What is GPT-3? written in layman's terms - <AUTHOR> https://tinkeredthinking.com/index.php?id=841 <comment><USER3> I have some issues with how this article describes GPT and its impact. The scenarios that are described as using GPT-3 remains the stuff of science fiction as far as I know. They would require major technological breakthroughs in areas of autonomous agents, combining language models with 'concept-based' models, and more mundane things like labelling (can you imagine how difficult it would take to accurately label all legislation for 'nefarious details', given that even humans can't agree on what is nefarious?).

More specifically:

\- training on data is a lossy process. In your examples, GPT would actually have a worse memory than your lawyer or therapist. There is no way to combine language models and something more abstract like 'facts'.

\- GPT has shown zero ability to do anything consistently successfully without a human-in-the-loop. When it comes to bring AI models into production, this matters a lot. There's no way autonomous therapists are coming from GPT-3 when half the time the model spews out potentially dangerous garbage. You can't teach GPT-3 to not hurt people because it has no concept of people or hurting them. It JUST knows the shape of English.

\- GPT is an unsupervised (in terms of data labelling work required) model. It has not made any breakthroughs in requiring labelled data for fine-tuning the model to do a specific task. Which remains a gigantic problem for productionalizing models. Like how are you going to build an autonomous therapist? That data remains as inaccessible and impossible to label as ever.

\- Please stop telling people that neural nets are related to brain neurons. They have essentially no relationship other than the name and it just fosters this fear of Terminator and obscures the real issues that need to be thought about. This is just my personal opinion but I'm so tired of having to spend my time telling otherwise smart people who don't know better that we aren't close to Terminator.

GPT is an impressive technical accomplishment, but it's impact on the world has been exaggerated quite a bit IMO. Some of the demos I've seen are almost certainly smoke and mirrors or very carefully chosen, human-in-the-loop examples.

<comment><USER4> A much more realistic and accurate take on the tech than the article. One combination that can work is to have GPT3 with an unskilled human judge in the loop. The human can discriminate with common sense while the machine generates good jargon with correct grammar.

<comment><USER5> That seems even worse!

Jargon (sometimes) isn't just obfuscation; it carries important shades of meaning that would be tedious to spell out every time. 'Homicide' and 'murder', for example, are sometimes used interchangeably, but are not actually legally interchangeable. You would not want your involuntary manslaughter plea upgraded to murder, a more serious--and therefore more severely punished offense.

You could, of course, try to train "unskilled labor" to detect things like that. By the time you are done, the labor won't be unskilled and you will have reinvented the paralegal.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > GPT-3 continuation: A confused voice came from inside. When I opened the > door, the person that looked back at me was Hayama Hayato. Why was Hayama, > who I only shared memories of me playing soccer with, in my room at this > hour of the night? That question immediately flew out from my mouth.

[I knew that name felt familiar]([https://oregairu.fandom.com/wiki/Hayato_Hayama](https://oregairu.fandom.com/wiki/Hayato_Hayama)). Does that mean GPT-3 was trained on an arbitrary, huge database of text? I wonder how copyright applies here.

<comment><USER7> There's an open question if GPT-3 simply provides a text completion API for the internet. The original paper discusses the risk that datasets for specific evaluation tasks (or equivalents) were simply memorized by the model.

A completion API for the internet could still be an incredibly valuable component.

<comment><USER8> yes! if a thing of similar performance as GPT-3 could just spew out links to where its "inspiration" comes from, this would be (super expensive?) real context-aware search. This could be really great.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> One thing I will say after seeing GPT-3 running live is that somehow the examples that you see trotted about in various articles never really seem to capture the spirit of the thing. Interacting with it directly and exploring the universe behind the prompt is one of the more profound computing experiences I've ever had.

<comment><USER10> Agreed. I've been playing AI Dungeon with their GPT-3 model, and it really does feel like there's a scatterbrained but human DM on the other side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> To me, what GPT-n really tells is how redundant human text in general is. It doesn't provide a lot of new information (if it does, they are accidental), but more or less wandering around the given topic. It is the redundancy that gives the system a space to churn.

<comment><USER12> The reduntancy is not low. GPT-* are basic "pattern generators" for our language organ. We have pattern generators for our gait for example -- all those synchronized movements of so many muscles can be effectively controlled by a well understood circuit, to the point that even a deafferented animal can still be be made to recognizably walk.

GPT is the equivalent, but for language: it can be used to phrase thoughts. Real language however, has thoughts, GPT doesnt have any thoughts. People are impressed by how many responses it has learned, but forget that it is contains a lot of gigabytes of "compressed" text associations. It needs "something else" to become actually useful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I have seen comments on Reddit that smelled as though something like this was used to create them. I don't see how, in future, we are going to be able to meet up and discuss constructively with strangers online, if this thing can be used to emulate people.

<comment><USER14> Or imagine the amount of useless blog posts for SEO spam. We already suffer from information overload. This will add a lot more.

<comment><USER15> > We already suffer from information overload

I would suggest this isn't quite right, we actually suffer from _content_ overload, not information overload.

The quantity of useful information in a lot of the content we are offered is depressingly small.

<comment><USER16> I would suggest this isn't quite right, we suffer from advertisement overload and "content" is actually a "hype" word - itselft a product of advertisement (propaganda).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Let me guess. GPT-3 wrote this article??

<comment><USER18> That was my thought as well. It has a lot of the idiosyncrasies I've noticed in other GPT-3-generated articles: coherent, but meandering, with a lot of cliches and rhetorical questions that don't really add to the article. Of course, you also see that in human writing. :-)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> I think GPT-3 will change the assumption written language or sentences a priory have meanings, because experience taught actions might follow. From now determining the author and their intentions is kind of an survival skill. Just imagine half of the Internet was written by GPT-3 and nobody knows which half.

</comment><comment><USER20> A comment from r/machinelearning:

"It seems obvious from the demos that GPT-3 is capable of reasoning.

But not consistently.

It would be critical, imo, to see if we can identify a pattern of activity in it associated with the lucid responses vs activity when it prodcues nonsense.

If/when we have such a apattern we would need to find a way to enforce it to happen in every interaction"

And people agree:

"Dunno why you are getting downvoted, I agree with you. It seems like to get GPT-3 to do good reasoning you have to convince it that it is writing about a dialogue between two smart people. Talking to Einstein, giving some good examples, etc. all seem to help. Shaping really seems to matter, but I don't think we have enough access to the hidden state to determine if there are quantitative differences between when it is more lucid and when it isn't.

It's like Gwern said: "sampling cannot prove the absence of knowledge, only the presence of it" (because whenever it fails, maybe with a different context, different sampling parameters, using spaces between letters, etc. it would have worked)"

Its interesting that this kind of speculation is entering the conversation. I think we are on the cusp

<comment><USER10> I'm not convinced that "capable of reasoning, but not consistently" is a meaningful claim. The examples seem to primarily consist of people spending hours trying things, until eventually GPT-3 outputs a chunk of reasoning they could personally do in seconds. Does that mean that GPT-3 is doing the reasoning, or does it mean that GPT-3 is an English-based lookup table and they managed to find a clever sequence of search keys?

The fact that there _could_ be reasoning going on is certainly exciting by itself. But I don't think it's fair to call it obvious without a compact specification for how to make GPT-3 perform a general class of reasoning. Less "here's a script to make it output stuff about balanced parens", more "here's a strategy to teach it most basic string manipulations".

<comment><USER21> Have you seen the database prompt?

[https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#the-database- prompt](https://www.gwern.net/GPT-3#the-database-prompt)

<comment><USER10> As I mentioned, I don't think any single prompt can demonstrate the presence of true reasoning. If the prompt isn't shown to broadly generalize, it might just be doing a text match to something that was said before on the depths of the internet. You can see this in the next section; Kevin Lacker gets GPT-3 to demonstrate it knows some basic trivia questions, but it "knows" _any_ prompt with the same textual structure as a basic trivia question, even if the prompt is nonsense. This strongly suggests that it's parsing out key words and doing a lookup on them rather than accessing a consistent internal model.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> > So embeddings are bits of binary code that are associated with the words and > word-snippets that the computer 'reads'. These embeddings never change.

I'm not entirely sure but I think this definition of embedding is wrong: first they are not binary, they are floats (as the other parameters/weights) and they do change, as the error backpropagates through them. They are simply "swappable parameters", explicitly corresponding to each word, thus it's possible to detach and reuse them for other purposes after training, which is not necessarily easy (or meaningful) with any other weight matrix in a model.

</comment><comment><USER23> > If prompted correctly it responds identically a human.

It appears to be grammatically incorrect. It made me think "ok, probably written by a human." But then also realized that typos and grammar issues are probably prevalent in the data set. How would they manifest? Will they reinforce emerging changes in language? (eg, think of how the meanings of words have slowly mutated). And how much of the scraped content is itself written by a AI?

</comment><comment><USER24> Apologies i realize this is a bit of a tangent but what i would like and can't find is an understandable description of how Generative neural networks work. My very basic understanding of neural networks is as a classifier. Cat and dog pictures in, likelihood out. I can't get any intuition about how this can generate new cat pictures.. is it a search problem? How does that search work?

<comment><USER25> Classifiers are just one example of output, one where the final layer of output is interpreted to be probabilities of different items. Using a different loss function (or reward function), you can train for the output to be different things.

But in fact text generators work basically identically to classifiers. You train the model to classify texts according to which single word comes next. Then you append a word to the text according to that output, and repeat.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Good article. I was half expecting at the end to read that the article itself was generated by GPT3. Luckily GPT3 can't explain itself just yet.

</comment><comment><USER27> Just wrote about something similar and what we can learn about GPT-3 inputs. Applicable for lots of domains but written to product managers.

[https://productsolving.substack.com/p/openais-gpt-3-will- cha...](https://productsolving.substack.com/p/openais-gpt-3-will-change-how- we)

<comment><USER9> I'm curious how long this prompting UI into language models like GPT-3 will continue. It's so fiddly and imprecise and unpredictable. It's better than nothing, of course, but there's a lot of art in it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> The idea of garbage in, garbage out is worth considering in the context of human minds and priming. Advertisements and algorithmic curation could contribute to hazardous information environments. Perhaps GPT agents may assist in revealing this dynamic and simulate the extent, and consequences of manipulation?

</comment><comment><USER29> "Generate text that could believably have been written by a human" is a task we're getting very good at. I'm curious how far it extends towards concrete applications. When can we start using it to fill functionality gaps between the functions of a human-coded framework?

<comment><USER30> In about the average life span of a redwood tree.

<comment><USER29> I'm probably going to be dead before Google Assistant can correctly interpret "take me to the McDonald's beside the Target"

<comment><USER31> I reckon that's 3 years away...

Current assistant features rely on trying to match your query fuzzily to an action template. Eg. "Set alarm for 10pm" might match the template "Make alarm at time {TIME}", with $TIME=22:00. Minor transformations of parameters can occur (Converting the time from 10pm to 22:00), but those are mostly hard- coded.

Future assistants will use a neural network to do the matching and parameter conversion, with the networks big enough to encode world data. So things like "Mcdonalds beside the target" can be encoded by the neural net so your query matches "Navigate to ${ADDRESS}", with $ADDRESS="Mcdonalds, 21 Foo Avenue".

It's all do-able today, but nobody has done it yet. Probably 3 years away I'd guess.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Looks like they also made a podcast.

"#828 - What is GPT-3?"

[https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/828-what-is- gpt-3/id13...](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/828-what-is- gpt-3/id1397732851?i=1000485603786)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Great introduction to GPT-3 and machine learning for non-technical people. Interesting implications/possible use cases described at the end, including therapy and regulatory capture.

<comment><USER33> GPT-3 probably has thousands of different skills like these two, we just haven't explored it much yet.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Images in the article are not showing up.

<comment><USER35> Isn't this a text-only article? My issue is rather with the title of the page, "Tinkered Thinking", instead of "Tinkered Thinking - What is GPT-3?", which harms bookmarking.

<comment><USER36> Don't just chuck your bookmarks into a pile. Sort them, label them - <USER2> them.

Otherwise it's pretty much "garbage in, garbage out".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Sounds like it's similar to the tool that creates these deep dream images, but for text.

</comment><comment><USER38> How long until someone builds GPT-4 with several trillion parameters? How much would that cost?

<comment><USER39> Training GPT-3 costs only a few million dollars. Scaling up is still pretty cheap. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a quadrillion parameter model in 5 years, given the potential value.

Google has actually already trained a trillion parameter model IIUC [1], though that was a Mixture of Experts so was way cheaper to train.

[1] [https://twitter.com/lepikhin/status/1278174444528132098](https://twitter.com/lepikhin/status/1278174444528132098)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> When is typical Hackernews commenter GPT-3 response bot coming out?

<comment><USER41> On common topics like Facebook, neural networks, and China, the comment section would look no different. Hell, the exact same conversations end up happening most of the time, too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> where one should start learning how to leverage OPENAPI to build some complex logic? i've seen gym, but it seems to me that they are predefined envs where you can just play.</comment>


IBM has released open blockchain with embedded Go scripting - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/openblockchain/obc-peer <comment><AUTHOR> There is a little more information here: [http://thenextweb.com/apps/2016/02/16/ibm-has-just-open- sour...](http://thenextweb.com/apps/2016/02/16/ibm-has-just-open- sourced-44000-lines-of-blockchain-code-on-github/)

</comment><comment><USER2> The over-arching collaborative project (hyperledger) seems to have multiple competing implementations: [https://github.com/hyperledger/hyperledger](https://github.com/hyperledger/hyperledger)

So it seems this is just one of them.</comment>


Taking Our Nomad Agency to South East Asia - <AUTHOR> http://thebakery.io/blog/taking-our-nomad-agency-to-south-east-asia/

<comment><USER2> Looks like you had a great time in South East Asia.

How's the rent in Berlin?

<comment><USER3> Finding a flat in Berlin could be challenging. The prices are still way lower than SF, London or Paris. Two of us are sharing a pad in a pretty central location and pay 850 euros including bills and all.

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the info. I figured most major cities in Germany (e.g. Munich, Berlin, Hamburg) have a shortage of apartments right now.</comment></comment></comment>


Collapse OS – Why? - <AUTHOR> https://collapseos.org/why.html <comment><USER2> I also am predicting collapse by 2030.

The mechanism follows from climate disruption. As the tropics become uninhabitable and/or unfarmable, millions will migrate (mostly) north, crossing borders and driving fascist / jingoist governments into power. (We see this beginning already.) Global war follows, disrupting all kinds of global trade, shattering supply chains. Famine ensues, and more war.

Preventing this requires preparation to absorb millions of refugees, and food aid to places not entirely uninhabitable. Temperate agriculture will be badly disrupted too, so we also need mass agriculture less dependent on clement conditions.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here is an interview with the author cited in the article:

[http://www.cadtm.org/The-coming-collapse](http://www.cadtm.org/The-coming- collapse)

</comment><comment><USER4> I disagree with his argument of the end of cheap energy. Even if oil were to become very expensive, we could use nuclear power. It is more expensive than natural gas, but it can power the economy. Also, countries with hydro power would have an economic advantage in a post oil world. Countries with these power sources would become manufacturing hubs.</comment>


Facebook Posts Strong Profit and Revenue Growth - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-posts-strong-profit-and-revenue-growth-1469650289 <comment><USER2> It has been said many times, that something else will come around, become more popular, and overthrow facebook. I just don't see that happening now.

They're still doing well. They bought Instagram. (I think a very smart move.) They'll eventually buy the next big thing.

I think Facebook is here to stay.

<comment><USER3> Facebook managed to beat out it's competitors to the top spot, and maintain that spot long enough to the point where it has just become a constant in people's minds now. Every other attempt to dethrone has been too technical minded I think. There was that Diaspora that gave users privacy, only to find people didn't care about that (the majority). Then there was Google+, who again introduced a whole lot of lingo and looked complicated to use and why bother? Everyone's on Facebook after all, and Google = Search, everything else is just riff raff!

Once you stop talking to developers and programmers, you find that people don't give a shit about things remotely technical, and just use stuff because 'everyone else is using it'.

Saying all that, these days my FB feed has gone advert mad, and I find I mainly use it for event organisation instead. I do get the feeling it is slowly dying though despite being profitable, but whether it will be replaced by a new social networking site, or a set of separate apps with specific functions instead, remains to be seen.

<comment><USER4> > Everyone's on Facebook after all

I know of several people who choose to not waste their time with Facebook. Seriously, why? Any time I need to nudge somebody, that I don't care enough to bother with in the real world, there is Linked In. Everybody else either has my phone number, email address, or they are people I don't know.

<comment><USER5> LinkedIn is a spammer paradise and a cancer for everybody else though. LinkedIn is designed decently but just as full of spam and overflow as Myspace was. Pretty much only worth using between jobs - but otherwise, I think there are much better platforms. They've become all about upselling: "Buy our premium membership and see the people who've seen your profile!" And they of course, sell your data and viewing habits without care.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/09/03/has- linked...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/nextavenue/2013/09/03/has-linkedin- crossed-an-ethical-line/#99b9d64468cc)

<comment><USER6> Absolutely agree!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Through clicking the "web" link it's exciting to see Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) [0] has support for this article. The WSJ paywall does not seem to affect it.

The load time for me on average wifi was almost unnoticeable.

[0]: [https://www.ampproject.org/](https://www.ampproject.org/)

<comment><USER8> AMP versions of articles are developed by publishers, not by Google, so it's there thanks to WSJ. As for the paywall, the AMP access component[1] is not stable, so WSJ's options were basically to skip AMP (and the associated traffic) or to skip the paywall.

[1]: [https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions...](https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/extensions/amp- access/amp-access.md)

<comment><USER9> I see the paywall on WSJ's AMP:

[http://imgur.com/tg7PqBu](http://imgur.com/tg7PqBu)

Got this from this page:

[https://www.google.com/amp/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook...](https://www.google.com/amp/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/facebook- posts-strong-profit-and-revenue-growth-1469650289)

(You can't view it from desktop as they're doing browser detection and forward you to the WSJ page.)

<comment><USER8> Oh, good catch. I'm incorrect, and they are using the component.[1] I suppose they just have the same policy for the carousel as for Google News.

[1]: [http://i.imgur.com/Jlu6JRX.png](http://i.imgur.com/Jlu6JRX.png)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Good for them. Lots of people spend lots of time on Facebook, so ads get a lot of eyeballs, making them valuable. But I wonder what their clickthrough-rate is. For some types of ads, that's obviously not the point, but I doubt it's very high.

At first, I was curious how their drive towards more video, both user- and professionally-produced, will mesh with their real name policy. But since they allow 'pages' for public figures, businesses, content creators, and other more abstract entities, they may be able to strike a happy medium where content creators can broadcast under a well-known pseudonym, while content consumers are all real people with real identities, targetable with ads. With this setup, they can mount a true challenge against established video places like Youtube and Twitch.

<comment><USER11> Facebook (and Google) have the best ad products on the market without any question.

I have so many DR clients printing money via FB ads, CTRs are not the metric we even focus on, it is all about conversions or measurement studies to support even investing in the platform. All my clients (big and small) love the platform, ad formats and service level.

Great company, well deserved success.

<comment><USER12> > CTRs are not the metric we even focus on, it is all about conversions

If users don't even click on ads how do you measure conversions? Is it more a case of brand advertising where you're not looking for directly measurable sales?

<comment><USER13> They do click on the ad, and then they buy something. The parent is saying they don't care how many people click, they only care how many people buy (a subset of those that click).

<comment><USER14> All advertisers want to maximize ROI. Ad displayers want to maximize CPM. It's a mistake to focus on one specific metric, because they all multiply to form the actual metric you care about.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'd be interested to know how much of that is from political spending during this crazy election year.

</comment><comment><USER16> I should have bought some facebook stock, but they are worth close to 400 billion dollars. Basically they are being forecasted to generate 20-30billion a year in cashflow at that valuation. I could see them maybe doing that, but its still a high valuation.

</comment><comment><USER17> We tried some display ads (non-app installation) on facebook. Since it's CPM+CPC model, our CTR was extremely low and caused CPC very expensive.

I guess they have huge PV so overall performance is high. I wonder what the actual would ROI be for other publishers on FB.

<comment><USER17> Forgot to mention, our conversion was kinda low too. So eventually we gave up ads on facebook. My friends who do mobile game publishing love facebook though. Kinda varies by verticles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Their huge ad scale provides a very flexible revenue machine. I think when FB misses a quarter it will be a big miss. Otherwise they can scale up ad units and make millions in incremental revenue if they need to pad a quarter.

</comment><comment><USER19> I still remember the very widespread arguments that were made before Facebook was heavily monetizing their platform/s: that they would make more money by charging subscription fees.

That turns out to have been false. They're getting $14.34 per year per user in the US, up ~50% over last year. There's no scenario under which they could match that with a subscription service (most people would never be willing to pay).

They're averaging $3.84 per user worldwide, up 38% over last year. You can't go around raising subscription fees by 40% or 50% per year on most of the world, but you can optimize delivering them advertising. You can boost ad rates by 50% without harming the user experience one bit.

The ad approach won again, easily.In Facebook it's going to end up producing another eventual $20+ billion annual profit money printing juggernaut ala Google. No subscription service in history has ever come close to accomplishing that sort of outcome, none ever will.

</comment><comment><USER20> From the article: _" The most lucrative ads are app-install ads and news feed ads shown in Facebook's mobile app."_

Interesting. Neither of those is "social".

</comment><comment><USER21> Current estimate of the population of China is 1.37 billion, and India 1.26 billion.

So does that mean Facebook is now the largest affiliated group of human beings ever?

<comment><USER22> Via nation state opt-ins we have larger groups of people like the United Nations, Commonwealth (2.2B), OECD, NATO, etc.

On an personal opt-in basis, the Catholic Church has 1.27B now, so Facebook is beating that. So yes, maybe Facebook has now become the largest single-org individual opt-in in history. Anyone know of a competitor?

<comment><USER23> How many people have a Google account? (Eg because of Android phone, or gmail?)

<comment><USER24> Upwards of 3 billion last I checked.

Up to 3.179 billion: [http://plus.miernicki.com/](http://plus.miernicki.com/)

Note that these are Google registrations, which include ... numerous things. I suspect most are Android activations.

The data were the basis for my own estimates of G+ user activity -- only 9% of the (then) 2.2 billion G+ profiles showed _any_ public activity, far fewer than that if you were looking for activity in the past month.

[https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq](https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Finally after about 10 years of using Facebook I was given a relevant ad last week.

Admittedly I cunningly lie about my age in Facebook and say I was born in 1918 (but on the correct day/month for my half-friends who don't know the actual date).

</comment><comment><USER26> I can't remember the last time I clicked an ad on Facebook, but what I do click on are sponsored articles that showcase apps or products that I am interested in but not sidebar ads.

</comment><comment><USER27> "Advertising on mobile devices accounted for 84% of Facebook's $6.2 billion in advertising sales in the latest quarter"

Proper Adblock on mobile devices will dilute their revenues :)

</comment><comment><USER28> FB makes 70% of its ad revenue from mobile. Can someone please explain to me the value prop of mobile ads? Doesn't the small screen size put a lid on how much advertisers will bid for that space? After all, on web sites, the ad unit size correlates with CPM price.

<comment><USER29> App installs.

<comment><USER28> thank you

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> It would be amazing if they at least started looking at what types of ads they are running. Some, if not even most, are completely against local regulation. The rest are outright actual scams or some multi-level marketing schemes.

</comment><comment><USER31> So are people basically content, or do they still long for something more free?

Has the believe in something Diaspora-like evaporated completely since they screwed up?

</comment><comment><USER32> How long before Facebook acquires Twitter out of pity?

<comment><USER33> Would Twitter be a good fit for Facebook? Their stances on ID are fairly different at the moment.

I'd expect Microsoft to buy them. It'd make more sense than LinkedIn, and cheaper, too!

Note: TWTR dropped by 15% today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Which is a peak, because Facebook is neither new nor special even in the third world.

</comment><comment><USER35> 50 years from now, our kids wont remember Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, it will be Mark Zuckerburg sitting on a stage ready to release mosquitoes on to the audience.

</comment><comment><USER36> Facebook vs Death. OMG who's gonna win!!!??

</comment><comment><USER37> EDIT - Whoops non-paywall didn't pick up - click top result:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=Facebook+Posts+Strong+Profit...](https://www.google.com/search?q=Facebook+Posts+Strong+Profit+and+Revenue+Growth&oq=Facebook+Posts+Strong+Profit+and+Revenue+Growth&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i61j69i60j69i61j69i64&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8#q=Facebook+Posts+Strong+Profit+and+Revenue+Growth&safe=active&tbm=nws)

<comment><USER38> That is _exactly_ the same link...

EDIT: and thanks for fixing it ;)

<comment><USER39> It's not; OP points to the direct wsj.com article (crippled with a _" To Read the Full Story, Subscribe or Sign In "_ banner if not subscribed), while aresant to a search for the article on Google, and when coming with a Google referer the full article is displayed. Thanks aresant.

<comment><USER38> It was when I commented, it just has been edited in the meantime.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> non-paywall: [http://on.wsj.com/2ayjLKO](http://on.wsj.com/2ayjLKO)

</comment><comment><USER41> Given the sheer volume of WSJ paywall links posted here, combined with the significance of YC, surely someone at YC could call someone at WSJ and get them to bypass the paywall when the referrer is HN. This is getting ridiculous. I'm familiar with the "web" link but even that gets old when every 4th or 5th link goes to WSJ.

<comment><USER42> Not to be rude, but are you kidding?

HN has provided you with a workaround, WSJ has provided you with free content, and that is not enough?

How about signing up for the WSJ?

<comment><USER41> _are you kidding?_

No. The volume of links to this one particular site with a very aggressive paywall has been increasing. Further, HN administrators actually change links pointing to alternative sites over to paywalled WSJ URLs when WSJ has the story (I know, because it happened with a story I submitted).

 _WSJ has provided you with free content_

They're not ad supported?

 _How about signing up for the WSJ?_

I might consider it, if they weren't so obnoxious with the paywall, along with inundating their pages with ads and completely blocking the loading of content when using an ad blocker. I will not reward that type of behavior, and neither should anyone else. I reported them to Google for cloaking a few weeks ago because under certain circumstances, the paywall comes up even when clicking over from Google (so, to your argument that "HN has provided [me] with a workaround" \- that isn't always the case because they flagrantly violate Google's anti-cloaking policy under certain circumstances, on top of everything else).

<comment><USER43> You're trolling, right? This is a parody or something.

> I will not reward that type of behavior

My mind is being blown. I'm completely feeding right now.

<comment><USER41> So everyone that doesn't share your opinion is trolling? No, I'm not. If you want to pay WSJ for that type of behavior, you're certainly welcome to.

<comment><USER43> Do not object to the WSJ paywall. I will not allow it. I will not stand for this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> That's slightly annoying. I strongly believed that Facebook would never be profitable. Guess I was wrong.

<comment><USER45> Can someone tell me why this is being downvoted? Confession of a strongly held false believe and updating on evidence saying otherwise is a good thing, isn't it? Downvoting that seems weird to me.

<comment><USER46> Probably because he led with "That's slightly annoying." At a quick glance, it looks like he's annoyed that Facebook is doing well (which would just be petty and deserving of a downvote) as opposed to annoyed with himself for holding an incorrect belief so strongly.

<comment><USER47> downvoting that benign statement is petty.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Mapping the Expansion of Google's Serving Infrastructure - <AUTHOR> http://nsl.cs.usc.edu/Projects/MappingTheExpansionOfGooglesServingInfrastructure

<comment><USER2> Global Surveillance Provider ?</comment>


Ask HN: How do you find out about local tech events? - <AUTHOR>

I found out about the Erlang Camp on HN.  I'm sure there are other local events like it.  Where do you go to discover them? <comment><USER2> meetup.com, Yahoo Upcoming, Linkedin, eventbrite</comment>


Ask HN: Do we regret forcing designers to learn to code? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Nobody has _forced_ designers to learn to code, but I for one am happy to see so many UX professionals taking an interest. It's the job of a designer to clearly communicate their vision to developers so that it can be implemented. Designers who have a basic understanding of HTML/CSS are unquestionably better equipped to do that job.

Consider a dismissable modal that appears in the center of the screen. As a front-end developer, I would like to know the modal's dimensions, its colors, which icon to use for the dismiss button, whether the corners should be rounded, and what sort of transition to use (should it fade in/out, and for how long). By creating a functional prototype of the element, he or she no longer has to answer each of these questions individually.

I don't see this as a bad trend. When designers are able to communicate their ideas clearly to developers, everyone wins.

</comment><comment><USER3> Who is we?

</comment><comment><USER4> Depends what you mean by coding. Being able to structure a website in HTML and style it with CSS is a relatively simple skill and demands no long-term study => Sketch makes it even simpler. (Just for the basics)

Also i think you are talking about a designer i would call a unicorn as being able to transfer design into something usable is very useful but uncommon and rare.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't regret, nor force.</comment>


Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha - <AUTHOR> https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptcha/ <comment><USER2> One of the more insidious elements of ReCAPTCHA is its propensity to challenge users who have robust cookie blocking in place. So as we encourage people to be more privacy-aware, the web gets harder and harder to use.

We've seen ReCAPTCHA pop all over ecommerce, all over benign websites with little to no need to challenge use almost completely because of the increase in privacy-aware users.

ReCAPTCHA essentially flies in the face of the recent blocking features rolling into Safari and Firefox and more privacy-aware users...growing by the day.

In many ways it's a genius structure from Google. 1\. Convince people to use your privacy challenge. 2\. Serve it when you don't see Google tracking cookies. 3\. Offer a way around that with the least privacy-aware browser available (Chrome use is growing steadily month over month.

So good on Cloudflare.

<comment><USER3> You're forgetting the main benefit for google, which is getting humans to train all their vision models for free. At one point they were just forcing X% of clicks to fill out a captcha regardless of origin or identity just to get more data.

I for one am getting quite tired of trillion dollar corporations getting things for free out of me. Hard pass.

<comment><USER4> > You're forgetting the main benefit for google, which is getting humans to > train all their vision models for free.

Is this still true? I keep seeing the same type of images for years and there might be 7 or 8 different categories but that's it. To me reCaptcha looks like a service well in its maintenance phase. If it was actually in use for training purposes you might expect images to match a wider range of tasks.

<comment><USER5> I've lost track of how many times I've had to read house numbers from Google Street View...

<comment><USER6> I haven't gotten one of those in years. These days it's just picking out buses, cars, traffic signals, and sometimes motorcycles. Maybe once in a while it'll ask for storefronts.

<comment><USER7> Most of mine lately have been traffic features also. This is a little tricky in some cases, e.g. with crossings, as it sometimes gives me things that I don't think are crossings but it insists I select, perhaps they are in the US, or the perspective is weird, or someone else has told it that a series of white squares is a crossing and it requires me to agree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> > "Earlier this year, Google informed us that they were going to begin > charging for reCAPTCHA. That is entirely within their right. Cloudflare, > given our volume, no doubt imposed significant costs on the reCAPTCHA > service, even for Google."

Even in the article they say... "Google provided reCAPTCHA for free in exchange for data from the service being used to train its visual identification systems." ... I thought this was one of those win/win things... Google gets something, websites get something... what's changed? Is Google not getting much out of reCAPTCHA now?

<comment><USER9> Seeing that reCAPTCHA v3 doesn't use endless streams of images any more, I would guess that Google no longer benefits much from having users tag storefronts, traffic lights, buses or fire hydrants. Maybe their image recognition algorithm is past that stage.

<comment><USER10> It does as a fallback. But you're missing the main point of v3, which is that it shifts the legal onus of blocking from Google to the integrating site. No longer can Google be sued for accessibility violations, if it's the site that's stopping the user from entering purely on a suggestion from Google.

<comment><USER11> Just because you do some technically workarounds doesn't mean you get a legal free pass.

I don't think this aspect did matter much because it was always the sites decision to use reCAPTCHA and that didn't change.

I also don't think Google gets much profit out of the image tagging part anymore, they already have a huge database of tagged images.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> yjftsjthsd-h _Well._ That's probably fantastic news; using ReCAPTCHA (and thereby making users subject to Google's tender mercies) was honestly my main reason to dislike cloudflare from a user's perspective. ReCAPTCHA is utterly foul; it follows you _everywhere_ it can, exists to undermine privacy, punishes non- Chrome users, and throws you in an infinite loop when it decides that you're not a human.

<comment><USER12> I don't blame reCAPTCHA for existing, I blame Cloudfare for using. It made using Tor literally impossible. Hopefully this will be better.

<comment><USER13> Didn't Privacy Pass help here?

<comment><USER14> I have no idea what privacy pass is, but if it involves setting browser state across more than one site, then it breaks the tor anonymity model.

Anyway, hopefully hCaptcha works with Tor.

<comment><USER15> Specifically designed to allow you to authenticate once and then use that as a proof of work across multiple sites, without revealing your identity as being connected across those sites. Here's the math: [https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-the- math/](https://blog.cloudflare.com/privacy-pass-the-math/)

<comment><USER16> I'm not so hot on this stuff so this might be answered or clear on the site and I didn't get it - can the other sites tell who authenticated you? Can the authenticator add metadata?

I'm wondering about other use cases, using it to prove you've paid for something, or donated perhaps. Or passed a daily quiz/challenge. I feel like there's some fun ways of using this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's a start. reCAPTCHA is a notorious pain in the arse for anyone whose browser isn't Chrome and for anyone who doesn't keep cookies. I'm not sure if hCaptcha will be better, but it's hard to imagine it being any worse.

<comment><USER18> By now, I almost immediately close a page with a reCAPTCHA, because the stream of buses, traffic lights, and cycles never seems to end when you're using Firefox. And then it says "too many requests from this computer" and refuses to continue.

<comment><USER19> I'm amazed Mozilla hasn't sued Google for discriminating against their browser - I also use Firefox and suffer endlessly using privacy tools. I can prove there are no more busses and I'm 100% right, but I can predict 100% of the time it'll say "please try again".

The pattern seems to be 2/3 'right' guesses. on sites like eBay, the captcha is broke on firefox. I complete it, and it says "you need to resubmit this form again", and reloads the entire page.

That's the cost of privacy; broken pages and refused access because Google says "NO!".

And businesses are okay with Google denying them money. I wonder if they did a cost/ben analysis if they find it worthwhile.

Thanks to Google, I've actually saved quite a bit of money, they lost out hundreds recently when their automated systems decided to refuse my transaction. Their loss and my gain.

<comment><USER20> Google pays Mozilla to be the default search engine in firefox. This is Mozilla's main source of revenue, so I doubt they will sue.

<comment><USER21> I wonder why they don't negotiate with Msft to use Bing or even DDG instead. Seems... incredibly odd... to put oneself in a position where a third party is directly antagonizing your users, reducing your user satisfaction and likely dramatically increasing churn, but you can't do anything about it because that same party is your main source of funding.

(Disclaimer, I work at msft. Nowhere near this though).

<comment><USER22> I'm not sure why you think they don't negotiate with other search providers.

<comment><USER21> The fact that they're still on google even though google is screwing over their userbase? I don't use Firefox because of how difficult it makes captcha. There are others like me.

If they are negotiating with other providers, they certainly aren't doing a very good job of it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > Earlier this year, Google informed us that they were going to begin charging > for reCAPTCHA

So it came down to cost.

> Over the years, the privacy and blocking concerns were enough to cause us to > think about switching from reCAPTCHA. But, like most technology companies, > it was difficult to prioritize removing something that was largely working > instead of brand new features and functionality for our customers.

I like that they're upfront about this. In most companies / teams of this size, these issues are always swept under the carpet until something ugly forces you to clean up at a later point in time. It's just unavoidable.

</comment><comment><USER24> Hey everyone. HCaptcha founder here. We are so happy to be on hackernews. I'm curious if anyone is having any problems? We are trying hard to respond carefully to customer requests but as you can guess we are very busy. Also we are hiring :)

<comment><USER25> Hey Alex, one suggestion, the HCaptcha challenge box is way to tall, sitting at 725px, it's larger than the chrome viewport on a 13" MBP, so I have to keep on scrolling up and down to solve the captcha.

<comment><USER24> You would not believe how much we think about these things. We appreciate the feedback and will continue to tune for every puzzle. Thank you so much for the feedback.

<comment><USER26> can you get 4chan to start using hcaptcha, I can't tell you how much I hate Google recaptcha. not to mention the brainiacs at 4 Chan have figured out how to solve Google's recaptcha easily.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is what I recently got on CF's HCAPTCHA (look closely): [https://imgur.com/a/QZNHmUC](https://imgur.com/a/QZNHmUC)

<comment><USER28> I see 2 clear images of dogs. 2 possible dog images. And zebras humping.

Nice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> A few days ago I encountered this when Cloudflare decided my IP address (which is behind an ISP-level NAT) was suspicious all of a sudden (which it hadn't been doing, a pleasant change from when I was at this location three years ago when half the internet sprouted Cloudflare CAPTCHAs at me). It was _awful_ to solve, worse than the substantial majority of reCAPTCHA checks I've encountered. Certainly _nothing_ like the illustrations in the article.

<comment><USER30> I had the same experience. But this may just be an artefact of humanity now having been trained exceptionally well to identify traffic lights and busses, but being relative novices at identifying elephants.

And now I'm wondering if this may not be a spectacularly useful tool to raise standards of education world-wide. Imagine, say, the French government buying them and asking every person on the internet twice a day to match some vocabulary to images: Identify "le baguette"! _Lingua Franca_ , le sequel.

Or a maps puzzle: "Please identify Equatorial Guinea, Papua New Guinea, and Guinea-Bissau".

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I just tried it on a website that uses Cloudflare and that always asks me to solve a captcha. (I guess this website does this if the user has a foreign IP address.) In the past I managed to get the non-script Recaptcha. But I don't see a non-script Hcaptcha. I'm a little afraid of _possible_ browser fingerprinting scripts. If there was an unwaivable, enforced right to privacy I wouldn't be afraid.

Also, I don't want to solve any script captchas anymore because of a traumatic experience with script Recaptcha. I had a portable Chromium with login cookies for a few websites. I didn't use that Chromium for other websites than these few. Suddenly, one service almost always demanded a new login after just 1 day. On each login I had to solve a script Recaptcha. I didn't find a way to get non-script Recaptcha. According to the service evil spambots had attacked it. Once, Recaptcha let me solve captchas for minutes, just to eventually tell me I was a bot. I had an IP of a large internet provider. I deleted cookies, got a VPN IP, tried it again, worked on the captchas in the exact same way as before and managed to log in to my account. A website operator wrote in a forum thread that Recaptcha was the only solution to the bot problem. One user suggested "email login as an optional alternative". This was not implemented, because apparently Recaptcha was really specifically the only solution. I then switched to another service, which cost me a few hours of work. This traumatic experience has made me completely unwilling to solve any script captcha.

</comment><comment><USER32> A little off-topic, but the article mentions they support Privacy Pass. I remember seeing the announcement a little ways back when they first released it but just kind of forgot about it. Is anyone using the browser extensions? Has it reduced the amount of captchas you end up seeing, or made your browsing experience better in any way?

</comment><comment><USER33> The enterprise grade hCaptcha[1] is not free either. Does anyone have pricing information?

[1]: [https://www.hcaptcha.com/#plans](https://www.hcaptcha.com/#plans)

<comment><USER34> According to the article Cloudfront is paying, but is paying "a fraction of what reCAPTCHA would have [cost]". Recaptcha is $1/1000 challenges, so apparently hcaptcha is some small fraction of that.

Cloudfront might get a discount for running some of the infrastructure on their own servers, on the other hand that might also be an integration hassle that actually costs them money.

<comment><USER35> > Recaptcha is $1/1000 challenges

This seems unwise, because many captcha farms charge less than this. A quick Google search shows one service offering $0.50/1000 challenges. If it's 2x cheaper for an attacker to solve a captcha than it is for a provider to display it, it sounds like the attackers win.

<comment><USER36> This only works if you are Soviet Russia vs the USA and your plan is to ruin the other by draining their money and you have equal pools of cash.

Spammers don't want to hurt the company they attack if they can help it, they need them!

I don't understand why ReCAPTCHA cost so much though. A human solving them is cheaper than a computer/human hybrid creating them?

<comment><USER35> True, the attacker is much less likely to have anywhere near the funds of the target, and they don't want to hurt them.

Regardless of the actual price multiple, it costing anywhere near the price to serve as the price to solve just seems to defeat the point. Really, it costing any money per captcha served just punishes sites that happen to face a higher volume of bots, even if they're a small site. It's just going to push the company to switch to a different captcha service, which may be even cheaper for attackers to solve.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > _But, sometimes, when we 're not 100% sure if something is malicious or good > we issue it a "challenge"._

I think they meant "bot or human", not "malicious or good". Bot != malicious. And these challenges will do no good to non malicious bots.

<comment><USER38> I think you're confusing intent with implementation.

You're right that the implementation excludes non-malicious bots and fails to solve for malicious humans, but that just makes it an imperfect implementation of the intent: which is to differentiate malicious & good.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> From the article:

"We evaluated a number of CAPTCHA vendors as well as building a system ourselves."

and

"We worked with hCAPTCHA in two ways. First, we are in the process of leveraging our Workers platform to bear much of the technical load of the CAPTCHAs and, in doing so, reduce their costs. And, second, we proposed that rather than them paying us we pay them. This ensured they had the resources to scale their service to meet our needs. While that has imposed some additional costs, those costs were a fraction of what reCAPTCHA would have. And, in exchange, we have a much more flexible CAPTCHA platform and a much more responsive team."

So Cloudflare are basically cloud hosting hCAPTCHA's services. I wonder why Cloudflare didn't just buy them, as it seems like it would be a win-win with getting an excellent CAPTCHA service, and not have to build it themselves?

<comment><USER30> CF likes the CAPTCHA part of CAPTCHAS, but any vendor is probably far more invested in the "generating ML training data" scheme.

CF probably has zero interest in that part of the product: It doesn't fit with their existing products nor customers, and it's just too small relative to their other business to devote much attention to it.

At the same time, the business opportunity is probably too large for hCAPTCHA's founders to just forget about it, or for CF to compensate them on the hot-new-technology assumption when they're only looking for peace-of-mind- utility tech.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> IMHO CPATCHA is a lazy way to protect your service as you shift the burden to your users.

Maybe if you are big and essential for some users, you can afford that. But if not, be aware that users will turn their back on you if you add obstacles between them and your service.

Edit: meant to say "be aware that _some_ users will turn their back to you"

<comment><USER41> > IMHO CPATCHA is a lazy way to protect your service as you shift the burden > to your users.

What is the non-lazy solution to having a basic website contact form that _doesn't_ receive hundreds of spam submission per day?

<comment><USER40> "receive hundreds of spam submission per day"

But this is exactly the point I am trying to make. That's the service provider's problem and not the user's. CAPTCHA shifts the problem to the user.

CAPTCHA is a 00's idea, when we had the multiple page registrations(with errors showing only after you submit the page), the insane password requirements, etc.. It doesn't belong to modern stack in my opinion.

"What is the non-lazy solution?" That's how disruption is born.

<comment><USER42> The vast majority of users never see a recaptcha puzzle when you're using v2's invisible recaptcha.

<comment><USER43> And 0% of users see it if you're using reCaptcha v3.

<comment><USER44> It never presents challenges to users, but instead just buckets them into bot or not bot?

<comment><USER43> Almost. It gives a botness score to the server, and it's up to the website to decide what to do with that score. They can pick a threshold to approve, reject, or apply stricter verification to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> Apart from the surveillance aspect, one thing that bothered the hell out of me with Cloudflare using ReCAPTCHA was that it yielded a much larger part of the web than necessary effectively blocked in China, since the CAPTCHAs would get triggered, and not load, from Chinese IPs.

I had a customer where we had to migrate away from Cloudflare for this reason - this was about 5 years ago and the issue has been there to this day. Glad to hear they've finally done something about it. Even if it took Google starting to charge money for ReCAPCHA to trigger it.

</comment><comment><USER46> Has anyone else seen reCAPTCHA getting way more difficult of late? It often takes me a full minute to find all of the tiny traffic lights hidden away in a set of low-quality images.

<comment><USER47> Just use Buster[1]

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buster-captcha- sol...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/buster-captcha-solver- for/mpbjkejclgfgadiemmefgebjfooflfhl?hl=en)

<comment><USER48> Worth noting that it's possible to get a hellban if you get too many wrong guesses using extensions like Buster.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> This sticks out to me:

> We also had issues in some regions, such as China, where Google's services > are intermittently blocked. China alone accounts for 25 percent of all > Internet users. Given that some subset of those could not access > Cloudflare's customers if they triggered a CAPTCHA was always concerning to > us.

They are explicitly saying that China's blackmailing of Google is working so well it even affects decisions on using Google products outside of China.

I'm not a Google fan and think this move is a great improvement for the web and user privacy, but that this was explicitly motivated by China's blackmailing tactics is terrifying.

And we can from this post even make another case that also doesn't paint a nice picture: Cloudflare does not care enough about 25% of internet users to move away from reCAPTCHA - until it affects their bottom line in a visible and immediate way.

</comment><comment><USER50> There are plenty of services that will happily accept a screenshot from a developer, send it out to live humans who solve it in real time, and then return the answers to the developer.

I'm not going to link to them, but you can find them yourself by googling "buy recaptcha solver". The prices for the top two results are $0.50 and $1.39 per 1000 solves (respectively, $0.0005 and $0.00139 per solve).

At that price point, it's feasible for the truly determined to just use those solvers to bypass ReCAPTCHA (or similar services).

<comment><USER44> Are there chrome extensions that I can use these with? I'd be willing to pay those rates to never have to solve a captcha again. I'm fine leaving the tab open for a few minutes while it's solved even.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> hCAPTCHA looks interesting, although it seems they use Blockchain for no real reason compared to just storing the payments as rows (i.e what they gain from being chained on top of another)

<comment><USER52> The point of a blockchain is that to edit an earlier record, you would need to edit every record that comes after (due to storing a hash of the previous block in the current block). _However,_ it doesn't make sense when one entity controls the entire system because if a hacker (or even an insider) can change _one_ record, they could change _all_ of them. Hence why a good blockchain would be _distributed_. Then, if one node edits the history, the other nodes will see the anomaly and ignore that node.

This is also why Git's history is easy to edit when it's only on your machine. But once you push to GitHub and others clone your repo, it becomes a lot harder to edit history. Yes, Git isn't a blockchain, but it does use the idea of hashing the previous "block" (commit) and storing it in the current "block."

<comment><USER53> Yes if do not you want to distribute your data with random people over the internet, you need a Merkle tree. Not a stupid blockchain with all the downsides a blockchain have.

<comment><USER34> If you strip out the proof-of-work algorithm you're basically left with a chain of Merkle trees, and the payloads hashed by the Merkle trees. Calling it a blockchain is just a way to make it sound more familiar to potential investors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Hey, I interviewed with them a year ago. Their captchas are actually harder than reCaptcha's.

</comment><comment><USER55> > Earlier this year, Google informed us that they were going to begin charging > for reCAPTCHA.

Wait. Is this news? I don't see other article about this. What is the pricing?

</comment><comment><USER56> It's not worth a rich person's time to solve captchas, while it is for a poor person. This has lead to captcha solving services, extensions plugins, etc, all which have high latency delay, not over a fast documented API. It would be 100 times easier if cloudfare/google let's you directly buy credits, at the mid-point price between current bid-ask spread, of say 50 cents per 1000 captchas, which would probably last you a few months to a year.

</comment><comment><USER57> I've ran into hCaptcha a couple times recently and found it vague and I had to try to guess what they meant. Both times it asked me to identify the truck. Well, what do you mean by "truck?" are you counting a semi as a truck? I ended up having to do it twice because I don't consider a semi a "truck" but they did.

<comment><USER58> Interesting, I know some people consider a Truck a semi but your pick up truck isn't really a truck according to others. So confusing with all the different definitions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> So no one can turn free human labour into enough money to pay hosting fees?

And given spammers a lot of the time are messing with Google, it's also in Google's interest to do this for free!

What are they thinking? Is this one department make $100 internally while killing $1000 in another internal department?

</comment><comment><USER59> This is fantastic news for privacy on the web. Thank you Cloudflare!

I've been seeing hcaptcha in more and more places recently. It's a bit rough around the edges still, but it works well and feels far less hostile than recaptcha.

</comment><comment><USER60> The funny thing is that Google doesn't even use recaptcha and instead use some awkward hard to read piece of shit. After 4-5 guesses, and they are guesses you might proceed.

</comment><comment><USER61> Did anyone notice that hcaptcha runs on top of etherium?

</comment><comment><USER62> I hate Hcaptcha. It keeps presenting the same challenge over and over again. Everytime I need to access a site it protects it wastes so much time.

</comment><comment><USER63> Are people here not aware of reCAPTCHA v3? It doesn't involve user interaction. I just integrated it into a site. Works well.

</comment><comment><USER64> How good or bad is the new system on tor? ReCAPTCHA straight up was a 0/10 over tor for me.

</comment><comment><USER65> 1\. I think challenges from hCAPTCHA is harder than reCAPTCHA. It's far and even further from human-friendly compared to reCAPTCHA.

2\. hCAPTCHA seems to be using the similar revenue model as early stage reCAPTCHA and it even pay its users. I doubt that its model is sustainable.

3\. A huge company like Google may not be able to handle user data well, so a small company will be able to?

</comment><comment><USER66> Can we get back text based captchas instead of annoying whack-a-mole photo picking?

<comment><USER67> No. Photos of street things are much easier to pick out than warped or miscolored text.

<comment><USER42> Especially the amount of warping you apparently need to do to text to make it hard for a neural network these days.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I hope this captcha is tor friendly.

</comment><comment><USER69> One look at what cookie domain (google.com) recaptcha runs on will give you a hint to its usefulness.

</comment><comment><USER19> It's funny that we need to ensure humans are the ones performing certain actions like making a purchase or accessing a service, but we let machines make decisions over very important matters in our lives (credit/financial decisions).

It's intriguing they said Google will charge for reCaptcha, any information on that? I can't imagine all the small business owners will have to start paying, but perhaps if they did they'd just remove it altogether (a net win!).</comment>


Fire the workaholics (2008) - <AUTHOR> http://37signals.com/svn/posts/902-fire-the-workaholics <comment><USER2> I effing love what I do. The result is that I frequently "work" 14+ hour days, skip social stuff to code (or sneak in my iPad to research the problem I'm stuck on), and I love talking shop.

I'm this way in my own business and I was like this at the job I had before I left to start it.

Honestly, with all of the slack ass clock punchers out there that can't write a lick of code, the idea of canning someone for working too hard seems pretty silly.

And FWIW, I found time in the last couple years to get my pilot's certificate.

<comment><USER3> Some of us "slack ass clock punchers" have lives outside of work. I have friends and family and hobbies that do not involve sitting in front of a computer screen for every waking moment of the day.

Working to live, vs. living to work.

<comment><USER4> If you love your work, what is wrong with living to work?

(When I say _living_ to work, take it as implied that I mean taking good enough care of yourself to prevent physical or mental health problems from tanking your work quality)

<comment><USER5> Exactly. I love what I do. If I had to work a job that didn't involve programming, I'd still do it after work (I've played an amazing 3d game that as written by somebody who worked a summer job at a gas station). I regularly program outside of work, I've stayed at work for long hours. When I'd have a day with multiple meetings, I'd frequently stay late to write code as otherwise I'd feel unsatisfied.

At the mean time, some days I'd prefer to have dinner with my girlfriend after work. On weekends I'd occasionally prefer a get away outside of Silicon Valley. Exercise is an absolute must. I also have interest outside of computing: reading (history, philosophy), photography. Pursuing them only helps re-invigorate my passion for computing: occasionally ideas would come to me when I'm reading an unrelated book, working out at the gym or taking photographs.

Many times there's a direct link: I'd write my own photo gallery software and host the pictures myself, build creative ways to backup my images, research ways to do interesting image manipulation from Linux (photo manipulation libraries, etc...) etc... Pursuing photography as a hobby while on a budget as a college student meant I had to do "casual programming" quite frequently to get what I want done (now, however, I've shelled out for Aperture).

It's important to understand that performance requires maintenance, good ideas come form outside. At the mean time, there's nothing wrong with working long hours if you want to do so: it's only healthy and pleasant if you actually have a passion for what you do (as long as you don't go to the extreme of forgoing maintenance and ignoring other sources of inspiration).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I think this was a productive discussion three years ago.

I didn't write my side of it as linkbait, and I don't think the DHH did either.

the truth is we are both right.... you can do a lifestyle business or you can go all in. my style is all in and as fast as possible.

other folks like slow and steady.

sometimes life deals you cards that dictate your approach (i.e. yo have a kids, your dad gets cancer and the Panda update cuts half your traffic... all in the same year).

it's true that some folks work 100 hours a week and get less done than folks who work 40.

it's true that there are folks who work 100 hours and get 2x as much done as someone who works 50.

the fact is, you have to do what is right for you and your goals. me? i love to build shit... and i do it hard and fast with a lot of mistakes and passion.

the video: [http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2219-jason-calacanis-vs- david...](http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2219-jason-calacanis-vs-david- heinemeier-hansson-on-this-week-in-startups)

</comment><comment><USER7> Jason Calacanis' follow-up response to this adds more nuance to his previous statements:

      > Truth be told, I've never asked anyone to work harder
      > than I do, and I work seven days a week.

It's good to know that he doesn't ask anyone to work eight days a week.

<comment><USER8> My bias: sometimes JC ask me mobile technology questions.

But than again spending 7 days a week on a problem and business model known not to work is not exactly working smart..ie Mahalo..

<comment><USER9> I think to a certain extent that shows the problems with the 7-day-a-week mentality for anyone who is working on product direction, marketing, etc. If I've got someone working on keeping my servers up, or doing deep parallel algorithms work to solve a specific problem my company has, I want the person who has the tunnel vision required to focus for 14 hours.

But if I've got someone deciding which specific problems are most worthy of concern, I want someone who is going home at night and on the weekends and living life. Working on one thing for most of your waking hours makes it really difficult to understand how that thing is useful outside of your domain.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Firing someone who's always obsessed with work and willing to always spend hours upon hours to get things done might be a good idea for the reasons stated. Better idea would be to send that person on a mandatory vacation during the doldrums between projects. Make them turn in the company laptop and company cell phone for the two weeks they're on vacation. If they protest, tell them that during vacation it's their job to rest, relax & recharge to be ready for the next project. By the time they're back they'll be ready to take on those challenges.

</comment><comment><USER11> I think the operative words in that article are, "requiring passion." And to that, I would add, "work smarter, not harder."

When I was in my early twenties, I lived in NYC and London. My motto was the typical, "word hard, play hard." I worked 12+ hour days fairly regularly. The work was interesting, the people were cool, and I was learning a lot. I remember leaving work one morning as people were coming in; their day was starting as my day was ending.

On the weekends (and sometimes weekdays), my friends and I would go bar- hopping, catch a movie, attend a festival, etc. While in London, we'd also take weekend excursions to another city or country. I also remember sky diving & bungee jumping trips.

Now that I'm in my thirties, I don't work as many hours, though my work output hasn't decreased. Instead, I like to think that I work smarter now, not harder. I still really enjoy my work - and oftentimes don't even feel like I'm "working." But if I spend too much time on something, instead of slogging through it, I'll stop and look for a more efficient solution. I've learned that time is too valuable for brute force.

On the surface, it may not seem like I'm working as much. I work anywhere from 8-12 hours a day now, but in aggregate, I get much more done. And none of those hours really feels like work.

I attribute this to having passion for what I do, and learning how to work smart.

<comment><USER12> You sound a lot like me now. I'm a typical "work hard play hard" twenty- something, and if it was possible for me to be working smarter, I don't see it. I probably spend my first 40 hours solving/understanding the problem, and the next 30 hours refactoring the code to look like my mental model of the solution. I'd love to slow down but it's just doesn't seem possible to ship a high quality product given our schedule. Some of the senior folks work saner hours, but it's not at all obvious if their output is higher quality than mine, or even equal quality (this isn't a slight--i'm getting twice as much zone time as them!). If they're 'working smarter' than me, I can't see how, other than having already paid the learning curve for a large class of problems.

Can you give concrete examples of how you work smarter now, compared to your twenties?

<comment><USER11> Sure. On an individual contributor level:

Right out of college, I tended to prefer building things on my own, rather than using existing patterns or frameworks. I did this partly because I wanted to learn the "fundamentals", and partly because I was arrogant (or stupid, some probably said).

One day, a senior developer gave me a book on design patterns. I was floored. I started applying them and found the quality (and maintainability, reusability, etc) of my code increase tremendously.

Over time, others have given me more tips on improving my efficiency. From something as simple as learning keyboard shortcuts and customizing an IDE's UI, to unit testing and handy shell scripts, I found myself saving a lot of time.

Of course, you may be doing all of these things already, in which case, you may already have a pretty optimized work technique already.

On a managerial level:

I'm a believer that if you put the right team together, 1+1=3. So my value has shifted from being an individual software developer to someone who can put together teams of developers insanely smarter than I am, then remove all the roadblocks out of their way so they can build great things. I still write some code, but while my value as a developer has dropped tremendously, my value in managing a team of developers means our overall output is greater than the sum of our parts.

In other words, I increased my "value" by becoming a manager. Of course, that kind of a role change is not for everyone, but that's what I did.

Another example is one of prioritization. Sometimes it's only realistically possible to do X units of work a day (let's say 10 units), and sometimes a person is asked to do Y units of work a day (let's say 30). That means 20 units aren't going to get done; it's just not possible. Trying to squeeze in more would result in a lack of quality (due to lack of sleep, exhaustion, etc). So what can one do? Do the most important 10 units first. It sounds pretty obvious, but in the heat of the moment, I sometimes found myself wanting to do the 10 easiest units first, not the 10 most important. Proper prioritization made a big increase in the quality of my output as well.

<comment><USER5> > One day, a senior developer gave me a book on design patterns. I was > floored. I started applying them and found the quality (and maintainability, > reusability, etc) of my code increase tremendously.

Careful with that. The purpose of design patterns is to give a name to something you already do, not to find new things that do that aren't needed ( _cough_ Spring Framework, J2EE). I am sure you aren't doing that, just wanted to make sure the messaging is more clear.

The Design Patterns Book didn't initially help me when I started programming. However, after working on several substantial Java, C++ and Perl projects I've picked it up and again and was able to identify what I've done and what the standard libraries I use do: "oh, java.util.HashSet is an adaptor bridge from from a hashtable data structure to the Set interface" or "boost::graph uses visitors to implement multiple dispatch based on different edge/vertex types". Now, I'll often make sure to use standard design patterns for my APIs when possible (e.g., Iterator interface, rather than accepting an anonymous classes/function objects if all I want to do let them lazily stream data one at a time).

<comment><USER11> > The purpose of design patterns is to give a name to something you already > do, not to find new things that do that aren't needed (cough Spring > Framework, J2EE) ... > Now, I'll often make sure to use standard design > patterns for my APIs when possible (e.g., Iterator interface, rather than > accepting an anonymous classes/function objects if all I want to do let them > lazily stream data one at a time).

You're absolutely right. Thanks for catching that!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> _People who always work late makes the people who don't feel inadequate for merely working reasonable hours. That'll lead to guilt, misery, and poor morale. Worse, it'll lead to ass-in-seat mentality where people will "stay late" out of obligation, but not really be productive._

I don't have this problem (assuming a reasonable management team). In fact, I can usually outdo the workaholics in less time. They always forget that not working is oftentimes the most productive thing you can do. I can't count the number of times I've spun my wheels on a problem for hours, went home and rested, and came back to realize just how stupidly easy the problem is.

<comment><USER14> Yes! Most problems don't require you to grind away for hours on end. If I don't get anywhere within 45 minutes or so, I'll just walk away. The unconscious mind is a wonderful tool, but it needs breathing room to do its work, it seems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Why do people pride themselves on the number of hours they work? It's like being proud of how long you can go without food, or how long you can hold your hand over a flame. What exactly does it prove? Would Calcanis be happier with his employees if they gave themselves 30 lashes every morning before work?

Working long does not equal working hard.

<comment><USER16> [https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Protestant_wo...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic)

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> [2008].

Comments from 3 years ago, courtesy of the awesome fast shiny new HN search box:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=131691>

PS: I was sure I commented on this, possibly on 37signals' site itself, but I can't find the comments anywhere... oh well.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I surely hadn't notice that now we have a search box. Teaches me that It should have stroke me as a bit odd that it wasn't posted on HN already, and that rellying on HN identical URL "was posted already" mechanism is not really relliable.

<comment><USER18> I think a re-post isn't without merit though. There's plenty of people here (myself included) who might not have seen this article otherwise.

<comment><USER17> I never suggested it wasn't worth reposting - I just thought some people might like to know when it was posted, and see the previous set of comments.

<comment><USER11> Perhaps having an easy way to link up, or display, the comments from a previous post of the same link would be helpful. I myself find it really interesting to read old comments from a previous post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I don't agree with the article. If my employees were showing signs of workaholism and I didn't send them home, then their burnout, lack of creativity, and drag on morale would be my fault, at least in part.

<comment><USER20> At least send them home when they start smelling bad after a 3 day stint. I wish I was in my early twenties again I could use that time far better then what I did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Fire them? Uh...no. Here are my responses to his points:

1) I work 80-100 hours a week, and enjoy it. For the past 7 years. No burnout yet. I find time to exercise and unwind. 2) If you are just throwing hours at the problem, you are not passionate about the problem. Workaholics are (most often) passionate about their work. 3) Those people who feel bad that someone else is working more than them need to get over themselves. 4) Workaholics often "put in their time" in an attempt to retire early. Not a bad judgment call, IMHO. 5) Even workaholics know how to unwind, and do. You can work 80 hours a week and still have days off (168 hours in a week, 112 waking hours).

<comment><USER22> I think it's just inflammatory link bait, in the same vein as Calacanis' OP. The bottom line is there are many ways to run a business. Personally I would not fire a great person regardless of whether they worked 20 hours or 100 hours a week, but I understand that there may be social dynamics at play that shouldn't be ignored.

<comment><USER2> Jason is an expert at leveraging hyperbole to a) get attention and b) initiate constructive dialogue. I respect him for his ability to do both.

But sometimes I feel what he writes needs to have a disclaimer at the top that says, "This is what worked for me in my very unique business. It may be disastrous in yours."

Basically, I view Jason as a conversation starter, not someone whose advice I'm necessarily going to follow. And having talked to him a few times at cons I've gotten the feeling that's really what he wants.

<comment><USER23> > But sometimes I feel what he writes needs to have a disclaimer at the top > that says, "This is what worked for me in my very unique business. It may be > disastrous in yours."

That doesn't need to be stated, it's a given. They never say our way is the only way to do things; they're just telling you what works for them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I'm so tired of all the speculative psycho crap. Why don't we just make a judgement based on someone's output and admit that the rest is always going to be a totally subjective matter of personal sympathy?

</comment><comment><USER25> Working hard on something you are passionate about is a lot like running in a race. The minute you ease back on the throttle, you better hope that your competition doesn't pounce. You better have a big enough lead on your competition to allow yourself to relax. That relaxation time needs to be earned. Too much relaxation breeds complacency. And if you are not in an environment in which you are competing with someone, you really aren't working toward a worth while goal, but just spinning your wheels. You are either living off the spoils of some prior success or inheritance. Work like you are about to be attacked by a pack of rabid dogs or seek out such an environment. Don't get it? Go watch a horse race. Every split second counts. That winning rush of adrenaline is like no other. Should everyone seek out such an environment? No, not everybody all the time. But to never have done so is cowardly. Nobody is successful by working 100% smarter than everyone else 100% of the time. Those that say they do are liars. To do so is like saying they never had a failure, and everything came easy for them. Achieving success is a complete bitch. Those that have the energy and stamina to succeed in the end are the ones who earn the right to slack off. Execution is everything.

</comment><comment><USER26> 0) Controversy makes for good headlines.

1) Indifference and over obsession are both blindness.

2) Effectiveness is mostly perception because reality is too costly to measure.

3) Take a mini sabbatical every now and then: <http://➹.ws/sabbatical>

</comment><comment><USER27> How many hours per week do you think the average startup employee (not founder) works?

</comment><comment><USER28> Do remember that sometimes the "workaholic" is actually doing the jobs of other people or double checking that they got their stuff done because the "workaholic" is blamed for the failure of the system. It happens a lot and some organizations are not really good at finding where it all went south. It also happens more in bad economies (no other jobs) or highly political places (friends before truth).

</comment><comment><USER29> "Your Highness, the people have no bread"

Marie Antoinette: "Let them eat cake"

"Mr Millionare, small businesses are struggling to make ends meet despite 80hr work weeks."

DHH: "Let them relax by flying their private planes"

</comment><comment><USER30> Or you could just tell them to work less.

</comment><comment><USER31> Excellent advice. Nobody ever wished on their deathbed that they'd spent more time at the office working.

<comment><USER32> Lots of people regret not accomplishing anything. Sometimes accomplishing things requires work. Creating a successful startup is an example. Earning enough in a regular job to be able to fund your own startup is another.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I tend to work as little as possible. Playing is important. Family is important. Living is important.

Might be dead tomorrow and would be thoroughly miffed if I'd worked through my life. I believe life is the reward and must be lived, not some religious fantasy.

<comment><USER34> You should be thoroughly miffed that you are writing off all the time you spend working as "not my life".

<comment><USER33> It isn't really my life if I'm a participant in a system which supports others who either a) actively do not work and exist only to be supported -or- b) exploit others only for personal gain.

It would be my life if I actively improved the human condition and directly provided for my family.

I'd be happy with (and I will eventually have!) a few hectares of acres of land to be honest as I could do the above with that.

Then I can get back to solving problems rather than filling timesheets which is after all the best way of helping people.

<comment><USER34> It is your life even if people you don't like benefit from it.

How cliched is the "I'm unhappy now, but at some future time when XYZ, _then_ I'll be happy (but not until then!)"? That's pretty much what I meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> I bought the book ("Getting Real") when it came out and it brought home a lot of truisms of starting up in the 21st century. But 'Firing all the workaholics' isn't as simple as that:

I've worked in places where people with no lives (and more importantly no equity in the company) spent most of their waking lives in the office because it was there- they obviously didn't have a whole lot going on in their lives, maybe needed some kind of social acceptance or maybe a combination of the two.

I've also worked in places with a fantastic buzz [where I've had no equity in the company]' where I slept on the floor to get a job done.

I've also worked for a startup doing 100+ hour weeks end to end just to get ourselves started (not naming any company names).

The latter two I enjoyed and did of my own volition; the first I didn't. If DHH is talking about losers who are several orders of magnitude less productive than my counterparts then fair enough; but sleeping on the floor is the manifestation of obsession. If you wanna stop that, go ahead you Danish wanker.

</comment><comment><USER36> Sorry to burst yer bubbles, but this has all been discounted years ago, mainly by the United States Air Force. They did extensive studies on the optimum work hours/recreation hours and found that strict 9-5, 5 days on, 2 days off, was far more productive and safe than any other configuration.

They won't let you put in more than 40 hrs a week in those multi-billion dollar war planes. Working more than 40 hours a week is counter productive. It increases the likely-hood of bad judgement, cloudy thinking etc will creep into the work.

So the Robber-Baron Korp evil HR types who think they are being cool forcing people to work 40+ hours, are actually just hurting their bottom line.

<comment><USER37> That sounds like a pretty interesting research I'd like to read more about - can you please provide some citations/ links.</comment></comment>


Sorry, Immunity to Covid-19 Won't Be Like a Superpower - <AUTHOR> https://www.wired.com/story/sorry-immunity-to-covid-19-wont-be-like-a-superpower/ <comment><USER2> This article is basically just saying we don't know enough to be certain how long immunity will last. It's packaging zero new information under a clickbaity title.</comment>