Any recommendations for TVs as monitors? - <AUTHOR> A few people on HN have mentioned that TVs these days can be used as credible monitors, and can be cheaper/bigger/etc. Has anyone got any advice on this matter - specific models, gotchas watch out for, etc? <comment><USER2> I used to use a TV as part of a triple screen setup, but I went back to dual screens because the TV was noticeably worse than the monitor. My tv wasn't great, and my monitors are fairly nice, but there are a few things I've noticed about TVs that make them less suited for computer work than monitors.

For the same resolution, TVs often have a larger pixel pitch than monitors. I haven't noticed this as an issue for 4K tvs, but there are a few 1080p tvs that have pretty bad pixel pitch. My 32" 1080p tv has horrible pixel pitch. It is really only noticeable at the distances you'd view a monitor from, but it's really annoying.

Monitors compete on things like gray-to-gray response time, ghosting and input lag. TVs care about ghosting, but contrast ratio and black level is a bigger concern for them. I find that TVs have a fairly noticeable input lag, even when in game mode, but I'm really sensitive to this issue.

TVs tend to be slightly larger than monitors for a given screen size. It's not a huge difference, but if you want to do multi-display setups the bezel width can be a difference.

My best friend uses a TV as a monitor and is not bothered by any of these issues in the least, so it basically comes down to personal preference.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using TVs as monitors for years and one thing I can say for sure from my own experience is this: Try not to let any static images stay on the screen for long periods of time. This isn't really an issue with actual computer monitors, but when using a TV as a monitor, it almost always leads to burn-in of the images.

Another note is that you'll likely want to turn off some of the features that benefit you on the TV side of things (motion flow, image sharpening, etc). These features actually make the experience worse when using a TV as a monitor.

</comment><comment><USER4> As with computer monitors, you'll tend to get what you pay for according to a logarithmic scale of price and performance, but the cheapest one will be absolutely amazing by historical standards and not worth having according to some people. The key factor is budget rather than technology.

</comment><comment><USER5> Stick to 4K and make sure it can do 60 or 120hz from a PC input.</comment>


Seasteading Institute's Floating Cities - <AUTHOR> https://www.seasteading.org <comment><USER2> Meh, I've been on their email list for many years now and I've never seen them make any worthwhile advancement towards even a scale prototype.</comment>


Should E-cigarettes be allowed in the office? - <AUTHOR> The best article I can find is a bit outdated. Is there more progressive thinking in tech on this subject ? http://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2016/02/07/the-truth-about-wasting-time-at-work/#7f73c8571285<p>My thinking is if someone doesn't have to get up for smoke breaks they could be more productive. <comment><USER2> Never mind the health aspects: should burning incense sticks be allowed in the office? No general answer - if all your cow-orkers love the smell, I guess there's no issue. Otherwise, I see no difference from "should I eat my durian for lunch in the office?" or any other smell-related activities. (I prefer that smelly and noisy activities, such as lunch, private calls or smoke breaks, happen outside the workspace; but that's indeed my preference - YMMV)

</comment><comment><USER3> An office that is worried about the productivity loss of smoke breaks is run by idiots.

<comment><AUTHOR> Please explain ? If you think about it, if someone goes away from their desk for 5mins (conservative estimate) 10 times a day (given not everyone goes that often) that is almost 10% of their day "wasted".

It's also relevant to more than just productivity, e.g. a receptionist leaving the phones unattended.

<comment><USER4> 10 times a day? O.o I dont know where i read that, but isnt it assumed that we (IT specialists) are productive about 60% of our work time?

<comment><AUTHOR> Agreed realistically there will always things that limit your productive time, and that's normal, although management will try to push against that. The question is from a company policy point of view. E.g. new policy "Employees are allowed 3 smoke breaks a day , or they may use an e-sig at their desk."

<comment><USER5> There are studies around showing that even a few minutes walk can increase creativity _. So it is actually possible that smokers that are going out to smoke are actually more creative that their sitting counterparts.

_ Here for example : [http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/30/want-to-be- more-cre...](http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/30/want-to-be-more- creative-take-a-walk/) but there are likely more serious link around.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If E-cigarettes produce smoke or perfume or any vapour then no as it could be uncomfortable for colleagues with asthma.

<comment><USER7> I hear that the juice is made up of similar stuff to what asthma inhalers contain (before the flavours are added).

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As long as it doesn't include "vaping" i'd be fine with it

<comment><AUTHOR> the distinction between simply using an e-cigarette and "vaping" can be drawn by arbitrarily measuring the amount of smoke ? that complicates things a bit.</comment></comment>


Tweet from Hacker News [Chrome Extension] - <AUTHOR> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bpedfepjebcpimgkcicedlnfebhgbfda

<comment><USER2> Looks convenient! I'm on the iPad right now, so I'll have to wait to get home on Chrome to try it out. Thanks for the tip.

<comment><AUTHOR> No problem! I knew I wanted this, so figured maybe others would too!</comment></comment>


Nvidia Announces PCIe Tesla V100 - <AUTHOR> http://www.anandtech.com/show/11559/nvidia-formally-announces-pcie-tesla-v100-available-later-this-year?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social <comment><USER3> Don't get too excited about V100. P100 was announced over 1 year ago and is _still today_ not available from AWS, GCE, or Azure (despite various announcements). Although you can now, finally, order one at retail for the low, low price of $12k+ [1] [2].

The upcoming Volta-based consumer GPUs are going to be your best value for machine learning, not V100.

[1] [https://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-Tesla-P100-computing- processor...](https://www.amazon.com/NVIDIA-Tesla-P100-computing- processor/dp/B06WV7HFWV/) [2] [http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l...](http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=489-BBCF&cid=298721&st=&VEN1=saalXTMnP%2C101952148149%2C901q5c14135%2Cc%2C%2C489-BBCF&VEN2=%2C&lid=5704670&dgc=ST&DGSeg=SO&acd=12309152537501410&VEN3=105703622544116288)

<comment><USER4> You can get the Quadro GP100, which is pretty much identical (I've got 2).

[http://images.nvidia.com/content/pdf/quadro/data- sheets/3020...](http://images.nvidia.com/content/pdf/quadro/data- sheets/302049-NV-DS-Quadro-Pascal-GP100-US-NV-27Feb17-HR.pdf)

Agreed re consumer GPUs for machine learning though.

<comment><USER3> Interesting, I hadn't heard of GP100, only released in February. Still, at $6000, as expensive as eight 1080 Tis.

<comment><USER5> Yeah but the double precision on the 1080 TIs is crippled, so the eight 1080 TIs would (in theory) be 50% as powerful in FP64 performance of a single Quadro GP100. There are good reasons to use the higher end chips, in some cases (maybe not for ML).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The "NVIDIA Tesla Family Specification Comparison" table indicates 112 TFLOPS "Tensor Performance (Deep Learning)" for Tesla V100 (PCIe).

Is that double precision?

The Nvidia 1080 Ti has a double precision performance of 332 GFLOPS [1]. If the above number is for double precision computing, the Tesla V100 (PCIe) would be about 337 times as fast (!!)

Does anyone have more insight into these numbers?

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_processing_units)

UPDATE : I should have read the article more carefully, it seems to be a mix of FP16 (half precision) and FP32 (single precision). That would likely mean a factor ~10 in computation performance (specifically for deep learning)

<comment><USER7> "...matrix operations with FP16 inputs and FP32 accumulation..." [http://images.nvidia.com/content/volta- architecture/pdf/Volt...](http://images.nvidia.com/content/volta- architecture/pdf/Volta-Architecture-Whitepaper-v1.0.pdf)

<comment><USER6> Thanks, I also read the article better now. I updated my comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I wonder when will such briefs include information about cryptocurrency mining performance on a regular basis.

<comment><USER9> I was under the impression that ASICs were far better for mining. Have GPUs caught up again?

<comment><USER10> GPUs are definitely dead for bitcoin. You'll get something like 10^9th more efficient SHA256 hashing from an ASIC than a GPU.

But for many other coins, there are two big factors bringing GPUs back into the game for mining:

\- Lots of alt-coins competing for popularity; many might have ASIC mining implementations in the future, but there either hasn't been enough time or enough money to be made by doing it yet.

\- There's been various research done to reduce the potential gain in efficiency from an ASIC implementation over using commodity hardware. This was done in response to the concentrating effect of ASIC mining operations, which put a greater percentage of global hashpower in a smaller set of hands. The main way ethereum implements this "ASIC resistance" is by exercising memory bandwidth -- an area where GPUs are already quite optimized -- in the hashing algorithm. [https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash](https://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/Ethash) goes into detail.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I remember a time back before the turn of the century me and my friends joking how cool it would be to run doom on a CRAY - who knew that less than 20 years later we could be...

<comment><USER12> DOOM wouldn't run very well on a CRAY machine for multiple reasons, but one of which is it doesn't have the right video hardware.

A Raspberry Pi has way more compute power than the first generation Cray machine and a 386-vintage machine has better single-core, non-vectorized performance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> With the incredible die size of Volta, and the cost associated with it, I wonder if the rumors are true that AMDs next gen GPU codenamed Navi is using the same strategy as their Zen CPUs (Ryzen, Threadripper, Epyc) - <USER2> smaller dies connected for better yields and lower cost.

Would something like that be even possible with GPUs? I know the Exascale paper from AMD mentions GPU chiplets which sound like this.

</comment><comment><USER14> Tensorflow 1.2 has integrated new instructions from Intel, does anyone have any figures on 1.2 showing CPU performance vs GPU's?

</comment><comment><USER15> What else besides deep learning can the tensor core do well ?

<comment><USER16> CFD and other high-fidelity multiphysics simulations can be efficient when GPU-bound. It all comes down to being able to write a matrix and stream a bunch of vectors to multiply it by. When considering Krylov subspace methods, this extends to covering a large part of the problem space of linear algebra.

I think the Tesla cards in particular are double precision, which is not necessarily the best for deep learning applications.

<comment><USER5> High-fidelity multiphysics seems incompatible with FP16, unless you're talking some kind of mixed precision method.</comment></comment></comment>


Computer gamers solve problem in AIDS research that puzzled scientists for years - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2011/09/18/computer-gamers-solve-problem-in-aids-research-that-puzzled-scientists-for-years/

<comment><USER2> This has popped up a few times now, but I have to wonder, are there other problems that would benefit from the attention of "human computing"?</comment>


Ask HN: Who needs contributors? - <AUTHOR> Looking for contributors to your project? Feel free to post any project that may interest HN readers, with a strong preference towards open source. Please follow this general format:<p>Project name Project description What do you hope to build this month? What kind of skills do you need? Link to your GitHub or somewhere else you'd like to onboard new contributors, like your project management software or chat room. Your license(s) <comment><USER3> GNU Octave

A free numerical computation environment, mostly compatible with Matlab.

We really need help with JIT compiling. We have a toy LLVM implementation, but it uses the unstable LLVM API and we gave up trying to patch it up with every LLVM release. It is now a white elephant that we allowed to starve to death. The problem we have is that the kind of people who are attracted to contribute to numerical computing are very different from the kind of people who know compilers and programming languages.

Anything would be better, whether fixing and extending the LLVM implementation, or picking any other free JIT compiling backend. Ideally, because we like to help each other out in GNU, we would use libgccjit (David Malcolm used Octave as the original inspiration for libgccjit), but this is not a requirement.

Our collaboration infrastructure is a bit byzantine, but our bug tracker is here:

[http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=octave](http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?group=octave)

Our mailing lists are here:

[https://savannah.gnu.org/mail/?group=octave](https://savannah.gnu.org/mail/?group=octave)

And our code is here:

[http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/](http://hg.savannah.gnu.org/hgweb/octave/)

(Mercurial is not the problem, we like Mercurial. It's mostly Savannah that would be nice to improve or replace.)

We are GNU. Our license is GPLv3+ but we can accept code under any compatible license.

</comment><comment><USER4> Kubernetes- production grade container scheduling and management

The Kubernetes developer guide walks through how to get started: [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/release-1.3/do...](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/blob/release-1.3/docs/devel/README.md)

Things we are trying to fix this month for the v1.4 release: [https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%...](https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/issues?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=is%3Aopen%20is%3Aissue%20label%3Apriority%2FP1%20milestone%3Av1.4%20)

Features we are trying to get done in the next two months: [https://github.com/kubernetes/features/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is...](https://github.com/kubernetes/features/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+milestone%3Av1.5)

License: Apache

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Code Corps ([https://codecorps.org](https://codecorps.org))

We're helping volunteers and donors contribute to software projects for social good.

Monthly Goals: \- Finish our migration from Rails over to Elixir/Phoenix \- Build out Stripe integration so projects can start raising monthly contributions \- Finish UI style guide \- Rework CSS to use flexbox and be more responsive \- Minor features in blog

Skills needed: Elixir, Phoenix, PostgreSQL, JavaScript, Ember.js, HTML, CSS, Sass, flexbox, UI and graphic design (Sketch a plus), dev ops (Docker, AWS)

Slack: [http://slack.codecorps.org/](http://slack.codecorps.org/)

Phoenix API: [https://github.com/code-corps/code-corps- phoenix](https://github.com/code-corps/code-corps-phoenix) Ember front-end: [https://github.com/code-corps/code-corps-ember](https://github.com/code- corps/code-corps-ember) WordPress blog: [https://github.com/code- corps/blog.codecorps.org-site](https://github.com/code- corps/blog.codecorps.org-site)

License: MIT

</comment><comment><USER5> National Voter File

We're building the first open source, publicly available national voter database in the United States to power grassroots campaigns, monitor voter suppression, and make door-to-door advocacy possible for anyone.

Monthly Goals: \- Create loaders for new states \- Enhance reliability of existing loaders \- Create python geocoder to tag housholds with lat/long \- Develop queries to explore data quality \- Begin work on flash API Skills needed: PostgreSQL, GIS, Python, Penthao Data Integration (we can help you learn)

Slack Signup: [http://goo.gl/forms/8SJRDlo7Lx2rUsan1](http://goo.gl/forms/8SJRDlo7Lx2rUsan1)

Project Website and github: [https://nationalvoterfile.org](https://nationalvoterfile.org)

Dimensional Data Model: [https://docs.google.com/document/d/169mIkiIdl4OetbGvnbVCzq9S...](https://docs.google.com/document/d/169mIkiIdl4OetbGvnbVCzq9Srw9PKCsB6U1CErTD9aI/edit?usp=sharing)

Information on state voter files to load: [http://voterlist.electproject.org/home](http://voterlist.electproject.org/home)

Pentaho Data Integration: [http://community.pentaho.com/projects/data- integration/](http://community.pentaho.com/projects/data-integration/)

License: MIT

</comment><comment><USER6> HospitalRun ([http://hospitalrun.io/](http://hospitalrun.io/))

HospitalRun is an offline first, Ember based, Hospital Information System for charitable hospitals in developing countries.

> What do you hope to build this month? We are focused on ongoing work toward > reaching the 1.0. For a list of outstanding issues, see this GitHub > milestone on the frontend app: [https://github.com/HospitalRun/hospitalrun- > frontend/mileston...](https://github.com/HospitalRun/hospitalrun- > frontend/milestone/3)

We're in need of folks with the following skills: Ember JS experience for general app development; internationalization and localization; New Relic instrumentation experience; automating deployments from GitHub; HL7 experience; product and UI design for lots of CSS and UI cleanup ([https://github.com/hospitalRun/design);](https://github.com/hospitalRun/design\);) design systems experience for working on a styleguide and pattern library; docs writing for app documentation; web and marketing design for the hospitalrun.io site ([http://github.com/hospitalRun/hospitalrun.github.io](http://github.com/hospitalRun/hospitalrun.github.io))

To contribute, check out our CONTRIBUTING.md file on GitHub ([https://github.com/hospitalrun/hospitalrun- frontend/blob/mas...](https://github.com/hospitalrun/hospitalrun- frontend/blob/master/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md)) and join our Slack team.

HospitalRun is open source under the GNU general public license.

NOTE: We are hosting a two day hackathon at GitHub HQ in San Francisco on September 23 & 24th. Apply here if you are interested to join us: [https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScY8IzsHNXuSnwJamdO...](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScY8IzsHNXuSnwJamdOosE2ZTVBAfG4UO3hDotudUDtq3Ld9w/viewform)

<comment><USER7> Interesting project. Any sub-Saharan African countries using this?

<comment><USER6> Yes. Several of the CURE International ([https://cure.org/](https://cure.org/)) charitable hospitals (including a few in sub-saharan Africa) are already running it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> GrassrootsPB

GrassrootsPB ([https://www.grassrootspb.com](https://www.grassrootspb.com)) aims to gamify phone banking for down-ballot progressive political candidates, and continue Bernie's political revolution! Our website and Firefox/Chrome extensions are up and running, but we have many ideas for improvement, and are looking for volunteers to help us out.

Monthly Goals:

      - Front-end redesign to be more responsive and generally nicer-looking (already have one dev working on this)
      - Start migrating towards React as a front-end framework
      - Add support for a nice Django newsletter mechanism (some Django apps for this already exist).
      - Plan out extended gamification opportunities (leagues, etc)

Longer-term goal: Support a scalable, predictive dialing system, instead of having to use a Chrome/Firefox extension to count calls.

Skills needed: Any of Django, HTML, CSS, JQuery (currently), React (future), good UI/UX design. Familiarity with Heroku and/or AWS is a plus.

Slack: Join the ProgCode Slack through [http://progcode.co/](http://progcode.co/), and join the #grassrootspb channel.

GitHub repo (private, but ask for access in the Slack): [https://github.com/lakshbhasin/GrassrootsPB](https://github.com/lakshbhasin/GrassrootsPB)

</comment><comment><USER9> Ember A11y

We're making Ember accessible by default.

Monthly Goals:

      - Support Ember.js' internal upgrade to the new rendering engine.
      - Adopt dynamically scoped variables to make ember-a11y function.

Skills needed: Ember.js, Glimmer, Accessibility

Slack: [https://ember-community-slackin.herokuapp.com/](https://ember- community-slackin.herokuapp.com/)

Ember A11y: [https://github.com/ember-a11y](https://github.com/ember-a11y) Ember A11y Addon: [https://github.com/ember-a11y/ember-a11y](https://github.com/ember-a11y/ember-a11y)

License: MIT

</comment><comment><USER10> Social Crowd Reach

We are re-purposing the social media tools that we built for Bernie and making them generic so other campaigns and activists/ grassroots groups can utilize them. This is an effort to focus on grassroots mobilization, share the lessons we learned from working on the Bernie campaign, and give the technology and knowledge to the smaller groups who otherwise don't have access to it.

We are a member-owned LLC (Social Voter Labs LLC) because we don't want to be beholden to donors or investors. We have 6 skilled, active team members so far and a board of advisors that includes Lee Camp and other prominent leaders in the progressive political space, as well as those with DevOps team building and entrepreneurial experience.

Our goal is to launch Beta by the first week of October. To do this we need to upgrade an existing social media tool, add at least one more social media outreach tool and 2-3 additional collaboration features requested by our users.

We need software developers who are comfortable with React, Redux and/or Node.js/Express. Additionally, we are looking for people with experience testing in this environment. We may be able to offer a small stipend or fellowship for 1-2 months of development help.

You can join our site here: www.socialcrowdreach.com and join the Social Crowd Reach campaign to interact with us directly. You can also email us at: email@example.com Our license is Copyright Social Voter Labs LLC

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm an unaffiliated 3rd party (with a ton of interest) but from what I hear, Python's BeeWare project could use contribs. They have a number of endeavors that are all really neat. Some of them:

1\. Toga: cross-platform + mobile, OS-native (looks like a "standard" app for that device) GUI toolkit. [https://github.com/pybee/toga](https://github.com/pybee/toga)

2\. VOC: transpile Python bytecode to JVM bytecode. The goal is to be able to run arbitrary Python code within a JVM, with the intention of extremely performant, native deployment to Android. [https://github.com/pybee/voc](https://github.com/pybee/voc)

3\. Rubicon: running python through objective C for OS X and iOS. [https://github.com/pybee/rubicon-objc](https://github.com/pybee/rubicon-objc)

4\. Batavia: a Javascript implementation of the Python virtual machine. [https://github.com/pybee/batavia](https://github.com/pybee/batavia)

5\. Briefcase: packaging Python as a native app, particularly mobile but eventually desktop executables as well. [https://github.com/pybee/briefcase](https://github.com/pybee/briefcase)

And more!

<comment><USER12> Wow. I'm so glad I learned about this project today. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> GraphHopper

An open source routing engine in Java using OpenStreetMap data [https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper](https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper)

See how to contribute here [https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/blob/master/.gith...](https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/blob/master/.github/CONTRIBUTING.md)

We have also "good first issues" [https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/issues?q=is%3Aiss...](https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22good+first+issue%22)

and need Java developers with strong algorithm or "storage" knowledge or JavaScript UI developers.

See also our Stackoverflow propaganda ;) [http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/327654/194609](http://meta.stackoverflow.com/a/327654/194609)

</comment><comment><USER14> Ember CLI Mirage ([http://www.ember-cli-mirage.com/](http://www.ember-cli- mirage.com/))

A client-side mock server to develop, test and prototype your Ember app

Monthly Goals: \- Unify the {json:api} serializer with the base layer \- Robust relationship support (many-to-many, one-to-one, polymorphic, reflexive) \- Add factory traits and relationships

Skills needed: JavaScript, Ember.js

Slack: [https://embercommunity.slack.com/](https://embercommunity.slack.com/) channel #ec-mirage

Website: [http://www.ember-cli-mirage.com/](http://www.ember-cli-mirage.com/) Source: [https://github.com/samselikoff/ember-cli- mirage](https://github.com/samselikoff/ember-cli-mirage) Roadmap: [https://usecanvas.com/ec-mirage/mirage- roadmap/19kMeB5ceYCLm...](https://usecanvas.com/ec-mirage/mirage- roadmap/19kMeB5ceYCLmWrMZaRLez)

License: MIT

</comment><comment><USER15> OpenFarm

Track how your garden's plants are doing, and learn to grow anything.

Monthly Goals: Help our RGSoC interns develop their skillset, redesign our onboarding flow, iron out bugs in our front-end code, get people contributing knowledge.

Skills needed: gardeners, icon and UX designers, Ruby on Rails developers, JavaScript / AngularJS.

Slack: slack.openfarm.cc

GitHub: [https://github.com/openfarmcc/OpenFarm/](https://github.com/openfarmcc/OpenFarm/)

Live Site: [https://openfarm.cc](https://openfarm.cc)

License: CC0

</comment><comment><USER9> Ember CLI

We're building a tool that makes it easy to build and maintain Ember applications.

Monthly Goals:

      - Finish moving off of Bower and onto our npm infrastructure.
      - Upgrade our internal npm usage from 2.X to 3.X.
      - Make our story for caching using Broccoli far more efficient.
      - Improve the Node ecosystem's publishing patterns for the projects we use.

Skills needed: Node, npm. Familiarity with Ember.js & Broccoli unnecessary but a bonus.

Slack: [https://ember-community-slackin.herokuapp.com/](https://ember- community-slackin.herokuapp.com/)

Ember CLI: [https://github.com/ember-cli/ember-cli](https://github.com/ember- cli/ember-cli)

License: MIT

</comment><comment><USER16> Project Name: Brand New Congress Technology

Project Description: Brand New Congress is an initiative to primary most of the existing incumbents in Congress with a representative group of progressive people who all agree to enact an aggressive progressive platform once they are elected. You can learn more about our goals and what we're trying to do on [https://brandnewcongress.org](https://brandnewcongress.org). The tech team at Brand New Congress works on a variety of tools that will help bring about the revolution, and we are currently focusing a lot on expanding our website and making it way more awesome.

What do you hope to build this month? Our main focus this month is to create an awesome events portal like map.berniesanders.com v2.0 ([https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/website/issues/98](https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/website/issues/98)), update our dashboard to make it the central hub of where all our volunteers are looking everyday to see how BNC is doing ([https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/dashboard](https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/dashboard)), and updating our current sign up and donation flow ([https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/website/issues/85](https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/website/issues/85)). In general, we'd love to use these tasks as a way to find someone that would be willing to take on a leadership role and be able to commit a decent amount of time every week to keep our website updated and think up new ways to use our site/tech stack.

What kind of skills do you need? Our projects are currently largely Javascript/React based. We're starting to play around with Apollo and GraphQL as our data layer, but don't worry if you don't already know about those technologies as they are pretty new and we'll teach you.

Link to your GitHub or somewhere else you'd like to onboard new contributors, like your project management software or chat room. [https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/welcome](https://github.com/BrandNewCongress/welcome)

</comment><comment><USER17> SatNOGS [http://satnogs.org](http://satnogs.org)

SatNOGS is an open source ground station and network, optimized for modularity, built from readily available and affordable tools and resources

Monthly goals: We are currently focused on adding satellite command and control to the existing SatNOGS client. A quick write up of our satellite Command and Control capabilities is available here: [https://satnogs.org/2016/08/cnc- librecubesat/](https://satnogs.org/2016/08/cnc-librecubesat/)

Skills needed: if you are interested in helping us develop our C&C capabilities on the SatNOGS client * Python * GnuRadio * flask if you are interested in helping with the project in general feel free to check it out especially if you are familiar with open of the following * Django * mechanical engineering using FreeCAD * electrical engineering using KiCAD * ham radio/wireless communications

Feel free to check out: * [http://satnogs.org](http://satnogs.org) for the SatNOGS project homepage * [http://community.satnogs.org](http://community.satnogs.org) the SatNOGS community discource instance is used to coordinate our efforts * [https://github.com/satnogs](https://github.com/satnogs) is our github organization page with various subproject for the several components of the SatNOGS project

license: our code is mainly under the GPLv3 license and the hardware components are the CERN-OHLv2

</comment><comment><USER18> OpenSynthesis, an open platform for intelligence analysis. Our goal is to help the public synthesize vast amounts of information into actionable conclusions.

Our first initiative is adapting the CIA's Analysis of Competing Hypotheses (ACH) [2] technique to work at internet-scale.

At this early stage, we're especially looking for contributions in the following areas:

      - UI/UX design
      - Online community design
      - Front-end development
      - <USER2>
      - Alpha testers

We have a 'Help Wanted' issue tag for good starter projects [3].

The code is GPLv3. The current stack is Django, Python 3.5, and Bootstrap.

[1] [https://github.com/twschiller/open- synthesis](https://github.com/twschiller/open-synthesis) [2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_competing_hypothes...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_competing_hypotheses) [3] [https://github.com/twschiller/open- synthesis/issues?q=is%3Ai...](https://github.com/twschiller/open- synthesis/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22help+wanted%22)

</comment><comment><USER19> Hail

Github: [https://github.com/hail-is/hail](https://github.com/hail-is/hail)

dev gitter: [https://gitter.im/hail-is/hail-dev](https://gitter.im/hail- is/hail-dev)

Starter issues (a bit sparse right now): [https://github.com/hail- is/hail/labels/starter](https://github.com/hail-is/hail/labels/starter)

Hail is a scalable framework for massive data analysis. It's written in Scala and built on Spark and the Hadoop ecosystem.

I'm a software engineer/mathematician, but we're embedded in a world-class genetics research lab. The first paper using Hail was put out recently:

[http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/06/050195](http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/06/06/050195)

with more in the pipeline. Hail is being used to analyze some of the largest genetic datasets out there (hundreds of thousands of exomes and tens of thousands of whole genomes). There's tons to do. Jump in or email me (see my profile) if you'd like to get involved. If you tell me what you're interested in, I will try to tailor a task for you. No bio knowledge needed.

License: MIT

P.S. We found one other contributor and our last hire through HN. So, thanks, HN!

</comment><comment><USER20> HRCloud2 - Host your own Cloud server from home. [https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2](https://github.com/zelon88/HRCloud2)

Upload files to your own home-server from anywhere. Run your favorite Bash commands on any file, from anywhere just by selecting checkboxes and clicking buttons.

Currently the project has a relatively finalized GUI and about 50% of it's functionality complete. Currently, users can... Upload multiple files. Download multiple files. Convert multiple files to other formats. Archive selected files. Dearchive files to a directory. Copy multiple files. Delete multiple files. It also has a plugin-enabled chat-bot/personal assistant named HRAI that has a built-in (but under dev) load balancing system for autonomously creating Cloud networks (even if the servers are on separate networks).

It uses WordPress for user-creation and management, and DOES not interact with a database other than calling wp_get_current_user(); for the users identity. This is NOT a WordPress plugin. It requires it's own directory and DOES NOT interact with WordPress other than to identify a logged-in user.

I'm looking for help and advice in every department, but immediately if someone wants to help me troubleshoot the Python scripts for DocScan (the Microsoft Office Lens-like app) working when PHP calls it (works fine in Bash) that would be awesome! :)

</comment><comment><USER21> Write.as CLI

Our open source command-line utility written in Go.

Write.as is a lightweight hosted blogging platform with clients on every popular platform. We started with pastebin-like anonymous posting in v1, and now v2 has real blogs and post syncing -- but is currently web-only. So I'm bringing this new functionality to all our clients, but starting with mobile. And I'd really love more input from technically-minded people on this client, since most of our interfaces are focused on non power users.

Monthly goals:

      - Build a reusable client library in Go to use in the backend, and to open source
      - Develop a friendly command-line interface for publishing standalone and blog posts,
        registering or logging into an account, and syncing up anonymous posts to accounts

Skills needed: Go, command-line design and ideally Windows experience (I'm personally most used to Linux and OS X)

Code: [https://github.com/writeas/writeas- cli](https://github.com/writeas/writeas-cli)

Chat: [http://slack.write.as](http://slack.write.as) or #writeas on freenode

MIT license

</comment><comment><USER22> A registry for open source hardware electronics projects (which itself is open source under a CPAL license): [https://kitnic.it](https://kitnic.it)

1\. Looking for people to put up their PCB designs

2\. Help out with web development. Smaller planned enhancements are detailed on GitHub [1]. More generally we are moving towards a proper server side architecture, the first step being a service where people can enter their Git URL and see how it would look on Kitnic. Things like accounts, live-pricing, assembly aides and linking with PCB manufacturers are planned as well and I would love to discuss these in more detail.

[1]: [https://github.com/monostable/kitnic/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%...](https://github.com/monostable/kitnic/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3Aenhancement)

</comment><comment><USER23> CMS Airship

Github: [https://github.com/paragonie/airship](https://github.com/paragonie/airship)

Docs: [https://github.com/paragonie/airship- docs](https://github.com/paragonie/airship-docs)

Airship is a secure-by-default CMS that applies security fixes within one hour of their release by our team in the default configuration. Code delivery is secured by cryptographic signatures, a system similar to certificate transparency, and reproducible builds from open source components.

License: GPL

Language(s) Used:

      PHP (version 7 with strict types)
        Twig templates
      SQL (currently only PostgreSQL 9.5)
      JavaScript
        jQuery
      HTML5 / CSS3 (with no regard for legacy IE compatibility)

How to help: [https://cspr.ng/blog/2016/09/contribute-airship-non- expert-s...](https://cspr.ng/blog/2016/09/contribute-airship-non-expert- security)

Some more technical details in case HN is interested:

[https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/05/keyggdrasil-continuum- cry...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/05/keyggdrasil-continuum-cryptography- powering-cms-airship) | How the auto-updater works (warning: cryptography protocols ahead)

[https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/06/php-security-platinum- sta...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/06/php-security-platinum-standard- raising-bar-cms-airship) | The version 1.0.0 blog post

[https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/08/on-insecurity-popular- ope...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2016/08/on-insecurity-popular-open-source- php-cms-platforms) | A comparison of the security of three most popular CMS platforms

</comment><comment><USER24> EA/AI stock trading platform build upon NodeJS.

Currently got few weeks of works done, mostly focused on the Back testing part.

I focus a lot on performance, it's all native es6 (Classical inheritance / Promise / Events based). For example, I made some scripts that turn tick data to binary Float64 files, and the core platform gets benchmarks on every change.

I have done a far bit of Metatrader and tries a full JS platform before some years ago.. But learned a lot and just starting again :)

Ideally the platform is multi functional.. You can use it primarily for automatic trading, but manual trading is also possible. You can host it your self, run it local, or build a SaaS around it.

Let me know if you are a die-hard JS developer, both backend as Frontend is welcome :) experience with 2D canvas (not highcharts, too slow) and /or D3 etc, that's more than welcome.

Thanks

<comment><USER25> Link?

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Operation Code ([http://operationcode.org](http://operationcode.org))

Operation Code is an open source project that helps military, guard & reserve troops, veterans and their families get coding and building software to change the world.

We're overhauling the signup flow to make it easier for software mentors, new signups and contributors to get started.

HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Ruby on Rails

[https://github.com/operationcode/operationcode](https://github.com/operationcode/operationcode)

[https://github.com/OperationCode/operationcode/blob/master/C...](https://github.com/OperationCode/operationcode/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md)

MIT

<comment><USER27> Hey, wanted to add to this - we're always looking for volunteers to help mentor developers at Operation Code. If you're interested in teaching, send us an email at email@example.com!

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is small project called "staruml-ruby".

"staruml-ruby" is Ruby extension for StarUML 2 [1]. It helps you to generate Ruby source code from a UML diagram. Currently, this extension supports to generate Ruby code from class diagram. Feature that will be implemented for next release is relationship between classes. Reverse engineering (generating Ruby code to class diagram) is not supported at this moment.

Skill needed: JavaScript.

Source code is available on: [https://github.com/meisyal/staruml- ruby](https://github.com/meisyal/staruml-ruby).

License: MIT.

[1]: [http://staruml.io](http://staruml.io)

</comment><comment><USER29> Hyperledger project [https://hyperledger.org](https://hyperledger.org) is building blockchain for the enterprise. CONTRIBUTING: [http://hyperledger- fabric.readthedocs.io/en/latest/CONTRIBUT...](http://hyperledger- fabric.readthedocs.io/en/latest/CONTRIBUTING/) License Apache

</comment><comment><USER30> This is a very small project which has got few stars on github.

[http://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti- textbook...](http://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook/)

license is CC

Aim is to be the best practical introduction for writing webapplications in Go language.

Skills: Go, network programming.

To chat: [https://gitter.im/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti- textbook](https://gitter.im/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textbook)

The readme contains enough information for onboarding.

</comment><comment><USER31> TXR programming language: [http://nongnu.org/txr](http://nongnu.org/txr)

The scope for contributions is extremely broad. For example, integrating libui to have a graphical interface. Or pattern matching library? Replacing the poor debugger?

I have a 440 line TODO file, largely with one item per line in point form. Items to work on for the next release often come from this file.

TXR is as much a practical utility for everyday use as it is a language exploratory research project.

Skills: C, Lisp and Lisp implementation techniques.

License: BSD

</comment><comment><USER32> Hi Guys, I am looking for contributors for the open source book ReactJS Convention: ReactJS For Dummies - Why & How to Learn React Redux, the Right Way.

Available online at [https://reactjs.co](https://reactjs.co)

The book has already around 60 pages count and I am looking to expand that book thus any help appreciated.

Topics to be covered:

\- GraphQL/relay

\- React Native

\- FalcorJS

\- Server side rendering

\- other ideas?

Anyone who want to master their coding skills with writing an open sourced online book and GET CREDIT for their work: please ping me with an email from my GH account (github.com/przeor)

Best Regards, Kamil

</comment><comment><USER33> fuzzpy: fuzzing CPython to find bugs

Goals: new test definitions and/or donate cycles for existing tests

Skills required: Python and Make, optionally C/C++

License: University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License

Git: [https://bitbucket.org/ebadf/fuzzpy](https://bitbucket.org/ebadf/fuzzpy)

</comment><comment><USER34> [https://github.com/botwiki/botwiki.org](https://github.com/botwiki/botwiki.org)

Botwiki: an open catalog of friendly, useful, artistic online bots, and tools and tutorials that can help you make them.

</comment><comment><USER35> Freeciv-web

[https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv-web](https://github.com/freeciv/freeciv- web)

AGPL license

</comment><comment><USER36> Redtamarin: AS3 running on the command line / server side

Basically, based out of the Tamarin [1] / avmplus [2] open source project (not updated anymore) the goal is to develop the runtime to support more native functionalities and other system calls.

It is about the ActionScript 3.0 language and the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2), and how to port those to the command-line and server-side and "compete" with many other languages like Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, etc.

So yeah it is probably less sexy than to work on popular JS stuff :D

It's not about cloning V8/Node and do it with AVM2/AS3, it's more about providing the native calls, the tools to let other developers build their own clone of Node.js if they want to.

It's not about producing a "Flash Player clone" either.

Current release is 0.4.1, v0.4.2 coming up next week.

This project can do already a lot but have plenty more potential (at least we think so), if you want to have a "feel" of the project just browse the twitter timeline [https://twitter.com/redtamarin](https://twitter.com/redtamarin) plenty of posts, screenshots, and rants etc.

Skills needed: C/C++ (hardcore level), ActionScript 3.0 (advanced level), both or one of the other, any other skills also welcome (svn the odd stuff like marketing/sales)

Github: [https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin](https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin)

related Github projects: [https://github.com/Corsaair/](https://github.com/Corsaair/)

Website: [http://www.redtamarin.com](http://www.redtamarin.com) (need update)

Twitter: [https://twitter.com/redtamarin](https://twitter.com/redtamarin) (the news channel)

Forum: [https://discuss.as3lang.org/c/redtamarin](https://discuss.as3lang.org/c/redtamarin)

How to contribute: [https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin/wiki/HowToContribute](https://github.com/Corsaair/redtamarin/wiki/HowToContribute)

[1] Tamarin project: [http://web.archive.org/web/20110615150847/http://www.mozilla...](http://web.archive.org/web/20110615150847/http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/) [2] Avmplus project: [https://github.com/adobe/avmplus](https://github.com/adobe/avmplus)</comment>


Who is Facebook's mysterious "Lan Tim 2"? - <AUTHOR> https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/03/who-is-facebooks-mysterious-lan-tim-2/ <comment><USER2> As anyone who is, or has, worked in ad-tech would tell you, this is pretty _tame_ in terms of the "offline conversion problem."

When there are $billions$ of dollars at stake for this type of information, you can guarantee there will be many companies attacking this problem.

Therefore, not to be a pessimist, but if you think that 1) using a fake cell number on Facebook is going to help or that 2) there aren't services like Google doing this already, potentially with just as good match rates as Facebook, or 3) that using Firefox + adblock is all you need, then you're going to be constantly plugging holes in a leaking boat.

<comment><USER3> False flags and information is the only way to deal with this stuff...

If FB thinks you're a 72 yr old retired dentist from OK, and you buy nothing but feminine hygiene products and 3 wheel wheel barrels, you're pretty worthless as a consumer.

The future of ad block is disinformation. Makes the entire ecosystem worthless

<comment><USER4> AdNauseam is here:

[https://adnauseam.io/](https://adnauseam.io/)

It's on in the Firefox extensions site:

[https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/](https://addons.mozilla.org/en- US/firefox/addon/adnauseam/)

But not on the Google Chrome site:

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/01/05/adnauseam_expelled_from_chrome_web_store/)

<comment><USER3> Thanks for sharing this. Looks very interesting but with the fraud filtering in place for most ads, I wonder how effective this can be in the long run. Seems as if it'd be filtered out but maybe, that's the point???

<comment><USER5> i think that's exactly it - hopefully you'd get put on some adnauseum users list where your traffic is just dropped. OTOH maybe google et al just uses that list for working on fraud denial/defeat so you're probably feeding the beast no matter what.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Just checked mine. Literally hundreds of entries. 700+

Crikey. Just downloaded all the data and having a browse. 22k line location file (about 3k locations) stored too. I don't have the app installed on any device i own. I presumed the mobile page wouldn't have permission. Checking the data it does seem to stop when I changed phone (samsung preinstall fb app)

        $ date -d @1495296127
        Sat 20 May 17:02:07 BST 2017
        $ date -d @1573424412
        Sun 10 Nov 22:20:12 GMT 2019

What are they doing with ancient location data?

Also have every deliveroo purchase I've made in there they have an entry for every deliveroo purchase i've made

       {
          "name": "Deliveroo",
          "events": [
            {
              "id": 4538632xxxx,
              "type": "SUBMIT_APPLICATION",
              "timestamp": 1583216215
            },
            {
              "id": 33897312xxxx,
              "type": "PURCHASE",
              "timestamp": 1583146135
            },
            {
              "id": 3389731270xxxxxx,
              "type": "PURCHASE",
              "timestamp": 1582371142
            },

<comment><USER7> Delete Facebook.

<comment><USER8> Deleting Facebook doesn't mean they won't stop stalking you. In this case it isn't about Facebook collecting data about you, it's about other companies willingly sending data to Facebook. Deleting your Facebook account won't stop those companies from sending data to them. The solution is to stop doing business with all the companies that did share data with Facebook, whenever possible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > _Suppose I go to a restaurant, and I booked using my name and phone number. > The restaurant sends that data to Facebook to say "Terence Eden ate at this > restaurant on this day."_

Do I read this correctly that a restaurant will just dump its complete visitor log to FB and then let FB "sort it out".

Meaning that FB gets to vacuum the info on _everyone_ including those without FB accounts?

<comment><USER10> This is definitely the case for restaurants that use Yelp and Open Table booking systems.

<comment><USER11> "Open as in beer," if I may.

<comment><USER12> > "Open as in beer," if I may.

What does this mean?

<comment><USER13> I understood it this way:

OpenTable sounds like it would be open-source, but it appears that it isn't

I think the parent comment to yours made a sarcastic take using a variation of the popular ambiguity Free as in Beer [1] that usually differentiates between free as 0 cost and free as freedom as a reaction to the OpenTable software being free to use rather than open-source

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_libre)

<comment><USER11> Heh

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> So one of the comments on the post got my pressure up before coffee had a chance to kick in:

"It's just offline conversion events being uploaded so you'd stop getting these ads, or so they can market to you again in the future. You purchased this product, gave them a phone number.. Not sure where the issue lies? You agreed to the terms on Spreadshirt which is probably where you opted for marketing."

This is the basic approach. You give it to us. You agree to whatever we put in legalese and now we can do whatever we want. What?

It is disheartening, but I agree with the rest of the posts on HN that it is not at all surprising.

I just don't know how to approach it.

<comment><USER15> Devil's advocate for a moment: why can't the business do whatever they want with the data? It's not clear to me that I own the data in any single transaction with a business. I could see us both owning it, either shared or independently.

For VISA to sell transaction data, that's one thing. But a business that uses it to run their marketing, using transactions with their business? That seems less clear.

To further muddy the waters, if I can tell the business how they can use transaction data, shouldn't they also be able to tell me how I can/cannot use it? That seems like it would infringe upon bad reviews/etc., but it feels more consistent.

<comment><USER16> > But a business that uses it to run their marketing, using transactions with > their business?

It's about informed consent. The businesses should at least warn their customers that they're doing this, and who they're ratting us out to. That way we can each make an informed decision about whether or not to use that business.

<comment><USER17> What would be even better is if not only would they have to tell you this, but that you could say, "No. I don't agree to this nonsense" and they would have to refrain. They wouldn't even be able to deny you service based on that. They would, of course, be able to use the data if they needed to fulfill the contract with the customer, or if they had some legitimate reason for using it, or if there was some legal requirement for using it. Otherwise they would have to get consent.

It would be a kind of General Data Protection Regulation. All joking aside, and as much as I've grumbled about implementing it at the company where I work, I really wish this was a thing world wide.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps ironically, I'm frankly astounded at the apparent naïveté still held about Facebook, Google, et al.

> I have never used FaceBook [sic] login for anything

> Facebook doesn't even have my phone number, only my name and my business > email address.

People, if any company has __A-N-Y-thing __that can be associated with you, online or offline, you have no privacy. None. It is gone forever.

There is billions of dollars at stake for companies to build as complete a picture as possible of you and every detail of your life. And billions more remains on the table. That is plenty motivation to fuel a highly-lucrative market for accurate, meaningful profiling for years.

Sure, there's a long list of actions you could take to begin minimizing your exposure, the practicality of each varying widely. But frankly, most of them would only serve to make going about daily life inconvenient. (And the correlation between effectiveness and convenience isn't 1:1...)

The best case scenario is your data becoming stale, such that its values diminishes to a degree that makes it effectively background noise.

There is simply no means of unembedding yourself. But also, more discouragingly, for most people there is no practical means to avoid being ingested.

edit: grammar

<comment><USER19> You entirely missed the point of my comment when I said

> I have never used FaceBook [sic] login for anything

That was in response to someone saying you could avoid this by not using Facebook login. Maybe before calling out others' naïveté you should work on your reading comprehension.

<comment><USER18> Fair enough, I misinterpreted the context of your comment. But I wasn't calling anyone out and my point is still valid regardless. (And besides which, my "point" was just expressing surprise, which doesn't need validation or qualification.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> > It goes to show, Facebook's level of transparency of data isn't good enough.

I'm actually quite (pleasantly) surprised that Facebook provides this information, and somewhat curious why the author is angry at them rather than "Lan Tim 2".

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not angry, just disappointed...

The problem is, they don't give me any meaningful data other than a code name and an incorrect date. If they'd said "This is from Company X on or around date Y regarding action Z" that would be more transparent, and more useful.

<comment><USER20> Fair, but they might not always have that data. As the other examples show, they _do_ provide human-facing company names; perhaps in this case there was none and/or "Lan Tim 2" are the ones that handle all this without Facebook knowing what's going on behind them.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Home Depot lets you sign up to have your receipts emailed to you. Turns out if you do this they will send what you purchase to Facebook with your email, which was connected to my account.

I use Firefox to avoid being tracked by Facebook, and never login with Facebook. But it looks like I slipped up in signing up for email receipts!

Even if I didn't have a Facebook account, Facebook would still be building a profile on me using my email address /phone number in anticipation of the day I made an account.

<comment><USER22> I hate this whole new way of handling receipts.

If you order via kiosk in Taco Bell, you have your receipt ONLY by text message or email. Yep. No print out option.

HOWEVER, if you order via cashier, you CAN print it out.

<comment><USER15> "I bought a donut and they gave me a receipt for the donut. I don't need a receipt for the donut. I give you money and you give me the donut, end of transaction. We don't need to bring ink and paper into this. I can't imagine a scenario that I would have to prove that I bought a donut." \--Mitch Hedberg

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWx6uA5aCrE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWx6uA5aCrE)

<comment> blaser-waffle Mitch Hedberg is great, but I've expensed Dunkin Donuts while traveling for work many-a-time. And HR/Accounts Payable definitely want to see a receipt... even for a donut.

<comment><USER16> I've never understood expensing trivial stuff like that. It's far more effort than it's worth, in my opinion.

<comment><USER23> In an isolated instance, sure. But for those who live on the road, 5 bucks a day (minimum) would add up quickly enough. Those people are usually going to be doing the paperwork for other expenses anyway, so just tag it on.

<comment><USER24> Prefer a per diem rule. This can be a problem if you're my friend who services CT scanners around the globe because cost of living varies so much (the same price of overnight stay in two cities is the difference between a nightmare hostel and 5 star luxury) but if you mostly do the same trips especially in country a rule that says here's say $20 per day for food is easier than collecting and uploading receipts for every burger and coke.

It's easier for you, and instead of fighting expenses abuse and having a bunch of workers to check the expenses paperwork the business just has an understandable cost when it sends people to do their jobs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is seriously just a purchase event for a t-shirt that OP got. There is no mysterious Lan Tim 2 its just a random app for a random merchant that uses FB Ads and uses offline conversion / uploads.

<comment><USER26> Why do Facebook get that information though?

It's fine that OP bought a t-shirt, not fine that that is somehow reported to Facebook.

<comment><USER27> Quite simply so that "lan tim 2" can track their customer acquisition, they give the data to FB, FB correlate it with "did the customer see ads on our network, which ones, how often, etc." and give that back to the supplier.

<comment><USER28> Which means they are sharing their entire customer activity, _everyone_ , including personal data you never forfeited for this purpose (like the phone number / address used for shipping).

<comment><USER29> Yeah, I'm not sure I understood OP's innuendo at the end, but this is totally against GDPR right?

<comment><USER8> The GDPR is not enforced, so there's plenty to gain by breaching people's privacy and nothing to lose.

<comment><USER30> [https://www.compliancejunction.com/first-ever-uk-gdpr- penalt...](https://www.compliancejunction.com/first-ever-uk-gdpr-penalty- is-e325k-for-london-pharmacy/)

[https://iapp.org/news/a/germanys-first-fine-under-the- gdpr-o...](https://iapp.org/news/a/germanys-first-fine-under-the-gdpr-offers- enforcement-insights/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > Suppose I go to a restaurant, and I booked using my name and phone number. > The restaurant sends that data to Facebook to say "Terence Eden ate at this > restaurant on this day." Facebook can then tell if I saw an advert which led > me to make a purchase.

That's just great. So I guess the gift that marketing agencies have given us is that we can't trust _anybody_. The only thing left to do is go entirely cash-only and never give any personal details to any business whatsoever.

The marketing industry has become so toxic that it is now poisoning everything.

<comment><USER31> Not sure how you got to that conclusion. A simple ad blocker and not using fb would solve this issue entirely. Transaction data like restaurant purchases is only useful in this scenario if it's linkable to other online tracking data on you.

<comment><USER32> Browser ad blocker can't protect you from the actions of restaurant staff, acting on their booking software.

Not using fb can't protect you from fb independently creating shadow profiles with triangulation.

<comment><USER33> >Browser ad blocker can't protect you from the actions of restaurant staff

Then use a restaurant details blocker? Celebrities have been doing this since the beginning of time. Use an alias. The notion that physical places of business are collecting our data for their own purpose is not really a new one.

<comment><USER34> Yeah that's not actually true. Celebrities call and give their real names because being famous means there's always a table available even if when there isn't one for regular people. Source: In a past life I worked at a destination restaurant in the front of the house.

<comment><USER35> Do non-celebrities try to game this?

<comment><USER33> Yes I know a guy who looks like a C-list celebrity, he has called ahead and gets a table with bottle service. A little bit of research would show the real celebrity is in another city at the moment but they never do that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "This is a summary of the 931 apps and websites that have shared your activity." And "Some of your activity may not appear here." Holy cow!

<comment><USER37> I only had half a dozen, all from the last month. This is pretty surprising. I use Instagram regularly, though I only sign into Facebook occasionally.

All of the activity I had was from games that I casually installed and then deleted in the past month. These are games that I signed into with Google Play, which displayed advertisements primarily for Facebook.

Speaking of which, some of Facebook's advertisements are absurd.

[https://i.redd.it/czyfotsak2l41.jpg](https://i.redd.it/czyfotsak2l41.jpg)

"Start Reacting Today".

<comment><USER38> AI-made ad?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I have LAN TIM 2 on my facebook account and I have never bought anything from spreadshirt.

Moreover my facebook account is just a dummy one which only has the bare minimum of information to own my business page, which I don't even post to (I have dedicated social media people who do that).

Facebook doesn't even have my phone number, only my name and my business email address.

Very creepy.

<comment><USER40> > I have LAN TIM 2 on my facebook account and I have never bought anything > from spreadshirt.

Lan Tim 2 is likely a contract manufacturer. Spreadshirt outsources the production of their t-shirts to Lan Tim 2. Likely, many companies do this as well. Lan Tim 2 probably does more than just t-shirts.

It's like with most craft beer sold in cans. The individual breweries cannot supply the demand for their product, so they have another company that specializes in mass production do it according to their recipe.

The contract manufacturer is likely the one giving data to FB, not the spreadshirt.

<comment><USER39> I can confidently say i've never bought any t-shirts.

Perhaps they do other whitelabel manufacturing, but I just looked through my emails a week around the date and I don't see anything it could be.

Also keep in mind the only thing tied to my FB account is my work email (and my name I suppose), which I definitely didn't order anything with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I design Ad Tech systems, currently work as an architect for a DSP, and I deleted my Facebook accounts years ago. People who think they are privacy conscious and use Facebook are a living oxymoron.

<comment><USER42> Why do you build ad tech if you think it's harmful?

<comment><USER41> I moved to B2B, doing ads for companies targeting employees of other companies. Convincing you to buy a bad database is not harmful compared to convincing you buy unhealthy food or feel anxious about not having the latest in fashion.

<comment><USER8> Does B2B advertising still rely on stalking and collecting personal data? Personally my problem isn't as much as what the ads are about and more about the data they collect, essentially creating an ever growing liability for me up until the entire thing blows up when the data finally leaks.

<comment><USER41> We don't use fingerprinting besides cookies and don't rely on third party identity graphs; we have over a decade of experience doing B2B and understand what works. Also, anticipating the death of the cookie, we are moving towards contextual technologies over individual identifiers. Understanding a company's buying intent is a whole different ball game, takes a lot of data that doesn't belong to any single individual. It is intrusive to individuals because we infer your employer, but we don't care about anything else; we operate at a macro level and that keeps us ahead.

<comment><USER43> You infer peoples employer using what methods? I _genuinely_ don't understand why you'd think that's an acceptable thing to do.

<comment><USER41> We don't collect PII, emails, scrap profiles, etc. We are not in a situation in which someone could perform a few joins and know who was reading what, that's not how we designed it. If anything, we use a lot of financial and CRM data.

<comment><USER43> Er... maybe you're not being clear in what you do, but when I think of "financial data", I think of information that the general public would prefer nobody outside of their bank would have access to. Am I missing something?

I swear I'm not trying to be overly confrontational, but... what you're saying makes me think that you're just a bad guy who uses naive mental gymnastics to rationalize their dystopic contributions to the world. _Please_ prove me wrong. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but... you're not making it easy.

<comment><USER41> Think industry financial firmo graphics type data. Not your CC transactions. Also, I am not a moral compass. I have just done enough to feel proud of what I do while still making bank.

<comment><USER43> I have no idea what that means.

Edit: If you're not a moral compass (ie, you haven't put any thought about whether you're actively causing harm in the world), then you should at least try to say that on the onset.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> When the game is at this stage it's better to just not play.

When an advertising platform has to pay fartsniffers to follow you around to offer marginally better ctr than email spam, maybe just don't run ads?

Work manually on growing networks of users, actually walk up to them and chat, talk in relevant business forums and you won't spend thousands of dollars you don't have casting a net in hopes of finding people who more likely than not just don't want to be associated with your practices.

<comment><USER45> That is very true. Also the Google Page Rank has evolved strongly towards that direction. If you have meaningful content, praised by your peers, you get better organic traffic.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Am I the only one who thinks it would be pretty cool to hook this up as SaaS product that sends me an alert when I get a new offline conversion? Kind of like how my credit card sends me a push notification when I get charged for something. I like the level of transparency it provides.

Then you could also do something on a case by case basis where you can click to say "I don't want Facebook to have this offline conversion."

</comment><comment><USER47> I just checked, and have "LAN TIM 2" and "DiepTrinh" on my list.

The data from "LAN TIM 2" was sent to Facebook on the 5th of March 2020, yesterday that is.

The only stores I've shopped at lately were ALDI and EDEKA, and yesterday I bought a Webhosting offer directly at the hoster's site, no third party involved.

I have never bought a custom shirt.

What I do have is a Motorola G7 Plus, which is filled with uninstallable background services from Facebook. Two days ago I upgraded it to Android 10 and now all those background services, like "Facebook App Manager" or "Facebook Installer", "Facebook Services", all names which truly frighten me, are activated again. I had deactivated them months ago on Android 9 as soon as I got this phone. I really am wondering about the data this phone is pushing to Facebook without my consent.

I really wonder what caused those two entries, I never give any consent to any company to share my data.

God I hate Facebook, they are the cancer of the internet.

<comment><USER48> I have DiepTrinh as well and as I track my expenses I know for sure that I have not bought anything on the day they appeared on my list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> If it is Spreadshirt, doesn't going by `Lan Tim 2' violate Facebooks real names policy? Or is that just for peons?

<comment><USER50> From the article, it sounds like Spreadshirt outsources its manufacturing. (Just guessing, but they may even do drop shipping.)

There's no specific reason to believe this isn't the real name of the manufacturer. I tried to find more information about Lan Tim to see if that's likely the case, but I couldn't, but that's not very conclusive.

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> You can deactivate Off Facebook Activity.

[https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/future_activi...](https://www.facebook.com/off_facebook_activity/future_activity)

<comment><USER8> You are naive if you actually believe Facebook will actually stop associating the events with your profile just because you disable this setting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> Interesting and scary post.

But raises a more important question: If you are reading this and don't like it - why do you still have a FB account?

<comment><AUTHOR> Because humans are a social species. Abstinence is unrealistic for most people [https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/02/abstinence-isnt-safe-why- qu...](https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2020/02/abstinence-isnt-safe-why-quitting- social-media-isnt-the-solution/)

<comment><USER53> That's a bit of a flawed argument. Facebook isn't the only place online or offline where humans can socialise. Making the argument that staying with Facebook just for one potential (and flawed) avenue for socialising is to ignore myriad other ways to socialise.

<comment><USER54> Except that it's where the people that I would choose to socialize are. My twitter social graph is has nearly no overlap with my FB graph. For me twitter is mostly writers/literary types, FB is mostly people I know in real life (although most of my interaction on FB has been with interest-based communities for which no analogue exists outside of FB).

That said, I'm doing a social media fast for Lent. It's entirely possible that when Easter comes I might not go back to either Twitter or Facebook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Camera! My bloody _camera_ application that came with a phone pushes activity to facebook!

Google Chromecast shares activity with facebook!

<comment><USER55> Based on some of the network analysis I did on my phone, I think this is related to Facebook's analytics engine. Most apps I've seen communicate with graph.facebook.com to send telemetry (when which screen was opened etc.).

It wouldn't be beyond Facebook to immediately connect that telemetry to your user profile, making these apps show up in your profile.

<comment><USER10> Why would Google send anything to Facebook from its Home app ( the one used to control Chromecasts )? It's beyond short sighted to feed data to a competitor.

<comment><USER56> In what world are these two competitors? Would people "quit" Facebook to "join" Google?

You are the product in both of these companies, why wouldn't they work together? Ethics, sure, but that won't stop them.

<comment><USER10> They have the same customers and customers have a finite advertising budgets. When Facebook gets more Google data it benefits the "result" of the ads on facebook which in turn over time gets more $$ shifted there.

<comment><USER57> 1\. Who knows what data Google is giving back in return? 2\. Neither want a monopoly. A duopoly is far more resistant to regulation. 3\. Many business will advertise on multiple channels. So long as they edge out the others it's fine by them. They know they are the two premium outlets.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> This seems like a decent level of effort to build out especially if it's to become an effective thing. What's driving it, is it to show that facebook ads are delivering a total value in excess of the online conversions? Is this being done because there's questions over Facebook ads value return? Are we sure that Facebook ads even do deliver good value prop, like is this program showing successful linkage / is that linkage ad-related or organic?

</comment><comment><USER59> A bit off-topic, but does any one know how to get to the Off-Facebook Activity page by clicking through the interface? I've only seen links to it in articles, but I'd like to be able to show it to people who are logged in to Facebook.

<comment><USER60> On the web, it's Settings -> Your Facebook Information -> Off-Facebook Activity.

<comment><USER59> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Facebook also tracks your location via phones and has your location history - not sure if this is surfaced in this latest attempt at transparency

[https://about.fb.com/news/2019/09/understanding-updates- to-y...](https://about.fb.com/news/2019/09/understanding-updates-to-your- devices-location-settings/)

<comment><USER62> If you don't have the app does the website track your location on mobile or desktop?

<comment><AUTHOR> If you have given the FB website permission to use your browser's location, then it could track you. If you haven't, the best it can do is IP location.

For example, if you try to login from an unknown computer, you'll get an email asking if it was you - that usually contains a rough location based on IP.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This reminds me of a meme, "My wife asked why I spoke so softly in house, I said I was afraid Mack Zuckerberg was listening! She laughed, I laughed, Siri laughed, Alexa laughed"

</comment><comment><USER64> A while ago, I switched to per-site email addresses and a burner phone number I give to anything that isn't a financial institution or healthcare provider.

<comment><USER65> Smart. Recommended. Twilio makes this very simple.

<comment><USER66> Assuming Twilio doesn't leak your data. It doesn't, right?

<comment><USER8> Even if Twilio did leak the fact that the author signed up to Facebook it is still a lot better than leaking every single merchant to where the user has been.

<comment><USER66> Not necessarily. Twilio leaking would mean all the identities you thought were separate are one JOIN away from being aggregated into one.

See also: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22505464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22505464).

<comment><USER8> I am aware of this. I just don't understand what Twilio will gain from sending every single phone number you provision through them to Facebook or another advertising partner. It would actually pollute the data if they were to send these events from a high-volume customer that resells Twilio numbers to their own customers (who aren't doing business directly with Twilio and most likely aren't aware of it at all).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> This is in blatant violation of GDPR. At what moment did you as a user authorize Spreadshirt to communicate your private information to its partner "Lan Tim 2", and how does "Lan Tim 2" assume it can transfer your data to Facebook?

<comment><USER68> Lan Tim 2 was a subcontractor for the merchandise, and probably shipped it themselves. I'm no expert on the GDPR but I'm sure it has some kind of carve out for this kind of (very traditional, very routine) business arrangement.

The sharing with Facebook seems presumptively illegal. But I'm guessing the author isn't in Europe.

<comment><USER24> Nope, GDPR (and similar legislation before it) is explicit, you (even an individual "Sole Trader" in the course of business) need to _explicitly_ get permission to store or process people's personal information and you need to explain what will get done with it. You can't say "Eh, you know, stuff" and you aren't allowed to change your mind without requesting fresh permission (which obviously most users won't grant). You also need to make it possible for anybody to see what you've stored about them, and ensure you fix any mistakes promptly.

You _might_ get away with being somewhat vague about who needs it, e.g. maybe you can say "Our delivery contractors need to know your address" and not spell out which companies you've contracted with for delivery. But it's on you, the outfit the user gave their personal information to, to enforce that e.g. "This phone number is for calling our recipient about the delivery, you can't keep it after the delivery is successful and you can't give it to anybody else" through contractual arrangements or whatever other reasonable legal steps.

I am in Europe (though it's England, so eventually no longer subject to EU regulations sadly but it does have a Data Protection law anyway) and I see this "Lan Tim 2" crap in my Facebook as well. If I have bought anything from Spreadshirt it was months (maybe years?) before the supposed "Off-Facebook interaction" listed by Lan Tim 2.

I actually wouldn't be astonished if this comes down to:

* There's an incentive (maybe not by Facebook) to create tremendous numbers of "Interactions".

* It is possible to create fake Interactions by generating garbage, e.g. lists of randomly chosen phone numbers or email addresses and sending them to Facebook.

* So somebody creates accounts maybe initially with real business names "South China Air Freight Inc." and then they get lazy "So Lee" ... "Lan Tim" ... "Lan Tim 2" and they upload random garbage to harvest the incentive.

* This publicity drives Facebook to eliminate the incentive or make it too hard to upload garbage so that the incentive isn't worth it, and the "problem" goes away.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> Ah! This _might_ explain some of the weirder "wow, how could Facebook have known about this short of using the microphone" moments that I've had recently... well, short of either (a) using the microphone or (b) grovelling through vast piles of much more easily accessible external-to-Facebook data. Interesting.

</comment><comment><USER70> This is a good reason to use a service like Burner ( [https://www.burnerapp.com/](https://www.burnerapp.com/) ), and also probably to cycle your GSM handset number at your carrier multiple times per year, as TFA notes. (Switch to TOTP or U2F for two factor.)

I already use anonymous single-use email addresses for a lot of services (anonaddy.com is good for this), and I think in the future I'm going to just decline to use anything that demands a phone number of me. Far, far too much of it is being sold to third parties as soon as it's obtained by these companies.

[https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using- your...](https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/yes-facebook-is-using-your-2fa- phone-number-to-target-you-with-ads/)

<comment><USER8> Ironic that the service that's supposed to protect my privacy redirects me to a tracker (adjust.io) when trying to download their app. I'm also willing to bet good money the app itself will have creepy tracking built-in.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> I feel even better about resisting Facebook's attempts to get me to provide my phone number.

If I'm remembering right, they had two methods they'd switch between:

A. By emphasizing how much more secure it would make my account.

B. By telling me how many of my friends have provided theirs, which is a blatant attempt at manipulation via peer-pressure.

<comment><USER72> OKCupid is making a lot of noise these days about requiring a phone number, right after Facebook themselves had a massive breach (267+ million numbers):

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbbrandon/2019/12/19/267-mil...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnbbrandon/2019/12/19/267-million- names-and-phone-numbers-leaked-online---and-theyre-all-from- facebook/#3cf81c4c5a6b)

Either it's a bizdev scam that they're all trying to get in on, or they're clueless. I lean toward the latter but expect it to be the former. Surely they can raise ad rates with the extra PII, I'm guessing?

</comment></comment><comment><USER73> What would a "Real Privacy Problems" website/blog, aimed at individuals/consumers, look like and need to do to be an effective site to a) inform, and b) empower people to hold companies and our governments more accountable for the regulatory and industry environment in which we operate, and c) empower those individuals to make the changes in their own tech and behavior to minimize their own exposure?

</comment><comment><USER74> A few comments and op were trying to align dates listed in fb to dates they made purchases based on cc data and haven't been successful. I don't know if it's the case here, but working with dates in facebook ads is a bit of headache. Those dates might be when the transaction was made, when it processed, when the product was shipped, when the user first saw an as, when they last saw an ad, etc.

</comment><comment><USER75> I am stunned that despite having ublock origin and privacy badger in chrome, I still see numerous sites sharing my data. What plugin disables this?

<comment><USER76> None of them. You sign up to a website, they'll get your name, username, email and turn it over to FB.

<comment><USER77> I made the mistake of using the same "throwaway" email address for Facebook as all my online orders. Of course many of the stores uploaded their data on me to Facebook...

The bitchy thing is, even an Android app like MX Player or Maps.ME was sending events to Facebook, but FB's JSON just said "custom event"...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER78> I don't know the technical details, but the name itself looks like Vietnamese name, stripped from Vietnamese accent. The one with accent might be "Lan Tím 2".

Also since it is related to Spreadshirt, many Vietnamese are working in t-shirt making MMO, which make it even more suspicious to me.

</comment><comment><USER79> It's really pretty simple. If you use Facebook to login to other services, they're connected. If you're concerned about it, don't use Facebook as your ticket to all the other services out there.

<comment><USER19> That is not true, I have never used FaceBook login for anything, and certainly not for the 12 services listed in my "Off-Facebook Activity" tab.

<comment><USER80> i just get a facebook loginpage when i click the link. I dont use facebook thus dont have an account and never have. I wonder what is the difference?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Is it just coincidence that the name is a lot like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tam_Lin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tam_Lin)

</comment><comment><USER82> If true, this is absolutely outrageous behaviour from Facebook and companies involved or doing similar things. It's stalking branded as advertising.

</comment><comment><USER83> I always prefer to log in not through facebook and voila: no app in my list :)

I mean, what did you think happens when you sign up via facebook?

</comment><comment><USER84> Why the fuck are government websites like coveredca.com sharing information with facebook? I don't use facebook logins with it.

</comment><comment><USER85> As a person that doesn't use Facebook, the restaurant thing makes me want to punch Facebook employees.

</comment><comment><USER86> A good reason not to have facebook on your phone or create a facebook account linked to you cell number.

<comment><USER87> Interesting … it occurs to me that Signal ties everything to phone numbers, and is presumably able to see which phone numbers are communicating with one another (since they route messages between accounts and don't use private information retrieval). I wonder if they resell any of that information.

<comment><USER24> Signal doesn't know who sent most messages between friends.

Signal users have a "profile" which is encrypted, and their device can give the keys to other people. By default it'll give keys to Contacts you message on Signal, and this encrypted profile has more keys and tokens inside it that people can use to send you stuff. So when you send a Signal message to your friend Alice, what Signal sees is that somebody sent this encrypted message, which comes with a token proving Alice authorised somebody to send her a message.

Alice's device decrypts the message, and in doing so it decrypts a MAC which it can then examine to prove that this is a message from zeveb (or Alice has faked a message to herself but like, why?). Signal never learns who you were in this process.

So, if you use Signal to communicate with strangers and they haven't overridden the defaults (you can say you love strangers and don't mind spam, in which case this Sealed Sender technology works for anybody sending you messages) they would if they wanted to be able to figure out this relationship, and then monetize it. They explicitly promise not to, but I guess if you want to you could believe that Signal is the problem and we shouldn't worry about Facebook.

I definitely have a bridge for sale you should enquire about, also that big iron tower in France? I can get you a good deal on the scrap.

<comment><USER87> > Signal doesn't know who sent most messages between friends.

Why not? They know which device sent the message (because Signal were sent it) and they know which device received it (because Signal sent it). I know that they have some really clever ways to forget the sender information and still route the messages, but we really don't know that they actually do forget it.

> They explicitly promise not to, but I guess if you want to you could believe > that Signal is the problem and we shouldn't worry about Facebook.

I think Facebook is a far greater problem, but I also worry that Signal is a problem too. It's not either/or but both/and.

<comment><USER24> > They know which device sent the message (because Signal were sent it)

"Which device" here meaning they have an origin IP address for the traffic? Is that what you think most people mean by "sender" ?

Like, who sent this postcard "A pillar box in Westminster, London" ?

If your quibble was that this isn't technically completely anonymous I'm down with that. But the original claim was that Signal can tie this to a phone number, and "We could tell the IP address of the sending device" isn't that at all.

If you are worried about IP addresses then just as with literally everything else the only effective way to hide your IP is Tor. But then why bring Signal into this?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> I also have "Lan Tim 2" in my account. But I've never even heard of Spreadshirt until now.

Strange.

<comment><USER24> It's shown on my account too, it's the only thing shown. I use a Container to ensure Facebook doesn't connect my presence there to anything else, but evidently "Lan Tim 2" wasn't fooled and somehow connected... something to that account.

I also have access to an account for a fictitious member of an old web comedy group I was part of. They don't have anything from Lan Tim 2, but Lê Linh did register some "Off-Facebook Activity". Which is impressive for a person who doesn't even exist. Good quality data, obviously, from both Lan Tim 2 and Lê Linh.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> I've never made a Facebook account because I haven't wanted to agree to their data collection practices, terms of service, privacy policy, etc. How can I see what they have on me without agreeing to those things? (At minimum they should have records of their attempts to recruit me as an employee, but I never initiated those and never proceeded beyond a polite "no thanks" email reply.)

I don't get the benefit of GDPR or CCPA since I live in Quebec, Canada rather than the EU or California. But, I wonder if there's a way for me to send a request based on Canadian or Quebec privacy law, since they do have an office and plenty of users here in Quebec? Or have they effectively firewalled that stuff off from whatever entity controls or processes the data?

<comment><USER16> > How can I see what they have on me without agreeing to those things?

You can't. It's part of the perversity that is Facebook -- in order to be able to see (and delete-ish) the data they have about you, you need to sign up for an account and give them more data about you.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> the fact there is no "household" or "user targeting" to be found in this comment thread with currently 265 comments tell me there are only clueless pundits.

every single advertising company already sell advertisements by "household" where they clump together all accounts assumed to be from one user and their family/roommates, effectively going back to aggregate IP targeting, but not saying its using IPs because that tarnish things with GDPR et al.

also, even if not using household, they sell by "people targeting" vs the old "device targeting", which again breaks all account separation people here assume.

I strongly suggest people minimally interested in privacy or advertising to create an account with any advertising network, or at the very least look up youtube videos on how marketers create and target campaigns.

</comment><comment><USER91> Using Facebook for Business does not violate GDPR as long as it's stated in the privacy policy. Which for example Airbnb do mention ([https://www.airbnb.com/terms/privacy_policy#sec201910_4](https://www.airbnb.com/terms/privacy_policy#sec201910_4)).

Other situations where Facebook processes data sent by third parties to show relevant ads for said third party and not use the data to match for other ads is also legal under GDPR, since Facebook only acts as a data processor to act on behalf of said third party.

When ordering from Spreadshirt, you may be ordering from a partner that uses Facebook for Business and their privacy policy apply to you. This is also stated in Spreadshirt's privacy policy.

GDPR is not an umbrella protection for all type of tracking, even though it usually is brought up as such. It only makes sure you have insight in what is getting shared, a way to export, modify and delete said information. In shop/partner situations, you have to contact the partner to request deletion as the shop is not responsible after your approval.

I may be completely wrong, but this is my general understanding.

<comment><USER92> Just putting it in the privacy policy isn't good enough. The general consensus is that unless you're claiming another legal basis for your processing of data (which would be hard to argue here), consent needs to be informed, opt-in, and granular per usage. I don't see evidence of that in this story.

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> This is GDPR bomb.</comment>


Adblock Browser: Less Ads on Your Android Phone - <AUTHOR> http://gizmodo.com/adblock-browser-righteously-fends-off-ads-on-your-andro-1705808200

<comment><USER2> Stannis Baratheon says "fewer"</comment>


Show HN: Invoicerb, a simple, command line invoice tool - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/emson/invoicerb <comment><AUTHOR> So this was a simple command line invoice tool I created. The reason was that I used a third party app "Invoy" that never got updated and then didn't work with subsequent OS X updates.

The premiss was to create an invoice tool, that I could quickly run from the command line and didn't use a database.

Anyway take a look and let me know what you think.</comment>


PHP 7 null coalescing operator - <AUTHOR> http://www.richardbagshaw.co.uk/php-7-null-coalescing-operator/ <comment><USER2> This is a neat operator, but my first thought was that I'd probably forget it's specifics and misuse it thinking that it checks for falsy variables as well. This wouldn't help you in checking for a blank string, say.</comment>


Ask HN: Why is instant messaging over email not a thing? - <AUTHOR> I mean it seems like the perfect replacement for WhatsApp and all the centralized messaging services.
And everybody has an E-Mail address.
So why is there no widely adopted app that fakes the overlay from an instant messaging service with the email back-end? This idea is obviously not new, i have found 4 companies that tried it [0] [1], one of these companies is Microsoft [2].
Is there a problem i don't see? Is mail to slow? - i have tried it between Gmail and some other service and it seems fast enough.
There is even Push-IMAP (P-IMAP) for the push notification.
So is there a technical problem? Why is the instant messaging over email not a thing?
[0] https://www.spikenow.com/de/
[1] Hop and MailTime
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2015/07/22/microsoft-introduces-send-a-short-form-email-app-that-works-more-like-instant-messaging/ <comment><USER2> From article [2]:

> _But Microsoft argues that there's still a place for this sort of short-form > messaging within email, too, noting how you may need to quickly send a co- > worker a message like: "don't send the presentation yet!" or "let's chat in > 10," for example._

Couldn't you just put that quick message in the subject line of an e-mail with an empty body? It doesn't seem like you'd need a separate app to do that.

As far as I'm concerned, I wish my co-workers would stop trying to call or Slack me and just send an e-mail. Then I can have all my messages in one place that's easily searchable and can be filtered using my e-mail client's filtering rules.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is exactly what I was thinking. If you could just chat with an appealing UI over email, you have all your massages on one place.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> SMTP has a SEND command, so it should use that for such a purpose, I should think. But of course, not all email services support it, but you can use MAIL instead of SEND is not recognized, and then it will still work.

I usually receive a notification in the status bar on my computer as soon as the message is sent, although that is because I run my own email server. If you use someone else's server, then such a thing is more difficult, and may be too slow.

</comment><comment><USER4> What's the issue? You already listed Spike and Hop, which I believe are the best examples. Delta Chat also merits mention. They're all great UIs that can do IM and use email as the backend.

I think the main downside to the approach is that there are so many messaging apps out there, there isn't a clear use case for an email based one, besides a technical one. It _is_ nice to be able to send one liners to team members and clients, but it's something that Slack and all other collaboration apps accomplish. What do you think is missing?

<comment><AUTHOR> It looks like Hop is now Spike.

I didn't know Delta Chat, it looks promising, i will try it out!

> What do you think is missing? The interoperability, the freedom of not be > owned by a company. And, at least in Germany, all people have 3 messaging > types - SMS, Email and WhatsApp. And i don't want to use a Facebook product.

So the only other possible way to communicate with all other people is E-Mail. SMS is no option since its 0.09€ per send SMS.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I really also asked myself this question before. I sometimes used Outlook in an instant-messaging way and wondered if there is any optimized frontend to do so. Many "old school" businesses and government entities still struggle to introduce instant-messaging as an official way to communicate - end then it ends at the company's boundaries as others use other tools. Email is broadly accepted. I would become a user of instant-mail.

</comment><comment><USER6> Because you don't want to get an email every time someone hits <enter>. The UI is very different, an email client would have no idea how to treat these one- liners and you don't want to have your inbox flooded with messages. Also, people just don't seem to care what protocol is used, and email is massively inefficient for that.

</comment><comment><USER7> An early reason is that email, being all public protocols and interoperable and all, is less end-to-end encryptable than an app where you control all the code and systems.

</comment><comment><USER8> all you need is an X-Notification header . i guess nobody is going to do it though because they can't lock in users.</comment>