The Growth of College Grads in Dead-End Jobs - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/the-growth-of-college-grads-in-dead-end-jobs-in-2-graphs/283137/ <comment><USER3> Perhaps the problem is that people who are destined for a dead-end job are now going to college:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Educational_Attainment_in_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Educational_Attainment_in_the_United_States_2009.png)

In 1990 ~20% of the US had bachelors degrees. In 2009 ~25% did.

In the same period, the % of college grads in low wage jobs also went up by about 5% (according to the OP).

Caveats: 1) That second 5% is from the population of grads not the total population, so that second 5% is a lower number. 2) The 5% total attainment measures the full pool, not the delta in the pool as would be appropriate to use in comparison to the recent college grads numbers in the article.

A lot of this "college grads now worse off" seems like partial views of the statistics that ignore the meteoric rise in enrollment over the same period.

One stat I haven't yet seen, that would make a great paper for anyone still in college, is: What percent of these numbers can be explained by higher GI bill usage following the Iraq and Afghanistan wars?

<comment><USER4> The real problem is people studying bullshit that nobody really needs.

Young people got sold the idea that they can be anything they want to be, they they are all special snowflakes. The reality is quite a bit more brutal.

What we really need is mandatory career counseling, once a year, for every student. The counselors must be familiar with the state of the market, the market trends, technology trends, number of future graduate trends, etc.

<comment><USER5> There's also the problem across the aisle of employers looking for bullshit skills and experience that are almost completely irrelevant to the jobs they're offering. Graduating from college today and trying to move into the workforce feels like a lockout, like there's some sort of employer union to purposefully bar recent grads out of employment.

It really has nothing to do with studying "bullshit degrees", as so many of the graduates with "bullshit degrees" are incredibly competent and hard working, and would make better employees than the arbitrary person with "5 years experience", who may have 5 years experience being a terrible employee.

Counseling students of the trends of the market is stupid. You would get a ton of students with whatever degree was popular 2 years ago. You can't just switch your degree on the whims of the job market, and why would we want our college educated force to do so? There would be a stupid and obvious consequence: hordes of graduates all with the same single degree all still complaining about how college doesn't lead to a job.

Really the problem is that there just aren't enough jobs for college grads, and the jobs that are available, employers naively put bars of experience, completely ignoring a mass of very competent workers.

One thing I might be in support of is more of a compromise: cut out more of the atrociously poor general education in exchange for a policy of something like 1 career degree (Business, Science, Engineering), 1 arts degree (Everyone must double major). But this would likely have the drawback of students having to grind through a subject they're not interested in and are never going to apply in practice.

P.S. (I'm a few years out of college and have been employed the entire time, so this is not my personal anger at the job market, but more an observation of systemically poor hiring practices).

<comment><USER4> > _as so many of the graduates with "bullshit degrees" are incredibly > competent_

A history graduate is competent in what exactly?

They aren't even competent at teaching history, which generally requires Masters or PhD.

> _Counseling students of the trends of the market is stupid_

I never said the students should counseled on the trends. But the counselors must be aware of them.

<comment><USER6> "A history graduate is competent in what exactly?"

Studying/researching problems.

Writing persuasive documents based on evidence.

Working collaboratively in teams doing research.

Or, at least, that's what I'd expect. I'd expect that almost _anyone_ graduating with a 4 year degree in _anything_.

Sadly, I know it's not the case. > 20 years ago, I was taking a college course on 'intro to china'. It was definitely a 'blow off' class - a 2 credit class you had to take to fulfill some general ed requirement.

The class was 2 months, 1 (or maybe 2?) nights per week, and we had to write 4 'papers'. The 'papers' needed to be 1-2 pages on any topic of our choice relating to China - historical, modern, political, whatever. The instructor was a librarian by trade, and loved China, and taught the class.

First papers go back to the students, and 3-5 students in the back - 'non traditionals' by the look of it (all over 30 IIRC) started complaining - _loudly_ \- that they'd been marked down because of spelling and grammar mistakes. The instructor replied that this was a college class and they should be able to write basic English competently enough to avoid basic spelling and grammar mistakes - we should all know how to use semicolons, commas, periods, capitalization rules, possessive forms, etc.

One of the students shouted back "this isn't an English class - this is unfair bullshit that I'm being marked down like this". Sadly, a group of people all chimed in agreeing. The teacher was visibly shaken.

Of course, not arguing this is the state of every single college class out there, and it wasn't even the norm in my experience. I was just shocked at the time that it happened _at all_ , but now it doesn't shock me any more. Just saddens me that people think like this. Those sorts of people shouldn't be going to college in the first place, but were sold the line "get a college degree and your life will be great". It's not true.

<comment><USER7> This unfortunately happens fairly routinely even at high level universities. Not always as publicly, though, but it does happen.

I'm a faculty brat (professorial parents) at one of the top public universities in the nation. There are always students that will complain to professors that things are too hard, or that grading schemes are unfair, or etc. with very little cause. Possibly worse is that sometimes people's /parents/ will call or email their professor to appeal a grade.

It does seem to be somewhat major dependent: I have /never/ seen it occur in a math class, for instance, whereas it apparently routinely occurs in my mother's English classes. (She's known for grading more stringently than many other English professors. Complaints also don't usually work.) However, I think that it's a mark of an experienced teacher that they don't let bullshit like that faze them: the one time I've seen it really affect how a class was taught, it definitely made the class worse as a learning experience. (Some vocal computer science majors thought that an algorithms course was too difficult, and the professor made it easier, which definitely was a net loss for everyone. I'm very glad that I wasn't enrolled in it.)

I think it's disgusting. Sometimes professors make mistakes: in class structure, or assignment load, or grading something, or the like, and bringing that up politely is appropriate. But if they know they are assigning hard, long assignments, or the grading is fair, or the like, then it's usually for a good reason. The professors who don't care about teaching usually also don't teach hard courses or grade harshly, because it means more work for them.

I agree that generally the people who do things like this are less likely to do well post-college. Either because their parents are hovering over them (see parental phone calls) and they won't ever learn self-discipline and reliance, or because they expect that if they complain, the world will magically bend itself to their will. I think some of it happens when people are taking courses they don't want to take for a requirement, but I agree that there are a good number of people who get sold on the "college degree -> good job and happiness and money."

<comment><USER8> Back in my undergrad I TA'd Comp Sci for a few years. That sort of stuff was rarer in upper level courses, but in the intro classes which were often largely filled with non-cs majors, it was rampant. The policies of the course were extremely lenient as well, and very explicitly spelled out in the syllabus.

For example, there was an assignment every single week, and 3 times during the semester, they were allowed to turn in an assignment up to a week late. This is by far the most lenient late policy I've ever seen in a course. And still, every semester, I had to deal with several kids angrily yelling at me because they found out they got a 0 on an assignment because for the 4th time they decided to turn in something late.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Well, this isn't incompatible with the perception that a lot more college grads are stuck in dead-end jobs.

Let's imagine three tiers of college grads: winners, middling, and losers, depending on how employable they were when they graduated.

Before, the winners and middling grads got _real_ jobs, and the losers went to Joe-jobs.

Now, the winners are still getting _real_ jobs, the middling folks are now in Joe-jobs, and the losers are unemployed.

And nobody cares about losers because we're all callous that way, so all we've noticed is that people who used to get the real jobs are now stuck in the Joe- jobs.

<comment><USER10> I don't see how you draw that conclusion from the data.

A _slightly_ larger percent of graduates are working the "Joe-jobs".

College graduates have increased as a percent of the population.

Everything looks to be in order here.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> What a silly article. It ignores that you can get a college degree in anything. Do the analysis for art majors, literature majors, business majors, and various STEM majors. Look at 2 year degrees, 4 year degrees, and graduate degrees.

Sadly there are enough variation that you can almost make any statement technically true. You could say more people with college degrees are unemployed now than ever before in history. In absolute numbers sure, as a fraction of the available workforce not so much.

</comment><comment><USER12> These graphs ignore the fact that from 1992 to 2009, the percentage of people over 25 with a college degree rose from ~20% to ~27%: [http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p20-566.pdf](http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p20-566.pdf) (page 3). Meanwhile, the first chart in the article shows from 1990 to 2012, consistently just over 30% of college degree holders had a job that didn't require their degree. That means that in 1990, 0.7 * 0.2 = 14% of the population had a college degree and a job that required one, while in 2009, 0.7 * 0.27 = 19% of the population had a college degree and a job that required one.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I just had several friends who were Architects take menial jobs after the housing market busted. These were guys who were 2 years removed from college, thinking they had paid their dues and were in their chosen fields.

Two are still trying to catch on to another firm somewhere and another completely changed fields to find a job. I wonder if they're including these people in those stats?

</comment><comment><USER13> We've had a few previous discussion on this and peripheral subjects. Here's a good one:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6224982](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6224982)

I'd also invite you to read my comment on it:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6226836)

The "studied the wrong subject" stuff has surprisingly come up in this thread, so I'll just sum up the answer to that one here:

'About the suggestions that these people studied useless subjects: true, many of them did. What, however, would happen if they all decided to go into STEM instead? Assuming they all did amazing, we'd wind up with a glut of people with degrees in "good" subjects, which does nothing to magically create jobs (having a STEM degree does NOT mean you're going to start a company!) - <USER2> only helps where there are shortages. Once those are filled, we're back where we started (and wages may get pushed down due to a talent glut.) That's the best case scenario, too. What would be worse? What would the reality likely be? If everyone did rush into STEM, a good portion would fail out (not everyone is cut out for it. Really, some people just do not have the attitude, mindset, demeanor, worldview, interest, etc.) and be left with no degree (or they'd switch to one of those useless ones) and still be debt - right back where we started again. For some real world examples, just look through some other discussions on HN about this subject about people in countries who DO exactly this and they're stuck with unemployed and underemployed STEM grads up the wazoo.'

<comment><USER14> You'd probably end up with a lot of people who have the degrees but, in practice, aren't very competent. I don't subscribe to the belief that anyone can do anything they chose as long as they try hard enough. Individuals have individual skill sets, and some simply aren't all that skilled.

My thought is that many of the people enrolling in college should actually be pursuing a career in skilled labor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I can not count the number of college students I met while I was in college (2001-20010ish) who did not have a clear vision of how they would pay off debt and maintain a living after graduation. Following your dream, being passionate, etc were the proverbs being lived by.

Not a realistic analysis of how they would survive in non-minimum wage jobs.

It should not surprise anyone that following your dream without counting the cost results in very high costs for most people - the penniless genius and starving artist is still a proverb.

</comment><comment><USER16> The document one link down is really interesting: [http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/HardTimes....](http://www9.georgetown.edu/grad/gppi/hpi/cew/pdfs/HardTimes.2013.2.pdf)

Apart from the usual suspects (sociology, anthropology, archeology) "Information Systems" doesn't fare well but CompSci is still ok and Math is good.

</comment><comment><USER17> Many are by choice, aren't they?

I know a lot who studied "just anything" in college, because, well, I've gotta go to college, don't I? They didn't have a career path or anything planned out, just picked something, took some classes and graduated.

Then they decided what they picked wasn't anything they wanted to do for the rest of their life.

I know someone who studied business but soon realized she hates the business world, because you have to be cut throat to get ahead.

</comment><comment><USER18> Find a pain and solve it. This can be applied to a college degree fairly easy. Do you want increase your value to potential employers after graduation? Be able to solve painful problems. Where are the painful problems? STEM.

</comment><comment><USER19> For context: I spent my time across the arts and sciences at a top 20 school and graduated with a very high GPA — all without ever writing a paper longer than 12 pages. A lot of this was my fault, but it should not have been close to possible for me to graduate.

The problem to me is larger than which degree someone graduated in. It's that college isn't rigorous enough in general, and the only people who see the real benefits of education are people that study the sciences AND are curious and motivated. See, with science, business, and technology, the worst case scenario is that the teacher is terrible and the textbook takes over the responsibility of pedagogy. This, along with a motivated student, is enough to salvage an education.

In the humanities and the social 'sciences' (which, in my opinion aren't really science in how we tend to define it these days — and I say that as a great admirer of sociology, political science, psychology, and economics), motivation from the student isn't enough to save them from the worst case scenario: the student graduates underdeveloped, unfocused, and scattered with only the seeds of critical mind if the curriculum and teaching is poor. And that worst case scenario happens A LOT since, as previously mentioned, lack of rigor and inconsistent teaching quality is poor across all departments at the university level. With very few exceptions, my social science peers didn't have even a high level understanding of the alternatives to a intellectual framework like positivism. I doubt they would even know what I would mean by an intellectual framework or positivism. Technical students don't need to know this (though they should), but as a social science student, you can't do your most basic work without an understanding of such topics.

College has become a replacement for high school, because high school has become a daycare. University teaching is inconsistent because universities are confused on their role in society. This teaching problem is cross-discipline. However, with the sciences, the textbooks can more or less set an expectation of learning. Other subjects require a very disciplined teaching method to be valuable — the professor must direct the path. Humanities and social sciences require boldness and direction from its teachers, which they can't do because the university is a hostile environment for professors.

The only solution I see to this problem (on a personal level) is to encourage aspiring college students to choose the HARDEST college (the reading difficulty and writing quantity should terrify the applicant), which explicitly and forcefully values teaching, and has the highest level of prestige (for when it comes time to showing that resume around).

If you're a humanities or social science major, you should be reading at least a book every week (I'll give you 2 weeks for Das Capital ;) and always MULTIPLE books on any topic. Otherwise, you're wasting your time and money. I wish someone told me this, so I hope a high school or current college student comes across this comment and thinks about transferring to a serious institution.

<comment><USER20> I don't know quite what to make of this ... It almost sounds good. But then again, it almost sounds like elitist trifling ...

<comment><USER19> You're right, I made a mistake.

I should have pointed out that I didn't do anything of this stuff while in college. I didn't really know what positivism was. I didn't read Das Kapital (I didn't even spell it right!). I didn't know what an intellectual framework was.

But I've played catch-up since graduating. I hope to save someone else that dysfunction by just going to a proper institution that cares about disciplined learning.</comment></comment></comment>


U.S. Chip Makers Fear Trap in a Trade Deal with China - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-chip-industry-cool-on-chinese-purchase-offer-11552936389 <comment><USER2> > U.S. semiconductor firms say they have told the Trump administration not to > include them in any deal that calls for Beijing to step up purchases of > American goods and services. Because U.S. production costs are so high, > mandatory-purchase quotas would essentially force U.S. chip makers to open > new factories in China, these companies say, potentially giving China more > control over their production.

That doesn't make one bit of sense to me. Once the factories are in China, their products should no longer be counted as "American goods," and purchases of them should no longer satisfy the quota. Making that quota "mandatory" should also make China relatively price insensitive, because refusing to make enough purchases due to price would mean violating the quota.

</comment><comment><USER2> Paywall bypass: [https://outline.com/V5qU4L](https://outline.com/V5qU4L)</comment>


The booming stock market shows America is diseased - <AUTHOR> https://theweek.com/articles/886198/booming-stock-market-shows-america-diseased <comment><USER2> I have a theory that another reason the stock market and property values are growing so fast is that they're basically the only things that the upper middle class can invest in, so most of the money that well off people save just goes to pumping up the valuation of a couple different asset types that haven't actually changed in their fundamentals that much.

Upper middle class people can't really do venture capital or private equity (well, they can if they get accredited, but these also require a lot more knowledge and time), bond yields and interest rates are so low, and our retirement system essentially requires chasing inflation-beating yields to work, so they have no choice but to participate in bubbles.

<comment><USER3> Retail investors don't drive stock market trends. It's the Fed, institutions, and companies themselves.

Well known the Fed is pumping liquidity into the market for last few months through the Repo market. Plus cutting the Fed rate twice last year since the recession.

Companies are engaging in stock buybacks. When there's fewer shares in the market the share price goes up.

<comment><USER2> Does the money I put in Vanguards 20XX retirement funds in my 401k count as retail? Because I assume across all the different flavors/providers of that, it adds up to quite a lot

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I don't get it. Reading this article it almost sounded like satire. Stock market goes up, in a quality grows greater. Black market goes down, inequality worsens. It's as if the very concept of a public company is hated which begs the question: Is there any society where a free stock market does not exist that can hold a candle to the generally improved standard of living for everyone??

<comment><USER5> That's not at all what the article says. Naturally, it is good that the stock market goes up, i.e., the values of the companies goes up, if it's because of improved performance. The author argues the stock market is increasing more than it should based on increased inequality between the economy participants (stock holders, customers and employees), where one class of participant seem to be taking the biggest share of the pie. The author argues this creates a bubble situation that can lead to depressions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Its astounding how quickly people can forget the mistakes of the past, or pretend that they didn't happen. The foundation of a thriving civilization is learning from past mistakes and taking action to avoid _the same mistake_.

The bad faith arguments for trickle down economics and the myth of tax cuts automatically generating enough economic growth are just that: myths, that have been debunked.

This is what makes me especially excited for the possibility of a Warren/Sanders Administration. Republicans will run the economy to the ground; we need a player in the economy that is concerned not just with short term profit maximization but long term investments in society.

<comment><USER7>
      trickle down economics and the myth of tax cuts automatically generating enough economic growth are just that: myths, that have been debunked.

I'm just heading out the door, so I apologize for this being a very lazy reply. But does anyone have any semi-academic reading (I'm not an economist..., but I don't want pundit talk) that thoroughly debunks these points?

<comment><USER8> "tax cuts automatically generating enough economic growth"

This one is easy to debunk. Deficits have gone up with every tax cut since Reagan and they never came down much. Trickle down also doesn't seem to work with upper incomes rising while lower incomes are stagnating.

<comment><USER9> But you're one step removed.

Deficits are income minus expenditures.

If expenditures are increasing faster than income (regardless of how fast income is growing), then there will _always_ be deficits. A better measure would be to look at income (aka tax revenues) which _usually_ come from productive economic activity.

Your analysis is closer "eating vegetables makes you fat!" while ignoring that you're eating three desserts after each meal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've been thinking that it's weird that if you think a company has good chances of succeeding and you want to benefit from that, the canonical way to do it is to give money to someone _outside_ the company in order to buy their share of the company.

Like, wouldn't I prefer that money to go towards the actual funding of the company's projects?

I'm not aware of any form of "investment" that allows a casual investor (someone who isn't a millionaire) to actually deploy that capital towards production.

<comment><USER6> > Like, wouldn't I prefer that money to go towards the actual funding of the > company's projects?

The problem is that this would make the company too responsive to the needs of investors rather than its markets.

The corporations power is delegated via its shares but its value is derived from the markets it serves. It's in the interest of shareholders (who passively invest in it) for the corporation to judge projects based on what the markets think are valuable. Neither the corporation nor the shareholders know exactly what that may be, but the corporation spends more time and effort trying to get a good answer than the shareholders do. So the shareholders leave everything beyond the most drastic decisions (sell, close the company etc) to the corporation.</comment></comment>


Who helps your Linux distribution run smoothly? Thank a packager today - <AUTHOR> http://opensource.com/business/14/2/thank-a-linux-packager-today <comment><USER2> If you're a developer, try to package your own things for the distros you care about. And accept patches that fix packaging issues. Think about how much easier your ops friends, and the continuous integration systems and similar will have it if all they have to do is run an "apt get" or "port install" to get a fully built version of your code.

Things that help:

[http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_an_RPM_package](http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_create_an_RPM_package)

[https://wiki.debian.org/IntroDebianPackaging](https://wiki.debian.org/IntroDebianPackaging)

[http://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.creating- portf...](http://guide.macports.org/chunked/development.creating- portfile.html)

[http://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/guide.html](http://www.openbsd.org/faq/ports/guide.html)

[http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/creating.html](http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/creating.html)

<comment><USER3> Shouldn't packaging be left to each distributor's experts? As a developer of software you're an expert in whatever your software does--web server, calculator, compiler, whatever. There is no way you can be an expert in your software's functionality and in packaging, especially for more than one distribution.

I'm always wary of installing packages not provided by my distribution, just because I have more faith that my distribution's packagers know how to package and they are more likely to use QA processes that will catch packaging bugs. I'd rather compile from source than install third-party packages; I can make my own rudimentary package that would be woefully inadequate for general use but that is perfectly sufficient for my needs.

<comment><USER4> I think that depends. ArchLinux packages are almost just bash scripts. People can request fixes. I am sure when you first started programming you weren't an expert and that same logic applies to making packages. Multiple distributions you may be right.

I suppose it is fair enough that you would want to install third party packages from source but with most package managers I would guess you could download the package and look at how it is built or at least what files it contains. Using packages can make cleaning up a bad package easier.

<comment><USER5> If there is not a proper Debian package you can use checkinstall or GNU stow. This lets you install from a source tarball and be able to cleanly remove the installation if something happens, good or bad. (proper debian package / botched compile/install)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This cannot be overstated, I have heard during conferences packagers being made fun of, something to the effect of "they are so cute, they don't understand our problems".

To me it seem some are stuck between a rock and a hard place -- distro requirements vs application specific (vendor) requirements.

So vendor likes to bundle specific library .so in the package or compiles external modules as static. Distro requirement, for security reasons for example, disallow that. Packager is left in the middle trying to reconcile the differences between the two. I have seen people stop maintaining their packages.

Yeah sometimes there is nothing you can do and the latest coolest database or web browser or game just can't easily go into the main distro.

But also I can't tell you how happy I have been in the past if a library I wanted to use was in the repo and I could just to an apt-get or yum install and all that is due to someone putting the work into doing that. Now instead of packaging it myself, building it, I saved a lot of time.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hey Arch-folk! Top requests for AUR packages you'd like to see brought into the [community] repository?

edit: Or previously unavailable software that should be in the AUR?

<comment><USER8> I just looked at my AUR list and most are non-free. A couple popular standouts that are free: shutter, vagrant, gradle, leiningen, apache-ivy, jq

<comment><USER9> I'd add bittorrent-sync. Encrypted, de-centralized Dropbox replacement.

<comment><USER8> That isn't free (as in open source), so I left that out.

<comment><USER9> Fair enough.

They claim to be thinking about open sourcing it, so there may be hope yet.

<comment><USER10> Meanwhile... [https://github.com/calmh/syncthing](https://github.com/calmh/syncthing)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Or ask them to join Gittip! After they're signed up, others will be able to start giving them recurring weekly gifts that are totally anonymous and categorically no-strings-attached. It's like a DFTBA grant.

Disclaimer: I've taken 4 months off work to help work on the platform.

</comment><comment><USER12> Don't just thank them. If you cannot support with your time, send them new hardware and beer.

</comment><comment><USER13> I thank my packager by paying them ~$12k a year for "support".

</comment><comment><USER14> After being forced to use a non Debian distro at new servers at work (SLES) I am so proud of Ubuntu packaging community.

<comment><USER15> Debian does have an impressive list of packages, but I'd rather use Zypper than Apt any day. It's the only mainstream package manager that actually lets you choose what to do when a dependency can't be satisfied or there's a version mismatch.

</comment></comment><comment> jude- I'm lazy when it comes to these things, so I use FPM. It's great if you're dealing with RPM and .deb packages (and a few others). I saw someone else (vacri) mention it in this thread, but it definitely deserves consideration if you want to side-step setting up a packaging environment.

Link: [https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm](https://github.com/jordansissel/fpm)

</comment><comment><USER16> To me, its rather sad that we still have to rely on multiple third party apps for dependency management - something that a modern OS should have baked into its core branch.

</comment><comment><USER17> could they have used a better example than MUMPS tho....yes, I know it works with its peculiar brand of duct tape, chewing gum and baling wire, but still...</comment>


Introducing Zero Round Trip Time Resumption (0-RTT) - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-0-rtt/ <comment><USER2> This is gonna be interesting.

TLS 1.3 removes a whole lot of problematic constructions and greatly improves security. However, 0-RTT is the only piece that looks like a candidate to introduce new security problems, because it can allow replay attacks.

I'm pretty much waiting for some interesting attacks based on that showing up. But from the severity I expect things more like POODLE or BEAST (== relatively complicated to exploit) and less like Heartbleed.

(To be clear: I don't blame CF for enabling it, they have the problem on the radar and seem to take some precautions, as you can read in the blogpost.)

</comment><comment><USER3> Nick and Filippo also went into some more detail at their (excellent) 33c3 talk in December: [https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8348-deploying_tls_1_3_the_great...](https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-8348-deploying_tls_1_3_the_great_the_good_and_the_bad)</comment>


List Of Top Domain Name Registrars - <AUTHOR> http://www.collegefallout.com/list-of-top-10-domain-name-registrars/

<comment><USER2> This is a pretty low quality piece of writing.

I don't really object to you posting this to HN as it is on-topic, and I can understand that you want to promote your blog. In saying that, posts with unsubstantiated claims ("...most webmasters and bloggers prefer to pay via Paypal") and spelling mistakes ("Namecheap is a great place to buy domani names") aren't really well received by this community.

<comment><AUTHOR> Very sorry about it. Although I have made the necessary corrections. Next time, I will double check the quality of content I submit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was expecting to see a list of registars based on how many domains they handle, but thats not the case. On top of that you dont point either based on what criteria you sort these registars as the top ones. Like brianwillis points, its just a low quality article with biased sorting (i guess its not random that the first registar on your list has an affilate link huh ?)

<comment><AUTHOR> I agree. I should have set down a criteria for ranking the domain name registrars. And as far as the affiliate link is concerned, it is there becuase it pays well.

However, I will be careful of the content quality henceforth. Thanks for your frank feedback! :)

<comment><USER3> I don't have a problem when an uses there affiliate link, it is more than welcome for the author to be rewarded.I think it would be better if you informed the users when you use affiliate links, it would definately boost there credibility of your articles.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi! Following your appraisal of the post. I have gone on to edit the complete article and made it news-worthy. Please do go through it and let me know.

Regards.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Busines cards for testing a market - <AUTHOR>

Hi All,
I have an idea in mind and am visiting a related conference next week. I would like to give a business card to people that I talk to. Do you know of any website which prints cards in low volumes, example 30 cards. I am trying to save costs as much as I can.
Thanks <comment><USER2> Considering that a company like Vistaprint will do you 100 cards for $9 or so you might as well go down that route even if you wind up with a bunch of leftovers. It doesn't get much cheaper than that.

<comment><AUTHOR> I checked them out...but they charge $10+ for shipping and it takes about 7 days. So its not really cheap.

<comment><USER2> If you can't afford $20 then maybe you need to get more creative with your pitch and rely less on props like business cards.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Paste a link to an article, get a minimal version to read - <AUTHOR> http://justread.mpgarate.com/

<comment><USER2> Example with "The Rise And Fall Of The Dreamcast" (multiple pages): [http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamas...](http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gamasutra.com%2Fview%2Ffeature%2F132517%2Fthe_rise_and_fall_of_the_dreamcast.php)

Original: [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132517/the_rise_and_fa...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/132517/the_rise_and_fall_of_the_dreamcast.php)

Awesome tool!

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://evernote.com/clearly/](http://evernote.com/clearly/) I've been using this for years, now I can't read an article without it.

</comment><comment><USER4> To show of the functionality for first time page landers you should pre- populate with a popular article url. I had to open a new tab and find an article to test. I almost didn't come back. Almost, but glad I did!

<comment><USER5> I see website after website make this mistake. How is this not painfully obvious?

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> What's the difference between this and something like Instapaper or the iReader plugin ([1])?

[1]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ireader/ppelffpjgk...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ireader/ppelffpjgkifjfgnbaaldcehkpajlmbc)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Useful for articles that have sluggish javascript behavior, span multiple pages, or are otherwise hard to read.

Example use with a TechCrunch article: [http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunc...](http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=http%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch.com%2F2014%2F07%2F26%2Fthe- first-trillion-dollar-startup%2F)

Also works well as a bookmarklet:

javascript:window.location.replace("[http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url="](http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=") \+ escape(document.URL))

<comment><USER7> Ugh, I need to set up an extension to automatically rewrite all Techcrunch urls.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Pentadactyl command to do this with the currently open page:

        :command! justread execute 'open justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=' + buffer.URL

</comment><comment><USER9> [http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=news.ycombinator.com%2...](http://justread.mpgarate.com/read?url=news.ycombinator.com%2Fnews)

see also readability.

but what I really want is a _low bandwidth_ version of a webpage, to conserve my mobile data plan.

<comment><USER10> Could the browser tackle this? If I understand it correctly, in broad strokes, nothing comes down unless the browser asks the server for it.

I'm dating myself, but when I first learned about HTML, the idea was that text would be organized so the browser could make it more readable for you, based on your needs. For instance, a deaf person could use a text-to-speech browser, and perhaps the heading tags would help them navigate the document.

Today's web page simply treat the screen as a graphical canvas.

In those old days, I also learned that having a crummy obsolete browser for my crummy obsolete computer actually sped up browsing because my browser was simply incapable of downloading the stuff that ate bandwidth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> package it with [http://squirt.io/](http://squirt.io/) and suddenly we can read everything

<comment><USER12> Not sure if this practically possible to read a whole article this way or not but this is an awesome tool.

How come I never stumbled upon this!?

Thank you very much.

<comment><USER13> It's been on HN a while back, but while using it in practical cases like WSJ, it seemed to pick up HTML code, whitespace characters and/or text from a sidebar.

I ditched it at the time, but I may try to start using it again if I can get it work with ebooks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> what is different about this than the original arc90 readability algorithm with an URL field added to kick off the processing?

<comment><AUTHOR> This project directly uses the Readability api.

I created this as a more simple interface than Readability offers, primarily for my own personal use as a bookmarklet.

<comment><USER15> I didn't know they had an API. Would it be easy to create a bookmarklet that used it? I don't like their extension, it feels too heavy. I want something that doesn't run until I invoke it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> By the way, does anybody here know of an algorithm (and/or already implemented open-source library/app) that copes well with auto-extracting content from _forum-like_ websites? (i.e. phpBB, StackOverflow, HN, reddit, ...)

<comment><USER17> Umm... anything that uses xpaths should work I would think.

Apologies for blowing my own horn but I've had some luck filtering HN and reddit with this project I built (I used to have an example in progress online but i've taken it down): [https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug](https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug)

<comment><USER16> The point is I want some heuristic that would work "automagically" (like Readability, etc), _not_ requiring me to invent a tailor-made xpath for each and every such website in the world.

<comment><USER18> Try this:

[http://fivefilters.org/content-only/](http://fivefilters.org/content-only/)

It has a default extractor, and site-specific recipes use the same format as Instapaper, so you can leverage the work Marco has done on different sites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Don't spose you're putting the source up anywhere?

Knowing my luck I'd get used to reading with this, then you'd disappear off the internet forever. It'd be nice to be able to self-host.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a nice idea. I'll have to prepare the code a bit for this but will likely do so. In that case, I will let you know.

justread is written with golang!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> At first I thought by minimal, you meant summarized/shortened. Perhaps use an additional words to describe what you mean.

Other than that- looks good.

</comment><comment><USER21> Care to share the details of the html parser? is it one of arc90/goose/boilerpipe/fivefilters or a new engine?

<comment><USER22> > Built by mpgarate with the Readability API.

Is noted in the footer.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Would like to see as a browser extension, one button click to view the page in a readable format. Great work.

</comment><comment><USER24> this is great would like it even more if it remove all images and displayed text in a boring font.

</comment><comment><USER25> You're not concerned about the copyright issues related to this?</comment>


Illustrated Notes for "Building a Second Brain" - <AUTHOR> https://maggieappleton.com/basb <comment><USER2> Firstly, thanks to the author for taking such time and care with the illustrations.

However, by way of contrast to many of the other comments on here, I found this particular explanation quite unhelpful, both in terms of the presentation communicating the idea as well as the parts of the idea that I was able to glean.

It's probably an individual thing, but I don't want to combine things into projects, and I certainly Don't want to go down the route of having a folder structure.

Having recently converted my somewhat-organised notes into a Zettelkasten workflow, I have been amazed by the freeing nature of the medium. The core of my method is simple markdown files that can be easily written without the aid of any software. I have had fun building a significant amount of automation around the notes - building a traversable and plottable graph, implementing backlinking, templating and that sort of thing, but it is purely assistive and not necessary.

Some sibling comments make the point that BASB seems to be more of a complete theory, where as a Zettelkasten is a method alone. Here, I humbly beg to differ. It is the simple and mechanical nature of the Zettelkasten that frees the mind from the burden of too much information.

This is obviously an individual preference, but I think I've found the method that suits me.

<comment><USER3> I'm also interested in what software you're using for this. I've looked into tools that support Zettelkasten and they all seem to have made inexplicable changes to the system. The most significant to me is the change from using a hierarchical, meaningful numbering scheme to using timestamps that lack all form of context/hierarchy. Context in the sense that unless you're the Rain Man, there's no way to fit timestamps into a conceptual framework to refer to in your mind. You're always 100% reliant on your tools to find what you need.

<comment><USER2> The software I use is, at its most basic, a text editor. In my case, Sublime text.

Everything else is a Python package with a CLI, dockerised for portability, and written entirely by me to support my workflow.

I am absolutely sympathetic to the "I want a tool not a hobby" idea of using prebuilt software, and indeed I have tried many of them (including every one I have seen linked on HN), however I have found that building my own automation has really helped me to think carefully about how I use my Zettelkasten and what it implies for my own thought process.

This reply probably falls into the category of "unhelpfully helpful advice", but that's what has worked for me personally.

<comment><USER4> Can you mention how you organize files themselves? Things like subdirectories, naming, solving name clashes, and how do you decide when to split content into two or more files.

I've always struggled with mapping any note organization mapping into strict directory structure with ascii file names being the only meta-data. I'm currently using Trilium Notes which solves most of these by using SQLite instead of filesystem.

<comment><USER2> No subdirectories for notes, everything is flat. I have three directories: zettel for the Zettel, Daten for the data, and Kasten for software/scripts.

Zettel are named as follows: z{%Y%m%d%H%M%S}_{slugified title}.md

Tags are formatted as +{hyphenated tag name}.

Scripts parse all the Zettel, construct a bipartite graph of tags and Zettel, and populate tables in the index with lists of Zettel under each tag, a visualisation of the graph, various other meta statistics etc.

The point (for me) of my Zettelkasten is that through links and tags, the structure of the notes is _emergent_ rather than dictated _a priori_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The graphic design is stunning.

I did find it to be a massive distraction after the second or third page however.

There is a time and a place for an artistic touch and in this case, I found it distracting.

I find hand-written text difficult to read past 24pt and when done in gray, even more so.

Ultimately however, I think the greatest disagreement I have comes from the content itself - it reminds me of all the little tactics project managers I've had tried to use. All the 'team building' and 'team lunches' and 'daily stand ups'.

Life is about strategy, the long haul, not tactics. This approach is non-stop tactics and it never pauses to ask why go through all this? What are you trying to accomplish and is lack of organization bordering on OCD _really_ the thing holding you back? Maybe it is, and if so, great.

This obsession with arbitrary processes to me, is simply manager-types trying to justify their existence and slick sales-men, trying to sell yet another 'productivity booster' that has no empirical evidence behind it, just slick advertising, such as these beautiful illustrations.

<comment><USER6> > Life is about strategy, the long haul, not tactics.

Life is about _both_. Strategy _and_ tactics. Words _and_ action. For some people, if they make a bunch of grand strategic plans but don't follow through, then they repeatedly disappoint those around them. They find themselves lonely and stressed as they lose jobs and relationships with people who are sick and tired of them "making excuses".

> is lack of organization bordering on OCD really the thing holding you back? > Maybe it is, and if so, great. > arbitrary processes

They look arbitrary to you because the author doesn't explain the "Why" behind her system -- likely because it is very personal.

<comment><USER5> > They look arbitrary to you because the author doesn't explain the "Why" > behind her system -- likely because it is very personal.

Well, when something becomes a course, it is no longer about the author, it is about the people the author offers the course to.

I don't want to discourage people from trying new things and developing their own systems, courses, whatever. I do feel the need to point out that we live in an age of immense amounts of information and one needs to be very careful not to engage in information pollution. If there is a system similar to yours, there is no need to create your own that you think is slightly better. We really don't need another flavor of candy, at some point we need less 'stuff' and less people engaging in trying to sell us something, not more.

I think we've been at that point for a few decades.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I recently built a note-taking system [0] to capture ideas quickly. The notes are parsed as a DSL that understands different organizational techniques. It also picks up on symbols for tracking things over time, such as transactions and events.

What is great about the DSL is that once learned you can express a lot of information without disrupting flow. To me that is one of the biggest barriers for taking notes via phone or computer. Once a good note-taking habit is developed it's wonderful to have that reservoir of information and ideas to pull from.

0\. [https://www.tatatap.com/how-to](https://www.tatatap.com/how-to)

</comment><comment><USER8> A tangential point. I didn't go through this article in detail, but I loved the illustrations so much that I ended up looking at a few other articles by her (Maggie Appleton). As someone who fails at Pictionary with very crude drawings, there's something about those illustrations that's simple, eye catching and admirable. I'm feeling envious.

<comment><USER9> i have a longstanding thesis that developers-who-can-draw always crush it in online content, haha. but with Maggie, beyond just artistic ability she also works really hard to come up with visual metaphor by understanding the developer on an anthropological level.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> These illustrations are great!

Regarding software, one thing I've long wanted and/or dreamed of making is an app that can be pointed at any directory of markdown files and images that would then use some kind of AI to analyze the data, look for patterns, present statistics, automatically tag things, etc. I want to be able to dump things in without much organization, but then to be able to view it in an organized way. One small example is the way that the Bear app finds to-do items in any of the notes and presents them in a separate list. That, but with all kinds of data.

<comment><USER11> Check out [https://obsidian.md/](https://obsidian.md/), I believe it has a good foundation to get to the features you're asking for.

</comment></comment><comment> wh-uws I've basically built a version of this with trello, the butler addon, and some custom code to use custom fields to rank cards.

have a been toying around with productizing this.

let me know if you're interested

</comment><comment><USER3> I've always found it a bit odd (and a bit frustrating) that many programs around knowledge-building/note-taking are Mac-only. Anybody know why that is? Devonthink sounds like such an interesting tool that I'd love to try, but it's Mac only. This article's author relies on two tools which, at first glance, are also Mac-only.

That said, am I the only one finding it really hard to parse pages of illustrations? It feels like I'm stuck having to analyse every single illustration to figure out what the author is talking about and that a bit of supporting expository text is missing.

<comment><USER12> I've noticed this as well (for example, with Ulysses, Bear and OmniFocus). I am building a note taking application at [https://NoteBrook.app](https://NoteBrook.app) that I intend to be a simple, clean, fast app that runs on every major platform, works online and offline with apps, and syncs to all your devices. Would love to hear your thoughts. Plan on launching in the next few weeks as I complete the edit/favorite/delete, some cleanup, and publish all the apps. Early access code is ALPHA2020 if you want to sign up and try the syncing, but you can use it without signing up too, your notes will just be local.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'd never heard of BASB until this post, but it seems so much more useful than the usual type of content about "zettelkasten" and such. Those seem so focused on the mechanical actions you take and not enough on the steps towards getting value from your notes.

Is there a book form of BASB, or is it a course only?

<comment><USER14> I found that book but haven't read it. From the description though, it appears that it forms the base material for the course.

[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FLQHLTK](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FLQHLTK)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I have not taken this course. I do feel I have a second brain. I have constructed my own system of keeping my thoughts organized and making progress in better understanding in a cohesive manner.

By taking longer to finish grad school and ending up with mountains of debt.

And this second brain would be lost to the wind as soon as I take up a 9-to-5 Monday-through-Friday tech/STEM job where I have to do mainly what my boss tells me to do.

Go figure.

</comment><comment><USER16> This is very well done. I've taken BASB and this does a fantastic job covering all the main points.

</comment><comment><USER17> That's an awesome illustration. I always wonder how much value people get from BASB

</comment><comment><USER18> Aligns perfectly with my org-mode workflow flow</comment>


From Zero to Jitsi Meet in 30 Minutes - <AUTHOR> https://brainfood.xyz/post/20200323-jitsi/ <comment><USER2> The problem with a lot of self-hosted services isn't the initial configuration but the maintenance and monitoring.

This tutorial explains how to install it, that's fine - that was never the problem. How do you keep it up to date? How do you get alerted of newly uncovered vulnerabilities so you can patch _before_ you get compromised? How do you monitor it so you know if someone's got root on the box and is silently listening into your calls?

Regarding Jitsi Meet specifically, I looked at the code thinking I could use it and the whole thing kinda left a sour taste in my mouth. Why does it need an XMPP server? How am I supposed to configure the permissions on them so it doesn't get pwned or starts being used by uninvited guests for nasty conversations without my knowledge? Etc... the attack surface also seems huge.</comment>


Europe's Google News Tax Makes No Sense - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-09-23/europe-s-google-news-tax-makes-no-sense <comment><USER2> They're still trying this? As the article pointed out, it was tried before in Germany and Spain with terrible results for the publishers.

I say go ahead and pass the law, then see what happens. If the publishers want it so much, let them have it. Let's see how many go out of business.

</comment><comment><USER3> My issue is with the term "news aggregator". The idea is that is a news aggregator is hosting copywriten data. So would mearly using the headline and linking to the site count? What about the Tl;DR bots that places like reddit has thanks to their users. Would their users be infringing, the site infringing for hosting the link with the copy written headline as a link? Are these news outlets so out of pocket by leading users to their content?

For me (using my phone ATM as I never hardly ever use Google News anyway) all news.google.co.uk gives me as a brief summary of an article to basically get me to click the link. They only neg side I can see if that under the "more" fold there are links to other websites covering the same thing, so while I stay away from lets say the Daily Mail google will offer me links to say BBC or Sky News as well. So maybe instead of DM getting my traffic BBC will instead. But personally I wouldn't of clicked the DM link anyway and not clicked more and scrolled down till I found something of interest to me, I would of just kept scrolling.

If Google were copying major parts of the article so users not having the need to click though to the whole then I can see their point but that has not been the experience I've had from news aggregators (inc Google). They have just given me the headline and maybe the paragraph below the headline and then I've decided if I want to click or not. Which would of been on their home page anyway.

If a news site becomes so click baity to earn a click just for me to back out seconds later they never should of earnt that click in the first place, so in my eyes they are actually the ones ripping off their ad networks for baiting clicks to earn ad impressions and not Google and the like for pointing users to those links.

What me to click the link and give you ad impressions? Write content I want to read and I will come visit you directly anyway after I've found your site from Search Engines like Google as well as the clicks news aggregators create for you.

If I'm completely missing the point please let me know. I've seen this go on for a couple of years now and I still don't understand why they wouldn't want their content listed on the likes of Google OR are they just trying to double dip (get rev from ads and get the likes to Google to pony up for linking to them? If that's the case then I'm not sure where I would stand on Google jut delisting them. Sure they ovb feel the traffic Google create isn't worth it, but I also don't want Google "censoring" content I may be interested in just because Google have to pay to list it. If they (they people asking for this) were really pissed about it then surely they can just ask their dev teams to update robots.txt so Google doesn't scrape their site in the first place.</comment>


Cambridge Analytica Used Fashion Tastes to Identify Right-Wing Voters - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/29/style/cambridge-analytica-fashion-data.html <comment><USER2> Unfortunately, stereotypes have utility. No one likes being caught up as a false positive in a stereotype, but when you look at mass market politics / advertising / marketing they cater to charactures of their intended audience because for the most part it seems to work. Every once in a while someone takes it too far and a group gets offended, but let's not pretend that Cambridge is the only one doing this.

<comment><USER3> one interesting one was that I took 5000 twitter profile photos and averaged the pixel values by male / female. unsurprisingly, the male average had short hair while the woman long. but what did surprise me was that the shirt area of the males had a blue hue and the women had a red one. its not like anyone in particular was wearing red/blue by sex, but on average they were.

<comment><USER4> Cool! Could you share the results?

<comment><USER3> [https://twitter.com/autokad/status/689896734542069760](https://twitter.com/autokad/status/689896734542069760)

[https://twitter.com/autokad/status/689897031414886400](https://twitter.com/autokad/status/689897031414886400)

keep in mind these profile pictures are not centered, some are group photos, etc. its not 'super strong' but it seems evident to me, let me know what you think

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Are you telling me that people who buy camo clothes are more likely to be conservative? That's crazy talk. Next thing you'll tell me is people who dye their hair pink or blue are more likely to be liberal.

<comment><USER6> _Next thing you 'll tell me is people who dye their hair pink or blue are more likely to be liberal._

I have been curious about this particular recent feature.

Does brightly colored/neon hair indicate the person is part of some particular group?

My exposure to this trend has been primarily with people on the internet, specifically Twitter and it seems to be predominantly women, and predominantly associated with being outspoken on modern civil rights issues.

<comment><USER7> > Does brightly colored/neon hair indicate the person is part of some > particular group?

Yes. The "I'm non-conformist and quirky!" girl.

Of course, they're "quirky" exactly the same way as all the other "quirky" girls.

<comment><USER8> This is my social group. Neither I, nor my friends, dye our hair because we want to be non-conformist or quirky — we dye our hair because it looks cute. It's not at all difficult to think of fashion choices that'd be more distinct, but it's often the concern that we'll be seen as "weird" that keeps us from choosing them. I look how I do because I want to be liked and respected, same as anyone making the choice to be fashionable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I remember a scene from "NYPD Blue" between Sipowicz and his adult son [who wanted to become a cop like his father]. The advice was that the "most basic" thing to remember was "People, Places: The things they do, the times they do them".

If you turn a hard Left at Crazy, that's profiling ... but it's not wrong. Going with the example provided in the scene, it's good to figure out that the night-shift worker at the toy factory is bringing home a toy gun for his kid at 3am Christmas Morning instead of a high-profile over-armed robbery in an otherwise deserted industrial district in the middle of the night during a holiday.

It seems like the "grey line" shrinks and expands at will depending on the context one desires.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is how marketing works. They could have used music taste or religious affiliation or nearly any of the data add-ons Experian sells.

This isn't sinister in any way, merely clever as it seems marketers had been behind the times.

There are entire magazines and television shows that have equally strong affiliation. If spend on fashion related stuff was smart, it was because it was a bargain compared to the many other methods.

<comment><USER11> >"Marketers have been behind the times"

I have to laugh. I learned psychographics from Bill Wells back in the mid 1990s. He had come back into academia in after spending years at DDB Needham creating one of the first psychographic initiatives/programs that had teams of statisticians, social scientists and used mainframes for statistical analysis in support of product design, message refinement and targeted marketing and advertising based on "personas".

One of the fascinating things to me was that Bill told of doing a summer project during his own graduate school experience at Stanford in which it took him a whole summer to manually (using a mechanical calculator) calculate a Principle Components Analysis on some consumer data.

It boggles my mind in some ways that we have a bunch of CS trained start-up guys who are rediscovering both techniques and consumer behavior research that is sometimes 30 or 40 years old and think they have invented something new! OK, I am sounding like an old fart.

Now, I will admit that many marketing executives I have met over the years were not really comfortable with quantitative approaches but there is a whole subset that have been applying data science types of approaches for a very long time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > _Mr. Wylie explained that clothing preferences were a key metric for > Cambridge Analytica, whose business was constructing and selling voter > profiles drawn from Facebook data._

> _"Fashion data was used to build AI models to help Steve Bannon build his > insurgency and build the alt-right," he said._

Cambridge Analytica built the "alt-right"? Even if that term has any meaning (I don't really think it does), this statement is preposterous. Bannon's "insurgency"? No spin there.

<comment><USER13> Not sure why you're getting downvoted. The article is obviously pretty low- quality and technically incompenent; I'd expect better from HN's front page.

Even with the left-wing spin, arguing that CA (or even Bannon) built the alt- right is just laugh-out-loud wrong.

<comment><USER12> I don't think we'll get an answer but the downvotes all came in a span of a couple minutes so maybe some partisan site linked to the HN post or something.

Down voters feel free to explain if you actually have a objection.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't know if this is interesting. It is their job

</comment><comment><USER15> This sort of thing is going to cause a huge chilling effect in the medium-term as it becomes more widespread. Every nuance of how you act or look is going to get collected by websites and cameras and used to make conclusions about who you are (accurate or not), potentially stored forever.

One can only imagine how China will use these approaches with their planned 570M cameras with facial recognition.

edit: number of cameras was an order of magnitude low, corrected based on: [https://www.businessinsider.com/china-facial-recognition- tec...](https://www.businessinsider.com/china-facial-recognition-technology- works-in-one-second-2018-3/)

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder what google or reddit know about my political ideas..

<comment><USER17> I often wonder what HN could infer from my positions on various topics based on my voting (eventhough I don't use it to signal (dis)agreement).

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I just ask myself how I, a person who satisfies quite some nerd stereotypes would be classified by these algorithm (in particular for political advertising).

So for example the small number of categories that Google Ads assigns to me ([https://google.com/ads/preferences](https://google.com/ads/preferences)) are correct - but featureless and quite hard for marketers to target.

<comment><USER19> It's very likely that you just _think_ they're "featureless and quite hard for marketers to target."

For example, this story (from 2012) about Target's ability to predict a woman's pregnancy: [https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how- targ...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target- figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/)

<comment><USER18> > It's very likely that you just think they're "featureless and quite hard for > marketers to target."

At least of the second part, I am pretty convinced. When I see ads, I always think how wrong and clueless the ad network is again of my true interests.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> couple years ago i heard that adult content industry was selling pretty precise political profiling of their users. So it isnt just fashion.

</comment><comment><USER21> Hardly ground-breaking stuff; individuals do this in everyday life as a matter of routine. They even use this tacit knowledge when they attempt to manipulate others: just compare 'old' Chris Wylie with 'new' Chris Wylie.

</comment><comment><USER22> We use the erc20 contents of ethereum addresses to determine exactly which influencers someone is exposed to and will be exposed to

This is because nobody uses the best practice of avoiding address reuse

These are basically brands

</comment><comment><USER23> Not really surprising. I catch myself making assumptions about people's politics based on the clothes they're wearing. This data just allows one to confirm.

</comment><comment><USER24> People who buy Wrangler and LL Bean might vote conservative. Hard hitting stuff right there.

I suppose as per the article we could make a guess about the people that buy green hair dye?

<comment><USER25> Not sure why downvoted, I agree. A 'western' and 'outdoorsy' company tends to have conservative customers, I think any 12 year old could tell you that.

I'd rather see unexpected/unexplained trends, things the average person wouldn't already assume.

<comment><USER19> I think it actually goes a bit deeper than using certain brands to identify political leanings. That was step one, but they also rated users' openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, depression, anger and vulnerability.[1] _Then_ they showed targeted messages to people they decided were right leaning _and_ vulnerable to their messaging.

[1] [https://www.cnn.com/style/article/christopher-wylie- fashion-...](https://www.cnn.com/style/article/christopher-wylie-fashion- cambridge-analytica/index.html)

<comment><USER24> Yea... they did all that... then fell all the way back to "who buys wrangler jeans?".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Makes perfect sense. I remember seeing something a while ago about an fMRI study which showed that the difference between "Coke drinkers" and "Pepsi" drinkers had more to do with people's sense of identity than with actual physical enjoyment of each drink. We're probably all familiar with the stereotypes of latte-sipping liberals and beer-swilling conservatives. Are liberals physically different in a way that makes them more likely to enjoy latte? Unlikely.

People identify with brands as reflections of their identity and affiliations all the time. This is especially evident with cars. What kind of person drives a Prius? What kind of person drives an F-150? Don't tell me that mentioning those brands didn't make certain images pop into your head. I drive a Mini and love it, but I'd never buy a BMW 3-series (which is built from many of the same components) because of the brand associations. Of course someone who wears Carhartt is going to fit a different political profile than someone who wears Under Armour. It would be foolish _not_ to use that information in targeting an ad or political campaign.

</comment><comment><USER27> Honestly... who cares??

<comment><USER28> Agree. This is simply good targeting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Once again demonstrating that "deanonymized" data is anything but.

</comment><comment><USER30> So it is a cultural war.

<comment><USER9> ... how? How is an identification methodology a war let alone a culture war?

<comment><USER31> Because people's fashion choices, food they like, beer they drink.. that's culture. Two opposed cultures fighting over everything? Culture war.

It's another point in evidence of something we can all see.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> So what information could they see? Could they see posts and shares? If they installed the app from before? I mean you can find right wingers by looking at all of the right wing pages on Facebook and seeing who is in them. I can't imagine it's that difficult.

</comment><comment><USER33> Why is this news? Everyone does this, including the nytimes. The nytimes marketing department offers their clients on all kinds of identifying/targeting traits for advertising.

From your fashion to your viewing habits to which news you consuming to even the types of pets you have and everything in between is used. Where you work, where you live, what kind of parenting situation you have, etc.

Isn't that the point of political and corporate advertising? Isn't this why the nytimes and cambridge analytica is in business? Is the obvious "news" now because of trump and the "right wing"?

Considering the DNC spent a lot more money than the RNC the past few elections, there are far more organizations who targeted left-wing voters than right-wing voters. But I guess the nytimes doesn't want to write an article about itself and its ad team and their clients.

</comment><comment><USER13> As much as I think Trump's idiotic anti-media rhetoric erodes our democracy, when I see the NY Times publishing articles like this, it makes me cringe. First of all, it's a complete non-article -- marketing firms used correlative data to make inferences about political affiliation? No way!

Second of all, instead of being a smart and pointed analysis as to why this might be bad, it somehow draws political conclusions from a _fashion conference_ and displays a large header featuring the green-haired Christopher Wylie making fantastical claims about "Bannon's insurgency" \-- even an iota of research would clearly show that today's "alt-right" movement was a decades long project started by Newt Gingrich (among others in Republican leadership) in Georgia, escalated during Clinton's impeachment proceedings, and fully developed during the Tea Party movements that preceded Trump.

But of course, these are complicated political machinations that have many moving parts. Instead, the NYT insults its readers by pandering technically- and politically- incompetent drivel like "Fashion data was used to build AI models to help Steve Bannon build his insurgency and build the alt-right" -- give me a break.

<comment><USER34> These news don't make a big splash when other companies use profiling to identify people. This one did because those profiles were used to incite violence. It's news, just not to your liking.

<comment><USER13> It's really not news, it's clickbait (because it's controversial). I understand NYT and their like needs to make ends meet, but they need to find a better way.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> The whole article reads, to me, as "We can sell you ads on the most tenuous associations" as we're too stuck in our own marketing bubble. :)

Stereotypical difference between a peace activist and Wall St banker, sure. No doubt some more subtle variations too. Comparing mainstream brands? That seems a stretch too far to say the least.

 _Preferences in clothing and music are the leading indicators of political leaning_

Or might indicate nationality and age group far more than politics? Music has long heavily influenced clothing.

 _opting for Levi's over Rag & Bone makes a statement about associations and history and opens one up to fashion profiling_

Or you were born in the 50s and haven't, yet, heard of Rag & Bone, or you prefer Levi's fit, or they're heavier denim. Or you're British and prefer Rag & Bone, as they started here. Or one was on offer at Amazon.

Or your partner chose whichever they prefer on you.

<comment><USER36> I don't think it was being used as the sole metric. Rather, I think it'd be used as a weight.

X percent of the population wears A brand, while Y population wears B brand. What correlations can we find in some Z count of reference population? Use that correlation value to infer data where none existed.

Yes, some of that inferred data will be wrong. But a lot won't be. And when you're talking a _massive_ numbers game like _millions of voters_ then you're also talking about accepting that trade-off by hedging against other correlations that can help solidify a potential inference.

<comment><USER37> I think you're spot on. I have friend that probably defies nearly every major category he's part of: age, race, population density, location, home and perhaps even vehicle. But after reading this I realized his clothes do stand out and might be one of the few outward things that don't suggest "middle aged midwest conservative". If you need to figure out where to focus canvassing and marketing in a political campaign it's probably not bad to have a range of variables and metrics to weigh, especially when things are otherwise mostly homogeneous. My friend isn't going to tell his neighbors he voted for Clinton but you better believe he did.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Chris Wylie didn't work at Cambridge Analytica in 2016. He left in 2014 to create his own company, Eunoia Technologies, which was a direct and bitter competitor. The two regularly competed for clients and CA sued Eunoia, alleging that Chris took both clients and data with him when he left. It was a deeply unfriendly parting.

Therefore, Chris has no insider information about what happened at Cambridge Analytica during or in the run up to the presidential election. Therefore, these claims are creative fiction.</comment>


'Why I drink 100 units of alcohol a week' - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45262469 <comment><AUTHOR> A unit is a UK public health thing. One unit is 10 ml of alcohol. For some time the safe drinking advice was 14 units a week for women, 21 units a week for men, with some days drink free and no saving up of the units for the weekend. You'll still see these limits on some shelf labels and on the back of some bottles, but they are out of date. The newer limits are 14 units per week for men and women.

Drinks in the UK come with an Alcohol by Volume number, as a percentage, printed on the bottle. To find the units in the drink you multiply the serving size in liters by the ABV.

People think a glass of wine is one unit. That was true a long time ago when serving sizes were smaller and wine was weaker.

A small glass of wine (125 ml) at 8% ABV = 1 unit.

A normal glass of wine (175 ml) at 12% ABV = 2 units.

A bottle of wine (750 ml) at 12% = 9 units.

A bottle of beer (330 ml) at 5% is 1.6 units

A pint of beer at 5% is roughly 2.5 units

A pub measure of spirits is 1 unit.

A bottle (1 l) at 37% is 37 units.</comment>


How Segment Is Changing the SaaS Marketplace - <AUTHOR> http://gwintrob.com/articles/how-segment-is-changing-the-saas-marketplace/

<comment><USER2> In the same way that online ads have really started to feel the hurt from AdBlockers, I think that trackers are next on that list. There was a really big discussion of uBlock on HN the other day - which blocks Segment, similarly AdBlockPlus (when blocking trackers) does as well.

At this point it's a little more than an annoyance, but it's not hard to imagine a future where these things are baked into browsers and/or legislature puts some hefty restrictions onto them.

<comment><USER3> Along these lines, I've noticed that a few banks seem to be blocking Google Analytics. As an interesting aside, we noticed one large bank blocks GA, but not mixpanel. Has anyone else who serves enterprise customers noticed this? If this trend has real legs, we'd need to move back towards server side analytics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> What's interesting to me is not the wild west of competing analytics tools that Segment rolls up, but the shear array of not-really-analytics tools Segment feeds event tracking and identity to like Marketo, Hubspot, Customer.io, Olark, etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely, sunir. It becomes even more powerful when these tools start feeding into each other. For example, what if you can identify that one user is having a bad experience based on their Olark conversations and usage data, then put them on a special drip campaign to help them re-engage. Each tool becomes more automated/insightful when it accesses the data from the others.

<comment><USER5> Exactly Gordon. 10 years ago the goal was to build a monolithic bloatware do- everything product. The future is to pick the best product for each function, and have them all play well together. Segment helps customers have great complementary options to Customer.io which is one of the reasons we encourage them to use it.

Really interesting analysis. Thanks for doing it!</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Best desktop android running as VM? - <AUTHOR> Is there a good desktop android running as a VM? can run android APKs, terminal, copy/paste among apps and between host/guest windows. I need to type a lot into android apps from keyboard instead of tapping. <comment><USER2> Have you tried Microsoft's Android Emulator?

[https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/msft-android- emu...](https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/features/msft-android-emulator- vs.aspx)

Genymotion could be another choice.

I only tried both, I remember the default VM being a bit of a pain, so I guess either should be better.

<comment><USER3> Microsoft's Android Emulator is by far my favorite.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You could run GenyMotion as a VM on any laptop. ([https://www.genymotion.com](https://www.genymotion.com))

Or if you just want Android a Lenova Yoga?

</comment><comment><USER5> The Bluestacks emulator (90M users) is available on PC and Mac, [http://www.bluestacks.com](http://www.bluestacks.com)

<comment><USER6> Be warned that the Bluestacks software is an insidious little thing. It works, mostly, but 1) the stack is out of date (it was still on 4.0 last I used it only a couple months ago), 2) it comes pre-installed with an awful spammy launcher and superfluous game software, 3) it floods the system with superfluous extra processes, and 4) it even attempts to fool you into thinking you've uninstalled it when you haven't.

You can fix 2) by installing an alternate launcher, and in the case of 4), the main uninstaller does nothing, you'll actually want to uninstall the "BlueStacks Notification Center" to actually get rid of it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Not sure it meets your task requirements, but typically you can pair a Bluetooth keyboard with an Android device.

</comment><comment><USER8> If it fits your usecase, Arc Welder works like a charm.

</comment><comment><USER9> Well a chromebook rund Android apps pretty well.</comment>


Taps and Swipes: Intuition vs. Machine Learning in UX Design - <AUTHOR> http://minuum.com/taps-and-swipes/

<comment><USER2> Interesting stuff. Do you have any insights as to why swipes with very long displacements tend to be slower than medium-length swipes?

<comment><AUTHOR> Some users would choose to make long conclusive swipes, rather than short flicks. The swipes with very long displacements are only achieved by people taking the time to make a slow calculated gestures. Also key to note here is that we're tracking the final velocity of the strokes, rather than the overall velocity.</comment></comment>


Georg von Tiesenhausen – Apollo Lunar Rover Designer – Passes Away at 104 - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/space-pioneer-george-von-tiesenhausen-dies-at-alabama-home/2018/06/05/e84d1ba6-6900-11e8-a335-c4503d041eaf_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e61283872fe6 <comment><AUTHOR> Passing away on June 3rd, 2018, Georg von Tiesenhausen was the last of the original German rocket scientists that came to the United States with Wernher von Braun.

He is also presumably responsible for #29 and #30 of Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design:

29\. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Program Management) To get an accurate estimate of final program requirements, multiply the initial time estimates by pi, and slide the decimal point on the cost estimates one place to the right.

30\. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.</comment>


Ask HN: What is Apple updating right now? - <AUTHOR> Right now some sections of Apple website say "We've got something special in store for you." Do you have any idea what they will update? <comment><USER2> There are some speculations about a new ~10.5 inch iPad.</comment>


Ask HN: What does PG mean here? - <AUTHOR>

"When you get to hit a few difficult problems over the net at someone, you learn pretty quickly how hard they hit them back."[0]<p>[0]http://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html <comment><USER2> Full context:

> _But it 's particularly hard for hackers to know how good they are, because > it's hard to compare their work. This is easier in most other fields. In the > hundred meters, you know in 10 seconds who's fastest. Even in math there > seems to be a general consensus about which problems are hard to solve, and > what constitutes a good solution. But hacking is like writing. Who can say > which of two novels is better? Certainly not the authors._

> *With hackers, at least, other hackers can tell. That's because, unlike > novelists, hackers collaborate on projects. When you get to hit a few > difficult problems over the net at someone, you learn pretty quickly how > hard they hit them back. But hackers can't watch themselves at work. So if > you ask a great hacker how good he is, he's almost certain to reply, I don't > know. He's not just being modest. He really doesn't know.

PG's using some kind of sport (baseball?) analogy... you send problems out to other people (the ball) and find out how well and easily they solve them (hit them back). In other words, by interacting with other hackers on collaborative projects like open-source development, you quickly learn how good other hackers are because you can see how they solve problems, so you develop a more objective judgement of the relative strengths of hackers that is harder to achieve with some other professions.

<comment><USER3> It's tennis btw because you hit the ball back and forth. I guess it's also referring to how to just keep bouncing ideas off each other this way too.</comment></comment>


Ask YC: Does Facebook Publish App Statistics? - <AUTHOR>

After a cantankerous client, a few godsend clients, hiring (and then firing) my brother (there's a funny story to this, trust me), we've finally got the infrastructure, the personnel, and most importantly the TIME to roll out our own internal project.
I wont say too much about it other than it involves Facebook, and if the upside-down blogosphere has taught me anything, if you say "We're developing for Facebook" in a blog you're going to get Dugg, Slashdotted, and subsequently 404'd out of your own site in hours.
So I wont.
I will ask this though, does Facebook publish app statistics that are easily accessible?  I'd like to see how a certain sector of the app field is doing, and develop a forecast model for the team to look at so we can go over a few things.
Thanks <comment><USER2> A bit unrelated to your actual question, but your perception of the blogosphere is not really true. One of the companies that got funded in the most recent FbFund round is friends of mine, and even that level of coverage hardly 404'd their site. Don't count on it being so easy to get more traffic than you can handle ;-)</comment>


The oddly beautiful and sometimes disturbing artistic talent of drug cops (2015) - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/20/the-oddly-beautiful-and-sometimes-disturbing-artistic-talent-of-the-nations-drug-cops/ <comment><USER2> It's a very interesting article, particularly the observation that whimsy in law enforcement patches is giving way to military imagery. Not a happy trend.

But I don't think it's appropriate to call them beautiful. Disturbing, yes, but sophomoric, and many if not most of them look like they were made in MS Paint.

<comment><USER3> It's a little interesting to see the contrast between the DEA as a straight- laced government agency, and the patches they make. Frankly speaking, there's an "edginess" to it that's hard to reconcile with their public image.

<comment><USER4> This is similar to the extremely serious, straight-laced image doctors and other medical staff present to the public and their patients compared to the gallows humor expressed by them in private.

Many patients would probably be absolutely shocked by what gets joked about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> default-kramer Reminds me of that classic Mitchell and Webb sketch. "They've got skulls on them."

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU)

</comment><comment><USER5> Just more proof that the drug enforcement community is nothing more than a glorified gang who's members make their living off the misery and pain they inflict upon addicts. Put a bottom rocker patch and a 1%er patch next to those "badges" and they are no different to the emblems currently worn by criminal biker gangs. Law enforcement or criminal drug gang matters not, they are just two sides of the same coin and unless the laws change the general public will continue being victimized by both groups.

<comment><USER6> I used to take a similar view on the war on drugs- now it's more nuanced given my immersion into the problem. It's hard to say wasting countless lives and millions of dollars to combat organizations illegaly smuggling harmless product (marijuana) into the states is hardly worth the mess left behind. Take a step back and it's easier to justify when the income of that product is going to large criminal organizations that also create problems such as the meth epidemic in california or the opioid crisis across the country. And to facilitate the delivery of these criminalized products, criminal organization have no hesitation of delivering those packs covered in the blood of poorest class of people in the hemisphere (the consumers are dying too, but from consumption, another problem entirely). Lots of people against the war on drugs will say "yeah but if it was decriminalized..." A lot of things would be different if it was decriminalized, but good luck selling that pipe dream to the traditional base of america that has a strong influence across the nation. Not happening anytime soon. In my opinion everything sucks here and I haven't heard a viable solution yet to this very complicated issue

Edit: I do want to say that decriminalization is probably the most hopeful option of them all, I just think it's going to take forever, generations probably. This is really a public health issue in my opinion, it's just not treated as one :/

<comment><USER7> > when the income of that product is going to large criminal organizations > that also create problems

But that's just it, they wouldn't be criminal organizations if you didn't criminalize it in the first place.

To me, the war on drugs is a proxy for unpopular geopolitical actions or even domestic race wars that the US wants to fight.

<comment><USER8> I believe he means organizations that are involved in other illegal or harmful activities sans the drug presence.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, most organizations don't deal in _just_ weed. A lot of them deal in people too

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I Could Tell You But Then You Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me[0] is one of the books dedicated to these sorts of patches. My library still doesn't have a copy.

[0][https://www.amazon.com/Could-Tell-Then-Would- Destroyed/dp/19...](https://www.amazon.com/Could-Tell-Then-Would- Destroyed/dp/193555414X)

<comment><USER10> My girlfriend got me this book for Christmas! It's an absolute trip. Some of the Area 51 patches (for black site tech development, etc) have such surprising on-the-nose humor regarding aliens. It's nice to know that even people that work on top secret stuff have a sense of humor!

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I liked looking at these patches. They remind me of the kind of imagery they used to print on pogs. Lots of skulls and swords.

At the same time, if I saw an officer wearing this, I'd be inclined to take them less seriously.

The cultures of some police forces are weird. I don't claim to understand it, as an outsider.

And yeah, the drug war is out of control, yatta yatta all that jazz.

</comment><comment><USER12> Paywall workaround: [http://archive.fo/ny5td](http://archive.fo/ny5td)

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting while also reminding me of those weird society rules.

Free access to booze, tobacco and guns: ok, but you're the only one in charge of whatever happens next.

Now: thc, mdma or lsd: no way! Not only illegal, but if you're ever caught somehow transfixed by the shear beauty of your couch surroundings, be sure we'll fuck up your life ;)</comment>


Why You Can't Photograph a Spinning Propellor With An iPhone - <AUTHOR> http://scripts.mit.edu/~zong/wpress/?p=551

<comment><USER2> Similar stories have been posted many times before, and some of them have generated discussion. Here's a search:

[http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=rolling+shu...](http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=rolling+shutter)

Here's the one with the most comments: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1301295>

And here are some of the submissions:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3914245>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2183630>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1693693>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2787089>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1757753>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1637762>

There are more, but as one of the comments says, Wikipedia has more information:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_shutter></comment>


Stroom helps large organisations understand their systems - <AUTHOR> https://www.gchq.gov.uk/news-article/stroom-helps-large-organisations-understand-their-systems <comment><AUTHOR> And on github [https://github.com/gchq/stroom](https://github.com/gchq/stroom)</comment>


Ask HN: How would have Covid-19 impacted release of Pokemon GO? - <AUTHOR> How would have COVID-19 impacted release of Pokemon GO? Would Pokemon GO have been banned given the times? <comment><USER2> Did Pokemon go require you to be with groups of people, especially indoors? if not, it would probably have been fine.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well it uses AR, so it did require to go out more. Also they ban players on using location mocking. There are many news articles where people form groups out in search of rare Pokemons.</comment></comment>