Are "teens" born or made? An interesting twist. - <AUTHOR> http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2011/03/07/adolescent-brains-cause-or-consequence-2/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+SociologicalImagesSeeingIsBelieving+%28Sociological+Images%3A+Seeing+Is+Believing%29 <comment><USER2> It's my opinion that "adolescence" is a new social construct that is not universal and not innate. It's more likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy more than anything else.

In older times, teenagers (above say, 14) were considered men, or young adults. They would fight in armies, or even lead them. They were likely to be married and maybe even have children.

For all intents and purposes, people of age 16 are not much different from other adults except in that they don't have much experience in life. The only reason they "rebel" is that society still treats them like children. Imagine a 30 year old man being treated as a little hopeless child by his parents; of course he will show signs of resentment. It's not because he's "crazy", it's the natural response.

Perhaps the reason is partly due to school. If you're in school (below university/college level) you're a child "by definition" so to speak (from the society's point of view).

If I was in charge, I would design the school system so that elementary and secondary school end by the age 14 and then when you're 15 you'd be already in college.

<comment><USER3> "For all intents and purposes, people of age 16 are not much different from other adults except in that they don't have much experience in life."

I totally disagree on this. There are remarkable physical differences between a 16 yo, and a 28yo.

Your mental capabilities are different, your hormonal level is completely different etc.

Yes, there are cultures or where teens are forced to act as adults to function in society, but that doesn't make them they have the same capabilities as of an adult, be either physical, or emotional/mental.

And, traditionally armies are staffed with 17-20 yo. Do you know why? Because they make better cannon fodder, and more likely to obey orders, take higher risks, which are correlated with the high testosterone levels that teens do have.

(BTW, I am 30, and when I was 16 I was basically acting as supervisor of a team of 12 workers when my family was building the house due to my father having heart problems. Yes, I was good with money, I could negotiate some, tell people what to do to a certain point, but I lacked emotional intelligence, tact, or general maturity to handle more finer problems).

<comment><USER4> > (BTW, I am 30, and when I was 16 I was basically acting as supervisor of a > team of 12 workers when my family was building the house due to my father > having heart problems. Yes, I was good with money, I could negotiate some, > tell people what to do to a certain point, but I lacked emotional > intelligence, tact, or general maturity to handle more finer problems).

So basically you're saying you was more adept at 16 with dealing with other people, responsibility and money than the vast majority of college grads are in their mid-late 20's. So I'm failing to see your point.

Because of an education you wouldn't have otherwise received you were capable of doing tasks considered vastly beyond your age's observed responsibility level, seemingly even by yourself.

<comment><USER5> If you read between the lines, the authority of his office made it possible (and necessary) to order people around, but he didn't have the experience and training to be charismatic about it--he had not yet developed leadership skills.

<comment><USER4> Your point? Only _good_ bosses have learnt leadership skills, _bad_ bosses generally don't have the experience or training to be charismatic about it. I've seen far more bad bosses than good bosses.

The point you're making applies as much to a 40 year old boss as it does to a 16 year old boss. Leadership is an acquired skill without an age restriction, but people here on HN seem to want to instate an arbitrary age restriction on how they determine "too young" to be a boss. I really don't get why this would be when software and other tech industries are generally youth orientated and seen as ageist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> One wonders about the wisdom of treating any interaction with an adult as being tantamount to asking for sexual exploitation while _simultaneously_ dumping kids in a youth culture which says that sex is the best thing that everyone except them is having.

I had a very fortunate upbringing in a lot of ways, but I think I talked to maybe three adults who were not parents, teachers, or family in an eight year period. That sort of warps one's perceptions on things.

<comment><USER7> That is your experience. Hardly the problem we all have. Do you not have uncles, did they not come for dinner, what of aunties, and did you never go to your friends house where you would meet their parents, etc.

I do not think anyone isolates kids or teenagers. I think, instead, the media attempts to portray such a picture so as to sell more papers.

Regarding your latter comment, in a world where you do not mix even with the seventh graders or the fifth graders if you are in the sixth grade, it would be quite strange indeed if you were "hanging out" with a 40 year old, or 30 year old, in "friendship" basis both for the youngster and for the adult. Moreover, I do not think it ever was seen as "normal" not because of any implications but because there would be little in common not least because a teenager thinks and is preoccupied by entirely different things from an adult.

<comment><USER8> It is unnatural that kids are segregated by age into "peer groups" - in school and outside school (like at lessons). What's evolutionarily normal is to have children who are surrounded by, and interact mostly, with adults, in a group where many of the people are your family. The adults bring you up to their level. The kids keep you at your current (their) level.

No wonder kids today are more and more emotionally & intellectually stunted. None of them are "the dumbest guy in the room" - because they interact almost exclusively with other kids their exact same age.

30 kids and 1 teacher… the 1 teacher is not enough of an influence to make the kids feel ashamed of being so immature.

I, for one, have thought it was clear from history that "teens" are made. I grew up with lots of responsibility and it was clear to _me_ , even as a 10-year-old, how different that made me from the kids I went to school with. The having of the responsibility wasn't what made me different, but it obviously made me think and behave differently too.

IMO the only reason that upper middle class kids today -- who are the ones always studied -- don't develop the part of the brain that connects cause & effect, & prevents risk-taking, is because they are never allowed to have enough power to fuck up.

How can you learn that stupidity leads to crisis if you're never allowed to make your own decisions?

The brain is plastic, it changes based on what you learn. A child kept away from speech until he's 4 years old will be unable to learn to speak normally. A teenager kept away from responsibility & work of value will grow up to be...

But the "scientists" who do these studies make pronouncements about their studies, but they never say "Sheltered white upper-class kids with two parents have the following traits..." they say "Kids have the following traits..."

<comment><USER9> _IMO the only reason that upper middle class kids today -- who are the ones always studied -- don't develop the part of the brain that connects cause & effect, & prevents risk-taking, is because they are never allowed to have enough power to fuck up._

This simply isn't consistent with those people who are given a lot of responsibility. Like those who leave home at 12 or so and go into the world on their own. You'd think they grow into the power brokers of this country, but instead they usually get the short end of the stick.

The US prison population is full of people who decided at an early age to shun their parents and branch out on their own. Although one thing I've noticed is that black people tend to think white people are really goofy -- even adults. Maybe while blacks are incarcerated at higher rates, they're actually more mature, on average.

In any case, having the shackles lifted (no adult supervision) doesn't seem to result in a better life.

<comment><USER8> Straw man argument. I never said "stop supervising kids at 10 years old" or "12 year olds should leave home." Neither did I say that kids from impoverished homes fare better on cognitive tests. Ludicrous.

<comment><USER9> Not a strawman. But these are some of the few examples where teens effectively go into the adult world (in many cases acting as adults). And kids from impoverished homes often have to run the house. There aren't many controls. so I took some of the few that exist, as imperfect as they are.

The thing that is hard to reconcile is that the people who seem to be most lauded as successful have had the most supervised childhoods. Folks like Gates, Jobs, Obama, Clinton, etc... What they do share in common is that they break from the mold at about the cusp of traditional adulthood (around 18-21) -- not at age 13.

<comment><USER8> Of course it's a straw man argument. Again, I never said that the solution was to force children to fend for themselves from 12 years old, or your latest number, 13.

What I said was: "What's evolutionarily normal is to have children who are surrounded by, and interact mostly, with adults, in a group where many of the people are your family. The adults bring you up to their level."

And "How can you learn that stupidity leads to crisis if you're never allowed to make your own decisions?"

Children from impoverished backgrounds in the United States are raised, such as it is, with incredible differences compared to children of well-off parents. They have a "30 million word gap" in terms of words spoken to them. They are not asked questions that cause them to think. They do not receive adequate nutrition.

You can't compare a poor child whose parents ignored him with a middle class child whose parents let him make his own decisions, like whether or not to do his homework, go to bed at a reasonable hour, earn and spend his own money, pay for some of his own bills, prepare his own lunches & do his own laundry, make dinner for the rest of the family, clean his room or not, work at a meaningful apprenticeship, date who he wanted when he felt ready to date, get piercings or dye hair, wear what he wants, etc.

In short: you are a troll. I hope you are joking but if you don't realize that you are a troll, you seriously need to deepen your thinking on subjects because you're just flapping about on the surface of a topic but you think you're making waves.

<comment><USER9> _In short: you are a troll. I hope you are joking but if you don't realize that you are a troll, you seriously need to deepen your thinking on subjects because you're just flapping about on the surface of a topic but you think you're making waves._

Thanks. I needed a tldr on that one. What you say may all be true. Hard for me to know because my brain hasn't fully formed since I wasn't allowed to do crack rocks and rob liquor stores in the evening with my friends.

In any case you can raise your children to be effectively parentless. That's your choice. Charlie Sheen gets paid better than most.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was surprised when I learned that adolescence was first described in the early 20th century. That was around the same time children stopped regularly working with their parents in the family business/farm. As a society, parents have abdicated the "final transision" to adulthood to the school systems, but that isn't working, so kids have no clear path to "adulthood" and, instead, wander aimlessly.

Personally, I think (and have read others who agree, sorry, no references available) that the fairly ubiquitous "coming of age" ceremony is very important. My oldest is 17 and we will be doing something this summer with my father (backpacking or the like) to celebrate his manhood. And, yes, we will even have a formal ceremony.

I'm always looking for good reading on this subject (truly guiding your kids to adulthood), so if you have any good pointers, send them on!

<comment><USER11> Formal education is probably the culprit here. It segments young adults into age groups, and then limits the entire days interaction to the same lot of children.

You can't define people simply by what year they are born in. Some family environments provide children with an outlet where they end up with a very mature outlook, others don't.

The problem with this stratification is that it soon becomes the "norm" for children. My kids would say, for example, he wouldn't talk to some other kids because they are in another grade or in another class. It is a totally artificial barrier.

In days past, you'd have a grandfather or grandmother around. Kids would hang around their uncles and cousins workshops. There no distinct border. Children can see how they are expected to transition from one role to another.

Fast forward to the present day, the "teen" is now effectively a market segment, and it has become "weird" or uncomfortable to deal with kids who are too young for them or adults who are uncool for them. The narrative behind TV shows and books only serve to reinforce this.

As parents, we have a duty to help our children recognize these artificial barriers and help them overcome these perception.

<comment><USER12> I'd blame homework, not education in general. Kids have gone to school since Shakespeare's time. But they went home and either helped their dad on the farm, helped their mum do the housework, got a part time job, or read books and hunted crawdads.

Now, many people would consider it abuse, forcing a child of 14 to help out at work. Especially if they were only paid a nominal fee. They should be doing their homework, getting one-up on their peers. Unless they are from a family that doesn't value education, and then they should be learning to cope with a job market that won't value them.

<comment><USER11> Quite the contrary. It is the availability of massive amount of idle time that creates a demand/outlet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The whole too-many-laws spin is sort of weird (I thought Ayn Rand, too much gumment, blah, blah, blah), but the invention of adolescence is pretty interesting.

Culturally, I think the ages that are marked hardest are 13 (Bar Mitzvah's and the like) and about 21. There is sort of intermediate transition time, when (basically) you can have children but you are still a junior member of our society.

I have tutored a fair number of teens, and my trick is to treat them like adults who are still practicing (and thus need _some_ supervision). I am straight up about it too.

I think a lot of public school is geared toward getting working class people ready to be treated like children all their lives at the factory/ restaurant/ wherever. But usually the system wears them down, and they are docile alcoholics or tv addicts, afraid of their bosses and schoolteachers, with really low self esteem by the time they are 20 or so. So kids rebel or "have fun" (sex, drugs, rock and roll) while they can -- who wouldn't?

I went to a private school myself, where we were all getting ready to have self-driven, challlenging, interesting lives, and except for those of us with seriously screwed up family life (yes, I blame them ...), everybody had really good relationships with teachers and parents. It made total sense to us to study and learn to interact with older people. Who wouldn't?

</comment><comment><USER14> I heard a longish npr interview with mr. Epstein, and found his theories to be so startlingly simple and obvious, so in line with all my experiences, that I was utterly confounded as to how nobody had mentioned it before.

Most compelling were his discussions about the -numerous- societies around the world who don't even have a word for "teen". That, and his observations regarding how young adults are segregated from society and are basically barred from work (excepting the most menial and unfulfilling), completely changed my conception of then entire issue.

If I could be bothered to read a book about parenting, it would be his.

<comment><USER9> _societies around the world who don't even have a word for "teen"._

But isn't that just a matter of how they count? Admittedly it would be nicer if we said, tenie one, tenie two, tenie three, tenie four, etc... But he's saying that this is the crux of the problem?

<comment><USER15> The article points out that the societies have no word for "adolescent". The parent was using a synonymous term, not one involving counting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> John Taylor Gatto talks about this particular phenomena in his book "Weapons of Mass Instruction". Just looking at the way our school systems treats teens is enough to come to a full understanding of why teens develop so slowly. Most teens have no responsibility or any need for a real worry in their lives (beyond just living up to some societal expectations). Without actually being challenged as a complete human being (rather than just mentally in some small part of your brain), why would the brain need to develop?

I believe the most detrimental part is the fact that teens themselves often don't see themselves as "complete", "grown up", or as adults. This leads them to see and treat everything through a particular lens that they can excuse any behavior on. If from the start they were convinced they were adults (were complete and grown up), I believe they would take much more responsibility earlier on for their actions. I know I would've.

<comment><USER17> Just about anything by Gatto (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto>) is worth reading. I'd recommend starting with _A Different Kind of Teacher_ ([http://www.amazon.com/Different-Kind-Teacher-American- School...](http://www.amazon.com/Different-Kind-Teacher-American- Schooling/dp/1893163407/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1299594071&sr=8-1)) or _Dumbing Us Down_ ([http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory- Sch...](http://www.amazon.com/Dumbing-Down-Curriculum-Compulsory- Schooling/dp/0865714487/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1299594084&sr=1-1))

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The article is disappointingly short of empirical findings (and there _are_ interesting empirical claims that others have made about changes in the onset of puberty over the last century etc.)

Ultimately I find the suggestion that lack of discussion of adolescence in other societies is an indicator of their adolescents' brain development being different absurd _in the absence of any supporting evidence actually related to the brain_. I doubt many pre-industrial societies have a word for "feminism", yet would be amazed if someone were to advance the argument that a female perspective on the world only became significant and distinct enough to warrant discussion in the early 1900s - even more so if they were to use it to buttress an argument on female cognitive development.

Consider the alternate hypothesis: little attempt is made to describe and analyse adolescence in non-Western societies because: (i)those cultures are _much less_ inclined to offer teens freedom of choice and expression (ii) those cultures have little interest in understanding the psychological development of teens. Juvenile crime is not a distinct phenomenon if juveniles are subject to (and deterred by) the same draconian sanctions as adults. Teenage resistance to education is not an issue if teenagers are expected to work to eat. Teenage sexuality is not an issue if society treats sex simply a means to procreation and allows the genders to mingle only in the interests of arranging parentally sanctioned heterosexual marriage.

Even if these differences do have a noticeable effect on brain chemistry, I'll happily accept the angst of my teenage years as the price of living in a post- industrial society.

</comment><comment><USER19> I find the thrust of this article fascinating -- it makes sense intuitively.

But the following quote clearly sounded over the top: _Teens are subject to, Epstein explains, "…more than 10 times as many restrictions as are mainstream adults, twice as many restrictions as active-duty U.S. Marines, and even twice as many restrictions as incarcerated felons."_

I'd sure like to see some proof of that. Surely teens get a raw deal, but to _that_ extent? It set off my "critical thinking" alarm.

<comment><USER18> My alarm was set off by the graph purporting to show laws specifically targeting teens. There's no attempt to put that in the context either of growth in legislation in general, laws targeting adults that ceased to apply to [some] teens. Nor is there any discussion of whether teens would feel "restricted" or see their cognitive development impaired by laws preventing them from being sent down a coal mine 12 hours a day by their parents.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> So, did they do brain-scans of "teens" and "adults" in societies where the distinction doesn't exist? Seems like the critical piece missing from the argument.

It's also possible that there was a smaller difference in the brain a few hundred years ago from factors like food availability. The current over- abundance of food is changing the the timing of puberty for example.

<comment><USER21> >The current over-abundance of food is changing the the timing of puberty for example.

Is it food availability, do you have a citation - I hypothesised that this was due to the wash of oestrogen-like chemicals and hormone disruptors in domestic use in the more developed nations.

Edit: an example citation - [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/geoffrey- lean/...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/geoffrey- lean/6418553/Why-boys-are-turning-into-girls.html); other articles note the increase in the use of soya in countless processed foods and the high levels of oestrogenic chemicals it has.

<comment><USER20> [http://www.cfah.org/hbns/archives/viewSupportDoc.cfm?support...](http://www.cfah.org/hbns/archives/viewSupportDoc.cfm?supportingDocID=936)

<http://edrv.endojournals.org/cgi/content/full/24/5/668>

Could be chemicals, could be nutrition or genetics, doesn't look like they pinned it down. But in the context of this discussion, culture shouldn't be the only culprit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Maybe the whole concept of "teens" became necessary when the society changed from agricultural to technological - there is just so much more to learn before you can be a "proper" adult... you could be a productive member of 1800's society without knowing how to read, write or do maths.

And the trend (more and more learning needed) will probably continue, judging from the stuff my teen kids are doing in their last 2 years of high school - things that I came across in my honours year of engineering (e.g. electronic data acquisition) are now taught in year 12. Wow.

</comment><comment><USER23> Early 20th-century child labor laws were a misguided attempt to solve an important problem (the exploitation of a specific class of workers). The evil they meant to prevent is child abuse, which is a subset of basic human rights abuse.

Abuse is a violation of a right. What rights do children have that adults lack? What rights do we lose when we reach the age of majority? That's a hard way to look at this problem from a society that purports to grant additional rights (or to lift prohibitions) as a person ages.

Many of us on HN understand that non-academic labor is the best way to gain experiences that we find indispensable in the pursuit of happiness. Withholding opportunities from minors is an even greater abuse than the working conditions that prompted the prohibition of child labor and compulsory schooling.

<comment><USER17> I've never thought of it that - and I've done a lot of thinking about education. Thank you!

Perhaps another valuable question would be what trait of children allow their exploitation in times past? Naivety? Lack of physical power? Was our opposition to child labor the demanding physical requirements, or the sacrifice of schooling?

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> I submitted an article yesterday about how it's peers that influence children not parents, and there was a very relevant quote:

"Developed societies have a special age group for people who are no longer children but are not yet adults, and this group becomes a source of social change. In societies that have only two age groups, children and adults, a culture can go along virtually unchanged for generation after generation, but as soon as there's a special age group for teenagers, things start to happen. The teenagers look for ways of demonstrating their fealty to their own age group ways of showing that they're different from adults. They use weird forms of adornment that adults find unacceptable, and they invent new words or use old words in new ways. If people didn't keep graduating out of the teenage group and taking their vocabulary with them, eventually they would create a whole new language and the adults wouldn't be able to understand them. Which, of course, is just what they're after!"

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2298961>

</comment><comment><USER25> I took a sociology class (briefly!) and one of the things that left a tremendous impression on me was how in some cultures, sexuality is completely different. That sexual drives are perhaps not universal, and that they can be very largely shaped by your culture.

If so, then something like adolescence could likely also be susceptible to such an effect.

</comment><comment><USER26> A PhD who doesn't know that "data" is plural?

<comment><USER22> "Data is accepted as a singular mass noun in everyday educated usage" - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data>, references given.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are must to teach concepts(in JavaScript)for first time programmers - <AUTHOR> I am planning 15-day long twitter session for first-time programmers of various background with absolutely no experience in programming.
Aim is to remove their fear of programming so that they can learn on their own anytime once this programme is over.
Please suggest concepts/tasks/links which must include in this session ! <comment><USER2> Some nice subjects to start talking about would be: \- A brief story of programming: How it has born and why; \- Why to code?; \- What is JS; \- Programming paradigms: what are them and usability. \- Task: Build a "hello world" code in JS(classic, right?). \- Task: A 30 day programming challenge, to make some of these new coders keep on the flow. You can propose something really easy to do to make them want to keep coding.

I am a programmer, and i'd love to recieve some of those tweets in my feed. How can I find you?

Peace out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi bro my twitter handle is @Go_Movie_Mango, and I would tag #100DaysOfCode and #CodeWithMango , in that.

Your suggestions are worth considering :) thanks

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Though this ain't strictly a programming concept, Unicodes would be a nice addition. [https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute- minim...](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2003/10/08/the-absolute-minimum- every-software-developer-absolutely-positively-must-know-about-unicode-and- character-sets-no-excuses/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Wow this one is charming, so many concepts of unicode are often missed out even by computer science grads.</comment></comment>


Bytes – the first French company to incorporate using Bitcoins, ever - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/bytes-io/https-medium-com-bytes-io-bytes-the-first-french-company-to-incorporate-using-bitcoins-a86263824003 <comment><USER2> Congratulations to Team Bytes! It would be great if we can know the hurdles that came during the incorporation!

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for this link!</comment>


Valve's Newell: 'iPhone should be more like the PC' - <AUTHOR> http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/valve-s-newell-iphone-should-be-more-like-the-pc/

<comment><USER2> The headline makes it sound like Gabe wants Apple to make the iPhone more open (which I'm sure he does), but the quote itself sounds like he's criticizing Microsoft for attempting to make the PC more proprietary. That's two different sides of the same coin.

</comment><comment><USER3> Yeah because that openness is working for android really well. Most secure mobile platform ever lulz</comment>


Ask HN: Anybody using Amazon Machine Image for AWS Deep Learning? - <AUTHOR> Hello, I do not own GPU hardware and am trying to understand if public amis on AWS are worth the fuss at professional level or at least good enough for the likes of course.fast.ai moocs. Newest here https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B06VSPXKDX for Ubuntu. Any experience? Thanks! <comment><USER2> GPUs in the cloud right now are so pricy, in part I think because NVIDIA is making people put in K40s and K80 - the Quadro and Telsa class cards that are super expensive.

We started to put on premise machines that have GPUs in them to reduce our costs. We can get a desktop class Core i7 machine with a GeForce 1060 6GB for around $800 all in, where as on Amazon you have to have a G2 2.xlarge on demand it is $400/month, or $3478 one year term (that is for 1/4 of a G2 8.xlarge achine, thus you get one of its 4 Quadro K5000 4GB cards to yourself.) I could put 2 1060s in that machine for another $200 or so. This just beats AWS pricing in <4 months of use.

My expectation is that these 1060s will be good for two years, maybe even three.

Because our GPU tasks are low bandwidth and non-critical we can run them on our existing office internet. Our rent also includes power. So there are not too many additional costs over the bare machine costs.

<comment><USER3> I think you're definitely winning on price- provided you plan to run things continuously for that time period. The AWS GPU instances are probably not aimed at you though.

It's far more likely to be aimed at the Master's student in ML who has this new awesome model but it takes goddamn forever to train on his laptop and he just needs 3 days of time with a big-ass GPU instance.

He spins up the instances, runs his model, spins it down and is out what, $100 maybe? That fits into his limited budget.

Additional benefit: if I buy a kickass GPU, I'm going to reduce my overall productivity in research because now I can finally play some of these hot new games on full graphics!

<comment><USER4> > It's far more likely to be aimed at the Master's student in ML

As a counter example, I'm a master's student in ML and my lab wants to push more for an onsite machine since it's easier to expense one machine than a bunch of monthly AWS bills for each student in the lab :)

Additionally, most Master's students (at least in Canada) already have access to one or more very large compute clusters for jobs like this. I have used AWS a few times when I was short on time though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> To answer your question about the [http://course.fast.ai](http://course.fast.ai) MOOC: the course provides an AMI that has everything you need pre-installed. Just follow the directions in the setup video, which includes a script that sets up the instance for you.

To save around 80% (but slightly less convenient) there are two ways to use spot instances provided on [http://forums.fast.ai](http://forums.fast.ai) that are largely automated and work well.

In part 2 of the course you'll learn how to set up your own server. As others have mentioned that's much better value if you're using deep learning somewhat regularly.

(I'm the founder/teacher of this course.)

<comment><USER6> I can totally vouch for the ease with which you can setup your deep learning AMI. I followed the instructions on the site and the scripts provided by Jeremy abstract a lot of the stuff away. Super cool work!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have been using it a good bit for some of the deep learning assignments on Siraj Raval's channel ([https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN3xxRkmTPmbKwht9FuE5A](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWN3xxRkmTPmbKwht9FuE5A)). I have had a really good experience so far. The trick is to find the AMI id for whichever region you want to use the image in and then just put in a spot request for your instance. I just checked the current going rate for a P2.XL in us-east-1 and it was at 0.2355 per hour.

<comment><USER8> Siraj is _the_ bomb! Fellow wizard here :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've been using this AMI for CNTK since the AMI was made available recently. It's been working well for me - they seem to update the AMI for big tagged releases of the libraries, and all the CUDA drivers are good to go out of the box. Personally I found it easier to use than Docker images, and both are easier than manual install.

With a spot request you can get a p2.xlarge for around $0.22/hr, which for me is sufficient for moocs and side projects, but for beefier instances the prices get high.

</comment><comment><USER10> I'm using them at $work. But they are expensive, but so is EC2.

Unless you are able to get a decent deal (far better than reserved instances) then for raw CPU/GPU power hosting your own is better. Its the whole package that makes AWS attractive. (RDS, S3, instant spinup)

Spot prices is a good place to start if you are doing batches. just make sure you checkpoint little and often.

However if you are on your own, with limited funds, Get a second hand workstation (dell or hp z620/600) they tend to have decent PSUs, loads of ram and decent support, and a couple of Geforces with more Vram. (Quadros you are paying for the double float performance and ram. transfer Bandwidth and speed are the same or slightly better on geforce class cards.)

</comment><comment><USER11> A helpful on-topic note: Amazon has 1x K80 cloud GPU instances for $0.90/hr (not prorated), but very recently, Google announced GPU instances of the same caliber ([https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/add- gpus](https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/gpus/add-gpus)) for ~$0.75/hr (prorated to the minute), although Google Compute Engine requires configuring the GPU drivers first.

</comment><comment><USER12> If you are just getting started then [https://www.floydhub.com/](https://www.floydhub.com/) is a good place as they provide initial 100 mins on GPU for free and then later on approx 50% cheaper than AWS

<comment><USER13> Correction: 100 hours _

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I used the ami with a p2.large for a deep learning project at university. In my opinion it was quite pricey and reading from disk storage was disappointingly slow (we had a 60gb dataset). What i found really great was using the same machine first as a t2.micro instance for setup and testing s3 connection, a m4.large for some preprocessing and finally the p2 for deep learning, all on the same AMI and SSD.

</comment><comment><USER15> www.paperspace.com/ml has much more affordable GPUs than AWS and a new Pascal card. There's a pre-configured Deep Learning template and a couple interesting features like a browser based terminal and desktop (you can still SSH if you prefer).

<comment><USER16> Paperspace co-founder here -- happy to discuss our AWS alternative which is focused on affordability, simplicity and performance. Recently, we've had a huge influx of people in moocs offloading their work to our GPUs/cloud. Would love any feedback you have.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Hey OP! I've been using it extensively and it's definitely more than good enough for most tasks you'll be doing. If you're going this route, I'd highly recommend following the Keras' authors guide on how to set up the instance and connect to it with a jupyter notebook: [https://blog.keras.io/running-jupyter- notebooks-on-gpu-on-aw...](https://blog.keras.io/running-jupyter-notebooks-on- gpu-on-aws-a-starter-guide.html). This will boost your productivity a ton in the long run.

Best of luck!

</comment><comment><USER18> Just get the GTX 1060 6GB variant & that should be enough RAM to run most models without suffering pagination.

</comment><comment><USER19> A pascal titan x is the best card for deep learning.

Even my gtx 1080 is faster, albeit with slightly less ram than the K80 or M60s available in the cloud.

A titan X would fix the ram issue though.

The most economical would probably be to colocate some titan X boxes. Not only cheaper, but more percormant than anything you can get from IaaS right now.

</comment><comment><USER20> GPU hardware on Amazon is quite pricey. I would be careful since it can get out of hand rather quickly.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm using p2.xlarge for Udacity Self Driving card nanodegree and Fast.AI assignments. It's super pricey as everyone has mentioned but I prefer using AWS to owning my own rig because I can download large datasets quickly.

</comment><comment><USER22> Yeah. I mostly end up using p2.xlarge spot instances, and they have worked fine for my jobs so far. Be sure to checkpoint often and you'll be okay with spot instances.

</comment><comment><USER23> No. CUDA-capable hardware is dirt cheap, and once you have your own, you can run experiments 24/7.

</comment><comment><USER24> I don't have experience with the Amazon AMIs for deep learning, but I'll give the tip that you can use spot instances with limited lifespans (x instance at $y price for at most z hours) to reduce cost and the risk you forget to shut something down.

<comment><USER9> Doing spot requests is a great way to keep the costs down if you just want to rent a GPU for a while. But bear in mind that GPU instance types tend to spike in price all-at-once when somebody brings a huge compute job online, which will exceed your spot request's max bid with no warning and immediately terminate your instance. So make sure whatever you're doing can be interrupted!

</comment></comment><comment> gm-conspiracy So, what is a recommended, buildable GPU rig (bang for buck)?

i7 w/ dual 1060 GPUs?

<comment> lloyd-christmas my year and a half old rig is 2x 980ti and a 5930k, which is also my generic home computer. I only use AWS when it's a long running job and the weather is hot. It can really heat up your home on long running jobs, so keep that in mind.

<comment><USER25> I've been wondering: Is information processing "free" in terms of energy? I.e. if I put 100 watts in my GPU to make it do computations, will it heat my room for 100 watts' worth of heat?

I'm guessing yes, because where else is the energy going to go, but then we should probably be using heaters that are made of old/cheap GPUs, rather than just a resistor.

<comment><USER26> As a Canadian, I always feel good running compute-intensive jobs in the winter. It's heating as usual, with a side-benefit of computation.

<comment><USER27> I have a system to duct in, out or recurculate inside air as the seasons change. I can heat my home with 'waste' energy at idle, or switch to cool outside air for heavy jobs or late night gaming. In summer I exhaust outside, pulling cooler air from underground. It is slowly spawning its own system, only 1.5 years in.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Is your SSH password revealed when you attempt to connect to the wrong server? - <AUTHOR> http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/309938/is-your-ssh-password-revealed-when-you-attempt-to-connect-to-the-wrong-server <comment><USER2> I highly recommend to move off password-based SSH at all in favor of SSH keys or (even better, certificates).

Here are some projects to help you roll out new infrastructure without SSH passwords:

[https://github.com/gravitational/teleport](https://github.com/gravitational/teleport) ( I work on this one with our team) and [https://github.com/Netflix/bless](https://github.com/Netflix/bless) (heard great things about it, especially if you are using AWS)

<comment><USER3> I find this common "wisdom" or "best practice" questionable. Something to think about:

If I use a password, a suitably designed client can have absolutely no trace of my credential after it has been used.

If I use a key/certificate, that credential must be stored _somewhere_ on the client, and even in encrypted form, it _exists_ in persistent storage.

<comment><USER4> If someone is able to steal my private key file, then they have probably compromised my computer and could just as well install a keylogger.

<comment><USER3> Consider the scenario in which your computer is stolen (and might not ever be returned, so whether the attacker installs a keylogger is irrelevant):

The fact that a private key file exists suggests that the user is very likely to be using SSH regularly.

The fact that an SSH client exists is far less informational (there's one by default on most Linuxes and Mac OS).

If I only ever use password authentication with SSH and don't save anything else, not even server keys, the attacker has far less information. That might be important in some scenarios, especially related to anonymity.

<comment><USER5> You are aware it's usually recommended to have passphrases for keys, yes? Plus, you _really_ should have whole-disk encryption for laptops.

(I get the feeling I'm missing something here, but...)

<comment><USER3> Regardless of whether the keyfile has a passphrase, the point is that _it exists_. And FDE also suggests you may be hiding something.

Sometimes the best way to make something secure, is to make it look like there is actually nothing to secure.

<comment><USER6> Not these days. FDE is so common and easy to use now, it might well have been an option you blindly hit upon install. And that's just in consumer environments. In corporate environments, in any company with a half-decent infosec department, all employees' computers will simply be required to have FDE, regardless of what they do on the computers.

<comment><USER3> FDE is also apparently not entirely impossible to bypass, which leaves you in the same situation of an attacker knowing that those SSH keyfiles exist on your machine.

You may think it's all over at that point, but there's different levels of secrecy, and it'd be better that the attacker cannot even know that a further level exists beyond.

<comment><USER6> > FDE is also apparently not entirely impossible to bypass

Sounds vague, can you please elaborate or cite? (I am not aware of this and if properly set up, I doubt this is true, so I am excited to learn what you know about this)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> SSH is like a candy store for advanced attackers.

Password auth discloses your password to the server. Clearly this is unfortunate if you connect to the wrong server, but it also means that a compromised server can intercept the passwords of anyone logging in.

The same extends to anyone using password auth with LDAP. In practice this means that if an organization uses LDAP with passwords for SSH authentication, the ability to execute arbitrary code on one server (combined with a routine privilege escalation) implies complete access to any infrastructure accessible with the same password. Most MFA schemes simply force the attacker to act quickly to utilize an intercepted token on a higher value target. Probably this means trying to find a copy of the private key that the devops team is using to run Ansible without having to MFA to every single server.

For small scale use private keys are a simple way to combat this, but at scale they're difficult to manage, and tend to result in high value static credentials lying around on laptops.

A lot of companies are combatting this using SSH certificates. Certificates can be short-lived (as low as minutes given the right tooling), and the CA that issues them can be heavily audited and linked to an existing identity system.

Netflix has open-sourced BLESS: [https://github.com/Netflix/bless](https://github.com/Netflix/bless)

Lyft has adapted BLESS for use without a bastion, start at slide 28: [http://www.slideshare.net/aspyker/netflix-open-source- meetup...](http://www.slideshare.net/aspyker/netflix-open-source-meetup- season-4-episode-3)

Facebook has their own certificate scheme: [https://code.facebook.com/posts/365787980419535/scalable- and...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/365787980419535/scalable-and-secure- access-with-ssh/)

Google has something they don't talk about that seems to be along the same lines.

Quick plug:

At ScaleFT we're building a commercial solution that uses very short lived certificates: [https://www.scaleft.com/](https://www.scaleft.com/)

We're hiring if anyone is interested, my email is in my profile.

<comment><USER8> > The same extends to anyone using password auth with LDAP.

So don't do that. Use kerberos auth with LDAP, and use native kerberos support in apps, don't use kerberos with pam.

<comment><USER9> > Use kerberos auth with LDAP

Do you know of a good guide for how to set this up on Linux? Or a good book that covers the topic? I've looked into this before and it's seemed to be an absolute jungle. I'd like to explore setting this up at my company but don't know where to start.

I'd be looking for something that's comparably easy to understand and employ as Facebook's recent post about SSH with certificates: [https://code.facebook.com/posts/365787980419535/scalable- and...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/365787980419535/scalable-and-secure- access-with-ssh/)

What's the best straightforward way to set up LDAP, Kerberos, etc from scratch?

<comment><USER10> I recommend FreeIPA. You can find thorough documentation here: [https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- US/Red_Hat_Enterp...](https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en- US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/Linux_Domain_Identity_Authentication_and_Policy_Guide/introduction.html)

You'd need to install and configure a FreeIPA server. They make it easy to setup master-master replication which you'll likely want to do. You'd create a user, add a HOTP secret (from a Yubikey or Authenticator app), and force the use of 2FA. Then once you add a client to the domain you'll have to log in using your password and a HOTP token.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> What about the password you have entered before you press "enter" ?

I think that's a more interesting question ... presumably most SSH users know not to connect when the server keys mismatch and you get the BIG NASTY WARNING.

However, let's say you connect properly to a host you typically use, but through inattention or confusion you start to enter a password for _some other SSH host_ ... and then hit ctrl-C.

I _think_ I have understood that the remote SSH server actually receives the keystrokes character by character, but does it decrypt that all at once after you hit enter, or is it decrypting the characters one by one ?

<comment><USER12> Character by character occurs only after a secure channel is established.

The client program asks you for the password, in response to negotiations with the server. The password will be sent as a whole and not as typed, as part of the complete auth packet.[1]

1\. [https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4252.txt](https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc4252.txt) \- sections 5, 8

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> While this question is aimed at SSH, be careful about a similar vector happening on more standard http username/email and password logins at any website.

Most people use the same username or email address for all sites. It's pretty common to attempt to log in with the wrong password for that site, but one that is valid for other sites with the same credentials. While that password attempt shouldn't be logged, there's no guaranteeing it isn't - perhaps even via rouge admin and unbeknownst to the rest of the company.

The biggest threat here is email addresses as usernames, and attempting to login with the password that's actually used for the email account. Very easy to automate any incorrect (or correct) passwords against the original email account.

<comment><USER14> "perhaps even via rouge admin"

Those dang _rouge_ admins (sorry, but I found that typo particularly amusing :-D).

So, is a rouge admin embarrassed? Or is he just so terribly mad at the world that he has turned red?

<comment><USER15> And further more, are the rouge admins connected to the rouge angles of satin? Are these rouge admins satinic?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I've often wondered if this is a vulnerability in all kinds of services. Try to log in to some website with the wrong password and you're probably giving them your Facebook password by accident.

<comment><USER17> You've just described phishing.

<comment><USER18> Wouldn't phishing be more like "make a site that looks like Facebook and try to get people to input their Facebook passwords?" What this person described is more abusing password recycling no?

<comment><USER19> It doesn't even have to be recycling. In fact, I have incorrectly pasted a wrong password to my Google account not realizing I had copied from one row underneath.

Personally, I place a lot of faith and trust in Google so I don't think they'd store failed password attempts about me (I've already volunteered them more information about me than I would volunteer to my own elected representatives anyway). If I ever realized I made a mistake the other way round, I'd reset the password to my Google account even though it has 2FA.

<comment><USER20> Have you ever noticed that if you enter a password previously used on a Google account it will tell you "password changed X units of time ago"? That surprised me.

It wouldn't surprise me if they're storing failed attempts at all. More data to feed the machines.

<comment><USER21> Every Linux machine knows when you last changed your password, too.

      $ passwd --status

<comment><USER22> Only root can do that.

<comment><USER23> I'm not sure why that would matter, but that's not true. No sudo needed to look up that I set my password on this VM on 2013-10-08.

<comment><USER22> That was a direct copy'n'paste from a session on centos7.

Password age is kept in /etc/shadow, not /etc/passwd.

So the passwd command is (needs to be) setuid.

Redhat generally limits what setuid programs can do.

Probably sensible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> One of the answers mentioned: [https://livesshattack.net/](https://livesshattack.net/)

On which there are leaderboards for password attempts: [https://livesshattack.net/leaderboards](https://livesshattack.net/leaderboards)

A password that was tried 11633 times, almost as much as 11684 times that 'password' was tried is 'wubao'.

That led me here: [https://ewedaa.wordpress.com/2015/07/02/what-the-heck-is- wub...](https://ewedaa.wordpress.com/2015/07/02/what-the-heck-is-wubao-and- jiamima-in-ssh-brute-force-attacks/)

which indicated that this is one of the two first passwords used by sshPsycho when attempting a brute force attack.

According to the poster these two passwords are tried often:

> wubao = 誤報, means something wrongly reported

> jiamima = 加密碼, can mean 'add password' or 'encryption code'

Discussion about the use of kippo to log ssh login attempts: [http://www.cubieforums.com/index.php?topic=3739.0](http://www.cubieforums.com/index.php?topic=3739.0)

Kippo is available here: [https://github.com/desaster/kippo](https://github.com/desaster/kippo)

</comment><comment><USER25> Yes. To fix this generally, we'd have to stop hashing passwords for storage so we could use a ZK proof to verify.

There is a hacky middleground whereby a ssh client could hash what you think is your password with the server's identity to derive your actual password. But there's the issue of coming up with a canonical identity for a server, and if we merely trust the server to provide it then the scheme fails to a malicious one. Nevermind it would require special setup on the server, and the utility of password auth is for before you've setup public key auth.

<comment><USER26> I'm not sure what you mean by ZK proof.

But the best password based authentication scheme will only allow an impostor one guess at the password. For example [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_millionaires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_millionaires)

<comment><USER27> I think it stands for "zero knowledge" proof?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Thankfully, if someone is MITM'ing you, or has acquired the IP of your host, then the SSH fingerprint check against your known_hosts will prevent them from snagging your password in this manner. (provided the host's private key hasn't also been stolen)

That is, as long as you don't ignore the "IT IS POSSIBLE THAT SOMEONE IS DOING SOMETHING NASTY!" message.

</comment><comment><USER29> What about if you sign into one with key based authentication? Does that server now know your key?

<comment><USER30> Yes, the server knows your public key. In fact, unless you have specified which public key to use (via command line option or ~/.ssh/config), the server receives _all_ your public keys. This is identifying information - most people have at least 1 ssh public key in github, and github makes those completely public as well.

Filippo Valsorda from Cloudflare built a demo of this - try running:

      ssh whoami.filippo.io

and if you have any of your keys in github, it will identify you.

If you want to avoid this you should configure ssh to only send a single specific key.

<comment><USER31> I don't know why, but it has never, ever gotten me. I guess maybe they're a point in time snapshot and all my keys have rolled since then.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Really surprised that a simple and perhaps intuitive question got 131 points. You can just reframe it to "if I send my password to the wrong website, will it be able to read it?" and answer is still yes. Maybe it's 'of course'.

<comment><USER33> There is a lot of password-based authentication schemes that enables to not share the password with the remote end. You can send a hash. Or you can answer a challenge.

<comment><USER32> Indeed, you're correct. Although the server always got something. And if it was a hashed password, well, works as if the password wasn't hashed UNLESS the hash changes AFTER some challenge prior the authentication attempt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> This seems like an odd vulnerability. I use SSH keys instead, but I always imagined that if I used a password instead then my password would be used (on both the server and the client) to help derive private keys. If I have the wrong password, the encrypted messages we send to each other would just be garbled nonsense.

<comment><USER35> It seems like it should be really easy to fix too: add a proper authentication protocol, with protocol negotiation, and then in subsequent versions of SSH, make the warning messages more and more scary. Something like

> The remote host 'ssh.overwathc.org' WANTS TO SEE YOUR PASSWORD, even though > current versions of SSH can authenticate without revealing it. You have > never connected to this host before -- it could be operated by an attacker. > Are you sure you want to show your password to this host (yes/no)?

<comment><USER36> I think that would be "really easy" only if password hashing was done the same over all platforms SSH runs on. I wouldn't want to be the one to bolt on something like SRP on an already existing login system that uses subtly different "third party" mechanisms for authentification.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Why isn't the password hashed before it is sent to the server? Is it because the client cannot know how the passwords are hashed on the server side? If so, couldn't the password hashing method be sent to the client?

<comment><USER38> Try designing a specific means to do this and you'll find that it's not easy.

E.g. your first idea might be "ok, so the client just sends a SHA-256 hash of the password, simple." But... if you do that, then the SHA-256 hash _is_ the password. A rogue server can capture that SHA-256 hash to log in elsewhere.

So you might try and improve that scheme by having the server supply something to hash together with the password. But that means you can't use /etc/passwd anymore, since that doesn't store the password, it just stores a hash with one particular salt.

<comment><USER39> Just thinking out loud, but what happens if the SSH server provides two salts. One is the /etc/shadow salt (including the hash type and so on) and the other is a one-time nonce salt to avoid replay attacks. So the client will first generate a crypt(3)-style string (which is equal to the one that the server has stored in /etc/shadow) and then will hash it with the connection-unique nonce to produce a hash that the server can then verify.

Now, to be fair this does mean that you have to give every client the salt for the user they're trying to authenticate as. However IMO a password storage system should still remain secure even after you get the salt for the passwords (you didn't get the hash, so the salt is not useful information to an attacker).

Would that be a viable method, or have I missed something obvious?

<comment><USER38> Your scheme successfully avoids revealing the password to a rogue server, so it solves the immediate problem.

But your scheme has made the password hash be the password, which is unacceptable because it's equivalent to storing the plaintext password on the server.

Illustration. Here's /etc/shadow

        cyphar:salt:hash

With your scheme, an attacker is allowed to log in by providing

        f(nonce + hash)

so that's a red flag: the attacker doesn't need to know the password, just the hash. Looking at it another way, you've made the hash be the password.

(FWIW, I initially thought your scheme worked, but couldn't believe a solution had been overlooked and so I tried it with a concrete example and only then realised where the problem lay. )

<comment><USER39> Yeah, I see what you mean. And this would presumably allow someone who has read access to /etc/shadow to be able to log into the server with ssh (something they couldn't do with `sudo` without cracking the password first).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Private key stored in a passworded file on an encrypted disk, plus a key fob as second factor.

Pretty hard to get better security.

</comment><comment><USER41> There's a challenge response authentication scheme. The authentication method can be enforced on the client but not sure if you can exclude completely password based authentication and enforce certifcate or challenge response authentication, servers need to be configured accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER42> It is frightening that I never realized this up until now. I always thought that this information was not exposed during the authentication process. But I can't see how it can be an issue unless you are intentionally trying to connect to a place that you are not supposed to ...

<comment><USER43> i think one way could be if you have a coworker or someone who is able to get root on the machine you are trying to log into. if you have the same password on your own machines sshd he might even easily get back to it and read credentials stored in your browser or use your credentials to damage some part of the comapny in your name etc...

Might be somewhat far stretched but it is definitely something one should be aware of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> I wonder of we can get SSH to bcrypt/scrypt the password clientside.

Of course, if you've got a bunch of computers, you can just configure SSH to use Kerberos auth. The capability is there, IIRC, and not through PAM either.

</comment><comment><USER44> Of course not! Because you have password authentication disabled and never type your login password in to SSH, right? You use ssh keys and ssh-agent, right? :-)

</comment><comment><USER45> Yes, because for some inexplicable reason almost no one has adopted zero- knowledge password agreement protocols (like SRP).

</comment><comment><USER46> It's possible to set up multi-factor auth in SSH - I use both SSH keyfile & password to log into my home server.

</comment><comment><USER47> Correct answer is no, absolutly not.

Except a small percentage of servers that are malicious.

Security people are so pie in the sky sometimes.

<comment><USER12> Correct answer is actually yes. And it's no different than logging in to the wrong web site. You're trusting that the server you incorrectly connected to is not capturing your failed credentials - which it absolutely does see if you're using password auth - with malicious intent.

This is true for any remote system that you're authenticating to with a password that must be verified on the server side, and isn't specific to ssh's password auth.</comment></comment>


Algorithm predicts Five Factor personality type better than Facebook friends - <AUTHOR> http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/this-algorithm-knows-you-better-than-your-facebook-friends-do/

<comment><USER2> I had a whole joke I just had to erase because it was based on there being no way all the things in that list having facebook pages. I thought it was nonsense. But I was wrong:

[https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-hate-it-when-people-lie- to-...](https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-hate-it-when-people-lie-to- me/322361002793)

[https://www.facebook.com/pages/Uncontrollable-swearing- after...](https://www.facebook.com/pages/Uncontrollable-swearing-after- stubbing-your-toe-in-a-dark-room/70621254406)

The list makes much more sense now

</comment><comment><USER3> Isn't it a bit sandy of a foundation to base the whole thing on self- judgments? Is it surprising that self-judged personality tests is going to correlate well with self-picked likes?

<comment><USER4> The Big Five has a lot of external validity (as do the regression estimates of Big Five, if you read the paper), so that's fine. If things like Conscientiousness really do predict income, longevity, etc, then even if they're a 'self-judgment', why is that a problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> The message is that our personalities are encapsulated by objects and media. These items of evident importance are of course legitimated by the benevolence of facebook's curation. Facebook is not a social experiment, it's a marketing tool.

Anyway, the _accuracy_ of the study depends on a self-report.

<comment><USER6> Right, the goal is to convince marketers that the digital shadow and the meat casting that shadow are one and the same.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Trying to explain the results gives me a headache. "Programmers" indicates shyness makes sense but "In n' Out" burgers means calm and relaxed?

<comment><USER8> In n' Out Burgers correlates with California, which correlates with NOT being from the Northeast, which correlates with being, relatively, calm and relaxed.

<comment><USER9> Why are Californians chiller than others? I wonder if it's actually true

<comment><USER10> Californian here. Yes, we are. It's the nice weather.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Based on the likes chart, I've concluded my big 5 profile is "grumpy old fart that doesn't like anything".

<comment><USER12> I came to that conclusion when they told me "Sorry, it looks like you don't have a sufficient number of Facebook Likes for us to generate an accurate enough prediction!"

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> are partners good "matches" if their 5-factor personalities are approaching congruence?

<comment><USER14> That's a little off topic and I think you can probably find some relevant articles on the web but I remember reading about that before. As I remember, matching openness is pretty important for compatibility purposes, for neuroticism the important thing is that one or both scores are low, and for the others there are various advantages/disadvantages to matching up.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> This is like every undergraduate's machine learning first project ever, right up there with "using twitter and sentiment analysis to predict ____"</comment>


SEC Employees Bring Laptops w/ "Blueprints of Wall Street" to Black Hat Con. - <AUTHOR> http://abcnews.go.com/Business/sec-shut-wall-street/story?id=17730628

<comment><USER2> The linked article is so overly dramatic that it was hard to read.

It's an opinion piece written by a guy who's in the business of scaring people about identity / data theft and such [1].

He's writing about a Reuters story [2] which itself is based on impressions of a yet-to-be-released SEC report.

Sure, the large point about data security is valid, but don't bother reading this piece, just jump straight to the Reuters stories [2] or the Huffington Post summary [3].

1: "Adam Levin is chairman and cofounder of Credit.com and Identity Theft 911."

2: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/09/net-us-sec- cyber-i...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/09/net-us-sec-cyber- idUSBRE8A804P20121109)

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/16/sec-cyber-nyse- idU...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/16/sec-cyber-nyse- idUSL1E8MG95K20121116) -

[http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/09/sec-cyber- report-i...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/09/sec-cyber-report- idUSL1E8M9CMI20121109)

3: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/sec-cyber- attacks_n...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/sec-cyber- attacks_n_2096640.html)

</comment><comment><USER3> I'm one of several people on HN that have experience with this particular area of technology --- we assess trading exchanges --- and I find this story highly implausible.

* Modern trading exchanges cannot be broken into simply by knowing "how their computers are linked together".

* Every exchange I know of spends millions every year on software security and has an operations team dedicated to the proposition that they are continuously under attack.

* The interface to a typical trading exchange is a trivial message protocol like FIX which doesn't do much other than allow order entry and management, is authenticated, and is usually wired directly to a dedicated line.

* Exchanges _are_ under attack --- by their own customers, who are actively looking for ways to screw with their endpoints to get the jump on their competitors.

* Modern trading exchanges are just big message-oriented enterprise systems anyways; they aren't nuclear reactors.

* Knowing one exchange is going to tell you virtually nothing about any other exchange. What, the SEC has "the blueprints" for every trading exchange? That's a whole shitload of Visio diagrams if my experience with just a subset of them is an indication.

* Finally, the SEC isn't some kind of trading cyber secret police; they're a slow-moving bureaucratic regulatory agency. I'm sure there is some kind of national emergency management plan for shutting down the markets (like we have during disasters). So what?

I think I basically just call bullshit on this whole story.

</comment><comment><USER4> But the security should not depend on the plans being kept secret. I mean, in practical terms, there is some security through obscurity, and possibly such laptops might contain passwords and things (but then what if they got lost on a flight or in a cafe?) which would make an attacker's job easier; but the best security would be if they could hand all the plans over to Black Hat Con and not take a single hit in their security.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm having a tough time understanding what compelled SEC employees to bring a laptop to such a convention.

"We dodged a bullet this time."

More like the SEC employees tried to fire at us, but missed.

This isn't about policy. This is about common sense. Why wasn't the data encrypted? Why were the employees allowed to leave the company buildings with the information? Why didn't they have the common sense to leave them at home before attending said conference?

And, that being said... You would assume that those attending a hacking convention would normally be smart enough to know the risks (and _especially_ not to bring an official work laptop). Alas, it's funny and worrisome to see that Wall Street is being run by people incompetent with technology.

<comment><USER6> Indeed, common advice to people attending Black Hat conventions is to take a semi-disposable computer. You install an OS before you go. You reformat when you get back.

That's perhaps paranoid, but a bit of paranoia isn't harmful in such a situation.

<comment><USER7> And maybe create a honeypot in a VM just in case

Have some important looking documents in an open SMB share for example (or put a password for those past security 101)

Have a WiFi AP 'free' (or maybe with a simple password) see who tries to use it, log connections, maybe even try to MITM some popular sites (this may be illegal)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The classic lets bring secure information to a insecure location/enviroment issue always crops up. Usualy funny, usualy lamentably stupid.

This fits into the whole group of peole who are not hackers attending a hackers conference. All trades have there initiation practices, in the building trade noobies are asked to go to the store for a long wait/weight etcetc.

Why did the SEC have employee's at the event who were not properly trained, would you send the head of HR to a financial meeting, no.

Security is an illusion after all at a point in time and whilst a system is secure today, tomorrow it may not be due to some expliot and with that was not exactly secure the day you thought it was secure. With that the best security is when you don't need to secure something at all.

The need for laptops with such data in such area's is sily.

Sadly until somebody invents proximity based data encryption which only allows you to access that data at certain locations, whilst not foolproof, it would help. Take the data outside area's it should not be then you can't read it.

Still people just don't think, imagine if they had a iPhone or other mobile with lots of office pictures, that is harmless to many but useful to others and with that is data that gets overlooked much more.

</comment><comment><USER9> It's an opinion piece based on this article [1] where the author advocates for making legislation to regulate computer systems security. Very sensationalist, classic link bait.

However, that worries me anyway. Piracy fighting initiated with pieces like this, and now we have legislation that threatens our freedom of speech.

[1] [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/sec-cyber- attacks_n...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/sec-cyber- attacks_n_2096640.html)</comment>


'Least Desirable'? How Racial Discrimination Plays Out in Online Dating - <AUTHOR> https://www.npr.org/2018/01/09/575352051/least-desirable-how-racial-discrimination-plays-out-in-online-dating <comment><USER2> One thing I would be curious about is how members of the same race treat each other. Do black people favour black people the same way white people favour white people?

<comment><USER3> Anecdotal but in Asia, white features are in "high" demand. One of the most popular surgeries in Korea is lifting the eyelids higher to look more Caucasian.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was hoping for statistics, not anectotes. Like P(got a match|caucasian) vs P(got a match|latino) or similar.

<comment><USER5> For that, there's the OKCupid blog post mentioned in the article[0] or the book that covers the same ground[1].

[0] [https://theblog.okcupid.com/how-your-race-affects-the- messag...](https://theblog.okcupid.com/how-your-race-affects-the-messages-you- get-39c68771b99e) [1] [http://dataclysm.org](http://dataclysm.org)</comment></comment>


Apple's 5-Hour iPhone Ad Takes Viewers on Tour of the Hermitage Museum in Russia - <AUTHOR> https://news.artnet.com/art-world/apple-five-hour-iphone-ad-hermitage-museum-1800798 <comment><USER2> Does anyone have any recommendations for other "background" videos? I like to watch nature videos on YouTube, but they often have ads every 10 minutes which pretty much ruins the experience.

<comment><USER3> Search for "Slow TV" on Wikipedia. Norwegian Broadcasting Company has done several "series" and you can find them on YouTube (usually split into several multi-hour chunks).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So they are targeting to the kind of people that takes pictures at museums?</comment>


Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others launch webplatform.org - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/insider/2012/10/08/apple-facebook-google-microsoft-and-others-join-forces-to-launch-new-web-standards-resource <comment><USER2> My favorite part is the tongue in cheek title for Tim Berner-Lee: "Web Developer". That's an understatement (as well as a perfectly accurate one).

<comment><USER3> "Tim Berners-Lee - Mammal"

No seriously, TimBL should need no further title, given their audience ;)

<comment><USER4> "Tim Berners-Lee - Tim Berners-Lee"

<comment><USER5> Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This all looks very cosy with all these companies supporting it, but I wonder how this site will deal with the more political aspects of web technologies. For example, it's still totally ridiculous that there is not one audio or video format that plays everywhere. You have to dual-encode to two formats. So if you make a game with sound effects, you have to find both a Vorbis and AAC encoder, and if you want to host a video you'll need Theora and H.264 or whatever the deal is there, and so on. So what will WebPlatform.org recommend, given how obvious it is that one format would be far simpler and make for a better platform? Will it side one way or another? Will this upset their "stewards"?

<comment><USER7> For audio at least, things are looking up. Opus, a new royalty-free codec backed by both Mozilla Foundation and Skype (Microsoft), has been standardized as an RFC[1], and will likely be mandatory in WebRTC[2]. So we should be seeing that across all major browsers in a year or two.

Opus beats almost all other codecs (MP3, AAC and HE-AAC, Vorbis) in subjective quality[3], so it's a good standard to have.

[1] <https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6716>

[2] <http://jmspeex.livejournal.com/11042.html>

[3] <http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-09/15/opus-codec>, also <http://people.xiph.org/~greg/opus/ha2011/>

<comment><USER8> Isn't Opus for speech?

<comment><USER7> Not solely. Opus is a hybrid of the SILK codec, which is more for speech, and CELT, which is more aimed at music. It can seamlessly switch between the two methods and use them simultaneously: [https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Why_not_keep_the_SILK_and_CELT...](https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Why_not_keep_the_SILK_and_CELT_codecs_separate.3F)

The main goal was streaming (of both music and speech), and hence, low latency. Matching or bettering high-latency codecs (like Vorbis) on quality was just a bonus, and I believe somewhat of a surprise to the developers when listening test results came out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Checked the "No Tears HTML5 Game Development Tutorial" at [http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials/canvas_notearsgam...](http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials/canvas_notearsgame) and:

\- "Because this is a No Tears guide, we'll use jQuery"

\- Use setInterval() rather than requestAnimationFrame().

\- Questionable class-like implementation.

Granted the original HTML5rocks! post is over a year and a half old, but bad code and bad practices are NOT helping the cause.

<comment><USER10> It's a wiki. Why not fix it?

<comment><USER11> Unless the linked article is incorrect, only authorized employees are able to edit it. So like, it's an article, why not read it?

[my bad, it looks like maybe anybody can edit it after registering.]

<comment><USER10> I don't see how the red text "Web Platform Docs is an open wiki that anyone can help improve. See the getting started guide[0] to learn more." in the alert box at the top of the page could be more clear.

[0]<http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/WPD:Getting_Started> First sentence: "Anyone can contribute to WPD."

<comment><USER11> I only read the article (which implies only employees will be editing the wiki), then went to the wiki itself later.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Surprisingly the content of robots.txt is:

      User-agent: *
      Disallow: /

<http://webplatform.org/robots.txt>

<comment><USER13> I can't begin to fathom a motivation for that. Can anyone think of a reason, or is this likely simply a mistake?

<comment><USER14> The site doesn't even seem close to being useful or complete yet. I think it's intentional.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wonderful, just wonderful. I'm glad to have woken up today to find the first item on Hacker News to be several big-name companies _collaborating_ to bring several technologies forwards and more standardized, instead of _fighting_ against each-other for the proprietary implementations of trivial things.

</comment><comment><USER16> I'd really like to see a 'Web 2012' standard, and 'Web 2013' standard, etc. It's basically the set of APIs which is implemented across all browsers at that date (say July 1st of that year).

So as an app developer, you could just design to 'Web 2011' which is the set of APIs fully supported (or polyfilled) across all browsers as of July 1st, 2011.

<comment><USER17> What's the definition of "all browsers" though? Are we counting IE6? Only the newest version of each major browser? Would you be expecting web users to be using a minimum browser version?

Although a cool idea, I don't see how this would mitigate any issues currently surrounding standards.

<comment><USER16> Latest release version of major browsers (Chrome, IE, FF, Opera, Safari).

Have a mobile version which tracks mobile browsers.

Once the HTML5 term was dropped (because it's a living spec), it's impossible to refer to any meaningful feature set. Of course it's all HTML, but there's so much variance in what's supported and what is not. If I can then say 'HTML 2011', that means HTML which was supported by RTM versions in 2011.

A variation on this would be to say that rather than referring to the latest RTM version of browsers, 'HTML 2011' would refer to the subset of HTML which can target 80% (or something) of worldwide users.

<comment><USER18> I like it. Something users can intuitively understand. Even if they need to be directed to it to find out.

"You need a browser that supports Web 2010 or higher to use this app."

On the other side, it would help users pressure webapp developers that aren't supporting their specific device / OS version.

"My browser is 2014. Why isn't this working." would be hard for customer service to BS around.

THe downside is that even if most of the browsers being used support some 2015 feature now, it would be hard to justify using it in 2013.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> So if Mozilla is involved, how does MDN factor into this? Are both expected to co-exist?

Edit: addressed here [https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/10/welcoming-the-new-kid- web-...](https://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/10/welcoming-the-new-kid-web-platform- docs/)

<comment><USER20> So if Google is involved, how does HTML5 Rocks factor into this? Are both expected to co-exist?

<comment><USER21> In all likelihood all three will co-exist, but w3schools will continue to get most of the traffic.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> This would be a good time for the HN editors to change the story to link directly to the webplatform.org site.

<comment><USER23> I'm truly asking, why is that? If the OP found it through TNW (or any other!), I see no reason why not to give credit and traffic to the news provider?

You're just a click away, the link is at the beginning of the article and it is not an add covered site or link bait.

<comment><USER22> For one thing that's what I'd expect based on the title (since the site already launched). If the site hadn't launched, then a link to a relatively contentless news story would be fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Actual link: <http://webplatform.org/>

<comment><USER25> And... the site is down!

<comment><USER26> "This webpage is not available"

If _that_ isn't a universal standard, then I don't know what is.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Awesome. I hope this turns into something really great.

I know it's in alpha, but my first impression was a bit-off putting:

-Look at Hot Topics, figuring this is a good starting point

-Click on INDEXEDDB (I don't use it, have only a vague idea what it is)

-No introduction. No description of what it is or how to get started.

-Instead, a reference with 50 subpages

-8 flagged issues: Missing Relevant Sections, Needs Topics, Data Not Semantic, Unreviewed Import, Incomplete, Not Neutral, Cleanup, Compatibility Incomplete

</comment><comment><USER28> I don't want to be an asshole who just criticizes, but really? It's the best W3C, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Facebook, HP, Adobe, Nokia and Opera could come up with?

Just look at these screenshots:

<http://d.pr/i/EbSt>

<http://d.pr/i/zmk9>

<http://d.pr/i/i9y>

And it took me 5 minutes to load the site - it was down when I first tried it (and on subsequent tries).

So, I personally don't think this is the w3schools killer we were waiting for. At least not yet.

<comment><USER20> Actually a "2 + 3" captcha is much more effective than a typical one with an image. You'd be surprised.

When I ran a phpBB forum that spammers would join to get some of my PageRank 2 juice, putting up a special question on the registration form (by modifying the php code), was much more effective than phpBB3's captcha function with maximum difficulty applied.

Spamming software doesn't have support for capctha questions, only captcha images.

<comment><USER28> The problem is, it's always in the form of "x + y = ?", which makes it _ridiculously_ easy to bypass with an script.

At least that's what I initially thought. But after some more digging it seems that x and y are hard-coded to be 2 and 3, respectively.

I opened the registration page in 4 different browsers with different IP addresses (my own, my VPS, and a couple borrowed from Tor) and in _all_ cases the "security" question was "What is 2 + 3?"

Unbelievable.

<comment><USER29> Ten minutes to implement, stops nearly all automated attacks that aren't specific to this site, much less user hostile, and far fewer accessibility issues.

Believable.

<comment><USER30> Not to mention a placeholder for a more advanced captcha to eventually be deployed.

Extremely believable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Please do not post links with utm junk in the URL.

<comment><USER28> What the hell does it mean, anyway?

<comment><USER20> utm links are tracking links for Google Analytics. If the link was clicked from inside a mailing list's email (which it most likely was), and they have Analytics setup with their Email Marketing Provider, it'll put that utm junk on the end.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I wonder why are they not using Mozilla Persona for their authentication system.

<comment><USER32> Because that would require real work and collaboration and actually move the web forward.

<comment><USER33> Haven't rofled so hard in a long time. Thanks for that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> ezequiel-garzon With the exception of W3C, all participants are listed in a fair alphabetical order. These egos are way too big to mess with!

<comment><USER34> ...With the further exception of Nokia, who was willing to be behind Microsoft but _absolutely not_ behind Mozilla.

However, the full "web steward" page is more egalitarian:

<http://webplatform.org/stewards/>

<comment> ezequiel-garzon I completely missed that! Huh... I guess Microsoft-Nokia is indeed becoming an inseparable tandem.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Why is it that The Next Web submissions constantly gets more points than the origin link?

</comment><comment><USER36> Just curious but if Apple is on this why is its logo not there along the others?

<comment><USER37> Apple is a steward but puts a lot of thought and care into how its brand is presented on its own pages, let alone on those of a third party.

In a best case scenario they'd push back the launch of the site to make sure that everything is up to their standards (which logos they appear next to, amongst, etc; what their blurb says), but their second choice is to forbid anything about them on the site whilst they think about how they want it to look.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm impressed that they'd settle on IRC on Freenode for direct chat. Seems like the sort of thing that would not be improved by corporate lawyers for whatever reason.

<comment><USER39> Don't worry, I'm sure if it gets popular, the lawyers will soon stamp that out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Why is this site not responsive? Here's how the website looks on a iPhone [https://twitter.com/lukew/status/255327150863941632/photo/1/...](https://twitter.com/lukew/status/255327150863941632/photo/1/large)

</comment><comment><USER41> please let this be the end of w3schools

<comment><USER42> i second that. however webplatform.org will need some serious SEO to displace w3schools. also, webplatform needs some serious work on their docs to make them readable and easy to search.

<comment><USER43> Maybe if webplatform.org is mentioned in enough places, webplatform will have a better Google ranking and webplatform might displace w3schools.

The promotion of webplatform would really help webplatform gain popularity. Do not hesitate to send the link to webplatform ( <http://www.webplatform.org> ) to as many people as possible.

Share webplatform's site ( <http://www.webplatform.org> ) on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc...

webplatform webplatform webplatform webplatform webplatform webplatform webplatform

<comment><USER44> Does SEO work in HN comments? I know it doesn't on reddit, so I wouldn't be surprised.

<comment><USER45> User submitted links are rel="nofollow"'d, so no, HN comments and submissions don't help.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Is there a community on Stack Overflow that is already offering the same functionality as the WebPlatform forums?

Some thoughts...

The Q/A format in general seems like a great solution to the problem of sharing the best way to do things because it requires the person asking the question to ask a 'good' question and the person answering the question to provide a 'good' answer. Voting up the 'best' answer gives the closest approximation to the 'right' answer. The WP forum is devoid of any real content. It'll be years before it has anything approximating what SO offers.

I can see the wiki format being good as a replacement for something like w3schools, but that isn't really what this appears to be. Plus, we all know that wiki's get out of date pretty quickly with the ever changing technology... unless of course enough people are paid to work on this content... and who says they are the 'experts'. You can already see in the comments here that people disagree with the coding examples. Who is going to moderate all of this?

<comment><USER47> > Who is going to moderate all of this?

Google, Microsoft, Adobe and other stewards have fulltime technical writers working on new content and reviewing incoming contributed content.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> I was immediately reminded of the xkcd standards comic <http://xkcd.com/927/>

</comment><comment><USER49> Is this the Bretton Woods Conference for the web as we know it?

</comment><comment><USER50> Is there no way to sign up for this without connecting it to a Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter or Google account? The signup form indicates that you can sign in with a site-specific account, but I can't find out how to _create_ one.

<comment><USER51> [http://docs.webplatform.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLo...](http://docs.webplatform.org/w/index.php?title=Special:UserLogin&type=signup&returnto=Main+Page)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> This awesome, I remember being really frustrated when I started out at my Rails internship because there wasn't any comprehensive documentation for HTML stuff like I was used to with Java, C++, etc.

</comment><comment> ezequiel-garzon If a webmaster is looking: "Your first look at JavaScript" [1] is duplicated from [2]. However, what should be internal links in [1] take you to [2]. For example, search "where to put javascript" in the first document.

[1] [http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials/your_first_look_a...](http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/tutorials/your_first_look_at_javascript)

[2] [http://www.w3.org/wiki/Your_first_look_at_JavaScript#Where_t...](http://www.w3.org/wiki/Your_first_look_at_JavaScript#Where_to_put_JavaScript)

</comment><comment><USER32> I'd rather they come together to do something important, like implementing browserid/Persona. I don't think this will even come close to the usefulness of StackEchange.

<comment><USER53> This is supposed to look like a reference documentation as opposed to a collection of specific questions and answers.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> It's a really nice initiative by all these giants..Now we'll not have to search multiple sites for learning HTML 5 and CSS 3 at least!

</comment><comment><USER55> Nice to see that someone is actually trying to bring some order to the current HTML5 chaos: [http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SteveFulton/20120926/178364/N...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/SteveFulton/20120926/178364/Not_Flash_The_Still_Angsty_Zeitgeist_Of_HTML5_Technology_Burnout.php)

</comment><comment><USER56> Since this is related I'd love to share a similar project I am working on: <http://www.betterfrontend.com> \- think of it as curated best-practices for Front-End Development.

<comment><USER57> Some good content here, but the rails specific stuff feels out of place on a site that purports to be focusing on the frontend. I'd consider either making it backend agnostic, or rebrand the site as Better Frontend for Rails developers.

<comment><USER56> Valid points. My vision is most that popular frameworks have their own best- practices. Initially starting with rails is just easier to target and be used for. Thoughts?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> There is no licensing information at the bottom of each page within <http://docs.webplatform.org/wiki/*>

Can someone clarify what the licensing situation is?

</comment><comment><USER59> This is great, although I wish it would have started few years earlier.

</comment><comment><USER60> So happy to see Microsoft on this list. There's hope for IE yet.

<comment><USER61> Microsoft and WebGL - Never in IE

[http://games.greggman.com/game/webgl-security-and- microsoft-...](http://games.greggman.com/game/webgl-security-and-microsoft- bullshit/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Definitely still alpha (as they disclaim). Login doesn't always work, and when it does it sometimes forgets I'm logged in when moving from page to page..

<comment><USER63> I find it quite sad that these elementary things don't work even for an alpha give the big names that are involved in the project.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> I'm really not feeling this design. It's not bad, by any means, but it seems a little too flashy for what's supposed to be a knowledge base.

</comment><comment><USER65> Was it so difficult to list the members? I work at 'others' and don't like that you omitted my employer from the title. Thanks.

</comment><comment><USER41> one thing that would be of huge help, but also a huge undertaking is to allow for selection of targeted browsers, with the least common denominator dictating which code examples you see. for example if IE < 9 is selected, a jQuery fallback would be an acceptable compromise.

</comment><comment><USER66> Thought these Goliaths were colluding on something else for a second, heh.

</comment><comment><USER67> Less than 1000 users thus far. Great time to reserve your name.

</comment><comment><USER68> Hell yes, w3schools can go weep in the corner!

</comment><comment><USER69> this site runs on php, that is pretty cool! Then again php is good for wiki pages

<comment><USER55> ... and then again php isn't good for anything anymore [http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad- de...](http://me.veekun.com/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> The skeuomorphic logo is such a terrible choice or did I accidentally miss all of the web's 4-bar linkages?

<comment><USER71> The logo is not skeuomorphic.

<comment><USER70> Indeed it is. It is representative of bar-linkage mechanical systems.

Do you have any evidence to substantiate your claim?</comment></comment></comment>