Reddit CEO Cracks Down on Abusive Content to Protect Users, Attract Advertisers - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/reddit-ceo-cracks-down-on-abusive-content-to-protect-users-attract-advertisers-1510853654?mod=e2tw <comment><USER2> And from what I understand, it's been quite effective, too [1]. It seems that removing abusive communities basically reduces the amount of abusive content overall, because there's one less community where that content is acceptable to share. So not as much of a "spillover effect" as feared, which is good news.

[1] [http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand- hate.pdf](http://comp.social.gatech.edu/papers/cscw18-chand-hate.pdf)

<comment><USER3> That study if I recall correctly completely misses the spillover to other websites, considering only reddit itself - but bans on sites like reddit and Twitter have lead to the rise of sites like Gab, 8chan and Voat in recent years. The spillover is very real, just not on the same site.

<comment><USER4> > The spillover is very real, just not on the same site.

Which is good - concentrate the hate speech into a single place and then take it down.

<comment><USER5> How would that help? It's not exactly rocket science to open up yet another reddit clone for the untouchables afterwards.

<comment><USER4> Sure but a registrar / hoster that has just closed one hate site isn't going to let someone spin up another immediately. And soon enough they'll be out of options.

<comment><USER6> Your brazen support of censorship is troubling.

<comment><USER2> Why?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Similarly, Youtube is demonetizing videos with "bad words". Such as referring to "the naked eye".

See here for a deconstruction: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlRFoYr- XuY&t=306s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlRFoYr-XuY&t=306s)

This kind of censorship is nice, until it turns into censorship of "things the company dislikes", versus "bad / illegal things."

See recent vidcon for an example. Despite rules against harassment, a panelist out-and-out harassed an attendee... and the organizers did nothing.

This shows that power and political agendas trump peopl's alleged morality.

<comment><USER8> I'm not familiar with vidcon- can you provide a link to the incident?

<comment><USER9> [https://medium.com/@VidCon/vidcon- debrief-e6bb4e187a28#5f56](https://medium.com/@VidCon/vidcon- debrief-e6bb4e187a28#5f56)

I think this observation summarizes even this thread:

> _do not violate harassment policies, but the result is often that the > vitriol of their followers ends up focused not on ideas, but on people_

I was looking for any attempt at a neutral-ish video of the incident but came up empty.

<comment><USER7> The video taken by the "harassers" at vidcon seems pretty clear.

Were they forbidden from attending vidcon because of their alleged history of harassment of the panelists? _No_.

Do they get kicked out of vidcon for violating the rules? _No_.

Does the panelist violate the rules by calling them out and insulting them publicly? _Yes_.

So... let's say Sargon and his ilk _are_ terrible people. Shall we destroy the rule of law to "get" him?

[https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Bolt](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Bolt)

\---

 _Roper:_ So now you'd give the Devil benefit of law!

 _More:_ Yes. What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?

 _Roper:_ I'd cut down every law in England to do that!

 _More:_ Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you — where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast — man's laws, not God's — and if you cut them down — and you're just the man to do it — d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.

\---

I am disturbed by the fascination with witch-hunts. My attempts here to ask people to explain themselves have resulted in no explanations (of course). Just accusations.

Well, if those people are so bad, then the rule of law should allow them to be banned and/or punished. If they're not that bad, then the rule of law should be followed. If we're not going to follow the rule of law, then why pretend to have rules?

Maybe I'm weird... but none of that makes any sense to me.

<comment><USER9> I tried to avoid gigantic quotes from the Vidcon Medium post I linked previously, but I'm assuming you read this:

 _Our founder, Hank Green, talked with our panelist and said two things:

1\. He told her that her comment had violated our policy, but that he understood that there was a broader context (which to be clear, we were blissfully ignorant of until this weekend, and remain inexpert in.)

2\. He apologized to her for not having been more aware of and active in understanding the situation before the event, which resulted in her being subjected to a hostile environment that she had not signed up for._

> If we're not going to follow the rule of law, then why pretend to have > rules?

Rules are an imperfect tool. People behaving badly while carefully staying within the limit of the rules often run afoul of the intentions of the rule makers; it boils down to trusting those responsible for rule interpretation and enforcement.

<comment><USER7> > He told her that her comment had violated our policy, but that he understood > that there was a broader context

Ah... so the rules _don 't_ matter, because excuses.

Look, if Sargon and his ilk _did_ something, fine, punish them. But so far, the only response to my request for _evidence_ is insults.

And side-stepping the topic.

> a broader context (which to be clear, we were blissfully ignorant of until > this weekend, and remain inexpert in.)

Which means that they didn't talk to the victim in this case (Sargon). Only the abuser (Anita). Sargon said as much on Joe Rogan's podcast.

i.e. _accusation of guilt is assumption of guilt_. Evidence be damned.

> which resulted in her being subjected to a hostile environment that she had > not signed up for.

People who showed up and did _nothing_ and said _nothing_ to her. OMFG, crucify them.

Look this whole victim complex is appealing. But did any of it happen?

According to _everyone in this thread_? Nope.

> it boils down to trusting those responsible for rule interpretation and > enforcement.

Nope. If they show they're biased, I don't trust them as far as a shit- flinging monkey can throw poo.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> They'll have to dig themselves out of a pretty deep hole, reputation-wise. While there are specific subject subreddit with fantastic content, most of the regional subs they carry lots of news and politics have a well-earned reputation for racism and xenophobia, and the more discussion-oriented subs add in misogyny into the mix.

Only the subs with obsessively strict moderation like the science subs (or /r/Canada politics) seem to succeed in discussing issues without hatred.

Meanwhile, Twitter maintains mainstream acceptance despite being the online home of David Duke and various other infamous white supremacists.

<comment><USER11> /r/Canada isn't too bad because that's how Canadians are. Even when we disagree we generally try to be civil.

<comment><USER10> No, I meant /r/CanadaPolitics, but the name got autocorrected away. /r/Canada is a hive of racism and getting worse since the last election or so.

<comment><USER11> It's not a hive of racism, Americans just have become such virtue signalling morons that they call everything racism.

There happens to be a middle ground on many issues. Debating immigration policy isn't racist. Hell, even Emmanuel Macron and Merkel have started to control migration. No country can accept all the world's poor. It's simply not feasible. And the truth is, that is the concern that most Canadians are having. The economy's not great, working class wages and jobs are disappearing, the few places with good jobs have unaffordable housing, and Trudeau's talking about increasing immigration.

You guys can talk about how everyone that wants to debate certain topics is racist, but that doesn't change the fact that politics all over the west are moving a certain direction. The only question is whether we'll simply adjust policy, or wait too long and elect someone extreme as a knee jerk reaction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I would love to see a statement from Reddit/Twitter... _explicitly_ stating that they will remain politically neutral. There's certainly content that should legally be taken down, there's probably content that isn't advertising friendly and could be taken down. It seems like these companies are being very slanted in their evaluation of the latter category. Basically right leaning = bad, left leaning = good. All I want is impartial.

<comment><USER13> The subs I've heard about banning were echo chambers dedicated to the idea that "this group of people I don't like ought to be [starved|exiled|thrown from helicopters|raped|enslaved]" and such things. If that makes you think the policy is "right leaning = bad, left leaning = good," that says some pretty nasty things about the modern right, doesn't it?

<comment><USER14> Ah, that's the crux: racism and misogyny are terrible enough that if you hate it, you must be correct.

For me personally, the echo chamber on _both_ sides is enough to keep me far away from both /r/politics and /r/The_Donald.

For example, you cannot say anything positive about Trump on /r/politics. Nothing. There was a screenshot showing that there were 231 negative articles posted and zero positive articles. It's literally propaganda, but from the other direction.

Now, you can argue that you should fight the good fight and that it's immoral to say anything positive about him. Sure, I sort of buy that: If Trump was equivalent to nazis, then we should resist that from becoming a reality.

And yet he's not. From what I've studied of history, the climate today is similar-ish to 1920's Germany. But if you examine the details of how the Nazi party seized power, you'll find they held guns up to people's heads in order to get various statesmen to vote a certain way. The German political institutions were captured by popular vote, then by force. And as long as we avoid the latter, the former isn't _necessarily_ an indication that fascism is on the rise.

But it's hard to make that argument in this climate. If you try, you're shouted down or misinterpreted or outright framed. And that's the central issue here: When you become a zealot, you lose the ability to take advantage of the opposition's good ideas. Are you sure it's true that Trump's entire political franchise has had zero good ideas?

I'm worried that in the process of fighting Trump, we'll lose reason and rationality.

<comment><USER15> It's not propaganda if he's actually THAT bad. I'm being deadly serious. He is not a normal candidate and claiming that it's biased because there are lots of true stories about a bad person is a feature of our media, not a bug!

It says more about Trump's fans that they're willing to overlook his egregious failings and attack and undermine quasi-impartial institutions just to point score than it does about bias.

<comment><USER16> So... what were the _actually_ bad things that _actually_ happened because of Trump (i.e. because of something he did)? In my view, much like with Brexit, the fearmongering is way exaggerated compared to reality.

<comment><USER17> The purposeful gutting/disorganization of major federal agencies and operations, the discrediting of the white house's statements, the undermining of existing federal law (see: explicitly sabotaging the ACA), then there's, of course, aiding and abetting enemies in order to win an election.

<comment><USER18> What exactly is it you mean these things show? Sounds mostly like you are complaining about his form than anything he has actually done.

Is it worse than Bush administration who started a war?

<comment><USER17> I just don't know how else to tell you that these things are all very bad. They, to me, should appear bad at face value. We clearly differ in the perception of the world at a fundamental level.

<comment><USER18> Even if they are bad are they as bad as Bush starting a war?

It's claimed that somehow Trump is the worst of them all. From what you have stated here do you personally think they are worse things than Bush starting a war?

<comment><USER19> I find it really hard to believe you're arguing in good faith. What is the purpose of a comparison to Bush..? Even if the answer is that Bush was worse, it does not take away at all from how terrible Trump has been. And we're comparing 8 yrs of Bush to not even 1 from Trump, here.

Anyway - yes, I do think that conspiring with hostile foreign entities to manipulate voters and undermine American democracy is worse.

<comment><USER18> Well believe it.

The purpose is to test whether the claim that Trump is somehow worse than everyone else based on the mentioned examples of his bad deeds really holds up to a sanity check.

I think your last sentence much better illustrates who of us are in good faith here though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Someone needs to put a stop to this bad meme... On social media, advertising is _not_ an endorsement of the content. This might be the case for traditional media, but social media is different. Advertisers and platforms need to recognize the difference, to accept the lack of control over user-generated content as a feature, and to push back on unfair criticism. But perhaps their real goal is increasing their control _over_ social media content.

<comment><USER21> Wait, what makes it different? There's the old adage that half of your advertising money is wasted, you just have no way of knowing which half. Why would you willingly spend it on putting your ads next to content you don't want to associate with your brand? It seems exceedingly likely that this is the half that isn't productive.

(This is also what I don't get about the Twitter fake-account-number business and the YouTube videos-targeting-children business - if I were an advertiser, I would have no interest in spending money advertising to bots or to young children. I would prefer to pay for ads in front of 4 million users I want to reach than in front of 5 million users, 1 million of whom I don't want to reach. Why are advertisers not pushing back hard on inflation of account metrics?)

<comment><USER20> How we treat advertising on social media is a matter of convention, a social negotiation. If we agree that it's just targeting demographics and not endorsing the actual content, then that is what it means, and advertising dollars wouldn't care about the content. The effectiveness of social media advertising doesn't need to be sensitive to content.

And maybe it isn't totally different from newspapers and TV news programs. Just like we don't associate advertising on news media with the often violent and disturbing content of the news itself, we don't need to treat social media advertising as endorsing its user-generated content. And in fact, we haven't been doing that until the recent YouTube controversy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Yah, except they're hosting /r/The_Donald which has been confirmed to violate Reddit rules. Just like Twitter they cherry pick for $$$.

<comment><USER23> What about r/The_Donald violates the rules other than going against your political preferences? There are left-wing sub-reddits that openly call for armed revolution, violence against the "bourgeoisie" and the police, destruction of property, etc; but I'm sure they're OK to exist, right?

<comment><USER24> Ah yes, "whataboutism" \- it's almost like we're on The_Donald right now!

<comment><USER25> You shouldn't berate someone for essentially asking to back up claims.

<comment><USER26> Asking "what about left-wing subreddits" is whataboutism. Nobody is claiming bannable content shouldn't be banned because it's left-wing (except GP's implication).

<comment><USER27> crying 'whataboutism' is effectively ceding the argument I'm not sure why this term has been plaguing HN lately.

<comment><USER28> They learned a 'big word' and they use it to feel smart. It's like the time Peter Griffin learned the phrase 'shallow and pedantic'.

[https://youtu.be/yetwdpsiM8Q](https://youtu.be/yetwdpsiM8Q)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> When your business model is advertisement based, this is the inevitable outcome. The users are the product, and advertisers are the customer. Furthermore, non-government entities are under no legal obligation to protect speech in most jurisdictions.

</comment><comment><USER30> _Actual_ abusive content or just abusive content Reddit staff dislike?

Some bullying subs have been rightly banned but major ones like /r/cringe /r/srs and /r/cringeanarchy remain.

<comment><USER31> This is just like the banning of /r/jailbait, /r/fatpeoplehate, etc from the the last time reddit "cleaned house".

Some of the most blatant subs will be banned, or quarantined, and despite repeated calls for action things that are still-bad, but slightly-less-bad, will remain. Until the next purge - including /r/srs, /r/the_donald, and similar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> > Reddit also has a business incentive to clean up its act: It needs to appeal > to marketers—and live up to its investor's expectations. In July, Reddit > raised $200 million at a $1.8 billion valuation.

> [truncated]

> Mr. Huffman didn't give specific numbers, but said Reddit's ad revenue had > grown fivefold over the past two years, from a small base.

I'm sure given the scale of the userbase the property is worth something substantial, but $1.8 billion for a 10-year old company that, AFAIK, has never turned a profit is nuts.

Either 1) investors saw something in the revenue growth numbers that painted a rosier picture about the future, 2) the entire valuation is illegitimate, or 3) the tech world is really that bubbly right now.

<comment> aaron-lebo Yeah, it really doesn't make sense. Reddit was stagnant for a decade, never made money, now they are taking on $200 million and scaling up?

Completely unjustified, people just want something to throw money at.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Reddit is swarming with Russian bots and they still have a whole network of white supremecy and various hate subs, operating both out in the open and 'quarantined'.

<comment><USER34> All these companies have been pushing this "Russia did it!" narrative with very little evidence or reason backing their claim. My theory why the whole Russian conspiracy is a thing is because its easier to dehumanize Russia as "the bad guys" rather than face the facts of how many people are opposed to you in your own country.

Edit: I'm not in denyal that Russia had nothing to do with the election but I think Russia's involvement is grossly over represented. Its so much easier to say "Russia did it" while ignoring why subreddits like /r/thedonald or the right propaganda caught on so much.

<comment> aaron-lebo If you really believe there is no evidence, you just aren't looking, or you are very selectively deciding what qualifies as evidence. The reality is that Russia is run by a guy who assassinates political opponents and whose glory days were those of the USSR.

This is a long-running conflict with Russia. There really are issues in the US that need to be fixed (as the Soviets gladly pointed out about Jim Crow in the 1950s/1960s), but Russia is also geopolitically smart enough to attack those vulnerabilities. If you just sit down and consider why and what advantages Russia would have in spreading propaganda, it is hard to believe they aren't doing it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> So what are reasonable Reddit alternatives that don't act as outlets of banned subreddits? Once you start banning stuff left and right, it's a slippery slope, making large groups of population feel weird/forcing them to learned hopelessness. It would be better instead to train some ML for content classification, then set user preferences about what triggers them, and then warn users that some submission might disturb them, requiring additional click to see the content in question. There ML would be just a helper, not sole arbiter-of-truth, and even an imprecise one won't have a stifling effect on free speech.

Of course, if Reddit owners/investors feel they need to fully submit to requirements of their advertisers, there is little they can do, and should just max profit and see if they can survive with a lot less "love" from their users.

<comment><USER36> How exactly does one put a warning on "Posting here may cause you to get death threats, brigaded, doxxed, etc..."? I think Reddit's problems are that their most fervent users are their biggest problems. They actively encourage trolls. Whatever was good about Reddit needs a better site to go to.

<comment><USER35> You can simply blur the post like Quora does and by clicking on it it would reveal. There is already one mechanism in place by voting threshold, but very popular posts in certain subreddits might not be ad-friendly.

I am looking at social media as a form of reinforcement learning, especially the exploration phase; by censoring it the exploration phase is significantly weakened, leading to worse results in the end. So maybe evolutionary argument would be to allow all kinds of crazy ideas (with some requiring a bit more work to read), and let people themselves to decide which ones would be used in exploitation phase? In the past when a single stupid idea was forced upon everyone by authority (e.g. nazis), people didn't have any means to counter it. With open discussion spaces some people might find excellent counterexamples immediately, clearing the issue for millions right away why a certain idea is a really bad one.

<comment><USER36> Reddit's problems go far deeper than just the type of content they have though. Specifically, the fact that it creates a space for polarizing opinions and encourages groupthink through the upvote system would seem to be anathema to what most advertisers are looking for. Perhaps they can start running the same advertisers as Alex Jones and Breitbart who don't seem to be as shy of divisive content.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> What I don't understand about this new trend of companies trying to make their content "Advertiser friendly" is that those same advertisers seem to be fine advertising during events like the Vegas Shooting. I'm just hoping this trend of making your websites rated G dies off sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER37> I don't see the connection between the shooting and advertisers. If you are American I understand that the Las Vegas shooting probably affected you very much. There is a lot of violence going on around the world, so what do you suggest?

<comment><USER34> I don't think advertisers associate their ads with violence when cnn reports on it and I don't think they should associate social media websites with the minority of offensive content they host. Reddit and YouTube aren't identified by their edgy content.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This article's content has nothing to support the title. It's just an empty retelling of the site's last year's history.

What's actually being reported here? Feels like clickbait.

</comment><comment><USER39> Any other non-Americans just fed up with this peurile black-and-white, Left- vs-Right tribalism that all discussions of US politics have seemingly devolved into over the last few years?

It's like watching a bizarre caricature of some dystopian satire.

<comment><USER40> I follow UK politics a bit and am American and have difficulty seeing any substantive difference between the right/left divide in the UK and the USA, but I am only reading the BBC headlines. In the USA, many people can trace the right left not working together to 1990's or so with Newt Gringrich, so it's not a recent phenomena either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> But who will protect the users from Reddit's CEO, who has admitted to editing posts to make his arguments look better, and suffered no consequences?</comment>


Ask HN: First mobile side-project: What stack to choose in 2019? - <AUTHOR> Hi there!
Starting this year with the next 3 months to spare, I'm planning to build a mobile app in that time. It would be nice if I could use most of its logic for a single page app as well.
Requirements: list/enter/search data, create/login to accounts, take pictures, do OCR on them, maybe even some AI on those pics
Me: frontend dev (~Angular), only mere backend experience, almost zero for native apps.
What do you think? I'm thankful for every answer! Hopefully I'm not burning the candle at both ends here with this project :-) <comment><USER2> Use _exactly_ what you already know (angular + whatever you use on the backend).

Unless of course the _real_ "side-project" is learning a new stack[0], you want to set yourself up for success by using what you're already familiar with.

[0] This can be completely valid and worthwhile—just be honest with yourself about whether your goal is to learn something new or to solve a problem or to create a business.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you.

My problem is: _exactly what I know_ is not sufficient ;-) I know JS. The backend layer for me is unchartered territory, DBs I've shunned most of my career. So some learning curve can't be evaded.

And from looking at the view-layer competitors to angular (vue and react) I'm not sure why not to give those frameworks a try, as Ionic seems to be less 'native' and more 'webView' oriented.

<comment><USER3> > DBs I've shunned most of my career.

Database Design for Mere Mortals: [https://www.amazon.com/Database-Design- Mere-Mortals-Hands/dp...](https://www.amazon.com/Database-Design-Mere-Mortals- Hands/dp/0201752840)

This is the book I recommend to everyone who is shy about DB's - I have owned several copies and given every one away. It breaks down not only functionality but how to create a good design in a sensible and easy to understand way. Worth every penny (and now somewhat cheap)

<comment><USER4> Long ago I read it, and found it frustrating. I don't remember all my objections, but I do remember one: the author spent about four pages almost but not quite defining 3rd Normal Form. Yes, jargon can be a barrier for beginners, but jargon also serves a purpose.

It seems to me that Jim Melton's _Understanding the New SQL_ was pretty good. Anyway, I'm pretty sure I read one of Melton's books when I was learning about databases.

<comment><USER5> It was hard for me to absorb , I was like thinking that I lacked basic knowledge needed to master it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> React native + Firebase will get you a demo very quickly, especially on the standard functionalities. Fake the others at first, and then you can decide how to implement them with a custom api, e.g. on gcloud.

Launch in less than 3mo if you can, you can always iterate down the road.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'm thinking:

 _VueJS + Nativescript + Vuex_ (Wanted to give vue a try for a while now plus it's JS), _Firebase_ for accounts, _NodeJS_ (again, JS) + _GraphQL_ (being a BE noob I'm hoping graph-DBs allow me to stay flexible with my data- structure), BE hosting: probably _uberspace_ and then migrate to some cloud provider (are there any reasonable priced cloud solutions to dump pictures that are also easy to manage for a BE noob?)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm fairly familiar with Vue and Angular, but I decided to write my current side-project in ReactJS, with the intention of switching over to React Native once I've wrapped my head around the React portion of things. So far, I'm enjoying myself. I'm mostly a backend dev, so this is mostly new territory for me. Very fun.

The bright side of the React (and Angular / Vue) is exactly what you said: same logic for web and mobile!

<comment><USER8> I did exactly the same, First build a web app using ReactJS + Redux and once i was comfortable with it, i tried porting it to React-Native. Helped me understand these one at a time.

<comment><USER9> React Native is basically React with a different DOM. Very easy transition.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I found this video and talk to be very enlightening. I know it's not the neatest, most exciting framework, but Rails with Turbolinks sure can do the trick. My last two mobile applications were built in the same way that Sam Stephenson describes here.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWEts0rlezA)</comment>


Charlie Munger on Getting Rich, Wisdom, Focus, Fake Knowledge and More - <AUTHOR> https://www.farnamstreetblog.com/2017/02/charlie-munger-wisdom/ <comment><USER2> "We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side"

This is probably the lost art of the century.

<comment><USER3> The second half of that is worth quoting too:

> _"It's bad to have an opinion you're proud of if you can't state the > arguments for the other side better than your opponents. This is a great > mental discipline."_

<comment><USER4> It's why I don't much bother hanging out in groups where people agree with me. It's much more fun when they don't, because if you cannot deal with alternative views then you don't have a convincing foundation for your own.

<comment><USER3> So what happens to you if you get something right the first time?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> If you enjoyed that article, you might like the book 'Poor Charlie's Almanack, The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger': [https://www.poorcharliesalmanack.com/](https://www.poorcharliesalmanack.com/).

<comment><USER6> From the order form, you can get a personally signed copy for $150 (or $49 unsigned). Pretty sweet.

<comment><USER7> I have the signed copy, which has a very small signature on the 3rd or 4th page of the book. I would probably go for the unsigned copy.

The book is phenomenal

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those interested and this old piece is classic

[https://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html](https://old.ycombinator.com/munger.html)

</comment><comment><USER9> Great words of wisdom in this article.</comment>


TerraCycle - first mass-produced consumer product to have a negative environmental footprint - <AUTHOR> http://galai.typepad.com/blog/2006/08/holy_shit.html Their product is driven by passion to be eco-friendly, not by passion to gain some PR points or appeal to amateur tree-hugger shoppers. Their whole product, end-to-end, is truly eco-friendly. The full story is on their website, but I'll just point out one feature that I LOVED - their amazing packaging: <comment><USER2> Interesting company that's fighting it's first hard battle:

<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB117979361996510232.html>

Seems like big bag chemical fertilizer company Scotts Miracle-Gro Co doesn't like dangerous upstarts...

Fast forward: Terracycle settled

</comment><comment><USER3> Bold title. What if we calculate footprint like opportunity cost, where we compare with alternate configurations with the smallest possible footprints that accomplish the task.

A bicycle would probably be a big win. Insulation would be another.

<comment><USER3> In the case of plantfood, a bin with worms and a bit of DIY beats shipped products. Recycle and generate your own compost: [http://www.amazon.com/4-Tray-Compost-System- Factory/dp/B0007...](http://www.amazon.com/4-Tray-Compost-System- Factory/dp/B0007..).

Though I'd love to see a real economic analysis of environment saving tech that incorporates time saved/spent, and what the money gained/lost in that time could buy.

Curb-side recycling is horribly inefficient if you factor in collective lost productivity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> that's a really cool company with a really cool story. there was an article in the times or something about them a while back. i was skeptical at first, but what they're doing is really cool.

</comment><comment><USER5> Cool startup, but I call bullshit on the OP's headline.</comment>


Google's Goals with Chromebook Pixel - <AUTHOR> http://chaz.me/posts/chromebook-pixel-strategy/

<comment><USER2> My guess- Google's goal is to replace all of the MacBooks that their employees use internally. That's 40,000 sales right there. They know that they need a high quality machine- no one wants to be sitting in meetings with chintzy hardware.

Furthermore, with the recent Java-based Facebook & Apple attacks it's becoming apparent that OSX is becoming a significant hacking target. Google already ditched Windows for security concerns ([http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d2f3f04e-6ccf-11df-91c8-00144feab4...](http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d2f3f04e-6ccf-11df-91c8-00144feab49a.html#axzz2La6ZRVoz)).

In short- this is a Google Employee computer, that they happen to be selling to the public.

<comment><USER3> Perhaps a Chromebook would work great for a Javascript or Dart developer, but what about C++, Java, or Android? Or even Go? I'm curious how well Google dogfooding Chromebooks would work out.

<comment><USER4> Google developers are not allowed to ever have any code copied to laptops due to security concerns. The laptops that they give devs are mainly for ssh, remote desktop and browser usage already.

<comment><USER5> This (and the top parent) are the only reasoned, insightful comments I've seen about the Pixel all day.

If you have to be on a laptop, the screens on the new Macbook Pros are simply a joy to use - as long as you aren't mucking with bitmaps too much, the clarity of web and code is really unmatched, eyestrain is greatly reduced.

Within the above restrictions (laptop, must be a locked/stripped-down OS), the Chromebook Pixel begins to make a lot more sense as an attractive laptop option.

<comment><USER6> When I'm writing code, I need a proper keyboard and a nice, big desktop monitor (preferably two). I still use a laptop, but it's hooked to a keyboard/monitor for the majority of my work.

When I do have to work directly on the laptop, I find it much less comfortable and slower. This is due to both screen real-estate and ergonomics. Your mileage may vary.

At the moment I'm primarily doing iOS and Java development (for a GWT web app), so I'm dealing with Eclipse, XCode, the iOS simulator, and a few browser windows. The secondary screen tends to be where I park reference material, IM, and sometimes logs. Eclipse likes to have a lot of pixels, but is a necessary evil to make Java development bearable.

How does Google deal with Java IDE's? Remote desktop?

<comment><USER7> This wouldn't be the primary development device. This is what you take to meetings and on the train. Googlers all have pretty beefy development workstations for the "real" work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Price = Quality

When something is $1299, you don't even need to read the specs. You just know it will be worth it. But when something is $249, hmm better check the specs to see why it's so horrible.

It's just basic human nature. Google isn't wrong to capitalize on this principle the same way Apple has been doing from the start.

<comment><USER9> Except that's not true at all. Plenty of people check out the specs and build quality of expensive items. If anything, some people are more picky, because they're spending more and they want to make sure they're getting their money's worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Whatever Google's Goals might be, I won't buy it since you can run native apps. I need my IDE, my server setup and want to install and remove native apps as and when I want. That is why developers are not impressed with Chromebooks, agree?

<comment><USER11> > Whatever Google's Goals might be, I won't buy it since you can run native > apps.

I think you mean "can't" (though that's arguably inaccurate, given Native Client), unless you are saying that having Native Client is the reason you don't want it, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

> I need my IDE, my server setup and want to install and remove native apps as > and when I want.

Okay.

> That is why developers are not impressed with Chromebooks, agree?

I would say that that's why people who are attached to traditional desktop environments aren't impressed with Chromebooks, but I don't think that has much to do with "developers". Some developers are interested in cloud IDEs and apps running on cloud-based servers, and I would suspect that they would be well-served by Chromebooks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I really wish they'd focus all their energy on Android instead. They've come a long way in the last few years but there are still a lot of holes to stop up and I don't see why Android couldn't be adapted to run well on hardware like this too.

</comment><comment><USER13> If they really are going with those stores (I have no idea), they need something better to show off, and to sell to those with the dollars (leaving aside the "more dollars than sense" debate), than the current line up.

Picture a Mac store and a Google store side by side. (Not that this is going to happen.) Where are people going to hang out, given the current line ups?

<comment> rkuykendall-com Just a note, but this is actually very likely to happen, at least somewhere.

They built a new Microsoft store at La Canterra mall in San Antonio directly across from the Apple store. I think it used to be a Victoria's Secret.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Google's goal with the Chromebook Pixel - to make money.

<comment><USER15> But is it a direct or indirect goal? If they're using ChromeOS as an indirect way to make more money through something such as user feedback in some way... then it might make sense.

Or, it's a long term initiative.</comment></comment>


Ad-blocking Hosts File - <AUTHOR> http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.txt <comment><USER2> One problem with this approach is that the first time you access the internet using your browser there is a huge lag as the host file is read and cached. Also, you have to increase the default cache size for the host file or Windows has to constantly reread the cache file (causing web page load delays) because its too big to fit in the memory reserved for the cache.</comment>


Learn dynamic programming in 30 minutes - <AUTHOR> https://youtu.be/PY9sl9QZqSs <comment><USER2> My personal advice for anyone wishing to master dynamic programming: learn about recurrence relations first. When I first started learning dynamic programming I didn't know about recurrence relations. It was very frustrating to somehow "sense" that a problem involves dynamic programming but can't describe it properly; that basically means I'm unable to apply dynamic programming principles to any new problems other than a few studied and memorized examples like LCS.

Later on after I learned recurrence relations I relearned dynamic programming and it's a breeze. To be sure you just need to structure your mind to think about these problems in terms of recurrence relations. You don't need to go as deep as I did learning about generating functions (though they are interesting and useful on their own).

Also I don't believe in learning it in 30 minutes. You can get an overview in 30 minutes, much like you can finish a chapter or two in a calculus textbook in 30 minutes. But you won't really learn it until you do the exercises and practice problems.</comment>


Building a license plate reader from scratch with deep learning - <AUTHOR> https://nanonets.com/blog/attention-ocr-for-text-recogntion/ <comment><USER2> Great article, misleading title. It's not "from scratch" if it's using OpenCV, TensorFlow, and a web service to do all of the work.

Imagine, "Bake Cookies From Scratch," and step one is remove the Pillsbury cookie dough from the freezer...

<comment><USER3> "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first buy Pillsbury Deep Dish Pie Crust" \- Carl Sagan

<comment><USER4> For those not in the know, the joke here is a play on the real quote from Carl Sagan:

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I work on EasyALPR which I'm putting through Startup School.

One thing often missed in license plate reading is that the tech is really well solved now using an open source stack.

There is always room for improvement so I welcome new technological approaches like this.

However when thinking about license plate data, the real trouble is in what you do with the data, how you handle duplication, and create rules and interface to make the collection useful.

<comment><USER6> My uncle is a cop in DC and he says >90% of the hits on plates are for the same number but a different state. Is there any work in identifying the state a license plate is from? Just the style is often enough to narrow it down, despite the fact that most license plate frames partially or totally cover up the state name.

<comment><USER7> > My uncle is a cop in DC and he says >90% of the hits on plates are for the > same number but a different state. Is there any work in identifying the > state a license plate is from?

As is so often the case, it seems like it'd be easier to move ourselves to the machine, by including the state information in the code. If a code can only belong to one state, this problem just can't arise.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps each new plate issued should include the state abbreviation in one of the corners (such as CA for California)

<comment><USER7> It's possible but not necessary. License plates already feature non-overlap -- a standard California plate is 2AAA222, while a New Mexico plate is AAA222. Neither template can be confused for the other.

<comment><USER9> > License plates already feature non-overlap

No, they don't.

> a standard California plate is 2AAA222, while a New Mexico plate is AAA222.

And the New Mexico AAA222 pattern is currently shared with Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, one of the optional Michigan designs, Mississippi, one of the Montana designs, some Nebraska plates, North Carolina, the Northern Mariana Islands, Oklahoma, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Vermont, and the US Virgin Islands.

To be fair, only NC, OK, and PR share NMs use of a dash between the alpha and numeric portion.

<comment><USER6> Virginia used to issue in that pattern, with a dash between. Then they ran out and added a 4th digit. However, there are plenty of VA plates still around with the old pattern.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey,

This is an a DIY Article on building a license plate detector using attention OCR.

We deep dive in with this article on how you can automate your data entry work with the help of deep learning based OCR. It speaks about attention mechanisms, spatial transformer networks and how they are applied for any text recognition task.

<comment><USER10> This seems like an item for "Show HN".

[https://news.ycombinator.com/show](https://news.ycombinator.com/show)

(Not trying to scold or anything, but seems like this would fit well with that convention.)

<comment><USER11> I always seen Show HN for interactive things, not articles (which I would say this is), thinking specifically about this part from the Show HN Guidelines:

> Show HN is for something you've made that other people can play with. HN > users can try it out, give you feedback, and ask questions in the thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Nice primer on how the tech works. The visuals for weighted relationships especially made it click for me.

</comment><comment><USER13> _Musings_ : I've seen more articles on license plate readers (or perhaps been more aware/paying more attention to these). I understand YC has invested in a LPR-tech company Flock Safety. I'm intrigued by the rise in LPR related articles. Such technology has been around for a while, but perhaps properly modularizing it (each camera unit is wireless, etc) and making it SaaS-backed is innovative. Has anyone else noticed this trend in activity for LPR ML tech (care to explain or to discuss the trend)?

<comment><USER14> I've been mulling over trying to build one for our cove/neighborhood.

Ring/security cameras are fine but being able to pinpoint a handful of plates to the wee hours of the morning would allow theft issues to be handled pretty easily when cross referenced with camera tech.

Ex. Right now you get a description like "Older white 4 door" or "White Nissan Sentra"

Bounce that against plates from that time and you've got a good match to work off of, especially if the owner matches descriptions from cameras.

<comment><USER15> You don't need automated license plate recognition for that, though. If you find the motion events in the wee hours, and have a sufficiently high-quality video frame [1], you can easily check the type of car and then know the license plate by reading it with the neural network that was preinstalled between your ears rather than a software one.

I've been writing my own home surveillance camera network video recorder software, so I've thought about plugging in something like this, but I don't think it's really necessary. The one time I might use it is if there's a car that was likely involved in a burglary, I might scan the previous few weeks to find previous times they were in-frame. Then I might see their scoping the place out, potentially revealing more about themselves. It's too labor- intensive to look through that many motion events by hand.

[1] My understanding is this requires some care. You have to select the right kind of camera, place/aim/zoom it carefully, and tune it for license plate recognition, particularly at night. I think the cameras typically come tuned for slow-moving, not-very-reflective-to-IR objects. License plates on a moving car are the opposite, so you want to say decrease the aperture and increase the shutter speed from the default, position it carefully as I said, maybe tweak some other settings, and test it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I cannot think of a use of license-plate reader technology which is not immoral.

With the rise of this kind of tech and its prevalence, I think the privacy- focused among us should start pushing to outlaw the use of this tech and eliminate the need for external identification on vehicles.

<comment><USER17> Huh? The whole reason license plates exist is to be read. What makes a machine reading it always immoral compared to a human? Particularly the police identifying vehicles they're searching for. Why shouldn't they use technology to help find criminals instead of sitting around watching cars go by with their own eyes?

I once had a problem with my car in a big carpark. I asked the security guard for help and he wanted my license plate number. He typed it into the computer and the camera found my car and panned and zoomed onto it. Amazing! Much easier than trying to explain the location. So there's your non-immoral example and you can stop worrying.

As for privacy. So what? Where are people going in public that's such a secret? If you want to do something secretly, do it in private. If it involves using the public streets, then accept that it's public.

<comment><USER18> > Where are people going in public that'a such a secret?

It really doesn't take much of an imagination to come up with places people might not want others to know they go to.

STD clinics, abortion clinics, AA/NA meetings and gay bars would be some low hanging fruit if you really can't think of any on your own.

> If it involves using the public streets, then accept that it's public.

"If you didn't want your violent ex husband to track you down, you shouldn't have used public streets to get to the shelter"

<comment><USER17> None of those things are really private anyway. Private investigators, police, or stalkers can follow people from their house to wherever they go, and can identify you by your car's appearance even without the license plate. The difference here could be in the scale and ease of access to such data though.

Nobody seems to mind that Google Streetview shows cars. My sister visited her mother in another city at the time they drove past so now there's a permanent record that she was there at that time to anyone who knows what her car looks like. Is that a problem too?

<comment><USER19> > _" Private investigators, police, or stalkers can follow people from their > house to wherever they go, and can identify you by your car's appearance > even without the license plate."_

Quantity has a quality all of it's own.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Silicon Valleys funding market will shrink - a prediction - <AUTHOR> http://michaelkk.tumblr.com/post/25298397157/there-is-a-storm-coming

<comment><AUTHOR> would love to hear other opinions. let me know what your take is.</comment>


Heart: a planet-scale RDF data store - <AUTHOR> http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/HeartProposal

<comment><USER2> I feel like this page is using "map-reduce" as magic juice. The problem described is enormous, and saying you're going to use map-reduce in this case is somewhat akin to saying you're going to be using CPUs. Yes, but so what? That doesn't magically move you to "feasible".

I also get the sense that, far more than usual, this is technology without a use case. I'm not saying it's useless or that the idea is bad, just that I followed a couple of links and didn't find an even cursory discussion of what this is for or why it is better than other things, existing or otherwise.

These aren't good signs.

<comment><USER3> It's a proposed original ASF project -- the point is to churn some bureaucracy, not produce something people want.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Ouch. A directed graph in a columnar store like HBase? I guess there are worse approaches, but I would like to see a justification for this other than "we have this hammer called Hadoop..."

<comment><USER3> Got any better solutions? I don't. At least it ain't trying to do it relationally!

Tuplestores are one of the only data stores I can think of that doesn't actively fight you when trying to query EAV data or traverse Directed Graphs.

<comment><USER5> If it's a directed graph, why not use a graph database?

<comment><USER3> Tuplestores are one of the most common backend formats for storing graphs — you only need triples, or quads if you want timestamps. Everything's stored as (Entity, Attribute, Value) in the same table, with all of the Es and As being references, and with the Vs as references when the tuple is a graph edge but as atoms when it's a graph node.

Pretty much every existing RDF database is a tuplestore underneath, or abuses a relational database as a crappy tuplestore that won't get you fired for installing it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is so much useful and well-organized information in RDF format out there that is completely being unused. Check out: <http://wiki.dbpedia.org/Datasets> \- this includes almost the entire Wikipedia in a nice, organized way. Using Sparql/Snorql ( <http://dbpedia.org/snorql/> ) you can actually find everything that Bart Simpson wrote on the chalkboard during the opening sequence in season 12: <http://www.snee.com/bobdc.blog/2007/11/querying- dbpedia.html>

However, searching through RDF is a pain and not a small task. The tools available to manage 50GB worth of RDF data are very basic and inefficient. I used a MySQL-based RDF store and even on my extremely powerful server, doing a simple query choked the machine. I'm hoping with a better data store, we can now manage RDF data better and hopefully search it better. Think of how much useful information there is on Wikipedia, Powerset.com etc. I don't mean just the text, but rather the extremely well-organized human-edited information boxes on the right that contain categories, hierarchical data, and specifications. Using RDF, all of that could be instantly queryable.

I would love to write an app that queries a Google RDF store for local listings or map information. APIs are flat and tabular. I can only query Amazon for specific search words in items. Right now, I can't say with one query: "show me all ratings for every book that was written by the authors who currently have a book in the top 100 books list." RDF makes that possible. The problem right now is that RDF stores suck and searching through them isn't easy for the average developer. Here's hoping Apache makes it possible and scalable.

<comment><USER7> > "show me all ratings for every book that was written by the authors who > currently have a book in the top 100 books list."

Why not? That seems like a pretty basic SQL query to me, with one nested query. I think we even did something almost exactly like that in my undergrad dB database management class in the first few weeks.

something like (sorry, I'm the world's worst SQL guy)

SELECT title, ratings FROM books WHERE author IN (SELECT author FROM top100books);

If I just had one table with the sales figures, titles and ratings in it, I could even derive the answer in one query also.

I'm sure my syntax is all wrong and messed up, but that's not the point. The point is most of the notional "only RDF could make this possible!" examples I've heard are pretty much completely doable in one or two queries in SQL, and not even particularly complicated ones at that.

<comment><USER5> _> "show me all ratings for every book that was written by the authors who currently have a book in the top 100 books list."

Why not? That seems like a pretty basic SQL query to me, with one nested query. I think we even did something almost exactly like that in my undergrad dB database management class in the first few weeks._

That's more like (sorry, I'm bad at sql too)

      SELECT ratings.*, book.name, author.name
        FROM ratings
        JOIN books ON ratings.book_id = book.id
        JOIN authors ON books.author_id == author.id
        WHERE author.id
          IN (
           SELECT author_id
           FROM books
           JOIN ratings ON book.id = book_id
           ORDER ratings.score ASC LIMIT 100
          )

You better hope that sucker uses indexes or it's going to be a few minutes. And you better cache that because you don't want that running every time someone hits the recommended reads.

SQL can be pretty scary for this stuff. It would be even worse if you allows a many to many relationship with books and authors.

<comment><USER7> Like I said, I'm the world's worst SQL guy. But the good news is that I haven't invalidated my point by my sloppy syntax.

So this raises two questions...

1) Who doesn't use indexes these days? Even light solutions like SQLite support them.

2) The only real remaining advantage to RDF is that the data resources can sit on the end of URLs if I remember. I think this is mainly because nobody has put much effort into dangling indexed relational tables at the end of a URL. There's nothing that says I couldn't have

      SELECT ratings.*, book.name, author.name
          FROM http://someplace.com/booklists.ratings AS ratings
          JOIN http://someplaceelse.net/booksales.books AS book ON ratings.book_id = book.id
          JOIN http://yetsomeotherplace.org/publisherdata.authors AS authors ON books.author_id == author.id
          WHERE author.id
            IN (
             SELECT author_id
             FROM books
             JOIN ratings ON book.id = book_id
             ORDER ratings.score ASC LIMIT 100
            )

Or some such...sure it's sloppy and it's slowish, but aren't those the same problems as with RDF? And yet we're still using SQL to do this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Excited mark_l_watson?

<comment><USER9> No. I look at this site occasionally, and nothing seems to get done.

Also (pardon me if I take your good joke seriously :-) I don't see why we need planet scale RDF data stores. Instead, we need a very large number small SPARQL endpoints with some form of trust mechanism and a discovery mechanism.

<comment><USER8> :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So... someone is making a massive XML database out of some other components?

<comment><USER3> RDF is _absolutely not_ XML.

It's a directed graph, not a tree. It died primarily because the dimwits at the W3C saddled it with an atrocious XML serialization, but the semantic web bullshit didn't help, and neither did the poor use of it by Mozilla and others that led to it being used ineptly for RSS.

<comment><USER5> Thanks, I wasn't clear on what RDF was. I skimmed the wikipedia article and I thought it was just a variant of xml.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Skynet.</comment>


The father of all humans lived 239,000 years ago - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/25/8290303/father-humans-239000-years-ago-iceland-genome

<comment><USER2> "But the Icelandic analysis indicates he probably lived about 239,000 years ago — a number that's much closer to the estimate for humanity's most recent common female ancestor, who lived about 200,000 years ago. ""

So there WAS (almost) a proverbial Adam and Eve! (although possibly more of an UNNGH and HAAACH?)</comment>


Mozilla pays 12-year-old San Jose boy for hunting bugs in system - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/san-jose-neighborhoods/ci_16401891

<comment><AUTHOR> He's 12 years old. He found a stack overflow. In document.write. In Firefox. In 2010. Clearly something has gone wrong with spacetime.

<comment><USER2> One can only hope that the next generation will find a way to blow whistles into cell phones to get free calls.

<comment><USER3> For those who don't know: early phone hackers (phreaks/phreakers) discovered that a 2600hz tone would indicate a trunk was idle, reset and listen for a new call. Since the line was not actually hung up the billing system wouldn't activate leading to free phone calls.

Some people learned to whistle the tone, while others used bird calls, and even a whistle given free by Captain Crunch (the cereal).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600_hertz>

<comment><USER4> I'm actually even quite positive I remember hearing Mitnick wasn't allowed to use the phone in prison for some time because they were concerned he could initiate some sort of military attack by whistling into the phone.

I heard this around the age of 14 though- so it's possible my memory is foggy.

<comment><USER5> true story: <http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-9995253-83.html>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's amazing what the Internet has done for child geeks. Now they can find out about, interact with, and do useful things rather than hack alone in a vacuum.

My biggest child tech achievement was finding the word C--T in a data file for a text adventure when I was 10 (I was trying to cheat at the game). I casually asked my parents what it meant and my parents wrote in and complained and we got a free copy of the then-new Wing Commander by way of apology <g> (Happily, I didn't learn what C--T meant till I was about 14..)

<comment><USER7> No dictionary at home?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Here's the advisory, with link to the bug (require login to see bug).

[http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2010/mfsa2010-65.ht...](http://www.mozilla.org/security/announce/2010/mfsa2010-65.html)

<comment><USER9> I have a login, but still can't see the bug. I assume I don't have sufficient permissions on my account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The title makes it sound like he's on the payroll.

"12-year-old San Jose boy paid bounty for finding security hole in Firefox."

</comment><comment><USER11> Here are two pieces of evidence that this boy was fortunate in his choice of parents:

 _Miller is quick to point out that he's not just playing games; what Alex is doing is learning. "Clearly it's his passion," she says._

 _"But you still have to do chores," Miller reminds him when he talks of his next debugging mission._

What a delightful story, and so free of the "genius whiz kid" trope that has infected this genre since long before I was that age.

</comment><comment><USER12> Looks like a fairly default Ubuntu install in the picture. I remember playing with Linux at that age.. fun times. He probably had a better time of it than me struggling with Redhat 6.3 from my local bookstore though...

<comment><USER13> local bookstore? I had to find a news agent that sold it far from where I lived, the download size would've taken weeks to finish.

<comment><USER14> Look sonny, when I was 12 I was installing AmigaDOS from floppy disks...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wish they would open up the bug to take a peak at the comments and test cases

<comment><USER16> Protip: Firefox is open source.

<comment><USER15> Protip: Here's the bug I was referencing <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583077> \- it's already been patched and fixed, so why can't I take a peak for curiosity?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Pay him more. But don't hire him. It'll spoil his instincts.

</comment><comment><USER18> I love the story, and I'm glad the kid got $3,000 - _but_ \- do people not proofread their work anymore?

From the story: "[...], he plans __yo __buy Christmas gifts for his family."

</comment><comment><USER19> wow, I guess it goes to show how much younger people these days are when getting into programming. good for him :D

<comment><USER20> I don't think that's the case. As an 80s home computing revolution kid, quite a lot of kids were into BASIC etc. To a certain extent we've lost that now.

We grew up in a time where you could buy a computer and you pretty much had to learn how to program it. Now, you can get away without needing to learn.

<comment><USER19> I agree, with technology becoming so simple to use these days, it empowers people to do a lot more than they were able to do in the 80s. On the other hand, I feel that as the cost of creating a company decreases, and as more younger people learn about entrepreneurship, more of them are getting interested in creating stuff at an early age.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm sorry, but I can't help but see this and think of all the kids around this age who are prevented from earning money by child labor laws, and the idea that this kid is a "Slave" because he's "too young to make decisions for himself. It may sound like this is a ridiculous thing to say, but just yesterday someone was making this claim in another forum.

I was busy writing a game at that age with the intent to sell it. Unfortunately, at that time there were no good distribution methods for independant games.

But I think the desire of some people who are well meaning but narrow in their worldview to "protect" children really prevents a lot of children from achieving as much as _they_ would like, and are capable of.

When I finally was allowed to work, I remember several years where I had to work part time, even during the summers, because of these laws. One of my first jobs was a programming job, and I learned a whole lot from a senior programmer. I was 14 or 15, he was mid 20s. I wonder how much more I would have learned if I hadn't been prevented from working as much as I wanted because of state mandated limits on the number of hours. I can recall many times when he was explaining something to me, and it was getting really good, but I had to leave.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did I miss the part of the article where they took his $3,000 check away?

<comment><USER21> No, but most people from both political parties support the laws that prevent people from hiring kids his age. I think he was only able to get the $3,000 because it was a bounty or a "Contest", and not a "job" or "employment".

I think bug bounties shouldn't be the only way this kid is allowed to earn money. He's proven himself to have discipline and some responsibility. He should be allowed to go work for a startup, if he wants (at least during the summers when he's off from school, anyway.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Good for him! If he keeps this up, he's going to be an awesome programmer.

<comment><AUTHOR> That or he'll ruin the whole Internet and then do a dissertation on stochastic congestion control.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Why oh why couldn't I have been brought up in a white, suburban, upper-middle class family with my own computer and a highspeed internet connection.

Stories like this always make me bitter, but good on the kid for making the most of his upbringing.

<comment><USER24> WTH?

MOD consisted mainly of poor Brooklyn kids; in fact, some of them were members of street gangs, and taught themselves to hack on school computers. From nowhere to the cover of magazines ..

The wikipedia article sucks, but the lore is out there and well known:

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

<comment><USER25> Thanks! Now I get what the hell Hackers (the crappy 1995 movie) was trying to portray albeit really badly.

<comment><USER26> OT: Funny how perceptions differs. I liked the movie for its entertainment value, even though it was naive and used cliches about hackers.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Are you powerful? Will you quit email? - <AUTHOR> In his 2012 essay, PG suggested email will be replaced and the way to do it is through powerful people. Since they're all at the mercy of email too, they'd be the first to switch.
Now it's 2017 and I don't see powerful people leaving email.
I want to understand why. If you're powerful and are reading this, what's stopping you from quitting email? <comment><USER2> I've met quite a few and heard from even more IT guys that worked for them. I can at least add a few data points I've seen.

First is reason nothing goes away at most big companies: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. It's something they understand, they're often lay people who might not want to learn something else, they might have tons of stuff built on top of it (tech or processes), tons of important information stored in old emails (it's archive medium, too), and they'll get emails from other people anyway. So, why not keep using what you've been using.

A few others I hear occasionally on top of that big set. One that I like is that it's asynchronous. They can put emails off easier without it seeming like they're ignoring people. Managing it is fast and easy vs some web apps for communication. The security might be perceived as better esp with security software they likely have for email & data breaches they see on other things that aren't intranets or Gmail. It's decentralized, vendor-neutral protocol which existed for ages (stability). Bosses in smaller firms even use it straight-up as free alternative to paid chat or archive tools if it's Gmail. Just to avoid paying anyone past the ISP which is also cheap or someone's Wifi haha.

So, there's a few I've heard that tell me email ain't going anywhere.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm not switching from email until my company, government, any website I use, friends, family, and everyone else in the world stops using email. Email is so core to the internet, name one major website that does not require an email, name a company that dont have email. Email lets you receive a letter and view it whenever you'd like, and without losing it, unlike messaging apps, it allows for archiving of information and quickly lets you search. I see no reason to switch from email.

</comment><comment><USER4> Paul Graham said that email was horrible, and it shouldn't be hard to come up with something better. But he didn't actually put forward a concrete proposal.

So: What would be better? Given that the world currently runs on email, what would be enough better that it would be worth it to switch? I don't know. I don't think Paul Graham knew then, or knows now. And I think that the reason people haven't switched is that, so far, there isn't an alternative that's enough better. And the reason there isn't one is because, contrary to Paul Graham's expectation, creating something better is actually pretty hard.

<comment><USER5> >So: What would be better? Given that the world currently runs on email, what would be enough better that it would be worth it to switch? I don't know.

This is something I've thought about quite a bit recently. For one, I absolutely hate the fact that when I give out my email address, the receiver can give my address to a third party. The third party has full capability to contact me, I can never know who gave up my email address, and I can never revoke the capability. At a minimum, an email replacement would need to address this.

You're right, replacing email would be really hard. There are a few things I'd like to see that could at least improve the current situation.

1\. Push companies/organisations that request your email address to provide you in advance with the sender address they will use in the future to contact you, so that if we wanted to we could maintain a whitelist of accepted addresses to prevent all unsolicited mail.

2\. Come up with a service that makes it easy to manage throw-away addresses that redirect to the same inbox so that I can essentially revoke the address that I hand out to somebody.

<comment><USER6> > when I give out my email address, the receiver can give my address to a > third party

Use sub-addressing [1]

So, if you signup on example.com, and your email is "firstname.lastname@example.com" you give them "email@example.com" or whatever format works for your mailbox provider/software.

If you wanted to go one step further, a filter could be configured to look at the sub-address component, and compare it with the sender's domain and mark it as spam if there isn't a match.

1\. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Sub- addressing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Sub-addressing)

<comment><USER5> This can work for online services during signup. I haven't yet seen this, but I wouldn't be surprised if some services were smart enough to drop the sub- address before on-selling your email.

In face-to-face exchanges (for me recently, this came up a lot while giving out my address to real estate agents), anything involving '+' causes a huge amount of confusion and they start asking questions. I'd much rather a "normal" looking address, where I'm perfectly happy for normal to be say base64 with '.', '_' and '-' and as the three special characters (at least people will think its valid).

<comment><USER6> \+ doesn't have to be the separator. Gmail supports a '.' for example, and if you run the mail server yourself, its just limited by what characters the software you run supports.

If you have your own domain, you can of course also do shifty-bobs- firstname.lastname@example.com and have it go to a catch-all style mailbox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What people don't realize is that the invisible "lock in" cost of email is all the existing infrastructure. More specifically, it represents the cost of _moving away from_ that infrastructure. SMTP, POP, IMAP, all the servers and protocols, not to mention all the software integrations ( for all kinds of apps and OSes ) with email.

Unlike something like FB, or Google, that grew up building out their defensible data assets and infrastructure from a for-profit perspective, email infrastructure has been baked into the internet since before the web ever existed.

It's not the whole picture, but try replicating the functionality of email with "something better" without replicating the whole infrastructural advantage it has? Good luck.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hell no.

Email is the least-intrusive way for me to be contacted by people outside my organization. Some of them I do want to hear from and will be happy to transfer to a more synchronous or intrusive communication channel. Most I don't. Email is the best medium I have for screening those contacts.

Then there are marketing messages and announcements from platforms I use. I like having those pushed to me in such a way that I can easily ignore all but the 3% that are actually of interest.

And notifications. Yes, if a server is on fire, I want SMS or slack. But if someone's added a new ticket to our issue tracker or needs a pull request reviewed? Email is very effective for going through such notifications one at a time at one's leisure and dealing with each in succession.

Finally, there are the occasions where I want to share a big chunk of text with a bunch of people who may or may not be using the same platforms for other communications. It might be an announcement. It might be a list of questions for a vendor. Whatever it is. Email is very effective for that.

Now, what do you propose we replace all of those use cases with?

<comment><AUTHOR> I propose the same thingMr. Paul Graham proposed.

There are better ways to screen contacts outside the organization than being interrupted. Same for marketing messages and announcements. It's important to give different people different abilities, and sort tasks by importance or deadline.

A big chunk of text sent to people is practically spam.

<comment><USER8> And what tools would you recommend using instead of email at this juncture? I have yet to see anything that's a viable alternative for the use cases I mentioned, let alone a preferable one.

And no, a big chunk of text is not anything like spam if it's part of a conversation, nor as an announcement to one's own team or to other parties who have requested it. Length of communication is not correlated with value or desirability.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I would think that websites would have to stop using email as a means of identifying humans before email is done away with. What are the alternatives for self identification on the internet today?

</comment><comment><USER10> present me with a better alternative and I will abandon email. Gmail is a pretty good app tbh.</comment>


EmDrive Will Be Tested in Space - <AUTHOR> http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a22678/em-drive-cannae-cubesat-reactionless/ <comment><USER2> I like the put up or shut up attitude they've taken. But wouldn't more terrestrial testing be better before they go to the expense of launching it in space?

<comment><AUTHOR> They're sending up a CubeSat which looks to be pretty small, from Googling it looks like the cost to launch could be $40-60k USD.

I'm not familiar with testing things like this, but I could very well see that being cheaper than hiring out a well-qualified lab to test it out.</comment></comment>


Tumours shrunk 'dramatically' in 11 days - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35775314 <comment><USER2> From the article: "The drugs were lapatinib and trastuzumab, which is more widely known as Herceptin. They both target HER2 - a protein that fuels the growth of some women's breast cancers."</comment>


Secret code in Amazon SES banner - <AUTHOR> http://awsmedia.s3.amazonaws.com/ses_hero_lg.png

<comment><USER2> Looks like ascii.

        2e 7a 6e   .zn
        6b 66 20   kf
        61 6e 75   anu
        67 20 65   g e
        72 67 67   rgg
        72 6f 20   ro
        66 76 20   fv
        61 62 70   abp
        6e 6f 20   no

I may have read the binary wrong --- I'm surprised there are no 'm's.

<comment><USER3> Which is this: .znkf anug erggro fv abpno

Which looks like a backwards sentence (. first), and it also looks like ROT13...

.maxs naht retteb si nocab

bacon is better than sxam.

The x is clearly wrong, it should end up a p.</comment></comment>


Investigating the running abilities of Tyrannosaurus rex - <AUTHOR> https://peerj.com/articles/3420/ <comment><USER2> The paper has full study text and images, no paywall.</comment>


Designing for Privacy – An Emerging Software Pattern - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@milstan/designing-for-privacy-an-emerging-software-pattern-7c632cb1de35 <comment><USER2> I don't actually know if I read this quote somewhere or made it up somehow, but I've been using:

"Privacy/Security is getting better but it's getting worse faster".

There's soooo many people working hard on both security and privacy. They're trying their best to make products that are privacy focused and more secure. But they're up against Facebook, Google, etc... and the fact that many consumers just don't care. We say we care, but in the end, we don't.

*I guess the quote is paraphrased from a Renner book?

<comment><USER3> > _We say we care, but in the end, we don 't._

Others who care are fighting this fight. Facebook's message at the recent f8 was "privacy is the future"... It is not everyday you get giants like those, even superficially, to pay lip-service to something like that.

> _But they 're up against Facebook, Google, etc._

It isn't a losing battle, I don't think so. A lot of hardworking and smart people are putting in the effort, like you mentioned, but that effort isn't in vain. May be you're not paying enough attention to know the impact their work is having?

<comment><USER2> > A lot of hardworking and smart people are putting in the effort, like you > mentioned, but that effort isn't in vain. May be you're not paying enough > attention to know the impact their work is having?

I'm paying close attention, it could be I'm just being pessimistic :-) This is certainly a case where I hope I am wrong.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Privacy right now is still a super luxury product that hasn't trickled down generally to the aspirational goods market. I'm all for engineering privacy solutions, but reality is, these are designed to facilitate information sharing that was previous considered taboo or beyond the acceptable. You probably wouldn't trust a bunch of anonymous random grad students using university tech to keep your family's medical records safe, but with a privacy technology, suddenly giving them the data is viable - and this is what we call "privacy" now.

Privacy engineering is interesting, but not nearly as much as privacy products, as really without viable privacy products, privacy engineering is just another self-selected problem.

<comment><USER5> There are a number of viable data privacy software products out there. Companies, and engineers they employ, need to account for that and stop being ignorant

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm curious if security consciousness has been raised to the point where people are willing to pay for the iron-clad guarantee that their information will never be sold... and if it's enough to support privacy-first apps and startups.

<comment><USER7> Is there any instance of (a) a SaaS with a legally binding contract with some teeth around user privacy and (b) where that clause was exercised and the user benefited?

The civil route be an alternative to regulatory solutions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Regulation doesn't make the social change. Software does.

<comment><USER7> Ah, the third leg of the solutions stool: civil, government, and tech. I'd argue any culture will have a mix of all three.

For traffic accidents, there might be various applications of lawsuits, citations, and speed bumps in your town.

In the case of SaaS, we might have only one or two. For example, take LinkedIn last week, selling everyone's PII to ScribD. There might be legal issue in GDPR or CA jurisdictions. There's probably no civil one (?). There is certainly no tech one: you need your PII to be on LI so your friends can find you, because that's the value of LI. I suppose in there future there could be a tech solution here with agents representing you in the cloud, or maybe e2e homomorphic encryption, but it's surely not what drives LI's income at the moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Did anyone else immediately guffaw at the pairing of article title and domain, or am I just an oddball?</comment>


I Am Not A Programmer - <AUTHOR> http://floopsy.tumblr.com/post/32448842639/i-am-not-a-programmer

<comment><USER2> > _For me, however, no matter how many new or interesting projects I would > begin working on, the question that would ultimately appear in my mind would > be, "Why are you doing this?"_

This is not meant to be critical or in any way superior, but shortly after acquiring my first programmable calculator in the early 1970s and extending to the present, I have no doubt about why I write programs -- _programming works_ in a world where nearly nothing else does.

Governments don't work. Religions don't work. Relationships don't work. Philosophy doesn't work. And psychology certainly doesn't work -- it's a field with more self-deluding, self-important frauds per square meter than any I can think of.

But programming works -- if you become skilled at it, you may end up writing real solutions to real problems that people find useful. I get calls every day from people who have problems they could easily solve if only they knew how to program. For example, today I got an e-mail from someone who needed to compute the relationship between sensor height and volume in an underground storage tank that (a) had an unknown shape and size, and (b) had also been deformed by overhead truck traffic over decades. I solved the problem for him, using a little math knowledge and some simple programming.

Programming is to modern times what literacy was to the Middle Ages -- it puts you in the enviable position of having an essential skill, one people simply can't do without.

> _I Am Not A Programmer_

I am a programmer. Looking through my notebooks from the 1960s, I realize I was a programmer before I had a way to gain access to a computer -- I kept trying to solve problems algorithmically, years before I had a chance to write a real algorithm or see it executed.

I think back to the early 19th century, the time of Charles Babbage (difference engine) and Ada Lovelace (the first computer programmer), and I think how tragic that they spent their lives pining for access to something we take for granted.

This isn't to overvalue computers, only to say that having access to computers now seems like a natural right, a good thing, but being denied that access is like not being able to breathe. A few decades ago, almost no one realized this.

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

</comment><comment><USER3> _Governments don't work. Religions don't work. Relationships don't work. Philosophy doesn't work. And psychology certainly doesn't work -- it's a field with more self-deluding, self-important frauds per square meter than any I can think of._

Mathematics and Physics work too,just saying

</comment><comment><USER4> I dont really know why I should care that some, to me random, person, doesn't regard himself a programmer. There really is no valuable information for anyone who doesnt know that person in that post. So why post it? Who would be interested?

<comment><USER5> > There really is no valuable information for anyone who doesnt know that > person in that post.

Many people make things accessible via the WWW with no goal or intention to reach a wider audience than their respective peers.

> So why post it?

To reach his/her peers without having to send it to each one individually. Alternatively, he/she could be using a blog as a place to vent.

> Who would be interested?

Obviously, HN readers.

<comment><USER4> HN readers who dont know the person? I really dont think so. It hardly qualifies as news anyways.

<comment><USER5> > HN readers who dont know the person?

They up-voted it, didn't they?</comment></comment></comment></comment>