AI Mistakes Bus-Side Ad for Famous CEO, Charges Her With Jaywalking - <AUTHOR> https://www.caixinglobal.com/2018-11-22/ai-mistakes-bus-side-ad-for-famous-ceo-charges-her-with-jaywalkingdo-101350772.html?cxg=web&Sfrom=twitter <comment><USER2> Heres further proof the justice system is screwed. Yesterday I was stopped while driving for not having current tags. Registration was renewed but I didn't have the sticker yet. Cop looked at my paperwork said all good be back in 5.

Come to find out, I haven't had a valid license in 5 years.

There was a mistake in court 5 years ago when I paid a fine (speeding ticket). I have a receipt from court saying all settled/money received but court says they never got money.

So, after talking to a lawyer yesterday I will be paying another $250 for lawyer fees + court costs to get out of the mistake made by the court in another state 5 years ago.

I am lucky. I can pay that. It sucks but some people would be out food money if they suddenly had to pay $500 to drive again.

But, I did nothing wrong (except for speeding 6 years ago which I paid the fine and haven't had any issues since) and am stuck paying for the courts mistake.

<comment><USER3> It's funny but at the end of the day what youre talking about is the realization of idiocracy through our implementation of shitty "automation" using software.

I mean basically you have a computer system where the court system, law enforcement and DMV are all saying your license is expired for failure to pay...when you actually paid. Now you are getting more tickets and basically stuck in an infinite loop of hell.

I'm currently going through the same thing with my Bank (BOA), where my car window was smashed my wallet (credit and debit card stolen) and cards were used by the 2 theives at footlocker for ~$500. The bank software even caught the fraud first and texted me about suspicious activity on the cards before I knew what happened, the cards were reported stolen, I have a police report, but Bank of America keeps denying my claim saying they investigated and the purchase was legit because my "chip was present" even though they know the card was stolen and used by the theives. When I talk to a person it's always "oh let me reinitiate a new claim and I'll make detailed notes, you should definitely get your money back, that makes no sense." Automated claim comes back "denied. Valid transaction, chip present."

Like you I will probably have to take legal action to sort this out, at least in my case I'm a lawyer and can file a small claims case without paying a lawyer, but i will have to front the filing fees out of pocket and it will still cost me time/effort.

<comment><USER4> Pretty much. The same exists in the UK in all sorts of fields.

My preferred strategy is repeated escalation mixed with what I'd call some variant of baby language.

"You owe me X, please send me X, your internal processes are broken, please send me X".

"No, I don't care about your internal processes, you owe me X, please send me X."

"You haven't sent me X yet; can you send me X or do I need to initiate legal action?"

So far this has always resulted in me actually getting the X I'm rightfully owed. One day it probably won't. Sigh.

Amazon in particular have been amusing WRT this. "Our internal procedure takes X days..." At that point I usually cut them off and remind them that it's none of my business how they run things internally; what I want is resolution for the issue I'm facing.

<comment><USER5> I've always had excellent, and prompt customer service from Amazon. I'm curious to know what kinds of issues have you encountered where you were unhappy with how they dealt with it?

<comment><USER4> I recently ordered over £1000 worth of items which on arrival had been replaced (or incorrectly packed) as random household items of low value.

It took almost a month to get a refund whilst Amazon 'investigated'. Yes, it was eventually fixed, but not without a huge amount of 'process says this and that' warbling.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Add to that a justice system also mostly automated and you are quickly caught in a Kafkaesque nightmare you can't get out if something goes wrong. Imagine the justice system run like google support. Even if something is clearly wrong you can't clear it up if you are not a famous person with a big Twitter following.

<comment><USER7> On the other hand, a justice system which has most of the menial tasks automated might have more resources to do the important tasks well.

Similarly, Google could have a mostly automated system detecting violations and such, and also a good human support system with power to override the decisions of the former; the two are not really incompatible.

<comment><USER8> _On the other hand, a justice system which has most of the menial tasks automated might have more resources to do the important tasks well._

They said the same thing about banking when we got ATM's. But banking has only gotten worse, more impersonal, and more frustrating and alienating for the average person.

<comment> the-pigeon Out of curiosity could you explain what you mean?

I'm not nearly old enough to remember prior to ATMs. But I love ATMs. I only have to go inside the bank to do things once every few years. Everything else is on the phone or ATM. And the people I deal with on the phone are almost always very helpful and knowledgeable.

I know people have a lot of trouble with some of the big banks like Bank of America and Chase. But those aren't issues with the banking industry but those specific companies. There's plenty of smaller banks and credit unions who don't exploit their customers at every opportunity.

<comment><USER8> _I 'm not nearly old enough to remember prior to ATMs._

I am. When ATM's started to become a thing, we were told that with ATM's automating the basics, the bankers and tellers would have more time for more personalized service, Banks would lower fees through cost savings, and we'd all have higher interest rates on our savings because the banks would save so much money.

None of those things happened. Things just got worse.

A couple of years ago I tried to get a loan. A credit union I tried to approach wouldn't let ask questions of someone on the phone, or in a branch, until I'd cleared the computer's online pre-screening.

At another bank (Chase), a banker sat down with me, but was not able to discuss my finances in any way. All he could do was punch my information into his computer, and give me the same information I would have gotten by doing the same process online.

Citibank, at least, let me talk to someone in person who seemed interested in my business. But then I went on vacation, and by the time I returned two weeks later, the offer was no longer valid and I was referred to the web site.

Again, things have gotten worse not better. Just because you're too young to know that things were once better doesn't mean they're not worse.

<comment><USER9> You're just using bad banks. I have a great private bank in San Francisco (First Republic), where I get personalized service via email, phone, or in person any time I need it. I can use any ATM in the world free of charge, and any time I want to do anything it's a quick email away. (Including opening new business accounts, complicated requests, ordering cash in $2 notes, whatever you could think of).

<comment><USER8> I'm familiar with First Republic. It's a nice bank. If you never leave the Bay Area, and the most complicated things you do can be accomplished at an ATM.

My needs are more... complex.

<comment><USER9> I'm pretty sure my needs are just as complex as yours. I run a venture fund and have a dozen accounts with them. It's just that anything I need can be done remotely. I've gone in branch (to deposit large amounts of cash or to order $2 bills) maybe 3 times in 10 years.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > The police said they have upgraded their tech to avoid issues like this in > the future.

      if (person_id == "Dong Mingzhu") {
        // TODO: generalise this
        return false
      }

<comment><USER11> Someone could just do that every time that problem occurs; commit a new if- statement, close the ticket, and upper management says "Look at how much work this guy gets done! Now _there 's_ our star programmer."

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Ironically, the better the AI, the worse this problem is going to get. The error rate will never be zero, but the closer it gets to zero, the more the AI's judgement will be presumed to be correct by the legal system. So if you happen to be one of those unlucky souls who draws the false-positive card in an era where those are rare, you could be totally hosed.

<comment><USER13> Because our current justice system never hands out false positive cards today.

The real question should be if this is better than the false positive rate we have today, though that's probably unknowable. At least when AI fails, it fails spectacularly.

<comment><USER12> No. Sometimes AI fails spectacularly, and sometimes it fails banally (not to be confused with benignly). But when it fails spectacularly it makes the papers. When it fails banally you never hear about it.

Today society has a healthy skepticism of AI because it's new and untried. But some day that will change. AI will get better, and the spectacular failures in particular will be reigned in. Nonetheless, it will still fail some times. Society may forget that if we don't have the spectacular failures to remind us.

> our current justice system never hands out false positive cards today.

Of course it does. The difference is that we _know_ that humans are fallible. At the moment we still know this about machines too. My concern is what happens when the machines start to appear infallible, but still aren't.

<comment><USER13> If you think the people who will be fooled into thinking AI is infallible don't think humans in power today are infallible, you're kidding yourself.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Imagine that she wasnt a famous CEO and lost her job and spent the rest of her life struggling because of a silly mistake.

<comment><USER8> It's China. So she's just have her social credit score repeatedly dinged every time the bus ran a red light until she wasn't allowed to travel anymore, wasn't allowed to work anymore, wasn't allowed to have a bank account, or allowed out of her apartment.

Bureaucracy is so much more efficient when everything is automated, and we're all tabulated. We can just let the computers disappear troublesome people. If a few people are disenfranchised for no fault of their own, that's OK. They're just "edge cases." /s

<comment><USER15> This is exactly why the role of the state, in general, needs a much closer examination.

<comment><USER16> The exact same things are done constantly by big companies (Google, Apple, etc.). The only difference is you have much less recourse when it happens there. At least the government gives you rights you can fight for in court.

<comment><USER7> What's the process for fighting this in a Chinese court?

<comment><USER17> get jailed and shot for being subversive probably

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> It almost sounds like a headline from The Onion, but it's the reality in an increasingly dystopian society. That's really scary.

<comment><USER8> And once it's "proven to work" in China, it will be sold to every other country, and start falsely accusing people from Brussels to Boston to Bangkok.

Save more money on traffic cops. Spend more money on prisons.

<comment><USER19> They're trying to role out this type of shit in Singapore now (Chinese firms providing the tech).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> That's absolutely hilarious. But at least it was easily fixed.

But to anyone complaining about how this is dystopian: compare it to human police officers who can racially profile and exhibit their prejudices to disproportionately target segments of the population, and which there is absolutely zero easy fix for, especially when we consider how prevalent unconscious bias is.

At least an automated system can be analyzed for bias and, when it's found, corrected. There's a lot to be said (in terms of justice) for fair and uniform enforcement of a law, assuming of course there is due process for appeals (and that the law is democratically legitimate in the first place).

<comment><USER8> _compare it to human police officers who can racially profile and exhibit their prejudices_

It's already been demonstrated that computers can racially profile people. Everything from consumer cameras that tell the users that people in the pictures don't have their eyes open, but in reality are Asian; to chatbots that turn into Nazi bullhorns.

You can at least train a bad cop to be better. Or fire them. How do you fire an AI into which an authoritarian government poured billions of dollars, years of work, and reams of press releases?

AI was made by people, and because of that will always be flawed. It's only in science fiction books that computers and algorithms are perfect and clean and rational.

<comment><USER21> It's far easier to iterate on an AI and deploy updates statewide than it is to somehow weed out the individual biases of each individual cop.

<comment><USER22> That however goes both ways, making it also far easier to install a dictatorship etc. because you don't have to replace tens of thousands of police officers with regime loyal ones.

We're walking on razors edge here, it only takes one "election gone wrong" and we might find ourselves in a nightmare with no escape.

<comment><USER7> When has a dictatorship been prevented by the lack of loyal police officers?

<comment><USER23> Dictatorships have fallen because formerly loyal police officers stopped being loyal. It's unlikely that kind of personal evolution will happen with a machine.

<comment><USER7> Can you give me an example of such a dictatorship?

<comment><USER24> Ceasescu's fall was mostly caused by part of Romanian Securitate going against him, the same Securitate that was controlling the local police force. So much so that Ceausescu was still in power on December 21st 1989 when the local police was actively repressing the anti-Ceausescu street protests but had to escape by helicopter the following day once the same police force stopped fighting and killing the Romanian protesters.

<comment><USER7> So nobody had to replace tens of thousands of police officers to change the regime?

In my opinion, that just undermines the point. Nothing would have changed if the Securitate was controlling a bunch of AI sensors and such rather than a bunch of police officers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Good thing they didn't fine her for speeding at the same time.

I find it more than a little bit implausible that facial recognition accuracy is good enough to pluck a face out of a billion people and accurately identify a single individual to the point that a fine would be automatically issued, especially without corroborating evidence that the person fined was even there.

</comment><comment><USER26> Hilarious, but unfortunately, incidents like these are used to "prove" how incompetent and useless these technologies are, all the while pushing forward their use.

<comment><USER27> Pull Request: Make arrest system more bug-resilient.

Unit test: drop bug while typewriter types out "Tuttle", make sure it doesn't type "Buttle".

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This system seems dumber and simpler than I had imagined it would be. I had guessed the face recognition system would be linked to each citizen's cellphone (i.e. GPS coordinates). How else could it be so certain of any given person's identity, in densely and highly populated areas?

<comment><USER29> On the other hand, would be pretty easy to fool then by leaving your phone at home.

<comment><USER28> That would leave the average citizen at a huge inconvenience, given how much of modern life is tied to smartphone usage. Doesn't seem worth it just so you can go on a jaywalking/red-light-running spree.

<comment><USER29> I've managed to survive a few hours without my smartphone.

I now also live in an American city made for cars, not humans, so "jaywalking" is basically required to make any sane progress. So for grocery shopping, it'd take that trade-off.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> I once read about a proposed 1$ fee for mistakes like that. For individuals, it's just one dollar. For companies and especially the state, it can cost 1000$ and more in processing fees altogether.

<comment><USER31> I once read that companies can clearly claim increased costs and thus increased fines. Alternative is that government loses the provider.

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> I'm seriously confused by what went down.

First off, why are the police even reporting this?

Secondly, what can the system even do? I'd believe a system could detect a person jaywalking.

Identifying them is a huge problem though. running facial recognition against a billion person corpus seems impossible (in fact what even is your match data coming from?). (?). Wouldn't you need to narrow it down somehow, perhaps using phone GPS records?

<comment><USER17> chinese corp claims it can complete matching the whole population in 1 second but it's china so who knows what it's actually doing

[http://www.atimes.com/article/surveillance-system-can- scan-c...](http://www.atimes.com/article/surveillance-system-can-scan-chinese- population-in-1-second/)

<comment><USER32> Ya, I'm dubious there. accuracy rate "up to" 99.8%? What does "up to" mean?

This article paints a much more realistic view of what face rec can do, which jives with my 10 year dated experience in this field:

[https://www.businessinsider.com/china-facial-recognition- lim...](https://www.businessinsider.com/china-facial-recognition- limitations-2018-7)

Impressive for sure, but nowhere at the ability of scanning the entire country (which in addition to no algorithm being capable of doing that, you also have the problem that you lack data to even match against the entire country)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> That this is possible is concerning, it means the system is not smart enough. Might open the possibility of trolling by holding up cardboard cutouts of people and running across the street. Of course that's easier said than done but still...

</comment><comment><USER34> Funny what happens when you run before you can walk, but with any such technology, there would be false positives even when this gets improved significantly. At such a nascent stage, this is bound to happen.

</comment><comment><USER35> Maybe calling a machine that has just demonstrated its profound stupidity an "Artificial Intelligence" is part of the problem. This crappy tech is overhyped and overrated.

<comment><USER31> Would machine learning be preferred?

<comment><USER36> "Pattern Recognition" is the most accurate term IMO (at least as far as this particular tech is concerned, and yes it is a subset of Machine Learning), and it doesn't pretend to be something it's not.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> "debuted crime-fighting facial recognition technology to much fanfare over the past year"

People wanted this in China or is this a state run news source?

</comment><comment><USER38> We love any link that has machine learning in the title and quickly vote it to the top. This is the future guys, who knows what's next.

</comment><comment><USER39> Strange, the title says jaywalking, but the body says running a red light.

</comment><comment><USER40> Every time I see the acronym "AI" I cringe a little bit.

It's literally not AI! It's very quick statistical work; which works for many circumstances but definitely is not AI. Especially when it doesn't work.

</comment><comment><USER41> What is the trustworthiness of this website?

<comment><USER42> Caixin is a reputable magazine on financial news in China, its chinese PMI (Purchasing Managers' Indexes) are widely cited.

[1] [https://www.scmp.com/business/china- business/article/1385987...](https://www.scmp.com/business/china- business/article/1385987/new-boss-and-backing-pipeline-hu-shulis-caixin-media- group)

<comment><USER43> Others have pointed out that it doesn't seem possible to identify a single face out of millions with enough confidence to issue a fine with current technology.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> that's why you need a good appeals process.

<comment><USER45> Yep. Pay the fine or hire a lawyer to defend you in court. If you lose pay court costs and bigger fine.

<comment><USER46> And if you win, you pay the lawyer, court fees and administrative costs. The last ticket I had for speeding was rougly $90. The speeding fine was only $30 of that -- the other $60 was not recoverable with a win in court.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> It's good that some famous person is getting hit with this.maybe it will create doubt within the court system that we all may benefit from.

</comment><comment><USER48> Yes, but even hidden, it's probably still going to appear quite significant, and I do believe that at some point, the fine size becomes nonsensical.

But then again, I do not think that who you are or what you have should change the magnitude of the crime you commit. I don't think it is sensible that I should get greater fines because I chose to bust my ass and suffer from stress to gain more for my family, whereas I could get a much smaller fine if I just lived a more laid back life.

Granted, it's supposed to differentiate between the rich and poor, but in doing so it also differentiates between the hardworking and the lazy, punishing productivity and rewarding laziness.

<comment><USER49> Oh, give it a break. People don't choose to be poor.

<comment><USER48> I did not say that people chose to be poor. However, it does not seem fair to be punished for working harder than required.

<comment><USER49> You're not being punished for that, you're being punished for a crime. That happens to be proportional to what you can give. What's not fair is fines that barely impact wealthy people.

<comment><USER48> Neither does it seem fair that I'll be fined twice as much if I work twice the hours, does it?

<comment><USER50> A fine is supposed to discourage people from breaking the law. Is it fair that wealthy people can ignore the laws because they do not feel any real consequenes?

I have heard drivers who constantly break the rules, because they can easily afford the fine. To them the occasional fine is just the price they have to pay for easy parking, or saving a minute on their drive.

What alternative do you suggest?

<comment><USER51> > What alternative do you suggest?

Well the answer to the specific complaint here seems relatively simple. Base the fine on hourly pay, not yearly pay.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> > Face recognition algorithm classifies bus-side ad as person and triggers an > automated regulatory fininig process.

FTFY

</comment><comment><USER53> There's been a memo going around from the higher-ups in Central Services that anyone named 'Harry Buttle' should currently take extreme care, due to minor bugs at Information Retrieval.</comment>


They sold the startup, then bought it back..  (footytips.com.au) - <AUTHOR> http://smallbusiness.theage.com.au/managing/sales/here%27s-a-tip-908840164.html

<comment><USER2> "AFL footy tipping business"

"I wouldn't call myself a footy nutter, said Isterling."

No habla Australiano

<comment><USER3> Habl _o_ \- that guy habla just fine.

In any case, Aussie rules football is way more entertaining than the American variety: much more running around and action. Plus the "goal" thing that the referees do with their arms pointed out from the waist is cool.

<comment><AUTHOR> I know that I'm biased (I grew up and live in Melbourne), but I have never seen a team sport I prefer watching to Aussie Rules.

And my day job (big 3 letter IT company) uses this website to run our office footy tips competition.. And it works pretty well! (And my tipping skills are terrible). But as a user - I think the site is great - it's always worked well, solves it's problem nicely, and does something people want.

<comment><USER4> Rugby Union > AFL.

:)

<comment><USER5> Double points in the bonus round for taking a cheap shot at a Victorian!

Congratulations :)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Checkout my command-line Mint using Ruby and Ledger - <AUTHOR> http://blog.andrewcantino.com/post/1503439483/command-line-accounting-with-ledger-and-reckon

<comment><USER2> Ledger rocks. I really hope it's file format takes hold and Intuit goes under...</comment>


Will anyone pay developers for FireFox extensions? - <AUTHOR> http://technologizer.com/2009/07/16/would-you-pay-for-firefox-extensions/ <comment><USER2> I would not. I might, however, donate.

Paying is upfront, before I even know if the add-on will be useful. I don't like paying for anything upfront without some kind of evaluation.

Also, seeing as my use of the add-on depends on the continued existence of Firefox as well as the developers commitment to keeping it up-to-date with breaking changes in Firefox, I don't see a long life expectancy for add-ons anyway. I've already had some favorite add-ons fall by the wayside. I have no interest in paying for something that suddenly becomes unsupported without explanation 6 months later.

Finally, my use of add-ons is relatively limited anyway, and most of the ones I do use have very obnoxious features that I wish I could do something about. Right now, the only things I can see giving any money in any way for are Firebug, its extensions for analyzing page speed from Google and Yahoo (though I'm not as likely to "donate" money to a major corporation), and Web Developer.</comment>


Ask HN: Review My Site - ScriptCanary - <AUTHOR> http://ScriptCanary.com

<comment><AUTHOR> Known Issue: We're working on making this fully self-service, but for now the site accepts contact through the sign-up form. Payment happens via emailed invoice.</comment>


New aircraft display blends infrared video with CGI terrain in real-time - <AUTHOR> http://www.flyingmag.com/avionics-gear/oem-avionics/evs-and-svs-future-your-pfd?page=0,0 <comment><AUTHOR> Headline changed because the original was a TLA nightmare.</comment>


A Berkeley View of Systems Challenges for AI [pdf] - <AUTHOR> https://www2.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2017/EECS-2017-159.pdf <comment><USER3> Probably the trickiest part in here is the piece on adversarial learning - <USER2> think this will be very hard given current technology and will likely lead to a lot of failure in deployed AI if something much more robust is not realized. But, an interesting problem space for sure...

<comment><AUTHOR> My background is in test automation (on user interfaces). Is it correct to say in ML the concept of test automation is irrelevant? Because during training and predicting the model is already being validated for accuracy and correctness.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Personally, I can only really speak to the challenge of Moore's Law ending, but for anyone who can work with systems like Kami or Clash while also understanding AI algorithms, there will be some golden opportunities to design and sell accelerator boards.

</comment><comment><USER5> Wow, an incredible author list.</comment>


The code injected to steal passwords in Tunisia - <AUTHOR> http://blog.jgc.org/2011/01/code-injected-to-steal-passwords-in.html

<comment><USER2> Unfortunately just encrypting the login page would not protect user accounts from Tunisia's ISP. The ISP can just sniff your session cookie and hijack your session instead. They won't be able to change your password but they can read and write all your other data.

The only real protection here is to go full SSL and not forget to set the SSL only flag on session cookies. Even then, you only have to wait till Tunisia buys a forged certificate for Facebook.

<comment><USER3> Or they just redirect all HTTPS requests back to HTTP. How many people would notice?

<comment><USER4> Presumably a Tunisan blogger may be "paranoid" enough to notice.

When it's your your password on the line (and possibly your ass in jail) data security is more than aggregate statistics.

<comment><USER3> Err, well, I'm pretty sure they could have logged in via HTTPS all along by just manually typing in <http://www.facebook.com>

<comment><USER4> If the URL starts with "http:", the attacker gets to decide which parts (if any) are going to be sent HTTPS.

<comment><USER3> Sorry, either either the autolinker or I screwed up that post. My point was that if people cared about security, they could have been visting the facebook login page by manually typing HTTPS in the first place.

<comment><USER4> True.

I don't use FB, but someone on Slashdot was saying it likes to reply with every link going to http anyway. Based on my experience with Twitter and other sites, this sounds very plausible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is why mixed content warnings from browsers are an oh-so-important annoyance.

<comment><USER6> Also why the entire login page needs to be served via SSL.

<comment><USER7> and surely the entire site, if you want to avoid session hijacking.

(and after that, all the government needs to do is require an ssl signing authority to be used by all tunisian banks, and it's back in!)

<comment><USER8> There is no such thing as Security - only the illusion, that too of Selective, Government Controlled Security :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Isn't it time for Godaddy to take the password box off their unencrypted home page now?

<comment><USER9> Based on anecdotes, it sounds like GoDaddy has bigger problems.

<comment><USER10> GoDaddy's customers have the problems. GoDaddy itself is raking in cash hand over fist.

<comment><USER4> It's the users of the customers of GoDaddy that bear much of the risk.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Similar HN post (2.5 weeks ago): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2079223>

</comment><comment><USER12> It is very easy to get someones password if they have checked "remember me" and gone out for a coffee.

By very easy I mean it requires almost no talent.

Long time back (even)I wrote a script to grab password and username using DOM and JavaScript.

<comment><USER13> If you mean using the browser or OS password mechanism, then sure, if you're logged in as the user you can access their secrets.

But this doesn't should not be true for "remember me" cookies. Those just need some identifier.

At any rate, you still need "talent": to know where the person is, when they're going for coffee, ability to access their machine without bystanders asking questions, etc.

<comment><USER4> If you control any firewall or router along the way you can inject iframes which retrieve any url you like and run script in the same-origin context. Except for "https only" sites, but note that Microsoft helpfully provides the government of Tunisia with a trusted root CA in their products. Try <https://www.certification.tn/> . I wonder if it's a code-signing cert?

<comment><USER14> > Microsoft helpfully provides the government of Tunisia with a trusted root > CA in their products

Isn't this rather huge news? Why did they do this sort of downgrading hackery when they could do a more elegant (and slightly more transparent) man in the middle?

<comment><USER4> A) It's better to avoid using your capability even if you have it.

B) Probably a lot of users prefer Mozilla, though it may defer to the system store on Windows anyway, I'm not sure.

C) For the same reasons it's a pain for FB to use https everywhere, it's a pain for Tunisia to set up SSL interception on their outbound connections. There are certainly off-the-shelf boxes which can do it though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I might have missed this, but how was the javascript injected in the first place? Did they have a URL param being displayed (unescaped) on the page?

<comment><USER16> Attacker sits at network / ISP level, and can therefore inject any (js, ...) payload in non-https web pages, on the fly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I don't see how Javascript is to blame here, which is I think what the author is implying with the "game over" link to slides about JS insecurity.

This attack only worked because the attacker could subvert the same-domain origin policy, by posting usernames and passwords to a page at the facebook.com domain (but which was routed to an attacker's host at a lower level.) The security failure happened at a lower layer than where Javascript security would be responsible.

</comment><comment><USER18> "... was stealing usernames and passwords from common sites like Google Mail and Facebook".

Gmail always opens with SSL for me. Didn't Google make this the default after Chinagate?

<comment><USER19> If you're the ISP, can't you fake ssl certs all the way down to the root?

sorry if i'm being ignorant

<comment><USER20> SSL certificates usually come with the OS or the browser. AFAIK there's no easy way for the ISP to add certificates.

<comment><USER21> Unless they are a government entity which is recognized as a certificate authority, or which can exert influence over one.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Send a Facebook message to anyone's inbox, for free - <AUTHOR> http://lukasklein.com/blog/free-facebook-message-inbox/

<comment><USER2> It's kinda sad that Facebook gives people a way to rat people out for using fake names. I hope they don't see much usage.

<comment><USER3> It's useful for exposing profiles where someone is pretending to be someone else.

<comment><USER4> Theres a seperate action for that, see the screenshot.

<comment><USER5> You can't use that action if person being impersonated is not on facebook. They require you to identify the account of the person being impersonated.

I know this because I tried to report an account impersonating my grandmother, who doesn't have a computer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I heard that apparently there's a thing called "email" where you can send messages to anyone for free.

<comment><USER7> Facebook is working on making that useless too by changing everyone's profiles to only list their @facebook.com address and redirecting all email from non-"friend"s to the bit bucket labeled "other" in Facebook's message center.

Source: [http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/facebook- changes-e-...](http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/facebook-changes-e- mail-settings-without-user-consent/)

<comment><USER8> It's really frustrating - it's nearly impossible to connect with people you aren't already friends with, since people rarely check the "other" folder.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> martin-adams I'm sure this is probably a quick way to get your account shut down as sending reports that aren't valid concerns would probably be frowned upon.

Good find though.

<comment><USER9> Having your Facebook account locked is the gift that keeps on giving.

It gives you a legitimate excuse not to use Facebook that all your friends must accept unquestioningly, and if the reason is because you sent the Zuck messages he didn't want to receive then you get an awful lot of hipster cred as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Have you sent this post to Mark Zuckerberg using this tactic?

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how much time the OP provided to FB to respond.

<comment><USER12> It took two months for a response for me from their security team, and in the end their team dismissed my bug as a discrepancy in privacy settings (it isn't). For me at least, it's not really worthwhile trying to make an information leak a publicly known fact — nobody really cares.

<comment><USER13> What is the bug you submitted that they dismissed?

<comment><USER12> Under certain conditions contact information of a friend can be extracted when it logically shouldn't be able to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> i just found i have "other" folder in my fb

</comment><comment><USER15> Sounds like the job of a junior-level developer at Facebook, without the product management oversight of the feature. Whoopsie.

<comment><USER16> Or simply a feature that existed prior to the other folder.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> does not work anymore

<comment><USER18> For everyone or only for Mr. Zuckerberg?

In my case, I can still use the function for content posted by my friends …

(Don't worry, I didn't report them, I only went as far as the message dialogue and immediately when back to click 'undo'.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> genius! Good exploit:)</comment>


On Bitcoin: Stop trying to be an economist. You are a software engineer. - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2013/04/10/great-now-engineers-think-that-they-are-economists-too-2/

<comment><USER2> The statement about Europe and Spain is not entirely true. Spain had large spending issues before their current depression, the debt of their football clubs is 752m Euro that is ridiculous. I am far from an economist but the view of the author on Europe seems a bit American. Trough the same way of this inflation system the Euro has brought great wealth to the Netherlands, once a high valued currency (the Dutch currency before the Euro) and the lower ones (e.g. the Greek currency before the Euro), where merged the Netherlands could export their products at a lower price, and they have made a lot of money this way.</comment>


Now Drone supports BitBucket - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/drone/drone/issues/2#issuecomment-38970192

<comment><USER2> tl;dr Drone is a Continuous Integration platform built on Docker, written in Go</comment>


Learn JavaScript by Example and with Challenges - <AUTHOR> http://www.learneroo.com/modules/64/nodes/350

<comment><USER2> This is pretty cool. There was a similar link to a Ruby site on here a few days ago. Too lazy to dig up the link though :/

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Since my last submission of Learn Ruby was well received, I created a version for Javascript.</comment>


Firefox Contained in Flatpak vs. Snap Comparison - <AUTHOR> https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/firefox-linux-flatpak-snap.html <comment><USER2> I really wish that Snappy would die, and that Canonical would spend their resources developing and integrating with Flatpak instead. I use Ubuntu as my primary OS, and as the primary OS for workstations and servers at my work, but I don't think Canonical is a good owner of software projects. Mir was a huge waste of resources that was destined to die since Wayland had so much support. I don't see Snappy doing much better in the long run.

<comment><USER3> Flatpak and Snap serve different purposes. Snaps are designed for transparent installation on Ubuntu. Flatpak's milestone 1.0 doesn't directly support the current Ubuntu LTS (18.04). It would be irresponsible for Canonical to rely on Flatpak given their respective priorities.

I can understand Flatpak's rationales for technical decisions. Ubuntu users are not in Flatpak's target audience.</comment></comment>


Death Cab for Cutie's Ben Gibbard Deconstructs the Science of Songwriting - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cuepoint/death-cab-for-cutie-s-ben-gibbard-deconstructs-the-science-of-songwriting-bbd085a06a2a

<comment><USER2> Besides the OP, and Suzanne Vega's recent series of posts for the _NYT_ , here's another, almost completely opposite, guide to songwriting, extracted from a (very) long article by David Samuels from _n+1_ cheekily called "Justin Timberlake Has a Cold" \--

While [Mike] Caren's rules are not comprehensive or exclusive, it is easy to measure their value by a glance at the dozens of gold and platinum records hanging in his office. He is happy to run down his rules for me.

"First, it starts with an expression of 'Hey,' 'Oops,' 'Excuse me,'" he begins. "Second is a personal statement: 'I'm a hustler, baby,' 'I wanna love you,' 'I need you tonight.' Third is telling you what to do: 'Put your hands up,' 'Give me all your love,' 'Jump.' Fourth is asking a question: 'Will you love me tomorrow,' 'Where have you been all my life,' 'Will the real Slim Shady please stand up.'"

He takes a deep breath, and rattles off another four rules. "Five is logic," he says, "which could be counting, or could be spelling or phonetics: '1-2-3-4, let the bodies hit the floor,' or 'Ca-li-fornia is comp-li-cated,' those kind of things. Six would be catchphrases that roll off the tip of your tongue because you know them: 'Never say never,' 'Rain on my parade.' Seven would be what we call stutter, like, 'D-d-don't stop the beat,' but it could also be repetition: 'Will the real Slim Shady please stand up, please stand up, please stand up.' Eight is going back to logic again, like hot or cold, heaven or hell, head to toe, all those kind of things." The ninth rule of hit songwriting is silence.

[...]

His favorite example of a song that uses the most rules in the fewest words is a hit by the rapper Ludacris, "What's Your Fantasy," which starts off with the lyric "I wanna li-li-li-lick you from your head to your toes." Caren loves that song. "In the first line: a personal statement, 'I want to,' a stutter, repetition, 'li-lick you,' logic, 'from your head to your toes, move from the bed down to the down to the, to the floor,'" he explains. "'I gotta know'—another personal statement—and asks a question, 'What's your fantasy?' So he's got six of them, in the first two lines of the song."

<comment><USER3> I feel like this comment provided more information on the topic than the whole article. Great writeup.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4>
        The Photo Album is my least favorite record we've
        ever made because it was a really difficult,
        arduous process to make it. We almost broke up
        during the recording of the record and then the
        tour after that was horrible. I look back on that
        record and I think I didn't have enough songs —
        I barely had 10 songs and two of the 10 were barely
        complete thoughts.

Funny, given that _The Photo Album_ is usually one of the top 2-3 Death Cab albums[1] of their most dedicated, long-term fans. For what it's worth, I think the second half of _Kintsugi_ is weak, and I hope that this isn't a result of Walla's departure.

[1] Mine are probably _Transatlanticism_ , _Plans_ , and _The Photo Album_ , although _The Open Door EP_ holds a special place in my heart.

<comment><USER5> Michael Stipe said in an interview that "Fables of the Reconstruction" was his least liked record. When they recorded it the band was exhausted from touring, they were burned out and very negative. The negativity made for a dark record. He felt the negativity wasn't what they were about. That album is one of my favorites because of the darkness.

Ben addressed this divide between the artist and fan in the interview. It's so true that the context in which a song is heard becomes part of the song in a person's memory.

I'm a recently-become fan of DCfC. I can already tell that I'm going to listen to their songs many times over and think about every lyric in their albums the same way I did with REM.

<comment><USER6> Which is crazy because fully half of REM's whole catalog is inessential, and Fables is if not their second best album at least their third best, and is the bridge between the Murmur sound and the musical trajectory they'd start on with Document. Also: there's a difference between "darkness" and "melancholy", and also: better "dark" than "sophomorically shrill", which is the tone they adopted on Pageant, Document, and (especially) Green.

You can do better than Death Cab! I liked some of their earlier albums, but their lyrics have always been sort of weak and superficial to me (those lyrics also ruined The Postal Service for me).

<comment><USER7> To each their own – I like (a lot of) the lyrics of both Death Cab and The Postal Service _because_ they're refreshingly simple and straightforward without being eye-rollingly cheesy. I think they pull off an "I'm just a normal person telling you about my thoughts and feelings" effect without being inane.

Edit: And thanks for the interesting run-down of REM albums. I've never listened to them much, and you've given me a good sense of where to start.

<comment><USER2> Yet, Thomas coyly omitted his actual #1 and #2 picks!

The place to start with REM would be _Automatic for the People_ , a great record by any standard; it is quite forthright, lyrically, about where it's coming from.

Second would be _Murmur_ , which is somewhat the reverse. You get the feeling, but the words are ornamentation or invitations to projection.

<comment><USER6> Murmur, Reckoning/Fables, Automatic, Document, Pageant, Green, Out of Time, and after that can someone just make me a mix tape with the good songs from the other 7 albums?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Disappointing, given the title.

<comment><USER8> Yeah, it really just touches on the 2 recent plagiarism issues. They then go on discussing the new album basically. Not much "science" if you ask me.

<comment><USER9> If you really are interested the following book gives great insight to the "science" of it all. It's a how to guide but it gives great insight.

[http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1582975779](http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1582975779)

<comment><USER10> This is about how Stock/Aitken/Waterman thought about it. They wrote/produced more than 100 British chart hits in the eighties and nineties. [http://z3.invisionfree.com/Madonna_Dot_Refugees/ar/t12695.ht...](http://z3.invisionfree.com/Madonna_Dot_Refugees/ar/t12695.htm)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What the hell is "the Hindustani Classical Scale"?!

<comment><USER12> [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_classical_music#Prin...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_classical_music#Principles_of_Hindustani_music)</comment></comment>


Google Protest Leader Leaves - tech-historian https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-16/google-protest-leader-meredith-whittaker-is-leaving-the-company <comment><USER2> There are two narratives:

1\. These people are rabble-rousers who will never be happy and are disrupting the work environment at Google.

2\. These people are highlighting legitimate problems within the company and are trying to enact positive change.

Take your pick. But be aware of both narratives. And be aware that neither of them is unreasonable.

<comment><USER3> 1\. is a bit presumptuous though if you're going to jump to the conclusion that they'll never be happy and that this would be a continuous issue after the enacted change that they were protesting for. It's a rather baseless assumption if the only thing to go off of was an organized protest with well- defined ethical motivations. Unless there's evidence of rabble rousing intention, it seems that 1. _is_ unreasonable.

With that said, I have not followed this closely. For all I know, that evidence does exist and/or Google leadership has chosen not make said evidence publicly available.

<comment><USER2> People who tend toward 1. would say that Google has bent over backwards to accomodate protesters and has acceded to their demands multiple times, e.g. canceling their project in China and dropping their contract with the US military.

Seems reasonable to me.

<comment><USER3> That's a very good point. As I mentioned in my previous comment, I haven't followed the situation (or other Google situations like the ones you mentioned) closely. However, I feel a just-as-reasonable explanation is that Google did those things to save face because if they truly felt those were the right things to do, there would be no retaliation and there would be an implicit agreement that the intention was morally motivated and not intended rabble-rousery.

On the other hand if the situations you mentioned are unrelated to the Women's March, which it seems they are, then I really don't see them as being relevant to whether or not the people in question were rabble rousers. Protestors are not a constant set of people and each protest and the organizers of said protest have to be looked at individually, at least in terms of determining whether 1. or 2. is most reasonable.

Otherwise, it's a broad generalization of "protestors", which would inadvertently make 2. the more reasonable narrative as well because 1. would be moot to the specifics of the particular situation.

<comment><USER4> > Google did those things to save face

Companies don't have thoughts or emotions. A company's actions are a result of the individuals that make it up. When you see controversy like the China thing or military contracts, that's just how decisions get made in big companies. Someone wants to get money from the military. Some other people don't. They discuss it and the company makes a decision by individuals taking action. People inside Google that wanted to do military contracts heard the counterarguments and didn't carry on. That's all.

Maybe Larry Page thought "hey, this is bad for our brand" and fired all in charge. But that seems very unlikely. What seems likely to me is that the people that wanted to do the project heard the controversy and decided on their own that it wasn't a good idea.

As the company gets bigger, there are certainly more and more of these controversies. It does get hard to manage when you feel personally responsible for what others have done and your voice is not heard. That is why people are leaving.

<comment><USER3> This all simply supports my point then: it's an irrelevant argument in the current discussion. If the Woman's March protest had zero influence, then the point is simply moot.

Furthermore, I specifically mean the leadership at Google when I simply say Google. I'm referring directly to the people deciding resolution or retaliation. Whether that's a single person or a group of people, it doesn't matter. By enacting a change that's protested for, they're legitimizing the concerns set forth by the protest (aka supporting the notion that they're real moral issues and the opposite of rabble-rousing)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Googlers haven't realised yet that they have different leadership now. The open culture of discussing and opposing things that Google does is slowly degrading.

<comment><USER6> Realize Meredith and her crew are a minority of employees. We are talking < 10% of employees shared all her views.

Majority of googlers wanted maven. They wanted search in China.

Biggest change to culture is people getting tired of SJW outrage. And a focus back on our users and business

<comment><USER5> The majority wanted Project Maven and search in China?

<comment><USER7> Rephrased slightly differently: The majority want opportunities that will advance their careers, increase their stock values, and keep the company doing well (which usually means bigger bonuses)

<comment><USER8> Rephrasing even more: there is a number of rats that are capable of doing anything to advance their careers and to make more money. When a few people appear that value their conscience more than money, these rats will fight them.

<comment><USER9> Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines? They ask you not to take HN threads further into flamewar and not to call ante-upping names like "rats".

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> "Whittaker also publicly denounced some Google decisions, including the appointment of Kay Coles James, a conservative think tank leader, to an AI ethics board. Google soon nixed the board."

Many people hold strong beliefs that conflict with the strong beliefs of others and engage in open debate rather than walk-outs. I can only assume Whittaker realized that her views would not prevail, but felt that she was nonetheless in the right, and therefore resorted to alternative means of pressing her point.

<comment><USER11> Or maybe she just didn't want to work for a company with questionable morals anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Rowboat politics. If one of the rowers decides that she doesn't like the direction the coxswain is steering and starts to row in the other direction, it tends to annoy the other rowers. This is true whether she is right or not. If she can't change the coxswain's mind it's better for both her and the rest of the crew for her to find another rowboat.

<comment><USER13> Your analogy fails right away with a simple example: if the renegade rower realizes that the team is rowing towards a waterfall, then it is indeed _not_ in the team's best interest to push him or her out.

<comment><USER14> Pioneers are seldom welcomed with open arms and often made into pariahs. Not picking a side here, just stating a fact.

The fact is also such that most pioneers would not end up having chosen a better direction than status quo.

The harder some people try and toe the line, the harder some other people will try to rebel, and then the system starts trending more towards extremes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I don't really understand why it's surprising to anyone that they would face "internal retaliation" after exposing their employer as evil and boycott worthy to the entire world. By publicizing it to the degree that they did and attaching their name to it, they were putting their interests over the company. If my company started doing business practices that I didn't approve of, I would try my hardest to change the direction from the inside out or I would leave and then criticize. I don't understand the desire to stay with a company and accept paychecks while simultaneously publicly denouncing and leading protests against them.

<comment><USER16> It's literally illegal. There are laws against retaliation against whistleblowers. That is why it is surprising.

> I don't understand the desire to stay with a company and accept paychecks > while simultaneously publicly denouncing and leading protests against them.

Because you don't want to see the thing you worked so hard to build misused to build killer robots and "war minds"? Seems reasonable to me. Google's got a different mission and sometimes the leadership forgets it, and needs to be reminded.

<comment><USER17> What did she do that is protected under the various whistleblower protection laws? [https://www.whistleblowers.gov/sites/wb/files/2019-06/whistl...](https://www.whistleblowers.gov/sites/wb/files/2019-06/whistleblower_acts- desk_reference.pdf)

I don't think that objecting to your company's AI work for DoD or plans to comply with Chinese internet search regulations fall under any of them.

What did the "Open Research Group" at Google actually build?

<comment><USER18> So many arm chair lawyers on HN. The parent is wrong. It's illegal because it violates the NLRA, not whistleblower protections.

"Protected concerted activity".

If you want a good primer, "Labor Law for the Rank and Filer" is a good one.

<comment><USER19> I'm not clear on what Whittaker's role was with regard to the Chinese project, but the final straw appears to have been her protest regarding the composition of the AI ethics panel.

How is an outside ethics panel going to affect their working conditions? The people on the panel don't have any say on employees' pay, promotions, disciplinary actions, assignments, or anything else that might affect their working conditions.

The idea was to have some people from outside the company look at the tech and its potential hazards and provide some input on the ethics of developing and deploying it. People inside the company said, No, we don't want that particular viewpoint to have a seat at the table on this outside committee. The ethics panel had nothing at all to do with their working conditions.

<comment><USER20> Are you trying to make a fine distinction between "working conditions" and "work"? You just said that this panel that she was protesting the composition of would look at what the company was doing and plans for what the company wished to do, and have input into the ethics of developing and deploying them (and I'm assuming changing them or ending them, otherwise this panel's only job was to kiss paper.)

The employees of google would then be expected to produce and maintain these projects. That's their work. At the least, they're expected to share a roof with these projects, and profits from the work they do could be spent on these other projects, or vice-versa.

<comment><USER19> It's not a fine distinction at all.

'Working conditions' includes those things I mentioned: pay, promotions, hours, etc.

The AI ethics panel may or may not have led to a change in the scope of 'work.' We'll never know, because the panel was disbanded. Presumably Google is now making decisions about future AI work without the benefit of the ethics panel.

In any event, organizing a protest against the composition of this outside panel that had exactly zero power to change Google employees' working conditions does not fall under the NLRA. Apparently Meredith Whittaker was counseled along the same lines, which is why she resigned after trying to pressure Google into changing their decision by using publicity via the press, rather than suing under the NLRA.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I don't know, this seems like a pretty weak article. Sometimes people just change jobs and there's nothing nefarious about it. If Whittaker had been fired for her activism, or even just felt forced out, wouldn't she herself be talking about it? She wasn't afraid to tell the media about Google mistreating her in the past.

</comment><comment><USER22> Google works like crazy to hire all of the smartest and the best people, but do they really need them? Billions and billions in shareholder value could be extracted by hiring a bunch of mid-tier Java programmers and having them farm Ad Words for the next decade, until the first competition shows up.

<comment><USER23> > until the first competition shows up

Their worry is that competition will be started by the people they've not hired and kept on the bench. I'd imagine a large amount of their top-level hiring is driven by taking minds off of the market, more than optimising their output.

<comment><USER16> This couldn't ever work. Folks that smart want to do things that are real.

<comment><USER24> Some people are brilliant but just want to be financially comfortable enough to do the things they actually want to do. Ask some CS majors why they are trying to get into the field and a huge swath with frankly say it's because they can bust ass now and get six figures at 22 years old and coast the rest of their lives. Not exactly the reality, but that's what freshman CS majors are thinking about when they hand their resume to the google rep during the career fair.

<comment><USER16> Yeah, working at Google is not a great plan for "coasting" now or later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Wrong fit. You should always recognize who is your paymaster.

She would be better off as an independent activist, a face for other disgruntled employees who have to remain anonymous because they have responsibilities to family etc.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's always hard to gauge this stuff.

The early moment seemed to have support but it seemed to sort of fizzle later on... but the media attention remained making it really hard to get a feel for the real scope of these issues / how many google folks shared their views.

I've worked long enough to encounter management who would retaliate, and employees that once they find a cause are willing / do everything they can to die on it. I don't know if ANY of what happened at google is one or the other or both or none.

</comment><comment><USER27> I thought this story had already been reported a month ago. But no, I was wrong, that was the _other_ organizer of the Google Protests, Claire Stapleton:

[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/google- wa...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/jun/07/google-walkout- organizer-claire-stapleton-resigns)

So to clarify, _both_ of the female Google employees who lead/organized the protests have now left because they say they faced retaliation. That looks very bad for Google.

<comment><USER28> What retaliation have they faced from Google exactly?

<comment><USER27> [https://www.wired.com/story/google-walkout-organizers-say- th...](https://www.wired.com/story/google-walkout-organizers-say-theyre- facing-retaliation/)

>In a message posted to many internal Google mailing lists Monday, Meredith Whittaker, who leads Google's Open Research, said that after the company disbanded its external AI ethics council on April 4, she was told that her role would be "changed dramatically." Whittaker said she was told that, in order to stay at the company, she would have to "abandon" her work on AI ethics and her role at AI Now Institute, a research center she cofounded at New York University.

>Claire Stapleton, another walkout organizer and a 12-year veteran of the company, said in the email that two months after the protest she was told she would be demoted from her role as marketing manager at YouTube and lose half her reports. After escalating the issue to human resources, she said she faced further retaliation. "My manager started ignoring me, my work was given to other people, and I was told to go on medical leave, even though I'm not sick," Stapleton wrote. After she hired a lawyer, the company conducted an investigation and seemed to reverse her demotion. "While my work has been restored, the environment remains hostile and I consider quitting nearly every day," she wrote.

Both are now gone.

<comment><USER26> If you don't like the ethics council... and you protest it, and then they disband it ... that would involve a dramatic change if your role was on it.

Retaliation or not, there would be some change. So any change, not sure I buy is/isn't retaliation.

<comment><USER29> I don't believe she protested the AI ethics council.

<comment><USER26> I'm pretty there was some protest surrounding the ethics council.

<comment><USER30> There was separate protests that the ethics council was inappropriately scoped and those on the council not fit to be there. The protests Meredith was on was regarding the letting go with generous severance packages of employees found to have been sexually harassing co workers, and the lack of resources within Google for those victims of sexual harassment/assault.

<comment><USER19> She was active in organizing the petition drive that successfully pressured Google to keep Kay Coles James off the committee. [0] [1] [2] [3] [4]

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/01/google- ka...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/apr/01/google-kay-coles- james-removal-employees-letter?source=techstories.org)

[1] [https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/04/google-employees-call- on-...](https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2019/04/google-employees-call-on-company- to-kick-heritage-foundation-ghoul-off-ai-ethics-board/)

[2] [https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/04/leftist-googlers-kay- cole...](https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/04/leftist-googlers-kay-coles-james/)

[3] [https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/05/google-drops-heritage- fou...](https://dailycaller.com/2019/04/05/google-drops-heritage-foundation- president/)

[4] [https://www.newstarget.com/2019-04-06-leaked-emails- suggest-...](https://www.newstarget.com/2019-04-06-leaked-emails-suggest- google-is-a-leftist-cult.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Its a shame this submission might be flag killed as there continues to be important issues to discuss.

The main thing it seems to me is that if a worker is unhappy with their company and is so unhappy their protest (and organise a walk out) their employer its even more clear they are unhappy working there. The unhappiness or alienation will increase.

I might have got it wrong though .... did these protestors say they were happy working there and just unhappy with other things or people?

It seems like it's a wider issue that's common across all work places. What should be the best way for people happy working with their colleagues or team but concerned about other things with the organisation to continue their good working environment and share their views? Maybe it's just a HR thing.

<comment><USER32> >What should be the best way for people happy working with their colleagues or team but concerned about other things with the organisation to continue their good working environment and share their views? Maybe it's just a HR thing.

It's a corporate thing. Profits over ethics, laws, and people. That simple principle cannot be changed from the inside.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Do we have any real information regarding if this is as a result of retaliation? The article provides evidence that at least one of the organizers claim they're being retaliated against; do we know how widespread this may be?

</comment><comment><USER33> Throw-away account. Personal opinion, and I don't want any shit from it.

These people _do not_ represent the majority of googlers' views or experiences IMO. I am sure there are genuine grievances, but they're representing a tiny- but-vocal minority group that is bringing the company into disrepute over what I think are relatively run of the mill problems that happen everywhere.

For want of a better term, they strike me as "trouble makers". Re-orgs happen _all the time_ in Google - it is quite common for people to arrive at work and discover that their job has been re-orged out of existence and they've got to find a new role for themselves within 60-90 days, or basically get sacked. If you were a manager with spare headcount and literally 100s of qualified applicants (internal and external) for that headcount on your team, would you take on someone who is a known agitator and does a lot of "off piste" work, is divisive, and generally ruffles feathers instead of getting their work done? Or pick one of the other brilliant & experienced people without a history of stirring up shit for social media outrage points?

</comment><comment><USER34> Cute timing wrt Whittaker's departure, considering Peter Thiel's diatribe against Google just yesterday regarding Google's involvement in proceedings with China. [1]

Meanwhile, Facebook assumes widespread immunity in ethical ontology within Thiel's (goofy) narrative, all being quite selectively convenient given Thiel sits on FB's board.

Both stories were initially broken by Bloomberg, which is also charmingly harmonic, temporally. Thiel likely pushed to collate onto Whittaker's thunder is my (mere) immediate speculation.

Disclaimer: Worked as an engineer at Bloomberg 8+ years (now in academic scientific research), I doubt Bloomberg consciously coordinated the stories but anything's possible, I suppose. (as mentioned, more likely the stories coordinated themselves in alignment to Bloomberg publication - if anything).

1\. [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20447055](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20447055)

</comment><comment> chupa-chups Almost same content but w/o free article limit:

[https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/16/20695964/google- protest-l...](https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/16/20695964/google-protest- leader-meredith-whittaker-leaves-company)

</comment><comment><USER35> It stories like these that make me wonder, is it better to take an adversarial/external approach to change (like Meredith) or to work slowly inside an org and change it from the inside?

Of course the external/adversarial approach can generate huge changes quickly by relatively junior folks, but always comes at a huge cost and is not sustainable (see: most of the people who did these protests have left). So you get one shot, and worse, it sends a message to others that this behavior isn't tolerated. So in the long run, could even lead to worse outcomes overall.

On the other hand, the idea that you can change the system before it changes you...well we all know how that usually works out.

<comment><USER36> Change from inside has a very poor track record. People who say that are usually rationalizing their involvement. Even non-violent protests are adversarial. The history of the world seems to suggest that is the one tried and known method for change is adversarial confrontation. If you look at it from a game theory/economics point of view, there is little incentive for people to change unless you change the landscape and the factors that compel their behavior. Change from inside really doesn't have that because organizations/organisms/nature are resistant to change -- if it is working why risk it? Very few organizations have the ability to disrupt itself.

<comment><USER37> > Change from inside has a very poor track record.

Has it? Or is it just less visible because it happens over a decade or two? Germany's left wing and their March Through The Institutions comes to mind as a very successful change from inside.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This may be a bit off topic, but I registered the domain GoogleProtest.com several years ago when I had a problem with them.

Does anyone have a suggestion of how I can donate it to whoever needs it?

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm surprised no one has linked Meredith Whittaker's statement on this:

[https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/onward-another- googlewalko...](https://medium.com/@GoogleWalkout/onward-another- googlewalkout-goodbye-b733fa134a7d)

</comment><comment><USER40> Interesting to see as polarization increases, as it will given the environment, whether a company can break into two along political lines.

Has that happened before in history?

I wouldn't mind a seperate conservative google and a liberal google. Let the quality of the product offered decide which is better.

<comment><USER41> Hasn't that question already been answered by the fact that the epicenter of tech is in liberal Silicon Valley?

If conservatives could compete, they would have done so already. There are exceptions of course, but statistically, leftists are better at tech.

<comment><USER42> Correlation != causation. Could be that, because cities become tech hubs, and because cities tend to lean left, that anyone who wants to work in tech will move to a city and be influenced by the left-leaning culture. I've known people who were farther right, went into tech, moved to cities, and are now farther left.

<comment><USER41> Sure, but the effect is the same. A "right-wing Google" won't succeed because left-wing policies are more beneficial to the growth of cities, which are beneficial to the success of organizations like Google.

It is actually sort of surprising to me that _cities_ are _tech_ hubs - <AUTHOR> should be able to deliver fantastic products while working remotely and never meeting anyone in person. (And the free software/open source movement is an existence proof of that.) So there must be something else about cities that makes them better at not just the success of tech companies but the success of groups of tech companies.

<comment><USER43> > left-wing policies are more beneficial to the growth of cities

Left-wing policies like urban exclusionary zoning? Yeah right. Look at how Texas and other Sunbelt states are doing, despite them being in inherently more challenging parts of the country than CA.

<comment><USER44> Texas cities are doing good in spite of the state's political culture, not because of it. All the cities except maybe DFW are in a constant struggle with the conservative state government.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> she's a fraud. [https://googlersagainstdeceit.blogspot.com/](https://googlersagainstdeceit.blogspot.com/)

</comment><comment><USER46> Google is going to shoot itself in the foot over the long term with the type of decisions it has been making lately both against its users and against its employees.

I imagine that since the protests started they've already begun filtering out the people with a higher level of ethics in their interviews - but the new class of people they hire are not going to give them the same results in the long-term, especially if they are no the type of employees to question the addition or removal of a feature, etc, but just do as they are told. Google's current leaders are slowly but surely killing Google's spirit.

<comment><USER47> I've figured for a long time that the hazing interview process is partly to select for people who'll play along with whatever the company does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> Change your organization or change your organization.

</comment><comment><USER49> >Whittaker also publicly denounced some Google decisions, including the appointment of Kay Coles James, a conservative think tank leader, to an AI ethics board. Google soon nixed the board.

I wonder how much that contributed. No matter the personal political leanings of the employees, most companies try to stay on the good side of both sides of the political aisle. When the president of Heritage Foundation (which is about as close to establishment conservatism as possible) was opposed so vehemently, it really created a rift with conservatives and now there are Republican Senators who now are calling for Google to get reigned in. The business leadership can't be too happy about that.

<comment><USER50> The fundamental problem of tech companies is that they need to keep two groups of people happy: whoever is in power, which is the bigoted right at the moment, and employees, who are generally not bigoted so on the American political spectrum are overwhelmingly left-wing.

This is an impossible task. My opinion is that Google should support its employees and deliberately position itself against the right. No matter how much ground you concede to them, they're going to act in bad faith anyway, so why listen to them at all?

<comment><USER9> We just asked you yesterday to stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. We ban accounts that do that. We have to, because doing that destroys the curiosity this site exists for. Would you please review the site guidelines and take the spirit of this site more to heart when posting here?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

<comment><USER50> I want to understand this fully. You care more about me pointing out the obvious political context we live in than about the person downthread literally comparing being gay to pedophilia.

Will you, in your capacity as a moderator for one of the most influential forums on the internet, actively care about justice, or will you just protect the status quo? Pick a side.

(Keep in mind that Scott Alexander made the exact same mistake of trying to be neutral rather than choosing to be on the side of justice. Now his blog is overrun by fascist trolls. Hacker News is not far behind.)

<comment><USER9> Other people's violations of the site guidelines don't justify your breaking them as well. That's not only a non sequitur, it's a fatal one. If you see someplace we didn't intervene where we should have, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can help by flagging it or by emailing email@example.com in egregious cases.

We're not trying to be neutral in the sense you describe. I agree that it's impossible, that everything is ultimately political or at least connected to it by one or two hops, etc. But this is a hard problem with no easy answers—actually with no answers, so far as I can tell. I certainly don't have one. In particular, the answer you're offering is not an answer. Picking a side and banning the other side would explode this community. It isn't just people on the banned side who would oppose such an approach; most HN users on all sides would. The rift would kill the community. What good would that do?

Another reason is that political issues are more important than most of what appears on HN. Justice is more important than Rust. Does it follow that no website dedicated to less important things has a right to exist? I don't think so. I think it's ok to have a forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity, even though justice is more important than Rust. It's fine if you disagree, but then it would be good to make clear that that is what you disagree with. So far I don't think I've ever heard anyone come out and say so. But if you do agree that it's ok to have a forum dedicated to intellectual curiosity, I think I can argue confidently that the approach we take as moderators follows from that.

<comment><USER50> Thanks for talking about this seriously.

> most HN users on all sides would. Such a rift would kill the community. What > good would that do?

Who are you excluding today with your actions? How do you know it would kill the community? I actually don't think so — the Rust community, thriving by any metric, has very strict codes of conduct. That's because the Rust community correctly optimizes for the safety of marginalized people over political diversity.

I know plenty of people that do not participate on HN today because of moderation that cares more about tone than content. Why not ban all the fascists and welcome those people? I promise that the sky won't fall.

Yes, I disagree with the premise that HN should be "dedicated to intellectual curiosity". This forum is way too important for that. For example, getting your side project on the front page of HN can have a large material impact on your life. Too many people are excluded from that today — they simply do not feel safe participating here.

You will necessarily make some groups of people feel unsafe and excluded. This is the basic truth about large communities. The question comes down to who you're going to care about: gay people or homophobes, for example. Immigrants or nativists. People affected by the structural injustices in the tech industry, or people that proudly support the same injustices. These are all mutually exclusive choices. Choose carefully.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> Cool! Does she want a medal or something? I'm not sure why people feel like they should be rewarded by their own company for publicly going against them. Talk about entitlement.

<comment><USER9> Please don't post personal attacks to HN or call names in arguments.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> As a googler, I say good. People like her have made going to work exhausting. Leave your politics at home and let me do my job in peace.

<comment><USER28> I was amazed there was even a Resist@Google group within Google. I'm okay with people protesting the companies actions but Google seemed to be internally supporting protests on company time and property. Which has pitted employees against each other across political lines.

I don't see why Google cant just keep it apolitical in the work environment while being open to critiques externally and not caring what their employees do politically in their spare time.

<comment><USER50> "Apolitical" means no speech or actions to change the status quo. That is fine if and only if the status quo is fine.

<comment><USER28> I just said the company should be open to external critique. Which the employees should be free to engage in their spare time...

<comment><USER50> Why only in their spare time?

<comment><USER28> Because you're paid by Google...to work at Google? And other employees shouldn't have to be fed your politics constantly just because they have to show up at work every day just like you do.

<comment><USER53> Let's take a step back. When I work somewhere, my job is much larger than 'deliver code'. It includes (and will show up on my Review) things like 'team building' and 'contributing to a non-hostile work environment'. It is everybody's job to make sure that their workplace is non-hostile. This is the cultural version of 'see something? Say something'. If you are in a workplace that makes that impossible, or retaliates against people who agitate for improvement, then that is a real problem.

TBH, the real problem here is people's different views on the Overton window. I suspect that is why you are getting such vigorous blowback on these topics; your window isn't aligned with at least some of the people on this thread.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> One less person on the payroll to generate negative news and internal strife is surely a positive development.

<comment><USER55> Positive for Google & Shareholders, but not for the rest of the 7.7 billion people on Earth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> No matter how good intentioned if you stir up shit for your employer they are going to want you gone.</comment>


SEO is bullshit - <AUTHOR> http://www.contrast.ie/blog/seo-is-bullshit/ <comment><USER2> Yet another anti-SEO post from someone with a notion that SEO is a band-aid for poorly structured pages and that all SEO professionals are charlatans.

Yes, valid/well structured sites give you an SEO head-start, but there's more to it: \- Properly structured browser titles matter \- The way you write matters \- Sitemaps matter \- Optimizing Flash-based sites/pages is important because there are a lot of them \- Links matter ... A LOT

There is a valid need for honest, skilled SEO professionals. The fact that there are so many bogus ones simply underscores this. Businesses on the web simply need to be educated on when and how to find a good one, when not to use one, and what they can DIY.

I'm sorry, but this post doesn't show much "intellectual honesty".

<comment><USER3> Anything that 'matters' you should be doing anyways for a good user experience. So explain what this 'optimization' for search engines exactly is?

Titles? That is for the user. Sitemaps? Actually they don't matter as long as your content is linked to internally. They can be produced trivially anyways if you really feel the need, but Google finds all my pages. Optimizing flash pages? That sounds like frowned upon injection. You should not change the way you write for a search engine. Have anchor text that represents what you are linking to? Come on, thats how it should be regardless. The best thing you can have is backlinks - which good content/interesting sites should naturally develop.

I don't know of a single thing you should do to optimize your site for a search engine. edit: If you are downmodding me be because this is incorrect, speak up.

This article is clearly garbage though.

<comment><USER2> Everything you mention is common-sense and easy to tech-savvy people like us. Not so much for "Joe the Plumber" (bad joke, I know) who just wants good search engine placement for his local business. He doesn't know what a "good user experience" means and he's not going to get it he builds his site using an off-the-shelf CMS or have his newphew build it.

Do you just not like the term "SEO"? Would you prefer "user experience consultant"?

My point is, there's a gap that skilled SEO people fill, regardless of semantics or the notion that optimization is inherent in a properly built site.

BTW, there's plenty to optimizing Flash sites that don't involve frowned upon methods. Yes, much of it is also about user experience.

<comment><USER4> My last boss wasn't technical, and he had all the "SEO" down that he needed - to the point that he had a string of SEO "experts" come in to see if they could do anything, and he figured out that he knew as much or more than them.

I have to come down on the side of "SEO is bullshit", even though the article in question was mostly content free. It's not that there's nothing to "SEO", just that there's not enough to justify it being a "career". The whole thing smells fishy to me, and I think that the market for it will eventually implode due to all the snake oil being sold. That or the structure will change radically as people who are honest and know their stuff start charging in a different way - perhaps something like getting money for training rather than working directly on a site.

Genuine designers/UI/user experience people are a different breed entirely, who know about making a site nice for people. That's not what "SEO Professionals" sell, though, generally.

Another few disjointed thoughts from my flu-ridden head:

* In terms of comparative advantage, if the thing you are relatively best at is attempting to fiddle with search engine results, as compared to, say, programming, or user interface work, or design work... what's that say?

* ... I had another one a few minutes ago, but my headache got the better of me. Oh, here it is: can't most of this stuff be automated somehow? That would be a legitimate business, creating tools that help people get things right.

<comment><USER5> The only way to get higher search rankings _without_ improving the overall quality of the site is by gaming the search engine's algorithms. If someone is selling that service, overall site improement, they are not doing SEO but traditional design and HCI work. And if they are getting better search rankings without making the site better for users, then they are selling snake oil.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> What an utter waste of space (other than, perhaps, as a conversation starter?).

SEO means lots of things to lots of people, and certainly big slices of it are crap.

Here are a few bits of SEO that I'd defy anyone to call bullshit:

1) Unique and descriptive title tags, so that results in Google are findable and make sense when they are found (title tags are used for the "blue link" part of the SERP).

2) Meta descriptions in the event that Google doesn't use bits of the content (not uncommon) to describe to the searcher what's on the other side of your link (this is the 155 or so characters of black text under the link)

3) Keyword research to understand how your customers look for you-- so you can use words that they search for when you have that choice to make. Is your ecommerce site selling "shoes" or "footwear"? "Steaks" or "meat"?

4) Backlinks. Sorry, but this is the currency of the web. If you aren't in the business of trying to be link-worthy and encouraging folks to link to you, you'll fall behind those who are.

5) Eschewing ajaxy guitar solos so that your content is consumable by search spiders.

<comment><USER7> this IS bullshit - those 5 things you can do without paying so-called SEO Consultants

<comment><USER8> Tony, please correct me if I'm wrong - but I think he was just advocating some simple best practices that improve SERP rankings NOT paying SEO consultants.

<comment><USER6> True 'nuff. And the OP was not attacking SEO consultants-- he was attacking SEO.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This is dumb, and essentially the same conversation that was had a week ago. I'll repeat what I said then:

A job is anything someone will pay you to do, and as long as there are companies that will pay employees to help them achieve better results on Google, SEO is and will remain a job.

From the [original] article: "Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his sparetime (sic)"

True. Anyone can also be a great cook and keep a house clean in their spare time, but that doesn't mean chefs and housekeepers don't have "real jobs."

I'll agree that there are a lot of overpaid SEO "consultants" who do nothing more than add META tags and ALT attributes and get paid $100+/hr to jerk off the rest of the time. However, speaking as an ex-employee of a company who has 3 results on Google's first page for "health insurance," there are legitimate companies out there who would drown if they didn't have SEO experts working full-time doing A/B split tests and careful traffic analysis on a daily basis.

<comment><USER4> > working full-time doing A/B split tests and careful traffic analysis on a > daily basis.

If I did that kind of thing - actual work, I think I'd find a different thing to call myself to differentiate myself from the snake oil salesmen.

Still though, even that kind of thing strikes me as kind of "zero-sum"-ish... not really adding a lot of value to the world at large. Tournaments (search engine rankings in this case) are zero-sum, aren't they? Not that that's a reason it's "bullshit", but not high on my list of "people making the world a better place" either.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> "User experience > SEO" -Dustin Curtis

Many of the SEO best practices can be implemented without taking away from the user experience. However, once the SEO crap starts taking away from the user experience...Stop.

<comment><USER10> Maybe User experience > SEO, but your users have to find you first right?

<comment><USER8> Read the second part.

And they have to come back.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I hesitate to wade into this, especially this late to the party, but what the heck...

I think a major fallacy of the crowd around here is to see SEO as primarily just code/content optimization. Good HTML, page structure, and tagging is a bit of an art, but business as usual to any top flight developer.

The elephant in the room with SEO is paid links. You may have a wonderful validating, user friendly page, but if your competition has 1000 backlink lead on you, you'll never see the top SERP spot for big keywords. Viral content can certainly help, but the unpredictable nature (esp of the links) tends to keep it in second place.

I think most programmers consider paid links 'beneath' them, and most marketers don't understand it (and technically it's grounds for a google ban, but that's only in blatant cases in my experience), but in reality:

1) Identifying proper backlink candidates, in your niche, and tracking contact info down

2) Crafting a non-spammy pitch, and following up on it

3) Making a deal, optimizing the link, and keeping it up to date

is not only a skill set to be mastered, it's a full time job for any site of large size.

Of course throwing down a technically sound site with good content is job #1 for any of us, but the idea that that alone will get you traffic, especially if your idea isn't novel/brilliant, is awfully optimistic. We all want to be Twitter, but somebody out there is getting rich selling wrenches, and the publicity/viral opportunities take real work to master.

Finally, many of the services good SEOs offer like advanced site analytics, integration with PPC campaigns, etc, can be major ROI gainers. They're not necessarily SEO, but they tend to fall under that community's expertise.

 _whew_ All that said, I too believe that 80% of the SEO experts out there are hawking snake oil, or black hat google-bomb of the month stuff that will have negative repercussions, but the idea that the whole industry is bunk comes from a large number of people that either all have a brilliant, novel idea, or are missing a serious ROI opportunity.

</comment><comment><USER12> SEO isn't bullshit. however, it is only a tool in a toolbox.

too many SEO firms are selling turd polish.

<comment><USER13> I couldn't agree with you more.

A lot of SEO can be done as you're building a site, but there are certain aspects to be made aware of. Unfortunately, too many companies sell these BS packages and belittle true SEO, instead of delivering actual results.

He'd also have more of a leg to stand on if he had given some _reasons_ to back his statements.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> What this should say, is that SEO as an INDUSTRY is bullshit, proper search engine optimization should just be taken into account as you build whatever you're putting on the web. SEO is a feature not an app in startup terms

</comment><comment><USER15> I was once involved in an SEO/PPC pitch for a major pizza company (by major I mean one of the top 3 players). One of the issues they wanted addressed was their ranking for the term 'pizza'. This is not something you'd think would be an issue for a company like this, but they weren't showing up on the first page of results.

We suggested that they might want to include the word 'pizza' somewhere on their homepage. That's right. The word pizza wasn't in the title, the meta- tags, the alt-tags, the body copy- it wasn't anywhere on the page. Apparently, that little tidbit had gotten lost among all the priorities of Branding, Marketing, Messaging, Promotions, etc., etc.

As soon as they added the word pizza into their title tag, they rocketed to the top of the results. Was that value worth paying for? Of course. Was the solution totally obvious? It should have been, but in case after case we find that, especially with larger/older companies, it's not.

IMO, SEO is completely natural at the one-man-sized-business level. Like most things, it gets increasingly complicated as you scale up.

<comment><USER16> Soooo, your client was Papa John's?

<comment><USER15> Close! But nope.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yawn. Haven't we had this conversation before?

</comment><comment><USER18> If you think SEO is bullshit, you are probably isolated in web-app-make- believe-land and think the only way to build an internet business is coding an ajax heavy service, getting viral growth, and being acquired.

This is not the way most internet businesses operate. Most depend on search engines to deliver prospective buyers to their site.

If you think SEO is easy, or completely self explanatory, you have clearly never tried to get a site ranked for a semi-competitive keyword. The vast amounts money associate with commercial search terms makes ranking highly competitive and the constant updates to Google's algorithm make it a constantly moving target.

Maybe all this anti-SEO sentiment stems from jealousy. Good SEO sites can make millions and have a much higher probability of success (compared to web apps) when orchestrated by an experienced SEO.

<comment><USER19> I think you're being harsh there. SEO is a byproduct of creating a good website/webapp.

Think about your users first, and they will link to you. You'll get inbound links. Make your site easy to use and navigate, and it'll be search engine friendly. It's far more useful to spend time making a good product, than trying to game the search engines.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> SEO is _mostly_ cleaning up after lazy developers or WYSWIG site builders who didn't write standards compliant, accessible, lean code and didn't know anything about information architecture. I know because I do it every day.

Search is how most people find most things online, period. Designing a website with such a contempt for SEO is a recipe for disaster. Yes, some websites don't need SEO or SEM, because they're naturally viral or sticky. Some products also don't need any marketing to catch on. In both cases, this is the exception and not the rule.

(SEO is also spending a large amount of your time defending your reputation against something that was left behind for you by snake-oil salesmen.)

</comment><comment><USER21> Just for the argument. Here is a SEO case study and how backlink can help you.

[http://blog.ask2link.com/case-study-advertisers-get-great- re...](http://blog.ask2link.com/case-study-advertisers-get-great-results-with- ask2link-text-links)

<comment><USER8> Interesting, but isn't this more "marketing" than "case study"?

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This post is bullshit.

SEO, just like anything by itself, is not an answer. Simple logical way to look at this:

1) You need more customers, visitors, users,etc. 2) Google often drives them to you. The higher you are, the more of them you see. 3) You apply SEO tactics to increase ranking 4) More people come, you've achieved your goals.

Now, doing this alone doesnt mean anything:

a) if your product sucks, you can be number one on google. odds are, you still wont go anywhere. b) if your support sucks, the people you convery will leave. c) if you cant sell, these people will leave after talking to you.

Hope this makes sense, just giving a balanced opinion.

</comment><comment><USER23> SEO in its most puerile form of purely gaming the system is indeed BS.

But SEO is also about making your website as friendly as possible for search engines and improving your linking for users while also helping with the search engines. It's about developing your links from other sites and helping get your site placed in front of as many eyes as possible.

Sure a great product or service will rise to the top. But for those who aren't the best, SEO is a tool that they can utilize.

</comment><comment><USER24> For people who want a more detailed follow-up: <http://www.contrast.ie/blog/seo-is-still-bullshit/>

</comment><comment><USER25> BAD SEO is bullshit.

Well thought out SEO as part of a larger scale site impact consideration is AWESOME :D

<comment><USER25> :( I thought that was a succint evaluation....

There are plenty of bad SEO firms out there who have no clue about what they are doing (and often do more harm than good to a site). Also SEO is seen as a fix-all solution - which it really isn't.

But SEO practices are an essential part of any website design, refresh or update.

At the end of the day it's just a buzzword that creates a market for selling their knowledge (knowt wrong with that of course!)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's retarded posts like these that make me with HN had downmods...

</comment><comment><USER27> Lol all this, and we all ask one question in return:

why?

</comment><comment><USER28> What's SEO?

</comment><comment><USER29> What a shortsighted, lame argument. It's like taking anything you disagree with and then comparing it to a bunch of arbitrary truths in life.

Look at this article and replace "SEO" with any other word that you disagree with.

For entertainment, just replace "SEO" with "McCain."</comment>


Uber raised $2B in first ever bond-offering - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-bond-offering-raises-2-billion-popular-offering-2018-10?r=UK&IR=T <comment><AUTHOR> "The offering was made up of two coupons: $1.5 billion worth of eight-year notes with a yield of 8% and $500 million of five-year notes at 7.5%, according to the Financial Times"</comment>


New mammal species a warning for humanity - <AUTHOR> http://www.rediff.com/news/2009/feb/10new-mammal-species-a-warning-for-humanity.htm <comment><USER2> Just goes to show that whatever the news - someone can explain why it is bad news.</comment>