Our Pointless Pursuit Of Semantic Value - <AUTHOR> http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/11/11/our-pointless-pursuit-of-semantic-value/ <comment><USER2> God, yes. So much of what's repeated about the benefits of semantic markup are pie-in-the-sky.

The link to the IRC logs in that piece was fascinating. To see Mark Pilgrim - who was always at the pragmatic end of things when it came to the accessibility debate - recanting many of the positions he takes in 'Dive into Accessibility' tells you how little of the things that we've been promised for years have actually amounted to anything.

Don't believe anyone who tells you anything about markup best practice until they can point you to a shipping user-agent that will make use of it and introduce you to a living human being who will experience some tangible benefit.

<comment><USER3> God, no. Please don't help to spread this horseshit.

Here are the user agents that make use of it:

\- ChromeVox: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kgejglhpjiefppelpm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/kgejglhpjiefppelpmljglcjbhoiplfn)

\- NVDA: <http://www.nvda-project.org/>

\- Window-Eyes: <http://www.gwmicro.com/window-eyes/>

\- VoiceOver: <http://www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover/>

\- JAWS: [http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product- pa...](http://www.freedomscientific.com/products/fs/jaws-product-page.asp)

\- Orca: <http://live.gnome.org/Orca/>

And two dozen others. And here a few living human beings that benefit from it:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwoe7OjIxpw>, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pntGp00HHr8>, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAw0SIkXm1o>, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBzSXIEusoU>, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zSTJwIULYU>, <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_TFHqIHBqM>

285 million people are visually impaired in the world. Putting aside the SEO, meta-data and other discussions, I think this is a pretty meaningful argument in favor of doing it right.

<comment><USER2> You (and I to a certain extent) need to be more specific. You've provided a list of screen readers. What I was really trying to say was "when someone argues that a particular markup or technique has benefits, then they need to demonstrate a real user with a real need who will benefit using shipping technology".

So we would need to pick a particular point of contention and then we can argue the toss.

<comment><USER2> PS If you read the Mark Pilgrim IRC logs he caricatured the response he often found when criticising any aspect of accessibility best-practise as "OMG!!! YOU HATE BLIND PEOPLE!!!". It's an effective way of shutting down debate and doesn't help anyone.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> _XML, RDFA, Dublin Core and other structured specifications have very solid use cases, but those use cases do not account for the majority of interactions on the Web._

Frankly, this couldn't be more wrong. _Every_ website in that list has plenty of semantic structure that is lost in the HTML.

\- Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Wordpress (not to mention HN) has plenty of structure that could be surfaced by SIOC[1].

\- Wikipedia is the king - see DBpedia[2].

\- Amazon (and to a lesser extent, eBay) are a perfect fit for Good Relations[3], which is already used by Very Big websites to provide value to customers.

The problem with this post is that reduces the Semantic Structure movement to HTML5. Yes, HTML5 semantic tags may not be worth it, but there's much more to the semantic web technologies than that.

[1]: <http://sioc-project.org/> [2]: <http://dbpedia.org/> [3]: <http://www.heppnetz.de/projects/goodrelations/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Semantic markup is more than just accessibility for me. Even if it doesn't add semantic value to browsers, search engines, or screen readers, it's beneficial to _me_ while developing.

It makes it more readable because you can quickly see the differences in elements instead of just seeing <div> everywhere. It also simplifies and cleans up CSS a bit as you can define more base element styles and then extend them with classes and IDs.

<comment><USER6> That is what author is saying - "Use the new elements to make your mark-up readable, not for any inherent semantic advantage."

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The conflation of "semantic HTML" with "the semantic web" has done immeasurable harm to both causes.

Yes, debating whether to mark up your forms using UL or OL or LABEL or SPAN or DIV or DL or TABLE or ... is a total waste of time. That doesn't tell us anything about the usefulness of machine-readable linked data, though. The two subjects have nothing in common except a relatively unusual adjective.

<comment><USER7> Or, to put it another way, there are two different kinds of semantics in play; the semantics of a document (this is a title, this is a paragraph, ...), and the semantics of the subject of a document (this is the price of the item, this is how many we have left in stock, ...).

The costs and benefits of enhancing one are different and separate from the costs and benefits of enhancing the other.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The fact that our current systems for giving semantic classifications to web content are insufficient does not mean that giving web content semantic meaning is a pointless idea.

It's like going back to the early 1980s and blogging about how computer graphics suck so you shouldn't be wasting your time looking into them.

<comment><USER9> I disagree and don't think that's the point of the article. The analogy you gave is a little hinky, too.

The main point here is that too much time is wasted on simple issues. While energy is heaved into whether or not <time> is a better tag than <data>, a lot of actual work and design could have been done.

<comment><USER3> I work in a front-end only dev shop, and while we might have a few hour-long discussions on markup scattered around the year, there aren't enough elements in the spec to keep us busy for a day. The article is just exaggerating the "issue".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Hmm, I've been doing web development for over 15 years now, and I was one of the first to jump on the CSS bandwagon ca. 2000. Most of the hand-wringing semantic purity came from front-end people doing small sites or blog templates, and the high watermark was around '03. There was a long period of stagnation and XHTML dying on the vine while the world continued using IE6 interminably.

To me this article is a very good rebuttal to a lot of the arguments that people were throwing around at that time. However these days things are different...

The emergence of WHATWG and the unification of the HTML5 standard and a recommitment by the W3C towards on-the-ground pragmatism have really changed the standards world. HTML5 to me is a breath of fresh air. When I read about the new elements I see that they are directly addressing real world issues, and I see that browsers seem to be picking them up pretty quickly. I don't see a lot of bloat or pointless ceremony like XHTML 2.0, and there is always an eye towards backwards compatibility.

Given these developments, I'd say the effort to understand and utilize HTML5 appropriately is a good investment even if there are no material benefits for a particular tag at this point in time. I don't see it as the huge time sink the author makes out, but rather as something I spend a couple hours a month doing as part of my regular job. It's not about obsessing over things, but just having an ambient awareness of what tags are there and how to use them so that my work is of higher quality and reaps whatever future rewards come down the pipe without extra effort.

</comment><comment><USER11> HTML5 is new enough that this has yet to be fully realized, but I'm hoping that the semantic labels help in getting content creators to think more non- linearly. For developers (and perhaps, print layout people), it's an accepted fact that the web is not just a sequential ordering of text with the occasional image. I suspect it's been harder for others to break away from that when all they see is divs.

</comment><comment><USER12> I have had RDF market on some of my sites for about 10 years, but was not happy with available notations until RDFa which I like.

I used to promote the idea of having parallel .rdf files, for example, index.rdf with the same base URL as index.html, etc. but with RDFa life is good enough. I still like my old idea however, but without this being a standard or at least a common practice it is not of much value.

<comment><USER4> With a decent web framework, creating a template which generates RDF from the same data source should be reasonably easy, if you know what ontologies you're targeting.

But yeah, having RDFa, there's no much point in that; clients should be able to parse the triples from it too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Or you could just use haml and .notation

I haven't seen a div tag in years. Unless your market is other designers do what your customers will pay for rather than whatever is in vogue. I wonder what fashionable designers would think about a site like HN still using tables.

</comment><comment><USER14> Semantic language has it's limits and rightfully so. The point of communication (sometimes) is to add something new. New things by definition have no pre-defined category. Therefore some content can only be described by inventing something. It's a moving target. I guess some attempt is a good thing like having a <title> tag, but it will never be perfect and if some day it is perfect then we are a dead species. I sincerely hope that most data continues to defy description.

</comment><comment><USER15> Slanted and biased. I mean, just look at the author's name :)

Actually, I quite agree. The days of being able to make sense of web pages via markup are gone. It was a good goal once, but the effort has failed. Time to move on and find a better accessibility solution.

<comment><USER4> But they aren't, they're just starting!

For example, search on Google for "Hearty Vegetable Lasagna Recipe". The way Google is able to recognize the review score, preparation time and number of calories of the recipe was extracting from the semantically tagged markup.

Now search for "Inception". See how Google recognized the review score, the director and the cast? Again, all from semantically tagged markup.

It's not over - it's only now beginning. But HTML5's new "semantic elements" are not the answer. RDFa, Microformats, Microdata - that's the real future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think there are some generally "semantic" things that are just good practice, like using logical classnames, keeping markup and styles separate, using the right list type for the task, etc. but I completely agree with the article.

It's all about readability and, call it crazy, but I think markup and code are like poetry. Imagine trying to have universal semantics for poetry...it seems dumb, right? But general practices make sense and general types of structure are good for different things.

Code and markup should be looked at the same way. This article, to me, did a great job reminding us of that.

</comment><comment><USER16> I thought Best Buy was seeing increased revenue from adopting RDFa?

</comment><comment><USER17> Anyone else think it's kinda funny the author's name is Divya?</comment>


HALP: High-Accuracy Low-Precision Training - <AUTHOR> http://dawn.cs.stanford.edu/2018/03/09/low-precision/ <comment><USER2> I have a feeling this could combine really well with John Gustafson's posits. I partially bring this up because of the paper he wrote with Isaac Yonemoto, where the latter uses an 8-bit variant of the posit to create a cheap approximation of the sigmoid function for neural networks[0], but also because for posits one can tweak the number of fraction and exponent bits to suit the needs of the required dynamic range and accuracy.

[0] [http://www.johngustafson.net/pdfs/BeatingFloatingPoint.pdf](http://www.johngustafson.net/pdfs/BeatingFloatingPoint.pdf)

<comment><USER3> The sigmoid approximation is nice, but not 100% necessary (I don't know the cost of doing sigmoid in GPU but I suspect the modern ones by nvidia probably have some way of doing it relatively fast) - note that sigmoid and tanh are still used in GRUs and LSTMs. And sigmoid, tanh, and their derivatives all have approximative shortcuts in posits.

There is a single critical step in training which I find gets stuck in early phases of learning due to accumulation issues (I solved it by expanding to 16 bits during this phase, which should be "on-chip"). It's nice to see another method to do the same! I suspect that batch normalization (which seems similar to what HALP is) after each step will also help.

<comment><USER2> Yes, while I haven't done anything with ML myself, I heard via the 3Blue1Brown video on Deep Learning[0] that the sigmoid function isn't really that used anymore. But I figured allowing that being able to tweak the dynamic range could make it a good fit for the rescaling and recentering approach.

You know what, I'll just go ahead and post a link to this article on the Unum google group, perhaps someone there can add some thoughts[1].

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk&t=17m](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aircAruvnKk&t=17m)

[1][https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/unum- computing/RHrQU...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/unum- computing/RHrQUoyDl5c)

<comment><USER3> Sigmoid is indeed hardly used as layer-to-layer transfer functions.

But I gurantee you > 20% of the world is activating sigmoid functions in ML apps every day.

<comment><USER2> Ah, thank you for that correction. Guess the video was accidentally misleading (they technically didn't say anything about other ML approaches, but overgeneralising like I did isn't that big of a leap)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> My realization from this article is a worrying trend of developing AI ASICS behind closed doors and only using them internally in your own datacenters or renting them through an abstraction, as a service.

Given how it's 2018 and we still don't have a single FOSS mobile phone in production, it's very possible that this technology will never leave the thin- client model, and we'll never see a retail sale of (open/programmable) neuromorphic hardware.

</comment><comment><USER5> Isn't this equivalent to changing the exponent bias? Like block floating point?

<comment><USER6> It's not just changing the exponent bias, but also adjusting the center of the representable range for gradients to be closer to the current value of the parameter (which is stored in full precision).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Cifar10? Is this a joke? Where are results on ImageNet?

</comment><comment><USER8> So much great work being done in Stanford. Can't wait to see what the next generation of students are doing.</comment>


Fix the GitHub Dark Menubar - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/adamisntdead/NoGithubDarkMode <comment><USER2> I am baffled by how Github thought this was a meaningful design change.

It looks jarring to have a top bar that has such a high contrast with the rest of the page. Not to mention the color palette used is very...odd. Very off white and pure black (255, 255, 255) do not go well together. They could have at least made the entire site dark themed in which I doubt there would be so much drama around it.

<comment><USER3> It's black, but not #000. It's a different and lighter shade of black.

<comment><USER4> and it's totally fine it's not #000 - total black doesn't happen in nature so it shouldn't be used in design - personally, I always use for example #111 ;)

<comment><USER3> Definitely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to admit that when I saw the dark bar for the first time, I switched to HN to see if someone died.

<comment><USER6> I checked HN for deaths, github / blog for SOPA style protest, even reddit. I then assumed that there must have been a bug or my browser has cached CSS with any error.

<comment><USER7> NixOS developers thought a recent change to the nvidia drivers caused the issue: [https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/22304#issuecomment-279...](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/22304#issuecomment-279139422)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> To the GitHubbers reading this thread, I like the dark menubar. I thought it was a feature of GitHub Enterprise only though, to distinguish the two :) I guess not!

<comment><USER8> The dark bar itself isn't really the issue, I'm all for a dark layout for GitHub. But as it is right now, with the header being dark and the rest light, it just looks very jarring and distracting to me. Your attention keeps being pulled to the top bar, but that's not where the real content is.

At first I assumed this was part of an incremental change to go fully dark, although I'm not sure why they would release it part by part.

But then a tweet [0] seems to imply that it's not gonna happen anytime soon.

[0]: [https://twitter.com/mdo/status/830210985512218624](https://twitter.com/mdo/status/830210985512218624)

<comment><USER9> That's what I thought too. Dark means the repo is private. If you fuck up, the world won't see

White means, anything you do here is publicly visible.

Seriously github.com can we please use the black to give some meaning.

I don't want my public repos to have black headers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Just a heads up that these extensions will stop working soon.

[https://twitter.com/mdo/status/830149416556191744](https://twitter.com/mdo/status/830149416556191744)

Most of these extensions popping up that revert GitHub's header to white are simply removing the `.header-dark` class which (currently) applies the dark styles and according to @mdo the styles will be permanently applied as a default.

The only way to revert them after this would be to reapply the old styles so if someone really wants that they might want to save them now.

<comment><USER11> I don't understand that point; how are they going to engineer it so that it's impossible to target the menubar via CSS?

<comment><USER12> They're not saying it will be impossible; they're saying it won't be a simple as removing the class.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So, what colour should the bike shed be?

<comment><USER14> Any color that doesn't increase the chances of you misplacing your Enterprise bike.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> For the people that don't like the black bar. It can easily be reverted using the stylish addon. This addon is available for Firefox and Chrome and allows you to add custom styling to any website.

Made a Gist with the styling that will revert the black bar to it's original light grey header.

[https://gist.github.com/babobski/41b29114a3c774bd018f75bd4ff...](https://gist.github.com/babobski/41b29114a3c774bd018f75bd4fffc872)

And the Stylish addons can be found here: FF: [https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/stylish/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/stylish/)

Chrome: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish-custom- the...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish-custom-themes- for/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe)

</comment><comment><USER16> Why did they change it? It's so distracting now.

<comment><USER17> It's the first of many iterative design changes coming to Github. It'll all make sense soon enough.

<comment><USER18> Why not release them when they make sense as a whole?

<comment><USER19> Maybe they follow the "make it worse, then make it better" approach to user experience.

Even if the end design is objectively worse than the previous/current one, it will feel better compared to the intermediate versions. That might make the users actually complain less in the end.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I coincidentally started using GitHub Dark with Stylish just a few days before these changes went live. I love it: [https://github.com/StylishThemes/GitHub- Dark](https://github.com/StylishThemes/GitHub-Dark)

</comment><comment><USER21> I think the dark bar is great. Makes the design a lot more clear. I finally understand it:

1) Black Bar: General Github stuff

2) White Stuff: Repository Specific Content

Now, if they could only put the link to the releases section in a place where you can find it, that would make the page perfect.

<comment><USER3> Not really.

The search input to search in the current repo is still in the black bar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> I installed a YouTube dark extension and thought it was leaking to GitHub's CSS. That's how bad this design change was.

</comment><comment><USER23> Why is this not a user preference? Double why can't I color it to the color theme that I would enjoy?

</comment><comment><USER24> Sorry to break the news but this is already done: [https://github.com/DennisSnijder/MakeGithubGreatAgain](https://github.com/DennisSnijder/MakeGithubGreatAgain)

<comment><USER8> Is a full extension to run a single line of JS/CSS really necessary? I feel like for things like this, it makes much more sense to use either greasemonkey or stylish, rather than install a whole browser extension just to remove a single CSS class.

<comment><USER25> And there's already a handful of userstyles to fix this already: [https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/github?as=1&sort=create...](https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/github?as=1&sort=created_date&sort_direction=desc)

My favourite of that bunch makes the navbar just slightly lighter instead of switching back to the old style: [https://userstyles.org/styles/138757/better- dark-github-nav](https://userstyles.org/styles/138757/better-dark-github-nav)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Fix the github and gist dark menubar with userscript [https://github.com/devmessias/whygithub](https://github.com/devmessias/whygithub)

</comment><comment><USER27> :) First time I saw the new dark menubar was on this repo

</comment><comment><USER28> Regarding the new GitHub dark bar... To quote Mr. Horse: "No sir, I don't like it".

</comment><comment><USER29> could this be the reason for the dark navbar [https://action.github.com/](https://action.github.com/)

<comment><USER30> Yup, I just assumed this was some kind of virtue-signaling political grandstanding sort of thing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Fix? It looks a lot better that way :D

</comment><comment><USER32> or just download a more flexible extension like Veneer and modify the CSS yourself

</comment><comment><USER33> Needs more black.

</comment><comment><USER34> Srs.

</comment><comment><USER35> I wish people would just roll with design changes. It's jarring? You'll get used to it. They'll improve it. Just roll with it. Let them experiment with their UI. These are pros. They brought you Bootstrap. And GitHub until now. Plus it's really not that meaningful. The UI is just a means to an end. You'll get used to it. It's what humans do best.

<comment><USER36> Bootstrap was not made by GitHub. You're thinking of Twitter there.

<comment><USER35> [https://github.com/mdo](https://github.com/mdo) has been at GitHub and working on Bootstrap probably longer at this point than while he was at Twitter. My impression is that he's also among the leads of this design evolution. He and whoever else is on this team have spent many hours thinking about this as their primary source of income. Why not just see where they take it?</comment></comment></comment>


The iPad is an incredible tool for work — but challenge to IT departments - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/the-ipad-is-an-incredible-tool-for-work--if-your-it-department-will-allow-it/2012/01/04/gIQArTDlaP_story.html <comment><USER3> Guess who wants a ipad but his boss wont buy him one :-)

Working in publishing (RBI) its an interesting tool for consuming media - <USER2> most companies are not in the publishing business so its value is considerably less.</comment>


Python Software You Can Use - <AUTHOR> https://glyph.twistedmatrix.com/2015/09/software-you-can-use.html <comment><USER2> Python packaging (particularly on Windows) is a definite pain point. That "no module named zope interface" is apparently due to the base Zope module not having an __init__.py. Every single time I install I have to manually add that file.

One of the golang attractions is the ability to quickly build a single-file distributable. The tradeoff is reduced programmer productivity.

In terms of 'make it work then optimize later,' my latest approach has been to use eGenix PyRun ([http://www.egenix.com/products/python/PyRun/](http://www.egenix.com/products/python/PyRun/)). For final distribution, compile then remove all the .py files in the tree (leaving just the compiled Python and binary dll/libraries) and create an alias link to the executable. Not perfect, but saves hours of time building distributions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Don't know where the guy lives but for me cx_freeze + PySide +SQLAclhemy make a great combination to build a good desktop app on windows. It works fine, builds all the time. I can admit that I had to work a bit on it, taht's for sure, but it does work. And the application is a small ERP, used in production every day, by a dozn of people. Tha only problems I have are my own bugs.

Python doesn't need such articles, that's for sure. If you want to use Python to write JavaScriptish web front end, then you're just going the wrong way. Just use JavaScript and that'll be so much easier.

</comment><comment><USER4> I have the same feeling. Would love to use same language for everything from backend to front end .

<comment><USER3> Given that language is actually language+libraries; and that libraries come to life depending on the good will of their creators; and that good creators just choose their languages preferences; and that new languages are created every year (and some even succeed !); your scenario is not going to happen anytime soon.</comment></comment>


As Tech Booms, Workers Turn to Coding for Career Change - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/29/technology/code-academy-as-career-game-changer.html?_r=0

<comment><USER2> The article and the cited boot camp programs left me confused. If you are exploring this, you might find [http://www.skilledup.com/articles/the- ultimate-guide-to-codi...](http://www.skilledup.com/articles/the-ultimate- guide-to-coding-bootcamps-the-most-selective-bootcamps) useful.

Boot camps are intense: there is a heavy time commitment (12 weeks, 6 days per week, 11 hours per day). The focus is on getting 6-figure salaries for "coding" with lots of well known company badges indicating where graduates have been hired and what percentage get high paying good jobs. There is no real mention about curriculum and what there is uses buzz words like "data scientist" and "full stack" and talks only in broad-brush terms. Typically, there is no mention of who is on the staff and what their credentials are. Admissions are very selective. Costs vary but are generally significant.

Initially I brushed off the boot camp ideas as teaching "coding" and not "programming", but I am trying to keep an open mind. How many people who get Turing Awards in the next few decades will have learned their chops in a boot camp coding course?</comment>


Refold – Cardboard standing/sitting desks - <AUTHOR> http://www.refold.co/ <comment><USER2> I tried a standing desk for about a year, with mixed feelings about it.

But guys - using a laptop at a standing desk is ergonomically still awful! If you look at the dude's neck angle in the photos, that is not a healthy way to be working all day.

Just because you're standing up doesn't mean you're exempt from regular 'keep monitors at eye level, head balanced nicely, arms and shoulders relaxed, etc' advice.

<comment><USER3> I don't know any ergonomic way to look at a laptop. I put my monitors up on a stand so I can look straight at them. Laptop -either the monitor is in the wrong place, or the keyboard is.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'd pay 25$ for this. I laughed at the 250$ price point.

<comment><USER5> Yeah, at that price, why not spend a little bit more and get a proper, motorized standing desk? Ikea has them for ~$500 [http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S19022530/](http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/S19022530/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice idea, but it's much too expensive. For ~200 Euro more I can buy a standing/sitting desk from Ikea that will likely last a lot longer than three years and has a motor instead of three fixed-height models.

</comment><comment><USER7> At multiple times while watching the video, I thought it was a joke.

</comment><comment><USER8> Spilling coffee on your desk has never been more catastrophic

<comment><USER9> You might want to consider spending $90 for the waterproof top to protect your investment.

<comment><USER10> Or $4 for a shower curtain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Not buying the 'environmentally friendly' marketing pitch... The idea that just because something can be thrown in the recycling doesn't mean it's better than a traditional wooden desk.

<comment><USER12> Corrugated is the most recycled material behind glass and aluminum. It gets used over and over. Source: I work at a corrugated plant.

If anyone involved with the company sees this, we would love to manufacture this for US distribution. We're right in the middle of the country and own or own trucking company.

<comment><USER13> Just curious, as someone in the corrugated industry, do you think they're pushing their luck with the price?

<comment><USER14> At $250, it's basically the same price as a wooden desk (in fact, I bought a tempered glass + wood desk at 40% of this desk's price) so they have to be pushing their luck there. If it really costs that much, then it's not such a great deal after all. If it was around $60...maybe $75... I would have seriously considered getting one, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I use a standing desk at work every day (a Varidesk pro plus). For me, having monitor stand is just as important as the standing aspect. Using a laptop on a standing desk causes me to hunch over and slouch, which leaves me with worse neck and back pain than sitting.

</comment><comment><USER16> I could see some very specific use cases for this, like maybe seminars that have a mobile component, needing a workspace in a natural setting (photogs, surveyors, etc). But as an individual purchaser, I don't have much interest.

</comment><comment><USER17> Will they be coming out with a cardboard drafting stool?

</comment><comment><USER18> I'd like something like this, but to fill the gap between a normal desk height, and a standing desk height.

<comment><USER19> You need a >crouching< desk?</comment></comment>


Being Someone Else's Bitch, Being Your Own Bitch... Or Making Others Your Bitch  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techdirt.com/blog/entrepreneurs/articles/20110531/01505814470/being-someone-elses-bitch-being-your-own-bitch-making-others-your-bitch.shtml <comment><USER2> There is no "platform" lesson here. The lesson is not to adopt risky business "models" based on wishful thinking. In one case, don't compete directly with the platform provider -- in the other case, it was never really a "platform" to begin with.

If I make a mobile app for wide distribution, I will probably confine myself to iPhone, because it will make me more money for less hassle than Android. I don't expect Apple to pull the rug out for under me in most cases, because I don't expect to compete with them directly.

If I'm selling a mobile app which acts as a book store, I would be dumb. Why? Well, the most prominent is that you're directly competing with Apple's __own __application released from Day One of it's book format device. Unless you're a large company with bargaining power (e.g. Netflix, Amazon), it will not go well...

Similarly with all the drama about the Twitter API. Twitter is not a platform. 99% of the complainers, well they're making Twitter clients. That's it. They are taking twitter's data and displaying it slightly differently(?[1]). They aren't creating anything new, or particularly original, sorry. Once a couple good clients came out, the game was over, and Twitter purchased one as the canonical version. In this case, you're in early or you don't go in.

[1] Most of them, tellingly, I have a hard time seeing the difference between.

</comment><comment><USER3> A comparison between companies and how they've dealt with bitch-slapping their bitches would be interesting.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some programming trade offs that are interesting to you? - anthony-j-c Examples of this would be a trade off between readability and flexibility, or adding too many comments versus not enough. <comment><AUTHOR> Extensible code vs Easy to follow and understand code. Both are inversely proportional to each other.</comment>


Live Moose TV - <AUTHOR> https://www.svtplay.se/video/21733002/den-stora-algvandringen/den-stora-algvandringen-slow-tv-sasong-1-16-apr-06-00-1?info=visa <comment><AUTHOR> >For several thousand years the moose have walked the same path to get to the rich pastures of summer. Follow the walk live from Kullberg in the north of Sweden.</comment>


'Fantastic' BlackBerry PlayBook sales reported by major Australian retailer - <AUTHOR> http://www.bgr.com/2011/08/22/fantastic-blackberry-playbook-sales-reported-by-major-australian-retailer/

<comment><USER2> My initial reaction was to wonder if Norman Harvey carries iPads. It does, and the lowest priced iPad is a few bucks less than the lowest priced Playbook.

I've been surprised how many Playbooks I've seen here in Whistler, Canada. Of course they are nowhere near as popular as iPads, but I thought sales had been terrible, but I see them about as often as a Galaxy Tab, if not maybe a bit more often.</comment>


Best (or worst?) April fools joke ever.  review my weekend project MailBait.info - <AUTHOR> http://mailbait.info

<comment><USER2> I don't think its an april fools... It looks legit and scary part is it Looks like it could be weaponized.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Tell me what you think. How can mailBait.info be made more effective at pulling off this horrible idea?</comment>


Ask HN: UK startup founders? - <AUTHOR> Looking to connect with other UK-based startup founders. <comment><USER2> Im a UK founder

[https://ramm.science/x/team/](https://ramm.science/x/team/)

Im in Dubai at the moment but back in London next week. Wanna chat?

<comment><AUTHOR> Darn. Sorry to miss you! I'm in London this week but normally based in Edinburgh.

Would love to chat though - I'm usually go south a few times a month.</comment></comment>


Luckin Coffee F-1 - <AUTHOR> https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1767582/000104746919002450/a2238391zf-1.htm <comment><USER2> Anyone have any insight into what makes Chinese companies list on US vs Shanghai/hk exchanges?

<comment><USER3> One big reason to not listing on Shanghai is this market requires certain amount of profits which Lucking definitely not making enough.</comment></comment>


Segways banned in UK - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/transport/8267312/Segways-banned-from-pavements-and-roads-as-rider-fined-75.html <comment><USER2> Segways haven't been banned in the UK - just from the public highway.

<comment><USER3> Maybe the title should be "Segway Use Now Regulated in UK"</comment></comment>


Facebook Delete Button - <AUTHOR> https://ssl.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=delete_account&__a=3

<comment><USER2> It's _really_ nasty to put this as a top-level link in HN without explanation ---this is not an article or announcement about the Delete Button, _it is the delete button itself_.

<comment><USER3> It's pretty hard to delete your account on accident it goes something like:

\- click delete

\- put password in

\- fill out recaptcha

\- confirm delete

\- don't login for 14 days

It isn't like the link is malicious but considering relevant news items a large portion of people (on this site) want to delete their accounts it may be quite useful.

<comment><USER4> _on_ purpose

 _by_ accident

<comment><USER3> I think it's my age that causes me to say on accident by instinct as everyone I ever grew up with has said on accident.

<comment><USER5> Callow youth: How dare you evolve our language!!

More seriously, do you make a semantic distinction between _by accident_ and _on accident_ where the latter signifies (some) intent, or do you use _on accident_ exclusively.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why do people want _other_ people to delete their accounts along with them? Are they trying to save us or something?

<comment><USER7> Being on Facebook is only fun if other people are doing it with you. Turns out the same holds true for being _off_ Facebook.

<comment><USER8> No surprise. We are sheep. Lemmings. Geese.

Reminds me of the ol' goth thing- being non-conformists in exactly the same way as everyone else (though the original quote was put in a better way)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Good to see that Hacker News has now become a place devoted almost entirely towards griping.

<comment><USER10> Yes, and we can never have too much sarcasm.

<comment><USER8> Ironically, I can't decide if I should up-mod you because I agree with your statement at face value, or if I should down-mod you because your sarcasm implies the inverse

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The "Delete your Facebook" crowd remind me of bad televangelical ministers. Why are they trying to get other people to delete their accounts? We can save our own souls, thanks.

</comment><comment><USER12> This submission strikes me as being incredibly condescending. Don't you think the typical HN reader can figure this out on their own?

</comment><comment><USER13> Apparently I can't view the delete button without being asked to create an account. :-)

But even without my having created an account they know who has asked me to friend them and use that as a hook to try to get me to sign up. That's just creepy.

</comment><comment><USER14> Traditionally facebook's "delete button" holds on to all of your information for another 14 days and if you log back in that period your account is restored.

Sort of like "we dare you to go cold turkey" - I'd love to know what the re- login stats are.

<comment><USER15> Credit cards do the exact same thing. Sure they will deactivate it, but if you put a charge on it for 60 days it is reactivated. This was a pain for me because almost all my bills are automatic payments.

<comment><USER16> Ask for a new one and then cancel it. All those automatic payments will bounce off the first card and you won't have that problem anymore.

<comment><USER17> Doesn't reporting your card stolen (which is required to get a new number/card) adversely affect your credit scores?

<comment><USER18> Hasn't yet for me. Never heard of that, either. But I looked it up and that can happen when the bank makes a mistake and lists your new card as a new line of credit. So you could fix it through the dispute process, which is painful. Whether the new account is "adverse" or not depends on your individual report.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Please stop doing that...!

If somebody wants to delete his fb account is his own business. It's really upsetting if this stupid trend evangelizing against fb keeps going on HN.

</comment><comment><USER20> Does anyone know how many information gets shared with third parties if your fb account is just disabled and not deleted?

</comment><comment><USER21> nice to know this exists, but I wouldn't use this any sooner than I'd delete my gmail account

</comment><comment><USER22> I just wish facebook had some competition to keep them honest.

</comment><comment><USER23> Is this a new feature?</comment>


Users don't like social login - <AUTHOR> http://identity.mozilla.com/post/45842909320/users-dont-like-social-login <comment><USER2> In case you're not familiar with them, this blog comes from the Mozilla Identity team, which is creating a unified login product called "Persona." It's basically the features of social login (you don't have to create a new account for every site) without the drawbacks (an advertising-driven company knowing your every login).

I use Persona on my costs-real-money subscription site[1] and I'm _very_ happy with it. Integration was easy, the user experience is pretty good, and it's been stable and reliable. The best thing, of course, was not having to implement my own password-management infrastructure, which saved me a ton of time, as well as insulating me from the hard security problems that come along with such a beast.

If you decide to try Persona, I heartily recommend it. There are a couple of gotchas to be aware of:

1- On iOS, only Safari works due to Persona using a pop-up window for login. People using Chrome on iOS will get a confusing "relay frame not found" error.

2- Signup flow could be better. When users create an account, they get a confirmation email. Clicking the link in that confirmation email redirects them to the Persona site, _not_ back to your site. It's possible this is configurable and I haven't figured it out yet.

3- Persona emails are case-sensitive. There's some rare issues that occur as a result. At one point, it could crash the login, but I believe that's been fixed.

Don't let these flaws stop you, though--Persona is very well done and constantly getting better. I've had hundreds of people sign up for paid accounts and only two have had trouble to the point of asking for help. (And nobody's cancelled their subscription because of login problems. :-) )

[1] Let's Code Test-Driven JavaScript, letscodejavascript.com

<comment><USER3> _"not having to implement my own password-management infrastructure, ..., as well as insulating me from the hard security problems that come along with such a beast."_

But you do realize it does definitely create another, much more serious, security problems right? What happens when the single sign-on server gets compromised? What happens when tokens aren't as secure as they should (like the recent OAuth SNAFUs, with an 's')? What happens when you don't pay attention to all the fineprints in the Persona docs stating things like:

 _"Be careful if you don't do this it's going to be easy to forge"_

and:

 _"Guidelines to use Persona securely"_

?

So it can be used not securely? Like OAuth? Do you think I find it re-assuring that I have to take steps so that things are not easy to forge? What when the latest JavaScript / browser exploits manages to forge requests?

Don't get me wrong: this seems _very_ convenient. But you're trading time for something here. It saves you time by now having to roll your own security correctly (a DB into which you put emails and bcrypt encrypted passwords) but it comes at a price.

The price is the added insecurity that single sign-on adds.

<comment><USER4> > _What happens when the single sign-on server gets compromised?_

Persona has a federated architecture. In the very near future, most users will _not_ be vouched for by a central authority.

> _bcrypt encrypted passwords_

Don't forget to upgrade everyone to scrypt when that recommendation changes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Hi, I'm on the Persona team at Mozilla. If you'd like to learn more about what and why Mozilla is doing with authentication, I gave a 45-minute talk at PyCon US this past Saturday. You can find the video here: <http://pyvideo.org/video/1764>

I'm also happy to answer questions in-thread or via email.

<comment><USER5> I looked at Persona for a project a friend of mine is doing, and I pretty much rejected from the start. Persona seems flawed in that it assumes email as identity.

I'm a developer on a e-commerce site, when we started out we assumed what Persona assumes, that email is a unique and stable identity. We found out the first day of production mode that this assumption is flawed. People changes email address all the time, it's at least as unstable as their home address, most peoples phone number is more stable.

As software developers we assumed that pretty much no one would ever change their email address, or that at least they wouldn't discard their old one. Regular people however do that. They do not care about their email address.

Is this something that the Persona team that given any thought. If so, what did you come up with?

<comment><USER6> Email address is the backbone of web identity. Nearly every registration system uses it. If you're having trouble with it, maybe, just maybe, it's on your end?

<comment><USER5> If you honestly believe that, I would claim that you either have no customers or that your customer reside in a very limited sub-section of people.

People do not believe that their email and identity is in any way linked. You and I might believe that, but don't count on your customers sharing your beliefs.

<comment><USER7> I'll use a call to authority. Amazon uses the email as identity. If it works for them, surely it can't be that bad a decision...

<comment><USER8> Nope, like all other large providers (Facebook, Google, etc.) Amazon allows users to use e-mail addresses to log in, but they are not canonical stores of identity. In fact, Amazon is the most humorous example you could have pulled, because Amazon actually allows multiple accounts with the same e-mail address, and uses the password to differentiate (which is pretty much what jointb86 said, but I doubt if you knew this is the case that his comment was clear).

"Why Does Amazon.com Allow Multiple Accounts With the Same Email Address?"

[http://www.experimentgarden.com/2009/11/why-does- amazoncom-a...](http://www.experimentgarden.com/2009/11/why-does-amazoncom- allows-multiple.html)

"Note: If you change the e-mail address on your account to an e-mail address that is already associated with another Amazon account, we will ask that you first verify your e-mail address."

\-- [http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=468538)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think adding social auth was one of the biggest mistakes we made for the beta of Jetstrap. Users constantly forget which service they use. We added email/pass authentication, but now older users think they had a password when they didn't, and with django social auth you can't reset the password for a social account.

It was one big mess not at all worth it. I'd like to try Persona and see how that compares, but I think normal email/pass is better than plain social auth.

<comment><USER10> Why don't put the way the user was logged in by last time in cookie and just highlight it next time for him? Or even more explicit - add the "you have logged in this way last time" under the appropriate button?

Technically that's easy to implement.

<comment><USER11> If a user returns relatively quickly they generally remember how they logged in. The problem is when they come back after some months. At that point, they've probably completely forgotten how they logged in, and have cleared their cookies for some reason or another. It's a standard troubleshooting suggested by many websites. (Not saying it _should_ be so, but it is.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Technical people don't like social login.

Real people (non-tech / nerd) prefer not having to create individual accounts for all sorts of different services.

I've seen proof of this time and time again.

<comment><USER13> One example of this is pud's launching of fandalism.com. When he announced the site on HN[1] some HNers complained about Facebook only login. But he was still able to get 400,000+ signups within 3 month[2].

[1]<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559081>

[2]<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3850739>

<comment><USER14> A facebook "only" login is the key here. Given a choice many people rather create a new login or not use facebook.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The worst offenders are sites that lead you into logging in with a social account and then ask you to add your email and create a password anyway.

<comment><USER16> Some use social login as an alternative to valid email id testing(atleast i do). Saves money when your outbound email is quota restricted (appengine).

<comment><USER17> Yes, I do this exact same thing. I really don't want to store password on my side and I'm of the impression that sites like Google, Facebook, and Twitter do this better than I ever will and that most of the users visiting the site will have some kind of account on these sites. Ignoring man-in-the-middle attacks, if one of the above thinks the email is valid, I have no reason not to.

As a disclaimer, though, I've worked on highly specialized apps where the users belong to a certain organization bound by one of the above. For example, I made a website for my school and every student there has an email address that is tied to that school's Google Apps for Edu account, so I'm guaranteed that all valid users (students) will be able to log in via Google.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > We also noticed that users dislike the NASCAR-style > plastering of branded > login buttons.

This reminds me quite vividly of Stack Overflow's login page. I can never remember if I signed up direct, with OpenID, or Google, or whatever else is there.

I've been starting to dig Mozilla and Firefox again lately (the last week of developer tools news cemented that), so I'd love to see their idea take off and gain full adoption.

<comment><USER19> I rely on LastPass for confusing sites like that one. If it weren't for that addon, I'd never know, for example, which of the 7 or so Windows Live accounts that have been generated on my behalf is The Right One for which website.

<comment><USER20> I merely bought and installed an xbox 360, and now I have a small number of windows live or hotmail or xbox accounts, I haven no idea which are distinct accounts and which are linked in some way. Ptthht, ptthht. Trying to cancel the auto re-up of their gold account was a nightmare of circular hate. Ptthht.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> If you want to run your own Persona Identity Provider (so you can login directly with your own email account and control the authentication from your own domain/site/server instead of having to remember yet another password for the fallback Identity Provider provided by persona.org), here's a tiny little piece of Python code that implements that:

<https://bitbucket.org/djc/persona-totp>

In particular, the authentication method I use is Google Authenticator- compatible TOTP (RFC 6238).

<comment><USER22> That's fantastic, thank you! You just showed me simple examples of at least two technologies I considered complicated to implement.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I don't like social login, but I do like not having to create yet another account.

<comment><USER24> Indeed. The article doesn't make the context clear up front (perhaps because it's on a blog and partly aimed at people who already know what the blog is about), but the author and Mozilla have a solution to that problem that isn't "social". The post mentions it toward the end:

"We built the Persona protocol to reduce data sharing to the minimum needed for the user to easily log in: the browser mediates the login without leaking data to the identity provider. _In the end, Persona is the easy login solution that respects users._ "

Ben is a smart guy, I've read about Persona, and it seems to be really well thought out and to have learned from the failings of e.g. OpenID. I intend to use it the next time I need an easy login solution for users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> To be honest I don't get to see social logins. Adblock and ghostery seem to put and end to them and my participation.

And that's the way I like it :)

</comment><comment><USER26> We just implemented Persona across all our sites and are very happy with it.

We did it in a way that's completely independent of our normal email/password login as well, but integrates seamlessly. That made me really happy, as the reliability of our system hasn't decreased a bit.

The Persona team was also really helpful, though it turned out we didn't need much help implementing it.

</comment><comment><USER27> While I'd like to agree, I'd also like to see something beyond anecdotal evidence on this. It'd give me a great excuse next time someone wants a Facebook login and a Twitter login and a Pinterest login [sic] on the same site.

<comment><USER28> 100% agreed -- anecdotal blog posts should not be up-voted to oblivion simply because the community at HN agrees with them. (Though I find it ironic that such a technical community doesn't consider lack of data in arguments like these an issue.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I love the concept of Persona and hopes it catches on. One question I can't seem to find the answer to, though.

Users are allowed to have multiple emails tied to one Persona account. If they login to my site with one email I will see that email address and can bind their account data to it. If they sign in with their other email address, will I be able to identify them as the same person?

<comment><USER30> IMO, the whole point of tying multiple email addresses to one Persona account is to _prevent_ websites from figuring out that both addresses are tied to the same person.

This is very important when you're trying to build an identity system that you want every website to adopt. Users want to split up their lives into distinct identities (e.g. one for professional settings, one for friends, one for family, one for a secret hobby...). A viable identity system should allow people to manage such identities with ease and switch between them at a moment's notice, without letting anybody else find out that @lubujackson on HN is the same person as @blowjobs on a porn site or a member of an unpopular political movement. Even if somebody carefully compared HN databases with the porn site databases.

Having said that, people do change their email addresses a lot more frequently than web devs assume. When this happens, they need to update their profiles in every single website where they used the old address. It would be better if my identity were linked to some sort of key that doesn't change, rather than an email address. Likewise, if there is a proliferation of Persona identity providers, some of them will inevitably go out of business after a while. It should be very easy to migrate one Persona account to another.

<comment><USER7> Persona identity providers should be the email providers. If the email provider goes bust, then that identity is lost. If they only stop supporting Persona, then Mozilla steps in and supports Persona on that domain. I think it's quite an interesting approach.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Mailchimp had similar findings, albeit coming from a different angle: [http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent- worth-i...](http://blog.mailchimp.com/social-login-buttons-arent-worth-it/)

</comment><comment><USER32> I prefer logging in with Facebook or Twitter rather than having to remember yet another login. You can always revoke access later.

</comment><comment><USER33> I wish more sites would start using Persona, instead of privacy disrespecting FB or G+ login helpers. Even OpenID isn't as widely used as it could be.

</comment><comment><USER34> Users always complain about social logins. On iOS apps that I've built, I've found Facebook login to have something like a 50% conversion. I'd be curious to hear whether or not the conversion is improved by using Mozilla's Persona product. Is the only sales pitch here that the login is managed by a non- profit organization?

Not sure how that makes this a better product overall. Can anybody clarify?

<comment><USER4> Major difference: Social auth outsources your user table. Persona outsources your password column. You still have your own users, and you still have a portable identifier for them.

What's more, Persona is built as a fully-decentralized architecture with a temporary centralized fallback. That means that _one_ button can support _all_ users, via their email provider's native authentication mechanisms (in the future) or via Mozilla's centralized fallback (for now).

<comment><USER35> I don't understand your first point. How can you have an app function without a users table?

The main issue as I see it is just the baggage that comes with a private company login. For instance, Facebook login raises questions about what Facebook will do with the login information, and also what the site will try to do with your Facebook data and permissions. Those questions will increasingly become a concern for everyone, but beyond that some people have opted completely out of Facebook because they find it actively harmful and so they are excluded a priori.

Persona is simply a login mechanism with the users interest in mind. People may take or it leave it, but it will be on its own merits rather than being overshadowed by needlessly related general concerns with a third-party product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> And here's my How-To for adding Persona authentication to your site: <http://techblog.bozho.net/?p=1056>

<comment><USER4> Thanks for that post! Do you have any suggestions for how the official documentation (<https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Persona/Quick_Setup>) could be improved?

<comment><USER36> Hi. I have to confess I neglected my promise to contribute to the official documentation, but I haven't found the time..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> We (PADL) have developed a SASL/GSS mechanism for Persona, which you can get here:

<https://github.com/PADL/gss_browserid>

Internet Draft here:

<http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-howard-gss-browserid-00>

This lets you use Persona to authenticate to non-web services such as IMAP, SMTP, SSH, NFS, CIFS, etc. We (or should I say, I) are pretty excited about it!

<comment><USER22> Hey, that looks very interesting! I hope it goes places.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> Just a random data point, but one of my apps with a definite non-technical demographic gets 97% of logins via facebook, 2.5% via twitter, and 0.5% via email/password registration. I haven't tested it obviously, but I don't think removing Facebook login would do much for conversions.

</comment><comment><USER39> There's an "evil" incentive to have social logins such as Twitter + FB. It gives you a free access token, which can be extremely useful, especially if you're building a social media analytics service, or some sort of tool that requires making API calls.

</comment><comment><USER40> Meanwhile, the Persona vs Personas mess is not fixed yet:

<http://www.getpersonas.com/>

<https://persona.org>

Context: Personas should have been renamed to "Themes". But apparently it's not done yet.

</comment><comment><USER41> "Lesson 2: Social Sign-in is Better Than Email Sign-in After dozens of failed A/B tests to improve the conversion rates of our landing page, we came up with the idea to enable social sign-in (i.e., signing up for a Buffer account and logging in using your Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn account).

After all, Buffer is for posting on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn so it only seemed logical that our potential users would be able to quickly and conveniently sign up using one of their existing accounts."

<http://sixrevisions.com/user-interface/ux-design-mistakes/>

</comment><comment><USER42> This is exactly what I said to Ben when we implemented Persona at PlayCanvas.

Social logins might be OK if you are making a photo-sharing app or a social newsreader, but if your business relies on _companies_ signing up, my suspicion is people won't be comfortable signing up with their Facebook account.

We wanted the benefits of a secure login system without all the social baggage. Persona provides that. Though we also support Google OpenID as lots of people already have a GMail or Google Apps account.

As an aside, I won't sign up for _anything_ using Facebook, I simply don't trust them or the app not to broadcast my every move to people.

</comment><comment><USER43> I really hate when my identity is _provided_ to me by some third party. It universally applies to both social networks and Persona. I don't like the very idea of leasing my own identity.

This said, I really wish Persona project will fail as much as possible.

I only hope there'll be a day I'll finally truly _possess_ my own network identities, and third parties (social networks, email providers, etc) will act as notaries who just _assert_ them for others to verify.

<comment><USER44> > I only hope there'll be a day I'll finally truly possess my own network > identities, and third parties (social networks, email providers, etc) will > act as notaries who just assert them for others to verify.

If you have your own domain name, that's exactly what Persona does. The protocol is completely decentralized. Mozilla only provides a fallback for domains that don't support Persona.

<comment><USER43> I believe domain names are still inappropriate for identities. Even XRI i-numbers was a better idea.

One just can't own a domain name. It only can be leased for a limited time, for a price, and even then, at least in some TLDs one can't be sure the lease won't be revoked at someone's whim. There's no real difference whenever one leases email address from a provider or domain name from a registrar.

Maybe I'm overzealous about it, but I really wish to be _the_ source of my own identity and posess it like I posess my GPG key.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Bold claims without any evidence backing it up.

<comment><USER46> I'm glad to see I'm not alone.

I had high hopes of seeing data and research (no offense, TechCrunch) to support this claim. I'm in the camp of not liking social authentication, especially when it's the only option, but I'm also a sample set of 1.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> I agree very much with this. What I do is use "dummy" facebook, google, email etc accounts to log into sites that either require social logins or make it easy to try with social logins, but that I don't trust yet.

I am generally suspicious of sites that require or "encourage" logins with social details.

</comment><comment><USER48> In case anyone was wondering (like I was), Mozilla Persona is built on BrowserID introduced last year.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm 1Password user. I dont' have to trouble anymore with logins nor selling my ID to Facebook, Twitter or Google. I only use social on those apps where the owners think you only need Twitter/Facebook as the option to use their apps.

</comment><comment><USER50> "Users don't like social login" should actually read "Some people don't like social login in some contexts - other people like it, or even prefer it, in others".

At least that's what I've seen in user testing... but that's not as interesting I guess.

</comment><comment><USER51> With regards to the last point - privacy from your identity provider -- isn't that somewhat moot for most sites as they have those facebook/twitter/google+/etc share/like/plus icons that report back anyways.

</comment><comment><USER52> The point about having multiple providers and forgetting which one you used rang true to me. My gotos are twitter, google, or github and it seems I change based on the type of app I'm connecting with.

</comment><comment><USER14> Surprisingly companies are finally realizing this. Like companies really thought people would not care to give away all their 'social' unneeded information for some random x or y service.

</comment><comment><USER22> To see an example of Persona, you can visit <http://www.yourpane.com> and click the "Persona" button (don't enter an email address).

</comment><comment><USER53> Biggest problem with social login for me is that I have all of them (google, twitter, facebook etc.), and sometimes multiple (google, twitter).

</comment><comment><USER54> Is there an option to not provide my email as part of the "identity" because I could see that being a barrier to signing up for some sites?

<comment><USER4> You must provide _an_ email address, but you're free to use disposable or other addresses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> It would be nice to see actual user studies rather than quoting TechCrunch. Tech journalists are not everyone's target market.

</comment><comment><USER56> Relevant XKCD: <http://xkcd.com/927/>

</comment><comment><USER57> Claiming what users like or do not like without metrics is deeply suspicious.

</comment><comment><USER58> This just in: users don't like social login, water is wet, sky blue..

</comment><comment><USER59> Yes, actually we don't want ANY login/registration.

Just put auth info in a cookie, and let the user associate it with an e-mail address later, once he actually knows he will keep using the service.

I believe "I can't be arsed to register" is one of the top reasons websites lose prospective users.

<comment><USER5> That is absolutely true, or at least I think it is. The single best thing we did it to allow our customer to do a purchase without being logged in.

If the email address entered on our checkout page is already in our database, we link that purchase to the relevant account. If the customer want to login, they can, if not, that's cool to. We get a lot of wrong matches which needs to be fixed, but that seems to be a price we can and will pay.

We have had customer adding orders to other people accounts, because their email address was entered wrong ( even though we require the customer to enter the email twice. ) and we have customers ending up with multiple account that we need to merge. Despite all the problems, customers love not having to log in before doing a purchase. It's hit and miss in a few cases, but we try to do what our customers expect, matching their purchase to their account, regardless of login credentials. That's what consumers want.

<comment><USER60> We did the same thing with one of the sites at work... You can make a purchase without login, and the related emails to a given order includes a token so you can see that order's status without login.. If there isn't an account at that email, we generate one with a few space-separated random words, and email the user... password recovery is email only and pretty easy. All in all, the user experience has been pretty well received.

Now that I've seen this in practice, it would be my preferred way moving forward. It didn't/doesn't take that much effort to do things this way. The bigger issue is in the occasional phone order our demographic is mostly men 50+, so some genuinely don't have email.. we use an internal address in that case...

<comment><USER60> meant, we generate an account were the password is some random words...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> As hard as remembering different passwords for different sites is for the end user, I really think it's about time the user took a step toward meeting security and engineers in the middle.

Did 20th century humans think key rings were too complicated? Why are we implementing tokenization, one way hashing, etc. when the end customer can do this much more securely? Oh yeah, we'd like to get at their data when they're not around..

<comment><USER3> Exactly. But sadly you're in a tiny minority of people thinking about the security implications. Most developers don't: which is why we're having countless OAuth exploits and whatnots.

Schneier wrote a long time that anything too complex cannot ever be secure. That's the case of OAuth and of _many_ federated/unique/single sign-on logins.

</comment></comment><comment><USER61> I doubt users really care about what type of login they use. Instead, users are starting to associate social logins with spammy bullshit, federated identity marketed shitfest of Web 3.0, built on the SAML/HTML5-based Intelectual Property and right forfeiture platform.

</comment><comment><USER62> I actually do not login to website that asks me login either using Google a/c, Facebook or so. Twitter being an exception because everything at Twitter I've anyway made public, but I hesitate still.

<comment><USER17> That's a strange opinion to have though, because before doing login through either of these services, you will be asked if you want to give that app permission to certain parts of your account. For example, I might have you log in through Google to verify your email and I don't see a reason why you wouldn't let me see it; you've already shared your email with my app to register an account in the first place.

<comment><USER62> I should have been clearer.

Most of the website, do not just ask Email. Most ask other info too, like my DOB, full name, Other Profile information. And when I say I "do not use", I am talking about the first time logins of course. I don't really know what kind of a website it is, legit or just a vapour. And I do not know in advance what information it will ask.

Take the example of The Old Reader, till recently they wanted to take control of your Contacts too(along with Reader; now they don't). I knew it once I was at past the Google SigIn page(and I aborted right there). It was frustrating even for those few seconds. Many do this.

So, I have given up on them altogether.

I mean I have OpenID accounts set up especially for this with the data I would like to provide for this. There Mozilla's Persona(it's Identity Management System)- etc. Why not use these?

And do not even get me started on Facebook. I don't open a website again if the only way to login was via Facebook. Paranoid? No, rather pissed off. (By the way, whenever I tried using Facebook logins the above mentioned problems surfaced only in bigger multitude).

<comment><USER63> Because _everyone_ has Google, and the lowest setting on Sign in with Google+ contains some personal information from your account, including things like DoB, Full name, etc. Google recommends OAuth2 over OpenID for authentication, and I'd rather be using the service Google supports the most in order to provide the best experience to users.

Just because you use OpenID and Persona doesn't mean that the majority of people will. But the majority of people will have a Gmail account, or a Facebook account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> The biggest problem with "social login" ain't about advertizing companies like FB and Google having all your infos.

The biggest problem has actually nothing to do with social: the problem is security of all these single-sign on / unique ID.

We're in 2013 and hardly a day goes by without a major security exploit found affecting Rails, Java, OAuth, Flash, etc. There are so many botnets out there that sites we rely upon for our daily workflow are getting taken down (GitHub)...

Yet people don't talk about security. They don't even mention it. Not in the TFA. Not in this thread (besides two insightful comments).

As long as people will keep thinking that they can put all their eggs in one basket online and "really really have this basket by hyper-secure" we're gonna be in big trouble.

It doesn't help that several people on HN are selling snake-oils products _"put all your passwords in this unbreakable app, we guarantee you nothing bad could ever happen"_.

<comment><USER4> > _As long as people will keep thinking that they can put all their eggs in > one basket online and "really really have this basket by hyper-secure" we're > gonna be in big trouble._

That's why Persona is based on a federated protocol: it's designed to spread your eggs across many baskets, and it even lets individuals bring their own basket.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Why do you believe that your religion/faith/worldview is correct? - <AUTHOR> Nearly everyone in this world holds to some central and defining philosopy or faith or religion that shapes the meaning of life for them. I would like to know: What, in your opinion, is the most compelling reason that persuades YOU to believe that your particular "world-view" is accurate/true/trustworthy? Do you base your belief on scientific reasoning? historical evidence? philosophical syllogisms? simple "faith"?<p>This is an honest and genuine question. Feel free to ask clarifying questions of responders, but please no trolls or religious debates. We're just looking for a respectful exchange of ideas. <comment><USER2> I think having seen all of the worst evils in the world committed in the name of some belief, I have dropped concerning myself with anything that isn't scientifically validated. I feel like all organized religions are just some form of control and don't provide any benefit except for forcing an association with a group that might not hold the same complete beliefs as I do, but is essentially pushing those beliefs onto you by association.

One thing that kind of blows my mind still is how the engineers I work with (some of the best most logically discerning minds) can believe in religion. It seems counter intuitive. Maybe it's out of fear? Not sure. I used to be religious though, and constantly thought about what makes my ancient book of mumbo-jumbo more valid than someone elses book? And is it not messed up that everyone is so divided and just because they were born to a culture or society that does not believe a religion, they will all burn eternally? Seems shady to me. Anyways, ridding my life of unfounded beliefs allowed me to realize the value of life, empathize, and treat others equally, irrelevant of culture or beliefs, whereas I feel like religion tries to make everyone else the "others" who are less than.

<comment><USER3> I believed the universe was full of planets before our scientists validated it. My belief was based on the emotions I felt looking into the night sky full of the stars. It'd be a dull life if I could not entertain thoughts and feelings unless they were "scientifically validated".

Be aware (just in case!) your perception of religion as merely a means of control may be a projection of your own desire to control others, out of your own fear of the unknown beyond what is "scientifically known", and in doing so have made the religious ones who are "others" who believe in something "shady", "others" who are less than you.

<comment><USER2> > I believed the universe was full of planets before our scientists validated > it. My belief was based on the emotions I felt looking into the night sky > full of the stars. It'd be a dull life if I could not entertain thoughts and > feelings unless they were "scientifically validated".

How old are you? ;) I completely agree with you. I love thinking and imagining reasons for things that we do not yet have answers to. But at the same time I recognize the probabilities of my explanations being correct. While, many followers in organized religions blindly and devoutly believe that their religion is the one true explanation, which is illogical to me.

>Be aware (just in case!) your perception of religion as merely a means of control may be a projection of your own desire to control others, out of your own fear of the unknown beyond what is "scientifically known", and in doing so have made the religious ones who are "others" who believe in something "shady", "others" who are less than you.

That's an interesting point. I've accepted that our lives are a temporary spec of existence on an insignificant rock, and I'm oaky with that. I also believe that we should fulfill our evolutionary purpose by propagating, improving technology, and recording information for future generations. If I made it seem that I think religious people are "less than" that is not how I feel. I'm okay with anyone believing anything they want to help them get through their day as long as they aren't harming others. My only point in that sense was the confusion I face with people seeking evidence and facts while engineering things and solving problems, but not applying the same scientific method to everyday life.

A modern example I can think of when it comes to religions being a form of control is how the republican party has a very profound base of religious conservatives. Many of whom are working class people, but the republican party is run mainly by wealthy elite. Most of the fiscal reforms that the republican party espouses do not have a direct impact on the wealth of the working class, but they republican party is able to capture all of these votes. (I have religious family who seem to get most of their political influence from their church). So many other historical examples of religion being a major contributor to the success of empires and countries . The Roman empire and Islamic empires being some examples. Helps you unify people, they are devout because they are promised eternal salvation, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think my strongest belief is that we can never ever have any objective evidence on whether or not God exists. I'm deeply suspicious of any attempt to prove or disprove the existence of God.

I do belief God exists and created this universe, and as creator of this universe, God is not subject to its laws, and therefore falls completely outside the purview of science. This universe exists entirely because God wants it to, and God[0] could interfere with this universe at any time without leaving a trace, but clearly created a universe that is internally consistent[1].

Due to not being subject to this universe, God must by necessity also exist outside our concept of time (which is part of the universe according to Einstein), and therefore presumably causality. This follows logically from the above, but also conveniently solves an ancient dilemma about predestination.

I am Christian. I believe Jesus was some aspect of God that somehow became human, to teach us and to carry our sins. I believe the Bible is for the most part the result of divine revelation, but it has been written down by people, usually in the context of that time, and occasionally been rewritten, hopefully by well-meaning people.

Apart from the first paragraph, I'm not remotely sure of any of this. I'm a fairly agnostic Christian. To claim to know the truth about God would be the height of arrogance and hubris to me. I'm sure I'm wrong about some things, though I believe I'm relatively close on most.

I believe this because it makes sense to me. It explains the existence of the Bible, of Jesus, and of the religion He inspired, but it's strongly tempered by my understanding of science.

[0] I'm reluctant to call God "he" here, because it would suggest I believe God has gender, which I consider an silly idea. I do normally call him "he" though. Mostly out of habit.

[1] Except maybe in Quantum Mechanics, and possibly Inflation, because the former feels like a hack where we almost caught God in an inconsistency, and the latter feels like a cheat to get the universe he wanted.

<comment><USER5> Why the Christian God, and not some other religion's ?

<comment><USER4> The Christian God is also from two other religions, but it's Jesus' teachings in particular that appeal to me. Admittedly those teachings could be equally valid without him being the son of God or the Messiah, but there are several angles from which Christianity does make more sense to me than other religions. Though I admit my knowledge about most other religions is much more superficial.

I'm sure it also matters that I was raised a Christian, but my faith now is not exactly the same as it was when I was young. It went through a lot of phases before ending up like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I've had my worldview destroyed and changed so many times that personally I don't put too much weight on my current worldview. I believe I'm in the minority though.

I believe my worldview is a tool to help me get what I want while avoiding the things I don't want. That's probably the case for most people.

As my "wants" and "do not wants" change so does my worldview. Once I get the thing I want or I can't seem to get the thing I want then I have to re- evaluate my worldview and/or wants.

I believe most people's worldview is fairly static. They find something that is good enough (they don't suffer too much and they kind of get what they want) and they stick with that. Problems happen when these two groups of worldviews clash.

</comment><comment><USER7> True believers are also true non-believers. Thus, if you truly believe in the Hindu gods, you can't also believe in the Christian or Muslim god.

It then becomes a matter of _which_ set of beliefs you espouse, and _why_. The 'why' is usually due to imprinting, in that your beliefs are the ones you were first introduced to by your family, or close familiarity.

This also means there's is very little difference between (say) a devout Christian and a committed Atheist, because the Atheist disbelieves in just one more god than the devout Christian disbelieves in.

(To explain, assume there are 453 possible known deities: the Christian does not believe in 452 of those, while the Atheist does not believe in 453 of those.)

</comment><comment><USER8> A God who defines His paramount and most important characteristic as being Holy not His power. The God Jehovah Jesus HolySpirit is the God who is worthy of being called God. Scientific reasoning only proves to me the existence of God as does historical evidence. The levels and layers of interdependent complexities in the universe and living things in the macro and micro are without a doubt proof of such an amazingly intelligent and powerful being.

Some things that confuse me are the stories of a global flood occurring and as a result all humans deriving from noah. Why God seems to be amazing when it comes to math and science and yet He spends a lot of his interaction with us on the foibles of man because we are obviously flawed creatures ( I know that I am ). As though He is surprised by how wretched and evil we are at times.

Evolution just seems to be the self generative and adaptive mechanistic process by which God seems to build complex from the simple. I think that doing it this way is harder than to just produce fully formed complex systems whole cloth. It is actually a more thought out and elegant method of producing robust survivable beings.

Just as an aside, it almost seems to me that when he created this universe, He first started with what a human needs to be in order to have dexterity (fingers etc..), intelligence, communication (vocal cords) and so on. Working backwards creating a physical programming language(dna,rna) that synthesizes molecules tailored exactly so for biochemical systems, to atoms to subatomic particles and the forces/fields that govern/marshal these discrete particles.

Amazingly, these 92 elements had to be created in generations of stars and neutron stars as only the simple element hydrogen existed.

sorry for rambling on.

<comment><USER2> Crediting our lack of understanding of the universe to a higher power is like assigning thunder and lightening to Zeus. Now we know better.

<comment><USER9> Do we? The definition of an atom in the 1900s was wrong, but it was science at the time. In 50 years, a lot of scientific definitions will radically change but people keep saying that science > religion.

<comment><USER10> I imagine, because science will change to reflect the new evidence, religion doesn't...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm an agnostic (because agnosticism >> atheism in terms of empirical strength), and the extent of my theological beliefs is: only an atheist can be a true christian [0] and Matthew 10:34:

> "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send [or > bring] peace, but a sword."

As for religion, I think it's mostly a vessel for 'naturally' (socially) selected rituals, and the spirituality is tacked on after the fact [1]

[0] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X_hwUEPelQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1X_hwUEPelQ)

[1] [https://medium.com/incerto/we-dont-know-what-we-are- talking-...](https://medium.com/incerto/we-dont-know-what-we-are-talking- about-when-we-talk-about-religion-3e65e6a3c44e)

</comment><comment><USER12> I think faiths and ideologies are group identities that pass me by since I'm a perpetual outsider.

There are books and sayings and thoughts that I really appreciate and like to think about... And I definitely have some personal biases, motivations, desires... But I don't have a worldview that I could write down, and my views on many things are marked by confusion, doubt, or pluralistic appreciation.

Here's one quote I like, by Paul Goodman:

 _Behavior is more graceful, forceful, and discriminating without the intervention of the state, wardens, corporation executives, central planners, and university presidents. These tend to create a chronic emergency that makes them necessary. In most cases, the use of power to do a job is inefficient in the fairly short run. Extrinsic power inhibits intrinsic function. "Soul is self-moving," says Aristotle._

I tend to agree with that based on experience, but then, I'd also have to add that it's a biased statement. Of course sometimes the state improves things, the executive inspires, the planner gets things done, and the university president has courage and wisdom...

Of all the spiritual traditions, Zen is the one I've been most interested in, but as soon as you find some dogma in Zen, someone comes and slaps you.

Basically my worldview is that of a cosmic know-it-all without any concrete suggestions. And then I just try to do whatever's in front of my nose to do, as Henry Miller once said:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYL3mB3rAfU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PYL3mB3rAfU)

I also like imaginative, powerful, crazy manifestos, like Hakim Bey's "Temporary Autonomous Zone".

[http://www.sacred-texts.com/eso/taz.htm](http://www.sacred- texts.com/eso/taz.htm)

And rather than join some political party, I'd rather be at home reading Spinoza, Simone Weil, Huangbo, Van Gogh's letters, anthropology, McLuhan...

Sometimes I try to figure out, like, is private property good or evil? I just don't know, man. There's so many ins and outs.

</comment><comment><USER13> The main reasons I hold my belief in the religion of Islam to be true are its compatibility with common sense and the overwhelming amount of outside evidence in favor of it.

Unlike other religious groups that define faith as something you engage in _despite_ facts (a "leap of faith"), I see it as a return to objectivity and reason that is, first and foremost, based on facts.

The first fact I am referring to is the utter helplessness and dependency of mankind on forces outside our control, and the seemingly perfect ordering of everything in the natural world to our advantage even though cosmically we are only a speck of dust and a blip in time.

The second is the existence of individuals throughout history who succeed against all odds in calling their people to worship a wise Creator whom they claim to be sent by, and whose teachings become guiding principles in the minds of billions of people of different races, cultures, and languages.

There are many, many more signposts but these are the most obvious.

Specifically about Islam, I researched the religion before I embraced it and found the exact opposite of what its detractors say. I found a moral teaching superior to all others containing no contradictions with science or reason. Every theological or moral problem that used to trouble me had an answer in Islam, and not only that, but usually in the most ancient sources.

The clarity and "take it on face value" character of Islam was very satisfying to me in a time of my life I was experiencing a lot of confusion. There are no baffling paradoxes in Islam, or ranks of mystic knowledge to climb. It's about accepting simple truths, like the Oneness of God, reality of death, etc. into your heart in deeper and deeper ways, and a sense of communion based on that that transcends millenia and unites continents.

Also, as a side note, there's a very important fact that atheists / agnostics dismiss too easily, which is the answering of prayers. Until you yourself have been in dire need, prayed for something improbable, then received it from a direction you didn't expect, you can't understand the effect that experience has. It's easy just to say, "you're imagining it," or, "confirmation bias."

I am not the type of person to enjoy religious flame wars, just posting for those who are curious.

</comment><comment><USER14> Sri Ramakrishna said that all religions are just different path to the same divinity. Just like we call water by different names in different languages but ultimately they all mean the same liquid that quenches thirst , similarly different religions also lead to the same quenching of our spiritual thirst. Sri Ramakrishna not only said that but he practiced reaching enlightenment through different religions.

</comment><comment><USER15> > Nearly everyone in this world holds to some central and defining philosopy > or faith or religion that shapes the meaning of life for them.

Is that a fact? Seems like a false assumption to me. Unless you just mean whatever deeper beliefs everyone has, whether aware of it or not, but it seems you're making a stronger claim. For example, I'm in Australia, and I'd say 95% at least of the people I've met in my life aren't among this "nearly everyone".

</comment><comment><USER16> The answer to this has some (however minimal) overlap to 'why do you believe object oriented programming is a good idea?'

</comment><comment><USER17> Your religion/faith/worldview has not to be correct, until it works for you.

A lot of people believe the world was created by God and he placed the fossils into the ground to test our faith. Are they right? It doesn't matter much until it works for them.

</comment><comment><USER18> In no small part because any alternative is inconceivably unbearable.

</comment><comment><USER19> Muslim here. I'm open to being convinced. In fact, if you want to convince me, my inbox is open. I think it is possibly the most important question to decide on, so I'd appreciate honest discussion. Most online discussions are rarely civil because they're a little dishonest.

IMO, there is always going to be lack of evidence for or against. Agnosticism is logical, but I would rather just pick something and experiment with it. There's a theological/philosophical aspect of belief. But in the end, there will always be too little evidence and we have to pick something.

Theological reasoning:

1\. First, it's not a problem we can solve. We're too busy living our lives, working 40 hours a day. Tech and society in the last 3000 years hasn't helped us with the problem at all. It's almost certain that someone in the past has figured it out, with all the nobles spending their time on something. It's possible some knowledge was destroyed, but for the most part, it's best to work with existing frameworks.

2\. Religions are at their best as soon as they become popular. After a few generations, they become corrupted as they're an easy way to seize power. So be wary of anything that wasn't part of the original teachings.

3\. I think a God is inevitable. You have all these planets out there, some billions of years older than ours. Even if a God didn't create the universe, it's likely that one life form has spawned a godlike entity, at least compared to ours.

4\. I don't believe that God is infinitely omnipotent or omnipowerful. But relatively so. As in God might be able to destroy Earth in seconds, but that doesn't necessarily mean he can teleport or possess people.

5\. Multiple gods are unlikely, because they'd be conflicted if ruling the same space. If there are other gods, they might be governing other planets or universes. But it doesn't matter. In the case of humans, it's likely that there is one God governing us.

6\. If God doesn't care about us, then there is no purpose to this exercise. Earth would be accidental, like an old can of soup which bacteria somehow developed from, and we would be the bacteria. If God doesn't care, then there will never be enough evidence to work from and this could well be the case.

7\. But the Abrahamic God really seems to care.

8\. If God cared, he would at least let us know before destroying us for being infidels. Hence the Prophets - Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, etc.

9\. Muhammad was also an outstanding individual, very brilliant and lucky. He's either a genius or divinely guided. Not a lot of people go from being an outcast in his 50s to building an empire that conquers Byzantine Rome and the Persians.

Practical reasoning:

1\. Pascal's Wager.

2\. A variation of Pascal's Wager: I can't see a situation where I'd be happier in life, as an atheist. The Buddhism approach of "life is suffering/impermanent" seems to be the logical outlook. A life as an atheist would mean living in constant existential crisis. I donate, without anyone seeing my donations, because I feel God would reward me for it. Maybe God doesn't actually care, but it makes my life pleasant to think he does. Religion acts as a placebo. Why would I want to remove a placebo if it works?

3\. The Prophet Muhammad and his companions were great role models. People seem to point out his marriage life as a negative, but the other 99% of his life were great. Very honest, friendly, forgave enemies, very down to earth despite their power. If Muhammad says believe in Allah, then I'd do so.

4\. I think life has to be anchored on to something. Should I take Job A or Job B? Which brings me closer to God? Is Job A more sinful? Sinful isn't just sex, drugs and murder. It can be subtle things like usury, which is profitable, and very well respected.

5\. If God cares that we believe, then we should be fine asking for things. God has near unlimited resources; we could basically ask for anything without annoying him, and the act of prayer is also an act of worship because it demonstrates our faith.

6\. Completely anecdotal, but Allah answers my prayers. I pray for money, I receive quite a lot of money. I pray to meet people for guidance, I get to meet people who give guidance. I pray for parking, a parking spot opens up. I pray for a banana in the desert, someone gives me a banana the next morning.

<comment><USER20> For a muslim, I would suggest to be extra careful with choice of words describing God especially with point No. 3 and 4.

I don't know if I understand what you really meant to convey (your context, nuances, etc.), but you would not want to accidentally commit subtle shirk and invalidate your faith without even noticing.

We don't think about God. We think about God's creations instead.

<comment><USER19> With regards to point 4, the 99 names of Allah supports this. It's very precise on which parts Allah is powerful at, e.g. The Creator, The Raiser of the Dead. There is still omnipotence, just not infinitely so.

Also if you look at wording, it's things like "Most Merciful" rather than infinitely merciful.

<comment><USER21> Dear Muzani, I want to refer you to these verses. There are many like it.

وَلِكُلٍّ وِجْهَةٌ هُوَ مُوَلِّيهَا ۖ فَاسْتَبِقُوا الْخَيْرَاتِ ۚ أَيْنَ مَا تَكُونُوا يَأْتِ بِكُمُ اللَّهُ جَمِيعًا ۚ إِنَّ اللَّهَ عَلَىٰ كُلِّ شَيْءٍ قَدِيرٌ - 2:148

بَدِيعُ السَّمَاوَاتِ وَالْأَرْضِ ۖ وَإِذَا قَضَىٰ أَمْرًا فَإِنَّمَا يَقُولُ لَهُ كُن فَيَكُونُ - 2:117

And you have overlooked other attributes, such as al-Qadir.

I also want to say that translations often lack the complete meaning of the original text. We can't base our theology upon a translation such as "Most Merciful".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The more an idea is operational the more it is correct.</comment>


Antecedent about Steve Jobs telling a contractor to drop out of college - <AUTHOR> https://overcast.fm/+BlzHhiD3k <comment><AUTHOR> This a12z podcast episode is about gaming but at 2:00 they talk about interacting with Steve Jobs. Including telling the guy that his mouse copy was [terrible]. And Steve Jobs complained about the smell of the contractor's office because it was above a Burger King.</comment>


Ask HN - <AUTHOR>

Who do you trust most with your data?<p>1. Apple 2. Google 3. Facebook 4. None of these<p>"trust" means trusting them to not mis-use your personal data <comment><AUTHOR> personally I would have to say Apple. Not sure why. Just a feeling.</comment>