DeepMind Memory Task Suite - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/deepmind/dm_memorytasks <comment><USER2> I was surprised to see that these are based in Unity. Is there a growing community of machine-learning research in Unity, and if so, what's prompting that?

<comment><USER3> I saw these folks talk at a conference last year and demo some of this work. There is a strong push towards asking computers to do tasks that humans and animals do in psychology and neuroscience experiments: navigating a maze, finding a platform submerged in water, etc. Many of these tasks require memory (see also: playing Montezuma's Revenge). Part of the goal is to reach parity with humans on certain tasks. Another part is to help understand how cognition works by building it from scratch and cross-referencing results with human/animal results.

By using Unity, they can create a virtual environment that mimics the real physical experiments. I think this is good, as one big 'cheat' in many AI projects is representing the 'state' of the system in a way that implicitly captures expert domain knowledge - i.e. about what parts of the environment are significant with regards to performing the task. Letting the agent 'experience' a virtual world in a 'raw' form allows _it_ to figure out what's salient - what it needs to remember - which animals also have to do in experiments.

Plus, Unity videos demo really well.</comment></comment>


IBM Job Ad from 1956 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/07/07/for-the-mathematician-whos-ahead-of-his-time-2/

<comment><USER2> My favorite is this one:

<http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2008/06/28/atomic-golf-ball/>

Lets make the golf ball radio-active so we can find it easier!

You just can't make this stuff up.</comment>


Word Embeddings: Past, Present, and Future - <AUTHOR> http://w4nderlu.st/teaching/word-embeddings <comment><USER3> Great slideshow. Word embeddings are already indispensable in NLP, but I'm wondering if it is right to assign just a unique vector per word. Instead, each word should have a vector based on context, for disambiguation and nuance.

I see word meaning as an action similar to object recognition in vision - <USER2> have to infer meaning because the actual word itself is a family of meanings. Most of the time it's used one word - one embedding, even in word2vec which is the standard method used in papers.

Of course word sense disambiguation is an old topic of research and there are many methods. The translation task is probably the ultimate word- disambiguation application - it shows how much work is still to do after word embedding, in order to understand the meaning of words. If words had unique meanings, we could have done translation with simple dictionary substitutions.

<comment><USER4> Sense2Vec is a thing; Spacy has a demo [https://demos.explosion.ai/sense2vec/?word=natural%20languag...](https://demos.explosion.ai/sense2vec/?word=natural%20language%20processing&sense=aut)

For many downstream tasks it doesn't seem to improve things though. NLP is hard - lots of things should work but don't because of the sparse training data. Like this slide deck says: most sentences occur only once.

<comment><USER5> I thought Spacy only did part of speech disambiguation rather than sense disambiguation. ie. it would be confused if a word has multiple meanings, all of which are nouns.

<comment><USER4> This demo uses the Spacy POS tagging to build a word embedding which disambiguates multiple senses. The paper explains it: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06388](https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06388)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Anyone have pre-print/draft version link for this cite:

Alessandro Lenci, Distributional models of word meaning, 2017

Doesn't appear to be release yet: [http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev- linguis...](http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev- linguistics-030514-125254)

<comment><USER7> I had the chance to read a preprint, it's a great survey, it will be published soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Video:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsGf8cV4hqg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsGf8cV4hqg)

</comment><comment><USER9> Side note: You may not want to open this on mobile data. It was downloading at 1mb/sec and I had to force close the browser immediately.

Edit: Not sure how big is it in total though. Maybe someone not on mobile can share.

<comment><USER7> I edited the page. Now there's a download button and a preview button. If you click the preview button, the javascript document viewer embedding the pdf will be loaded, otherwise it won't be loaded.</comment></comment>


Learn php in Minutes - <AUTHOR> http://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/php/

<comment><USER2> Do all of these need to be posted?

<comment><USER3> Indeed.

Cant someone just post: [http://learnxinyminutes.com/](http://learnxinyminutes.com/) and be done with it?

If only some one would do that...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This comes to mind: [http://abstrusegoose.com/249](http://abstrusegoose.com/249)

</comment><comment><USER5> This might come in handy as a quick recap of a language, but I'd advise against learning a language like that.

<comment><USER6> It's really not meant to be a comprehensive learning resource. More like a cheat sheet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Appreciate this, good for memory recall.</comment>


Gamma Adjustment in an HTML5 Canvas - <AUTHOR> http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2011/12/gamma-adjustment-in-html5-canvas.html <comment><USER2> If you intend to gamma correct images, gamma correcting the alpha channel like this code snippet does is not desirable.

</comment><comment><USER3> Forgive my naivety, but why do we have cross domain limitations if I can fire up a proxy and do the exact same thing? What's the difference?

<comment><USER4> Because you can't pull an image off of someone's computer and upload it to your server with a proxy.

Without cross domain limitations on canvas, you could do that.

I wrote a bit about those rules a while back:

[http://simonsarris.com/blog/480-understanding-the- html5-canv...](http://simonsarris.com/blog/480-understanding-the-html5-canvas- image-security-rules)</comment></comment>


Is Your English Accent British or American? - <AUTHOR> https://myaccent.cambridgeconsultants.com/ <comment><USER2> It's hard to tell if the speech recognition is working, or even if the microphone is on. If I hum the star spangled banner, it rates me as 79% British.

<comment><USER3> I said the sentence in Spanish and it gave me 62% British. I tried Portuguese, and it gave me 55% British.

<comment><USER4> The NN (I guess) checks the accent, so it doesn't care about the content of the words. One could speak Spanish in a more or less British accent.

<comment><USER5> Yes, it would break your words into phonetics, and analyzes whether it's "american" or "british" phonetics which occur more frequently in the dialog. Unless well practiced, your phonetics likely cary over into other languages that you speak.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm from Britain and it rated my accent as 99-100% British the few times that I tried it. So not bad from my point of view.

Meanwhile, I wonder what Cambridge Consultants are going to do with a dataset of thousands of Hacker News users reading out the sentence "Please call Stella and ask her to meet Bob the frog at the store with three small red plastic bags".

<comment><USER7> "My voice is my passport, verify me."

<comment><USER8> *password I believe. Upvoted.

<comment><USER9> No, "passport". It was clearly a reference to the voice authentication hack in _Sneakers_.

<comment><USER7> Indeed. They took a bunch of smaller words and spliced them together to fake his voice print. Cambridge Consultants are clearly harvesting our voice prints for the CIA. ;)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I have two accents: the "Finnish Rally Driver" (55-45) and "Monty Python" (7-93). I was ashamed of my regular Rally-Driver until Dame July Dench said "What a delightful accent, are you from Hungary?".

<comment><USER11> I have so many questions for you right now.

\- what does Finnish rally driver sound like \- how did you meet Dame Judy Dench \- where are you actually from?

It's pretty funny how language roots show. Finnish and Hungarian are the same family of languages and apparently Dame Judy picked up on it!

<comment><USER10> \- what does Finnish rally driver sound like: [https://youtu.be/fZfxJ7BST8E](https://youtu.be/fZfxJ7BST8E)

\- how did you meet Dame Judy Dench: At Heathrow Tesco. All Britons look the same, but she was quite "posh". Dame of that age and looks, but did not confirm the exact identity.

\- where are you actually from? Finland, github.com/timonoko

<comment><USER12> Torilla tavataan!!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Born in Washington DC and that is the southernmost point of my childhood. Father born in England to Eastern European immigrants. Mother is Italian American from Pennsylvania. West coasters semi-frequently think my accent is European, but nobody from back east or from Europe says that.

I got 84% British.

My wife was born in Russia and spent most of her life on the US west coast. She got 91% American.

Fun little app but given my results and some comments here I see it as a west coast accent detector.

<comment><USER14> > Born in Washington DC and that is the southernmost point of my childhood. > Father born in England to Eastern European immigrants. Mother is Italian > American from Pennsylvania. West coasters semi-frequently think my accent is > European, but nobody from back east or from Europe says that. I got 84% > British.

That's really interesting. I have a very similar background (and from Washington DC) and I got 84% British, too. It rated my pronunciation of the word "call" as ~100% British. That's pretty interesting if it can regionally categorize people.

<comment><USER15> I suspect that is because a typical mid west or west coast accent has a moving pitch with the word "call", typically down then up within the one syllable. The usual British accent has a monotone or a slight drop in pitch for the word "call".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> A Kiwi accent would almost certainly result in a server explosion.

<comment><USER17> No obvious explosions, but it doesn't know what to make of it. First submission: 18% American, 82% British, second submission: 68% American, 32% British.

I tried putting on American and British accents and could easily get it over 90% either direction, so at least it's working for those.

<comment><USER18> Mine gets relatively consistently British. Wonder if it's regional accents in any way?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This could be very useful for English language learners if it told you the pronunciation mistakes that you make.

As it is now, it's a little disappointing. I got 98% British but I have no idea why it came to this conclusion. It could be that my British accent is good, or that my accent is rubbish but doesn't sound American, or anything else really.

<comment><USER20> It tells you which words you said it considers british and which it considered american by their red / blue colour.

It is also a binary choice. Like the hotdog/not hotdog app, you can't expect an AI to tell you much if it only has two options to chose from.

</comment></comment><comment> Digit-Al I got 97% British, which is reasonable as I am British. However, I then tried a couple of time putting on an atrociously bad faux Australian nasal twang, and it still rated me 97% and 84% British - so I'm not so sure on it's accuracy... or maybe it can tell a British person putting on a rubbish foreign accent :-)

</comment><comment><USER21> Saying nothing qualifies for British. Legit.

<comment><USER22> English is British by default, that's just geography.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> This is kind of fun for practicing accents. Even with my "best" attempt at a British accent I never got below 80% American.

Would be cool to see if it had any data for identifying some more specific American accents though.

<comment><USER24> I'm American and it put me at 66% British...

Edit: and now 99% British every time. Methinks the site is broken.

<comment><USER25> I'm also an American and get consistently 80-90% British. It seems to think I pronounce "Bob" in an especially British way. I pronounce it in a way that sounds like "Bahb" to me, same sound as in not and cot (I don't have the cot- caught merger). I believe it's the vowel <ä> in IPA that I use. To my ears that's not the way most UK speakers would pronounce it, which I think is more <ɔ> or <ɒ> for all of Bob/not/cot.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> When I said, "bleep da doop de blah bleep nah," this classified me as 80% American.

Then, I clapped my hands twice (and didn't speak), which classified me as 72% British.

As a final test, I did both at the same time: 90% American.

<comment><USER27> Sound legit. Noisy: American. Subtle and understated: British

<comment><USER26> Hmmm. Some statements, by their existence, contradict themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I noticed the URL, and stayed away. They want my data for stats, profiling, or building an automated Henry Higgins, they can contact me and quote a price.

Not a native speaker (raised on Danish), but lived for a while in Australia, and also spent a lot of time in the UK. And it shows. The British invariably take me for an antipodean, the Aussies usually for a Pommie bastard, and then every once in a while for a Kiwi. Nobody _ever_ thought me North American.

<comment><USER29> Cambridge Consultants is a /very/ different firm to Cambridge Analytica, if that's what you were thinking? It's a well regarded contract engineering consultancy rather than a data analysis company.

<comment><USER28> Letting my general paranoia overrule my inclination, I assumed some sort of connection. A [very] quick looup didn't disabuse me of that assumption. I probably stand corrected.

Mind you, I am _always_ sceptical of these 'tests' all over the web. Somebody clearly is after my info for free.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> This is really hit-or-miss. My initial test gave me a 93% British (rather accurate considering I'm from a former British colony), but subsequently the results varied a lot, including a few cases where it claimed my accent is 74% American.

The way I pronounce "ask", "plastic" and "Bob" should be dead giveaways that my accent is not American...

<comment><USER31> I've lived in London my entire life and the result flips between very American (~80%) or slightly British.

I pronounce "ask" with a long "a" so I'm not sure why it keeps flagging that pronunciation as American either.

<comment><USER32> This may well not be the answer but some of the accents you'll hear around Boston do use the vowel from "father" to pronounce "ask."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm from neither the US nor Britain and I got 90% British (I don't hear any British in the way I speak though).

</comment><comment><USER34> Side question. I've been always wondering: how has the American accent evolved? Where does it come from? Is there any region in Britain that sounds American? Or did just evolve independently as a mix of British and something else?

And: since when is it that different? Did Lincoln had an American accent?!

<comment><USER35> It's somewhat the contrary if I remember correctly. It's the British accent that changed after the split.

<comment><USER36> How did Received Pronunciation catch on? It seems that Britain is chock-full of different accents, especially from the north, but all the English ones sort of contain elements of RP, like the unpronounced R's (Irish and Scottish don't.)

<comment><USER37> The split came about through formalised education. The British you hear today is upper middle class, noble English.

Similar happened in France and French Quebec. Modern French is formalised Parisian french. While Canadian French is country French, according to a very posh friend, the most educated quebecois still sounds like a country hick the first time he hears them.

<comment><USER38> > Similar happened in France and French Quebec. Modern French is formalized > Parisian french. While Canadian French is country French, according to a > very posh friend, the most educated québécois still sounds like a country > hick the first time he hears them.

You got it backward. Modern French is bourgeois Parisian French. It was standardized more than a century after the French revolution (in the 1880's when public education became mandatory).

When Québec was colonized in the 1600's, only a handful of territories in France spoke French, mostly around Paris. This was the language of the court, the nobility and a minority of peasants. The rest of the country spoke various languages, such as Caló, Catalan, Corsican, Franco-Provençal, Ligurian, Occitan, Flemish, Luxembourgish, Alsatian, Breton, and Basque [1]. Furthermore, Parisian French was only one of the d'Oïl languages spoken at the time [2].

The colonists that settled and explored Québec were mostly from northern France, the region where an Oïl language was spoken. The language spoken in the colony was standardized to match the one of the royal administration (Parisian French).

Due to not being a French Territory when the revolution happened, Québec kept a fork of Royal French. Reading written french from the 1600's and 1700's out loud is striking, as it's almost identical the pronunciation of modern Québécois French. An example of this is the term "Moi", spelled Moé in the 1700's and pronounced Mo-a (Moi) by modern continental French and Mo-Hey (Moé) in Québécois French.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_France#Mino...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_policy_in_France#Minority_languages_and_endangered_languages)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langues_d%27o%C3%AFl](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langues_d%27o%C3%AFl)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> LMAO. I am British and I managed to fool this by doing an American accent. Well more concisely, by sounding like a Texan. Or at least thats what I think it is.. very fun!

[https://i.imgur.com/dWkBnXF.png](https://i.imgur.com/dWkBnXF.png)

<comment><USER40> I'm American but I scored 83% British with a crappy Cockney accent ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I am from Kiev, Ukraine, initially studied English at classic Soviet school with explicit orientation to British style. Nevertheless, it suggests 93% American. Initially I guessed this is due to r-coloring, but words like "plastic bags" have no R ;)

</comment><comment><USER42> I'd be interested to see if any broad scousers, Geordies or weegies have tried this.

<comment><USER43> I am from Liverpool and got 98% British using my normal accent

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I am from the Boston area (without a Boston accent) and I rated 90% US. My teen daughter who is also from this area and to me sounds like she has an even "flatter" American accent rated 64% US, with the words "call" and "small" flagged as moderately British. My teen son (who sounds identical to her) was 95% U.S.

I lived in London when I was younger and can imitate some local accents; my "upper crust" accent was rated about 65% U.S. on the first try and 86% British on the second. My "Norf London" was 50/50 on the first try, 65% U.S. on the second.

<comment><USER45> I doubt it's that nuanced actually. My best RP gives 99% although all my British friends would classify that as 'evil nazi overlord' owing to my Swedish accent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Haha, that was fun. First time around I was 55% American. Then 49% American. Then I did my best British accent (49% American, guess I can't ever become a spy in Britain) and my best American accent (88%, hah!).

I'm English as a second language, continental western-europe.

edit: tried British accent one more time and thought about it for a sec before doing it, changed the call and ask to do a British 'a' and got 99% British. It seems I'm destined for a life of spying after all!

</comment><comment><USER47> This seems like it'd be hard to do reliably - if I recall, there were significant variations in the regional makeup of the various thirteen colonies to start with, and some of those linguistic peculiarities have outlived their originators, besides England having it's own subdialects and variations over time too.

Get a Mainer, a New Yorker, a Virginian, and a Georgian together, and they're hardly mutually intelligble, and that's just on the east coast.

<comment><USER48> Other than some slang, I wouldn't call any of these accents mutually unintelligible.

<comment><USER32> Yeah, I can't think of any American accent that I just altogether can't understand.

<comment><USER32> My wife, who is not a native speaker of English, initially had trouble understanding AAVE and people with heavy Latin American accents when she moved to the US, for what it's worth, so maybe we could consider those particularly challenging, but I doubt any native-born American would struggle with those really.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Swede here, got 92% Brittish, i'm happy with the results. The English education back in school has apparently won over my media consumption :p.

</comment><comment><USER50> My awful french accent rated me as 98% british accent.

<comment><USER51> My awful Estonian accent rated me 99% british.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> 98% British but it only highlighted "the" and "Bob" each time. I guess the rest of the words were unknown.

My accent would be Swedish.

</comment><comment><USER53> Things like this are fun as a New Englander who doesn't have the "pahk the cah" accent of Boston. Our vowels are flat, and mine get flatter when I'm drinking--when I visited Ireland with my family the landlady at a little bed- and-breakfast took me aside and inquired if I had been educated in England. Nope--I just don't say "baaaaaaaag".

</comment><comment><USER54> It's funny that my south indian accent was 90% match to American and my "normal" Indian accent was split 50-50.

<comment><USER55> Not hotdog ? [https://youtu.be/ACmydtFDTGs](https://youtu.be/ACmydtFDTGs)

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> I'm Swedish, learned British English in school but basically all tv shows here are American, my English- speaking friends are all either American or Canadian but at work we have a lot of British people. This rated me as 98-99% American.

</comment><comment><USER57> I'm from Britain but I've lived in a non-English speaking country for 7 years so my accent seems to have tended towards American English. I got 90% British.

Also, this is measuring my "reading accent" which is much more British than my normal speaking voice.

</comment><comment><USER58> I'm Irish. Was curious to see how it would interpret my accent.

41% US, 59% British -- did a few times an the ratios reversed.

Doing impressions of British or American people got me close to 100% of their respective values. I'd say there is some merit there alright.

<comment><USER59> Haha I am Irish too, 94% British, 6% American...can I ask where you're from? I am from Dublin.

<comment><USER58> I would have a midlands accent (and a US mother).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> I'm 100% American from the mid-Atlantic region. Rated my accent 53% American and 47% UK. I tried on my best south London accent, which is fairly cartoony, and got a 60% UK.

Edit: just tried my best Southern accent (kinda Georgia) and rated 72% American.

</comment><comment><USER61> Wanted to try it but got an error:

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

Sorry, your browser doesn't support audio recording, which is required by our site.

Why not try again using Chrome, Firefox, or Edge?

Note that iOS only supports in-browser audio from iOS 11 onwards.

\</comment><comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>-

This is in Chrome on iOS 11.2.2 with microphone access enabled.

<comment><USER33> Use Safari.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> My French accent gave me random results, going from 80% British to 80% American.

</comment><comment><USER63> I got 62% British, which doesn't entirely surprise me. I grew up in Eugene, Oregon, and people I talk with often say I have a Canadian accent. Apparently this is quite common for Oregonians.

</comment><comment><USER64> Born in London and lived there til I was 3 but I'm American and it rated me once as 53% American and another time as 37% American. I know I say a few words differently but not that differently.

</comment><comment><USER65> I'm American. I read it in what I think is my normal voice, and it came out 93% British.

Ok, maybe I enunciated and pronounced my 't' sounds out of self-consciousness. Still.

I retried and got 90% American.

</comment><comment><USER66> I'm from St. Louis and it guessed 65% American. I then tried a fake British accent and it thought I was 63% British. I guess I need to work on my British accent.

</comment><comment><USER67> Lived my whole life in the States, classified as 84% British. Maybe some aspects of the Israeli undertones from my family, but more likely just a bad model.

</comment><comment><USER68> When I speak with my normal NY Northeastern accent it tells me British 80%.

When I speak with a poorly done, make-believe Southern accent it tells me American 90%.

<comment><USER48> How? I tried it in my best city accent, my native suburban accent, and my best Rochester accent, and got >95% American each time.

<comment><USER53> Depending where in northeast New York one is, one can end up with something close to the Northwest New England accent (which shares a lot more with an English accent than most of America).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm South American, but I lived in Cambridge in the 80's (when I was still in primary school). I got 92% and 99% British.

</comment><comment><USER69> Thought I sounded 65% American, told it I was British and not to use me for retraining, then tried again and was 90% British...

</comment><comment><USER70> Born and bred in Dublin, Ireland. I've worked with Americans too long, and am often mistaken for American.

This thing put me at 94% American ;)

</comment><comment><USER71> It's quite poor. Two attempts as a non-english speaker in my normal voice, and 70% british first, then 70% american.

</comment><comment><USER72> This isn't very accurate. I'm Canadian (I sound American) but this thing is claiming my accent is 80% British.

</comment><comment><USER73> Even though I grew up in a Commonwealth country, it says I've got 85% British accent which is totally not correct

<comment><USER74> Huh? Why would you expect your accent to be more American if you grew up in a Commonwealth county?

<comment><USER73> Let's just say that I'm used to pronouncing words the American way

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> How are people saying "Plastic"?

</comment><comment><USER76> 93% British, and when I let my Dutch accent shine through more, it goes up to 98% British.

</comment><comment><USER77> Lived in England and Scotland for 31 years, lived in Australia for 6 years.

67% American 33% British

<comment><USER78> Have you seen the voice controlled elevator sketch on Burnistoun? Give the poor algorithm a break! ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER79> My New England accent got me 50/50\. I guess that makes sense?

</comment><comment><USER76> Maybe this thing classifies all non-American accents as British.

</comment><comment><USER80> Born in India -> living in the U.S for 10+yrs. Got 89% U.S.

</comment><comment><USER81> Sang Polish national anthem and got 72% American.

</comment><comment><USER82> Apparently my british accent is fail

</comment><comment><USER83> 99% accurate for me!

</comment><comment><USER84> I was insulted that it rated my Aussie lingo as "British".

<comment><USER34> :-) I must say though, that for a non-native English speaker, Aussie sounds indeed much more British than American.

<comment><USER85> To this Canadian as well!

<comment><USER86> I'm American and to me, Aussie sounds Aussie, not at all British. I reckon I'd be insulted too.

<comment><USER87> But I bet Aussie doesn't sound American either. It's a binary classification, it will give spurios results if you feed it with input outside its domain.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> I got 50/50

</comment><comment><USER89> Crap ui.

</comment><comment><USER90> 58% 'Murrican 42% British. So, like Irish?

<comment><USER91> I got 70% British for an Irish accent.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> On iPhone this site requires iOS 11 and up. :(

<comment><USER93> so update your iPhone.</comment></comment>


Empty DDoS Threats: Meet the Armada Collective - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/empty-ddos-threats-meet-the-armada-collective/ <comment><USER2> Cloudflare publishes these marketing articles, spinning them as "helpful" for the community. The biggest community help Cloudflare could provide is kicking booters [1] from their network. They won't however, since it needs to protect the booters for Cloudflare's business to prosper.

1\. [http://whois.domaintools.com/booter.xyz](http://whois.domaintools.com/booter.xyz)

(Repeat this whois search for the top 10 booters found in Google)

<comment><USER3> I work for CloudFlare, just an engineer and not a lawyer, etc. This is my opinion but I recognise I work here and am a dumb person from a legal perspective.

One of the things that CloudFlare cares about is due process. That has been blogged about too: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/fighting-back- responsibly/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/fighting-back-responsibly/)

If CloudFlare were to subjectively decide to remove websites or DNS zones, due process goes out of the window as we'd be able to just do whatever we pleased to whomever.

We (collective HN readers, etc) cannot wish to restrict and prevent overreach if we indulge in the very same action by subjectively removing/blocking access. Either a company follows due process, or it does not.

Due process is extremely valuable to a society, relying on a transparent system that has an appeals process should be important to everyone... the legal system gives this, and it's value is so great to society in restricting overreach, that as individuals and as the wider company we have embraced due process, and rejected the things that would weaken it... our own actions.

If you wish to have booters or whomever else removed, please present our legal team with a valid legal request.

<comment><USER2> Indeed, it is the purpose of a court to follow due process, but not of a private entity. From CloudFlare's business standpoint, your decision makers should seriously weigh the reputation damage that this (perfectly legal) "willful negligence" attitude provides: a marketing director of your competitor pointed out that "CouldFlare is protecting most booters" in a phone call with me.

<comment><USER4> Do I want to see booters online? Of course not.

But if CloudFlare were to shut them down without due process, that would damage their credibility - to the point where I would feel uncomfortable doing business with them.

I'm sure there's a group of people where CloudFlare's stance is damaging to their reputation.

But there's also a group of people where any other stance would damage CloudFlare's reputation.

Think also from the customer standpoint: people who need DDoS protection are people who are having their site shutdown without due process (by criminals who launch DoS attacks). When the company you hire to fix the problem becomes part of the problem, it's not good - and they would be part of the problem if they offered a 'send us an email and we shut down our users' denial of service attack vector.

<comment><USER5> Either way, CloudFlare is a part of the problem. They're either protecting booter services (thus necessitating your use of DDoS protection in the first place) or terminating the booter sites without "due process".

It's relevant to mention that CloudFlare already does terminate a class of sites without "due process": malware hosts. What makes malware hosts that much worse than booters? Answer: CloudFlare's IPs can get blacklisted for it.

<comment><USER6> Is it of comparable difficulty to reliably empirically establish 1) malware hosting and 2) operating a booter site?

<comment><USER5> I'd say yes: if you visit a purported malware URL and you are served malware, then it is a malware site. If you visit a purported booter site URL and it advertises booter services, then it is a booter. If the booter sites start trying to hide their identity, fine, I can see not removing that without proof. That will also severely injure the booter's signup rate, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's always shocking to me, that people who can rise to a position where they can make the call to pay a ransom, can be this incredibly gullible/stupid/naive!

<comment><USER8> This is more complex. $4k is not really that much for a company to spend. If you were wrong, well you lost someone's conference trip, if you were right you saved company much more.

Anyway, I hate this CloudFlare articles, it's clever marketing. Essentially they say that if you would use their service you could call bluff, and save that $4k, while they also contribute to the problem by protecting all DDoS for pay services.

<comment><USER7> If you're wrong, you're potentially spending $4K to mark yourself as an especially likely target for someone who doesn't even have the resources to attack you. It's not JUST risk mitigation, it's also about furthering this ridiculous economy that's been springing up since the first XDCC bots were born.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> My company received one of these threats last week. We took it seriously, despite our suspicion it was an empty copycat threat.

</comment><comment><USER10> Why redact bitcoin address that was used for threats?

Let crowd do analysis on address that belongs to criminal.</comment>


Should I use ECC or RSA for my HTTPS certificate? - <AUTHOR> https://certsimple.com/help/ecc-or-rsa-certificate <comment><USER2> Although I like the idea of shorter key-sizes, there are some points you should consider when using ECC (DUAL_EC_PRNG).

Check out Bruce Schneier's blog regarding this topic: [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/why_is_the_ns...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2015/10/why_is_the_nsa_.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Ack. However from the paper Schneier links to:

> The Dual EC DRBG is atypical, in that no other standardized ECC protocol has > any known way to insert a back door.

[https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018.pdf](https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/1018.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Mike from CertSimple here. We know AWS CloudFront and Heroku currently only support RSA, and they're certainly the most common issues with customers, but if there's any other CDNs / PaaS / IaaS with HTTPS termination that don't yet support ECC we'd love to know - I'll update this doc accordingly.</comment>


I'm an ex-Facebook exec: don't believe what they tell you about ads - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/02/facebook-executive-advertising-data-comment <comment><USER2> "The fact that Facebook could easily throw the election by selectively showing a Get Out the Vote reminder in certain counties of a swing state, for example, was a running joke."

Woah. They're asking to be regulated.

<comment><USER3> Not a very good joke. I'd have considered it a moral imperative to act on that impulse.

<comment><USER4> As soon as Facebook takes a political stance, the other half of the population will leave.

<comment><USER5> It is sad that voter participation is a partisan issue in the United States.

<comment><USER6> The idea was telling only those voters in certain counties (who predictably would vote a certain way) to vote; i.e., a less-blatant version of telling exactly the subset of people who are registered to vote for a given party, to go out and vote. That is a partisan action.

<comment><USER4> That was what I meant, although I have to agree with the parent that Facebook really should show everyone a get out and vote message.

<comment><USER5> If they did it would still be seen as a Democratic-leaning message.

<comment><USER7> So Republicans don't want people to vote?

Real question, I'm in Australia and don't know.

<comment><USER8> That's correct. Get-out-the-vote efforts are seen as partisan. I volunteered to help register people to vote (as a non-partisan without any messaging at all) and was verbally abused by Republicans on the street.

Republicans also regularly impose laws to disenfranchise voters. An example is Georgia's law where voters are purged from the rolls every 3 years. Minority voters often only vote every 4 years.

The list goes on and on. These voter suppression tactics are very, very targeted at minorities and Democrats, often to the point that the Supreme Court has to strike them down as unlawful.

<comment><USER2> Yeah, basically if everyone always voted, the Democrats would generally win. That's why Republicans don't want to encourage voter turnout and also want to suppress ease of voting which usually harms poorer people who tend to be Democratic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> "And knowing the Facebook sales playbook, I cannot imagine the company would have concocted such a pitch about teenage emotions without the final hook: "and this is how you execute this on the Facebook ads platform". Why else would they be making the pitch?

The question is not whether this can be done. It is whether Facebook should apply a moral filter to these decisions. Let's assume Facebook does target ads at depressed teens. My reaction? So what. Sometimes data behaves unethically."

This is the key quote for me. It's clear that if this data can be abused, it will be.

<comment><USER9> > This is the key quote for me. It's clear that if this data can be abused, it > will be.

And it's so fucking sad that this is true. This kind of technology could enable Facebook and entities like it to predict when people are feeling depressed, hopeless and suicidal and instead of doing something like presenting a simple message like "Hey are you alright? Do you need some help?" nope, their thought is "this person is RIPE for some well placed marketing."

I get that this guy is likely a product of his industry and he didn't set out from childhood to prey on people's emotions to sell them shit they don't need, at least, in all likelihood. That said I certainly hope there is a hell if for no other reason than this man and all like him really, really belong there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I am surprised people are shocked by this. Personally, I live in Berkeley - within a 20 mile footprint you have a nice sampling of exorbitant wealth and abject poverty.

As you drive through you can see drastic changes of roadside advertisements transitioning between English, Chinese, and Spanish. In the poor areas of town bus stations are plastered with high-interest payday loans. Drive 5 miles North and you will see advertisements for expensive art/music events. Drive slightly more North and you will see endless advertisements for divorce and accident lawyers.

It would be a miracle if all of this store location/advertisement placement was coincidence.

It's such a shtark reality you can stand at the Bus Station, read the bus outside advertisements, and estimate if it's likely to be going where you are. But once you get _inside_ the bus where fewer people of wealth can see, you no longer can.

</comment><comment><USER11> So wait, remind me why we should believe Antonio Garcia Martinez?

The guy trumpeted the fact that he lied to his investors as a point of pride:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_g...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5b4tqe/i_am_antonio_garcia_martinez_a_tech_entrepreneur/)

"Trust me, they're lying, I know because I'm a liar" doesn't seem terribly convincing.

<comment><USER12> Why not? I'm inclined to trust the security advice of a 'reformed' criminal hacker, assuming this individual has no clear reason to be lying to me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Ahh the old "so what" argument.

So what if I can target recovering alchoholics with alchohol ads?

So what if I target gambling addicts with my gambling platform?

So what?

<comment><USER14> There are alcohol and gambling ads on Facebook? Those two in particular often aren't allowed on ad networks.

<comment><USER13> That defeats his whole "so what" argument, Because if those 2 matter others do as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wow, I can't decide if this guy is more morally or intellectually bankrupt. Seriously, "sometimes data behaves unethically"?

Data doesn't do anything. Not even analysis or deep learning does anything. People (or programs written by people) execute decisions on the basis of data. It's still the people being unethical. Big data isn't some magic wand that absolves you of moral responsibility, but it's extremely interesting that at least one marketer at Facebook seems to believe it does.

And that's just one of the many things that manage to be simultaneously offensive and just plain incorrect in what is frankly, a pretty short article.

<comment><USER16> You ought to continue to read past that. Because you missed his point. He goes on to basically question "ethics" entirely:

 _> What did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic stereotype you can imagine....People who liked Jay Z were more likely to like Obama – it was one of the statistical truths Facebook couldn't be seen espousing.

I disagreed. Jay Z is a millionaire music tycoon, so what if we associate him with the president? In our current world, there's a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly, even though there's plenty of data suggesting their correctness, and this was one of them.

African Americans living in postal codes with depressed incomes likely do respond disproportionately to ads for usurious "payday" loans. Hispanics between the ages of 18 and 25 probably do engage with ads singing the charms and advantages of military service.

Why should those examples of targeting be viewed as any less ethical than, say, ads selling $100 Lululemon yoga pants targeting thirtysomething women in affluent postal codes like San Francisco's Marina district? _

<comment><USER17> That's not questioning, that's rejecting wholesale without a proper argument as to why. And frankly I don't at all see the ethical analogy between luxury athleisure and payday loans, and it seems to me you'd have to be pretty damn fucking self-deluded to think they're remotely comparable.

<comment><USER18> it's a good that a demographic buys. that's the way that ethically bereft corporations see it. i would even guess that this is how zuck sees it. people who buy jay-z buy obama. people with lower income buy payday loans. there is nothing ethical about any of this unless you want to add the ethical dimension. corporations are expected not to. and yet the data is allowing them more and more to target these "opportunities".

i wanted to catch some flies over the weekend. i used some soap and vinegar as the vinegar attracts them and the soap breaks the surface tension to drown them. corporations act much the same way. perhaps we need to see them as predators rather than someone looking to solve our problems, much like flies should see me. i don't provide what they want, but they don't see it that way until it's too late.

we sell bad food to overweight people. facebook can help with that. we also sell diets to overweight people. facebook can help with that too. either we add an ethical dimension to business or quit criticizing marketers for doing what they are expected to be doing.

i would even go as far as to argue that a system based on desire is not a good system. as the case with the flies, we can be led to death through our desires and various drives that have another purpose, but have been subverted to achive different objectives. whether as individuals or as a civilization.

<comment><USER19> >>it's a good that a demographic buys.

Oxygen and carbon monoxide are both gases. One of them is poisonous to humans.

<comment><USER18> Corporations will sell you just enough rope to hang yourself unless the government steps in and tells them not to through regulation. But that's the antithesis of business, neo-liberal economics will argue. Canada still sells asbestos to third world countries for instance.

<comment><USER20> Apparently asbestos mining in Canada has ended.

 _Asbestos opponents and those weary of seeing Canada 's mesothelioma rate rise celebrated in 2011 when the country's asbestos industry ground to a standstill. Canada's last two remaining active mines, the Jeffrey Mine in Asbestos, Quebec, and the Lac d'amiante du Canada in the nearby town of Thetford Mines, Quebec, shut down because of financial, labor and development issues — the first time in 130 years that the Canadian asbestos production stalled._[1]

1\. [https://www.asbestos.com/mesothelioma/canada/](https://www.asbestos.com/mesothelioma/canada/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Misleading title - since when did FB product managers become executives?

Though completely believe FB will use their data in any way possible to make money, ethical or not.

<comment><USER22> To be fair "Executive" means "A person or group having administrative or managerial authority in an organization."

Seniority of the product manager role depends on a number of factors. Sure, most FB product managers are not considered execs these days, but he was their first Product Manager responsible for ad targeting and then their advertising exchange all the way back in 2011. That probably brought with it a team, a good salary and a lot of sway.

Unlike the cookie-cutter 9-5 corporations of yesteryear, startups have been pretty loose with standard job naming convention. You can be fresh out of a BA and get called "CMO" or you can be a 20-year veteran leading a team making executive decisions and just be a "Product Specialist."

The responsibilities and compensation define executives far more than titles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> The problem with any platform like Facebook (though Facebook happens to be have the richest seam of user data, at scale and across devices) is that the segment with the highest clickthrough rate will inevitably be one which draws on shady factors.

It will be the segment deliberately concocted to find that most vulnerable / subsceptible to buy. If you're looking to ship garbage self help books, you're going to target people who like garbage self help book writers. Rinse and repeat for preppers etc.

To prevent this you essentially either have to ask marketers to hobble their own search terms even when they know there is likely a higher CTR out there (like payday loan companies willingly deciding not to advertise on daytime TV), or asking Facebook to hobble its own platform.

Until there is some kind of regulation or FTC pushback I can't see the situation improving.

</comment><comment><USER24> This is a tricky problem in pretty much the entire consumer-facing ML space. For example, even if you don't feed in 'protected classes' \- you can say 'the algo finds a way'. It might figure out a certain zip code won't pay back a loan, so it will down weight them accordingly - even though that zip may predominantly be one ethnicity. Is that discriminating on a protected class? Well, kinda. It's discriminating on a proxy for a protected class which, if we're getting technical, is really a (poor) proxy for cultural, genetic, and socio-economic backgrounds.

So it's in some ways 'more fair' but it does take away our ability to 'socially engineer' certain decisions by prohibiting use of one feature or another.

</comment><comment><USER25> Advertisers and Facebook don't have to try to target emotionally troubled teens in order to target emotionally troubled teens. All they have to do is have an advertisement that works well on emotionally troubled teens, have sufficiently correlated targeting tools, and run an optimization algorithm like gradient descent.

To take a slightly different example: it doesn't matter if Facebook doesn't offer racial targeting if a payday loan company runs ads segmented by zip code and picks the best performing areas that happen to be predominantly black.

EDIT: This should teach me to read the entire article first, since I made up an example that was literally used in the article. My bad.

<comment><USER26> The main problems they're talking about are PR problems, not ethical problems (if you assume that advertising itself is ethical, which I don't necessarily think is true). Specific types of targeting are then bad because of the optics, not because of their efficacy.

Put another way, there's no ethical problem with recommending that people who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there.

<comment><USER27> > _Put another way, there 's no ethical problem with recommending that people > who follow Jay-Z should follow Obama, but there's a PR problem there._

I agree with that specific statement, but I would say there is an ethical problem with the similar situation of recommending payday loans to poor people.

The difference is recommending Obama to Jay-Z followers isn't harmful to those followers, but recommending payday loans to poor people is.

<comment><USER26> I mean, is it any less ethical than recommending that poor people purchase things in general? The _point_ of advertising is to convince people to make purchasing decisions that they wouldn't have otherwise made, which is almost always damaging financially.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that you're wrong- I think that the argument you made applies to advertising in general, and that it's correct.

<comment><USER27> > _The point of advertising is to convince people to make purchasing decisions > that they wouldn 't have otherwise made, which is almost always damaging > financially._

That's not really true. People purchase things because they decide that the benefit is worth the cost. Advertising makes people pick one brand over another when they already plan to buy something, and it helps sway someone's decision when they're not sure if it's worth buying. It also brings their attention to products that they wouldn't otherwise have known about. But this sort of advertising is almost never "damaging financially", unless you think the act of buying something counts as financial damage.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> >Why should those examples of targeting be viewed as any less ethical than, say, ads selling $100 Lululemon yoga pants targeting thirtysomething women in affluent postal codes like San Francisco's Marina district?

Because one can cause poverty and the other doesn't.

<comment><USER28> How does an ad cause poverty?

<comment><USER14> If it encourages someone to do something that will cause them to go into poverty, such as taking a payday loan they can't afford.

<comment><USER28> I don't think it's actually responsible for the problem then. The choice rests entirely with that person.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> "In our current world, there's a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly, even though there's plenty of data suggesting their correctness"

Truer words were never spoken.

</comment><comment><USER30> So yeah obviously Facebook like any other large advertising platform is gonna use its data for seedy means. What's crazy to me is that the author seems to be using the word 'ethics' synonymously with the concept of political correctness. As if he actually does not know the difference.

</comment><comment><USER31> He's a nice guy. But his book is way past its sell-date - time to stop milking it so much & get on to the next gig/book/whatever.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=antongm](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=antongm)

<comment><USER32> Lol. Nope. It's been out less than a year. How many writing careers do you follow?

<comment><USER31> Everybody I know and his cat has read the book. Give us another book. How about reprinting the old adgrok blog posts about why SF is better than nyc because person in NYC is significant only if they showed up in the Sunday marriage section, whereas the SF guy can build something out of thin air and climb the rings of Fame. I dug that.

<comment><USER32> That's on the Wayback Machine, not that it was the Gettysburg Address or anything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> "Sometimes data behaves unethically."

No, data doesn't behave at all. This is quite a cynical deflection of responsibility for ethically questionable actions taken by people.

<comment><USER34> Ethics is a human construct. So data could very well show that unethical (by some definition) behaviour is profitable.

I think this is the point being made: the data shows, beyond statistical doubt, that payday loan ads aimed at a certain demographic have better conversion, ergo profit. The data also shows, beyond statistical doubt, that [current fashionable brand] yoga pant ads aimed at a certain demographic have better conversion, ergo profit. The data doesn't care. If you are an ad-funded company (as both facebook and google are), you can't afford to ignore the data, it's your differentiator.

I'm not saying I agree with it, I am saying that ethics is an opinion, data is fact. I long for a time when we as a species evolve beyond being so predictably influenced by propaganda.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Can you run an ad for Final Exit [1] aimed at depressed teens?

If you ask Amazon "suicide how to", you get exactly what you asked for.[2] Is that wrong?

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/Final-Exit-Digital-2011-Self- Delivera...](https://www.amazon.com/Final-Exit-Digital-2011-Self-Deliverance- ebook/dp/B004TGU1VY/) [2]

<comment><USER36> "Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator. It's like a monster truck you can pour into your face."

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I don't agree with his claims that the following are among "a long list of Truths That Cannot Be Stated Publicly". I don't think anyone would care; I care very much about racism and can't imagine anyone I know objecting to these.

* "people who liked Jay Z were more likely to like Obama"

* "Hispanics between the ages of 18 and 25 probably do engage with ads singing the charms and advantages of military service."

(I'm skipping the other example because it's an issue of economic exploitation, not ethnicity.)

<comment><USER38> Yeah, basically if you have any kind of oppressed category of people, you can take advantage of them by exploiting their vulnerabilities (lack of education, lack of access to credit, etc). If you aren't careful with how you use your algorithms, you can come up with all kinds of systems that reinforce systemic racism.

<comment><USER37> A good point that I overlooked; thanks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Dumb article is dumb. Ex-product manager = / = Facebook exec, this person also hasn't worked there in four years. "Targeting emotionally troubled teens" without detailed explanation as to how someone could implies simplicity in the matter, but it's not like an advertiser is typing in "show my ads to emotionally troubled teens please."

<comment><USER32> Dumb reader is dumb. It's an op-ed not an article. For the details, perhaps open FB's ad creation UI. You are indeed correct you don't target ads like you enter a search query.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Just started reading Chaos Monkeys. Thoroughly enjoying it so far (am up to Zuck's inner circle of desks). Guardianistas are a funny lot aren't they. They write as if people who can endure the push and shove of business long enough to try to improve things from the inside (unlike themselves) are going to be anti-business (like themselves).

</comment><comment><USER41> "We are not Facebook's customer. We are their product."

I have stated that fact so many times to so many people, and yet most people don't care. They continue to use Facebook.

It's almost as if people are addicted to Facebook.

<comment><USER42> We're both the customer and the product.

I'm the product to advertisers, but also to my friends.

Similarly I am the customer to the products that are my friends.

<comment><USER43> The product is bait.

You're keeping your friends there, they're keeping you there, and now the group of you brings in the bigger fish.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Sometimes data behave unethically -- I just can't take that much of cynism

</comment><comment><USER45> > Let's assume Facebook does target ads at depressed teens. My reaction? So > what. Sometimes data behaves unethically.

Stop right there. Data has no behavior. _You_ behave unethically. Data informs a decision, but _you_ are making the decision. Take responsibility.

<comment><USER46> I think you and he have sort of the same point: data has no ethical orientation. If you unpacked that sentence, he would probably clarify it to "data behaves in ways that, if there was a human making that call, would be unethical".

What makes the situation interesting is that there's not necessarily a person that makes the decision to do potentially damaging ad targeting: if you want to prevent it, you probably have to specifically prevent it in each case. Is Facebook responsible for preventing every single unethical ad targeting? Given the unfeasibility of that, does this problem mean we should call it quits on targeted ads entirely?

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> A little off-topic, but from the article:

> _I'll illustrate with an anecdote from my Facebook days. Someone on the data > science team had cooked up a new tool that recommended Facebook Pages users > should like. And what did this tool start spitting out? Every ethnic > stereotype you can imagine. We killed the tool when it recommended then > president Obama if a user had "liked" rapper Jay Z..._

The author left Facebook in 2013 [0], so I had assumed by now Facebook could do a proper job of recommendations. It's been awhile since I've "Liked" a page, so I just tried it (In-N-Out Burger) and was extremely surprised to see that Facebook apparently still doesn't provide a popup for related pages I may also "Like", in the same way that Twitter does whenever you follow _any_ user.

That's _really_ surprising. For starters, Twitter has had user suggestions for several years now, and it has _much_ less structured data to work with than Facebook does -- for example, a FB page can specify its category, address, and many other attributes; Twitter has nothing to go by other than user's name, account screen name, biography, a location field, and connection metadata (i.e. geolocated IP). Yet it's been awhile if ever since I've seen Twitter recommend someone truly off, e.g. President Obama and Jay-Z.

In contrast, Facebook provides a _related stories_ feature for news stories a user shares in the feed - or at least it did before the fake news thing blew up. Is this a signal that Facebook doesn't really care about user engagement with brand pages? Or did the fuckup that the author describes make it so that this was a feature that no product manager wants to be associated with?

(Or it could be that I'm just missing the Related Pages feature. Maybe it shows up in mobile and not the browser version)

edit: It's strange that the feature doesn't exist in 2017, but this anecdote, as portrayed by the author, reflects badly on both Facebook's data science and the author. I mean, how is it possible for so many smart people to not figure out how to fix such undesired associations? There are so many other signals for clustering related users beyond similar followers.

edit 2: This feature _does_ exist -- you have to like a post in your news feed (on the website), and then Facebook will append a "Related" box in your newsfeed. Unless your browser window is open particularly high, the fact that the "Related" box was triggered by the Like action is obfuscated (because it is out of view). Still doesn't explain why they couldn't make the feature work in 2012-2013.

edit 3: Appears author is wrong about the tool being "killed". Seems to still exist, though maybe it was only temporarily "killed"

[http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-suggests-similar- page...](http://www.adweek.com/digital/facebook-suggests-similar-pages-after- users-click-like-on-pages-timeline/)

[https://www.facebook.com/addpage](https://www.facebook.com/addpage)

[0] [https://www.linkedin.com/in/antongm/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/antongm/)

<comment><USER32> There have been dozens of page recommender units, which have come and gone.

<comment><USER47> Thanks for clearing that up!</comment></comment></comment>


Waking Up from the 'Nightmare on Tech Street' - <AUTHOR> http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/12/waking-up-from-nightmare-on-tech-street.html

<comment><AUTHOR> Are people doing anything to reduce their consumption? I just spent $300 to have a laptop repaired. In the past I would have rather put that money toward a new one.

<comment> puzzle-out I've just finished up a Phd, so missed the consumption party anyhow, but still using a two year old hp desktop and four year old mac laptop - I would repair rather than upgrade unless a new model would actually cost less than the repairs (which has often been the case the last five years).</comment></comment>


How to Pass a Silicon Valley Software Engineering Interview - <AUTHOR> http://paultyma.blogspot.com/2007/03/howto-pass-silicon-valley-software.html <comment><USER2> I thought #1 was great and the rest felt like watered down or badly written versions of standard advice.

The focus on "algorithms 101" is pretty thinly veiled snobbery IMHO. If he knew math itself really well he'd probably claim that was of _vital importance_ to all programming at Google too. Instead he falls back on what he does know that feels like "real computer science".

My experience is that most programming is usually pretty unscientific and that things like great taste in design are far more important than the scalability of any given algorithm.

I'd bet there are a 100 CS PHDs at Google for every truly challenging problem solvable by a more scalable algorithm.</comment>


Tell HN: Show me the damn shipping fee - <AUTHOR>

If you sell product that requires payment and shipment, and you want to improve your purchase conversion rate, please calculate and show the damn shipping fee right away!
I shouldn't have to create an account, I shouldn't have to type in payment details, and I shouldn't have to dig around your site to see what the amounts are.
Just have a box for me to enter my shipping address — maybe even on every item's store page! (and remember what I typed in) — and show me the cheapest shipping option. If/when I check out you can give me all sorts of crazy shipping options to choose from. <comment><USER2> _" Just have a box for me to enter my shipping address..."_

Even your full shipping address shouldn't be required in the U.S., just your 5-digit zip code. Actually, it might be fairly easy to guess what city a customer is in based on their IP address and fill in a default location automatically. If it's close enough, the customer wouldn't have to do anything.

This, by the way, is why I like Amazon Prime so much: I don't have to deal with any extra steps (physical or mental) to determine the shipping price - the purchase is frictionless. But that would work even if the shipping wasn't free, as long as the price that was listed included shipping.

<comment><AUTHOR> Zip code. Yes. That's what I meant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Yeeeeeeeees. Doubly important for international shipping. Countless times did I have to go through Amazon's checkout only to find out they won't ship a given item internationally (or that it costs >100$).

<comment><USER4> There's a slight complication with international shipping, but it's not related to this post.

Some carriers will 'helpfully' inspect the imported goods, work out what the import duties are, and then ask you to pay those duties and a fee to cover the work they did before they release the goods to you. I have no idea what they'd do if you presented them with a receipt showing that you had already paid the import duties on the item. It is very frustrating to pay a lot of money for shipping and the. Have to pay extra for an unwanted service.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I strongly agree.

What are the reasons for not showing shipping fees?

Is it a bit complicated? (Like US sales tax)

Or is it just a desire to show the lowest cost possible until the customer has almost finished the buying process, and then spring an $X charge and hope they don't abandon the cart?

Ebay UK and Amazon UK seem to mostly have this right. I wanted to buy a book. I found plenty at £0.01 but the shipping was clearly listed at £2.whatever. This makes me much more likely to actually buy.

(Incidentally the book was John Allen Paulos's "a mathematician reads the newspaper". A bargain at a few quid.)

<comment><AUTHOR> > What are the reasons for not showing shipping fees?

Lazy design. They want you to finish shopping. I also think they want you to commit first. If someone goes through the hassle to set up an account, add the items to the account, type in billing information, only to find out the shipping is going to cost $5 or $10 more than they were expecting to pay, customers then might just decide to eat it. It's too much work to go through all that again somewhere else.

Mind you, this whole issue is a lot better than it was years ago.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Hear! Hear!</comment>


Share code that uses new URL Search tool and win AWS credit - <AUTHOR> http://commoncrawl.org/url-search-tool/

<comment><USER2> While I know that some of the pages of my home page are in the crawl, they do not show up with the following query: [http://urlsearch.commoncrawl.org/?q=nl.utwente.cs.wwwhome%2F...](http://urlsearch.commoncrawl.org/?q=nl.utwente.cs.wwwhome%2F~hiemstra) nor with: [http://urlsearch.commoncrawl.org/?q=nl.utwente.cs.wwwhome%2F...](http://urlsearch.commoncrawl.org/?q=nl.utwente.cs.wwwhome%2F%7Ehiemstra) (no, this is not only an ego search problem ;-) )

<comment><USER3> Yes, that's a little odd. If you shorten the search term, the results come up just fine: [http://urlsearch.commoncrawl.org/?q=nl.utwente.cs.wwwhome/~h...](http://urlsearch.commoncrawl.org/?q=nl.utwente.cs.wwwhome/~h&start=60)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I hope that some of you who use/play around with the Common Crawl data will try out using the JSON files from the URL Search and then share your code.

If you didn't see the details in the blog post, Common Crawl is giving out $100 in AWS credit to the first five people who share code that incorporates a JSON file from the URL Search.

<comment><USER4> Is it possible to get a list of webhosts, like all the domains and subdomains, stripped from the rest of the url?

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> From @djoerd Why does @CommonCrawl URL search (<http://urlsearch.commoncrawl.org/> ) need 'tld.domain' format rather than 'domain.tld'? Read Google's BigTable paper.

</comment><comment><USER5> Why can't they just write code that reverses the input?

<comment><USER6> The main intent of the search is to retrieve a list of urls that the site crawled for a given subdomain, domain or tld. So for now you can do that using reversed url notation. Which I admit is not very intuitive.

We're toying with the idea of implementing some sort of wild card that way we can present the urls in natural order. Something like *.google.com to retrieve all urls under google. But we wanted to judge the level of interest first. After all "done" is better than "perfect".

<comment><AUTHOR> "Done" is better than "perfect" should be on a sign hanging in every startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I'd love it if there was a feature to search for a specific URL. Like if "com.google" just loaded the Google homepage if you put it in quotes.

<comment><USER6> good suggestion

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Top results for "com" are a little odd. Seems like @ wasn't filtered from the domain part of the URL (though it should be, I would think).

<comment><USER6> I think it's just that the site converts unicode urls for display purposes. If you click on one of the links with "@" in it, you'll see the real url in url encoded format

<http://%firstname.lastname@example.com/Ajax/get.comments/oid/4612> 184.108.40.206 20120516214328 text/html 912

</comment></comment><comment><USER2> The first FAQ link seems to be broken (maybe a web server setting gone bad?) BTW, this is a great resource. Thanks for sharing this!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the catch Djoerd! We will fix it now</comment></comment>


Ask HN: How to get people to tell you their problems? - <AUTHOR> YCombinator, Startup School, etc. all discuss working through issues with potential customers. Asking them about their problems.<p>How do you start that conversation? Because it seems rather difficult to get just some random person to tell you their problems at work or at home. <comment><USER2> First of all, this is a huge topic, about which entire books could be written. And, in fact, entire books _have_ been written on this topic. So don't expect anything approaching a comprehensive treatment in a post here.

That said... start with empathy. Put yourself in your prospects shoes, so to speak. Think about the things you _will_ talk about with someone you don't know, the things you won't, and why they differ. Further consider how you decide who you will and won't talk about certain things with.

Example: let's say you're a guy and you have ED. Most guys consider this incredibly embarrassing and wouldn't talk about it with many people. You might even be reluctant to tell your doctor. But you probably would, eventually. OTOH, you might be sitting at a bar, have a stranger sit down next to you who asks "how's it going", and then you blurt out "Ah, hell, my dick doesn't work, the transmission in my car is shot, and my dog died. How about you?"

So, why would you tell your doctor about your embarrassing condition? Probably because your doctor has massive _credibility_ in your eyes and represents a source of a resolution to your problem.

But why tell the stranger in the bar? He/she can't help right? Maybe not, but since they are a total stranger that you'll probably never see again, you can safely tell them without caring one whit about their _judgment_ of your condition.

So, maybe demonstrating credibility and a non-judgmental attitude are keys to getting people to talk about things? Granted, this is an over-simplified example, but think through some similar scenarios and see where it leads you.

Regarding credibility: a lot of this is tied up in the research you've already done (you did do preliminary research, right?) related to your prospect (in terms of industry vertical, demographics, geography, etc.), and the questions you ask. Asking good questions is a good way to demonstrate that you know what you're talking about and may represent - as your doctor does - a viable source to some mitigation of the problem at hand.

Beyond that: many/most books written on the topic of selling and sales cover this ground to varying degrees. Search the HN archives for the (many) threads on "sales book recommendations" and peruse some of the titles. There are also a lot of books written to target consultants or would-be consultants that deal with similar material.

<comment><USER3> Great answers. The Judgement thing can be seen when you are at a conference or training and they say "there are no dumb questions". Personally I like to respond with "What is the capital of <obscure state or country>". Gets a nice laugh every time.

<comment><USER2> Respect and trust are also important, and kinda relate back to the "non judgmental" part. If you ask somebody a question that pre-supposes that they made a mistake, or are stupid, or don't know their own industry, etc., then that person is probably going to react in a very defensive fashion and put up walls to avoid talking to you. You have to show people that you respect them, and that they can trust you to treat them with respect and dignity, and not belittle or demean them.

There's an idea that pickup artists talk about, called "enter her world". The notion goes something like this: if you're out at a bar, and you're a guy, and you see an attractive woman you want to talk to, you approach her and start a conversation, at which point you're just "another sleazy guy in a bar". But if you quickly demonstrate, using your questions, statements, stories, etc., that you have some understanding of the woman's world, the issues she has to deal with, etc., then you can "enter her world" and now you're not _just_ "a sleazy guy at a bar". Now the barriers go down a little bit and the conversation becomes more personal, and more meaningful. OK, it's not a perfect analogy, but you can probably see the connection. The point is basically that you have to earn admission into someone's world if you want them to talk about things beyond a superficial level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have a background in UX before diving into programming. And the simple answer is just to talk to people and then ask in a friendly way. How you start the conversation doesn't matter much at the start. As long as it isn't off putting people are quite friendly.

I found it always help to explain your goal/project your working on. Starting the conversation with: "Hi I'm working on a fun project and wanted to get out and talk to some people about it. Do you have some time to help me?"

After doing this with 30 people in your social circle, slowly start reading up and improving your approach and start asking people further away from you

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't make these pronouncements often, but what you need to know is settled science ;) If you read then actually follow "The Mom Test" you'll get the answers you need. To me it's one of the most revolutionary books in business and should be required reading for anyone doing a startup.

No relation to the author, I don't make money off the recommendation, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> I have the opposite problem. I avoid human interaction because I haven't figured out how to get people to _stop_ talking to me about their problems.

<comment><USER7> Are they problems they'd pay you to fix?

<comment><USER6> They don't pay me enough to listen, let alone provide fixes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Getting really good at conversation helps.

Two books I would recommend are

How to Win Friends and Influence People

And

The Mom Test</comment>


Ask HN: Why are you coasting at your day job? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> To avoid/recover from burnout and to get the work/life balance correct after spending many years slavishly giving all my expendable energy and thinking ability to my work and employers (who did not concern themself with my state) at the expense of my happiness and to the detriment of my general positive outlook on life. My mind is less burdened which leaves me opportunity to actually enjoy life instead of it passing by whilst I was consumed with thoughts of difficulties at work.

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm currently in-between projects and will be going on vacation -- more like time off due to training and accrued comp days -- next week. Hell, I'm not complaining.</comment>


What HR Professionals Look For in a Programmer's Resume - <AUTHOR> http://www.javaworld.com/community/node/3405

<comment><USER2> _The best way is to highlight achievements with numbers. It's especially helpful to use numbers that have business meaning. An HR person doesn't need to be a techie to understand "saved company $2 million" or "reduced hours by 70%."_

I good structure for these items on a resume is a mini version of the SAR (situation-action-result) technique used in personal statement writing. You describe a situation that was less than ideal, what actions you took, and the benefit to the company that resulted. For example,

 _"Before my appointment as IT Director, Acme Co. was spending $52,000 annually on telecom expenses. After examining several alternatives, I was able to implement a VOIP solution, saving the company $37,000 per year while increasing phone system reliability."_</comment>


Show HN: Forestry.io – A full CMS for Hugo/Jekyll in a single (React) file - <AUTHOR> https://forestry.io/remote <comment><AUTHOR> Hey folks,

I was building a website for a friend and I REALLY didn't want to use WordPress. I was tired of updating plugins, dealing with hacked sites, paying for expensive hosting, etc. So, my co-founder and I built Forestry.io, a CMS for Jekyll and Hugo sites that works with GitHub and allows you to host anywhere.

Instead of 100's of PHP files, Forestry is a full CMS in a single html file. Drop it into your static Hugo or Jekyll site and log from mysite.com/admin/. Boom done. No updates required, no hassle.

It commits all content updates back to your GitHub repo and can publish to your host (Amazon S3, FTP, GitHub Pages, etc). If you commit to your repo, Forestry will pull in your changes so people using the CMS will see them.

Looking forward to everyone's feedback.</comment>


How Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are rushing to cash in on cannabis - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/2014/04/high-tech/ <comment><USER2> I thought this piece on Vox was pretty clear-eyed about the economic impact of legalized marijuana; it's skeptical about the value of the pot startup market (its author is a legalization advocate, as am I).

[http://www.vox.com/2014/4/16/5620322/how-legalized-pot- would...](http://www.vox.com/2014/4/16/5620322/how-legalized-pot-would-change- america)

<comment><USER3> If we are going to legalize pot, I would prefer that it be legal to send via post.

I'd support a method where any individual address could subscribe to a certain amount of pot delivered via mail per month.

I can already do this with a wine club... Why not a pot club.

<comment><USER4> > I can already do this with a wine club... Why not a pot club.

I'd be happy to have the wine club. It's illegal to ship alcohol to more than half the US states, including mine. Can't buy it at the grocery store either.

<comment><USER5> > _Can 't buy it at the grocery store either._

In Pennsylvania, some grocery stores get around this ban _(which includes liquor and wine anywhere other than state stores, and beer in stores that are not exclusively beer distributors)_ by creating a small building within their store that operates somewhat separately as a "cafe" or restaurant, which _are_ allowed to sell alcohol (since they also serve food).

For example, the _" Whole Foods Market Devon-Mile Post Pub"_ ([http://www.beermenus.com/places/2550-whole-foods-market- devo...](http://www.beermenus.com/places/2550-whole-foods-market-devon-mile- post-pub)) is basically a garden shed with a walkin refrigerator that is _inside_ of the Whole Foods. While it can sell beer, the enclosing Whole Foods cannot.

Really a ridiculous system. If pot legalization progresses as alcohol legalization did/continues to, then we have a long road ahead of us.

<comment><USER6> Ironically, Colorado has alcohol laws that are even more bizarre than that. Until 2008, it was illegal to sell alcohol on Sundays. To this day, no corporate entity may own more than a single liquor store, and no grocery stores may sell anything other than 3.2% beer.

So, Whole Foods, Costco, and, more recently, Trader Joe's, each have a single location in Colorado that has an attached (but separate) liquor store. The other locations are not allowed to sell anything but 3.2% beer.

<comment><USER7> That is pretty bizarre--though I don't know if I'm ready to concede that it's _more_ bizarre than Pennsylvania. Until recently you couldn't buy liquor or wine (but beer was okay, for some reason) on Sundays in Pennslvania unless you were being served in a restaurant. For a real spectacle of oddity you need to see the bottle shop dance[1] that I describe in another comment.

I don't think I've ever seen a beer with an ABV above 1% and below 4%. What kinds/brands of beer are these?

[1][https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613369](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7613369)

<comment><USER8> Bud light and other light beers tend to land in 3.2% territory, I think. And some brands specifically make 3.2 beer catering to the PA market (it may not even be available in your area if your state doesn't have weird restrictions around 3.2%, like PA or UT).

<comment><USER7> Light beers are usually higher than 4%. Bud Light is 4.2%

[1] [http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/29/1320/](http://www.beeradvocate.com/beer/profile/29/1320/)

EDIT: Ah, here's the confusion. I'm pretty sure the 3.2% is ABW instead of the usual ABV. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low- alcohol_beer#Categories](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low- alcohol_beer#Categories)

<comment><USER8> You're right, I looked up Bud Light and it was 4.2 and I was confused :/.

Not sure on if 3.2 and ABW applies in all 3.2 states. My only knowledge of this comes from my ~75 year old uncle, who told me that you used to be able to buy 3.2 beer when you were 18 (depending on the state; he was probably in CA or WA).

I don't drink anymore, but when I did, it was all craft / microbrews, which are typically 5-7% ABV ;). The lowest I've seen is 4.7% (Founder's All Day IPA, a session IPA). And some of the DIPAs and Imperial stouts and wild ales / Belgian trippels/quads go to 8-12% ABV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Paul Graham talks about people who "live in the future" \-- in a specific area of their lives, they see clearly that some change is coming long before everyone else catches on. It seems the trend towards legalization of marijuana is one such area -- it probably is one of the next gold rushes. (In my opinion, 2 other such areas are virtual reality and the Rust programming language).

<comment><USER10> Many cannabis dispensaries and growers have been successful small business for a long time now in states where it's legal. In fact dispensaries in California lobbied against full legalization in an effort to protect the existing economics. I guess they are making lots of money already and fear consolidation and industrial grow ops will change the business and hurt their margins.

VR has a long way to go imo. Having used the first gen occulus, though interesting, it feels gimmicky and very much reminds me of 3D glasses(in terms of hype vs how cool the tech is in practice). Few people will willingly strap a vision obscuring black box to their face for more than a few minutes at a time to try it out. Probably worse than that, even if it was fun to play games with, it probably wouldn't catch on mainstream for a long time because the dork factor is incredibly high. It's like google glass on steroids.

Rust is not that different from existing languages.

I appear to be disagreeable today, apologies.

<comment><USER9> Lol, I appreciate well-thought out disagreement. You may be right about VR ... possibly it's too early. But it's day will come, undeniably. I also think full legalization of marijuana is undeniable, even if there are some roadblocks.

Rust, as far as I know, is the _only_ language trying to pursue compile-time memory safety while still giving the developer control over memory allocation and cleanup. That's absolutely a game-changer, and _no other language_ (that I know of) is even trying to tackle it.

There's a lot I don't love about Rust, but that one feature trumps everything. There are sexy languages I get excited about (Nimrod, Lisp, Haskell), but the feature the world needs most is memory-safety with low-level control.

I think once that feature is delivered with a full release, the world will flip from "ho hum" to "holy crap, we have to have this."

<comment><USER11> Does that mean that Rust would be a good candidate for writing security/crypto libraries in?

<comment><USER12> In theory, yes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Yet another cannabis article that completely ignores Seattle. Where's the reporting about Winterlife?

<comment><USER14> Every time I meet one of their couriers in broad daylight, and they hand me a receipt, I feel like I'm just grazing a tiny part of history. It's not Rosa Parks level. It's a smaller matter, but it's still an important change for Western society, which legitimizes very, very few kinds of states of consciousness, and strongly favors the one that makes you most productive in a job.

<comment><USER15> For minorities it's not a small matter. i502 is about so much more than getting high, it's about eliminating a policy which was so often enforced at the discretion of the officer and prosecutor, which opened the door for all kinds of discrimination.

the war on drugs is one of the most damaging policies for society, and i502 is a substantial step in the right direction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Tranzbyte's new Zazzz marijuana vending machine looks pretty sweet though! I think it has the potential for countless uses, far beyond the cannabis industry.

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/04/14/pot-vending- ma...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014/04/14/pot-vending- machine/7704059/)

<comment><USER17> Have seen this for wine, and also required a breathalyzer. Cool tech but they eventually were removed and never saw it being used regularly.

<comment><USER18> Regulation stifling innovation. Sad.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I've started a pot delivery system where you can select your delivery location via a smart-phone app; Doober. Like Uber - but for Pot - PM for details!

</comment><comment><USER19> I've spoken with people who work for the state of Oregon.... state employees who are working on the software infrastructure for recreational marijuana dealers. Licensing, taxing, etc. It's basically a scaled up version of the current system of medical growers/distributors but tailored for recreational use.

That's how confident they are legalization is coming in the next few years.

<comment><USER11> I thought it was legal in those states? Also, it's a bit of a virtuous cycle: legalization is coming because many people think it is coming.

</comment></comment><comment> at-fates-hands "Defying projections, crime has dropped since the law went into effect January 1, and the flow of new tax revenue, more than $2 million a month, is on par with the state's haul from alcohol taxes. Is this what the pot-friendly future of America looks like?"

It sounds like all rainbows and unicorns right? Well, not exactly. . .

"Marijuana is by far the No. 1 cause of student expulsions from Colorado public schools" \- [http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/more- younger...](http://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/more-younger- students-bringing-marijuana-to-schools-around-colorado-investigators-claim)

"Colo. kids getting into parents' pot-laced goodies" \- [http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/02/marijua...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/04/02/marijuana- pot-edibles-colorado/7154651/)

"Colorado News: Pot problems in Colorado schools increase with legalization" \- [http://www.summitdaily.com/news/marijuana/8877953-113/mariju...](http://www.summitdaily.com/news/marijuana/8877953-113/marijuana- schools-colorado-kids)

"Harmless pot? New marijuana study shows brain damage in those 18-25" \- [http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865601141/Harmless-pot- Ne...](http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865601141/Harmless-pot-New- marijuana-study-shows-brain-damage-in-those-18-25.html)

Yeah the tax benefits are great for the state, but there's going to be a lot of unintended consequences. Not sure I'd want my kids getting exposed to this at a young age.

EDIT: I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Downvotes for a one article and nobody presenting any fear of their kids being involved with pot at an early age.

I will simply leave with you a family friends comment to me who's been a drug counsellor for 25 years, "In my 25 years of practice, all of my patients who came to me seeking help with their addictions, they all had one thing in common - they all started with marijuana."

<comment><USER20> > "Harmless pot? New marijuana study shows brain damage in those 18-25"

I downvoted you for endorsing this stain on the reputation of science journalism. Tiny sample size, writer exaggerates findings to craft a clickbait article title, it's awful. We deserve something better than tabloid reporting in our science articles.

<comment><USER21> I also disagreed with the parent comment, but meta point: I'm not sure down voting is fair in this situation. Parent seems genuine and earnest in their comment. It seems like it'd be enough to simply reply with the counter point...

<comment><USER20> I haven't seen an etiquette guide for HN anywhere, but if we can't downvote the promotion of bad science journalism, what can we downvote?

<comment><USER22> It isn't promotion of bad science journalism. It's a crap story, but there are 3 other links in there too. I'm strongly pro-legalization and think the concerns are overblowon, but a lot of people are using the 'bad science' complaint to silence a point of view they dislike.

<comment><USER20> It's true, I do find the old 'think of the children' appeal to emotion, and the trotting out of the 'gateway drug' myth to be distasteful. However, I'm not silencing anyone's point of view--I don't have admin rights on HN, just the ability to rate comments.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>