NYC Active Major Construction - <AUTHOR> https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/buildings/html/nyc-active-major-construction.html <comment><USER3> Considering the NY-Newark metro area has ~18M people, 120k proposed housing units (at ~2.5 persons per household) is about a 1% increase above the base rate of housing, assuming no vacancies and one household per unit. Considering the already astronomical price of housing in the area, it's hard to imagine that this is really going to move the needle. If we were serious about reducing housing cost, you'd see 3-5x the number of proposed units as you do, or more.

<comment><USER4> There's actually oversupply and prices are pretty good right now - <USER2> speaking of course.

<comment><USER5> The first statement is completely false, of course.

The second is simply vacuous.

<comment><USER6> While you're right that there is not an oversupply(needs citation), it is interesting to note some Burroughs have seen a decrease in rent in the past few years.

[0] (2018) [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-12/pick-a- ne...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-12/pick-a-new-york- city-borough-rents-are-falling-there-and-fast)

<comment><USER5> This point is that these dips in some neighborhoods a basically negligible against a backdrop of an overall affordability situation which is extremely bleak for most people who live in the city. And quite different from how things were 20 years ago or more.

It's like -- okay, a 1BR in a reasonably accessible neighborhood now costs $2600 instead of $2700. What are we talking about here?

<comment><USER4> 20+ years ago there was much more crime and living in the city was not desirable

<comment><USER5> I should have said "about 12 years or more."

The tipping point for crime was around 1996-1997. After that, murders (while a bit higher) were much closer to current levels.

After that there was about a 12 year period (until 2010) when rents weren't nearly as high as they are now -- around 40 percent lower across the board; and some neighborhoods have basically "flipped" and seen their median rents double.

The point is, from around 1998-2010 the city was about as "desirable" as it is now -- but significantly more affordable. To get affordability back to those levels -- we'd have to see something like a 30 to 40 percent reduction throughout the system.

It seems unlikely that would happen, even given the most ambitious upzoning, and the most wildly optimistic increases in inventory anyone could reasonably hope for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's an interesting definition of "major". Some of these permits are for projects like a 59 square foot expansion [1] of a single family home.

[1] [http://a810-bisweb.nyc.gov/bisweb/JobsQueryByNumberServlet?p...](http://a810-bisweb.nyc.gov/bisweb/JobsQueryByNumberServlet?passjobnumber=421888381)

</comment><comment><USER8> The map is made with www.carto.com, a pretty sweet mapping solution!

<comment><USER9> it does look cool. i'm honestly more impressed by the overall look-and-feel and responsiveness of the dashboard. at first i thought it was shiny or Dash by plotly. does carto interop with or fork those??

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This map does not seem to cover road construction type things. I walk some road construction everyday and it's not on here.

<comment><USER11> I'm fairly certain that is because "Active Major Construction" is a specific classification, and it does not apply to road construction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Still not enough. Here is why Tokyo housing prices are stable, despite the city growing, while NYC's continue to go up: [https://reason.com/2019/04/02/nimbys-argue-new-housing- suppl...](https://reason.com/2019/04/02/nimbys-argue-new-housing-supply- doesnt-m/)

> According to the Journal, the Japanese capital of nearly some 13 million > people saw the construction of 145,000 new housing units started in > 2018—more than New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, and Boston combined. The > country as a whole has managed to add close to the same amount of new > housing as the U.S., despite having about half the population.

What's remarkable about that last point is that Japan has been shrinking for a few years now, while the US continues to grow.

<comment><USER13> Japanese homes are only kept for 20-30 years from what I read. Do the above statistics include homes that are demolished and rebuilt?

<comment><USER12> I don't know if that's really accurate for Tokyo. It's mostly concrete and steel construction, like any other major city.</comment></comment></comment>


Wapiti - Web application security auditor - <AUTHOR> http://wapiti.sourceforge.net/ <comment><USER2> Automated web app security tools are helpful to a point and should be a part of your security assessment toolkit, but not the only part. Every web application is different, business logic testing is hard to generically automate, and AJAX just makes things more complicated. From my experience, tools will often miss issues that a somewhat skilled tester can pickup with minimal manual effort.

Be careful with Skipfish, it can generate a significant volume of traffic that'll peg a production server pretty quickly.

Also worth a look:

<http://dirb.sourceforge.net/> (you'd be amazed how many high-risk vulns this simple dictionary-based content discovery tool will help find)

<http://www.cirt.net/nikto2>

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

<http://o2platform.com/>

[http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_WebScarab_Proj...](http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_WebScarab_Project)

<http://portswigger.net/scanner/>

[http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Testing_Projec...](http://www.owasp.org/index.php/Category:OWASP_Testing_Project)

</comment><comment><USER3> I think Google released something similar a while back ago. Anyone remember the name and link?

<comment><AUTHOR> There are SkipFish and RatProxy

<http://code.google.com/p/skipfish/>

<http://code.google.com/p/ratproxy/></comment></comment>


A kind reminder to the community: please (re)read the HN guidelines - <AUTHOR> http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html?

<comment><USER2> The guidelines are short enough that they could go on the actual <http://news.ycombinator.com/submit> page or at the very least there should be a link to <http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html> there.

</comment><comment><USER3> Whoever you are, notakarmawhore, thanks for registering a dummy account to do this. Personally, I am far less annoyed by down-voting, trolling and bias, than I am by the people who are increasingly using "community" posts to bump their karma.

In particular, the "Ask YC/Ask PG" posts ( _"Ask PG: what color is your belly button lint?"_ ) were cool at first, but lately, they're contributing less signal, and more noise.

<comment><USER4> Perhaps there should be an option for this on the submission page: almost "post anonymously", but you'd still have to log in to do it (though your name won't appear on the submission), and if the karma of the article became _negative_ it would still apply to you.

<comment><USER5> Articles can't have negative karma, and I think the only incentive to not posting a lot of crap is the reputation you build with your peers. Anonymous posts would take away from that.

<comment><USER4> Well, the admins/editors would still know who you were, and could chastise you privately. Perhaps, further, only accounts with high amounts (>100?) of karma could post anonymously?

<comment><USER6> That would be strange indeed - when you can just make up a new account instead.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Its good (s)he put this up. It does clarify things, and many people have missed it.

For example, I only saw these guidelines for first time 11hrs ago, and I've been here for 39 days.

</comment><comment><USER8> How is this hacker news?

<comment><USER9> Now that is the funniest thing I've seen in ages. At least I hope you mean it that way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Could you give more details what's wrong?

<comment><USER11> This is definitely not going well:

"Be civil. Don't say things you wouldn't say in a face to face conversation.

"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g. 'That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3.'"

<comment><USER12> The problem I see is this: when people disobey this rule, lately they don't get modded down. The rudeness level seems to be rising significantly.

How do you mod a comment down, anyway?

<comment><USER13> get ~25 karma, then you can

<comment><USER14> Not to be an old-timer snob (because I haven't actually been here very long, but I hung onto reddit from the start until I couldn't take it any longer, and I really like the current style here)... anyway...

Here's an idea: Don't allow people to up-vote on ANYTHING (stories or comments) until they get a karma of 25.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I much prefer the actual aggression that results in people seeming rude when they forcefully present their views to this sort of passive aggression.

<comment><USER16> I think the majority of people disagree (in face to face communications). Although passive aggressive is not good, its far more common to behave that way face to face then outright aggression.

And the guidelines talk about making it more like face to face and less like traditional online forums.

<comment><USER15> I think a culture where people aggressively argue their views is better. But, people need to not identify too much with their ideas. They need to be able to say "switch" and start arguing the other side with the same intensity. But that intensity is going to be the difference between good and great.

And I'm fine with the majority of people disagreeing with me. The majority of people are idiots happy with good enough. :)

<comment><USER16> >I think a culture where people aggressively argue their views is better.

I disagree (but I upmodded you). >But, people need to not identify too much with their ideas. They need to be able to say "switch" and start arguing the other side with the same intensity.

Yes - that is informed debate - but I don't think that is what people are arguing against - its more the silly stuff that every other forum ever created seems to degrade to.

>The majority of people are idiots happy with good enough. :)

Well thats just mean ;) And certainly not something you would say to a "happy idiot" in person. Not if you want to achieve anything other then a punch in the face anyway ;)

<comment><USER15> "And certainly not something you would say to a "happy idiot" in person."

You obviously haven't met me.

<comment><USER16> No but I have met many like you. Well not many, but some. And its not common.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> would have more effect if written by PG or nickb, instead a person who has 12 karma and created their account an hour ago. I'm not saying this community doesn't need a refresher in discipline but who is this guy to give it.

<comment><USER13> his account name says he's not karma whoring. in other words, he made a new account just to avoid getting free karma on his main account.

<comment><USER18> Indeed. And even if he were some new user who wasn't pg, his point would still be valid, and shouldn't just be dismissed offhand.

<comment><USER17> sorry thought the name was a cheap shot at other users, instead of the obvious of what it was, good 2nd point.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Tool shows main pros/cons of CA and SF props and lets you save and share votes - <AUTHOR> http://www.votersguide.co/ <comment><USER2> I like the way the props are easy to see! I'll save my votes and use this when I'm at the ballot!</comment>


Horizon – Record horizontally. Always - <AUTHOR> http://www.horizon.camera/ <comment><USER2> Installing such app almost certainly implies that the user is aware of the problem of vertical videos. So being aware of it, they will simply rotate the device when recording (since it provides better quality/resolution).

It seems to me that it would be helpful if such idea is applied on the system level without the need for an app.

<comment><USER3> Horizon isn't just about vertical vs horizontal video, it's about either being skewed to a diagonal. Consider how many videos (whichever general orientation) wobble 5-20 degrees off axis; that's what Horizon solves.

Compare those professional "unsteady cam" shots where there's lots of horizontal & vertical movement, but _never_ any tilt.

<comment><USER4> This is great! I'm very surprised that it isn't anywhere on the site. Instead the focus seems to be on horizontal photos, which seems ridiculous since anyone can flip their phone sideways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Is there a video hosting site that displays vertical videos without cramming them into horizontal frame?

I think lot of hate against vertical videos comes from the the way that youtube displays them.

I tried to create browser extension that displays vertical videos without the horizontal frame but I couldn't figure out how to determine orginal dimensions of the clip.

Vertical format was picked so that two people talking fit the frame. Today we more often see one person talk while being accompanied by non-video content (related, comments, slides, code). When single person talks (s)he's small and often accompanied by useless background on both sides, regardless of whether the video was recorded vertically or not.

I think that youtube went embrace (allow to upload), extend (by useless horizontal frame that makes the video smaller), extinguish (by the hands of all the people enraged by vertical videos due to previous stuff and the fact that people often use fullscreen on non-pivoting monitors).

<comment><USER6> I'm not so sure. When i facetime with family (on phone or laptop), i find the experience is strictly superior when in horizontal mode. There is something about gaining the peripheral context that makes the entire experience feel more natural.

<comment><USER7> The normal human visual field is broader than it is tall. Exact numbers are hard to come by, but 4:3 is a reasonable approximation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Quite the trade-off, so instead of shaky unaligned horizons you now get irritating zooms effects [1], plus up to more than 2/3 of the original frame missing? (at least that's what the online demo represents).

At least the constant zooming could be easily lessened by defining a safe area of the frame as the active content while using the remaining sensor area for compensation only.

[1] [http://www.horizon.camera/demo](http://www.horizon.camera/demo)

<comment><USER3> As a Horizon user, it bugged me that so much of the image was cropped to ensure stability (portrait width in landscape orientation - grrr). The rotate- to-zoom effect isn't perfect, but at least it gives the option to use more pixels when available (and I'll take zoom over wobble). Otherwise you're using an HD camera to take stable SD video.

You _do_ have the option of turning off rotate-to-zoom and stick with the prior low-res stabilized image.

<comment><USER9> We have implemented a solution to the problem where the crop area zooms in/out smoothly in Flex mode, so that the wobbling problem is reduced. It will be available on the upcoming updates and in the Android version as well (hint! ;)).

In the meantime, you can switch between modes while recording depending on the situation. Finally, locked mode switches automatically to horizontal or vertical orientation in version 2.0.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> These guys strap an iPhone to a car wheel, drive at ~ 30MPH and record stabilized video. Pretty neat. [http://blog.evilwindowdog.com/post/88969373226/extreme- car-e...](http://blog.evilwindowdog.com/post/88969373226/extreme-car- experiment-horizon) Was posted on HN a few weeks back.

</comment><comment><USER11> What is the technical limitation that stops an app from making the camera shoot native horizontal while holding the phone vertical?

Would the camera have to physically rotate or is it software and iOS/android just don't give devs access to it?

<comment><USER12> Yes, the camera would have to physically rotate or stay level. Think of a film camera: holding the camera sideways means shooting in landscape at a 90 degree angle = instant portrait mode, no fancy software rotation effects required.

Alternatively, if we had a completely square sensor... though that still wouldn't help if you rotate at less than 90 degree angles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Why can a software camera app be better quality than the original one, which is just supposed to feed data from the CCD to flash? You aren't interpolating, are you.

<comment><USER9> Even the original/stock camera app is a software app that processes the data from the CCD sensor before writing the final video file. For example, for stabilization, it interpolates the sensor input and executes image stabilization algorithms.

Horizon, processes the video input using the same tools that the default app uses to process video.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Nice to see a new TLD being put to use

<comment><USER15> Google doesn't think so:

[https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=horizon+camera+app](https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=horizon+camera+app)

They do show up in site search, though:

[https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:horizon.camera](https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=site:horizon.camera)

<comment><AUTHOR> I think that domain is around a day old or something. At least the site is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Thank you everyone for your support!

Here are 6 promo codes for you so you can get Horizon for free!

[http://codehookup.com/6fb173a3](http://codehookup.com/6fb173a3)

</comment><comment><USER17> This is a very nice idea and should really be available in stock cameras. Maybe they could license it to phone manufacturers to include it in their camera apps?

Anyway, what I wanted to ask.. how do they go around the loss of quality? It's not a simple crop? Can they somehow utilize any part of the chip they want (as long as the maximum is the same?) since the chip is much bigger than the max possible video it can record?

<comment><USER18> License it? Is this such a revolutionary idea that other companies can't "invent it" themselves without licensing it?

This is an obvious idea that everyone has been craving for, and I don't think such ideas deserve patents. If stock cameras adopt this idea, tough luck, they'll just have to compete like everyone else and add more differentiation.

It's not the implementation that matters here, it's the idea. And companies can do their own implementations of it. They don't have to license it.

<comment><USER3> They may not have to license it, but for a reasonable price I'd rather use a well-implemented library that excels at what I need it to do and goes beyond, than spend time hacking up something equivalent but inferior (hey, I've got other stuff to do too).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Great product, but a question about the trailer video...

Since the app seems to seamlessly adjust the picture so it doesn't rotate when you change the actual smartphone's physical orientation, what's the point of rotating the phone mid-shot?

Take the example of the two women sitting for coffee... why does the camera- person bother rotating the phone to horizontal in the middle of the shot? Why not just stay in place?

<comment><USER20> It feels like an attempt to battle the plague of vertical video and for that I'm thankful. Otherwise it's a great way to end up with a horizontally stable shot while allowing you to hold the phone any way that feels comfortable.

I can't think of any time when that isn't what I want.

<comment><USER21> I don't understand why otherwise savvy techy people ate so Luddite about vertical video. Adding an extra 200% of worthless landscape to a video of a person is an ancient plague that smartphones provided a cure for.

<comment><USER20> Goes back to why we switched to widescreen displays.

Area of vision man. It is not wasted space to see a horizontal plane, as that is what we expect to see when looking at anything. Vertical video simulates the effect of straining to see through a partly closed door it is tangibly horrible.

<comment><USER22> _Vertical video simulates the effect of straining to see through a partly closed door it is tangibly horrible._

Horizontal video simulates the effect of straining to see through a partly closed Venetian blinds it is tangibly horrible.

Now, is this any more correct? Or is it an equally arbitrary personal opinion?

The move to "wide" screen was also the move to short screen. I don't find anything natural about it; I expect to be able to move my eyes up and down as well as left and right.

A preference for short and wide screens seems more cultural than natural. Even granting that humans have better peripheral visions along the sides than top and bottom the current screens fall short in capturing this range.

My beef with most vertical videos is that people typically do not make good use of the format; there's nothing intrinsically _bad_ or wrong about it.

<comment><USER7> There is no personal opinion in the observation that normal human field of vision is wider than it is tall.

<comment><USER22> No one said it was, so I'm not getting your point.

In another comment you said that 4:3 is a reasonable approximation of normal human visual field. 19:9 screens don't map to this; this restricted height works well for consuming certain current entertainment offerings but I don't see that a preference for it is objective.

If area of vision were guiding screen design we would likely see more of what the current Surface 3 offers.

<comment><USER7> Well, why are movies horizontally oriented? Why is the screen rectangular at all, and not square? Why were wide-screen movies such a big deal when they came out? Obviously it's because filling the viewer's visual field creates a more intense, immersive effect; engaging more of your peripheral vision makes you feel more like being there.

Vertical-format video has the opposite effect: you might call it anti- immersive. It boxes the subject up in an intrusive frame and makes you feel like you're looking through a hallway or some other obstruction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Hrm, great idea but not in practice?

This is a demo from youtube. Looks even more shaky than the default camera app.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2-S5SgQFVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2-S5SgQFVg)

<comment><AUTHOR> Obviously, rotating your phone is going to be shakier than keeping it still.

<comment><USER23> I don't think they were rotating it. I think they were trying to keep it stable.

<comment><AUTHOR> What would be the point of that? It says "rotate-only", it's the mode where you rotate the phone and it stays horizontal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I came accross this problem recently (while using Google Autoawesome for a compilation of videos and photos)..

Suddenly vertical videos are zoomed in and create ugly compilations :(

</comment><comment><USER25> Better idea: make a phone with camera rotated 90 degrees!

When I had old Nokia phone I didn't have to rotate phone to take horizontal photos.

<comment><AUTHOR> "Horizon: Take videos by holding your phone vertically!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> World Star Hip Hop will never be the same.

</comment><comment><USER27> Or just hold the phone horizontally?

</comment><comment><USER28> Extremely shaky result, see unedited demo video on [http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/14/horizon-shoots-all-of- your-...](http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/14/horizon-shoots-all-of-your-videos- in-landscape-no-matter-how-you-hold-your-phone/)

For those wondering, it's not free. It used to be $1, now it's $2.

<comment><USER16> Hey randunel, this is Stelios from Evil Window Dog :)

The TechCrunch post you are linking to was posted back on our initial launch at January 14th. This video was shot with the first version of Horizon that didn't feature any stabilization. Moreover, our straightening algorithm has improved a lot since back then (6 months ago). Plus we are always working on updates to improve it even further!

Concerning the price, Horizon was always $1.99 but had a -50% off launch sale in the first month of its release.

The 2.0 update is a free update for all our of existing users!

<comment><USER3> Yay free updates! Nothing kills my interest in an app like having to buy it again, and manage multiple versions in my app collection.</comment></comment></comment>


Mike Judge's HBO comedy about Silicon Valley is filming Tuesday in Palo Alto - <AUTHOR> http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_22768573/roads-be-closed-palo-alto-filming-hbo-comedy

<comment><USER2> >The dark comedy will reportedly focus on six programmers who live in East Palo Alto and are trying to create software that will earn them big bucks.

I can tell this will already be hilarious, because East Palo Alto is not the same as the glamorous or rich Palo Alto. I would know, because I am typing this in my rented house in East Palo Alto.</comment>


Google trainee puts up dummy advert by mistake - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46466530 <comment><USER2> $10mm dollars in ads accidentally run! Like the famous Reddit thread about the guy that accidentally deleted their company's production database on their first day, I'd say this is one expensive process issue in the employee onboarding.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ouch, that's almost as bad as the Mars Climate Orbiter mishap.

</comment><comment><USER4> Just don't use production</comment>


A collection of free datasets from Microsoft Research - <AUTHOR> https://msropendata.com/ <comment><USER3> I ask this not with snark but with fond(ish) memories, but does Microsoft providing open data like this make anyone else think of that Northwinds sample database that used to come with SQL Server?

Not sure if it still does or not, as I'm in a different DB engine entirely these days, but I kind of grinned with a wee bit of nostalgia checking out this site thinking of that. I cut my teeth on that data set.

Edit: Son of a gun they still offer it [https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/framework/data/adone...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en- us/dotnet/framework/data/adonet/sql/linq/downloading-sample-databases)

<comment><USER4> SQL Server ships something called Adventure Works since over a decade - <USER2> idea as Northwind but larger to also demo and play around with Analytivs and BI.

<comment><USER5> Adventure Works, pffft... I'll take Scott any day of the week.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This page has problems loading the datasets. Is it overloaded or just broken?

Does anyone happen to know what licenses the various datasets are under?

<comment><USER7> Can confirm that I'm having the same issues, could be overloaded indeed.

<comment><USER8> Turn off your ad blocker. Fixed it for me.

<comment><USER9> How did you find that fix??! Just Curious..

<comment><USER10> Ctrl+shift+i in Chrome, Console, you may see something like "blocked by client".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Well if you are looking for a huge dataset, I would suggest stack overflow.

[https://archive.org/details/stackexchange](https://archive.org/details/stackexchange)

I remember I wrote a node script to download all question and dump into my Postgres instance. It was fun, Postgres with an index could able to fetch results super fast

How many answers for this question?

How many questions are unanswered?

With gin index, I could do a free text search as well.

</comment><comment><USER12> Wow, 230GB celebrity photo dataset caught me off guard.

<comment><USER13> Is it the one used in this paper?

[https://youtu.be/XOxxPcy5Gr4](https://youtu.be/XOxxPcy5Gr4)

<comment><USER14> Dude watching this video is how I imagine a bad acid trip to be

<comment><USER15> It's worse. I think I damaged something in my brain by watching that...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> They don't make it easy to find out what the Microsoft Research License Agreement is, when they put it behind a login wall on a site that doesn't work with ad-block. But this appears to be a copy of it: [http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~aditya/langid/msrla.txt](http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~aditya/langid/msrla.txt)

These license terms are a trap. Nobody should ever accept them.

You can't use the data for commercial purposes, which is harsh enough on its own -- it means the data should only be interesting to people who plan to be academics permanently, or who don't plan to succeed at anything they do with it.

You can't even open-source anything you make out of it, because open source software does not restrict the purpose for which it's used. You can't combine it with data under any Creative Commons license except CC-By or CC-0, because its restrictions are _definitely_ not Creative Commons compatible.

The truly insulting part is that you have to give an unrestricted license _back_ to Microsoft for everything you make out of this data. You can't benefit from what you make out of the data, but _Microsoft can_ , with _no limitations_.

Whatever you make from this data, you can't benefit from it. Most other people can't benefit from it. Microsoft can benefit from it, and if they want to, they can just take it without crediting you.

This is like an artist being asked to do something "for the exposure", by someone who will just take it and give you no exposure.

<comment><USER17> "You can't use the data for commercial purposes, which is harsh enough on its own -- it means the data should only be interesting to people who plan to be academics permanently, or who don't plan to succeed at anything they do with it."

It'd also be useful for someone farting around with machine learning who isn't anywhere close to being at a point of shipping anything to anyone else.

What you can benefit from is what you learn while using the data. Then you start a new project using what you've learned, and using different data.

<comment><USER16> Why would you plan to fail? You could just use different data from the start that doesn't require you to sign an NDA.

It's not like MSR is providing a rare commodity.

<comment><USER17> "Why would you plan to fail?"

Because it isn't failure if your only goal is to learn.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Absolutely nothing on this website works for me. Search gives an infinite spinner. Categories gives a blank page. What gives?

<comment><USER19> For me it was uBlocker Origin.

<comment><USER20> Confirmed uBlock causing it here too

<comment><USER21> Ditto

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Do we really need more sample data sets

<comment><USER23> Yes.

I can't really fathom the snark here. Is providing this a _bad_ thing?

<comment><USER24> I think the commenter above you missed that it's not "sample data", but curated datasets for machine learning tasks, which we most certainly need more of.</comment></comment></comment>


Who Owns Your Pictures? - <AUTHOR> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2013/04/29/Picture-Rights

<comment><USER2> <quote>I haven't read the British legislation, but what it apparently does is...</quote>

I wonder if this admission might suggest both the cause of this controversy and a way to resolve it?

<comment><USER3> To be fair, it's not been put up on legislation.gov.uk yet (though should be in the next few days).

For HN's convenience, the section is:

 _116A Power to provide for licensing of orphan works

(1) The Secretary of State may by regulations provide for the grant of licences in respect of works that qualify as orphan works under the regulations.

(2) The regulations may—

↳ (a) specify a person or a description of persons authorised to grant licences, or

↳ (b) provide for a person designated in the regulations to specify a person or a description of persons authorised to grant licences.

(3) The regulations must provide that, for a work to qualify as an orphan work, it is a requirement that the owner of copyright in it has not been found after a diligent search made in accordance with the regulations.

(4) The regulations may provide for the granting of licences to do, or authorise the doing of, any act restricted by copyright that would otherwise require the consent of the missing owner.

(5) The regulations must provide for any licence—

↳ (a) to have effect as if granted by the missing owner;

↳ (b) not to give exclusive rights;

↳ (c) not to be granted to a person authorised to grant licences.

(6) The regulations may apply to a work although it is not known whether copyright subsists in it, and references to a missing owner and a right or interest of a missing owner are to be read as including references to a supposed owner and a supposed right or interest._

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've not had chance to properly read all the relevant data, but essentially this clarifies in law the basic mode of operation most picture desks have been running in for a while. Attempt to find author for a bit, give up, publish and wait, pay on prompt, however they might get to skip that last part which isn't great.

Now, if you're embedding the EXIF data you're a step up, because the image desks _are_ aware of the EXIF data. They'll look to see if there's anything in there and away they go, however if they're being reused online most people won't bother with that so you're probably out of luck, and you've probably got little to no come back.

There's many services that try be good guys with the EXIF info, so if you're a photographer and you give a crap about your rights of ownership, use those instead. I stopped using Facebook a while back for photography as I'd noticed it stripping the EXIF data (as well as butchering the compression on a number of shots), same for Twitter. Flickr I was surprised about, but 500px seem to preserve a lot of the EXIF data on upload.

This could either be really dramatic or not very dramatic at all, it depends on how it ends up getting used in court, which will take a while to shake out.

<comment><USER5> I'm actually trying to build a somewhat alternative to 500px/Flickr at the moment, and one area I'm really concentrating on is the EXIF data. I'm actually thinking of giving users more control over what data is kept inside their photos after they upload them, and allowing data added via the web UI to be written back into the images.

It'd be nice just to have standard locations for the sodding data in the EXIF though, if I'm honest :)

<comment><USER4> EXIF has always seemed a crappy solution to a crappy problem, but it's what we've got and it's what we have to work with.

Interesting you're going after Flickr/500px though, there's a definite market there but I'd have thought a lot of people were either stuck in their ways or transitioning to 500px from Flickr.

<comment><USER5> Aye, I'm not sure how big a market I'll have at the moment. The goal is actually to build a community somewhere between the two, as there are parts of both I don't like. I'd like to promote constructive criticism rather than fanboy comments, and do away with ratings (which are my main problem with 500px). I also find that none of these sites have yet figured out how to help you discover great photos, which I'm hoping to find a better solution for.

I'm trying to get the basics up in the next couple of weeks so that I can start working on more specific features :)

<comment><USER4> As long as it's easy to get photos into it, I imagine there's plenty of photographers who'll use multiple services.

Post it up when you're ready to launch, I'd be interested.

<comment><USER5> I'll have multiple file drag & drop in for the very first release, but after that I'm hoping to implement the ability to import from other services. And further down the line I'd love to be able to offer Lightroom/Aperture plugins for exporting photos directly to the site.

HN will be one of my first stops when I launch it, as I'd like knowledgeable beta testers!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> In general, if you have a metric shitload of money, you own them.

If you're a normal person, you're on your own. Copyright really only seems to be effective if you've got a team of lawyers.

<comment><USER7>
        "Register the work with the Copyright Office" $35/batch

        "With registration before infringement, you can seek
        statutory damages ($750-$30,000) and attorneys' fees
        and statutory damages can be enhanced up to $150,000 if
        the infringement was willful."

        "Section 1202 Damages for Removal of Copyright
        Management Information (CMI)Elements-Remove or alter
        CMI (watermark/copyright information) intent to induce,
        facilitate or conceal infringement Statutory damages
        $2,500 to $25,000"

see <http://www.pacaoffice.org/library.shtml>

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> To a casual reader, this new legislation appears obviously beneficial. The number of orphaned creative works is large and constantly growing, particularly with the Internet's cultural emphasis on anonymity.

Articles opposing the change seem to assume that "diligent search" is code for "give up unless the EXIF contains full contact info", which is not at all a reasonable interpretation.

</comment><comment><USER9> In general this law appears to be a force for good, and should throw a bunch of images that the authors don't really care about into the public domain. Should make for an interesting dataset in the future.

</comment><comment><USER10> He basically said himself why it's like this:

 _It's a good idea to remove some metadata and/or re-encode images that users upload, but it's not so easy to selectively preserve metadata._

Re-encoding (with side-effect of removal of all metadata) stops several attacks that are based on embedding executable code in specially crafted images (browser filetype sniffing leading to XSS, unsanitized filenames causing execution of PHP-in-GIF, etc.)

It helps performance: some users will have images that are encoded incredibly poorly, have massive ICC profiles embedded (which are also a compatibility problem) and almost never have the specific pixel size you want.

And most common tools make it incredibly easy to lose _all_ metadata, but to preserve only specific bits you need to go extra mile.

So the default is drop creator information.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand why this law is needed. If the work is truly orphaned then no one will come after you. Therefore the law is only about the case where it's not really orphaned.

That seems like it completely removes any incentive to obey any kind of copyright on photographs. Just use any photograph you want. When asked, claim you did a diligent search and nothing came up. Take the picture down. No punishment.

How is that not a recipe for massively screwing photographers?

Without the law orphaned works are still orphaned and safe to use. If you do a truly diligent search and figure out the work is truly orphaned. But, if your search wasn't diligent enough and the owner finds out you get sued as seems proper.

Why is this law needed?

<comment><USER3> > If the work is truly orphaned then no one will come after you.

Of course. But it's almost impossible to know that for _sure_. The point of orphan works legislation is it lets people use works that they're pretty damned sure are orphaned (and which the licensing body agrees) because they've done a diligent search, in the confidence that they can't be sued for copyright infringement if the author pops up later. (Though they may be asked to stop using the work, depends on how the regs end up being written).

Point is: copyright infringement is strict liability. This sort of legislation is the closest we're going to get to a true 'due diligence' defence.

> Just use any photograph you want. When asked, claim you did a diligent > search and nothing came up.

Er, and then be successfully sued by the copyright holder for using the work without a licence? The law provides for the SoS to (by regulations) create licensing bodies, it doesn't let people give themselves licences.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> So who exactly started this Exif meme? The legislation doesn't mention exif and I wouldn't consider only looking at exif and not finding any as the end of a diligent search.

It's a lovely bit of framing though, so who came up with it?

</comment><comment><USER13> Finally, a practical need for steganography.

<comment> mark-r What you're looking for is digital watermarking: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_watermarking>

</comment></comment><comment> mark-r The bigger problem will be with pictures that are copied without your knowledge and discovered on someone else's site. Chances are the EXIF will be stripped and there will be no way to trace it back to you.

<comment><USER8> TinEye and Google Images solve this problem nicely. You upload an image, and they search the web for similar images. I'm often surprised by how well they can find the original source from even a low-res fragment.

<comment><USER11> They almost never find the images I'm looking for unless they are an exact match. In fact I've had some hilarious mis-matches.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> A few years ago -- and, continuing into today -- there were numerous security concerns around EXIF data. This included not just GPS data and personal security (and/or privacy), but also other identifiers including device serial number (and manufacturer/model) and the ability to cross-reference same between pictures, picture sources, and potentially purchase history. (Depending where and how you purchased, the serial number may be correlated with your credit card or other payment account.)

Now, for the latter: If you are publishing controversial photography, the last thing you may want is to have said photos traced back to your identity. For the sake of this argument, I'm going to assume you are one of the forces for good. Omniscient data sourcing is not always desirable.

In this specific UK case, and with a rather light and superficial reading of some news accounts combined with past reporting and experience, what I see are organizations who have been called out both publicly (bad publicity) and financially for blatantly copying and publishing photographs for which they made no effort to acquire rights. (There _is_ an existing system for this, which they simply ignored and refused to respect until dragged into court -- formal, and that of public opinion.)

I speculate that these entities know that many major distribution platforms now strip metadata. And, that they are working to take advantage of this through the current legislation and sought definition of "orphan works".

I think those distribution platforms themselves may also be complicit. We've seen how Facebook has repeatedly attempted to use its users' photographs wholesale and without individual notification/approval for its own gain. (E.g. The "we can and will use your photographs in advertising" controversy, amended after much vocal blowback to include a (difficult to find) opt-out setting.)

Personally, I think that the pragmatic route people may find themselves taking in the face of such legislation passing is to watermark with copyright notification anything and everything they may care about, _before_ uploading it to any public source. If it is subsequently reused and this is of sufficient concern, the original upload including date/time can be cited in demonstrating that subsequent, ungranted reuse that is missing said notification must result from deliberate (and illegal) editing to remove said notification.

This will be ugly and doesn't fix anonymity issue, but so be it. (And deliberately publishing without copyright information has always weakened the stand of a creator subsequently defending copyright. In many of these cases, public communication of the photographic content (or other imagery) may continue to be more important to the creator than maintenance of copyright privileges.)

TL;DR: Meta-data (EXIF, et al.) used to be more commonly retained. This causes numerous issues particularly around security and privacy. Stripping it became de facto policy amongst many major distribution platforms.

Numerous, influential agencies seek to make a buck any way they can _and_ to leverage or compete with near real-time peer-to-peer sharing and "news". Also to leverage and/or compete with peer-to-peer interests (i.e. inject noteworthy advertising). They see an avenue to using these materials without legal and financial repercussions.</comment>


Startup Nation Announced: Canada's Conference for Startups in November - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupnorth.ca/2008/09/18/announcing-startup-nation-canadas-conference-for-startups-november-13-14/

<comment><USER2> Thanks for posting the conference. There are going to be some ycombinator summer08 guys (backtype) speaking as well.</comment>


Facebook is launching a dating feature - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/01/facebook-is-launching-a-dating-app.html <comment><USER2> Facebook has always been a dating website, this is just making it more visible/defined for the less aware.

</comment><comment><USER3> I think it has been covered before that Facebook already has a hunch if two people seem to be interested in each other -- groups, events, messages they share, times they have visited each other profiles, and reaction counts proportional to posts after the friendship was started.

I think the fact that they also announced incognito mode today suggests that this dating feature could be passive. Like, if you browse Facebook normally and you are both using this feature, and Facebook sees you are both stalking each other rather much, it could break the ice for you. This is probably the better the more oblivious you are and I can see the value in this.

It will also be interesting to see how this feature will be rolled out. While there can be a mutual attraction between two people, I can see it being a challenge to programmatically figure out whether there exist any other reasons why the relationship could not work, e.g. logistics, and how well is Facebook able to identify such possible problems before initiating the icebreaker.

<comment><USER4> I'm pretty sure they've stated that they won't be showing friends to each other as "matches" though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's like Tinder. But with the potential to influence the ads you eventually see on your cable box and web browser.

What could possibly go wrong?

</comment><comment><USER6> Facebook deprecated just 4 weeks ago certain permissions from Facebook Login including relationship status, relationship details, about me, education history, work history. Tinder and Bumble for example relied heavily on those permissions in order to quickly fill the user profile with data.

[https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/04/04/faceboo...](https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/2018/04/04/facebook- api-platform-product-changes/)

<comment><USER7> ...is this grounds for monopolistic suits?

<comment><USER8> I wish they finally get burned by it. But probably not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is no one going to point out that Facebook is _still_ in the center of a public panic over privacy? Are you sure the public is going to want FB of all entities to host and run a dating service?

I don't get how everyone is so bullish here. I think if anything Mark should have waited a couple of months.

Not trying to be needlessly negative, I'm just surprised by the reaction here.

<comment><USER9> it's not at all clear by the data that the public is freaking out. news sites do.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Makes sense.

Birth rates declining. People getting married later, and having fewer kids.

Western Countries facing declining population in next 25 years.

Existential threat to their growth at all costs model.

</comment><comment><USER11> Disregarding all the recent privacy issues, I think FB is poised to become the best dating site out there. The personal data it's been collecting for all these years--the likes, shares, comments, events, groups, etc.--could be used to create fine-grained matches.

<comment><USER12> What does this mean for "opposites attract" and "my better half"? Many substantial, long-term, fulfilling relationships are mutual partnerships where each person grows and as a couple find things that are "theirs" while filling critical roles for each other.

Fine-grained matches might not be that great. What will one have to learn from a relationship? What new interests will be developed? I know that FB's sociologists and ML experts have been considering these aspects more than I, but I fear the continued segregation and viewpoint-reinforcement that FB and algorithmic association sites subtly (or invisibly) are forcing upon society.

<comment><USER13> One would hope that they've come up with a couple different algorithms, to find matches that fit those different scenarios. "Here's some people who compliment you well. Here are some people that are different. Here's someone who's basically you."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Darn it, I'll have to reactivate Facebook. Almost every dating site requires a Facebook login for authentication too, they will be hit hard depending on how well Facebook makes this.

I'm very cynical about Facebook, but just like their blue collar job listings, this has serious potential if done right.

</comment><comment><USER15> Facebook knows us better than anyone else [1]

However, this means that Facebook may know better than anyone who I would be best to date.

I'm excited to see where this goes, and a little terrified.

[1] [https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/facebook-knows- yo...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/facebook-knows-you-better- than-anyone-else.html)

</comment><comment> eigen-vector If anything, Facebook is late in launching this. I'm curious why they didn't buy Tinder and get into the game earlier. Maybe they did and figured they'd much rather build it in-house than spend a fortune buying Tinder or something simiar—like they did with Snap.

<comment><USER16> > late in launching

Dating is an unsolvable problem. You can't be late to it. There will be people being born looking to find SOs so long as the human race exists. Even if Match captures 100% of the market this year, next year, another batch of kids will enter the "I'm getting older and everyone I know is settling down" panic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A way to get young people to use FB more? I know they literally know who's best for a user based on the ton of data we feed, but I'm wondering the privacy conscious folks would be hesitant to create a dating profile on FB.

<comment><USER18> > ...they literally know who's best for a user...

That's what I'm genuinely wondering about: Putting all the privacy issues aside, will some machine learning algorithm really be capable of predicting "functioning chemistry" between people?

<comment><USER19> I interpreted the comment as: "Facebook would have a better chance of predicting it than competitors given their information."

Remember, you don't need to outrun a bear, just the other people around you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The elephant in the room here is that this was announced at F8 - a conference for platform developers - yet _this_ platform application was developed internally and is one that, because of the neutering of the API, no outside developer could have built. They essentially said " _hey developers, look at this neat thing we built that you can't!_ ".

I'm curious what the point of F8 actually is at this stage. The platform has become so restricted that social apps can't be built anymore. Facebook should just acknowledge that outside developers have outlived their usefulness now that they have helped the service attract 2 billion users, and scrap the conference.

<comment><USER21> When I wear my tinfoil hat it becomes clear that Cambridge Analytica was a manufactured crisis to give Facebook the public permission and mission to purge developers off its platform, which has been its plan for a while now.

<comment><USER22> Never let a crisis go to waste.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> You really have to admire Zuck for his leadership. He might be a cyborg, but he's a damn good one.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a great way for facebook to get more information about their users.

</comment><comment><USER25> Zuckerberg's original intention was to create a dating website for colleges. It was obvious to eyeball this intent from the pre-wall days. Your page looked like this:

 _I am a: [man]_

 _Interested in: [women]_

 _Relationship status: [single]_

 _Fave quotes, fave music, about me._

Then, all that got put on hold as FB was built out in every way except that (including adding the Wall, and then the News Feed). They must have realized that FB could be something much larger than a dating network, that would get used indefinitely by its customers, without pigeonholing their primary use case.

I'm surprised it took this long to pull the trigger on this feature, though.

<comment><USER26> I think by labeling themselves as a dating app on the side wouldn't have garnered as many users if they had done so much earlier. They wanted to be _the_ social networking platform for as long as they possibly can. Well, with the recent backlashes and incidents, they probably think they have just about reached the peak number of users. I say it's a well thought out timing and execution.

<comment><USER27> Very well thought out timing, indeed. They're cynically using sex to reel younger users, and those grossed out by the Cambridge Analytica news, back into their network.

<comment><USER28> But he promised it was only for meaningful relationships

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Most dating apps have some kind of integration with Facebook and/or Instagram this seems like a no-brainer. I have seen apps use FB data about liked movies, shows, places etc to generate matches. So, this should work very well.

Though that leaves a question - What next for apps relying heavily on FB data?

</comment><comment><USER9> I cant wait for the facebook breakups feature next year. More seriously, it is interesting how much power facebook has in setting social norms and this will give it significantly more. They will be able to export american dating habits worldwide.

<comment><USER30> It already exists and you can 'take a break' from seeing other users' posts in your feed for up to 30 days, initially.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Dating service for FB is too obvious of a feature, I am surprised they just start doing it now.

A social network is an obvious place for people to meet new people. I think this is a really good idea for FB.

</comment><comment><USER32> I'm not a huge Facebook fan these days, but I think this is an example of market expansion that really makes sense. Instead of trying to find more creative ways to advertise to users, identify new services you can sell directly to users based off of all of the data you've collected on them.

</comment><comment><USER33> I can understand why they exclude Facebook friends. However I feel many of my dating prospects are already Facebook friends who I have largely neglected, so this feature would be a significant deterrent to me using the service. There must be some compromise here.

Meeting someone briefly and adding them as a friend should not exclude them from my dating pool! That would seem to hurt everyone involved - Facebook, me and the other person.

</comment><comment><USER34> I have a thought that this is the consequence of GDPR. Just like Google's NBU (Next Billion Users) division which focuses on the Indian subcontinent, I think we will see a lot of Europe centric initiatives from the large companies... primarily to service a vacuum that will be created because of the GDPR.

Dating is a very contentious issue in Europe and USA because of the GDPR,FOSTA,etc. I don't see anyone other than huge conglomerates being able to muster the legal resources to win here.

<comment><USER35> I don't know - I think plain, focused dating sites are one of the few businesses I could see getting away with "all the data because statistical modelling and research" \- under the opt-in clauses of the GDPR.

Fb (and other incumbents) are at an advantage, because they have a window to a/b test illegal profiles and algorithms against gdpr compliant ones, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> While I applaud Facebook finally focusing on facilitating real world interactions, I am concerned with them getting more central control over people's lives.

Why hasn't anyone else built an open source competitor to Facebook, like Wordpress for social networks?

I started a company 7 years ago and put a lot of effort to build such a platform. Now we recently launched 1.0 . I really thought someone would beat us to it. But somehow we are the first complete platform to market?

Now we plan to make it easier to install, build a community, build a social activity browser, and build out apps for communities.

Feedback welcome:

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ1O_gmPneI)

<comment><USER37> People have tried. Have you looked around? It's just that building one is the easy part, and the Wordpress model (social network in the box) isn't a solution. It's just an impl detail. And people don't move away from the service their friends and fam are on just because someone had yet another crack at building a social network from scratch. It doesn't solve much beyond "isn't Facebook" which just isn't very compelling branding to most people.

So yes, many people beat you to market. But notice how you don't even know what or who they are. Nor does anybody else except some HN readers because they don't have any real traction.

<comment><USER36> If you don't know who they are, how do you know they had a viable product?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Great tactical move. FB will get:

\- another income source from the same data. (ads and dating)

\- even more information about their users and in a _justifiable_ way. Users want them to make good matches.

\- another costumer lock-in. It will be even more difficult to quit FB.

<comment><USER39> Your second point is spot on. Users can't complain about FB collecting too much data. "You want to find true love, right? Well, we need better data about you to make it happen..."

But on your third point, I see an escape: Get married. Then you're free to leave FB.

<comment><USER38> I would say that older generations are already locked-in, locking-in younger generations is the problem.

<comment><USER7> s/problem\\./problem that probably need not be solved./

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Based on the number of stories I have heard about people hooking up with their high school sweethearts via FB, it seemed to already be a dating app.

</comment><comment><USER41> Cambridge Analytica is going to love to get their hands on the questionnaire you'd fill out for your dating profile.

</comment><comment><USER42> Can someone explain me my it has not been done (AFAIK) by someone else?

Facebook holds all the data needed and deep style of life analytics can be performed on it to find the most suitable match. I had the idea to make an app that exploits the data, but does Facebook API access restricted this kind of usage?

Why Tinder, woking on a random principle is working so well?

<comment><USER43> Dating websites are incentivised to not help you find your perfect match and long-term partner. Perhaps FB will be different, but I doubt it, especially if there is monetisation involved.

It's one of the few industries where doing a good job means far less revenue and customers.

<comment><USER42> Good remark, I didn't thought about that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> > Users can launch text-only private messages, separate from Facebook > Messenger or WhatsApp.

Now what's that about? You can keep your history of initial messages in your messenger history after you're married/in a relationship?

Is this some poor idea of following Google in self-fracturing messenger apps into incompatible silos?

</comment><comment><USER44> I get a feeling this will be pretty bad for people that don't already (or start to) use facebook regularly.

And I'd hate to create yet another facebook account for this. So, yeah, as shitty as the dating scene is I'd prefer a 3rd party so that I can attempt at compartmentalize my accounts.

<comment><USER45> It's already bad enough excluding oneself from messenger.

<comment><USER46> It's pretty much impossible to not use Messenger these days. I stopped using Facebook, but I can't just quit Messenger unfortunately.

<comment><USER47> But it's not impossible. I've never used Messenger.

<comment><USER46> Depends on how old you are and where you live. As a college student in North America, everyone uses Messenger, nothing else. How would leaving Messenger work without shrinking your social circle to 0? In other countries, like where my family lives for example, no one uses Messenger or has heard of it — everyone is on Whatsapp. So depends on your demographics.

<comment><USER48> I assume these college students are using messenger via their _cell phones_ , correct?

Is it no longer possible to reach people via text or phone?

<comment><USER46> Nope, cell phones are the most popular method, but there's also a web app for Messenger (messenger.com) which makes it even more convenient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Antitrust much?

Why couldn't Tinder go-ahead and sue them for anti-competitive behavior and get the FTC with them.

</comment><comment><USER50> The question here is, what will be the ground left for startups? There are already sectors, where barrier to join so high practically nobody new can join (cars, banking, chip productions...). Do we really want web to become property of few?

</comment><comment><USER51> Makes sense for Facebook to get into, considering people have been unofficially using it as a dating service since its inception, and officially using it indirectly through third party apps.

Will Tinder/Match etc make it possible to signup for their services without Facebook?

</comment><comment><USER52> Created a similar app like this a while back which was dating between friends and events, it had some traction but will face issues like seeing similar people etc.

Link: [http://lucid.fyi](http://lucid.fyi)

</comment><comment><USER53> I thought that the purpose of FB from day one was to announce your availability

</comment><comment><USER54> One of the core advantages I see here is trust. It would be so much more effective to match with someone who is connected to you by shared people/interest, rather than just a photo card.

</comment><comment><USER55> The greatest minds in our industry are focused on solving two main (apparent) problems:

1\. How to we get people to click on more ads?

2\. How do we get more people laid?

Somehow I find this depressing, all that wasted talent.

</comment><comment><USER56> They see the writing in the wall that tracking will be regulated and with that a nice chunk of revenue is gone. So they try to make up for it, one vertical at a time.

</comment><comment><USER57> Is this the moment Facebook jumps the shark?

</comment><comment><USER58> So now all the data they have about me browsing the internet can be used to find a woman who has a complimentary meta data set? Hopefully she's pretty too.

</comment><comment><USER59> The concern I have is that your dating profile will be hidden from people on your friends list. It's a bit unsettling that someone can start a dating profile hidden from an SO. And equally unsettling if FB blocked people who list a relationship status if they are polyamorus.

<comment><USER60> Here's another perspective: As a Tinder user I definitely wouldn't use a Facebook dating service if my profile was open and accessable to all of my facebook friends. I value my privacy in this regard and don't want to showcase a dating profile among friends.

And it's really not Facebook's duty to decide who should be able to date.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> One big advantage that facebook will leverage is that they don't WANT you to keep coming back for more dating. They 'll have you on the platform anyway, so they might as well give you the best quality matches from the get-go (plus they do have some of the best AI, so dating might even stop existing as a thing in a few years)

<comment><USER61> > they do have some of the best AI, so dating might even stop existing as a > thing in a few years

Could you expound on your reasoning behind this?

<comment><USER9> good AI will find the best match first -> people switch profiles to "married" -> average dating activity drops by a large %

<comment><USER61> I think it is a little ambitious to think that dating will disappear because FB announced a feature :)

<comment><USER9> "Dating" is predominantly an american phenomenon, but facebook has a ton of different cultures in it. There are cultures that frown upon this "trial-and- error" human algorithm.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> This is going to make Facebook look cheap and gross if not executed well. It will at the very least mean more fake accounts being created.

<comment><USER47> Hey, you gotta impress investors somehow!

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> It is going to suck to be any company in IAC portfolio that's not dating.

</comment><comment><USER64> I hope it is better than Facebook jobs. They are mostly $10/hr jobs.

</comment><comment><USER65> I may as well throw in my suggestion for this feature, since I'm sure there are facebook employees here somewhere:

Finder.

Like, Facebook meets Tinder.. but for finding companionship.

<comment><USER37> What do you mean by companionship? And what does FB meets Tinder actually entail?

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> As a fierce Facebook critic, I admit that Facebook itself is a company with amazing teams and outstandingly built services. Too bad it's also the company with the worst possible track record on privacy, who championed scientifically engineered attention grabbing as a tech tool.

I would sincerely like to see a paid for version of Facebook. I would easily fork out as much as I fork out for Netflix for a service that would offer me the same functions without all the profiling, with more granular control on shaping the user experience (i.e. I would rearrange my FB dashboard to focus on groups, events and messaging, while having the newsfeed as a secondary page).

<comment><USER67> Sure, but would you be willing to pay $25/year? That's about how much Facebook's ARPU (average revenue per user) is in the US right now.

<comment><USER68> I use adblock so my ARPU is 0. Can I get a discount? :-)

<comment><USER69> Not quite 0. If you participate in liking, sharing, or commenting on Facebook posts that were sponsored at some point further up the chain, then you are part of the value that Facebook offers to those advertisers. (Advertisers are paying for the initial exposure _and_ the network effect.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> makes sense, wondering why it took so long to roll out this feature, isn't this one of the original uses that Zuck had in mind when he created Facebook?

</comment><comment><USER71> You mean Facebook is launching a dating service for divorced moms?

</comment><comment><USER72> I am glad I am married and in my forties so that I missed all this.

[https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2018/05/01/6065885...](https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/2018/05/01/606588504/americans-are-a-lonely-lot-and-young-people-bear- the-heaviest-burden)

<comment><USER37> On the other hand digital dating makes it easy to meet quite a volume of people. When I feel like it, I can meet a different woman every other night.

I wouldn't even know how to do that without it.

The more women I can meet, the less I'm dependent on luck.

<comment><USER73> If I had met a new woman every night, I have no idea how I would have chosen her specifically. And I really have no idea how she would have chosen me if she had met a new man every night.

<comment><USER37> I don't understand what you're saying. If I'm talking to multiple women at a time, there's pretty much one that rises above the rest in terms of chemistry: We laugh more, she seemed particularly interested in me, she's cuter than others, we talked for hours, we had sexual chemistry. Some combo of the above.

Over time I choose to spend more time with her, it turns into a relationship, I stop talking to others. Same for women. This is how dating works.

Since women are the ones approached, they already are picking from a line of suitors in general (compared to men) yet long term relationships are still forged. How?

<comment><USER73> What I am saying is that by virtue of me not having met thousands of women in a dating/romantic context, it was pretty clear to my wife and I, early on, that we were working a lot better than any of our previous relationships.

It's like if you gave me three apples, and said "which one is the best," I'd be able to tell you pretty easily. If you gave me two thousand, the best one would probably be better, but I'd probably be very indecisive about which one was best, and probably be wondering even as I picked it whether perhaps another one was actually the best.

<comment><USER37> Well, it's not 2,000 apples at once though. That's not a realistic model of how relationships work out.

It's more like balancing spinning plates. You don't have the bandwidth to keep up more than a few, and you have a pretty good idea of which one is doing the best. Some of the plates drop off, or you stop them, or the other party does, and you can take on new ones as you please. Or you decide you're done looking. But that's exactly what you did. You settled after some samples.

But worrying about indecision because you have so many options is like worrying about exercise because you don't want to accidentally look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, or not wanting to apply to too many jobs because you don't want to have too many godlike offers to choose from; Having so many women to choose from that you're indecisive is not easy and it's a quality problem to have, but I don't think that's most men's realities despite their efforts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> no one is going to call it "facehook"?

</comment><comment><USER75> If I used online dating services, I'd be thrilled at this initiative: a lure for the catastrophically stupid, hopefully keeping them off whatever competitor I'd use.

</comment><comment><USER76> headline: "Facebook doubles down on creepy"

</comment><comment><USER77> Facebook is AOL. We didn't like AOL for _reasons_. Can we just keep finding those reasons valid, please?

</comment><comment><USER78> This is pretty much cardboard.. We need an open system for vr.

</comment><comment><USER79> I wonder if they will enforce the various legal age limits for consensual intercourse.

FB sign up limit is 13 years, no?

<comment><USER80> If they enforce it the same way porn websites enforce age restrictions(average age of first porn video use is 11 years)... then it's another case of looking a way at the harm they do while they praise the benefits.

</comment></comment><comment><USER81> Pivot?

</comment><comment><USER82> Good move for Facebook.

Bad move for users.

</comment><comment><USER83> All the other dating sites just import your profile pictures and all your personal information from Facebook anyway, so...

Kind of surprising it took this long.

</comment><comment><USER84> Good... that's all I used Facebook for anyways... They might as well rename it to FuckBlock

</comment><comment> mike-cardwell As somebody who doesn't use Facebook, it's going to be damned annoying if everyone disappears off the existing dating apps and into the Facebook ecosystem. It's becoming an evolutionary disadvantage to be off Facebook.

<comment><USER26> It's disadvantageous even if you do have Facebook based on a number of factors.

1\. You gotta be pretty photogenic. This is a very strange one because I find more people more attractive in real life than in photos. The people who do look appealing in photos tend to have more angular faces and better proportions, but honestly in the end what matters most is how we look in real life.

2\. You're at an advantage if you're extroverted and have pictures of you attending many social events. A good number of "friends" that you randomly hang out with helps too.

3\. If you want to stand out, you better hope you have a close friend who is at least a hobby level photographer and goes out to most places with you.

Yea, I'm screwed. I never prepared myself to have an outstanding social presence, and it's too late at this point.

<comment><USER85> That's what [http://lifefaker.com](http://lifefaker.com) is for!

<comment><USER86> This could be straight off an in-game GTA website, brilliant.

<comment><USER9> that one is LifeInvader i think

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER87> This seems to be restricted to users who are not marked as married or in a relationship, which excludes a whole swathe of people who are poly or variously non-monogamous. Pretty disappointing, given this restriction isn't there on other dating services.

<comment> Digit-Al Wouldn't people who are poly or non-monogamous be less likely to have a relationship status of 'married' or 'in a relationship'?

They did explicitly state that they want to promote 'relationships' not 'hook- ups' so I guess that is the easiest way to achieve that. Maybe they'll add new relationship status descriptions if people complain.

<comment><USER88> _> Wouldn't people who are poly or non-monogamous be less likely to have a relationship status of 'married' or 'in a relationship'?_

Quite the opposite, the more people you are seeing romantically, the more likely you are married to at least one of them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> This is a big deal. And not just because it will obviously cause big problems for existing dating sites, but instead because the longer-term prospects of this strategy are the beginning of an amazon-like vertical strategy for facebook.

Instead of being an "infrastructure" layer like they have touted to be in the past, they are now getting into verticals. So anyone building a consumer focused business that relies on a graph should be pretty paranoid about what the future may hold, just as anyone in the retail/ecommerce world is already scared of amazon. Especially if you're using facebook auth or facebook ads to drive your business: because it tells them whether you're worth coming after or not.

Think of the forces at play here:

\- (1) Facebook already has an enormous, aggressive, and well funded team ready to pounce on new consumer apps that are up and coming. See Snapchat features, and the dozens of other apps that have gotten to the first tier of success only to be out gunned by facebook.

\- (2) The rapidly shrinking facebook API landscape (and related platforms), due to the Cambridge analytics stuff and other concerns. API access is shrinking, not growing, with many platforms (like WhatsApp) with no plans to ever even have one.

\- (3) The prevalence of facebook ads as a "first place" to learn and iterate on your business. If you think they are ignoring the rapidly scaling consumer businesses, you're wrong.

\- (4) And now finally, their willingness to go into verticals instead of stay at the infrastructure level. They have the perfect storm to come after any consumer business with network effects at the core of its functionality.

<comment><USER90> > they are now getting into verticals

This is far from their first `vertical`. Events, groups, marketplace... Eventbrite/whatever is still here, meetup is still here, and craigslist is still here too.

<comment><USER91> Well lets not just talk about North American markets.

To give an example, Facebook Marketplace has become a considerable threat for "Small Items for Sale" category in emerging markets where classified websites other than Craigslist are dominant.

With its strong user profile integration that keeps out fake sellers, Marketplace has become a huge sell in countries like India, Pakistan and UAE.

I am definitely not surprised if Facebook would be going in for a vertical approach. Messenger used to be a part of Facebook. It's a stand alone product for a while now with bots for virtually anything (sellers are using them to give out promo codes), a separate mobile app and even a web app.

However, I don't see this verticalization to necessarily happen as a non- Facebook experience though. For Instagram, it makes sense to keep it that way and not bring it inside Facebook. For Marketplace and Events, it might not be the case because it needs that strong network affect and makes Facebook work as a platform to find, do and participate in things.

<comment><USER92> You can also cite micro communities in United States. For example, college students use Facebook for anything from browsing memes to planning events to subletting their houses for the summer. It's a pretty convenient ecosystem to tap into considering everybody's already on Facebook (that was the original target demographic).

<comment><USER91> That's a good example and very common in Canada as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> from what my friends who work for dating sites tell me, they basically are flickr for nude photos.

So we can't trust Facebook with our data but they want to store our nude photos.

That's some professional level doubling down for you:)

On a serious note, RIP Match.com/IAC. They are getting blown up in the past 30 minutes.

Facebook should treat carefully, when you can just walk in and start owning an entire category, that starts to get government attention for no other reason that the failed companies complain....loudly.

I don't think FB wants more government attention at this point.

I always assumed that someone like Linked In, or even, Bloomberg would start a dating app.

<comment><USER94> > So we can't trust Facebook with our data but they want to store our nude > photos.

Unless they can monetize on your nude photos, Facebook doesn't want to store them.

<comment><USER95> FB can lobby for strict revenge porn laws that punish platforms and then sell (limited) API access to the porn platforms so they can flag images they get as possible revenge porn.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> I'm long MTCH and FB. I'm not worried, here's why:

Despite what people think, Tinder (owned by MTCH) is not that dependent on Facebook, people can sign up through alternative means, and will probably continue to do so as their audience starts to bring in younger users over time.

Facebook is better off buying Tinder outright than attempting to roll its own platform. Sorry, as much as I believe in Facebook, some of their in house projects never seem to pan out the way people think, though they do get announced with a lot of fanfare.

I see a good entry point for new investors in MTCH in the coming days. I will be increasing my position.

<comment><USER97> > Tinder which is owned by MTCH, increased it's revenue by 8 billion in a > relatively short period of time

That data isn't correct. Match has annual revenue of $1.33 billion. From Q4 2016 to Q4 2017, their revenue increased by $212 million, from $1.118 billion. In their most recent reported quarter, they did $379m in revenue.

Match did $803m in revenue for fiscal 2013 for contrast. Their growth has been modest and consistent over time.

<comment><USER96> Ah you're right, it was market cap, not revenue.

Eitherway, I'm still optimistic and wouldn't be surprised if Facebook bought out Tinder at some point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> Cue the cynics on HN, but I think this is a very natural step for FB to take and I think the product will do very very well.

Even if you're on a separate dating service like Tinder, you look up your matches on FB anyway as a sanity test. FB already plays a large role in dating and the signaling involved. It just makes sense for FB to own the process from start to finish when they have the ability to do it better than any existing dating app today.

FYI: Shares of Match Group (they are a public holdings company for many of the popular dating sites out there) plunged after FB announced this.

<comment><USER99> Facebook marketplace has been a boon for buy/sell to me and my family. Kijiji and craigslist are very sketchy, but with FB marketplace, you can see who the person actually is. It makes us feel much more safe when we go to meet the person.

I see FB dating as having similar success. I can see you and your connections and validate that you aren't going to kill or rape me when we meet up for coffee (or if you're male; I can see that you are a real person and not a bot).

<comment><USER5> > Facebook marketplace has been a boon for buy/sell to me and my family

Interesting. In my area, Facebook Marketplace is almost all stolen/burgled/shoplifted goods. People even call it "Fencebook."

Want a brand new, unopened PS/4 for $25? Fencebook to the rescue!

<comment><USER100> ...huh. How do you tell stolen goods from legitimate ones? Obviously the price can't be the only factor since they could just try to sell it closer to a realistic price.

<comment><USER101> If you're buying something expensive, require an original invoice and check that the serial number matches. If someone is apprehensive about that, somehow they lost the invoice for the brand new unopened PS4 they bought last week, or similar, just drop it.

If they're selling close to the original price, just get it from a shop instead, that way you'll get warranty etc too (there's generally no warranty on goods with "lost" invoices).

In general, look out for suspicious behaviour. Are they willing to meet with you at their home or office? Do they readily share their phone number? Do they have many excuses (one of the most common tells for liers are an excess of over-thought out excuses) for not doing things transparently? If it's too good to be true, it probably isn't true.

<comment><USER100> Thanks! The trouble is all of these can fail for what I would consider legitimate reasons. Requiring a receipt fails if they just open it, maybe even use it a bit (or not), and wait a few months before selling it, since nowadays people seem to genuinely go through some stuff (e.g. phones) pretty quickly and not necessarily keep or have receipts, especially if they themselves bought it second-hand. Meeting at my home or office is not something I would ever feel comfortable doing, and is generally recommended against when purchasing online. Sharing phone numbers is something I'd only do when the decision to purchase has gone through and we're actively trying to meet up (obvious privacy concerns), etc.

<comment><USER101> It's not an exhaustive, binary checklist, they are signals to watch out for. They are basically surrogates for trust. If you're selling something that looks like it might have been stolen, you have to come up with a compelling reason to trust you. Meeting at your office and sharing a business card might be such a reason. If the only thing you're comfortable with is meeting in a deserted parking lot late at night, and only communicating over a throwaway anonymous email account, the counterpart is right to suspect something is fishy. On the other hand, if you have an original invoice from the Apple store, then it might be OK.

Sure, there are legitimate reasons for not getting any of these right, but if they get _all_ of them wrong, be very careful.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What image processing task in your industry is still not automated? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Reliable detection of illegal images

<comment><USER3> I can think of very few illegal categories of images (at least in the US) because of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. But of the ones I can think of, it's not possible for a machine to recognize them (e.g. child porn).</comment></comment>


Google self-driving car involved in first injury accident - <AUTHOR> http://phys.org/news/2015-07-google-self-driving-car-involved-injury.html <comment><USER2> I wonder if self driving cars will have cheaper insurance, which will be a good incentive for more people to buy them.</comment>


Ask HN: What's your favorite 'loading' image? - <AUTHOR>

I just came across the "Haters Gonna Hate" loading indicator at the site below, which gave me a laugh:
http://status.numenta.org/issues
What are some other funny or novel loading images you've come across? <comment><USER2> hackt mit bitte s4 league 1 acc full prem ???

</comment><comment><USER2> hackt nur bitte s4 league ?</comment>


2015: The Year of Emoji Diversity - <AUTHOR> http://blog.emojipedia.org/2015-the-year-of-emoji-diversity <comment><USER2> I don't get the point of building Emoji into unicode. A browse of the Emojipedia suggests that supposedly standard characters look so different on different platforms as to potentially have completely different meanings to sender and receiver.

The Emojipedia itself is full of strange cultural assumptions. Following the links in the text to 'men and women,' two women holding hands could represent lesbians or 'best friends,' while two men holding hands are only considered as a gay couple - ignoring the numerous cultures where such behavior is simply considered companionable. Trying to formalize this into an international language standard looks like a recipe for toxic politics with a side of technological confusion.

<comment><USER3> > I don't get the point of building Emoji into unicode.

Yeah, I thought the purpose of unicode was to provide a character-encoding standard for all human writing systems in current use. Emoji aren't a writing system. Are they included for some legacy reason?

<comment><USER4> Yes. Back in the days when the Japanese phone industry was an island unto itself, they had a 16-bit custom character encoding and not enough common characters to fill it, so various manufacturers stuck UI icons and other assorted pictures in there. A decade or so later, when Apple and Google wanted a piece of the market, for interoperability reasons they had to support all the same glyphs. Since both iOS and Android are unicode-based, the easiest thing was to get them officially added to Unicode.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I'm not against people doing weird stuff, so all these smileys and putting them in every new mobile app and all that stuff is fine. I don't like it, but it's just my opinion, so that's fine.

But what I'm really against is spoiling one of the most important of all standards we have now with that. I consider a bit questionable the fact that emoji (and other inconsistent symbol sets) are built into unicode already, but considering the time it was done and the origin of those symbols that's somewhat OK. But, srsly, guys, racial diversity for some smileys in the unicode? Really? Why not racial diversity for Pacman? It's crazy, really. It's some symbols that even shouldn't actually be there (in the unicode, I mean).

I guess we really should see that as a problem. Unicode is a complicated standard. Actual encodings of unicode even more so. Imperfect programs working on imperfect systems, trying to support that stuff, rendering engines rendering that stuff, countless font formats and protocols having to deal with that stuff and et cetera, et cetera — even _more_ so. And unless we are forking unicode itself with purpose to make "coding standard for sane people" (and if we are sane, we are NOT doing it for obvious reasons) we must to be thinking about supporting all insane stuff introduced into unicode itself, because it is the reason for standards to exist in the first place — to be covered by implementations. So introducing all that complicated stuff without any real reason is a big problem, and we should be worried, because it's _us_ who will suffer from awful standards later, and not some guys with fancy hairstyles doing business with mtv and stuff.

So you want colorful smileys? Use _imaging_ file formats, goddammit. PNG, SVG. Invent your own markup standard (like {smiley12:asian}) to be used with all sorts of tweeting apps. Don't mess with encoding standards.

Cannot something be done about that?

</comment><comment><USER6> Crazy. The Fitzpatrick scale[0] has 6 entries but they've decided to lump the white people together as pink people. I know it's not 'racist' but why not just use the 6 different levels on the scale.

[0] It's fantastic to enable skin tone colours (although technically I think it's a nightmare) I just hope that I can choose colours that match my skin.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzpatrick_scale](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fitzpatrick_scale)

<comment><USER7> I see three different faces on the mockup that could be considered Caucasian. What RGB value(s) do you think need to be added to achieve sufficient diversity?

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Right now the source of truth for Emoji icons is Apple's icon set. I think we need an open source alternative to that. There should be a set of free and open source icons for emoji.

<comment><USER9> There is [http://emojione.com/](http://emojione.com/).

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> But when will we have an option to change colour of suit in the MAN IN BUSINESS SUIT LEVITATING character?

<comment><USER11> Or the color of PILE OF POO.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I got the impression that, for those emoji with multiple people (for example holding hands) there will be variations with the 5 skin color modifiers - that's 25 (if order matters) new characters to represent the permutations of one emotion.

We should go back to ":)"

</comment><comment><USER13> WTF? When a character is rendered onto a bitmap it is either there or not. Where the heck does colour come from? (Aside from AA, Unicode doesn't define that anyway.) Why on earth is Unicode putting a picture into its encoding?

<comment><USER14> It's not – it's adding emoji modifier characters, much like there are already modifiers for adding accents to letters. These characters act to alter existing emoji – in this case, specifying the skin tone.

The goal is to add additional semantic information to an emoji character. It's an interesting idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> It would be interesting to see emojis being designed from a more ground up perspective:

Take a set of emotions, take pictures of people from various cultures/ethnicities expressing those emotions - use some representative sample strategy. Publish the database of pictures. Try forming rules for how people generally express those emotions given relevant variables. Encode the resulting space into some clever bytecode representation. Now you have a basis for representing the semantics of emoticons, an alphabet if you will.

</comment><comment><USER16> Ugh. Diversity, or dragging along the baggage of thousands of years of racism into the 21st century. A smiley is yellow. That is not white, black or Asian. Giving smilies skin color is taking us back to a darker time.

</comment><comment><USER17> I've been seeing this around the web today, but sort of assumed it was a joke. Is this serious? Can't they all just be made to look like characters from The Simpsons and then, I don't know, maybe people can get on with some more important work?

<comment><USER18> I guess the current set of glyphs from Apple/Microsoft/Twitter/Google shows why this is difficult: [http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/full-emoji- list.html](http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr51/full-emoji-list.html)

Most of the "simple" things, like smiling/frowning/teardrop use yellow smileys. But there are also some emoji like boy/girl/man with turban/police officer which seem to call for less abstraction, and then the artist has to pick a skin tone.

<comment><USER2> I didn't realize there were 1430 of them. It reminds me of clipart shovelware when CD-ROMs were a new thing and people felt a need to fill up all that empty space with...stuff.</comment></comment></comment>


Why Do We Undervalue Competent Management? - <AUTHOR> https://hbr.org/2017/09/why-do-we-undervalue-competent-management <comment><USER2> I am also sure the study will show Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg run orgs with highly competent managers. But it is not competence in my book.

<comment><AUTHOR> While I'm not sure how well managed any of those firms are, I think you can distinguish someone's business acumen from their personal failings, and admire one while denouncing the other. We already do the same for composers like Wagner or writers like Roald Dahl.

<comment><USER2> Wagner and Dahl don't have as much influence on society as corporations do. So I don't really agree with that comparison.

My issue is mindless ambition/win at all costs/do whatever it takes produces "competence" too.

The more data that pours in, the more we will realizes that stuff needs to be filtered out from our definitions of competence. The costs are too great imho.</comment></comment></comment>