Who to Sue When a Robot Loses Your Fortune - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-06/who-to-sue-when-a-robot-loses-your-fortune <comment><USER4> If you're an accredited or institutional investor, then you have only yourself to blame (unless the investment was misrepresented, in which case it should be the one who sold/brokered the investment).

In this case, the investor was foolish to believe that a magic AI system could generate reliable positive returns. At the same time, it sounds like the performance of the system was misrepresented. Either way, if you're responsible for 1bn of assets, you better do really good homework.

<comment><USER5> This.

Investing is not a guaranteed return system. You might win, or you might lose all your money. At the end of the day, the only person who is responsible for it is you.

Don't want to lose your money? Don't invest.

<comment><USER6> > At the end of the day, the only person who is responsible for it is you.

There are rules about fraud and fiduciary duty and disclosure which make blanket statements like this incorrect.

<comment><USER4> I think the point is, an experienced investor should be able to either see through a fraud or at least do proper due diligence before investing a large sum. Plus, institutions often make a small initial test investment. If the performance is as expected, risk considered, then they may make the big investment.

A retail investor can't be expected to properly research claims, but a professional should be.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Robots don't just spring in to existence from nothing. _Someone_ made the decisions necessary to make the robot do the work they're selling (even if that's just deciding what training data and biases to feed in to something they choose to call AI). You can sue that person.

<comment><USER8> You sue whoever misrepresented the robot's capabilities to you. There's nothing wrong with making a robot that's bad at trading. There is something wrong with pretending it's not bad at trading when you're selling it.

<comment><USER9> What if that person didn't fully understand how the robot worked? The best your could hope for is negligence

<comment><USER7> There are places where adopting AI is going to be difficult for this reason - notably anywhere that has a legal requirement to explain _why_ a decision went a particular way. That includes things like insurance risk models, pension investments, etc.

<comment><USER10> The losses made by software training may be the least problem for the institution.If case goes to court,they may be required to reveal the reasoning behind software's decision and that means going through the code,as all that marketing bs called AI is just a trading algorithm trained on some datasets. No company would want to reveal the code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> It seems like this hedge fund was run by people who didn't understand finance in the first place. This is how many quant funds work:

1.You develop an alpha factor that you believe is associated with out performance.

2\. You control risk factors such as beta, volatility, Fama French 3 factor, etc.

3\. Now you create a neutral L/S portfolio that only has exposure to your alpha factor while also negating the risk factors like beta and volatility.

4\. Backtest it, run a paper portfolio for awhile, etc.

5\. Combine your new alpha factor with a bunch of other factors that you have already developed. The idea being that layering these alpha factors on top of each other will negate some of the noise inherent to each factor.

6\. Make money and cycle out and in alpha factors for as long as they work/don't work.

It seems like this "hedge fund" was solely trading based on sentiment without creating a L/S market neutral portfolio or layering on any other factors. This is a _very_ bad idea. The quote from the guy who made the software is pretty damning:

"The signals we have been provided have a strong scientific foundation. I think we did a pretty decent job. I know I can detect sentiment. I'm not a trader."

This is a big red flag. A lot of AI/ML people have this arrogance that trading is easy and that you don't need any financial knowledge to make money. Maybe that was true in the 1980's, but at this point, it requires an incredible level of expertise to generate and implement profitable quant trading strategies.

But all of this is off-topic, to get to the point: the Bloomberg article is garbage click-bait. You sue the General Partners, and I don't think anyone is confused about this.

<comment><USER12> I am not a trader (and have zero knowledge about it) and what I'm about to say might be utter garbage, but hear me out and correct me where I'm wrong.

> This is a big red flag. A lot of AI/ML people have this arrogance that > trading is easy and that you don't need any financial knowledge to make > money. Maybe that was true in the 1980's, but at this point, it requires an > incredible level of expertise to generate and implement profitable quant > trading strategies.

If they were making the trading bot via training it on past data and what they call 'sentiment signals' generated from social media reaction, etc, do they need experience with trading?

Is there something else that a human trader knows that the bot (which has been trained on past data and accounts for live reactions) doesn't?

<comment><USER13> Something that stood out to me from the article was that the bot "generated a single trade in the morning." Unless they're trying to realize a quick gain by exploiting the "dumb money" most knowledgeable investors specifically _avoid_ trading at market open because the volume/volatility typically comes from Charles Schwab et al. executing trades from regular Joes & Janes. It's noise, not signal.

Since the bot wasn't implementing a day-trading strategy it's pretty clear the programmers didn't know much about how the markets work. I would guess the training data reflected that knowledge gap. As the saying goes, you don't know what you don't know.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> He should sue himself for going into high risk/velocity trading in the first place.

<comment><USER15> To me, this is the right solution. Someone might have persuaded him into the decision, but he's the one that made that decision in the end. You shouldn't be making decisions like this if you don't understand the risks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm surprised with comments that puts all the blame on the investor and make the impression that authors never do similar things (rely on systems they don't fully understand). The thing is, software is all around us, some is more or less harmless (web browser) and some can create a lot of damage (self driving car, buggy aircraft controller, bank software).

The thing is that we generally have absolutely no clue what is the quality of the piece of the code that is controlling our destiny right now. What if the airplane we are flying right now decides to dive? What if bank looses all our record? What if Nest thermostat goes crazy and burns thousands of dollars on heating during your vacation? What if your 401k disappears because of the obvious bug in the bot's script? I can go on and on.

To be able to live in this world without going nuts we have to trust that those systems are correct and if something goes wrong we do need a legal way to punish responsible party (if there is a fault on their side).

The weird thing is that we still treat software and real engineering differently. If you enter the bridge that collapses under you feet because it is a bad design - you will sue. But if you trust a company that sells a superhuman trading bot which makes silly decisions and loses your money -> it is your problem. Following this logic - don't step on the bridge without reviewing the design and making sure it is safe.

</comment><comment><USER17> The founder/CEO of the company that built the trading system had previously "agreed to pay $17 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to settle charges of defrauding investors at his mobile-payments company, Jumio Inc."

How could you trust him to trade $2.5B?

</comment><comment><USER18> Salespeople often exaggerate to make a sale, it's not uncommon. Believing them with enthusiasm is a sign of someone salespeople love to find. This guy is right to sue but he's still a sucker who was taken in and then leveraged himself to the hilt based on a pitch he could not (or would not) verify. A prudent person would have tested it with a small amount to start with.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm sorry but this sounds like a couple idiots with too much money.

"Li eventually let K1 manage $2.5 billion—$250 million of his own cash and the rest leverage from Citigroup Inc."

Leverage = Loan

r/wallstreetbets is that-a-way.

</comment><comment><USER20> If my microwave oven burn my pop corn, I don't sue the microwave oven. The product (robot) is not what seller tell you : you sue the seller. The product (robot) has a defect : you sue the maker.

</comment><comment><USER21> This is a straightforward dispute about to what extent the backtested performance claims were accurate, and whether the fund was following the strategy as declared to its client. The fact that it's a "robot" is irrelevant to the dispute - the same fact pattern would apply to a human fund manager.

</comment><comment><USER22> This is an important aspect:

> Over the following months, Costa shared simulations with Li showing K1 > making double-digit returns, although the two now dispute the thoroughness > of the back-testing.

And I wished the article linked to the fillings or at the least discussed this more thoroughly.

</comment><comment><USER23> Should have bought Old Glory Robot Insurance!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnL7sdElno](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXnL7sdElno)

</comment><comment><USER24> "People tend to assume that algorithms are faster and better decision-makers than human traders," said Mark Lemley ... "That may often be true, but when it's not ..."

Is it just me or is that quote kind of disingenuous? "People tend to assume" and "That may OFTEN be true" make it sound like it isn't as clear cut or there's still doubt over whether such algorithms outperform humans. Is that truly the case? I don't know much about trading but aren't algorithms doing most of the trading now?

<comment><USER25> The faster part is certainly not a matter of debate. The better less so and it depends a lot on the area. High Frequency Trading they essentially dominate and given what I heard also really prove their role's legitimacy as arbitrage as more HFT bots drove down the margins in a move towards uniformity - <USER2> like arbitrage should.

They are prone to some occasional "dumb" errors however - like humans but different those which attempt to predict trends using feeds like Twitter have caused losses as they fail to get the context.

And it depends on the area and how you define algorithm and trading. Your bank has lists of requirements for mortgages beyond legal minimums - <USER3> already following an algorithm but due dilligence involves humans in the loop.

<comment><USER24> Thank you for the insight! Much appreciated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> 10x leverage on a fantasyland AI magic machine. Might as well sue the casino when you lose playing baccarat. (And people do sue.)

</comment><comment><USER10> It depends on what basis algo trading was sold to the customer. Regardless of whether it's a human or computer, anyone willing to give such an amount a go, should be asking how risk is beimg hedged?What happens when shit hits the fan? How fast can you exitvthe position?If it's Forex, what stops are being used to minimise the losses and etc. I'm sceptical that either sides signed the deal without firstly going through some details on how it works, the risks and rtc.Also,the legal department probably did their homework to cover as much as possible in such cases. The responsibility, ultimately,falls upon the institution utilising the software and not the software itself.

</comment><comment><USER27> Haha, let the algo decide the stop-loss, genius. This guy was sold on a fancy robo investor that couldn't beat VTSAX if had twice as much money to start with.

If you don't know who the idiot is, it's you.

The dudes who put this thing together were using a theory from, get this, 2015, to do sentiment analysis. Cool 4 character domain, but they couldn't even be assed to get a let's encrypt cert for it -- why would you trust them to manage billions?

[http://42.cx/](http://42.cx/) The number of buzzwords is both overwhelming and inherently fishy.

</comment><comment><USER28> The whole framing of this case is incorrect and stupid. It doesn't matter if the software used for trading is a bunch of if statements or machine learning, it's still just software. If it's misrepresented the case is pretty straightforward. The algos used don't matter.

</comment><comment><USER29> If it was bug that caused him to lose money, sure, he should be compensated by the company that made/owns the robot. But he says that it's capabilities were misrepresented, so the robot doesn't actually have fault, he either just made a bad investment or was scammed.

<comment><USER13> It usually works the other way around. A bug in the code doesn't often rise to the level of negligence. (Though 99.99% of the time a fund will reimburse a loss caused by a buggy algorithm for customer relations reasons they aren't obligated.) Misrepresenting the capabilities/returns of a strategy is where fund salespeople get themselves into trouble time and again. It's perfectly legal to sell a terrible investment strategy so long as you've been truthful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> If I buy a chainsaw and accidentally cut my finger off I wouldn't assume that I have any legal right to sue the chainsaw manufacturer or the person who sold it to me.

At least not where I'm from - is this not the case in the USA?

<comment><USER31> A more fitting metaphor along this line would be if you bought a chainsaw- weilding robot and directed it to cut down some trees, and it instead cut off your finger. Once a product has agency and is making decisions of its own accord, if it makes the wrong decisions, I don't think it's unreasonable to say the person who programmed it has some level of responsibility, likely some kind of negligence.

<comment><USER32> You really can't pin anything like this on a single person, as tempting as it may be. The company that sells a product should deal with the consequences and accept responsibility as a complete unit. If someone coded something and somehow the bug eluded understanding all the way up the chain, it's everyones fault for not putting more "solidness" pressure all the way down.

<comment><USER31> Yeah you're right, poor wording on my part. Agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Maybe the concept of blame is meaningless when it comes to robots, and we're clinging to a cultural and spiritual concept of blame that serves no purpose when it comes to robots.

If a robot doesn't function properly, you fix it or take it out of service. Taking retribution against a robot (or abstractly, the civilization that created it) is of questionable value. The right question is how do we build robots that don't lose fortunes?

The fact that human beings get angry at robots and want retribution or recompense for malfunctions is an evolutionary adaptation for dealing with other humans. It is useless when it comes to dealing with non sentient deterministic agents. Sure, if the robot was being controlled by a human, go after the human. If not, what's the point?

<comment><USER34> This cannot work as a practical matter. If a person is killed by a robot, it is important to have a legal theory to understand some analogue to "the responsible party". Otherwise, the introduction of a "robot" in the workflow becomes a wildcard to evade torts of all sorts.

<comment><USER33> If the goal of the legal theory is to reduce human deaths by robots, why not just reduce human deaths by robots by dismantling or repairing the appropriate robots?

Again, the legal theory works because when dealing with human beings you have to assign responsibility to human beings. Hurricanes and earthquakes kill tons of human beings and there's no legal theory of responsibility. We simply work as a society to minimize those deaths without blaming anyone.

<comment><USER34> You seem to be suggesting that a sufficiently complex system dissipates responsibility, transforms an act of engineering into an Act Of God.

If that's not your intent, I suggest you rephrase.

When a bridge (another system which is complex but tractable in principle) fails, we work hard to find the feature of the design that led to the failure, and if we decide it was negligence, we exact consequences.

From current news: Should Boeing get a pass on their MCAS failures because "Gosh, it's really hard" ? The MCAS is a robot.

<comment><USER33> Responsibility itself is a heuristic with a goal. As autonomous systems take on more and more responsibility, tracing back a historical cause will be less and less relevant than actually fixing the fault in the system.

Take Boeing for example. Assigning blame to individuals, while rewarding, may not be as effective as changing the system that allows Boeing to continue to act the way it does. Boeing scapegoats, fires some people (which may include the CEO) but the organization, and the nation and legal system that sustains it continues largely unchanged.

You're trying to patch by punishing humans individually, while ignoring faults in the system we have collectively created. Our instinct is to assign blame because historically and evolutionarily harm is usually done by individual humans, and punishing humans is a good heuristic. But it does not seem to me that punishment does a good job of creating good large scale organizations or systems.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Clearly depends on the laws of the nanny state you live in.

In my nanny state, the government will appoint a team of therapist to mange the trauma, we get mandatory employer 4 weeks paid pain and suffering leave. The government refunds your loss plus potentially lost opportunity cost

In the country next to us, they are savages. Can you believe each adult is responsible for the consequences of their decision They have some meager protection for fraud and general exploitive behavior. But if it's a legitimate investment firm and you go in knowing what you are doing and they loose your money THAT IT your money is lost. savagery

Edit: post is tongue in cheek, assuming there is no fraud some of the comment suggest there could be subtle fraud involved

</comment><comment><USER36> Forgetting who's responsible for trading losses (the customer should know investing is never a sure thing), this sounds like a very crude algorithm. The best trading programs don't use machine learning and sentiment scraped from the internet, they use well defined strategies that are set by a competent human. The whole point of using AI is to use it for tasks humans aren't suited to; we're far better than machines at gauging sentiment over days and weeks. Computers are better at seeing numerical trends over shorter time periods, or identifying lesser known securities based on trading signals. Using a computer to try timing a major benchmark seems like a massive waste of time.

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't get the whole issue with the who to blame conundrum when it comes to robots or AI. They're just glorified buttons, pressed by a human.

</comment><comment><USER38> Obviously it's whoever misrepresented the abilities of said robot. If that's nobody then you don't have a case.

</comment><comment><USER39> Answer: The person responsible for creating the decision making logic behind said robot.

</comment><comment><USER40> What if the robot was written by another robot and a "salesperson" was also a robot?

<comment><USER23> Wasn't there a Philip K Dick story about a human computer programmer in the future where robots were taking over all the good programming jobs, who had to pretend to be a robot, in order to get the high paying robot-only programming gigs? Every morning when he signed in to work, he had to fail a Turing Test in order to prove that he was really a robot.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Who do you sue when a factory machine smashes your hand?

The factory owner.

</comment><comment><USER42> That title is pure 1%er American.

</comment><comment><USER43> The guild of the guilty?

</comment><comment><USER44> There is no new ethical dilemma here.

Software has been around for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER45> Pedantry: "Whom to sue", not "Who to sue".

(Pedantic tl;dr: I refuse to put the punctuation inside the quotes. I consider that an outright bug in English and it needs to be stamped out by rebellion.)

<comment><USER46> If you want a bug in english, then how about: "Petting Dave's cat", "Going toMartha's Vineyard", "Using its eyes." (no apostrophe)

What a stupid idea to make "it's" stand for "it is"

<comment><USER47> Not a bug, IMO. In general, we have separate individual words for possessive pronouns; we don't create them by adding the possessive suffix to a nominative pronoun: I -> my (not I's), you -> your, he -> his, she -> her, it -> its, etc.

"It's" is just the standard use of apostrophe to indicate a contraction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's amazing that people with that kind of money would be persuaded into paying millions in fees thinking they can beat the index.

<comment><USER11> What is "the index?"

The S&P 500? The FTSE 250? The Nikkei? The Russell 2000? The Russel 3000? The risk-free rate? LIBOR?

When you make statements like this, they mean nothing at all.

Let's say you're talking about the S&P 500. Many hedge funds have been beating it for 20 years or more.

But let's say you had 2 Billion dollars. What would you do with it? Are you telling me you would put it all in one index fund? Maybe you would put it in a couple, maybe you would put it in some bonds? Well guess what, you just made an active management decision! You decided what index, or what bonds, or whatever.

There is no such thing as passive management.

<comment><USER49> > Many hedge funds have been beating it for 20 years or more

Relatively few, I would say, if you measure it by realised Sharpe. Rentech, Brevan Howard, D.E. Shaw, and maybe AHL and Winton excluding the past few years. I'm struggling to name others that have done well over a sustained period.

There are a _lot_ of funds out there, and IMO much of the supposed 'outperformance' is a combination of leverage and survivor bias (I say this as a former hedge fund quant).

<comment><USER11> 2 Sigma and Bridgewater due pretty well for themselves Sharpe ratio-wise.

Also if we're talking about market makers, Jane Street, Susquehanna, Fortress, and Citadel very well for themselves.

<comment><USER49> Huh. I hadn't realised that two sigma were that old. My point still stands though.

Market making is a different kettle of fish in the sense that it's more of a financial service than a directional bet on markets. It's also much less capital intensive so there's less pressure to raise money from clients. As a market-maker, you can certainly find yourself on the wrong side of a trade, but generally the goal is to be as market-neutral as possible.

<comment><USER11> I mean, the goal of absolute return hedge funds is pretty much the same: only have exposure to alpha factors. With market makers it's pretty much the same thing: only have exposure to order flow. That's the alpha.

I've worked as a quant at both hedge funds and market makers, and both have a similar philosophy of a only getting exposure to "alpha", though the means and capital required (as you mentioned) are quite different.

I think a concept of Sharpe ratio still applies to both though, with market making having an clearly higher one.

Personally, I've found working for a hedge fund a lot better, market making is kind of a drab business when you get down to the nuts and bolts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> > "That may often be true, but when it's not, or when they quickly go astray, > investors want someone to blame"

Uh... don't get me wrong, but when you go to the casino and lose all your money, it's no one's fault but yours. Same way for stock markets.

Whoever is dumb enough to put money into essentially a gambling algorithm should be able to pay for the losses himself.

<comment> daniel-cussen No not the same way for stock markets. It's not a statistical certainty that you will lose money like gambling in a casino is, and millions if not billions of people depend on the markets in order to invest for retirement. There are people who are certified stock brokers and certified financial advisors who have a _legal fiduciary duty_ to maximize returns and minimize risk on their client's behalf.

<comment><USER50> > It's not a statistical certainty that you will lose money like gambling in a > casino is

But it is a very real possibility as the recent financial crisis shows. Everyone who is unable to stomach a total loss of his investment in one basket should not do so, and it is double dumb to invest in unproven automation like this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I'm glad it's not possible to Sue in my country. Saves a lot of silly nonsense and has people a bit more responsible about their actions instead of doing random shit and sueing willy nilly when the shit hits the fan

<comment><USER52> Serious question: how do handle broken contracts, malicious acts, etc?

<comment><USER53> In Sweden you can only sue in civil cases where there's a real disagreement, not because someone spilled coffee on you. Not sure if it would be applicable in this case though.

We often hear about the crazy lawsuit culture in US anyway and how insane it is. Whether that is true or not I don't know.

<comment><USER54> But tort law does exist, right? So if somebody purposefully spills boiling hot coffee over you, you will be able to sue them. The claims are just less outrageous than in the US because there are no punitive damages for example.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Light captured at 100B frames per second - <AUTHOR> http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-fastest-camera-ever-created-will-be-used-to-study-invisibility-cloaks <comment><USER2> I find it interesting that these cameras and videos claim to capture photons as they travel through the air. Don't the photons still have to bounce off something (toward the camera) in order to be imaged by the camera? In other words, can we really "see" the photons/light in the various positions of its apparent journey, or are we still looking at a portion of the photons that have reflected off other particles (such as dust in the air) and made their way to the camera?

<comment><USER3> Even without dust in the air, you have things like Rayleigh scattering. But yes, we only "see" the photons that were deflected from their original path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That's about 105 years of a normal movie if you're going to watch one second of it completely.

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8709920](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8709920) is the same story, posted 42 days ago.

<comment><USER6> but this submission did not get enough upvotes nor was on front page. Why so

<comment><USER7> Because success, both for startups and for HN submissions, is highly affected by chance.

<comment><USER8> So HN is bascicially a startup simulator for side projects?

<comment><USER9> I'm imagining now a system where users with lots of karma can "invest" in posts they think should be on the front page, incubator style. If they make it to the front page it's an "IPO" of sorts and they get a return on the other users votes.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > With CUP, the photons necessary to take an image are blasted through a beam > splitter and then through a tube that has several tiny mirrors. These > photons are converted into electrons, which encode the data you want > captured—namely the time and space data necessary to create an image.

Can photons actually be converted to electrons? I've never heard of anything like this. Very interesting.

<comment><USER11> I've possibly missed the point of what you're asking, but... surely it's obvious that photons can be converted to electrons, given that's what a photodiode does and that's how digital cameras work?

<comment><USER3> >surely it's obvious that photons can be converted to electrons, given that's what a photodiode does and that's how digital cameras work?

This is a common misconception. Both of those use light to facilitate electron excitation, but neither of them actually convert photons into electrons. The electrons are already there.

<comment><USER11> Ah, so that's how I missed the point of what he was saying. I know how photodiodes work -- I was just struggling with the semantics of "conversion".

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> If I remember correctly, these devices are capturing multiple photons over a similar path; not a single photon's journey.

</comment><comment><USER13> every day feels more closer and closer to everything getting insanely cool all at once

</comment><comment><USER14> Is the blotchiness due to uncertainty principle or sensor imperfections? Both maybe?

<comment><USER15> That is energy vapour surrounding individual photons.</comment></comment>


Closed for Business - <AUTHOR> http://mattgemmell.com/2012/07/23/closed-for-business/ <comment><USER2> _You search the internet for pirate copies of apps, then copy them onto your (regular, unrooted, non-"jailbroken") device, and launch them. The system is designed for piracy from the ground up._

OK, I admit, I couldn't read past this sentence. This is so much complete and total bullshit that I closed the tab in disgust.

The ability to sideload apps on a non-rooted, non-jailbroken device is _exactly_ what any and every device I own absolutely must support and this is non-negotiable. If I own a piece of computing hardware, I will have the freedom to install and run any software I want, regardless of where or how I obtained. Oh, and I don't use pirated software.

Given that people are already talking about a "war on general purpose computing"[1], it's downright shameful for this guy to run around promoting the idea that open devices are designed to enable piracy.

[1]: <http://boingboing.net/2012/01/10/lockdown.html>

<comment><USER3> So, to paraphrase:

"Guy doesn't agree with me on something fundamental. Shame on him."

<comment><USER4> I don't think that's what he said at all. I read it as a criticism of a bad premise. Do you mean to imply that there is so such thing?

<comment><USER3> He wrote "it's downright shameful for this guy to run around promoting the idea". There is a level of badness at which ideas become shameful to promote, but that's a pretty high bar to clear, and I'm pretty sure electronic brands that don't actually kill people can't clear it at all.

<comment> jack-r-abbit It really bugs me when people lop off parts of sentences to make a quote in a different context. What he actually wrote was " _it's downright shameful for this guy to run around promoting the idea that open devices are designed to enable piracy_ ". The idea that _open devices are designed to enable piracy_ should not really be one of those "well, that is your opinion" type of things. It is a broad generalization that is flat wrong because... well... it is such a broad generalization. Open devices are designed to... uh... be open. To enable user control. To enable hobbyist tinkering. To enable community help. Being that the "enable piracy" idea is dead wrong, promoting it is dangerous & harmful... thus worthy of shame.

<comment><USER3> I haven't cut off context. You just disagree with his idea so strongly that it upsets you for him to even have it.

I don't believe "openness" connotes "intent to enable piracy", but "piracy is far more rampant in the open Android ecosystem than the closed iOS ecosystem" isn't an unreasonable observation to make, and, having made it, "openness promotes piracy" isn't a totally unreasonable conclusion to draw from it.

Stop telling people to be embarrassed about their ideas. It's a very poor rhetorical strategy. The only benefit it accrues to you is that it riles your supporters up into similarly gnarly expressions of contempt. It certainly doesn't persuade anyone of anything.

<comment> jack-r-abbit The internet has a lot of porn... but I don't think it would be reasonable to conclude the internet promotes porn.

The world has a lot of racists... but I don't think it would be reasonable to conclude the world promote racism.

<comment><USER3> The Internet definitely promotes porn.

Reasonable people have observed that Google profits off piracy in other contexts.

Your last sentence is a non sequitur.

<comment> jack-r-abbit Porn is definitely promoted on the Interent... but I don't think it is accurate to say that _The Interent_ promotes porn. Or that the Internet was designed to enable porn.

So... reasonable people observed that Google profits off piracy... and that leads to the conclusion that "open devices are designed to enable piracy"?

> _Your last sentence is a non sequitur._

Side note: Interesting that _non sequitur_ has two different uses that make you either wrong or right depending on which you were using.

If you are thinking of it as a literary device because of its apparent lack of meaning relative to what preceded it, then I would say you are wrong. It is an example of how the formula _THIS has a lot of THAT, therefore THIS promotes THAT_ is not an accurate formula. I believe it to be a relevant example, therefore not a non sequitur (literary device)

If you are thinking of it in terms of logic because its conclusion does not follow from its premises, then I would say you are right... because that was the whole point of giving those examples. The premise of _THIS has a lot of THAT_ is not sufficient to make the conclusion that _THIS promotes THAT_. It almost never is. So... yes, a non sequitur (logic).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> So very many things wrong with this piece.

1\. Show him the money: I'm not sure he's comparing apples with oranges here. He makes a good living from iOS, but (crucially) by consulting for others who themselves may not have a sustainable business model. There is an increasing amount of evidence suggesting the indie dev model isn't sustainable on iOS, either, from AppCubby and Sparrow to the iconFactory and more.

2\. Open vs Closed: I don't think one data point (the app store) is enough to damn open platforms. The Mac is open by his definition, and so is Windows. Are those both "bad for business"? Hardly.

3\. Open vs Open: He then conflates "open" (as in I can install anything I want on it without going via a store) with "Open" as in open source, when the two are very different. Piracy is possible on a on a closed-source open- install platform, the open/closed nature of the source is absolutely irrelevant here.

He tries to join the two with a hand-wavy "piracy is easy on Android because it has an open mentality", when the source license has zip to do with this. It makes all the later jabs about Stallman more than a little strawmanish.

4\. Choice vs Free: This is more a pedantic point, but you can't go from "too much choice is bad" (which I'd agree with in certain contexts) to "and so freedom is bad". He doesn't back that up, by the way, just asserts "but freedom _is_ bad". No, it is not bad. Sometimes freedoms collide, and sometimes they can be traded. But "overwhelming choice is bad" and "overwhelming freedom is bad" are not synonymous statements.

5\. Lock it down (unless it's a movie or album that I want): His conclusion in this piece is basically "Close it down and keep prices high to beat the pirates". Which is an interesting contrast with <http://mattgemmell.com/2012/02/17/the-piracy-threshold/> where he says "Open it all up and keep the prices very low or I will pirate".

There's more to be had in this post, but I think I've reached enough errors to abort. At least this one didn't end with "disagree? amuse me by telling me".

</comment><comment><USER6> > Stories like this come as no surprise, but the industry press rarely deals > with the core problem - and nor does Google.

Yeah, except the part where Google announced encrypted applications from the Android Market at Google I/O. The presenter got light applause and seemed confused, asking for more applause. It seems that no one figured out the implications of that. Apps will be encrypted with a device-specific key from the store. People have been complaining about this since forever, Google is taking a major step to address the piracy problem, and no one has noticed.

<comment><USER7> Yeah, that was one of the biggest announcements they made this year. If it works (and why wouldn't it?), it'll put an end to the piracy problem while at the same time allowing you to side load any non-pirated application you want.

What wasn't clear to me was whether or not it was going to be enforced on older versions of Android. I imagine it will be though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Your whole article is based on a publicity stunt. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4280871>

Dead trigger makes its money from in-app purchases. In practice it is no more free now than it was before.

Piracy is rampant on iOS too. It's slightly more harder on an iOS device, but it's not exactly difficult.

<comment><USER9> Dead Trigger was a bad example - personally I'm not wild about mixing purchase and in-app purchase at all - but in the overall discussion others stated similar experiences, in one case a developer quoting piracy rates of 90% on an app which I believe had no in-app purchases (sorry, can't find the link now).

Football Manager 2012 handheld will be one I'll watch with interest. The publishers Sports Interactive have said that it has it's targets for Android and if it doesn't hit them there won't be another version. That's a massive franchise (in the UK at least) so I'm keen to see whether it can justify it's existence (selling price $5).

<comment><USER8> That sounds like a much better example. Being an existing franchise, it should avoid what I believe to be the primary problem for both Android and iOS: app discovery.

I remember an anecdote about a 90% piracy rate. It turns out that the game was prominently listed on a popular pirate board, but was buried deeply on the app store.

Combine that with a tendency for pirates to install huge numbers of games that they'll never likely play, and a 90% piracy rate isn't surprising.

Personal anecdote: Massive sales cause me to buy games that I'll likely never play. I just dropped over $50 on Steam because of their massive summer sale. $20 went to the latest Humble Bundle. A few months ago I bought a bunch of games for 10 freaking cents each on the Google store. I've purchased two sequels and one in-app since for those games, but my total outlay is still well under $10.

So I believe that the biggest problems on both Android and iOS are pricing and discovery. Piracy is a problem, but not as much as pricing and discovery, IMO.

<comment><USER10> "So I believe that the biggest problems on both Android and iOS are pricing and discovery. Piracy is a problem, but not as much as pricing and discovery, IMO."

I completely agree with you.

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure I'd want to rank problems, but I'd like to see everyone working on the problems they can solve (such as pricing and discoverability) before they start saying with certainty that piracy is killing everything.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> His entire premis would require that there could never be a software business on the PC because it is open (it is far more open than Android). Thereis, so he is wrong.

</comment><comment> jack-r-abbit > _here's a tutorial on how to "sideload" Android apps (in practice, as with > most articles that mention "backups" of software from nebulous sources, this > is a tutorial about piracy)_

Uh... Sideloading is not about piracy. One of the nice things about Android is that you are not locked into getting your apps from a store. I've sideloaded apps my company is creating. I've sideloaded apps that friends have made. I've sideloaded advance betas from companies I've had a relationship with. Sideloading is just installing a file.

<comment><USER12> Yeah, I've sideloaded a number of betas or prerelease applications and have _never_ pirated an Android application. This article's making some pretty big assumptions.

</comment></comment><comment> B-Con > Piracy is a symptom of failure to find an effective business model.

I hate this assumption, it's grounded in nothing but unwarranted optimism about humanity.

Maybe people pirate because they're cheap, selfish, and don't like spending money on things they can get for free. As the article established, people were mass-pirating apps that were easier to install legitimately and cost less than a buck anyway. If you pirate that, odds that you just need a better business model to entice you to not pirate are slim to none.

That may not apply to everyone, but it does apply to a lot of people.

There is absolutely zero reason to believe that there is a perfect equilibrium where business maximizes its goals and users have _no_ incentive to pirate. The two are constantly at conflict (money is pretty much a zero-sum game, and ultimately it all does come down to money in some way or another), and it's hard to compete with free. No matter what you offer, if it has a cost then it's hard to compete with that same offering minus the cost.

</comment><comment><USER9> There are a lot of good points here but one thing I would say is that closer is better for business _in the way it exists now_.

The overall point - that it's a failure of business models - is one of the two truths that seem to me to be becoming evident in the whole "piracy" debate.

The second (which applies to "consumers") is if there's no valid business model it's highly likely that you're going to see an impact on content creation and availability for platforms where piracy is widespread.

But I find exciting that over the next 10 or 20 years markets will change fairly radically as a result of these things. Personally, I'm no fan of piracy, I think people should be paid for their work. However, I also think that the genie is out of the bottle now and it's going to be a fact of the world going forward and it's for all of us to learn to live with.

</comment><comment><USER13> "A price-tag of one dollar is passive smoking. You're killing people around you, for your own short-term benefit."

They're killing their competition _and_ benefitting from it? Those poor fools!

<comment><USER14> Actually, it's quite a good analogy. No one benefits from this strategy in the final analysis because a race to the bottom makes all developers paupers. Smoking a cigarette relieves the pains of addiction (delivers short-term profit), kills you in the long term (destroys your business model), and imperils the health of the people around you (makes iOS and Android less desirable platforms).

That said, I disagree with the careless linking of FOSS principles and bad market practices. Linux, BSD, Apache: these technologies and others have had enormous positive impact that has enriched the industry as a whole more than paid versions could ever have benefited individual developers. However, the existence and promotion of FOSS in no way guarantees the cancer of one-dollar apps. Only developers' persistent undervaluation of their own work can do that. Specifically, their rush to capture the long tail of cheapskates at the cost of forgoing the bulk of the consumer surplus makes the entire market less desirable. Everybody loses when we must wade through a swamp of low-cost crap rather than the garden of costlier but higher-quality services we'd wish for.

<comment><USER13> Casting price competition as a sin might be the most preposterous possible reaction to market failure.

There are definitely barriers to making a living selling apps, but blaming them on your fellow victims is utterly foolish.

<comment><USER14> Of course price competition is a legitimate strategy wherever it occurs. I'm simply arguing that it may not be the most effective in the short term or the long.

Econ 101 says that competition will push prices down to the level where everyone makes exactly enough to keep producing their product. Econ 101 assumes zero differentiation between products, zero brand value, etc., in these cases of perfect competition.

If you are a developer who's making something innovative and useful, whether on iOS or no, it is differentiated from the rest of the market. You are free to compete on price by selling for $1, but you may also compete on quality, solve a unique problem for your market, and sell for $5 or $10. I believe that many developers are doing exactly the latter, but still selling for $1 simply because they think it's "what is done." If they instead sold for $5 or $10, people would still buy and the developer would make more money. If enough people did this, it would remove the noxious attitude that "nothing is worth more than a couple bucks on the App Store." Consumers would get better apps, iOS developers would make a better living, and the ecosystem would improve as a whole.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> We're Android-only developers and we're doing fine. Piracy was around long before smart phones so you gotta know how to work with it.

We expect piracy of our apps and priced them accordingly. Our users pay the $2 simply for the ease of automatic updates & notifications. If you pirate the app you'll always be a version (or 15) behind and have to keep up on your own. If it's worth it, you clearly need the $2 more than us. Kewl.

For something you want to seriously scale, you have to do it for free anyway. It's still land rush for new markets. Nothing's changed there.

</comment><comment><USER16> Doesn't Android provide a license verification service, much like the recently discussed iTunes receipt validation process? I have an app, GPS Aids, which checks online if my license is valid. Again, this can be blamed on the developers, for not taking any reasonable steps to prevent piracy. If the app has to be cracked, it's going to reduce the piracy rate quite a bit.

As an aside.. I would never pirate a $1 app, that is just ridiculous. I've spent way more than the average person in the app stores.

<comment><USER17> Yes, and the licensing service is actually one of the most used developer libraries embedded in Android apps ( <http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/dev> ), although it's quickly being overtaken by the free + in-app billing model at the moment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The entire premise is flawed. This developer didn't leave Android. They got rid of their entry fee to try to make more money via in-app purchase. Despite the publicity stunt, that is a run-of-the-mill business decision with little or no wider significance.

</comment><comment><USER19> Lots of people don't get to work on cool stuff at work, but they get paid and work in a convenient place for their life situation.

A lot of people have energy to give to open source because they get something out of it that's not money. Most people who play sports are not paid, or do art, dance, blog or lots of things really.

If you don't want to work for free, don't, I'm sure someone else who's bored or wants to sharpen their skills will step and fill the void you left.

</comment><comment><USER20> If I put it the same way the author did: "If you don't like Android's openness, this is your bus stop."

We don't NEED another iOS... iOS and WP7 is enough.

</comment><comment><USER21> Not everything in the world is a business model. If Linus was in for the money 20 years ago, the world that we live in would be seriously fucked up (much more than it is today). Same goes for Google's Android - it's open, it's free. It's focused on abundance, on sharing.

</comment><comment><USER22> Valid or not, the point is undermined by the author's abrasive response to counterpoint: <https://twitter.com/mattgemmell/status/227818567851180032>

<comment><USER23> I wouldn't call that abrasive. The "counterpoint" was quoting a previous article of his out of context, acting as if he was saying it was OK to steal content - which he was not, he was explaining WHY people steal content.

Having your words twisted is definitely insulting.

<comment><USER22> Twisted implies malicious intent, which the other individuals clearly did not have.

And, whether you agree with Mr. Gemmell or the other two gentlemen, this was a misunderstanding at worst and the assertion that the "piece is really personally insulting" is laughable. (It's probable that he responded out of frustration, which is only human, but perhaps he could have used the opportunity to clarify himself.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> easy to pirate, extremely open and customizable, designed with 1000% nerd philosophy at every step, made the author millions: minecraft

<comment><USER12> But that's one (immensely popular) example. It's the very most popular indie game in the world, or close to it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Hmm, if all this is true, then how can any successful company have an open source software product? Bacula <http://www.bacula.org/en/> is a great backup solution available fore free, with installers, yet they run a successful business.

</comment><comment><USER26> Where is the evidence to support the claim that the lack of purchases is due to piracy?

</comment><comment> excuse-me "it's open - with the corrosive mentality that surrounds such openness."

That's must be why Oracle and IBM have never made money supporting their products on Linux - it's that corrosive mentality of having the core of the underlying kernel be open source.

<comment><USER27> "Existence of some viable open source models doesn't change the reality for the vast majority of developers. We don't have a rich daddy like Mozilla. We don't have an operating system for which we can use a paid-support model. We just want to make apps, then sell enough copies of them so that we can make some more.

"The only principle that enters into it is that of survival: keeping food on the table, and making sure the lights stay on. Open doesn't sit well with those goals."

<comment> excuse-me The article seemed to be saying that since android is based on a FOSS kernel, and FOSS is a cancer (in Balmer's famous words) then people will pirate Android apps. Of course iOS is based on an essentially public domain BSD kernel where you are free to copy it all you want.

But you could read it to say, the Google app store is more open than Apple's restricted/approved walled garden and this allows more pirate apps. The article isn't very clearly written.

Of course the open access also avoids the many stories we get on here about - my original app was arbitrarily removed by someone at Apple because they thought it was the copy of another app - and I can't talk to anyone about it.</comment></comment></comment>


The surreal art of 'unnatural lighting' - <AUTHOR> https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2020/09/the-surreal-art-of-unnatural-lighting/ <comment><USER2> Reuben Wu's _Aeroglyphs_ is one of my favorite series of photographs from recent memory. Really stunning work. [https://reubenwu.com/projects/25/aeroglyphs](https://reubenwu.com/projects/25/aeroglyphs)

<comment><USER3> I asked myself, would the same images, if rendered in CG or photoshopped, lose their charm/appeal? My conscience responds with a resounding "Yes". So, then the process itself must be the art and not the end result. The process being actually flying the drone, taking long exposures instead of pressing buttons on a keyboard and moving the mouse to generate or modify an image. Why is the former process more appealing than the latter? Both are intellectually challenging processes. I always struggle with this internal dialog.

<comment><USER4> This is a pretty normal view. I've been a photographer and videographer since I was about 16, and worked freelance and in magazines all over my country before I got into teaching and IT.

If you read any film theory book, you'll eventually come accross Cahiers du Cinéma and André Bazin, one of the philosophers who most greatly influenced the Nouvelle Vague movement of cinema in France.

He would argue that the second you even _point_ the camera at something, that's when the editing of reality starts. So in the end, what really matters, is the expression you're looking for. So work on that, and worry less about the tools you use to get there.

Many have since tried to challenge this view in various ways, including the Direct Cinema, and Cinema Verité movement, and even up to guys like Lars von Trier with his rather stringent Dogme manifesto. Because when you've mastered all other forms, the only way to challenge yourself is to give yourself artificial limits.

So do you _morally_ have to say no to CG or photoshopping? Absolutely not. It's a tool like any other. You can use it to enhance the experience. And with todays digital cameras, it is often needed to glean the experience you had when watching the subject in real life, kind of like the expressionist painters of yore, who would strive to paint the feeling they had with the subject, rather than illustrate "the truth." Or you can willfully subject yourself to artificial limits, because it's a challenge.

With that said, I think the photos shown here reveals brilliant and inspired creativity with new techology and tools, and in the end, that's what it's about: To make something fantastic out of perhaps untraditional tools, either because it's a challenge, or because you have a grand vision—or both.

Anyway, I hope this gives you some inspiration to pick up your camera (any camera, even the one on your iPhone), and challenge yourself. All the best!

<comment><USER5> This is such an informative comment on a niche I am so foreign to. Thank you very much for sharing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I love the fact that tech is so cheap that tinkerers can do some interesting things now. Light painting has been gaining from the simple use of a light source to illuminate something for long exposure photography for a while now. However, the creative means of lighting with the new toys that cheap tech is allowing for has made it even more fun to play. Also, the sensitivity of the new camera sensors make have helped.

I'm old school, my favorite light source for light painting is the full moon. Everything looks daylight until you notices the give tell-tales like smoothed out water to indicate long exposure, or night stars in the blue sky[0]. If timed correctly, you can get a moon strike which is where it starts while the moon is below horizon, and then the image starts to change as the moon rises[1]. I wish I had a link of live action video shot with nothing but moonlight.

If you have an actual budget, you can bring out enough lights to colorfully light up the side of a mountain[2]. (I have nothing to do with the making of this video)

[0] [https://vimeo.com/241441999](https://vimeo.com/241441999) [1] [https://vimeo.com/241600503](https://vimeo.com/241600503) [2][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReMPjkJdvMY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReMPjkJdvMY)

<comment> h6d-100c While a lot of the tech so cheap, the cameras that Reuben uses cost 60K+ plus ;) He was the primary photographer phase one used to launch their new mirrorless/tech camera body.

Not that it probably makes a substantial difference in achievable end product probably.

<comment><USER6> Fair play, but camera prices are not part of the tech I was talking about. I come from the motion picture world, so a $60K+ camera is also quite cheap. I've used lenses that cost >$60K each, so maybe I'm desensitized to camera prices.

I was talking about cheap electronics to make the LED builds that make for cool blinky blinky things. OSS running on commodity hardware in the form of Arduino/Pi/etc allows for dependably repeatable motion control. For a few hundred dollars, you can make your camera appear to float and run all day on a single LiPo battery charge. You can literally make your camera fly with very affordable drones. You can buy BT/WiFi components so you control all of this with your phone. If you were a hacker 20 years ago, your inner youth would be drooling over this stuff.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I prefer the natural bird flight time lapses ("Ornitographies") of @xavibou

[http://www.xavibou.com](http://www.xavibou.com)

[https://instagram.com/xavibou](https://instagram.com/xavibou)

<comment><USER8> dang! these are so creative. thanks for the pointer. i always wondered about capturing flights' time lapses. this is much harder than the flights. i wonder what inspired them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The artist is the Reuben Wu from the band Ladytron. Interesting that his "second act" is getting the metaphorical spotlight.

<comment><USER10> I've always considered Ladytron his second act.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> When done with video it looks like a real-world raytracing demo: [https://www.stratusleds.com/aerial-leds](https://www.stratusleds.com/aerial- leds)

</comment><comment><USER12> Painting with light has long been used to make shadowless photographs of industrial and military components.[1] It's used there for clarity, not artistic effect.

[1] [https://maritime.org/doc/threeinch/img/plate001.jpg](https://maritime.org/doc/threeinch/img/plate001.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER13> artificial light in nature is the basis for one of the coolest ski films i've ever seen: [https://youtu.be/4DjdJydl-ds?t=92](https://youtu.be/4DjdJydl- ds?t=92)

<comment><USER14> I find I have few words to describe that video better than "dope as hell"

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> See also the Ball of Light series by South Australian based photographer Denis Smith: [https://www.denissmith.com.au/ball-of- light](https://www.denissmith.com.au/ball-of-light)

</comment><comment><USER16> This is a totally different style, but I have recently become a huge fan of James Turrell. There the light is "real" (i.e., it's not captured through photography), but often using naturally produced sunlight along with controlled colored light systems in tandem.

He's also building a massive art piece at Roden Crater. It's a big mind boggling no one has used it for a sci-fi movie yet. If you ever get a chance to see one his skyspaces or his artwork, I highly recommend it. It can be very entrancing and meditative.

<comment><USER17> I experienced this one at LACMA a while back and it was incredible.

[https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/james-turrell-light- rei...](https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/james-turrell-light-reignfall)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Off-camera light and creative lighting are two of the most powerful ways to create surrealism in a medium that, in theory, if capturing what is literally happening in the real world. Realizing that photography literally means "writing with light" has inspired my dabbling in the hobby of photography more than anything else!

</comment><comment><USER19> This is super-interesting conceptually, and fascinating to look at.

But I can't help but feel you could get exactly the same output by compositing daylight photos and gently photoshopping them in, as by compositing these drone-illuminated shots and layering them in.

When you're trying to achieve this type of artificiality anyways, this seems like an awfully expensive and complicated way to do it...

<comment><USER20> I initially agreed with you, but I think it would be hard to get the texture of the illumination correct. The quantity of light and how elements shade each other/etc, might be difficult to get right. For many applications it might not matter though

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> The photo of Crowley Lake made me curious. The columns that look carved out of the stone at the shore are not man-made at all: [http://www.geologyin.com/2017/01/mystery-of-crowley-lake- col...](http://www.geologyin.com/2017/01/mystery-of-crowley-lake-columns- solved.html)

</comment><comment><USER22> This is some really beautiful work. Anyone know where we could get some posters and support the artist?

</comment><comment><USER23> You know what would really blow me away? If someone came up with a way to convert a 3D polygon mesh into a drone's flight path so that it could render any sort of 3D object into a scene with timelapse lighting. Light _rendering_.

<comment><USER10> I wrote a small script to do that with 2D SVGs, there's nothing difficult about doing it in 3D.

<comment><USER23> But did you make the drone fly the path?

<comment><USER10> Yes.

<comment><USER23> Why not make a post and harvest some karma? Would love to see the pics.

<comment><USER10> Unfortunately they didn't turn out very good and I didn't try again (maybe I should). Here's a build log from the first attempt (click "build log"):

[https://www.makerfol.io/project/m8xrLUp-light-painting- with-...](https://www.makerfol.io/project/m8xrLUp-light-painting-with-drones/)

I subsequently made a harness for the Mavic air too, that's the one the script was written for.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> It's nice to see north Wales crop up on HN. Moel Tryfan and its quarry is one of many in the locality. I'd usually call it unremarkable, but this photo has taken it to somewhere else.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting photos. The artificial lighting makes many of these look like Star Trek: TOS sound stages, especially the one of Moel Tryfan.

</comment><comment><USER26> It's amazing how the tiniest of touches change these pictures from average nature photography to futuristic sci-fi.

</comment><comment><USER27> Does their lighting technique only work on inanimate objects?

<comment><USER6> Typically, your light painting source is very low power so that it builds up over the course of the exposure without over exposing. Doing long exposure with people is hard. The subject would be required to stand extremely still. Any movement will cause the subject to be blurry as they will literally be appearing in multiple places within the image. If the subject moves too fast, they will completely disappear from the image. We use this technique frequently in music videos. I've also experimented with using flash strobes to expose the subject in the split second even though the shutter remains open. At that point, your subject can move out of frame and still be exposed from the flash.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Paywall :(

<comment><USER29> edit the url to place a period after .com so it reads:

[https://www.nationalgeographic.com./magazine/2020/09/the- sur...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com./magazine/2020/09/the-surreal-art- of-unnatural-lighting/)

<comment><USER30> Why does that work?

<comment><USER31> Likely a web-server misconfiguration (check out name-based virtual hosting[0]). Adding a trailing dot after the TLD (this signifies the root of the DNS naming hierarchy) works fine, and you're referring now to an absolute name (FQDN). How this get handled afterwards at the webserver side, depends not just on the resolved IP, but on the name itself (which is passed from client to server in the HTTP Host: header). And that's where this might fall apart if the administrator didn't provide for this situation.

[0] [https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/vhosts/name- based.html](https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/vhosts/name-based.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> As beautiful as the images are, I can't help but wonder if we really want to be running loud, bright drones in the middle of the only quiet, peaceful areas that still exist.

<comment><USER33> If it helps at all, the article mentions that the photographer uses exposures "as long as 30 seconds," so these drones aren't in the air all that long. Unless and until hundreds of copycat drone-light photographers start swarming deserts and lakes, I don't feel too bad about the light and noise pollution incurred to produce this shockingly creative landscape photography. Besides, I bet the effects of a single drone flying for a few minutes pales in comparison to the headlights, engine sounds, and emissions of the car used to get to and from the photo location.

<comment><USER34> >Unless and until hundreds of copycat drone-light photographers start swarming deserts and lakes

If a few of these start trending on twitter/instagram/whatever, there will definitely be hundreds of people doing this.

It's already hard to enjoy a trip to many places without a "bbwweeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEEEEE _EEEEEEEEEEEE_ " reverberating overhead.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This is nothing new. There are various areas of professional photography that have long used long exposures to selectively add light. Sometimes called "flashlight painting", the photographer can use a literal flashlight to fill in shadow areas selectively during a long exposure. This can produce images that are not physically possible using static light sources. The use of a drone over landscapes is a simple extension of this longstanding studio technique.

[https://www.photigy.com/school/how-to-use-light-painting- in-...](https://www.photigy.com/school/how-to-use-light-painting-in-product- photography/)

<comment><USER36> >This is nothing new.

I feel like this comment has some good content and could hold its own without this statement. It just feels a little antagonistic. Everything has been done before, we're all on the shoulders of giants.

<comment><USER37> I appreciate a quick summary of a longer comment. Being aware of the context I can more easily skim without missing anything.</comment></comment></comment>


Lazarus Rising or Icarus Falling? The GoPro and LinkedIn Question - <AUTHOR> http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com/2016/02/lazarus-rising-or-icarus-falling-gopro.html <comment><USER2> Damodoran is a legend in the field of valuation and corporate finance. But while methods like this are theoretically perfect, what if LinkedIn's product is getting fundamentally less useful? How do you accurately model the decline of a software company, where shifts in adoption trends can be steep?

Also Damodoran says things like this: "The top management of LinkedIn has struck me as more competent and less publicity-conscious that those at some other high profile social media companies."

But what if part of the CEO's job is to ensure positive public sentiment for his product, which generates higher engagement (which in turn generates more revenue through conversions) ? Most of the commenters here and elsewhere seem to revile LinkedIn's tactics, so I would say Weiner isn't succeeding in his job. Maybe time for a change?</comment>


Affair Website Ashley Madison Is Hacked - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/affair-website-ashley-madison-hacked-1437402152?mod=e2fb

<comment><USER2> Comments moved to [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914024).

</comment><comment><USER3> previous discussions from the last 24 hours:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914024)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9915155](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9915155)

</comment><comment><USER4> Previous discussion from 10 hours ago: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914024](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9914024)

<comment><USER5> And the linked article isn't paywalled.</comment></comment>


Bill Gates admits Control-Alt-Delete was a mistake, blames IBM - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2013/9/26/4772680/bill-gates-admits-ctrl-alt-del-was-a-mistake <comment><USER2> On Linux 0.01 (10/30/93 1:00:00 AM) I see the following:

            jne cur2		/* check for ctrl-alt-del */

During years I've been working on shared KVM (keyboard, video, mouse) devices, where windows sysadmins did press ctrl+alt+delete as first step, to wake up the monitor from sleep.

If you had bad luck and the KVM was in the wrong port... boom!

I did learn to disable this feature the hard way.

</comment><comment><USER3> "the new device called the phone" (Ballmer's, but still precious)</comment>


When automation goes horribly wrong - <AUTHOR> https://gojko.net/2017/03/15/automation-horribly-wrong.html <comment><USER2> " I'm sure that in the future the scientists will find a direct negative link between pompous software system names and the damage they caused, and MiDAS will be right on top of that list. "

hahha loved this quote. Nice post! Thanks</comment>


Trigger Warnings - <AUTHOR> http://katenonesuch.com/2015/06/01/trigger-warnings/

<comment><USER2> Is there a proper term for the illiterate? I'd hate to offend anyone.</comment>


WorldMate + Push = Must Have iPhone App for Road Warriors - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/04/worldmate-push-must-have-iphone-app-for-road-warriors-free-copies/

<comment><USER2> Sounds like they spent a lot of time on the small features and polish. Hotel near the airport, but only after 10PM? Brilliant!

Sometimes these small things make all the difference.

</comment><comment><USER3> WorldMate is well-known for its WinMo/Blackberry application.

I'm surprised that they ported it to the iPhone, given the almost complete lack of business users on that platform.</comment>


Ask HN: How do you deal with complain rate on SES - <AUTHOR> <comment><AUTHOR> Hi all,

I run a news letter with AWS SES and the complaint rate is reaching 0.05%. They expect 0.1% complaint rate.

I have received zero complaints email from SES in last 1 months but this rate isn't going down. ALl of my email required double opt-in and ubsubscribe link.

I have no idea why this complaints rate isn'g going down and worry I may get suspend. I only send around 15K email per month.

AWS support is no helpful because the tech support isn't free and around few hundres dollars a month :(.

Any one has experience with using SES and dealing with complaints rate?</comment>


Rift Is A Super New Game That All Game-players Will Enjoy - <AUTHOR> http://www.uniquedailyarticles.com/Art/216074/32/Rift-Is-A-Super-New-Game-That-All-Game-players-Will-Enjoy.html

<comment><USER2> SPAM</comment>


Anonymous internet payments using pay phones - <AUTHOR> https://stallman.org/articles/anonymous-payments-thru-phones.html <comment><USER2> Quick, to the nearest coin-operated pay phone!</comment>


Falling inequality in mortality in the US - <AUTHOR> http://voxeu.org/article/mortality-inequality-good-news-county-level-approach <comment><USER2> What great news. Congratulations to all those working hard in that area.

"Underlying explanations include declines in the prevalence of smoking and improved nutrition, and a major cause is social policies that target the most disadvantaged."

It will be interesting how history treats smoking in the long term (next century). I am still interested in the solutions proposed (and defeated) in Singapore and Tasmania where persons born after 200x may not purchase cigarettes. I lean libertarian but this is one area I think government is needed. Taking (or taxing) a pleasure away from someone who has enjoyed it for years is not nice, but preventing people from falling into the trap is different.

<comment><USER3> I'm curious about the moral justification for banning things that cause harm primarily to the people who do them.

I recently learned that gay (man to man) sex is actually super dangerous - having gay sex for a year costs between 0.088 and 0.97 QALYs (due to spreading HIV). This is significantly higher than most of the estimates I've heard for a year of smoking.

[https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/are_gays_or_guns_mor...](https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2016/are_gays_or_guns_more_dangerous.html)

Should we adopt some of your solutions for that too? Perhaps reintroducing sodomy laws for people born after 200X?

If not, what principle distinguishes these two cases?

(Note: I'm perfectly ok with people engaging in self harm. So I obviously don't favor such solutions. I'm just pointing out that this reasoning is applied incredibly inconsistently.)

<comment><USER2> I'm not saying things should be consistent, but dealt with case by case. Definitely not a blanket ban things that cause harm primarily to the people who do them. I'm talking specifically about smoking.

In the case of smoking, we have an industry that sells addictive items that kill you, and has a history of lies and cover ups. I'm not sure of the benefits, as I don't smoke, but I hear from people who have smoked and quit that they are happier not smoking. I'm no expert, just someone who's interested, as I said. Growing your own tobacco and smoking it would be a different thing.

If tobacco smoking was introduced today, I think it wouldn't get past the FDA and similar. Can we "turn off" a legal industry that is grandfathered in? Should we?

Your slippery slope question of sodomy is different. There are no large multinationals marketing and selling it. Just free individuals engaging.

The sale of tobacco products does seem to impose quite the externality on society. Are we willing to put up with it long term? That's the question I'm interested in.

<comment><USER4> _There are no large multinationals marketing and selling it._

Massive multinationals sell antiretroviral drugs and are heavily subsidized by governments across the world. They directly profit from harm men having sex with men cause to themselves and make you (and me) pay for it on top.

The average costs of such therapy is 15-50k USD a year, I googled[1], depending on strain, circumstances, etc. Wouldn't that also be quite an externality? Smokers are probably cheaper[2], because they die sooner.

[1] [https://www.poz.com/article/hiv-costs- medication-19139-5119](https://www.poz.com/article/hiv-costs- medication-19139-5119)

[2] [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht- obese.1.97488...](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/05/health/05iht- obese.1.9748884.html)

<comment><USER2> This is just silly. These drug companies aren't selling sex, nor encouraging people to do it. They also sell chemotherapy drugs, which are also subsidized. Tobacco causes 1 in 5 deaths _and it causes income inequality_ which is _what the article is about_.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I have to wonder, this largely seems to have coincided with the fantastic decrease in crime since the 2000's onwards. Coincidence?

I largely agree with the article. This needs to be lauded and discussed.

</comment><comment><USER6> Rising equality in US mortality.

Is nice to see some progress.

<comment><USER7> Dat double negative clickbait title

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> Uh oh, this doesn't fit the class-war narrative so no one is going to touch it.

<comment><USER9> The article does say:

"Overall, these findings show that even in times of great economic inequality, inequality in health outcomes is not inevitable but is strongly mediated by policy."

Acknowledging income inequality as a problem, even if it isn't have a negative effect on whether you die earlier or not.

<comment><USER10> How does that sentence acknowledge income inequality as a problem? It just acknowledges it exists, it doesn't make any claim about whether or not it is a problem.

<comment><USER9> The snippet:

"...in times of great economic inequality..."

^Is intentionally sensationalized, the notion being that economic inequality in our society is generally viewed as a negative. Consider the following:

"...in times of great famine..."

Now you could try to make the argument that someone is merely stating a fact and picked an adjatiave which helps the reader picture what's going on, but I don't think anyone would assume the author considered famine to be a "neutral fact". Similarly, the end snippet is clearly addressing the elephant in the room given the title of the article, which was certainly chosen due to the subject matter, but also due the phrase which we are debating (income inequality), which is essentially another way or saying that a class of people are losing wealth to another class.

<comment><USER8> It acknowledges that some people think it is a problem, but it does not itself make any statement about whether or not it's a problem.

For those of us who believe economic inequality is both good and natural, this is a great rhetorical device for undermining the left -- "in this time of great economic inequality, life is better than it has ever been for the general populace."

A person on the left may use the opposite rhetorical device, "in this time of great economic freedom, people are increasingly poor."

As this is written, there is no way to know which rhetorical device they were using.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


New ASP.NET Security Vulnerability could allow access to web.config - <AUTHOR> http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2010/09/18/important-asp-net-security-vulnerability.aspx?CommentPosted=true#commentmessage

<comment><USER2> This doesn't seem like something worth worrying about to me.

In order for this to happen to your site, you would have to have CustomErrors turned off, or otherwise have your site set up to display stack traces to the general public. That's a quick recipe to get your site hacked regardless of technology, so the fact that it leaves you a little more open to a specific type of crypto attack is neither here nor there.

So basically, if you're following best practices (not just for ASP.NET, but web dev in general) and not displaying stack traces to your users, you're not in danger of this happening to you.

<comment><USER3> Reading into it, it is not enough to just have CustomErrors on to mitigate the risk. There are some pretty detailed instructions, involving pushing all errors to a single page, with a random delay embedded in the page script.

They seem intentionally vague about how someone can use this to get asp.net to dump the web.config however.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The recommended temporary patch is horrible. They want servers to return 500 error with exactly the same message no matter what the problem is. That means 404 and any other custom error can't be returned to the user. The user has no idea what just happened and why they're seeing the error.

A patch is on the way to eventually make this unnecessary but there's absolutely no ETA for it. Are we talking days, weeks, (gasp) months? They do deserve credit for responding to the comments but it would be good to have a better ETA.

<comment><USER2> The article is a bit vague there, bit I didn't read it to mean you couldn't distinguish 404s from 500s.

It seems to say that you shouldn't tell people which _flavor_ of 5xx he got, since that's useful info to an attacker.

As I mentioned in another thread, this doesn't seem like it would affect any real sites, so it's not a case of waiting for (gasp) months for a patch while your server is in real jeopardy.

Security warnings like this come through for ASP.NET a couple times a year, but nearly all of them are of the "don't do the stuff you already shouldn't be doing, or bad things might happen" variety.

<comment><USER4> The 404 restriction is driven home in the comments. Many users ask and its repeated several times that all errors should be 500, even 404.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> For those of you who don't know .net, this is basically where all the site specific configuration files lie - think database passwords, email servers, admin passwords to bootstrap the system, etc.

So this is kind of a big deal.

<comment><USER2> Indeed, but if you're doing it right, you won't have any passwords there. The things you need to access from a web app tend to allow trusted user access, so all an attacker would be able to get from a properly configured site's web.config would be the name of the database server (or the fact that it's (local)).</comment></comment>


Do shareholders of private companies have the right to know financing details? - <AUTHOR>

In my experience, VC funded startups (later stage especially) are secretive when it comes to number of shares outstanding and valuation.  Getting numbers from management is like pulling teeth.  If you own shares in one of these startups, do you have a right to know the details of the financing rounds? <comment><USER2> Sure.</comment>


Comcast starts throttling mobile video - <AUTHOR> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/comcast-starts-throttling-mobile-video-will-charge-extra-for-hd-streams <comment><USER2> Comcast has a mobile service?

<comment><USER3> Yes it bundles with your broadband. And they have finally deployed gigabit internet in some places (I just got it).</comment></comment>


Google Maps starts explaining what foreign businesses actually are - <AUTHOR> http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/21/11997418/google-maps-japan-listing-explanation <comment><USER2> Slightly off-topic but recently, Google Maps on Android has been asking me a lot of questions about a few places I've visited in the past (mainly businesses). Questions regarding things like "Is this place accessible for limited-mobility people?", "Does this place serve alcohol?", "Is this place opened late?" and so forth.

I reckon there needs to be at least questions about providing them with so much free information, but it's definitely an interesting crowdsourcing experiment and it could make for an extremely precise experience for everyone involved.

</comment><comment><USER3> > Google Maps starts explaining ...

IMO, 'showing'\- rather than 'explaining' \- would be a more appropriate term to use in the title.</comment>


Leaving Earth comes with serious psychological risks - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb83ay/leaving-earth-comes-with-serious-psychological-risks <comment><USER2> Not sure I trust Swedes to grapple with such an existential idea.

"They also used Hasselblad lenses, a camera brand with a storied spaceflight history."

Eye rolling intensifies...</comment>


Reddit censoring discussion round Hong Kong on China's request - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/AustinGWalters/status/1196512610520305664 <comment><USER2> That was a joke comment.</comment>


Ask HN: What will happen to Amazon Video? - <AUTHOR>

Chrome's set to be disabling npapi soon (less than a week most likely).
This will mean Amazon Prime's Instant Video, which uses Silverlight, will not work for chrome users unless they:
1. Know chrome has disabled npapi, because a webpage with silverlight doesn't inform you its disabled, it just asks you to install silverlight. (Try watching prime in chrome beta, it just asks you to install silverlight)
2. Know how to re-enable npapi (through a temporary workaround), or that they can switch to a different browser (or downgrade chrome).
I haven't seen any comment from Amazon about this upcoming issue, and haven't seen any alternatives to silverlight for it. Anyone know what might happen? <comment><USER2> [https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/settings?ie=UTF8&ref_=ya_man...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/video/settings?ie=UTF8&ref_=ya_manage_instant_video)

You can select Adobe Flash Player instead, and avoid Silverlight entirely</comment>


East Germany showing off its computers in a state parade, 1987 - <AUTHOR> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-1987-0704-077,_Berlin,_750-Jahr-Feier,_Festumzug,_Computer.jpg

<comment><USER2> nice find OP. Never saw them bragging about their computers though.

I was a kid back then and remember those parades (1.May "workers day") somewhat fondly.

I once just walked on my own in their midst and overhearing grown ups talking how ridiculous this is, made me realize that all of them just pretended to be a willing part.

It was all fake and only those waving aparatschiks on the stage were kept in the dark, exactly like in the "The Emperor's New Clothes".

It was actually a mind blown eye opener, never liked grown ups anyways.

But the grown ups seemed tp make the best out of it and met after the rally at their companies having BBQs and getting drunk - that was always a fun part.</comment>


Show HN: FasterBadger – browser in the cloud (pages are rendered on the server) - <AUTHOR> https://fasterbadger.com <comment><USER2> Very nice. Can you do better urls ? So we can link to sites directly; Exp: [https://fasterbadger.com/google.com](https://fasterbadger.com/google.com) or use search query in browsers like; [https://fasterbadger.com/%s](https://fasterbadger.com/%s) Also some custom !bang commands like DuckDuckGo uses will be nice; [https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html](https://duckduckgo.com/bang.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks. Direct site linking is on the shortlist of features to add next. Haven't thought about !bang commands, that's an interesting idea.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> This is an interesting idea. Is there an intended use case? The page says to "speed up browsing on many websites by rendering them in the cloud", but as far as I can tell this also means we have to wait for the entire page to render before we are sent the png's. Along with the increased latency by going through FasterBadger instead of through the CDN's.

Or is it for sites where most of the times is spend on the rendering client side?

<comment><AUTHOR> It actually starts rendering even before the entire page is ready (and fixes up the page later; well, in the current version it just re-renders the page later). For some sites (news sites tend to be particularly bad here), rendering on the client takes significant time, especially with older phones - because of complex scripts, styles, many re-layouts/reflows, ads/trackers (which bring their own scripts/styles), and so on. Additionally, there's the issue of the number and size of network requests, which can be a problem over slow 3G connections. Of course, I could be wrong in these assumptions, and it could be the case that with improved networks, improved hardware and better- optimized sites none of this will be an issue. So FasterBadger is an experiment - will server-side rendering be enough of an improvement for people to change browsing habits? What about people with slower phones and slower networks, e.g. in developing countries? We're definitely finding sites today that e.g. don't display any content for a whole 30-60sec on an iPhone4 and display in mere seconds via FasterBadger, but of course not every site will be sped up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's well done.

There is another option inside the browser by using WebKit.js ([https://trevorlinton.github.io/](https://trevorlinton.github.io/)) for the rendering and send the page encrypted to the browser with XHR (or with another method).

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! WebKit.js could be interesting down the line, thanks for pointing it out, though I wonder about performance and standards compliance. There's also the stability issue - the page says it's "experimental/unstable/not yet alpha". FasterBadger is based on the much more stable PhantomJS, and still plenty of gnarly bugs are coming out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> This seems like it'd be particularly helpful for dealing with the incredibly excessive CSS layers in Google websites like Google+ (which locks up my browser for five seconds when it loads). But I'd be pretty iffy giving my login details through a proxy like this.

<comment><AUTHOR> We don't store anything you type into forms, and don't store any cookies any longer than the browsing session is alive (currently expires after 5min of inactivity). But you're right of course, as a user you have no way of verifying this. The main scenario I was envisioning here is things like news sites, which often go overboard with complex scripts, CSS, images/videos/flash, ads, etc, to the point where a simple news article is difficult or impossible to read - especially on an older device or on a slow 3G connection.

<comment><USER5> I see the actual speed benefits immediately, I tested it with a public G+ post URL, and it loaded much faster than my laptop can load a G+ page normally, and without causing my browser to freeze up.

Out of curiosity, what's the monetization or business plan with this?

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Monetization is not fully thought out yet but I'm envisioning a freemium model down the line. Basically, either start charging after a certain usage threshold (e.g. an hour of free browsing per day), or charge for extra features like server-side ad-block, ability to pick the country in which the server's IP is located, HTTPS access (even though HTTPS is currently free), etc.

<comment><USER5> The biggest concern, particularly down the road, is assuring people you're above board on security. When I mentioned it on G+, the first suggestion was that you guys could inject ads and such, which obviously would be a huge problem.

But generally if there's a solid paid model, a company can be pretty free and clear of those problems.

The other thing you would want to consider is Firefox and Chrome plugins where you could set specific sites to open via your protocol. Maybe Engadget doesn't work well on my computer for whatever reason, so I tell the extension to open all Engadget URLs through your service, or something like that.

<comment><AUTHOR> Agree on the security aspect, and injecting ads would be horrible, I definitely think there are better monetization models here. Plugins are an interesting idea, will give it some thought. Though for now, I'm thinking in a different direction... I think FasterBadger is mainly applicable to mobile (since complex pages would be much more overwhelming to phones than desktop machines), and plugins are less of a thing there. However, a native app that speaks the FasterBadger protocol (essentially an alternative browser app) could be interesting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> My first thought upon seeing this is regarding a way to build this into a web proxy, & let a local server do the work while clients only have to be configured to use the proxy. Dunno if its feasible, not knowing how it works, but it seems promising.

<comment><AUTHOR> Interesting idea. Unfortunately FasterBadger is far from being a universal browser now, there are still many sites that it won't support or won't support well (anything that relies on more than just basic click and keyboard input events), so the degree of integration you're talking about probably isn't appropriate yet... but perhaps will be in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Interesting concept Bookmarked. Luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks!</comment></comment>


Accounts get in the way of startups working together - <AUTHOR> http://sachin.posterous.com/accounts-get-in-the-way

<comment><USER2> It is so easy to enable Google, Facebook Connect, Twitter, and Hotmail account logins for your site that it makes absolutely no sense to roll your own. Instead of rolling your own features like login, signup, forgot-my-password, confirm-email etc., just implement the above for your sites from the get go. OpenID is good too but I've found almost nobody uses that to log into my sites. 75% are Gmail/Google, 20% Facebook, and rest are Twitter and MSN.

<comment><USER3> Hold on there. We added RPX (wraps Google, FB, Twitter, etc, etc) signup/login in addition to our username/password and the response has been...unexpected. We still have well over 50% of people sign up with username/password instead of RPX. I had expected a huge shift, but it didn't happen.

Sure, maybe some of those _would_ have used RPX if that were the only thing we had, but apparently they still prefer a username.

Going 100% with the 3rd party logins is a tricky route. It's impossible to know how many potential signups you're losing.

<comment><USER4> Not to mention that you're potentially putting a very crucial part of your company infrastructure in to the hands of another company whose interests are probably not aligned with yours.

What happens to your startup if (though unlikely) in six months time Twitter decides to start charging for authentication or different levels of service?

Something to consider.

<comment><USER3> Yes, definitely an issue. If RPX disappears, we'd be in a world of hurt. I'm willing to take that chance, but they've really got us in a vice.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _"If you want another company to use your services, then you need to make it easy."_

Or, make a service that's so good, enough people _demand_ integration.

This article makes some good points but I think things change once you start talking about startups that charge money ... and the Typekit example he gives is proof. It's the one paid service he lists–it doesn't use RPX, FB connect, etc.

</comment><comment><USER6> This is a really great post. Why more startups don't use something like RPX from JanRain is beyond me.

</comment><comment><USER7> Seamless access is definitely one feature I appreciate the most.</comment>


Hospital Goes Bankrupt, Electronic Records Now Inacessible - <AUTHOR> https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-health/2019/02/20/student-could-die-because-she-cant-get-copies-medical-records-florence-gilbert-hospital-new-vision/2796887002/ <comment><AUTHOR> The latest unforseen complication of EMR adoption: no one knows how to deal with the records of hospital systems that go bankrupt.</comment>


Google Gets 3 Months to Fix Privacy or Face French Fines - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-20/google-to-get-3-months-to-fix-privacy-policy-or-face-french-fine.html <comment><USER2> [http://www.cnil.fr/english/news-and- events/news/article/cnil...](http://www.cnil.fr/english/news-and- events/news/article/cnil-orders-google-to-comply-with-the-french-data- protection-act-within-three-months/)</comment>


The Lack of an App Store Free Trial - <AUTHOR> http://blog.forecast.io/the-app-store-free-trial/

<comment><USER2> As a developer I understand the draw but as a consumer I definitely do not want limited time free trials. Limited functionality free version w/IAP upgrade is a popular way to solve this problem.</comment>


Show HN: Good Indians, a database for good outsourcing - <AUTHOR> http://goodindians.com/

<comment><USER2> Not sure if this is a joke or totally messed up.</comment>


Ask HN: Pragmatic Web Framework for a Mobile Startup - <AUTHOR>

What is the best choice of web framework for a startup where the primary responsibility will be serving RESTful json to native clients with real time components. In the future we may develop an SPA as well (but nothing super complicated). My top three choices so far are Node+Express, Ruby (Rails or Grape + ActiveRecord), or the Java Play! framework
My primary considerations are being able to easily hire for it, a strong ecosystem that won't be past its prime in a few years,  have good code maintainability, and being reasonably fast to market. Performance is somewhat of an issue, but i'm comfortable using job queues and scaling horizontally with elastic beanstalk, which I feel mitigate some of the performance problems of the frameworks/languages themselves
I love the large, growing, ecosystem of Node, the performance, and I like the idea the idea of eventually moving engineers between backend/frontend, but I fear lack of code maintainability will slow us down in the long run. Loopback.io (built on express) seems like a good potential choice.
Ruby (I've been suggested Grape+ActiveRecord) seems to be the absolute fastest to market solution and offers pretty good maintainability, but I fear that the Rails ecosystem is waning and it may not be the best choice for websockets. Should I worry about Rails being eclipsed by node and losing relevancy over the next 3-5 years? Is the performance and real time support so much better in node that its worth it to take the code maintainability hit? Is the ecosystem and maturity of Rails alone make it worth it?
The Java Play! framework looks amazing due to its maintainability and performance (with web socket support). I think  detecting errors at compile time makes up for its extra verbosity. Is it not mainstream enough? Is it fast to develop in? Is it easy to hire Java web developers with web applications experience? How its its ecosystem vs rails for web apps? <comment><USER2> Why don't you take some time and do a quick and dirty prototype with all three of those solutions, and see which ones you like working with?

I'd also say that you should probably be willing to take your first few software developer hires into acconut - if you find the right developer, but they are a Python/Flask developer, that doesn't mean you should rule them out.</comment>