Sites using Facebook 'Like' button liable for data, EU court rules - <AUTHOR> https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/sites-using-facebook-like-button-liable-for-data-eu-court-rules/ <comment><USER3> "He warned that the decision would go beyond Facebook and effect all social media plug ins, which are important for many firms to expand their reach on the web."

Add an image on your own website that links to Facebook. Problem solved. You keep your like buttons, their servers are no longer involved in serving your web page.

<comment><USER4> I did this and wrote about it[0]. It works really well, is very fast and doesn't compromise your users' data. There are also libraries that make it very easy to add.

[0]: [https://www.stavros.io/posts/scourge-web- analytics/](https://www.stavros.io/posts/scourge-web-analytics/)

<comment><USER5> Does Facebook allow it?

Unless you have rights holders permissions then the social links at the bottom of that article look like copyright and probably trademark infringements. (I'm not saying that's a good thing, just how it appears.)

<comment><USER6> > Does Facebook allow it?

Who cares? Facebook is a zero sum game at this point for advertisers/content creators. Facebook stacking the odds like a casino does chuck-a-luck. There's only them winning here, nobody else.

<comment><USER7> _Who cares?_

The site owner that might be sued by Facebook for copyright infringement, for starters.

<comment><USER8> Aren't logos fair use? Maybe a like button might be sueable, but a logo should be fine, right?

<comment><USER9> And they will be suing for what? For attempting to send more people to facebook? What's the damage?

Facebook has no right to have their arbitrary code on other people's websites. So they can't force any specific way to show their button. From the end user's perspective it's all the same.

<comment><USER7> Facebook could reasonably argue that by bypassing their established use policies for the like button, you are depriving them of value - in this case the value of the data that their JavaScript collects and sends back to them, and that you (the site owner) are being unjustly enriched through the use of their copyrighted image(s) on your site.

Except in cases of fair use, which isn't nearly as broad as people think, the use of other parties' images is subject to whatever licensing restrictions they choose to put on them. You can choose not to display their images if you do not accept those terms.

<comment><USER10> I feel like trying to sue someone for linking to Facebook would go down _extremely_ poorly.

<comment><USER5> The reason sites want to have Like buttons is because they perceive value in that for the site. A C&D would be enough to bring anyone in to alignment that didn't have a wish for a very expensive day trip to court.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Sites using the like button are dumb to begin with, especially if they are in e-commerce. You're handing your competitors an ability to do lookalike targeting of your customers via Facebook ads. This is one of the biggest advantages of that platform. Surprised nobody writes about this while gasping at Facebook's profits.

<comment><USER12> E-commerce, possibly, but less true for journalism. Nobody browses news site front pages anymore. They visit news article links directly from their Facebook feed of other people sharing/liking stuff, Reddit, HN, or other social media.

When was the last time you typed in nytimes.com or some similar foo into a browser?

<comment><USER13> Well, since you're asking - Daily - news sites' front pages are bookmarked on my mobile but often typed as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think all these privacy protection rulings are a step in the right direction, in that we are seeing governments respond to dark patterns similar to how they respond to spam and telemarketing.

The loose thread now is in how the companies are required to communicate their data mining. These twenty page privacy policies that I agree to with a flick of the scrollbar and a button click, or these equally boring popovers when I visit a site, are where the governmental innovation needs to happen next.

<comment><USER15> All it takes is strict enforcement. The rules are already there.

Many of the popovers (basically all that you can't easily dismiss without giving consent to anything unnecessary) don't result in valid consent.

Twenty page privacy policies are also questionable: "the request for consent shall be presented in a manner which is clearly distinguishable from the other matters, in an intelligible and easily accessible form, using clear and plain language."

I also hope that the ones that ask for consent with a modal pop-up create a modal pop-up offering you to revoke consent on every page load: "It shall be as easy to withdraw as to give consent."

Strict enforcement of the existing rules is all that's needed. Getting consent is going to be really hard, to the point where web sites may be best of not asking for it, and only doing what they can without processing personal data.

<comment><USER16> This. I long for the day when regulators pick one high profile target that uses "by entering you agree to [us giving your data to third parties for ad purposes only]" and simply hit them with an enormous fine.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I get the sentiment, but wouldn't this apply to something as simple and fundamental to the web as including an image that I don't host on my webpage? The 3rd party hosting that image could be collecting a decent amount of data about people accessing it - I really have no idea what they're doing, or any way to verify it.

This ruling feels poorly thought out to me. Activities on the web aren't totally private, that's how it's always been. Getting rid of 3rd party content makes it ... kind of not the web anymore.

<comment><USER18> That's a very D&D Rulebook type interpretation :). Not that rulings should be ambiguous, but usually some common sense can be applied (and is expected to be reasonably applied).

The Facebook like button is a web tracker, disguised as a social engagement button. If not its primary -, then its secondary function is to (indiscriminately) track users and non-users outside of its walled garden, like some reversed Trojan Horse.

Hotlinking an image is just that: hotlinking an image. Facebook relies on us and lawmakers to say: "We just can't ban third party content!", while we perfectly could leave innocent third party content alone, and focus our sights on the spy button. It isn't reasonable, nor common sense to conflate the two: even if similar in syntax, the context is vastly different.

<comment><USER19> > That's a very D&D Rulebook type interpretation :). Not that rulings should > be ambiguous, but usually some common sense can be applied (and is expected > to be reasonably applied).

You can't build a business on assumptions made on an ambiguous ruling. And while common sense seems reasonable there it has no definition. Why should investors take the risk?

<comment><USER20> Lots of businesses, investor-backed and otherwise, currently operate within the "frontier areas" of the law. Some of them step a little too far and get whacked, others stay in the gray area for decades making money. Legal due diligence is not about guaranteeing 100% you're above board. It's about weighing the risks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> > Bitkom, a German trade federation for online businesses criticised the > ruling, saying it would heap costly bureaucracy on firms without enhancing > consumer protection.

Swap "costly" for "mildly inconvenient" and then I could almost see where they're coming from but I think they're missing the forest for the trees here. Let the "like button" die, rulings like this take the wind out from beneath it and eventually it's a metric you'll never be burdened with.

<comment><USER22> Also the "without enhancing customer protection" is not correct. The mere act of loading a page with the like button causes data to go to fb

One solution would be to have a "turn on like" button, but the image solution that some comments point out seems like a good option as well

(Or fb could have data sent only when the person clicked the button, but that's unlikely to happen)

<comment><USER23> Corporation with financial interest in disinformation spreads it through press release. News at 11

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> The best part:

> Under EU data protection law, therefore, a European retailer and the US > platform are jointly responsible for gathering the data

I really hope this means that Facebook and all those stats/ads providers can be held responsible if they don't take adequate measures to ensure that only data from users who have given valid consent is sent.

Going after individual site operators is a fight against windmills. It would be much more effective if they could go after a company that provides an Ad SDK to hundreds of thousands of apps, but just tells the app developers in the fine print "by using this SDK you confirm that you have gotten consent from your users" \- and as a result, knowingly accepts that nobody will care and data from non-consenting users will be collected.

<comment><USER24> > I really hope this means that Facebook and all those stats/ads providers can > be held responsible if they don't take adequate measures to ensure that only > data from users who have given valid consent is sent.

Yes, it does mean that, and on top of it authorities can also go after each web site that has a like button on it

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Will EU regulate mobile apps and the two dominant platforms too? On web I'm safe using blockers, no JS etc. But on my phone I lack alternatives to suppress privacy abusers.

<comment><USER26> I believe Apple is trying to get in front of this, and hopefully that means Android isn't far behind.

[https://www.consumerreports.org/software/apple- ios-13-will-i...](https://www.consumerreports.org/software/apple-ios-13-will- include-more-privacy-protections/)

<comment><USER27> Android is far ahead… as long as you only use AOSP or Lineage, avoid Google Apps and install apps from F-Droid and not from the Play Store.

<comment><USER28> That's not the Android that people are talking about.

<comment><USER29> Even on the Google Play Store, there's a browser called Firefox that supports the concept of "add-ons".

I know these are a novelty on Android where most people use Chrome because it's pre-installed - but add-ons are small, self-contained downloadable additions to your browser. There are multiple such add-ons that will block ads for you. They also work in-app where the Firefox WebView/custom tab is used.

<comment><USER30> > I know these are a novelty on Android where most people use Chrome because > it's pre-installed

I still don't understand which law allows _not_ to show a choose your default browser installer, like Windows had to after the court decision.

<comment><USER31> Are you in Europe? I am and recently I was asked this exactly question out of blue, and I was given 5 options (if I recall correctly).

<comment><USER30> Yes. 5 options on Android and on iOS? Because if Windows had to, they should too.

<comment><USER31> I don't have access to iOS devices, but this happened on 3 different Android phones. It wasn't on setup though.

<comment><USER29> That's interesting, I've never experienced this myself. Wonder if there are any screenshots floating about on the web.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> How much value does like and other sharing buttons provide to anyone other than Facebook/Google/Twitter these days? I'd argue very little.

I used to work for one of the larger social sites in the UK with many millions of unique users and we found that the social buttons got next to no engagement. Before I left we began the conversation about removing them entirely as they were just dead space on the page.

<comment><USER33> I agree that for most sites these buttons have very little value both because of lack of relevance and because of low conversion placement.

However there are whole businesses that have been built around these buttons (fx Upworthy).

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Wouldn't the same logic, apply for users clicking on ads?

<comment><USER35> this is a great point. it would be awesome if indeed sites had to gain my permission before showing me an advertisement - or at least a custom one. someone should sue!

<comment><USER36> Or at least showing an ad that they don't host themselves. A first-party hosted ad wouldn't give away any user data.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I wonder if this will end up being applied to the usage of third party CDNs as well such as Google Fonts.

<comment><USER37> I hope it applies to CDN's, I suspect data collection is the very reason they exist and that many are already collecting data, but even it tech circles it flies under the radar. On top of this there's potential issues with any third party and we'll need stronger guarantees from cloud hosts, data centers and the like.

CDN's are especially nefarious when it comes to privacy because they make it so hard to block third party content while retaining functionality.

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> It is interesting how with the many copyright and data protection acts and rules, that the EU is, in effect creating a whole new type of decentralised firewall for content for want of another way of perceiving it all.

Though this is a firewall for the people against business practice/malpractices. Which is a good thing. I'm sure there will be many cases of this causing issues, but on the whole, it does fall in the favour of the end-user, us the people.

I say firewall, more an IDS that reacts to breaches. But it is good how they are at least not ignoring and overlooking such details and this is a fine example of it being well thought out.

</comment><comment><USER39> What exactly is the data being transferred? It is that the user has visited the site, correct?

The only way the third party site can know that is via third party cookies, or attempting fingerprinting as a third party iframe. Do you see any other way?

I thought that the EU already realized that this is a matter of cookies - <USER2> this case third party cookies of a site that you HAVE logged into. Browser makers should just let the user make a decision whether they want the requests to be automatically sent with third party cookies in this case — OR to explicitly approve every single time they log in using oAuth or want to share something.

Whatever happened to this proposed law from 2017, which correctly realized that it's the Browser's responsibility to let the user select the cookie policy they want:

[https://www.kitguru.net/channel/generaltech/matthew- wilson/t...](https://www.kitguru.net/channel/generaltech/matthew-wilson/the- european-union-proposes-law-to-stop-browser-cookie-pop-ups/)

<comment><USER40> > or attempting fingerprinting as a third party iframe

That's essentially what a Facebook like button is

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Do facebook Like button really matter anymore? I mean my page has over 5000 likes but there's almost nil traffic on my blog through my page. I have removed like button from my website and nothing has been impacted

<comment><USER42> It matters for Facebook tracking users in exchange for the "opportunity" of increasing traffic. Of course most of this traffic only occurs if you pay for it.

<comment><USER43> Not to mention that from what I've seen most of the traffic you'll get from Facebook originates from click farms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> [http://panzi.github.io/SocialSharePrivacy/](http://panzi.github.io/SocialSharePrivacy/)

IMO, decent websites have been using something like that for a long time (the small subset of them that have like buttons, that is), so nothing will change for them.

<comment><USER45> Yep, I seen this on Bruce Schneier's blog[1] back in 2013.

[1] [https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/03/changes_to_th...](https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/03/changes_to_the.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The important crux of the problem is that the current model for _all_ "like"/"social" buttons is that simply including the link grossly violates your user's privacy.

Why should I have to surrender my privacy to read an article on your site? Why do you think that it's ok?

The _only_ time a your site should be sending tracking information to someone your user's have not explicitly stated they want _you_ specifically to share is when they have actually interact with the bottom. Not a mouse over, not a resource load, not an invisible overlay.

The use has to consciously opt to do that.

If you can't ensure that your site isn't abusing users/readers you need to gate _all_ your pages with a page stating that you will be providing other companies with tracking information that provides your browsing history. You should also list all of the companies you will be sending that data to.

If you don't want to do that because it will hurt "engagement" or "conversion" that's your problem.

Alternatively you could have a banner that says "you've used our site so we sent information about your browsing history to these companies, and there is no support for deleting that information. We recognize that you may not like that but we don't care about your privacy, and have no intention to preserve it"

<comment><USER47> That is an issue with the browser implementation, I think.

<comment><USER46> No. A browser is required to load resources whether or not they come from they come from the same domain (otherwise you break all sites using CDNs, multiple servers for load, etc)

The browsers (well Safari at least) actively work to break those things being used for tracking, but fundamentally (and the reason FB, etc require you to embed JS that loads their trackers) tracking companies treat user privacy systems as an adversary and continuously update to defeat it. Look at Google circumventing it in the past (and being hit with fines because of it). Nowadays they're simply more clever in not crossing legal lines.

<comment><USER47> That is a different problem, of requiring too many resources just to load a document.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Would this include ad-tech, like advertising cookies and other tracking stuff (specifically, not Facebook / google ones)?

<comment><USER49> Almost certainly.

Read paras. 71-81 in the judgment[0] - it sounds to me like 3rd-party adverting would be covered by the same logic.

[0] [http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...](http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=216555&pageIndex=0&doclang=EN&mode=req&dir=&occ=first&part=1&cid=5673263)

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> What bugs me, is most sites dealing with the issue throw up an "Accept" button with whatever blurb in place, but they're already including the metrics/etc scripts before accept happens.

I mean, I get it... but the whole point was to stop the behavior, not side step it.

</comment><comment><USER51> Can this verdict be extended to cover Google analytics and all other 3rd party tracking?

<comment><USER52> Sure, but that's already covered - you need to have a data processing contract with Google to use GA while being GDPR compliant. You'll have to do the same with Facebook for their buttons now, FB will provide an agreement and you sign it pro forma and that's it, I guess.

<comment><USER7> _you need to have a data processing contract with Google to use GA while being GDPR compliant_

That is true...unless you are not based in the EU and don't "envisage" (a term used in the GDPR) serving EU customers. Then you don't have to deal with any of this nonsense and are free to add whatever like buttons/analytics solutions you would like. A US site that doesn't offer translations in European languages, doesn't accept EU currencies, and doesn't use an EU domain extension, is not subject to GDPR - even if EU users can access it.

 _" Whereas the mere accessibility of the controller's, processor's or an intermediary's website in the Union, of an email address or of other contact details, or the use of a language generally used in the third country where the controller is established, is insufficient to ascertain such intention, factors such as the use of a language or a currency generally used in one or more Member States with the possibility of ordering goods and services in that other language, or the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union, may make it apparent that the controller envisages offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union."_

</comment></comment></comment><comment> VvR-Ox That's what I really like about the EU. At least sometimes it tries to serve it's people.

<comment><USER24> Agree, IMHO the EU government is the most concerned with citizen's/users' rights. As it must deal with the pressure from so many different member states, more often than not is acts only when it's actions can have positive effects on citizens and users, even if many times that is not fully perceived at national level

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This sounds like a great precedent.

A side project of mine, starting in the Junkbuster days, is fighting cross- site tracking/profiling, and almost every Web site does it at least a little. Legal precedents suggesting liability for that seems huge, and maybe end the technological arms race (which I think the privacy&security people will otherwise ultimately lose).

</comment><comment><USER54> > Bitkom, a German trade federation for online businesses criticised the > ruling, saying it would heap costly bureaucracy on firms without enhancing > consumer protection.

What cost is involved by not embedding third party bescons on your website?

How does it not improve consumer protections? It's literally stopping doing the thing that is causing harm.

> "With its decision, the ECJ places enormous responsibility on thousands of > website operators – from small travel blogs to online megastores and the > portals of large publishers," Bitkom CEA Bernard Rohleder said.

Yes, this is exactly how serious this situation is. I'm glad you're getting a handle on just how damn huge this problem really is. Aren't you glad we're finally doing something about it?

> He warned that the decision would go beyond Facebook and effect all social > media plug ins, which are important for many firms to expand their reach on > the web

Uh, yes, that's the the idea? Your firm's right to expand their reach does not overrule my right to privacy.

People can still share and like your links on the social platforms. It doesn't require me to be forced into it.

<comment><USER55> Bitkom criticizing it would be expected as it's a lobby group for "Neue Medien" and "Digital Transformation" and many of their members are AdTech and Analytics companies. [https://lobbyfacts.eu/representative/3d75bcd811c04ccfbfa6d0c...](https://lobbyfacts.eu/representative/3d75bcd811c04ccfbfa6d0cd61af1c39/bundesverband- informationswirtschaft-telekommunikation-und-neue-medien-e-v)

<comment><USER54> > it's a lobby group

With weak arguments like those it seems it's not a very good one..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> And Google Analytics tracking system?. I guess every site on earth has it!

<comment><USER57> Simpleanalytics is a nice alternative with a lot less tracking. It's still analytics, just a bit less invasive

<comment><USER58> Simpleanalytics is extremely expensive for what it does.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Good. The sooner the like button and all the other 'social media' plug ins disappear the better. It's trivial to host the button and the link on your own pages. That way only the actual likes get counted.

</comment><comment><USER60> For those that want to show official Share Counts on their Share Buttons while maintaining User Privacy, take a look at Shareaholic's Share Count Proxy -

[https://www.shareaholic.com/blog/social-share-count- api/](https://www.shareaholic.com/blog/social-share-count-api/)

Share Count queries to the Social Networks are proxied through this service securely and visitor privacy is protected... like an anonymous VPN.

<comment><USER61> I'm not sure a company that says "Imagine being able to capture, analyze, and re-target any person on any ad platform that clicks on any of your links on any marketing channel" is one that should be trusted with anyones privacy.

<comment><USER60> Shareaholic offers many different types of marketing tools. The product that you're referring to is the URL shortener, which is independent of the Share Count Proxy product -- [https://www.shareaholic.com/link- manager/retargeting](https://www.shareaholic.com/link-manager/retargeting)

This URL Shortener service is also GDPR compatible as retargeting pixels are not set for EU subjects regardless of what customers want to set. In the roadmap is to add an opt-in message on the redirect.

<comment><USER61> I get that you offer different types of tools, but my point is that trusting one company that markets tracking to anonymize the tracking of another company that markets tracking seems backwards regardless of if you say that this specific product actually does tracking or not.

<comment><USER60> Coming in cold, that's a very fair concern/comment. I generally believe that products can be privacy-first but still serve the needs of marketers while providing _consumer choice_. Consumer choice is the key in my opinion. Shareaholic tools do what the customer sets them to do, with opinionated safeguards to prevent customers from missteps with regards to GDPR and consumer choice. For example, Shareaholic is one of the very few that also respects DNT signals (even though DNT is now defunct).

Btw, Share Count Proxy is also whitelisted by Firefox which provides the added advantage of share counts actually showing on Firefox if you use the proxy while direct calls to Facebook.com, Pinterest, etc are blocked.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> The entire Cookie warning fiasco should never have been about cookies. That scared people from using cookies - even authentication related ones. It should have been about connecting your browser to unrelated domains owned by a third party. I mentioned this in a previous post, but when you're logged into your CVS pharmacy account I get tons of connections to Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER63> Everything that stops them from feeding my shadow profile to FB is welcome. I never gave my consent for that shit.

</comment><comment><USER55> what's really missing in all this GDPR and privacy discussion is a technical way to enforce it. If you have a large multinational company with 50 TLD's you might have several hundred (including all the subdomains) that are Internet facing.

For a company on that scale to remain compliant to things like cookie law (mention every cookie and what it does for opt-in) there is no easy way to see if you're compliant. We need some standard (like security.txt) which defines how cookie data, impressum or other site specific links are expected which has to be machine readable. Right now every company creates it's own mess of html which is no fun scraping to figure out if the company is compliant or not. (yet scraping is what everyone in compliance expects to happen).

I wonder how these laws can be enforced without creating a huge administrative backlog.

<comment><USER64> for this there's a e-privacy regulation in the works[1] but it already took a lot of time... GDPR only got as much support as it did because the snowden leaks happened shortly before the vote.

As I understand it, it will include things like Do-Not-Track and a better cookie banner legislation, which makes the banners less common.

Enforcement is trickier. Let's wait for a few more rulings and see if that's enough.

[1] [https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/proposal- epriv...](https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/proposal-eprivacy- regulation)

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> This is a great ruling, big win for privacy advocates and Europeans!

</comment><comment><USER66> a side effect of the ruling is that now facebook is NOT liable for that consent, and google is not liable for analytics / adsense. Will the EU start going after the little guys now?

<comment><USER49> You are wrong.

Facebook and FashionID are _joint_ data controllers, and FashionID aren't liable for additional processing that Facebook does with the data.

If consent is the legal basis upon which the processing is based then _both_ entities must have consent.

<comment><USER66> Since facebook does not interact with the user, fashionId is responsible for getting consent to send that data to facebook. It's how all the ad cookie prompts work.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> Tears of joy.

<comment><USER19> As the very structure of the Internet crumbles due to over regulation?

<comment><USER68> Maybe the internet was a bad idea. Maybe the whole neolithic revolution was a bad idea.

<comment><USER69> In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> And google analytics tracking system? I guess every site on earth has that.

<comment><USER52> That's already covered, FB is now treated more like GA in that you need to have a valid data processing agreement with FB if you're embedding their like buttons or you're not GDPR compliant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> GDPR needs to be sharpened to state that you can't even show a different service _at all_ based on consent relating to third party data sharing.

That is: "to give you this service we need to store some info" - OK.

"To give you this service we need to share info with advertisers" - not ok.

That is: you need to be able to provide the service using only non targeted ads if the user wants it.

</comment><comment><USER70> I think GDPR requires website owner to inform users what exactly is being processed and by who. The problem for website owners is that Facebook won't really tell what data they process and who will they share it with or they do not seem to allow to revoke consent.

</comment><comment><USER71> oh lordy

</comment><comment><USER19> The EU is out of control and is ruining the Internet.

<comment><USER72> The EU is the __only __actor that has taken a hard look at itself as to what it has let happen to people 's privacy and security online.

<comment><USER19> This is asinine. If you don't like websites including resources from a 3rd party you can block third-party connections, install a blocking extension. We don't need an authoritarian government to make these decisions for us.

Mark my words. This is going to have enumerable unintended consequences and the Internet will suffer for it. Fuck the EU.

<comment><USER47> I agree; if you do not want cookies then you can just disable it in the client, and if you do not want it to load third-party scripts or images, then you should disable that, and so on; the cookie warnings and all of that stuff is not helpful.

(Perhaps a better requirement would be to require the browser distributors to include warning labels about such features if they are done automatically.)

<comment><USER73> I don't see the reason why tracking and data collection should be opt-out.

If you do not like the idea that you own your data, not companies then you can give your consent to process data to everybody.

<comment><USER47> That is not quite what I meant. What I meant is independent of opt-in or opt- out, but is rather saying that such features in the browser should be and must be configurable, and that is separate from the issue of consent. (Maybe they should be disable third party cookies by default, or whatever, but it will work either way.)

What they will do with the data you give to them, is a separate issue than the web browser. The company you are dealing with still needs to have a proper policy for that, but that is different than the issue of the client configuration.

Requiring a warning message about cookies on the web page is not helpful, because that is the wrong place to put it; the browser can provide its own such warning, and the user can configure it. (Lynx provides the possibility to ask when a cookie is received.)

So, the actual problem is the browser providers designing them stupid, and making them such complicated that it is difficult to make up a new one which is actually good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> This is totally insane. Stop ruining the internet before it's too late, EU.

<comment><USER27> This is totally sane. I don't ever want my browser to contact Facebook and Twitter when I'm visiting unrelated websites. This was bullshit from day one. Please do continue!

edit: I hope that this will also hold for Google with reCAPTCHA and Analytics.

<comment><USER52> That part won't change, though. It's now just that the website owners need either your consent or legitimate interest as defined in GDPR + they need to have a data processing agreement with Facebook. It adds a formality, but it won't have a lasting impact.

<comment><USER27> Well, I hope that at least some websites will opt for using an image they host themselves instead of adding this formality. This has to hurt user experience, no?

On the other hand, I guess this is only one more checkbox to tick among the checkboxes we already have to tick.

<comment><USER52> A self-hosted image + link adds friction, so I don't think that a lot of the mainstream sites (that aren't privacy conscious and do it already) will do it. And, of course, many shops already use Facebook tracking pixels to target visitors that didn't buy anything, so they have very little interest in keep FB out.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> From the article:

> According to the European Court of Justice ruling, a site that embeds the > Facebook "like" icon and link on its pages also sends user data to the US > web giant.

This is categorically false. The site that embeds the like icon is sending absolutely nothing to Facebook. The user's browser is the one sending information. You have control over your browser. You can do something about it if you don't like it.

The EU's regulations infantilize the public and removes consumer choice.

<comment><USER75> How is it removing consumer choice to ask for their consent?

<comment><USER19> Many sites who just don't want to deal with the regulation will simply not offer anything from a 3rd party on their site. That is least risky approach and most businesses paying attention will do that.

<comment><USER75> Yeah, stupid business people abound. If those offers are really interesting to the users, those sites will be replaced by better run ones, who correctly calculate the risks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER76> EU shooting themselves in the foot with all these data rulings. Innovation will never happen there, US tech products will slowly suck the wealth out of European nations, much like China manufacturing sucked the wealth out of the us manufacturing sector.

<comment><USER77> Needing consent for sending data to Fb is only consequential and consistent with the law's goals. It's been good practice on decent German sites for a long time to present social media buttons as greyed-out icons to indicate tracking code by those third parties is only embedded on the linked page.

<comment><USER78> Interesting, I would have thought that one of the few UI conventions that is fairly universal is that buttons are greyed out if they are inactive. I'm certain that many people will never click a greyed out button for this reason.

<comment><USER77> Not quite greyed-out as in disabled. Not sure merely using a b/w logo without logotext will work out with today's flat designs and usage habits. I remember it being used when minimal design wasn't as common as today, and the icons would stand-out (or rather fade into the background).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Namecheap.com: We say no to SOPA - <AUTHOR> http://community.namecheap.com/blog/2011/12/22/we-say-no-to-sopa/ <comment><USER2> Totally independently of their SOPA stance, I would recommend Namecheap over GoDaddy. I've been using Namecheap for years; they are reliable and have a sane (if not terribly pretty) user interface.

<comment><USER3> I switched to Namecheap after I got bit in the ass by the RegisterFly fiasco. Namecheap has been great to me ever since. I highly recommend them, despite their spammy-sounding name.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I moved all my domains from GoDaddy to Namecheap a while ago. The experience was really smooth, and Namecheap's interface is a TON easier to work with.

Although I support the idea of switching domains from GoDaddy to protest their support of SOPA, I sort have to wonder why anyone technically oriented hasn't done so already. Is there ANYTHING to recommend them other than name recognition?

<comment><USER5> Historical reasons. I've had my domains with them for almost ten years. Ten years ago they were the geek registrar of choice.

<comment><USER6> Same here. I transfered all of my domains from Network Solutions to them about 10 years ago and have mostly been able to ignore them--I run my own name servers & hosting. More recently, I've been registering domains on namecheap, and this may provide the motivation to finally consolidate my names with a less offensive registrar.

<comment><USER5> I am planning to transfer my domains to nearlyfreespeech.net. The only thing stopping me is that I renewed them 30 days ago, and apparently you can't transfer a domain within 60 days of renewal for some reason.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> That's nice. But I prefer my registrar have freedom and anti-censorship be a core everyday value, like NearlyFreeSpeech, rather than something to embrace as a marketing opportunity.

Maybe that's unfair to Namecheap, but at any rate, all these issues with GoDaddy that people seem to suddenly care about just now are the reasons I have given NFS all my domain registration business for years now.

Just being anti-SOPA isn't good enough.

<comment><USER8> I like NFS, but apparently they have some caveats, such as you cannot set up a domain to use its' own nameservers (buy foo.com, setup nameservers as ns1.foo.com ns2.foo.com with dedicated IPs) without them charging you $50 (?) /hour in tech support... PER nameserver.

Sorry NFS, I'm moving away.

<comment><USER9> That's because they are a webhosting company, not a domain registrar. They offer domains at a cost-covering price as a service for their webhosting customers. Technically ns.phx1.nearlyfreespeech.net works just as well as ns1.yourdomain.example, but the latter one requires manual work (adding glue records) because their control panel does not support it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Note that while Namecheap doesn't support SOPA, they clearly do support some form of new IP legislation: "not in favor of SOPA as it has been proposed", "... only a surgical strike is necessary." Whatever comes after SOPA/PROTECT IP - assuming they're defeated - Namecheap may well endorse.

<comment><USER11> Most sane people support sane IP legislation. It's perfectly reasonable for IP holders to want to have legal recourse against the bad guys. There are lots of people making a lot of money selling a lot of illegal merchandise online.

What people protest about SOPA is that it gives tools to companies (with a history of abusing the recourses granted to them by law) that are akin to a wrecking ball intended to be used as a flyswatter. Sure, you'll get the fly, but you're going to take out three walls, a couple of load-bearing columns, and an unfortunate cat in the process.

<comment><USER12> _> Most sane people support sane IP legislation._

Sane IP legislation is no IP legislation. I don't know why we are still clinging to the ridiculous concept of being able to own abstract concepts. The true insanity is IP in the first place.

<comment><USER4> I support, _in principle_ , the concept of IP, and the right of IP holders to enforce their rights, and I hope everyone else on Hacker News does too.

The big questions aren't "should IP even exist as a concept", but instead "how limited IP should be", "what rights IP ownership should give", and "what avenues are available to enforce those rights".

Don't forget, "IP protection" is a really broad concept, and it's more than just patent trolls and DMCA takedowns issued by corporations on content they don't even control: It also includes, for example, the ability to release code under your open source license of choice and then see it enforced through the courts.

<comment><USER13> Many people, myself included, are against the very principle of IP for good reasons: <http://www.stephankinsella.com/ip/>

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> When I was growing up and learning about DNS, HTTP, protocols, and packets I really wanted to get my own domain, but being under 18, I had no easy way to pay a registar without a credit card.

Namecheap was one of the first registrars to accept Paypal, and this helped me get started when I was first developing my passion for web development.

I've been using them for years and plan to continue using them for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER15> Does namecheap have free DNS? I have 25 domains on godaddy and thinking about moving them, but I will need to be able to manage nameservers through whoever I switch to since right now thats all done through godaddy.

Also, whats the cost of transfering?

<comment><USER16> $6.99 using the SOPASucks code. <http://i.imgur.com/MDSHl.jpg>

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've been a very happy Namecheap customer for years, and I have steered everyone I know looking for a registrar to them. I moved from EasyDNS and never regretted it. Now, I'm glad to see they are politically enlightened.

</comment><comment><USER18> maybe I have this wrong, but it sounds like they heard the rabble rousing and made a well timed good marketing move. No surprise. But it does make me sad when a political stance is a marketing move.

<comment><USER11> I have no problem with it if their political stance actually lines up with the marketing move. If folks are mad that your competitor likes to kick puppies, it's totally fair game to say "Hey, we provide the same thing, and you don't have to finance puppy-kicking if you use us."

<comment><USER18> I hope you are right, and the order of things is as you say. If not we are trading one evil for another.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Just adding a shout for Hover. They've been opposing SOPA for a while now:

<https://www.hover.com/blog/hover-opposes-sopa>

</comment><comment><USER20> Here's a step-by-step guide on how to transfer domains from Godaddy to Namecheap:

[http://blog.jeffepstein.me/post/14629857835/a-step-by- step-g...](http://blog.jeffepstein.me/post/14629857835/a-step-by-step-guide- to-transfer-domains-out-of-godaddy)

PS> I didn't write the guide. I am not affiliated to Namecheap. I just found it useful.

</comment><comment><USER21> Namecheap.com: We say no to SOPA but only accept Visa and Mastercard, both of whom support SOPA.

<comment><USER22> They also gladly accept PayPal, to be fair.

<comment><USER23> And PayPal accepts Visa/MC - how far does the contagion spread?

<comment><USER24> I think Discover and American Express are not on the list.

There's not much after that except for BitCoins.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm glad I started using Namecheap instead of Godaddy. I was inexperienced about registrars at that time...it was Russian Roulette choosing the right registrar. Thank goodness Namecheap's interface wooed me over GoDaddy's. I beat the bullet.

</comment><comment><USER26> Just moved my two domains over to Namecheap from Godaddy. I then went and purchase a third domain directly from Namecheap that I want to use for a side project. Not a crazy amount of money by any means but ever little bit counts.

</comment><comment><USER27> Namecheap was the most referenced domain registrar when I was planning on moving away from GoDaddy. They really have their act together and I've been happy with them ever since. Way to go on your SOPA stance.

</comment><comment><USER28> If anyone here works at NameCheap, can I catch a break somehow if I try to transfer all of my domains over? I've got 20+ and hate spending extra money if they aren't up for renewal anytime soon.

<comment><USER29> A manager from Namecheap said that there's a deal when you transfer 50+ domains. You might be able to work something out with them for 20+, but the manager didn't respond to a request for a 43 domain transfer, so it seems unlikely.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/nmnie/godaddy_supp...](http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/nmnie/godaddy_supports_sopa_im_transferring_51_domains/c3aaeji)

<comment><USER30> Someone could ask Namecheap to allow people to "bundle" a transfer to hit their discount levels. Enable customers to get together and transfer all their domains from a single registrar like GoDaddy all on the same day. Customer Foo has 43 domains, customer Bar has 7 domains, they both transfer all of these domains on the same day and both key in a bundle code. They both show up in the same transfer bundle, so both get the 50 domain discount.

The bundle code could be an extension of the discount code, like Foo would enter BYEBYEGD:Email-addy-of-Bar while Bar enters BYEBYEGD:Email-addy-of-Foo. That type of structure would limit the bundling to two customers coordinating with each other (so Namecheap doesn't lose out on handing out too many discounts). Other structurings of bundles are possible, of course, depending upon Namecheap's internal sales and marketing goals.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Now there is a perfect marketing opportunity seized by Namecheap. Reminds me of when LaLa was acquired and Pandora offered a month free of Pandora One to "LaLa refugees."

</comment><comment><USER32> Happy to say I've been using namecheap for a little while now. Never had a problem with them.

</comment><comment><USER33> Unfortunately you do not have DNSSEC or IPv6 glue record support though.

</comment><comment><USER34> Do any non godaddy registrars offer bulk discounts?

<comment><USER35> Ask!

Many do not advertise it but will do a bulk discount if you ask. I'm pretty certain Namecheap is one of them (if you have more than 50 I think).

<comment><USER36> Contacted a help person @namecheap. when I asked for 50+ domains, was told, there is no bulk discount other than the current SOPASuck type deal. The current SOPASucks is limited to 10 domains.

I _Wish_ there was a bulk discount. Pity namecheap couldn't come up with tiered bulk domain transferring pricing.

<comment><USER34> yeah with almost 100 domains, I'd love to move them all at once and save some coin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> namecheap isnt saying "no" to SOPA; they are saying "yes" to all the transfers from godaddy.

P.S. I <3 namcheap

</comment><comment><USER38> Quote "Let us be clear: Namecheap is not in favor of SOPA as it has been proposed."

Yes that's very clear, the agree is some kind of SOPA...</comment>


Google Search for Android can now show results from inside third-party apps - <AUTHOR> http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/12/04/google-search-android-gets-app-listings-letting-find-information-apps-device-google-play/ <comment><USER2> This integration is definitely needed. Very like the Everything.me app though.</comment>


Card management API - <AUTHOR> https://stripe.com/blog/multiple-cards?

<comment><USER2> I swear that Stripe is monitoring my private repo. It's like they know exactly what kind of hacky workaround I just implemented on my project and wrote something to support it in an elegant way.

First ACH, and now this. Nice work, again, Stripe.

</comment><comment><USER3> Go Stripe! Now if you could just start support USD payments for UK merchants (without a US bank account) you'd make me really super happy. Integrating Stripe is a pleasure and if I never have to deal with PayPal ever again that would be nice :)

<comment><USER4> We're going to add support for this.

<comment><USER5> That's awesome to hear! I have had to fall back to PayPal for our new US store. Loving the Stripe UK beta!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This is right on time. Currently working on a site that makes use of multiple cards per customer. Great job, once again, Stripe!

</comment><comment><USER7> Wow. This definitely changes things a lot. Businesses can now store credit cards safely without ever having to worry about PCI compliance. That saves a lot of time and money!

</comment><comment><USER8> This brings a lot more clarity to the API update a few days ago. The API update was a bit more cryptic being only a short description of the change.

</comment><comment><USER9> By far our most desired feature right now is to allow a single customer to have more than one subscription. It's crazy what we go through right now to allow people to have two or more recurring products on the same account. :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep, we're working on this as well! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It sounds like the single default_card is used for recurring payments, and other saved cards are used for one-offs. No separate card subscriptions yet. Is that right?

<comment><USER11> You can use your default card for once-off charges as well (just don't specify a card ID when making a charge with a customer).

You're right that you can't use a separate card for subscriptions yet -- we just use the customer's default card. We'd love to hear your feedback on this though (feel free to ping me at email@example.com)!

<comment><USER12> It'd be handy to let a customer have multiple subscriptions, and to have those subscriptions be associated with one of the customer's cards.

Currently that has to be abstracted away on client-side databases and we end up having multiple 'Stripe customers' associated with a single client, so it fudges our customer count in the Stripe management interface.

<comment><USER11> Makes sense.

What would the ideal behavior be if your customer updates their default card? Should the recurring billing continue chugging along with the card it was created with, or use the new card instead?

<comment><USER13> I would expect to be able to list subscriptions and list what card is associated with each. I would show an "Update Card" button next to each subscription. That button would prompt the user to either choose from a list of stored cards or add a new one.

The concept of a "default" card would come up when creating a new subscription or charge, and would be presented as the default selected payment option. The user would be able to select another card or add a new one.

I'm thinking of something similar to Amazon's checkout credit card selection screen.

<comment><USER12> Newegg and other websites keep a history of cards you've used, so this new 'multiple cards' feature brings Stripe closer to feature parity with most closed systems. It's really impressive that Stripe offers these features openly to the world.

Most major websites that have check-outs operate similarly to how you describe, but there's no 'default' card presented at check-out -- instead it displays the last card used for the last purchase.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> YES!!!!</comment>


Xkcd-Style Plots in Matplotlib (2012) - <AUTHOR> https://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2012/10/07/xkcd-style-plots-in-matplotlib/ <comment><USER2> From a usability perspective, "sketchy" or "cartoony" charts actually serve a purpose. To me, they communicate "the trend is important here, not the precise numbers". This can _more acurately_ convey communication intent as opposed to a precise rendered graph.

<comment><USER3> I think I agree on the core idea, but if you extrapolate this into font selection, for example, you would rather pick Comic Sans for more "strategic" and abstract projects? ;)

<comment><USER4> (Clearly you're joking) but this isn't an extrapolation. Lines that make up characters in a font don't have any semantic meaning related to the words. Lines in a graph do have semantic meaning related to the data they represent.

[edit] maybe you could make this argument for a language like Chinese. At least for characters with semantically meaningful radicals.

<comment><USER5> > _Lines that make up characters in a font don 't have any semantic meaning > related to the words._

Err, actually they do. If not the line itself, the font's overall design does. A font can look casual, another official, fun, etc.

In fact this very post uses the "Humor Sans" font for the graphs for exactly this very reason. To make labels appear more casual.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Jake is a great teacher - I would definitely recommend his book to people new to Python for data science, as well as any talk by him that you can find on youtube.

Also, it's kind of a shame that matplotlib is still so deeply ingrained in the Python data ecosystem.

<comment><USER7> Why a shame? Is there something better it's crowding out?

<comment><USER8> Assuming all you want to do is make some graphs, almost every alternative is better. Matplotlib is like the opengl of plotting libraries, there's almost no abstraction, you have to create plots in an imperative way and it's extremely verbose.

A plotting library focused on useability should let you specify what you want in a declarative manner, then get out of your way. Ggplot2 being the prime example.

<comment><USER9> Do you have any concrete examples for Python? As far as I know, ggplot2 is only for R. I would be interested to try out some alternatives to Matplotlib.

<comment><USER8> Altair (based on vega-lite) is a personal favorite. Plotnine is also a good port of ggplot.

<comment><USER9> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Am I the only one who kind of hates the "notebook" format?

Don't get me wrong, the general concept is great. Shareable, interactive code snippets are awesome. But for a demo article like this I want a single python file that I can run and immediately see the results. I don't want to have to spin up a jupyter or pylab instance (I've never used pylab so not sure if it works the same EDIT: pylab is analogous to matplotlib, not jupyter. lesson learned). I just want to run the damn code.

On a bit of a tangent here but I also hate the way Jupyter makes git diffs absolutely unusable.

Now, the above being said, the fact that sites like Github have native Jupyter functionality is awesome. It'd be a lot less painful if they'd (the author) have linked to a repo that we (I) could run.

\--

For example, first I copied the initial code snippet that defines the xkcdify function. Then I ran it with python3, and realized it needed python 2 due to the urllib2 dependency (this is not a big deal since the article is from 2012). Then I ran it again with python2, and realized I don't have numpy/scipy etc installed for python2, so I pip installed those. Then I copied in the following code snippet that generates the plot. I then ran it again, and it still didn't work. Finally after a brief google search, I realized I needed to put pylab.show() at the end since I didn't have the %pylab inline or whatever that command is since I'm running it with "pure python".

Honestly, it really wasn't _that_ much effort, but I vastly would prefer to have a demo like this given as a single python file, with the dependencies clearly specified in the blog post.

<comment><USER11> You're not the only one. Here are slides from a talk that Joel Grus gave at JupyterCon 2018 titled "I hate Jupyter Notebooks":

[https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1n2RlMdmv1p25Xy5thJUh...](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1n2RlMdmv1p25Xy5thJUhkKGvjtV- dkAIsUXP-AL4ffI)

Video of talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jiPeIFXb6U)

<comment><USER10> Wow, thanks so much. Great talk. I felt like I was going crazy trying to get these stupid notebooks to work with their weird out-of-order execution glitches

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I've always had a problem designing diagrams in Visio. (I work in IT so think high level network diagrams, flowcharts describing state/processes, that sort of thing.)

Last year I found the template that makes everything look hand-drawn. It changed the way my brain saw the diagram, going from "this thing must be absolutely pixel perfect" to "this is something I literally sketched on the back of a napkin".

This allowed my brain to _create_ the thing, without worrying about whether everything was lined up just so. Then, at the end, I can choose to flip the theme back to straight edges, and line everything up if I choose.

Actually, many times I just left it as it was. Others seemed to like the hand- drawn look, which came as a surprise.

</comment><comment><USER13> Interesting. Is something like this available in R?

In a same vain: when producing content using latex ( in the eighties ) I had a problem that papers under construction looked way to good ( lie as if was printed) ; in order to counter the good looks of the printed paper I choose to use a typewriter like blurred ink dropped font to ensure that what was printed was a draft and still under construction; producing graphs that show intent but not precision is very useful.

<comment><USER6> [https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/xkcd/vignettes/xkcd-...](https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/xkcd/vignettes/xkcd- intro.pdf)

<comment><USER13> Thank you very much! I will look into this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Is there a bootstrap or css theme to go along, so my PoC web-app can match the style of my proof of concept graphs?

<comment><USER15> There is [https://roughjs.com/](https://roughjs.com/) \- but the style is different and it's for drawing SVG.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> (2012), infuential but archaic.

Now it is built-in matplotlib: [https://matplotlib.org/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.xkcd.ht...](https://matplotlib.org/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.xkcd.html)

</comment><comment><USER17> yUML.me is awesome for hand-drawn DB schemas or to show a website's graph of interlinked pages:

[https://yuml.me/diagram/scruffy/class/draw](https://yuml.me/diagram/scruffy/class/draw)

</comment><comment><USER18> it would be cool if Randall stopped drawing plots by hand and just started using this ;)

<comment><USER3> I would not be surprised if he does exactly that already ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> Follow up in 2013. XKCD officially merged in Matplotlib.

[http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2013/07/10/XKCD-plots-in- matpl...](http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2013/07/10/XKCD-plots-in-matplotlib/)

</comment><comment><USER20> it should be noted that the code to do this is actually part of matplotlib now. The author comments about it here [http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2013/07/10/XKCD-plots-in- matpl...](http://jakevdp.github.io/blog/2013/07/10/XKCD-plots-in-matplotlib/) and refers to the code in the post here as "my ugly little hack."

</comment><comment><USER21> Needs 2013 tag. Still fun tho.

<comment><USER22> In the intervening years there've also been some nice posts about this. In particular I agree with one that argued that using this style in professional setting is indeed a good idea, to emphasize that what you're presenting are hand-waved assumptions.</comment></comment>


Another example of why chaos on Android is good - <AUTHOR> http://scobleizer.com/2010/10/25/first-look-at-aro-another-example-of-why-chaos-on-android-is-good/ <comment><USER2> Interesting, but the meat seems to be buried in a 46-minute video. Not worth it for me.</comment>


Ask HN: Where is the source file for the Paredit Cheatsheet? - <AUTHOR>

I'm learning to program Clojure and Emacs Lisp, and mastering the ParEdit minor mode for Emacs goes with the territory.
There's a nice cheat sheet for ParEdit, which is easily found with a search for "paredit cheatsheet". However, it's downloadable only as a relatively low-resolution PNG file. To counter eye strain, I've been using "zoom in" while viewing it on my laptop, but the fonts look jagged as a result and I find that distracting.
Does anyone in the HN community have the source file or know where it can be located?
I'd like to generate a high resolution PDF which will look nice in full-screen mode on my laptop, and then make the source and PDF publicly accessible via GitHub. <comment><AUTHOR> Absent the source document, I tried blowing up the PNG with Photoshop, using settings suited to enlarging a text-heavy graphic. I then saved it as a PDF:

[https://raw.github.com/michaelsbradleyjr/prelude/master/pers...](https://raw.github.com/michaelsbradleyjr/prelude/master/personal/cheatsheets/PareditCheatsheet- letter.pdf)

It looks okay, certainly better than a zoom-in on the PNG file.

Another option would be to recreate the cheatsheet with Libre Office, or InDesign, LaTex, etc. However, that would take more time and I'm hoping someone has or has access to the source file and can share it.

</comment><comment><USER2> No idea sorry... the user who uploaded it to emacswiki didn't leave any contact details. And it's not part of the paredit source repo: <http://mumble.net/~campbell/emacs/paredit/>

:-(</comment>


Telephony honeypot received 1.5M robocalls across 11 months - <AUTHOR> https://www.zdnet.com/article/a-simple-telephony-honeypot-received-1-5-million-robocalls-across-11-months/ <comment><USER2> The article says:

"NCSU researchers said they ran 66,606 telephone lines between March 2019 and January 2020, during which time they said to have received 1,481,201 unsolicited calls -- even if they never made their phone numbers public via any source. "

I wonder where they got 66,606 virgin numbers? Otherwise, previous owners of the numbers have likely spread them, negating the meaning of the researchers not spreading them.</comment>


Crypto currencies and blockchain are broken because they lack utility - <AUTHOR> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18493519
I've been struggling to put this in to words for a while now. The above thread on crypto currencies tanking has me bothered and has driven me to try and express myself.
Crypto-tokens are useless without utility. Because there is no value (not even fiat acceptance) intrinsic to any coin, they are useless without a utility function.
Some blockchain models have tried to solve this (lack of utility) with smart contracts. Smart contracts are also broken, though, for distributed trust systems. Sure, they might work on chain, but when someone needs to author a real-estate deal there is some trusting that happens off-chain. And when trust (the entire point of the blockchain) occurs off-chain there is no guarantee that what you expect to happen has actually happened (did they sell the property, is it in the condition described, etc.).
So, the only utility (smart contracts) for distributed trust systems can't be trusted when it comes to real applications.
The only other way any fiat currency gains utility is mass acceptance (which all crypto currencies lack). If I can't buy a cup of coffee with it, why would I accept XYZ coin as payment for anything.
So, I argue for utility. If any currency/blockchain technology is going to be successful it needs to be useful for something. In short: can I buy stuff I want with it?
My question is: how can the ideas of crypto currency and blockchain be leveraged in a way that is actually useful on a mass market scale? (ie, how do we bring utility to an idea that has been fluff - 'mining', really?! - so far?) <comment><USER2> Why cant an 'auditable chain of custody' be the only/primary utility?

I have heard people say that blockchain is the wrong tech for voting, as an example, well - OK - so, what then, is the 'correct' tech implementation for vote tracking?

Cant you have blockchain based code control even in an open source system to ensure no nefarious business goes on - based on how others have exclaimed they dont trust code for e-voting platforms... why cant this work.

So, ___what_ __is the right tool to tackle such problems, and if we dont have a right-tool, then why do we not have a working group sanctioned and funded by the DARPAs of the world to solve things like this?

<comment><USER3> In most countries internet access is a total monopoly and so unreliable that the service blows out during a championship sports game let alone the entire country using it at once to vote. Meanwhile we have managed to avoid election disputes leading to riots and burning down parliament for 150 years using a simple volunteer run hand counting method with independent observers. I wouldn't be so quick to throw out a century of success for unproven technology from 2008. Maybe if one day we have guaranteed p2p connections avoiding the high priced access control by just 1 or 2 telecom monopolies, and weak standards/protocols that aren't being hacked on a regular basis like LTE.

<comment><USER2> > __ _Meanwhile we have managed to avoid election disputes leading to riots > and burning down parliament for 150 years using a simple volunteer run hand > counting method._ __

The words 'Accurate, Accountable, Auditable' do not occur in this sentence.

<comment><USER3> Vote selling also doesn't occur in that sentence. There's a reason we don't tear off a hash from a ballot right now to be given to voters, enabling them to verify later their hand counted ballot wasn't discarded or used to vote for somebody else, because it enables vote selling since now you have proof you voted for a candidate. Foreign superpowers could even automate this with a smart contract. Upload a signed txn proving you voted how they want you to and collect your $100 worth of coins. SuperPACs with hundreds of millions of advertising dollars would cancel ads and buy your vote.

<comment><USER4> Zero knowledge proofs can solve this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> We fixed this: [http://Mattereum.com/LP](http://Mattereum.com/LP) and it'll be up on an alpha basis in the next couple of months.

Basically we are where SSL was before we got Certificate Authorities to bind the crypto keys to real world legal entities. Without that commercial infrastructure to absorb risk and connect the two domains, nothing can move across domains - which is where the real value can be generated.

I project managed the Ethereum launch, I've been around the crypto world for 20 years, and we've been working in this for quite a while. Read the paper. Give us a look.

<comment><AUTHOR> So I looked. It sounds nice. You have nice partners. But I don't see source or anything like that.

Suppose I wanted to dabble or contribute, how would I go about that?

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> The value is too volatile in most crypto schemes to enable anything like remittance or other consumer level transactions. You need either a stablecoin scheme, which introduces a centralized authority (and in that case, you've reinvented paypal and people will just use paypal) or some reliable method where your coins can be sold immediately at a guaranteed price otherwise if you want to send $50 to your cousin in the developing world by the time you've wasted time going through all the hassle of doing so they're now worth $25.

For your off chain problems Egor Homakov's Failsafe Network (now called Fairlayer) addresses that problem [https://github.com/fairlayer/wiki](https://github.com/fairlayer/wiki)

For your request of being able to just pay with your phone anywhere you go, with an easy to use interface that registers payments immediately, Moxie's mobilecoin project may be the answer if it's ever realized [https://www.mobilecoin.com/](https://www.mobilecoin.com/)

Basically you just need to wait for this to mature, and for the majority of speculators to get run out when it all collapses. It would be nice to have reliable exchanges as well instead of every few weeks discovering another scandal of price fixing or stolen coins.

<comment><USER6> People have been already doing remittance for the last five years with cryptocurrency. It isn't too tricky to understand that someone can set up a small office in both countries, take in one currency, send cryptocurrency they already have, buy more with that currency and have the other office sell some cryptocurrency when they receive it from the first office.

This is something that does not depend on low volatility and can be done on a small scale while bypassing a large expensive service like western union.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> un-censorable money is not utility enough ? how about a fixed cap and deflationary nature that makes it a better store of value. Can you find any other asset class that has performed better in the last 5 years ?

</comment><comment><USER8> This article is almost a year old, but it explains why using a utility token will put most companies at a strong competitive disadvantage.

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/tromero/2018/01/09/why-your- ico...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/tromero/2018/01/09/why-your-ico- investment-is-going-to-zero/#d52f0053922b)

It's not a feature. It's a bug.

</comment><comment><USER9> Thanksgiving is coming, black Friday and Cyber Monday. 2 things are happening:

\- 1. people are cashing out any gains and closing things out this year prior to filling taxes.

\- 2. people are getting more fiat to spend this week and get some good deals.

You can't tied the monetary value of crypto and its utility all together. These are 2 separate things. Just wait for the end of the holidays and you'll see Wall St will jump on crypto since they've been waiting for a big discount to get on board. As far as utility goes, tones of very talented people are working heads down on crypto as we speak. They don't get bothered by charts.

<comment><USER10> Am I reading reddit? There was no reference in OP's post to the current prices.

<comment><USER9> My bad I jumped the gun too soon. Sorry for that poor comment of mine :/

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Blockchain could make easier to implement the vision of complementary curencies from [https://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0712683992/transac...](https://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0712683992/transactionne-21/) Bernard Latier is prophetic in "The Future of Money: Creating New Wealth, Work and a Wiser World". Aloso, Blockchain could enable some sorts of decentealised UBIs. Unfortunately the first wave was too libertarian in its culture and not focused on doing really good things for the world. Too much greed, fear and short sighted decisions. But this wave proved that the monopoly on money is an acident and not a necesity. This could be very huge. When many people start believing it just becomes reality..</comment>


Internet Porn Has Officially Killed HBO's Adult-Entertainment Business - <AUTHOR> https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2018/08/hbo-adult-content-removed <comment><USER2> So, instead of soft-core porn, they have . . . Game of Thrones?</comment>


The Problem with Scientific Credit - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/66/clockwork/the-problem-with-scientific-credit <comment><USER2> For those interested in more, there was a Discover magazine article on this topic ("How Bad Luck and Bad Networking Cost Douglas Prasher a Nobel Prize") in 2011, covered in HN at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8640177](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8640177) .

Pasher made it to the Nobel Prize ceremony as a guest of Chalfie and Tsien "who not only invited the Prashers but paid for their airfare and hotel."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Prasher) adds "Chalfie and Tsien were awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for work that they publicly acknowledged was substantially based on the work of Douglas Prasher, and through their efforts and those of others, Douglas Prasher returned to scientific research work in June 2010. ... working for Streamline Automation in Huntsville until December 2011, and then from 2012 to 2015 in Tsien's lab at the University of California in San Diego."

</comment><comment><USER3> I have a big problem with the conclusion of this article:

They start off and continue with correct observations of failures of the creditation system,... only to end up concluding with a moralizing of the inidividual.

A systemic problem needs a systemic solution.

What should this Prasher have done when his grant was refused? Put a gun to the heads of the reviewers? What should the other pilot besides Lubitz have done? Rammed the door a little harder?

It's also totally disingenious to compare with and portray Darlene Love's story as one of "all's well that ends well", how different would her life (and her relatives, and perhaps the black community) have been if she had been credited appropriately from the start?

There should be some kind of "told you so" factor resulting in feedback to grant approvers...

We should experiment more with different credit metrics.

We should have some kind of priority blinded timestamp service, so people can comfortably collaborate without paranoia (whenever you have an insight, however vague or unsure you are, first get it timestamped, then communicate the idea with your colleagues, even if most of those ideas end up nowhere in practice), ...

The system should be such that it recognizes its own mistakes and compensates for it, it should actively try and identify inappropriate accreditations, rejections and try and contact the rejects, make crystal clear that the system acknowledges its mistake, and offer to reintegrate the individual... this is a breach of trust from the perspective of the individual after all!

</comment><comment><USER4> I have such mixed feelings about this piece. On the one hand, I'm extremely grateful for it drawing attention to these types of problems with credit. On the other, I feel like it vastly underestimates the scope of the problem.

For one, it seems to assume the algorithm involved is somehow inferentially perfect, which is curious. A lot of this literature is circular, in that it assumes credit from citation patterns, which are flawed, which then taints the whole thing. For another thing, it seems to assume researchers aren't manipulating the perceptual processes being referenced in the article, which is obviously isn't true (that is, that they're not engaging in dishonest hijacking of the credit system).

</comment><comment><USER5> Is a sort of global attack against science. Other example: the CSIC, The biggest research organism in Spain, lost more than 1800 employees between 2011 and 2017. Even worse, a lot of the new hires where for bureaucrats. So it seems that a lot of people are quitting research aiming for a simpler and better life.

</comment><comment><USER6> WOW. Such a sad story about what happened with Prasher.

<comment><USER7> You might not want to look up Hugh Everett III.</comment></comment>


Apple may allow Spotify to set as Default Music App - <AUTHOR> https://9to5mac.com/2020/02/20/bloomberg-apple-discussing-allowing-iphone-users-to-set-third-party-web-browsers-and-email-apps-as-defaults-native-spotify-on-homepod/ <comment><USER2> It really is some validation when your competitor has to grudgingly allow you to exist because your users (to both you and them) want you so much that it would disserve them to screw you.

It means that you're that much good. Some folks at Spotify must be unbearably proud today.

<comment><USER3> I feel like this is ultimately not the motivating factor and that anti-trust is more-so the reason. Apple wants to keep regulators just happy enough.

"Apple Music now has more paid subscribers in the United States than Spotify, according to a new report by Reuters. A "person familiar with the matter" told Reuters that Apple now has 28 million paid subscribers, while Spotify has 26 million. However, thanks to Spotify's free tier, the Swedish streaming company reportedly still holds more overall users than Apple Music in the U.S."

[https://pitchfork.com/news/apple-music-now-has-more-paid- us-...](https://pitchfork.com/news/apple-music-now-has-more-paid-us- subscribers-than-spotify-report/)

<comment><USER4> Those numbers seem way off. Spotify now has 37 Million paying/Premium subscribers in North America according to their Q4 2019 filings. They are crushing Apple Music by a good margin.

[https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-02-05/spotify-reports- four...](https://newsroom.spotify.com/2020-02-05/spotify-reports-fourth- quarter-and-full-year-2019-earnings/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now if people would show a bit of support for Google Music I would be a happy fellow. I know it's unlikely to happen, but it's really hard to avoid the fact the Google Music comes with ad-free Youtube Premium for free. Definitely a USP that none of the other music providers have.

</comment><comment><USER6> Thank god. I've honestly considered ditching my iPhone just so I can have voice control to Spotify in the car like I have at home with my google home.</comment>


ForwardTacotron – Generating speech without attention - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/as-ideas/ForwardTacotron <comment><AUTHOR> We've just open-sourced our first text-to-speech project! It's also our first public PyTorch project. Inspired by Microsoft's FastSpeech, we modified Tacotron (Fork from fatchord's WaveRNN) to generate speech in a single forward pass without using any attention. Hence, we call the model ⏩ ForwardTacotron.

The model has several advantages:

* Robustness: No repeats and failed attention modes for complex sentences

* Speed: Generating a spectrogram takes about 0.04s on a RTX2080

* Controllability: You can control the speed of the speech synthesis

* Efficiency: No usage of attention so memory size grows linearly with text size

We also provide a Colab notebook to try out our pre-trained model trained 100k steps on LJSpeech and also some Samples. Check it out!

* Github: [https://github.com/as-ideas/ForwardTacotron](https://github.com/as-ideas/ForwardTacotron)

* Samples: [https://as-ideas.github.io/ForwardTacotron/](https://as-ideas.github.io/ForwardTacotron/)

* Colab notebook: [https://colab.research.google.com/github/as-ideas/ForwardTac...](https://colab.research.google.com/github/as-ideas/ForwardTacotron/blob/master/notebooks/synthesize.ipynb)</comment>


Ask HN: College vs. Industry candidates – do you interview them differently? - <AUTHOR> I'm going to do some college campus interviews soon, and it's been about ten years, so I was wondering what distinctions people make in their interview techniques when talking to potential college hires vs. people with industry experience.  (Extra credit:  What's your favorite college hire interview question, either given or received?) <comment><USER2> With college students I assume they are going to be nervous so plan on working around it. i.e. giving them more time, telling them to calm down and relax. reassuring them they are ok, etc

College students experience is often limited by what was given them by their professors. As such I do not expect a good answer for 'How do you refine requirements'.

From college students I look for raw skill that I can shape, not skills already shaped.

For an experienced developer I am worried they are set in their ways. 'Well I have always programmed in Cobol ... and you know there is a Cobol.Net' Sorry I do not care, I need you to use what we are using. College students do not have that problem, they expect to learn new stuff.

For both I always ask general IT type topics that I think they should already know. If I can I look at the college students courses they took and their grades. Choose one I am familiar with and ask an advanced question: Oh I see you have taken Programming Languages. Was that the study of different programming languages or did you build a compiler? Follow up if different languages - what languages did you cover? Which was your favorite and why? So what is the difference between functional programming and .... Or follow up with Build a Compiler (usually a simple one) - so explain the major components, how did you address the issue of grammer was it BNF or CDL etc, please explain that.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've conducted many interviews hiring for a growing tech company pulling from a large pool of new hires (4 major universities) as well as a metro with software pedigree.

With younger developers (or fresh grads) its about their propensity to learn rather than anything they've learned to do before, chances of a fresh grad having previously worked on something that would move the needle in 3 months are slim.

Reviewing their profile: prior internships and/or limited work experience offer are openers for how they might operate in a workplace, how they crack open problems and how well they handle the 'I don't know how to do this scenarios' (of which there will be many).

I refuse to whiteboard, so for the technical aspect, probe the keywords mentioned in order to ascertain what they were really accountable for and what is simply fluff, paying close attention to how they articulate their work and its impact at the company.

The rewards of a well-mentored junior developer are tremendous, though very time consuming at the onset, so make sure whomever you pick is a good fit that you'll be happy to work with.

<comment><USER4> > I refuse to whiteboard

Why is that? How you communicate is really very important. If the discussion warrants it, I offer the whiteboard to people if it helps them explain something or if I'm having trouble following. Is there a downside to this, or do you mean it as short-hand for some other interview practice?

<comment><USER5> I think they are probably referring to "whiteboarding" in the sense of asking somebody to implement a heap sort algorithm on a whiteboard using psuedocode or something along those lines.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Straight forward Kindle Fire battery status viewer - <AUTHOR>

When I got my KF, it was a surprise to me the many taps to get to the battery level screen, so I put together a little battery status app.
It's free and I hope this helps somebody out there. Install by pointing your KF browser to the Download page.
https://github.com/seymores/Fire-Status <comment><AUTHOR> Link: <https://github.com/seymores/Fire-Status></comment>


Ethics in Online Advertising - <AUTHOR> http://powazek.com/posts/1451 <comment><USER2> I am not sure if advertising can be ethical.

Most advertising aims to mislead or manipulate people. Even the unobtrusive ads besides google searches are nothing more than less relevant search results forced on the user.

Advertising is even hard to justify in economics theory, where consumers are usually considered as satisfied when there preferences are met. What's the point for the economy as a whole to mess with people's preferences?</comment>


Complete Guide to Know the Stem Cell Characteristics That Determine Cell Fate - <AUTHOR> https://www.creative-bioarray.com/services/stem-cell-research.htm <comment><AUTHOR> Neural stem cells often exhibit different fates due to the expression of different carbohydrate patterns on the cell surface. And these carbohydrate molecules promote the potential properties of neural stem cell membranes and ultimately determine their cell fate. Stem cells can be applied for a variety of human diseases, but it is difficult for researchers to determine what cell types these stem cells will transform into when they are transplanted into the patient's body. When the researchers transplanted the same number of stem cells into the body of two patients respectively, if the stem cells differentiated into neurons in one of the patients and differentiated into astrocytes in another patient's body, then the final treatment of these two patients will be significantly different. Based on current research results, researchers can predict the differentiation endpoint of neural stem cells and their possible cell fate, which may enhance the success rate of stem cell transplantation therapy for many types of diseases.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> This pathway is active in transplanted cells and developing brain cells, so when the brain is formed during body development, the pathway may control neural stem cells to form astrocytes and neurons. At present, researchers are testing whether this pathway can alter the behavior of transplanted cells or the way in which the developing brain is formed. The researchers focused on the internal "machines" of cells that first added carbohydrate molecules to observe the molecular mechanisms underlying the process.

Researchers have discovered that specific proteins on the cell surface may be altered by this pathway, which can help elucidate how carbohydrate molecules tell stem cells to differentiate into specific types of brain cells. For further study, researchers are expected to find more specific methods to improve the efficiency of stem cell transplantation for the treatment of body damage and various diseases through more in-depth research.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> In the research published in 2008, the researchers discovered a new method that can take advantage of the potential characteristics of cells to identify and classify neural stem cells with different fates. The researchers claim that the difference in cell surface carbohydrate may be the reason why these bacteria have different potential properties. And then researchers examined several pathways that add carbohydrate molecules to the cell surface, and found that one pathway can help make neurons, while another pathway can help make astrocytes. By stimulating the neural stem cell pathway and altering the cell potential properties, the researchers were able to create more astrocytes and fewer neuronal cells, which suggesting that the carbohydrate molecules on the cell surface can control the fate of neural stem cells.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Scientists have identified intrinsic cellular properties that affect the fate of neural stem cells, which may affect the type of brain cells that are differentiated from neural stem cells, such as neurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes, etc. Related research may help researchers develop new methods to predict or control the fate of stem cells, therefore, it can be better applied to human transplantation therapy.</comment>


APK Get Token from URL - <AUTHOR> Hi,
I have an application on my android phone. There is a browser inside the application. It writes token to the URL with the Post method. SAMPLE;
POST: https://site.com/ext/myinfo?token=bsdasdf2y1cuuwwqtek6lqbjnrynbkdhctxolrylgw3wpnav4ronsorsay7cs2lps1deıvndpuxgıdrar1zvcj54w1osf
the token is refreshing every hour. How can I get token from the APK? I need to get the token code regularly.
Sorry for my English. <comment><USER2> This question should go to stack overflow.

You want to do Man in the middle (mitm) and bypass the SSL encryption by either using some Dev tool or installing an own SSL certificate for that domain on your phone. Both requires no root privileges.

<comment><AUTHOR> Okay thank you</comment></comment>


HealthSherpa Launches 2 Minute Obamacare Signup - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2Us633lxYI

<comment><AUTHOR> We are live in all 37 federal (hc.gov) states. Same plans, prices and subsidies, substantially faster / easier shopping and signup. We are connecting directly to the federal data hub to get people enrolled in subsidized plans.

You can test enrollments HealthSherpa.com. Use any hc.gov state (ex: 33604 in FL). Enrollments submitted now are finalized 11/15\. On and after 11/15 on they are immediate.</comment>


World needs $90tn infrastructure overhaul to avoid climate disaster, study finds - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/oct/06/climate-change-infrastructure-coal-plants-green-investment <comment><USER2> For those of us challenged by so many zeros, that's about $13,000 per human being, ostensibly to be spent over the next 15 years.

For the US, that'd be a cost of ~$4.8tn, or, just over $300bn annually for the next 15 years. Spending that much would represent an increase of about 8% of the US government budget for 15 years, and have to be funded by raising taxes, cutting spending elsewhere, or borrowing.

On the plus side, it would all get injected into the economy and put many people to work (like some of those disenfranchised men who were a topic yesterday [and the disenfranchised women who apparently weren't] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12649106](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12649106) ). And it would hopefully thereby reintroduce inflation and the fed would raise interest rates so we could move back to a less abnormal economy. Unless, of course, that we're already in the new normal.

<comment><USER3> That sounds like a no brainer. I'd be interested in hearing the other side of this argument.

<comment><USER2> One consideration, and perhaps an economist can weigh in, using the same analysis for India, they'd need to spend a total of US$16tn. That's 55x their annual budget for the entire country (I think, (Rp. 197,80,60 Crore = US$293Bn?). It's completely un-affordable. However, for example, the cost of labor is also a fraction of what it is in the US, and, the way the money needs to be spent is likely different, so more digging needs to be done that I have time for now.

The point being that many countries simply can't afford to do their 'fair share' today, and if it's going to be done globally, wealthier countries will have to pay more.

I'm too lazy to Google up the annual budget of all the nations on the entire planet, but I have a suspicion it's fraction of the cost of doing this infrastructure overhaul.

<comment><USER4> I don't think per capita is the right way to calculate this. We're talking about infrastructure spending, and if poor countries have less infrastructure, then they also have less that needs to be upgraded.

They also produce fewer green house gasses... and it would make sense that more money would need to be spent where those gasses are emitted (ie: not in poor countries).

And they use less energy, which means fewer plants that need to be replaced.

In the summary [0], it says they think spending needs to increase from 3.4T/yr to 6T/yr... a 70% increase.

I think a more accurate estimate would be to take current spending in India, and increase it by 70%.

That would mean the US would shoulder a much larger portion of this increase.. Which makes sense, since we're one of the largest emitters of green house gasses.

0\. [http://newclimateeconomy.report/2016/executive- summary/](http://newclimateeconomy.report/2016/executive-summary/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I may be jaded, but I just don't see it happening. People love power and using power. Too many of us are greedy, and lazy. Too many regect the science. Too many weren't taught to respect the earth, and we don't teach our children. Too many are caught up with winning at all costs.

What we have lost is our humility, our humanity, our will power and our motivation.

The problems are too big, and I'll be dead soon anyway. Might as well enjoy it while you can. YOLO.</comment>


Ask HN: Why there are no GPU clouds using cards like GTX 1080? - <AUTHOR> AWS and Azure offer instances with GPUs like K-80 that are expensive on themselves and the instances are pretty expensive too, for example p2.xlarge costs $0.9 per hour. These cards are so expensive partly because they have good double-precision capabilities.
However, for Deep Learning it is enough to use cards like GTX 1080 which are much cheaper than something like K-80. I wonder why none of the providers like Linode or DigitalOcean built servers with these cheaper cards and offered instances with them. I think there would be high demand for this kind of offer taking into account the current AI hype.
I've heard somewhere that Nvidia legally prohibits using their consumer cards in servers, but I didn't found anything confirming it. The consumer cards also probably have less expected lifetime than their server counterparts in 24/7 usage mode, but the huge difference in upfront cost probably could compensate it. <comment><USER2> Upgrading to new graphics cards has a _very_ high fixed cost which may not necessarily be offset by the decrease in variable costs from efficiency.</comment>


Ask HN: What are some interesting metrics for a B2B startup? - <AUTHOR>

We see a lot on HN about metrics: it is mostly a matter of growing fast and getting traction.
This is all focused on consumer startups though: The traction you are getting, are you on your way to hit a million users, do you see a hockey-stick growth rate, etc.
But what about business-to-business startups? I am the CTO of a B2B startup, and for now we are working under the radar, talking to a few businesses and gauging interest to define what our product and service offering needs to look like to be sexy for them.
Are there any common metrics in the B2B world that kind of work? <comment><USER2> Here are my favorites:

Qualified Lead Velocity Rate (via Jason Lemkin) - [http://saastr.com/2012/12/12/why-lead-velocity-rate-lvr- is-t...](http://saastr.com/2012/12/12/why-lead-velocity-rate-lvr-is-the-most- important-metric-in-saas/)

Are you able to sustainably grow qualified leads? Distribution and sales needs to be predictable (as Aaron Ross says) so that you can do it over and over, not just one-offs.

Cohort Growth (via Armando Mann) - [http://prezi.com/dyny1qyjsvri/acquisition- engine-draper-univ...](http://prezi.com/dyny1qyjsvri/acquisition-engine- draper-university-592013/)

Cohort Growth is being able to demonstrate that every so often you are increasing your ability to derive value from a set of customers (higher retention, more upsells, lower costs). Basically the second order of LTV.

So those above are for B2B startups that are already growing. The basic metrics for B2B startups (e.g/i.e. SaaS) is LTV (lifetime value of customer), CAC (customer acquisition cost), retention/churn, revenue, virality coefficient (referral effectiveness), etc.

All this being said, I wouldn't automatically discount all consumer startup metrics. A lot of metrics I learned from the casual gaming industry are just as relevant in b2b, just in a different flavor and numbers.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot ! As for discarding the consumer startup metrics, of course not, but having worked in a high-growth consumer startup before with millions of users, I am a bit lost when I see number 3 or 4 orders of magnitude below what I am used to. Thanks !</comment></comment>


Sizing up the coming Recession - <AUTHOR> http://www.portfolio.com/views/columns/economics/2008/03/17/Sizing-Up-the-Coming-Recession

<comment><USER2> that even FED can't do - but according to warren buffet, we are already in recession ...</comment>