Some shirts hide you from cameras, but will anyone wear them? - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/features/2020/04/some-shirts-hide-you-from-cameras-but-will-anyone-wear-them/ <comment><USER2> I ordered this specific anti-human recognition hoddie, and it actually looks pretty awesome. It really only goes well with black/grey pants, though.

[https://www.rageon.com/products/ensemble-7](https://www.rageon.com/products/ensemble-7)

And Adversarial Fashion's anti-ALPR backpacks are cool looking as well.

[https://adversarialfashion.com/collections/bags/products/sta...](https://adversarialfashion.com/collections/bags/products/state- plate-alpr-backpack)

Sadly, it's definitely much easier to push out a software update than it is to replace your clothing. But that game of cat and mouse won't start until the clothing becomes more commonplace, which is very doubtful.

<comment><USER3> For me at least, that first link has some NSFW content. (This is a courtesy notice, not a criticism.)

Specifically, it shows a pair of leggings on a woman designed to look like a naked man titled "David's Marble Legs":

[https://www.rageon.com/products/davids-marble- legs?refSrc=43...](https://www.rageon.com/products/davids-marble- legs?refSrc=4347638644824&nosto=productpage-nosto-1)

<comment><USER4> > For me at least, that first link has some NSFW content.

> Specifically, it shows a pair of leggings on a woman designed to look like a > naked man titled "David's Marble Legs":

But how is that NSFW? This is one of the most famous sculptures in western art. Everybody has seen it. I had a photo of the David sculpture in the cover of a history book when I was 11, given by our school. I find it _very_ disturbing, even creepy, that somebody may honestly think that this image is NSFW.

<comment><USER5> imagine you happen to open this page at work while someone walks past your desk. if they say "hey, are you looking at penises at work?" you have the opportunity to explain "no, actually this is a representation of one of the greatest works of western art". more often than not, they will just keep walking and not ask for an explanation. do you really want to be the person they remember this way?

some people just don't want to open a picture of a penis at work (or be surprised by one at home), no matter how artistic. I don't find this disturbing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is futile. The cat is out of the bag. There is no technological counter to AI + ubiquitous sensor networks.

There are AI systems out there that can identify you by gait. Possibly already in your phone, ostensibly to help detect if the phone is carried by someone else. Straightforward to connect to the 24/7 video surveillance network that is built all around us: ring, self-driving cars/drones that double as corporate spies, video checkout, etc.

Furthermore, radars are coming to your phone in the near future: [https://atap.google.com/soli](https://atap.google.com/soli). There is no way to hide from such radars picking up everything that moves: your gait, your breath, your heartbeat. Oh, and the gait, breath and heartbeat of anyone near you, whether they agreed to the 500 pages EULA surrendering their privacy or not.

<comment><USER7> Hi fellow jaded cynic!

I can't disagree with anything in your post, but I would add that there always opportunities to be a pain in the ass.

Maybe not all systems can be toppled, but most can certainly be hacked, abused, slowed down, obscured, damaged, re-purposed, stolen, rebooted, copied, exposed, hidden, rendered obsolete, improved, deleted, etc.

I see your defeatism and raise you a giant middle finger!

<comment><USER8> I agree. Messing with the system can be fun even if ultimately futile. Also the fact that AI can sometimes be stupid can sometimes lead to good trading opportunities.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The license plate dress has the added benefit that buggy self driving cars may actually notice the pedestrian wearing it.

<comment><USER10> Honestly, I'd wear that dress easily, even for regular outings, not just for hiding from cameras. Those hoodies, though, maybe I'm an old fart but they're a bit too "abstract". Sadly, those seem like the most effective option right now. I read the Adversarial Patch article [0] and it pretty much demonstrated similar patterns.

Trouble is, if these get widespread enough - they won't look out of place _but_ the moment they become widespread is the moment updates get pushed to make them obsolete. It's an unescapable situation.

[0]: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.09665](https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.09665)

<comment><USER11> > Trouble is, if these get widespread enough - they won't look out of place > but the moment they become widespread is the moment updates get pushed to > make them obsolete. It's an unescapable situation.

Did you just say recurring revenue (for the clothing makers)?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Getting strong William Gibson/Zero History vibes from that article.

If you haven't read the book (written over a decade ago), a major plot point revolves around a T-shirt that renders the wearer invisible to CCTV cameras.

<comment><USER13> That was the first thing i thought of too

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I seriously hope this begins to become a fashion trend in the near future. I don't see why one of the more out-there fashion designers wouldn't pick it up.

<comment><USER15> As soon as it becomes mainstream models will be trained for it.

<comment><USER16> Na, just make it illegal. Governments are increasingly eroding people's freedoms. Let's remove another one, and force everyone to wear approved and regulated clothing. You know, for your own safety.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Related thought, on hiding from cameras and overzealous public identification systems...

Most western nations are now, temporarily, accepting face coverings as daily attire in the age of COVID-19. Plenty of asian and muslim nations did previously, for cultural and health reasons.

Culturally acceptable anonymity, courtesy of the pandemic. Maybe this isn't temporary if the fear of future viral spreads takes root in culture.

<comment><USER18> neat if it worked, but article specifically calls out that Chinese (and other) systems have been trained on medical-masked datasets :-/

<comment><USER17> Yes, several Chinese companies claim to do reliable identification of masked faces.[1] I find that pretty amazing but time will tell.

[1] [https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/03/10/masks-wont-make- you...](https://thenextweb.com/neural/2020/03/10/masks-wont-make-you-safe- from-facial-recognition/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The thing is, they won't work forever or even for very long. Even makeup will eventually be thwarted.

<comment><USER20> CV dazzle has been around for at least 7 years; an eternity in this era of CV growth. It still works. What makes you believe it will be thwarted?

<comment><USER21> I'm certainly no expert in CV, but having worked in government/law enforcement tech previously (pre-Snowden days) I have full confidence that if people started actually using CV Dazzle to evade detection, they would work on breaking through it. Generally speaking those systems only receive features that are actually problems the users are facing. Once they identify the problem they can throw nearly unlimited amounts of money at it, and they will win.

This is why I'm focusing my efforts on political solutions to protect our privacy, rather than technical solutions. That's not to say I don't think technical solutions are important, because they absolutely are, but even things like encryption could be made illegal politically if they want to. Thus politics is the most important arena for privacy advocates IMHO.

<comment><USER22> The argument that we need political solutions originally came from a time when technology people weren't paying attention to politics at all, and of course then you get this:

[https://xkcd.com/538/](https://xkcd.com/538/)

But it feels like it has gone the other way now, to the point that people dismiss potentially helpful technical solutions because "what really matters is politics" even though in reality you need both.

If the government bans privacy technologies then it's hard to use them, but if nobody develops or uses them to begin with then you don't have them either.

And for some people the government in question isn't ours, it's a foreign authoritarian government where "policy solutions" are just not going to happen and the only option available is technology. It's a lot easier to _develop_ that technology in less authoritarian countries, which means we have a responsibility to do it, because if they have to do it the cost of a mistake is a lot higher.

<comment><USER21> Agree with you completely. If I take my previous statement further to "don't even bother holing up as insurgents because the government will win the battle" then it goes to a place I don't agree with (I think there's plenty of evidence that the "little guy" can win against big governments. Afghanistan is a great example).

So I really should re-phrase my position to clarify that I meant _in the United States_ , but also even in the US I do think the technological solutions are important and should be developed. The important point I want to stress is that I don't think we should ever disregard the political war because of technological confidence in our ability to thwart the authoritarians. Both politics and technology are both critical pieces. If we lose on either front, we lose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "Is that you hiding from the cameras, or are you just wearing an ugly shirt?"

<comment><USER23> "What's that?" she asked. "The ugliest T-shirt in the world," he said, and kissed her cheek. "The Bollards will be disappointed," she said, coming in and closing the door. "I thought they'd had me sleeping in that." "So ugly that digital cameras forget they've seen it." "Cameras can see it. The surveillance cameras can all see it, but then they forget they've seen it." "Why?" "Because their architecture tells them to forget it, and anyone who's wearing it as well. They forget the figure wearing the ugly T-shirt. Forget the head atop it, the legs below, feet, arms, hands. It compels erasure. That which the camera sees, bearing the sigil, it deletes from the recalled image. Though only if you ask it to show you the image. So there's no suspicious busy-ness to be noticed. If you ask for June 7, camera 53, it retrieves what it saw. In the act of retrieval, the sigil, and the human form bearing it, cease to be represented. By virtue of deep architecture. Gentlemen's agreement."

William Gibson, Zero History (2010)

<comment><USER24> That sounds more realistic than one might expect. Most printers will apparently reject printing of patterns containing the EURion pattern [1], commonly found on paper cash. Not a far stretch that some facial recognition tech might contain deliberate hidden patterns in the future.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Obviously this is going to turn into one of those back-and-forth wars of more effective adversarial clothing designs versus improved detection algorithms. What I really wonder is, which one comes out on top in the end, or at least most of the time? Will designs and/or fashions get weird and effective enough that it just isn't practical to recognize people in general in public with computerized algorithms? Or will the algorithms win, with these being 95% ineffective and also resulting in drastically more attention from ordinary people and any human authorities who happen to be watching?

</comment><comment><USER26> One of the more memorable stories I read as a child was "A Bowl of Biskies Makes a Growing Boy" by Raymond F. Jones. In it, the intelligent, scientific teen with an aptitude for chemistry discovers the government is lacing breakfast cereals with drugs to quell the populace.

The boy discovers it, weans himself off the drug, and then eats mostly from the health food store to avoid it. But the government uses that store to round up anyone who discovers the truth, because it's a sign plain as day you have.

Stuff like this makes me think of that story. If anything, a motivated government could just train policeman on what patterns or clothing break camera recognition and stop people based on it. Or if you have an obscured plate, they don't need the camera if it's the law not to have it.

This really only works if we have pervasive but more or less harmless surveillance by benign or robotic actors. But this is kind of like that health food store in that all the technical solutions in the world can't stop a motivated agent. You have to eat somewhere, and you have to exist in more than just image recognition databases.

</comment><comment><USER27> I like the license plate dress featured in the article. A simpler point to bear in mind that even after the immediate pandemic emergency is over many people will need to continue to wear a mask in public. Doing errands/outdoor exercise/volunteer work in public while masked is an enjoyable increase of freedom and privacy.

</comment><comment><USER28> Privacy in meatspace is dead. Totally dead. Hopeless. Never coming back, unless technological society crashes.

Privacy online is all that remains. In meatspace, I strive only to be unremarkable. In my case, just a tired old man. Nothing to see here.

My cover story, I suppose, is using a VPN service to hide my porn addiction.

Edit: I recommend Vinge's _True Names_.

</comment><comment><USER29> I was hoping for something that thwarted the processing in the CCD (chip that captures light in digital cameras AFAIK) instead of something that just thwarts the recognition algorithms.

Of course, if the camera still captures a perfect image, that image or video is always around to be processed at a later date.

<comment><USER30> CCD cameras haven't been the preferred camera sensor for more than a decade at this point. The entire industry moved to CMOS a long time ago. You might find CCDs in use today in specific scenarios like where you need global shutters, but even then, you can buy CMOS sensors with global shutters that outperform those CCDs.

<comment><USER29> Of course, completely blanked on that. Haven't been looking at that tech in quite a while. Thanks for the correction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Tangential topic.

Are masks of the type worn to protect against covid-19 effective against being identified on camera? Because this seems like an amazing excuse (in terms of a silver lining on a very dark cloud) for facemasks as 'anonymity wear' to become mainstream.

<comment><USER32> Yes/No. Here, probably. Elsewhere, no. In China, their facial recognition has got so good that they can track people even with face masks on: [https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/how-china- built-...](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/03/how-china-built-facial- recognition-for-people-wearing-masks/)

<comment><USER33> Also if you add gait recognition, you can add as many masks and hoodies as you want, but you will not escape recognition.

<comment><USER34> Would wearing some kind of full length cloak or burqa-sequence garment that obscures a lot of movement be a plausible counter? Obviously they can't obscure everything about your gait, but I imagine they'd take away enough useful information to make it significantly harder.

<comment><USER33> Probably, but at that point you'd stand out to humans! Imagine being at an airport...

<comment><USER34> Standing out to humans is plausibly less of am issue than being monitored and recorded and your data stored in perpetuity.

Humans will forget about you, data recorded about you will be stored an reused and abused for who knows how long.

<comment><USER33> Good point. I was thinking that in a case of an oppressive gov you wouldn't be able to wear these things anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Wouldn't wearing something like this just make you much more of a target? Maybe I don't understand these things well, but it seems if I were trying to track people I'd make the very small minority wearing something like this a target group.

Another way of thinking about it, if I'm the only person in my community wearing these weird patterns, aren't I even more identifiable than I would be otherwise?

<comment><USER36> In China police are sent notifciations if undesireable people are seen on camera in their jurisdictioin.

I imagine for those people the ability to move around undetected would be very much worth the garish pattern.

I also question just whether the average policeman would be able to tell whether clothing was designed to be untrackable

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Will anyone wear it while crossing the street with Tesla's on the road?

</comment><comment><USER38> Finally I have an excuse to wear my ugly Christmas sweaters all year long

</comment><comment><USER39> If I could pixelate my own skin on a whim I wouldn't worry about the shirt. Unconfortably I think eventually we'll become fully traceable and privacy will be a thing of the past.

</comment><comment><USER40> What about an incredibly bright set of IR lights? Surely that would cause most cameras (at least IR ones) to massively overexpose. It might only work at night though.

<comment><USER41> To me, this is the best way to go. I've seen the hats with the UV LEDS embedded in the brim, but why not around the collar of a shirt?. The only side effect I see is UV light directly in the face. Not sure if the UV wavelengths/intensity can be low enough to blind a camera to not cause odd tan lines or worse?

<comment><USER42> UV LEDs probably won't do much against cameras. You want NIR, around 700-800nm. Security cameras are generally sensitive to it, unlike UV.

<comment><USER41> That's even better. IR won't cause skin cancer.

Either way, blinding the camera with lights that are invisible to other people unlike these outfits would be much more effective. You can still be subversive without advertising it to anyone. If you're recruiting, then sure, where these outfits. If you actually want to not be seen by the cameras, make the cameras unable to see.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The second image in the article looks like the result of some machine learning output. Something like the result of the Deep Dreaming app.

</comment><comment><USER43> Sorry I couldn't read the article, could someone post where to buy those shirts, I'll use them for sure.

<comment><USER44> [https://www.rageon.com/a/users/invisibilitycloak](https://www.rageon.com/a/users/invisibilitycloak)

if you read the article you'd see that they only work sometimes though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I could see this being a sub plot in a modern day Seinfeld.

Kramer buys one - or sells them? Things go sideways.

</comment><comment><USER46> amusingly I've seen a couple of people out recently wearing anti-cv masks. I guess you wear what you've already purchased, but it's most interesting that I've seen more than one.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'll buy five!!

</comment><comment><USER48> Wear a f __king mask.

The claim Hanwang's software works is dubious at best. And they also admit with sunglasses it totally fails.

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus- facial...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-facial- recognition/even-mask-wearers-can-be-idd-china-facial-recognition-firm-says- idUSKBN20W0WL)

</comment><comment><USER49> It's pointless, here is why:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/fyrqi2/til_that...](https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/fyrqi2/til_that_there_are_long_distance_piezoelectric/)</comment>


As predicted on HN: Kindle Lending Club - <AUTHOR> http://www.kindlelendingclub.com/

<comment><USER2> Apparently it's a US-only feature.

I'm allowed to buy "loanable "ebooks from amazon.com but I can't actually lend them since I'm not from the US. Nice.

Given that the lending feature is only ONE loan for the whole lifetime of the purchase, it's more of a joke. I think people should rather write a kindlebay not kindle lending clubs.

Amazon is also doing this wrong -- an ebook is conceptually either lendable or not. I would say it is, so allowing the publisher to toggle this checkbox seems beyond stupid.

If Amazon is afraid of wide scale distribution (like this kindle lending club) perhaps they just need to define lending as something between 2 physical kindle devices done in a peer-to-peer manner.

That is, I have to be physically next to my friend's Kindle in order to share a book (using some adhoc wifi connection for example). Or, if I want to 'lend' to a friend 1000 miles away -- make the lending happen with a delay of a few days (for 'shipping') and even add some small ($1 ?) cost.

Basically they could have introduced with software all the inconvenience of actual physical book lending (proximity, distance issues) but instead they invented something new: one lending per book lifetime and publisher-defined "lendability".

Of course, the sane option would be to have all ebooks as lendable with some normal limits (say, once _per month_ ).

<comment><USER3> Amazon has already demonstrated that it's more than willing to sell DRM-free products, as evidenced by its DRM-free MP3 downloads.

I think the issue here is that publishers are the scared ones. I suspect that ebooks will follow the same path that the music industry did: first with terror, paranoia, draconian restrictions, and maybe even lawsuits; next with acceptance of copying as a way of life, but refusal to make it easy for people by lifting DRM; finally, by realizing that it's usually in their best interest to remove DRM, and then allowing certain distributors to do so--like Amazon.

If the music industry is any kind of parallel, we still have a few years to go before publishers agree to lift all DRM. In the meantime, clever people will simply use any of the Kindle-DRM-breaking scripts out there to unlock the books they've purchased (usually for nearly the same price of a physical book, I might add) or just download them from torrent sites.

<comment><USER4> Amazon has publicly stated that they want to move to DRM free e-books eventually.

However, as you say, the sticking point is the publishers. This is all the more relevant because the profits on most books for authors and publishers are not nearly as good as with music. And also because e-books are far, far smaller and that much easier to share or pirate than albums or movies (even in pdf form a full e-book is likely to be smaller than even a single mp3).

Which I think helps explain some of the skittishness of book publishers. Though a few have already made the jump. Manning (a technical book publisher) allows you to buy DRM free e-books (which come in pdf form and are watermarked with the purchaser's name).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So many books are not lendable! What is the criteria I wonder?

The only lendable book I have is Jessica's "Founders at Work" which I don't want to lend cause I haven't finished it. I'm still on the Adobe guy.

<comment><USER6> The criteria is whether or the publisher feels they can "hook" additional people by letting you lend the book a single time.

They are probably weighing the possibility of the lendee actually reading it through in 14 days vs the possibility they'll only get part way through (hopefully to the juicy parts) and have to buy it themselves to finish. Thus generating extra sales.

Right now, Amazon has left the decision on whether or not books are lendable entirely to the publisher. Since the activity, lending, is something that is happening on the platform AFTER the point of sale I really don't think the publisher should have much any say in it.

I want to know if Amazon conceded this power to the publishers right off the bat or if they thought about enabling the feature completely in the consumers control first.

<comment><USER7> > Since the activity, lending, is something that is happening on the platform > AFTER the point of sale I really don't think the publisher should have much > any say in it.

But Amazon isn't selling you the book, right? They're selling you the right to read it on your Kindle, as long as they allow you to.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "as predicted on HN": i did a search on previous discussions on kindle and lending, if someone's interested, here they are:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865687> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2052925>

<comment><USER9> Not to rain on the parade, but I predicted this about 30 seconds after I heard of the Nook's lending capabilities. The first obstacle is the TOS for the lending service (unknown), the second came later when they announced a book could only be lent once. I would love to see it take off but I'm really skeptical that the publishers would let anything like this slide.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I've got your Kindle Lending Club right here: <http://thepiratebay.org/browse/601>

(good idea to use adblock on that site)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is superb cool, I loaned the "Coders at work", after 30 minutes, received an email and go to Amazon to deliver the book to my Kindle.

However, I believe Amazon might update their terms to prevent this.

</comment><comment><USER12> The killer feature necessary to make this app truly awesome: crawl my Kindle collection and let me decide which books to make shareable.

Unfortunately, I doubt that Amazon exposes an API to perform such crawling. The last thing that I want to do is give my Amazon login and password away...

<comment><USER13> The last thing you want to do is to die.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I don't understand how it works from that website. Maybe it's evident to Kindle owners, but from the outside it makes little sense. E.g. the "(absolutely risk free)" in the "Lend a book" button as opposed to "(always free of charge)" in the "Borrow a book" button makes me think there are hidden charges or something shady going on. Or maybe it's all free, or these charges are just evident? I don't know.

<comment><USER15> To lend a book on the kindle you just have to enter the name and email of the borrower. Then the book is removed from your kindle account for 14 days, and it will stay in the borrower account for 14 days. It is free to borrow and it is risk free, because after 14 days Amazon is transferring back the book.

The website is really just a market for matching borrowers and lenders. They will probably make their money with amazon affiliate links and ads.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is a similar site for Nook lending: <http://bookfriend.me/>

Note that Amazon/B&N only let you lend out your books one time, which really limits the lending feature...

</comment><comment><USER17> The site returns a lot of 500 errors randomly. I requested to borrow a book but it's not clear wherever my request succeeded or not. It looks like this website was being made in a rush.

</comment><comment><USER18> I love the design and the concept but if completely free where is the business model other than being just an affiliate channel?.

<comment><USER19> That's a perfectly reasonable business model for a site with almost no ongoing costs other than hosting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Wouldn't it be trivial to duplicate the books you borrow?

<comment><USER21> Not _trivial_ since the Kindle has a DRM scheme that is intended to prevent this. However, I'm sure that the DRM has been or will be broken, like just about every widely-used DRM system.

<comment><USER22> Has been. The DRM scheme turned out to be pretty weak. The unusual file format used by some of their books (Topaz) proved more of an obstacle.

<comment><USER23> This seems to only be true for the 1st and 2nd generation kindles. The PINs for the drm on the 3rd generation kindles don't seem to be generated from the serial number of the device.

Prove me wrong, please ;)

<comment><USER3> There are scripts out there to unlock even Kindle 3 books. The method involves downloading two scripts and unlocking it through a certain version of Kindle for PC. (New versions of KfPC don't work). Search for 'unswindle'.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is interesting, but could it be against the TOS?

<comment><USER25> No, lending is a part of Amazon Kindle. [1]

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&...](http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8&nodeId=200549320)

<comment><USER26> "Eligible Kindle books can be loaned once for a period of 14 days" Does any one know if lending dead-tree books is legal? It sounds ridiculous I know but is not it outrageous that you can not lend your own e-book to whomever you want for as long as you want as many times as you want, or it is just me?

<comment><USER27> There's a typo in your comment. You said "your own" e-book. Just because you paid for it doesn't mean you own it. Amazon does as much as it can to pretend that it's your book so that it can justify charging full price for what is actually much closer in practice to a rental.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Now let us re-sell our "used" e-books and I might see a sense in paying (dead- tree-price - $2) for an e-book.

</comment><comment><USER29> Yay for business models based on artificial scarcity!</comment>


Living without money - <AUTHOR> http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/article6928744.ece <comment><USER2> Yes, she's still relying on "money" in the form of bartering, but what I found most interesting is how little she relies on while still claiming to be happy. Compared to most employed/educated americans, her situation is rather insecure, and many (most?) of us wouldn't tolerate that. I like articles like this that remind me that a) my level of security may be illusory and b) even if I lost it, things might not be so bad.

<comment><USER3> "Compared to most employed/educated americans, her situation is rather insecure, and many (most?) of us wouldn't tolerate that. "

I'd like to interview her again when she gets really sick (not that I wish her to become ill). Also she seems to have children - maybe if she got really bad, they would take care of her in the end.

<comment><USER4> She did address that. She said if she gets cancer, she will die, and that is that.

I suppose it would be interesting to see if she stayed with that conviction once she really is sick. But, she's 67 already, and has managed to stick to some difficult convictions already, so I wouldn't bet against her.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Damn title got me interested, but she lives without money because she relies on bartering.

<comment><USER6> Bartering _with people who participate in the normal economy_ , most importantly. This won't scale.

<comment><USER7> In the _normal_ economy huge bailouts are given to the largest financial institutions, and even larger amounts of unaccounted for money is given directly to military and similar vested interests. It seems to me that the most horrific transactions are rewarded with money: genocide, and destroying the earth.

 _How much is enough?_

"You Are Welcome to Kill Me, If You Will" <http://www.angelfire.com/apes/hatrackman/>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This is closer to living without money: [http://www.amazon.com/Science- Dumpster-Diving-John-Hoffman/d...](http://www.amazon.com/Science-Dumpster- Diving-John-Hoffman/dp/1559500883)

I actually own this book. I bought it in highschool because I felt I was putting my money into things that I didn't need to, and so I could save money quicker for the cool stuff.

\----

I should add, I ended up _making_ money by fixing broken things. A lot of the things weren't even broken! I'd take books to bookstores too. If the homeless only had a place to store broken goods, a place they could fix items, they'd have a resource they could pool into.

There's an idea.

Also, a bag of produce was always a great treasure. Great for compost.

</comment><comment><USER9> As others here have pointed out, she's not living without money so much as making her own, on the spot, when she needs it - in the form of the very adaptable just-in-time currency known as barter. Douglas Rushkoff's book _Life Inc._ and his recent talks are all about centralized currency's corrosive (or rather, extractive) effect on society and are an excellent source of more economic-hack ideas. Here's his talk from the Web 2.0 conference last week:

<http://rushkoff.com/2009/11/21/radical-abundance/>

</comment><comment><USER10> "When I needed something, I found that it would just come into my life. My glasses, for example. There was an optician who was a member of the Tauschring and he gave them to me in return for some therapy sessions."

She still lives with money, just not with the physical pieces of paper.

<comment><USER11> Absolutely correct.

And more to the point, it's impossible to live "without money." Money is not a possession, it's simply a measure of wealth.

And this:

 _When something hurts, I put my hand on it and say to myself I have the power to heal myself and the pain goes away."_

<comment><USER12> There was a story a while ago when IRS went after someone who was fixing their friends' and neighbours' cars and didn't ask for money in return. He was retired and he liked working on cars and he did it for free. IRS claimed he should have reported it as income.

In respect to money being a measure of wealth, was he "theoretically" becoming wealthy and acruing "good will". Later by changing his mind and asking for favors from his neighbors he could "cash in" his "good will" but avoid paying income and sale taxes on it.

<comment><USER3> I'd say those bartering services are definitely a gray area or illegal because they avoid the taxes. But that they even caught on to the accrued good will seems impressive.

Edit: don't shoot the messenger, I did not create the laws

<comment><USER13> Taxes are for money, not good will. You created a law taxing friendly favors.

<comment><USER3> I think you are wrong. Ask a lawyer, though (and again, I did not create the law).

Trading is friendly, too, btw. In a good trade, both parties are happier after the trade.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Submissions dealing with minimalist lifestyles keep recurring on HN. Why does living with little interest this community so much? I'd speculate that it's because most people here have some kind of work they love, and this makes them realize they don't need much else, but I don't really know. It doesn't seem to interest people outside here as much.

<comment><USER14> Affluence masks the fact that the average American's relationship with material posessions is _fucked up_. I imagine that most of the people who vote up these stories have an inkling of that in themselves.

People need frequent reminders that material possessions are not necessary for happiness to counteract the cognitive biases and societal pressures that are perpetually indicating the opposite. To go without such reminders in the face of economic reality is extremely stressful, leading to depression, anxiety, and the growing problem of pathological hoarding. There are even now several television shows on the subject, one in the same format as the show about drug interventions. It really can get that bad for otherwise well-adjusted people trying to cope with the difference between what they need and what they want.

The truth is that you can never have enough of what you don't need, and sometimes you need the example (if not the experience) of someone living very close to the edge to illuminate the problem in your own life.

Less charitably: There is a widespread meme associating simpler lifestyle with productivity, and many people here have a craving, if not an addiction, to "tips" or "hacks" to enable them to be more productive, or at least _seem_ more productive. Because they profess to have obtained a desirable state, people with unconventional lifestyles are just as common a subject as famous historical figures or business leaders. The idea being that if you emulate something this woman or Thomas Jefferson or Steve Jobs did, you can achieve great things as they did. The term "productivity porn" is apt.

In essence, many are just looking for another way to get more of what they want, rather than learning to want less. Two sides of the same coin, so to speak. Both present at HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_subsistence_techniques></comment>


A large slab of ice is breaking off an Antarctic glacier - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/antarctica-giant-iceberg-breaking-off-2017-1 <comment><USER2> Hey folks,

I'm one of the scientists on Project MIDAS (the team that made the announcement). Happy to answer questions about this. I've also been keeping a spreadsheet of things roughly the size of the iceberg, for journalistic comparisons: [https://twitter.com/mewo2/status/818826891545210881](https://twitter.com/mewo2/status/818826891545210881)

<comment><USER3> I have a really stupid question. Here it goes, anyway. Isn't there a way to "glue" these big block of ice back to the main part?

I was going to add a few ideas on how to glue it back, but then I deleted them as it would sound more stupid than it already does.

<comment><USER4> Get 10,000 snow machines to dredge the water and spray snow and water everywhere ;) If people can build islands, why not glaciers?

<comment><USER5> Powered by...?

<comment><USER6> Coal

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> you may also be interested in:

largest glacier calving ever filmed:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC3VTgIPoGU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hC3VTgIPoGU)

<comment><USER2> For some context on size, the calving event in this video is about 7 cubic kilometers. The Larsen C berg will be about 1000 cubic kilometers. On the other hand, this berg is overturning, so the calving is, to put it mildly, quite energetic (equivalent to a couple of hundred kilotons of TNT). The Larsen C berg will just drift away in a much less dramatic fashion.

<comment><USER7> yeah, thx for the numbers. i wasn't implying the scale was comparable :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This article is about Larsen C-- so this is borderline off-topic, but I always enjoyed this ode to Larsen B. "British Sea Power - Oh Larsen B" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HN0rqVJT4U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HN0rqVJT4U)

</comment><comment><USER9> Thank you @mewo2 for your insider responses - a fantastic ammendum to the original article!

</comment><comment><USER10> "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2012

</comment><comment><USER11> Doesn't seem like that big of a deal considering it's already floating on water, so it's displacing the water it'll make when it melts. No sea rise at all.

<comment><USER12> Water in the form of a solid takes up less spaces than as a liquid so not sure I agree... Plus there is a large part of this that is above sea level currently so that part is not current being displaced.

<comment><USER13> I agree with Firebrand (^above) that if the ice is already floating (sea ice) and it melts it will cause no other immediate displacement of volume (even if a large part of that floating ice is above sea level and even if solid water takes up less space than liquid water). That's an application of Archimedes principle and can be explained here: [http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110645/why- does-i...](http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/110645/why-does-ice- melting-not-change-the-water-level-in-a-container). Indeed it's land ice melting that causes sea level rise. However, sea ice melting still changes the albedo and does directly contribute to climate change.

<comment><USER12> True, I was thinking that its not truly free floating sea ice and that much of it may be supported by the remaining ice its attached to (hence the crack).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For the metric people who don't know random US states: 335 meters thick and about the size of Palestine.

<comment><USER15> Product idea: automatically generate dimensional metaphors with regional cultural context based on geoIP.

<comment><USER16> That's actually a great idea! Kind of what Wolfram|Alpha does when it gives you various comparisons to the number you've entered. E.g. for "10 kilotons":

      ≈ (0.2 to 0.3) × mass of a Handy size cargo ship ( 28000 to 40000 lg tn )
      ≈ (0.3 to 0.5) × mass of a Small Handy size cargo ship ( 20000 to 28000 lg tn )
      ≈ 0.83 × daily mass of trash produced in New York City (≈ 1.2×10^7 kg )

[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+kiloton](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=10+kiloton)

EDIT:

For the ice slab in question, W|A gives following comparisons:

      ≈ ( 0.25 ≈ 1/4 ) × total area of Wales (≈ 8023 mi^2 )
      ≈ 1.7 × total area of Rhode Island ( 1212 mi^2 )
      ≈ 3 × area of forest flattened by the asteroid explosion over Tunguska in 1908 (≈ 2000 km^2 )

<comment><USER15> Ha, sometimes I wonder if I've ever had an original idea.

<comment><USER16> I know I haven't. Everything has already been done (usually not to my liking, but that's bikeshedding, I guess...).

<comment><USER17> It's not bikeshedding if the topic is not trivial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Global warming (even if it were to happen again) is not the problem that it's made out to be. History has proven this several times, such as during HCO [1].

Not that most people on Hacker News would agree, but I encourage people to do more research on the topic. MIDAS is funded by NERC, so they obviously aren't going to share this view.

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

<comment><USER19> Sorry you got downvoted to hell, but certain subjects are echo chamber religion with a lot of folks. It's just how it is. I don't know how some people can be so open-minded to scientific inquiry one the one hand, but when it comes to the matter of climatology, they treat skeptics as sub-human heretics.

I tend to think it is a deep-seated personality flaw that a lot of people have but don't realize they have. They think they are more open-minded that they actually are.

I'm heartened knowing that not long ago, the majority of people believed the sun revolved around the earth and anyone who dared to speak against that "settled science" was excommunicated by the Catholic Church.

<comment><USER20> There is little need to be open minded when laymen challenge educated scientists. Climate denial has all the same mechanisms as Evolution denial. It all tends to boil down to the idea "But the scientist have an against religion / american lifestyle / whatever ".

I don't deny that many progressives are less open minded than they think. But better challenge them things like anti-GMO / pro-organics ideas that don't really have much base in real science.

Unlike in the climate field, you'll find that actually lots of people who research GM / food safety will not agree with the alarmist headlines of GMO or "processed foods".

<comment><USER19> You think someone with a doctorate is a layman? We're educated people, we can form our own opinions, thanks.

<comment><USER21> If your doctorate is in a completely unrelated field, yes, you are a layman.

<comment><USER19> Oh, so I am without the ability to reason? Hardly.

<comment><USER21> Your ability to reason is not being assessed, it's your level of exposure to and understanding of the facts. Which, if you are not a climate scientist, is unlikely to be exhaustive.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Shared Pain Increases Cooperation - <AUTHOR> http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/09/04/0956797614545886.abstract <comment><USER2> I stopped at _"...little is known about the social effects of pain."_ A long time ago I was reading Marine Corps training manuals at USC's Doheny Library (a friend was doing an endorphin study and the Marine's apparently had some some interesting work there) and I can tell you that they not only knew about the social effects of pain, they employed those effects in a variety of training exercises.

<comment><USER3> I got to see some of it at Navy OCS (where Marine Corps drill instructors lead the military training).

For example, the women in our class always seemed to come in for extra punishment. Nothing demeaning, nothing untoward or out of regs, just... a little extra.

Now, why would those evil Marines pick on those poor women? Because it increased the social bonding of _the entire class_. It worked even though we knew what kind of mind games they were trying to do!

Moreover it helped pre-emptively dispel the notion that often develops that the women were being held to lower standards. However true that may have been in the Fleet, it wasn't true at OCS, and all thanks to the social effects of pain...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Their conclusion is a little too broad; they don't explore _why_ this might be the case in their experiment. We don't know whether being subjected to pain makes one more cooperative, or whether observing a pain response causes one to be more empathetic and thus cooperative, or whether both are the case, or neither.

For example, studies show that physicians down-regulate their automatic empathetic response. Would physicians therefore not cooperate more? And those with sadistic personality disorder may receive a rewarding feeling from viewing others in pain, which would probably encourage the opposite of cooperation. There _could_ be many cases where the conclusions don't work, but we don't know, because they didn't find out why it was happening.

</comment><comment><USER5> Nothing new under the sun. It's the origin of all the hazing for freshmen or new military recruits, pain and shared humiliation creates stronger bonds. To overcome adversity you need better friends on who you can rely (trust), natural survival mechanism. War created awesome friendships through pain and worst life conditions ever. Idk about having studies presenting it legitimately but the results were pretty much known for a while.

</comment><comment><USER6> PDF from the author's site: [http://brockbastian.psy.unsw.edu.au/documents/Bastian%20et%2...](http://brockbastian.psy.unsw.edu.au/documents/Bastian%20et%20al%20Psych%20Science%202014.pdf)

</comment><comment> loup-vaillant Depends what kind of pain. For instance, the pain of manual testing and deployment, when they could have been avoided with bit of planning… just make me want to defect.

</comment><comment><USER7> Please don't tell the boss! :)

"The beatings will continue until morale improves!"

</comment><comment><USER8> Who would have thought.</comment>


Debugging microservices on Kubernetes with the Conduit service mesh 0.4 release - <AUTHOR> https://buoyant.io/2018/04/20/conduit-0-4-0-wheres-my-traffic/ <comment><USER2> This is super sweet.

It would be great to tie this into a release pipeline, where the release process is actively keeping an eye on failure rates of that service, so that bad deploys could be halted or rolled back automatically.

I was thinking this could work really well when using production integration tests. A percentage of that traffic can be dynamically routed to the newly running services, allowing the release pipeline to ensure the service is functioning correctly before routing any real users.

</comment><comment><USER3> Oh nice, it's cool to get access to dependency info without having to implement a full distributed tracing mechanism that is invasive to the service components.

Breaking down service success rate by inbound dependency is great for debugging many typical fault conditions.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! We've got a couple more features coming up along this vein that you're really going to like.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Nice to see 0.4 released! Kudos to team. The original plan was to release 0.6 in late April, but we are waiting it very excited.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Yeah, that's the danger of putting up a public roadmap with dates on it. We've seen a little production usage that uncovered a couple issues that we wanted to address quickly, and that shifted the timeline a bit. But we'll get there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> How does conduit compare with istio?

<comment><AUTHOR> Conduit's a tool to solve actual, engineering-facing operational problems with as little complexity as possible, that happens to be a service mesh.

Istio is a Big Important Service Mesh for Big Important People that does everything under the sun, and none of it well.

Neither project has real production adoption yet. (For that, you have to look at Linkerd). Istio will get adoption by spending infinite marketing dollars. Conduit will get adoption by solving actual problems.

Conduit's also significantly faster and smaller. Sub-millisecond p99 latencies, ~2mb RSS footprint per proxy. We took some big risks initially with Rust, but it's paid off handsomely.

<comment><AUTHOR> Did I mention focused on solving real problems with a minimum of fuss?

If you can't get topline metrics dashboards for every service you're running in Kubernetes within 60 seconds of installing Conduit, I will literally* send a team of engineers to your house to fix it right in front of your face.

(* not actually literally)

<comment><USER5> How important is automatically getting grafana dashboards though? Let me say its pretty awesome for beginners and maybe someone unfamiliar with grafana dashboards and I am a huge fan of this functionality. But I'm not convinced it should be the feature that differentiates between the two solutions.

<comment><AUTHOR> The dashboards are a detail, but visibility into topline service metrics are absolutely critical. There's a huge difference between "I need to configure a bunch of stuff and do some complicated things first", and "I get them automatically".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Neat stuff! Any plans for StatefulSet or DaemonSet support?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, shouldn't be too hard</comment></comment>


Method to Protect Passwords in Databases for Web Applications [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/387.pdf <comment><USER2> Simple: Don't store the password store a salted hash of the password and compare the hashes. Avoid storing raw passwords unless absolutely necessary. If you do encrypt with at least AES-256</comment>


Future Space Missions (next 10 years) - <AUTHOR> http://i.imgur.com/lYdRVRi.png <comment><USER2> Still looking quite sparse, but it only covers public space missions

Would really love to see some of the private companies start coming out with some missions to prospect asteroids or build private space stations, we seem to be putting too much reliance on SpaceX to do everything private.

Looking forward to google lunarX price missions in the next year, I hope someone wins it..</comment>


Ask HN: Tools for Cooperation - <AUTHOR> Do you know any good tools for allowing cooperation between people? <comment><USER2> Notion - [https://notion.so](https://notion.so) \- wiki for orgs

Slack - [https://slack.com](https://slack.com) \- chat

Trello - [https://trello.com](https://trello.com) \- cards / prioritization

Figma - [https://www.figma.com/](https://www.figma.com/) \- interface design / wireframes

GitHub / Gitlab - source code server / pull requests

tmate - [https://www.figma.com/](https://www.figma.com/) \- share terminal over internet

<comment><USER3> I think the link for tmate should be [https://tmate.io/](https://tmate.io/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have used dropbox paper to collab on things in realtime, but not sure what kind of reply you were looking for.

</comment><comment><USER5> I think that it depend what you need to cooperate with.</comment>


Embed Everything - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@david_bryant/embed-everything-9aeff6911da0#.nukw8bqip <comment><USER2> It'd be nice if there was a description of the pro's and cons of embedding Mozilla over Blink. Otherwise, this is simply a nice FYI.</comment>


I got control of my spending with some no-code services and 100 lines of Python - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jcpeters/how-i-got-control-of-my-spending-with-a-couple-no-code-services-and-only-100-lines-of-python-code-36c8ac75f670 <comment><USER2> > As an engineer, it is in my DNA to build things. However, it's too easy to > get stuck in the mindset that you have to build everything. This mentality > often leads one stuck with a plethora of incomplete products that grew too > complex to finish before losing interest.

This. I can relate so much. I feel my instinct is always to roll-my-own because I can and, perhaps more importantly, because I'm not familiar with relevant no-code services.

What other such tools/services are out there that can help "to go from idea to proof-of-concept in only a few hours."?

<comment><USER3> It's relatively new, but I've been using Coda.io to build a lot of interesting ideas out. I've built some fantasy leagues, a very powerful task tracker/organizer, and do all of my trip planning using it.

Definitely check out their templates, [https://coda.io/templates](https://coda.io/templates)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> For anyone who wants to do things like double-entry accounting with transaction splits (e.g., properly encode an Amazon order for 5 different items from different expense categories, that're paid for by a mix of rewards points, Gift Card balance, and CC), there's GnuCash.

You can also do things like record transactions yourself, update with downloaded data, and reconcile against monthly statements (as another way of catching discrepancies).

You can make custom reports with charts. I used these, for example, for comparing how much I spent buying coffee every day, vs. how much I spent on every cost that goes into making coffee at home, when I tried that for a while.

There's also features for tracking investments, including automatic updates of market prices.

And, if you're a small business, you can build and generate invoices (including building the invoice over multiple days), and track accounts receivable.

Warning: GnuCash can be a significant investment of time. I eventually decided it was no longer worth it for me, though I might someday resume it.

Other Warning: If you have retirement accounts or other investments in GnuCash, consider hiding them from view, which GnuCash lets you do with any account. Bogleheads-style, US people probably want to keep contributing to a predetermined balance of total-market stocks and bonds, automatically, and not think about it, especially when there's market fluctuations.

<comment><USER5> Never really understood the need for double entry in the personal context.

<comment><USER6> Double entry accounting basically makes it easier for you to track down errors in your accounting. It's a bit like writing tests for your code. The advantages are: 1. You are usually alerted quickly when you make a mistake. 2. You can reason about where you made the mistake, even if you've lost the original documentation.

It's not so much that it's personal or business that's the issue, I think. It's more the consequences for making a mistake. When I was very poor (but luckily not in debt) I had a good system for controlling my spending. I would take out X amount of money every Monday. I would try to have some left at the end of Sunday (a couple of hungry days helped me understand the importance of being conservative in my estimation).

That system works fine (and would even work fine in some kinds of businesses). However, what do you do when you find that no matter what you do, you can't seem to get to Sunday without running out of money? What if you can't figure out where it is going? Some kind of accounting will help you figure out what you are spending your money on.

Doing the accounting is fine and most of the time it's not a big deal if you make a mistake here or there. However if you are _really_ pressed for cash (like you won't eat on the weekend if you make a mistake), it's probably not a bad idea to record your expenses in a way that allows you to detect mistakes. If your weekly transit pass is $50 and you accidentally record $5, you might conclude that you have $45 every week more than you actually have. You'll eventually figure it out, but it will mean more missed meals than you probably want to endure.

I like living a lifestyle where I make enough and spend little enough that I naturally have enough money. For me, that's my definition of "rich". After I got married, that state of affairs seems to have disappeared from my life ;-) Trying to reason about where the money is going is surprisingly tricky and double entry accounting has helped me make good conclusions without enduring stupid mistakes. Not necessary, of course, but still useful if you are the kind of person who likes fiddling.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I admire how you've managed to do this easily (and avoid writing code for everything). But the fact that you have to do it shows how broken and lethargic banks have become.

In the UK, they are starting to wake up. The new "challenger" banks which exist here all do this as a hygiene feature - see Monzo, Starling, Revolut. With Open Banking mandating open APIs for all banks, this will become the norm soon. The fact that American banks and regulation hasn't jumped on this is a symptom of something very wrong with the system.

I sincerely hope the launch of Apple Card or similar services disrupt consumer finance in the US as well and set a new bar. And when the above mentioned banks come to the US (which they are currently working on), you should absolutely switch and delete the 100 lines of python as well.

<comment><USER8> Banking in the US is utterly ridiculous. In Europe, if you need to move up to 100,000E in a day, you can do it with a few clicks or taps, and maybe a card reader that they already gave you.

In the US, you have to use a wire transfer is you're moving more than about $4,000. And wires cost a lot of money. And they aren't even instant even though they are billed that way.

I had to move some money from one account I own to another, and I needed it there the same day. The only way to make it happen was to drive 15 minutes to the origin bank, spend 15 minutes filling out a paper form in the branch, which was then _faxed_ to the central processing center. Then I had to call the center center every hour to see if they'd gotten to it yet. When they finally did do it, I had to call the receiving bank with the tracking number and tell them, and then they had to find it on their side, which took a couple minutes, before it was finally processed.

From the time I finished filling out the "instant" wire form (and paying $45!) to the time it hit my other account was over three hours! And that was after the initial 30 minute delay of driving to the bank and filling out a paper form.

<comment><USER9> I have been in a similar situation and to me it's one of the main reasons why we need cryptocurrencies.

<comment><USER10> Not at all. The Single European Payment Area solves these issues without wasting a gargantuan amount of energy.

<comment><USER9> Isn't all the infrastructure, people employed, offices and everything needed to support something also a waste of energy if it can be replaced by some lines of code? Also with your energy wasting straw man remark i assume you are talking specifically about bitcoin which is just one of many cryptocurrencies and a lot of them aren't based on proof of work.

<comment><USER10> Sure, there is a lot of energy expended for the traditional banking infrastructure. It also serves multiple magnitudes more transactions than any cryptocurrency.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Hi, sorry for a bit of off-topic but perhaps someone could tell me if I'm wrong here. I clicked on this article on medium.com and it shows me a dialog from Google asking if I want to continue browsing medium.com authenticated with my Google account. It shows there my name and e-mail address. I find it a bit concerning. Can medium.com technically walk through the DOM of that page to harvest my personal data such as e-mail address and send it to medium.com with some API call? I guess it must be filled by some .js code linked from google domains. Scary to see my e-mail address appear on random web page I entered.

<comment><USER12> Medium doesn't have access to that part, even though you see it on your screen. It use an iframe, which in the past, was accessible, but now with crossdomain policy and all that, the iframe content is no longer accessible.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> The brilliance of this is the use of email receipts as the data source. There's so many services that use Yodlee (and/or the the Quicken-style "direct connect" method) to fetch your transactions but they all eventually fall over:

\- your credentials change

\- your credentials require MFA authentication

\- your credentials require a password reset or security question/answer intervention

\- the bank, Yodlee, or the service lose track of the transaction offset and you get duplicate transactions or missing transactions

\- the service doesn't transmit all available metadata

</comment><comment><USER14> I've done something similar recently; but instead of grabbing data from my bank, I chose to enter data manually from receipts.

This makes it work for both cash and debit payments, and doesn't need any maintenance for API breakage. I find doing this data entry calming, to be honest.

I wrote about it here [https://gkbrk.com/2019/04/plaintext- budgeting/](https://gkbrk.com/2019/04/plaintext-budgeting/)

<comment><USER15> I used to do this when I lived on a much tighter budget and found the data entry was calming and provided something to do that didn't cost money. However, now that I have a little disposable income and a family the thought of sitting down and entering financial transactions every couple of days sounds horrifying. I can barely keep up with my monthly spreadsheet tracking net worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Very cool. Using email notifications to get transaction data is a nice hack. If you do find yourself wanting a more formal API, check out Plaid ([https://plaid.com/](https://plaid.com/)). I've never used it myself, but I believe the free plan is enough to get your personal transactions.

<comment><USER17> My bank doesn't provide an API. So I just automated a headless browser to log into my account and download the statements.

<comment><USER18> Over 18,000 banks provide APIs, what bank do you use? Is it a small credit union?

<comment><USER19> > Over 18,000 banks provide APIs

Please consider adding a source for this when you have a moment.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Just a nitpick, but the word you're looking for is discretionary. :)

We would all do well to follow this example though - NIH and reinventing the wheel are huge problems in our profession. Great work!

</comment><comment><USER21> Would love to see a .procmail rule + scripts to do this without the significant zapier integration.

<comment><USER22> I do essentially this with `imapfilter` and some cronjobs.

The biggest hassle is the fact that each of my banks/financial institutions uses _at least_ half a dozen unique addresses to send me relevant information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> But this way you send all your financial transactions through at least 2 additional providers (zapier and google) and your email provider. Not sure if this is worth it.

<comment><USER24> I prefer this, the finance is lost in the noise of other traffic and no creds to banks are shared unlike mint.

<comment><USER18> credentials are sent to the bank servers, and a token is stored on the mint servers, credentials are never shared _to mint_

<comment><USER24> No they store the plaintext password. Maybe more banks have oauth2 but many don't.

1st item on their FAQ [https://www.mint.com/how-mint- works/security](https://www.mint.com/how-mint-works/security)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> An easy way to take this to the next level (and be truly no-code) is: [https://www.tillerhq.com/](https://www.tillerhq.com/)

I love being able to continue using Google Sheets shortcuts + automation features. It allows me to generate well-formed reports that I can analyze with pivot tables or any of my normal processes that I use for analyzing datasets.

<comment><USER26> Tiller costs $59/year, though. So yes, no-code, but it also costs money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> I'd like the capabilities of Mint without the creds hand off. BofA has starting doing this in their portal but it's not well done.

I like the "hack" here - seems BofA supports this kind of alert too. I'd love to follow a simple guide that lets me (1) setup the zapier instance and (2) deploy the server side to a DO or Heroku.

</comment><comment><USER28> Very creative. Love the idea of using gsheets as the back-end so you can leverage the power of spreadsheets (which were basically designed for use cases like aggregating transactions!)

</comment><comment><USER29> I have been wanting to do this, as I set up the Chase email notifications, but never got motivated to tackle what you used zapier for.

One thing that it seems you could do is use Google sheets for your constants vs coded in the repo. That way if you spend from somewhere new, you can do add that category on the fly by updating your sheet.

</comment><comment><USER30> Your idea is very nice! I'm going to try it but without the use of zapier, instead I'm going to use python's smtpd lib to directly receive the emails and parse them. Thanks for sharing

</comment><comment><USER5> >[email purchase notifications ] I suspect every single major card company or payment application has the same option.

Quick glance at my UK amex says nope

</comment><comment><USER31> I love this...homebrew account aggregation. This is basically what I use Personal Capital for.

</comment><comment><USER32> What about Mint?

<comment><USER33> From the article:

> I looked into existing budgeting software such as Mint or YNAB; they were > feature packed but cumbersome to setup and complex to use. All I wanted was > a simple, unified view of my transaction history across all payment > mechanisms with a few spending categories from which I could do my own > analysis.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> pocketsmith.com does a great job of this out of the box (no affiliation, just a user and fan).</comment>


Web app access should be agnostic - <AUTHOR> http://www.unionsquareventures.com/2010/12/an-applications-agnostic-approach.php

<comment><USER2> It's not about browser wars and "web apps", it's about net neutrality, and that all applications/protocols should be treated as equal -- shaping and throttling per user is legitimate, but (so says the article) ISP shaping and throttling by protocol is not.

</comment><comment><USER3> Dup: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1999029>

Although that one has no comments and no upvotes (except for one I just gave it)</comment>


What happens when sleepwalkers go online? - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3743289/Zzz-mail-What-happens-when-sleepwalkers-go-online.html <comment><USER2> Hmm, I hope spammers don't try to use this as a defense in court...

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm less social awake than she is in her sleep.</comment>


Does our homepage load quickly or slow for you? - <AUTHOR>

Trying to get some feedback since we have gone to the Amazon 'cloud' for content delivery. Can you check out www.choicr.com and then reply with the browser and load-up time it took you? Thanks so much for the feedback. <comment><USER2> It does take a little bit, and the content seems to be rendered by layers (first the black one, then the logo, then the gradient).

Once its all loaded, awesome design :)

<comment><USER2> Btw, I took screenshots if you want me to send them.

<comment><AUTHOR> email@example.com

<comment><USER2> Great, will send you the screenshots on monday as they are in my office computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Pretty slow here in Sweden on first load with empty cache. The main culprit seems to be <http://my.betali.st/widget/4qvp5few.js> which takes 450 ms to load.

I also ran Firebug with Page Speed and it reported 65/100 on the scorecard. YSlow reports 86/100 with the ruleset set to "Small site or blog".

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much everyone. Yes, I would like screens if you could send them. email@example.com

</comment><comment><USER4> Loaded fast for me with no lag or anything (AZ, United States)

</comment><comment><USER5> Loaded slow for me, and in bits. I am at HP in Roseville CA.

</comment><comment><USER6> about 2.5 seconds from start to finish. 50Mbit home line.

</comment><comment><USER7> YSlow...it's what's for dinner.</comment>


10 Famous Microsoft Interview Puzzles - <AUTHOR> http://www.mytechinterviews.com/10-famous-microsoft-interview-puzzles <comment><USER2> Some of these are really easy, and others might be a bit difficult if you haven't seen them before. I had to solve to pirate gold one during an interview without know the answer. I was pretty proud to get it, and the guy could tell I hadn't seen it before.

Here's another one: You have a circular table that's about 1 meter in diameter. You play a game against a single opponent where you take turns placing quarters onto the table. You keep doing this until there is a turn when there is room on the table for additional quarters. If this happens on your turn, you lose, If this happens on your opponent's turn, you win. You have the option of choosing to go first or second. Which should you choose and how should you play?</comment>


Ask: where to find a part time programming job? - <AUTHOR>

Like many people here, I fantasize about working less and devoting more time to my own projects, and a part time job seems like the best option for me.
The difficulty is actually finding one. From what I've seen, jobs seem to either be full time or contractual; not much middle ground.
Should I interview for a full time position and then surprise them with my intentions after I get accepted? <comment><USER2> If you surprise them with your intentions, they just might surprise you with the door.

A better approach, if you can take the time to go through it, might be to work full-time for a year, and prove your worth many times over to the company. At that point, ask if you can move to working part-time. They'd likely rather keep a good programmer on staff part-time than let you go entirely.

In my experience, part-time programming jobs tend to pop up more frequently at research universities than at corporations. It may follow as well that a university would be more flexible in turning a full-time job into a part-time job, if asked.

</comment><comment><USER3> You should never do that. Either tell them before hand, or only apply for part-time jobs.

You can try these for part-time work

<http://jobs.smashingmagazine.com/freelance/programming>

or you might find some short work in the site point marketplace <http://marketplace.sitepoint.com/>

</comment><comment><USER4> My experience with part time jobs is they use it as bait to lure you in and see if you're as good as the person recommending you says you are. If you think about it, it works out for them since they can see how good you really are on the cheap (relatively speaking).

You'll probably work part time ~1-3 months until they really start to pressure you to go full time (assuming they like you). This is NOT fun.

At that point you need to decide to go full time or peace out. They are not sustainable, especially when you are part of a team and the rest of the team is working full time, and they're getting all frustrated that so and so is out today because he's part time.

I would just save up and then work full time on your idea(s). Figure out your monthly expenses, figure out how many months you can go, etc. There's nothing more focusing than knowing you're losing $x a day out of your savings account by just not working - the Cortez approach, I suppose.

Caveat: This is, of course, my experience. Take it with a grain of salt.

</comment><comment><USER5> _Should I interview for a full time position and then surprise them with my intentions after I get accepted?_

You should learn more about basic ethics.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ah. Is being a condescending prick your primary tenet? Maybe I should be taking notes...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I had a great part-time setup for a while. I left a job, and they called to see if I'd come back. At that point I was in a good enough position to negotiate the arrangement. Eventually, a pointy haired boss decided that I "had to go full time." Sad part is, I'm not sure if the extra 2 days upped my productivity much. When I knew I only had to do it for 3 days a week, I was a rock star for those 3 days. Eventually, the extra days caused me to leave years sooner than I would have.

I agree with marrone and tjr, if you're looking for part-time right off, be upfront about it. It helps if you have specialized knowledge, or a skill that will make up for not being full time.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'll hire you if you know Perl.

</comment><comment><USER8> Try www.taprootfoundation.org.

Sripathi

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure the guy wants to get _paid_ for his part-time work...

<comment><AUTHOR> I figured it was some sort of karmic meta-solution to my problem :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> +1 on the surprising people with yr intentions not being ethical.

I'm dealing with this whole thing. A while back I got one company interested, blogged about it, and got expressions from interest from two other companies as well. Unfortunately I had already signed on to start a 40-hr contract so the companies, all three, said we're interested, contact us as soon as yr contract closes. I told them I have to do at least three months, they said fine. Then I get back in touch as scheduled, one company doesn't respond at all, one company goes from obsequious to condescending for no obvious reason, and the third has gone from gung-ho to tentative. So where I had three companies to choose from I now have one company which may or may not extend the offer they were previously aggressive about, and if they do, it'll be for less money.

Obviously part of the issue here is that the tech culture often assumes 50 to 60 hr work weeks in exchange for 40 hr pay. But there are plenty of organizations without that particular dysfunction and they're still not recruiting for part-time. People I work with want me to come on permanently but they don't have the ability to overcome the pointy-haired bosses on this.

Many programmers I've talked to have said they would love this kind of work arrangement. This is the weird part of it all. It's a field where competition for talent is intense, yet this is an easy way for a company to scoop other companies, and it takes a lot of work to find it.

In practical terms I've had it all my working life, just by job-hopping contracts, but it's such a tiresome way to do it, it really flakes my fucking biscuit. I've literally never once had less than two months vacation per year. It's fantastic, and if I had to deal without it, I'd deal by entering a different industry and only programming at home in my spare time. Any employer who seriously thinks they're entitled to a full year of my time for ANY amount of money is smoking such incredible crack that it boggles the mind.

Which is the other reason this is so frustrating to me. I absolutely need time for my art, my writing, my acting, my music, and my personal code projects. I am absolutely going to get that time. I get e-mail from recruiters all the freaking time. So it's going to happen either way, companies are looking to hire me, and every programmer I mention this to tells me they think this kind of arrangement would be cool to have. If it's such an allegedly competitive hiring market, you'd think companies would be like, dude, this is a no- brainer, let's scoop the other companies and pick up brainpower at below market value! But they're not. The problem is that the technology industry is managed by idiot muppets why STILL haven't figured out that programmers are not cogs in machines and do their best when rested.

So this whole part-time thing is STILL hard to swing. Which means I'm going to have to stick with the erosive job-hopping, to the detriment of my career and the missed opportunity of all these companies that say they want to hire me, because these fucking numbskull butt-trumpet ass-brained fuck-farmers are stuck in the fucking past.</comment>


Any one of you using NAC – N acetyl cysteine for Covid-19 Patients? - <AUTHOR> https://www.researchgate.net/post/ANY_ONE_OF_YOU_USING_NAC-N_acetyl_cysteine_for_covid-19_Patients <comment><USER2> I am not a doctor, nurse, etc.

I take NAC daily because of its reputed benefits wrt the following: non- alcoholic fatty liver disease, increased production of glutathione, COPD.</comment>


There's no magic: virtualenv edition - <AUTHOR> https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/14-there-is-no-magic-virtualenv-edition <comment><USER2> See also "Virtualenv's bin/activate is Doing It Wrong": <https://gist.github.com/datagrok/2199506>

The activate/deactivate magic is responsible for some real nastiness in deployment scripts, and total confusion for beginners who are thrown by the statefulness. Virtualenvwrapper makes the situation even worse by hiding the virtual environments away.

By far the easiest way to use virtualenv is to forget about activation completely, and directly reference the binary you want to use. For example, rather than typing:

        source env/bin/activate
        python myprogram.py

Just run

        env/bin/python myprogram.py

It's an extra few characters on every command, but it's worth it to totally remove the magic.

<comment><USER3> No thank you. I will continue using my "magic" that has caused me 0 problems over the past couple of years running python scripts thousands of times. If you hate automation so much, feel free to keep typing "env/bin/python" every time you execute something, but for 99.99% of us, virtualenv works perfectly fine for everyday use.

<comment><USER4> > for 99.99% of us, virtualenv works perfectly fine for everyday use.

Depends on what you are running and from where. The usual virtualenv activate (although I recommend virtualenvwrapper's workon) works fine for a human interacting with a terminal.

But it is annoying for bash scripts, extremely annoying for Fabric scripts where each command is run in a separate SSH session, and sometimes completely impossible when a server needs to spawn a python subprocess. Used this exact method to solve issues with nginx+uwsgi web server deployments a few weeks ago.

Using the full path to the virtualenv's python works in any context, even when you can't set environment variables or run two commands.

<comment><USER5> Using Fabric's

      with prefix('source venv/bin/activate'):

.. is not annoying in the slightest (to me).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Understanding magic means you understand the concepts. It's a very advanced position to be in relative to your programming education.

I'm guessing it's also why "hard" classes in school start with the concepts rather than the magic (physics is a perfect example). You can't really go far if you don't get the concepts.

I've been doing some training lately for new hires, and I am inclined to start with the concepts and then teach the magic, but I wonder if it's the most effective way to learn in the short term?

<comment><USER7> Don't fear abstraction - that's as far as we'll get in plenty of cases, _especially_ when we're talking about the epistemology of the sciences; in any case, there's always an element of human control involved - once opinionated humans are put in charge of _articulating_ abstractions, we tend towards elegance, orthogonality, the stuff that makes you grin.

Fear _leaky_ abstractions, though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Related: Carl Meyer's "Reverse-engineering Ian Bicking's brain" talk from PyCon 2011: [http://pyvideo.org/video/389/pycon-2011--reverse- engineering...](http://pyvideo.org/video/389/pycon-2011--reverse-engineering- ian-bicking--39-s)

</comment><comment><USER9> Excellent article. Although it is quite obvious how venv worked, I had never bothered to actually look up the source. Consequently, I was always a bit hesitant on using it, because I have a customized environment for installing stuff and didn't want to break it. But venv is doing just what I'm doing, but automatically :)

</comment><comment><USER10> (A little bit off-topic, but I see that you're the person who wrote the Flask tutorial, just wanted to say thanks for writing it, I loved it: <https://github.com/akaptur/MyFlaskTutorial> ).

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you liked it, but that's actually my fork of the original, which was by another Hacker Schooler: <https://github.com/bev-a-tron/MyFlaskTutorial>

I really liked the way she distinguished arbitrary variable names from mandatory class names etc. So often, tutorials don't make that clear.

<comment><USER10> Ah. Well thanks to you both. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> haha, I had no idea "source" and '.' were the same! It all gets a little bit clearer, one step at time....

<comment><USER12> IIRC, 'source' is a bash-ism, while '.' is POSIX, so it might not work in all shells. That said $() isn't POSIX, but works on enough shells, that I'm comfortable replacing `` with it.

<comment><USER13> $() has been POSIX for a while, here's the SUSv2 definition from 1997: [http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xcu/chap2.html#...](http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/xcu/chap2.html#tag_001_006_003)</comment></comment></comment>