it makes me question anyone that puts stock in them.

<comment><USER14> Worthing actually reading the article.

NSO Group isn't like Cozy Bear -- it's not a code name for an unknown probable nation-state APT. It's an Israeli company that sells hacking tools used by the Saudis (among others).

NSO Group was "tied to America" in a legal sense relevant to WhatsApp's lawsuit. There's no implication that it was, like, secretly the NSA or something. Just that this Israeli company rented US-based servers from a US- based company, and this invalidates some legal defenses they're using to fight WhatsApp's lawsuit.

<comment><USER13> Yes, no, I read it. I just don't think there is a bill of sale for rented servers anywhere that has the recipient as "Elite Nation State Hacker Group". If the trail is IP address, I trust that as much a "spasibo" being proof of Russian Hackers.

<comment><USER14> NSO Group is not an "Elite Nation State Hacker Group". It's a private Israeli company that sells malware (and apparently malware-as-a-service).

If they didn't rent those servers, it would be very easy for them to say to the court "we did not rent those servers, our clients did". Notably, they did not say this. Probably because they did rent the servers, and if subpoenaed the hosting provider would produce receipts showing that. And then NSO's lawyers would get disbarred.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Sub-Pixel Problems in CSS - <AUTHOR> http://ejohn.org/blog/sub-pixel-problems-in-css/

<comment><USER2> When dealing with pixels, always round or truncate to the nearest integer. OK, you're done.

<comment><USER3> That would yield the IE solution described, though.</comment></comment>


A Day in the Life of Americans - <AUTHOR> https://flowingdata.com/2015/12/15/a-day-in-the-life-of-americans/ <comment><USER2> I wake up @ 4AM most days to get my work out in. Walking to the gym gives me a glimpse of a different America. It's mostly men, white guys in my city, they are all middle class looking dudes. Loading up trucks at the nearby grocery or beginning/ending their shift, maybe some security guards once in a while.

There's some homeless people every once in a while but for the most part they don't seem to be active. There are no cars in the streets and it feels like a movie set. Always an interesting hour, 4 AM.

<comment><USER3> > It's mostly men, white guys in my city

I am sorry, I am not American, though I live here. Does this not in itself contribute to the uncomfortable feelings of women and minorities in your city?

<comment><USER4> This question kind of reeks of the non-American who consumes so much American media that they think their place of origin doesn't have the same characteristics like mostly men out and about at 4am operating the third shift or wandering home drunk.

And I'm not too sure men at work, regardless of race, rank very high on the scale of people you're scared to run into in the early morning, even in your place of origin.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you're mostly interested in the breakdown of time spend, rather than these animations between activities, the charts at the data source are much clearer: [https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts.htm](https://www.bls.gov/tus/charts.htm)

</comment><comment><USER6> For me it's very strange to see that a huge portion of the population sleeps until 9am (and a big number even until 10am!). I worked in many countries before and in most workplaces you had to show up at least by 9. Of course there were some exceptions but in general that's how it was.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, well there's a lot of businesses that operate late into the night. You think 24/7 pharmacies, retail, restaurants, etc operate themselves? There's also emergency personnel, security, even night construction crews.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Seems like my sleeping patterns are a lot different than those of most other people.

Also, I felt depressed to see that people spend most of their lives sleeping and working or in some transition thereof.

<comment><USER9> Even more suspicious or chore-seeming to those that are more productive during the evening, which studies recently suggest this could be how some of us are wired. There's this, I think Anglo-Saxon fixation on early mornings being where productive and good people do things.

Maybe a cultural byproduct of regions of the world with short, dark winter days?

<comment><USER10> One of the benefits I find with coming back from trips to Europe returning to the US East Coast is there's about a week where I'm tending to get up by 5AM or so. I slip back to a normal schedule but I really feel good getting a bunch of work done by 9AM or so. Can't really keep it up sans jetlag though.

<comment><USER11> It's a really great feeling. I went for a while getting up at 5:00am, going to the gym, then straight to work by 7 or so. I'd often get the most important work of the day done by 10 and I felt pretty amazing. But having to go to sleep by 10 (which means in bed by 9:30) was too hard to adhere to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The animation is a little hard to follow because the "balls" get stuck in different places for a while, and the colors aren't easy to distinguish or attribute to certain activities.

</comment><comment><USER13> I like the guy who goes into work at 5am then goes back to 'sleeping' at 7:15am. heh.

<comment><USER14> pager duty, lol

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> That was some pretty dope animation

I was surprised the numbers at work around 1-3 PM only tops off at 30%. It said the diagram was for ages 25 to 34, most of these people should be working 9 to 5 jobs though.

I thought the numbers would go upwards of 50% to 60%

</comment><comment><USER16> It's extremely surprising that by 3pm in the middle of the day, there are as many people enjoying leisure time as there are people working (about 30%). Where are these people? I don't see anyone leaving the office at 3pm where I work. I'm pretty sure that the 'average day' doesn't mean weekend.

I thought it might be night shift workers, but then during the night, only about 1% of people are working.

<comment><USER17> I would have agreed with you before I got a job in the public sector. I'd say a quarter of the people in the buildings around here are gone by 3, with hardly anyone still here by 6. Some of those people start their day at 6 too, but there are also some "in by 10, out by 2" kinds of people. Nearby DC seems to be the same way from their rush hour traffic patterns.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Previous discussion in 2015 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10738607](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10738607)

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd be curious to see different countries at the same time of day. Would be quite illustrative, I believe.

</comment><comment><USER20> The U.S. is the Most Overworked Developed Nation in the World

[https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked- product...](https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-productivity- vacation/)</comment>


CLI tool for bundling & minifying, CSS & Javascript - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/samarudge/Squeezeit?

<comment><USER2> jsmin.py is worlds slower than jsmin.c (I benchmarked one project at 10+s for Python and <2s for C). I think the author will want to use the latter.

Also, without the ability to build a dependency graph (something Closure Tools excel at), I'm not sure that this is much better than a simple shell script like:

      dest=/tmp/build.js
      echo > $dest
      for js in $(cat build.order); do
          cat "$js" >> $dest
      done
      jsmin < $dest > out.js

(The same for CSS, but using slimmer).

At least then you don't have to write your script order in YAML.

<comment><AUTHOR> Since this is a tool I built for me and open sourced, rather than a project I designed to be open source, I'll try and explain some of my design decisions.

jsmin.c is faster, but since this is something run server-side once per build, I've never seen speed as much of a problem. On my build server this script completes in <1 second for all the files I've ever tried (My build server is Intel i7, so that might have something to do with it). Even so compared to the time needed to rsync the files to the app servers, or compress the images, this doesn't really make much difference.

Dependency graphs are cool and useful, but the idea of this project is, very much, to simply cat files together. It also has the advantage of being able to generate the bundle info file so you can use URLs with hashes in for CDN's/cache-ability (Like Rails asset pipeline does).

So in short, it was built to be a shit simple system to make my life easier, if you dislike it feel free to use something else, as is the nature of Open Source</comment></comment>