The trauma of Facebook's content moderators - <AUTHOR> https://restofworld.org/2020/facebook-international-content-moderators/ <comment><USER2> That was good article and I think something really needs to be done to make content moderation more humane.

This quote from the article

 _"It gets to a point where you can eat your lunch while watching a video of someone dying. … But at the end of the day, you still have to be human."_

reminded me of a similar article published by WIRED six years ago [1].

 _Eight years after the fact, Jake Swearingen can still recall the video that made him quit. He was 24 years old and between jobs in the Bay Area when he got a gig as a moderator for a then-new startup called VideoEgg. Three days in, a video of an apparent beheading came across his queue._

 _"Oh fuck! I 've got a beheading!" he blurted out. A slightly older colleague in a black hoodie casually turned around in his chair. "Oh," he said, "which one?" At that moment Swearingen decided he did not want to become a connoisseur of beheading videos. "I didn't want to look back and say I became so blasé to watching people have these really horrible things happen to them that I'm ironic or jokey about it."_

[1] [https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content- moderation/](https://www.wired.com/2014/10/content-moderation/)

<comment><USER3> It would be great if there were a way to make content moderation more humane, but perhaps this is like saying that it would be great if we could make hospital emergency room work more humane. It is unavoidably traumatic, and ER staff are known to detach and use dark humor as a coping mechanism. Content moderation is a similarly noble and difficult profession.

<comment><USER4> ER staff are paid a lot more, are sometimes even in a union, and also get the benefit of helping people and seeing the effect of their help.

<comment><USER5> Ever hang out with an ER staffer?

Most of their workload is bullshit. People with colds and sore throats, depressing people using ER as primary care, assholes using 911 to score Medicaid cab vouchers.

And at any time, any number of people can show up with any kind of personal tragedies from stokes to various traumas. My sister quit after a 13 year old bled out from a gsw, and she walked out of the room and got kicked in the head by an prisoner who had been stabbed after he bit the ears off of three other prisoners, and broke the arm of a guard.

<comment><USER3> Bite one inmate's ear...shame on you.

Bite a 2nd inmate's ear...shame on him.

Bite a 3rd inmate's ear...that's fricking badass.

<comment><USER6> Please don't do this here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's probably a bit controversial to say this, but haven't large sites had to deal with these problems for years by the time the likes of Facebook/Twitter/YouTube/Instagram/whatever came around?

It's obviously horrible doing this as a job and it's obviously a bit more common on Facebook than say, a large old school internet forum, but... at least in this case people are paid to do this. Reddit mods and old school forum mods have to deal with this stuff for free.

<comment><USER8> Right but the difference is the sheer amount of money involved and the politicization that comes with that. If Facebook was worth 100m nobody would care. If facebook only has 10m users nobody would care. It's the scale that completely breaks the legal and political frameworks the our society leans on.

<comment><USER9> I'd say another difference is the percentage of your attention is being devoted to this kind of thing. Presumably reddit or phpbb mods aren't spending 40 hr/wk looking at gore.

<comment><USER10> Wouldn't that suggest then that the "ideal" way to do it is a very part time job then with high volume? Like say 5 hours a week. It would be a scheduling and logistical nightmare of course but it would give more "dispersion time" for trauma.

<comment><USER9> I'd be interested to see if the tooling around moderation could also be improved. For example, could the images start heavily blurred, with a circle of clarity that opens when you click. Or something like that, which would harm throughput, but be more humane.

<comment><USER11> This is a very interesting idea. It could reveal only a portion and see how often that was enough for the moderator to pass judgement.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They should recruit people on Reddit for this. A large number of them seem perfectly fine with this type of content.

There are dedicated communities to all these things.

I do not mean this as a hit against Reddit users. It is just that there are small pockets of people who are psychologically capable of tolerating this or even enjoy it. It seems more ethical to hire people from /r/watchpeopledie.

<comment><USER13> I'd wonder if frequents in these subreddits are typically professional and healthy people to have on a team, though (honestly no idea, never been).

It's a strange conundrum because ideally you want good people who are comfortable watching things good people rarely want to watch.

Don't have much experience with this demographic -- maybe there are more sane, emotionally healthy people watching snuff films for fun than I instinctively expect.

<comment><USER14> > _maybe there are more sane, emotionally healthy people watching snuff films > for fun than I instinctively expect._

Probably not, since there are no documented instances of any snuff films ever found.

<comment><USER15> [https://consortiumnews.com/2019/07/11/the-revelations-of- wik...](https://consortiumnews.com/2019/07/11/the-revelations-of-wikileaks- no-4-the-haunting-case-of-a-belgian-child-killer-and-how-wikileaks-helped- crack-it/)

Thanks to Wikileaks publishing the Dutroux Dossier in 2008, we know hundreds of snuff films were recovered from the notorious pedo-rapist Marc Dutroux.

Just because the police keep those films as sealed evidence that are never published does NOT mean snuff films are an Urban Legend. I can see why the police always keep snuff films secret. Imagine what would happen if snuff films were uploaded all over the Internet? There would be mobs of angry villagers armed with torches and pitchforks descending on jails and prisons to lynch pedos. It would make harassment from QANONs look like school yard bullying.

<comment><USER14> Snuff films are, fortunately, still only a subject of urban legends, since those films you mention do not meet the definition. Were those films made _in order to entertain other people_ than the person who made them? Were the films ever _distributed_ to any of those people? Was anyone ever actually killed _in_ any of these movies? If the answer to _any one_ of those three questions is "no", then the movies, horrible as they may be, were _not_ "snuff" films, as commonly defined. From what I can see in your reference, the first _two_ of those things are decidedly _not_ true, and the reference is unclear regarding the third.

(The films were, according to your reference, made only for _blackmail_ purposes, and therefore certainly not made for enjoyment of any viewer, nor were they ever distributed to other people for their enjoyment. The reference does claim that people were killed in a specific place which was also filmed, but does not, what I can see, explicitly state that any murders were actually filmed, other than incorrectly calling all the films "snuff" films.)

<comment><USER16> I think that some of you should take a look at news websites about the drug and kidnapping cartels down in Latin America... They regularly post their own snuff films online and I can guarantee you that they're not only very real but also extraordinarily brutal. No urban legend about it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Every time you use Facebook, see an advertisement there, or click it, every time you share content on Facebook and get others to engage with that platform, you are contributing to a platform that is directly responsible for human psychological harm, in many different ways.

Same for Twitter, and for Reddit, and Instagram... and probably TikTok.

I don't believe the use of these platforms can be considered ethical.

<comment><USER18> You are commenting on one of those platforms right now.

<comment><USER17> HackerNews is a limited-focus link aggregation and comment platform. It doesn't require the kind of moderation that larger scale, broad-focus social media platforms do.

I don't envy the work that Dan and Scott have to do in the slightest, but I don't think they'll end up with PTSD from it. At least, that's what I gathered when I read "The Lonely Work of Moderating Hacker News"[0], especially this description of it: "Pressed to describe Hacker News, they do so by means of extravagant, sometimes tender metaphors: the site is a "social ecosystem," a "hall of mirrors," a "public park or garden," a "fractal tree."

[0][http://archive.is/bbzan](http://archive.is/bbzan)

<comment><USER19> So you think the only ethical sites are the ones that operate a small scale?

<comment><USER17> I can't say for sure, since I don't know every site. But I would posit that ethical operation is inversely correlated with user base size.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I'm surprised there hasn't been a revenge movie where one of these moderators use their access to find out where these people live and start hunting them down like some sort of batman-like person. I could see a movie like this being a means of making the more general population aware of the terrible stuff content moderators have to watch.

<comment><USER21> This is totally not what you are talking about, but the closest thing I have seen to that is the Netflix docuseries Don't Fuck With Cats. It hits on a lot of the same topics. The primary differences are that the hunters are Facebook users and not moderators and they are hunting the person to get justice and not violent revenge.

<comment><USER22> There's a show called Darknet [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_(TV_series)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darknet_\(TV_series\)) that's somewhat along these lines too, but it's very much in the horror genre.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> What I am wondering, and this is probably a dumb question, is why this has not been automatized? Can't content moderation be done with modern and strong machine learning based systems? There must be plenty of training data on this, and just like a spam filter which does not require humans in most cases, this should also be automatable. Why is it not?

<comment><USER24> It has been. Most of these sites catch a ton of images and video automatically when they are similar enough to prior known content.

That doesn't matter from a staff point of view though. You have a queue to work through. You'll be putting in an 8 hour day dealing with the stuff the system doesn't catch. The automation just means they don't need as much staff.

<comment><USER25> Yep. One way to view automation with machine vision / perception is that it can cover ~85-95% of the true positives.

You're still going to get false positives and false negatives that need human review, and at a scale of Facebook, that's a lot of humans.

<comment><USER23> I am just hoping that those currently uncovered cases will be "milder or more nuanced" cases that will be less damaging to the psyche of human moderators and will, once labeled correctly, improve the coverage rate of automated moderators.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> If you haven't seen The Cleaners, I highly recommend it.

[https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-cleaners/](https://thoughtmaybe.com/the- cleaners/)

</comment><comment><USER27> I can't help but wonder what the numbers look like on this content. One of the things Facebook should have enough data to know is how prevalent this sort of thing is.

Is deeply offensive content generated by a handful of users frequently, or many users less often? What's the volume look like?

<comment><USER28> Agreed. I would definitely love to see some sort of a basic data analysis blog post on this topic from FB, similar to how match.com used to publish data analysis posts on their blog back in the day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> Given auto translate works reasonably well these days, how much commonality does Negative Content over different regions and languages have?

Anyone know? Is it like 10%? 80%?

There must be, by now, a whole lot of data on whats getting flagged region/language wise.

Maybe we need a Cloudflare for Content.

<comment><USER30> Depends on the language. In my experience Vietnamese -> English is horrid and comes out as mostly garbage. Interestingly, the reverse has been better from what my Vietnamese friends tell me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> There are some things I will explicitly avoid in projects I'm working on. One of them is allowing picture or video uploads to users if the service is free. There's no low-risk, cost effective solution for moderating it, and in my country we also don't have safe-harbour type laws, so any content on the platform is your responsibility.

<comment><USER32> I had considered using services like Google Cloud Vision or other services for explicit image detection anyway.

Most websites it seems when you upload an image it's immediately available, I always wonder if it goes through some basic moderation system or just waits to get reported.

I've done tagging jobs on MTurk before it's weird... seeing random people's images.

<comment><USER31> I would wager most wait for things to get reported rather than be pre-emptive about it. I wonder if MTurk could ever be fast enough for an approval process on something like Instagram.

I think vetting users rather than content is probably the most efficient method of community curation though. If you have an approval process or other ways to validate that users aren't nefarious then you would reduce your workload by a bunch. Most bad images seem to come from burner accounts.

Unfortunately the only thing that comes to mind is a social credit as a service style system and maybe that's not where we want to steer this ship...

<comment><USER32> Yeah the tagging jobs I did were weird like "find the baby" haha... And other obvious tagging videos.

I can get from the user side about the burner accounts. I feel a physical response when I get denied to post a first post say in a sub and I'm like "Excuse me..." But yeah that's definitely discouraging/limiting to stick around before contributing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It also sounds (from other articles) like people are seeing specific clips multiple times. Surely a bit of semi-AI filtering should be able to blacklist the regular stuff

</comment><comment><USER34> The issue is as real as western countries dumping garbage in eastern countries just because they can pay them off.

The local governments won't acknowledge this as problem because of the money flowing in and a lot of people's livelihood is dependent on this. But we should call it what it is, exploitation.

<comment><USER35> I think in regards to India, the issue is a little more complex, and intertwined with social mores. This one sentence from the article is really important:

> According to Dr. K. Jyothirmayi, a Hyderabad-based psychiatrist, stigmas, > such as the perceived impact of a mental health diagnosis on one's marital > prospects, often prevent young Indians from seeking treatment.

From growing up in India, my view is that meditation and the general state of the mind has been taken seriously for, well, centuries. But move the focus towards anything with 'psych' or 'mental' in the title and people in India will shy away from it _even if it is affordable or free_. "Seeing a mental health counselor" is a recipe for considerable social stigma in India [1], not an empowering practice like it's perceived as in the United States.

The solution to this is hard, and in my opinion not something that Facebook or their Indian subcontractors can accomplish.

\</comment></comment><comment>-----

[1] I'm talking "All your relatives will refer to you as the crazy person" or "Your girlfriend's parents will call off the engagement" levels of stigma, not just "I don't feel comfortable talking about it in a bar" levels. Like a lot of other things, families with higher levels of income and education are _sometimes_ an exception.

</comment><comment><USER36> I read somewhere long ago that there have been incidents of FBI employees tasked with reviewing child pornography [1] who saw so much that they became desensitized or even aroused by it. Does anyone know if this is well- documented, or was this an exception rather than a common occurence?

[1] [https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/operation- innocent-...](https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/operation-innocent- images)

</comment><comment><USER37> I can't even barely read this article before becoming extremely sad for these people and the individuals (especially children) who were abused in these videos. I hope everyone involve gets the healing they need.

It's not the flat-earther and somesuch conspirary communities that worry me. It's the people who share and get enjoyment from this kind of content, and the networks which enable it.

</comment><comment><USER38> I cant help wonder about the economic(choices) side of this around 1) Should this victimization be taken into account when punishing offenders eventually tried and 2) Is the damage done to the content moderators marginally worth keeping the marginally caught content off the platform (recall there already is automation doing the bulk of the work)...

I do think we need to think about the side effects of laws where some US citizen demands that Facebook must employ content moderations else be liable for hosting it, it doesnt result in Facebook executives, engineers et al. bearing the burden. It results in some poor person in a 3rd world country bearing the burden.

Kind of like the environmental aspect of things I would think the best investment is in total prevention of the heinous acts in the first place. ie, it's much cheaper to prevent CO2 than it is to clean it up after the fact.

</comment><comment><USER39> Is this a case of trying to solve social problems with technical solutions? Maybe a platform like FB that is not run by the community that uses it simply cannot regulate users behaviour like a real social community can.

</comment><comment><USER40> I recall a statistic from about 10 years ago that computer forensic investigators in law enforcement burn out after two years due to the trauma of the images they are exposed to.

<comment><USER41> There's likely some confounding factors. Pressing "go" on the overpriced software tools and then entering into evidence what you find is the lowest level of work in that field so the churn is going to naturally be very high as people move up or out. The pay also isn't that great.

<comment><USER42> No, that is not the issue. Rather the issue is that even the hardest stuff on Facebook isn't remotely comparable to stuff of actual criminals, and the effort is wildly different:

\- Facebook: it's violating rules? Delete, next.

\- Forensic IT on a multi TB disk _full_ with child porn: document _every_ photo, what it shows, extract identifiable faces to cross reference with other content (to check for recurring places and victims), and the process is even more gory for video content. You have to watch every second or the defense can attempt "you didn't watch the video in full where the perp gives the victim an ice cream at the end" or whatever else. The amount of time you spend with documenting a single photo or video is many orders of magnitude worse than FB content mods.

<comment><USER43> This sounds very grevious, it's sad that a human being has to do this work

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Can we build better AI off of the data these moderators have generated to make their lives easier?

Can you crowdsource the moderation task to double check what the ai is flagging?

<comment><USER45>
        > Can we build better AI

Nope. That's what the people in charge of our social media companies keep trying, over and over, and it doesn't work at all. AI-moderation is like the Ring is to Golem for them. They can't accept that "cheap and fair" moderation isn't currently possible.

        > Can you crowdsource the moderation task

This is the clear answer, imo, and it isn't obvious to me why these C-level execs avoid it. If I had to make a guess, maybe they think engaging with millions of their users about moderation would open a can of worms.

<comment><USER27> When the goal is to prevent users from seeing this content, crowd-sourcing moderation defeats the purpose.

Users don't want the back-stop to be "a critical mass of community members object;" for content like this, they want to see zero of it, ever, and will choose to use another site that satisfies that hard constraint if FB cannot.

<comment><USER45>
        > they want to see zero of it, ever

Many _want_ that, but very few (probably nobody at all, by this point) _expect_ it.

        > When the goal is to prevent users from
        > seeing this content, crowd-sourcing moderation
        > defeats the purpose.

It's not actually all-or-nothing, and if it were, it would defeat it no less frequently than paid moderation already does. People tolerated toxic internet content before social media not because they never encountered any, but because they encountered much less.

No system can ever stop 100% of users from seeing 100% of the material they find objectionable. Every user has their own idea of what material is beyond the pale, and even if we invent AI that is competent at blocking content, and capable of tailoring its filters per-user, it will still fail some of the time, because users are people, and people's tastes change over time.

Aside from that, the way Youtube, Reddit, Twitter et al, currently operate, a user who reports objectionable content typically waits days, weeks, or years (or forever) for the company to take action. If you give a user a little _real_ agency, it goes a long way to mitigate their displeasure over occasional exposure to unwanted content.

<comment><USER27> What real agency does the system you propose offer? Because one down- moderation from a volunteer moderator is a drop in the bucket.

Meanwhile, if your system requires users to view beheading videos regularly, people will just migrate to a site that doesn't require that.

<comment><USER45> If I had to come up with a system, it would be some sort of reputation hierarchy, with a small number of paid employees at the top. Each level is responsible for auditing the levels under them.

        > What real agency does the system you propose offer?

The ability for millions of users to moderate themselves. So... fast response time, by opinionated, emotionally-invested moderators, as opposed to the status quo: slow response time by paid burn-outs following a flow-chart.

        > if your system requires users to view beheading videos regularly

I'm pretty sure that content would be reported faster than anything else. To be fair, another part of the issue is ban-evasion using multiple accounts, and that indeed requires additional measures to handle. Sadly, there's a disincentive to dealing with fake accounts, because trolls count as "sign-ups" too.

        > people will just migrate to a site that doesn't require that.

Like Youtube and Facebook still occassionally do. Well, most users haven't abandoned them yet, so there goes that theory :)

<comment><USER27> > occasionally

Precisely. How often? Close to never.

<comment><USER45> Give or take a live-streamed Christchurch massacre?

<comment><USER27> Yes. One disastrous livestream in the history of the feature, with further controls added almost immediately as a result.

<comment><USER45> Neither Youtube nor Facebook currently are able to filter _all_ these incidents. This happened _after_ Christchurch:

[https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1853804/mass- sh...](https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/general/1853804/mass-shooter- killed-at-korat-mall-20-dead)

I could swear there was also a Christchurch copy-cat attack in Europe, but I can't remember sufficient details about it to find an article. Perhaps that one wasn't streamed on FB.

I don't have encyclopedic knowledge of Facebook atrocities (I closed my account nearly a decade ago), but without vetting content before it goes live, I don't see how they will entirely prevent these videos from reaching _some_ users.

<comment><USER27> I don't know that _all_ is realistic. It's the desired unattainable goal. _Almost all_ is the current status quo. If a service like FB were to adopt a volunteer moderator model, that track record would crash by definition because the moderators would be seeing the garbage.

(That's before we factor in unintended consequences such as the risk that a critical mass of moderators decide the garbage is signal and start passing it. It's more risk than FB wants to take on for a problem they already solve via paid employees).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> About 9 years ago, I found myself at a party consisting mostly of content moderators for The Cheezburger Network.

I walked out of there shellshocked.

</comment><comment><USER47> Only a human should be able to decide what other humans can and cannot see. A future where computers are responsible for "deciding" what information we consume about the world is not one I want to live in. Computers are already being used as tools of censorship, we don't need it to be expanded further.

<comment><USER48> If computers can help with spam, they can certainly help with other well- defined and well-audited types of illegal and misinformed content.

It would be worse to not invest in more automation, even malpractice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I hope they are tagging these videos and someone somewhere is working on a neural network to classify the new ones.

</comment><comment><USER50> Funny how they can automatically flag copyright for videos now even when x mirrored but they can't identify these videos.

I can't believe there's so much original content for this. Maybe they could share a db of hashes of known bad videos across sites and government agencies.

</comment><comment><USER51> This is also relevant: [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/11/microsoft...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/11/microsoft- employees-child-abuse-lawsuit-ptsd)

</comment><comment><USER52> I don't understand what's done with the contractors in the US after the successful lawsuit, surely all those jobs were just moved offshore? There's no mention of this at all in the article....

</comment><comment><USER53> Perhaps it's a solution to use brainwave headsets. So whenever the viewer would get too much negative stimulation, the video would stop and the viewer could take a break.

<comment><USER54> The headset could also put a mark into their performance review for failing to develop a sufficient coping strategy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This story is an interesting contrast to the story of Twitter dropping users for spreading the QAnon conspiracy.

Clearly, there's near-universal agreement that _some_ moderation is fine; only a handful of (downvoted) comments on this thread saying "The easiest way to fix this problem would be for Facebook to stop censoring posts and let users block what they don't want to see." But we clearly don't think that's a good solution in this case.

The question of whether QAnon should also be blocked is one of degree, not quality.

</comment><comment><USER55> how do you become a Facebook moderator?

</comment><comment><USER56> Is Facebook worth it? Is it worth the trauma?

<comment><USER55> if it wasn't worth it, people would not do such jobs and people would not use Facebook, so apparently for a lot of people it is worth it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> Some great undercover video of what goes on at Cognizant here, as far as bias in moderating actions is concerned:

[https://www.politicalite.com/latest/facebook-employee-if- som...](https://www.politicalite.com/latest/facebook-employee-if-someone-is- wearing-a-maga-hat-i-am-going-to-delete-them-for-terrorism/)

In this video it is shown that regarding beheadings, Facebook made it a point to send their moderation contractors a memo that the image that was frequently reported of President Trump's face with a knife at the neck where he is being beheaded was an exception to the content policy on beheadings/violence/incitement because it was considered to be "art" by some museum somewhere in Portland - which from what I can see on TV - appears to be an extremely volatile and violent place in some parts.

There is a reference to a cartoon post of Elmer Fudd shooting a cartoon gun at Beto O'Rourke with the text "I'm here for your guns" at the top - which was not given any similar exception.

I don't think Facebook or their partners are serious about this kind of thing at all since they seem ok with advocating violence and gore when it resonates with some personal opinions.

Also noteworthy is that the name of this whistleblower garners fewer search results on Google, than the name of another whistleblower Eric Ciaramella who, if you uttered a-la Voldemort, would get you banned instantly.

Broadly, content policy at these websites seems to be a lord of the flies, unprincipled hackjob of whatever the political machinery at the organization deems worthy of steering society in the direction of their whims. Given the influence and power of Facebook and other tech platforms, this should worry people. I'm less inclined to be sympathetic to these folks and the difficulty of their jobs, given the apparent willingness to become social constructionists with the power that they wield so irresponsibly.

</comment><comment><USER58> In my opinion this is an argument in favour of shutting Facebook (and every other large social network) down. This sort of work is damaging and abusive, and nobody should have to endure it just so we can have social networks.

I understand there are some jobs in the world that need to deal with dark stuff (like law enforcement), but social networks just aren't worth the human cost.

<comment><USER59> That's a non-solution.

What you're proposing is not just shutting down social networks, it's shutting down any website that involves user content, anything that allows photo/video upload, comments, or any kind of user interaction. That's impossible.

You point out that public safety jobs are view more "worth it," and certainly they are, but that logic brings up the question of who judges what job is worth undergoing trauma.

In other words, is a subway or freight train driver's job "worth it," if they have to see someone commit suicide on the tracks? What about crime scene cleanup companies? Funeral services? Bus drivers? Truck drivers? Nobody's going to agree on where to draw the line in the sand.

A more realistic solution might be to make comprehensive support systems, mental health resources, and treatment a legally mandated, completely free service provided to any employee that works in these kinds of fields.

Finally, I think there are most certainly people out there who are not as sensitive and affected by this content who would be candidates for these kinds of roles. Perhaps there's a way to test for that sensitivity before the real job starts.

<comment><USER58> I'm actually not proposing shutting down any website that allows uploaded content, just large / public sites that require this sort of moderation. Not every site gets this stuff uploaded to it. The more private the network, the less need for this kind of company-led moderation.

As far as "worth it" goes, some people have to be exposed to it so long as we have law enforcement (but I'm certainly open to alternatives here). I'm not sure the train operator is a fair comparison, because seeing a suicide is an exceptional circumstance in their job, it's not the norm. The content moderators, however, are sadly expected to be exposed to traumatizing content as part of their job description — it's essentially the point of their job.

There are plenty of kinds of work we deem as hazardous to people's health, and thus are either banned or regulated. I'm not sure if there's a healthy way to expose people in these moderator jobs to the traumatizing content they face. It just doesn't seem worth the tradeoff to endanger them like this.

<comment><USER59> Think like a legislator. How do you write this regulation?

> [shut down] just large / public sites that require this sort of moderation

Let's say I start a restaurant review website that allows comments and photos to be uploaded. It does modest business for a while, I now have 50 employees. I'm following the law because my site isn't big enough to violate this "no user content for big prominent websites" law.

Soon, it becomes big, like a major competitor to Yelp, and I've got 1,000 employees. But suddenly, this new law kicks in that says that I have to stop accepting uploads because my site is too high profile. Now, I lay everyone off and go out of business.

This just isn't a workable solution, at least not in the particular way you're proposing it be constructed.

And really, you're asking the second largest advertiser on the web (Facebook), a Fortune 50 company, to just pack up its bags and shut down.

It's not like I love Facebook or anything, but I'm sure their 45,000 employees wouldn't be happy about that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Radical idea: if your service requires subjecting lots and lots of workers to scarring images, the correct solution is for that service not to exist.

Facebook doesn't have to let people post material to their site with very low barriers to entry. Granted they have to if they want to continue to be what they are and to make tons of money... but maybe they shouldn't continue to be what they are and make tons of money if this kind of abuse is necessarily coupled to those outcomes.

"Well this sucks but we can't keep operating if we don't do it". Well... sure but the solution is _right there_ in that statement. Don't keep operating.

<comment><USER61> Any place anyone can add any user content has this problem. Anything with an input box and a file upload would qualify as your not existing solution.

<comment><USER60> 1) that seems basically fine, but also 2) non-commercial efforts run by hobbyists and gated from the general public ought to be Ok. If you want to run a PHPBB site and subject _yourself_ to harmful garbage by letting randos write to your server, well, go nuts.

[edit] thought experiment: how many of the people making tons of money off Facebook—c-suite, major shareholders—would find some other way to make money if continuing to make Facebook mega bucks meant _they_ had to do this 5 days a week? What would we think of any of them who chose "bring on the trauma, I want those sweet greenbacks" and kept it up for _years_?</comment></comment></comment>


Turn stairs into piano = 66% more people use them - <AUTHOR> http://technology.todaysbigthing.com/2009/10/09

<comment><USER2> I wonder if you make the stairs just incrementally more interesting to use, would a lot more people use them? That is, people have a tendency to follow other people. So, for example, all you need is to do something that generates [initially] 10% more interest and you'll get 50% more usage (if that makes sense).

</comment><comment><USER3> I see the potential for a lawsuit here. What if someone comes up with the obvious idea of trying to play a tune? The leaping around would most likely result in serious injury.

<comment><USER4> This experiment was not performed in the US.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Yeah, this is a pretty cool idea. The Science Museum of Minnesota has a very long staircase that's musical just like this one, pretty interesting idea.

</comment><comment><USER6> What happens when the novelty wears off?

<comment><USER7> Tune the keys to different scales on different days. Have it play certain themes on important days and holidays when you step through it in sequence.

Personally I'd like to hear some video game-style level up music whenever I climb to the top.

<comment><USER6> Nice. I just dismissed the tuning aspect completely.

<comment><USER8> Ok, but then you should take care to make it look different. Having the keys laid out like a piano keyboard but playing the wrong notes would just be ... wrong.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google Search replaces + operator with quotation marks - <AUTHOR> http://www.google.com/support/websearch/bin/answer.py?answer=136861

<comment><USER2> Do they know how frustrating this is for some people?

> _A particular word might not appear on a page in your results if there is > sufficient other evidence that the page is relevant. The evidence might come > from language analysis that Google has done or many other sources. For > example, the query [ overhead view of the bellagio pool ] will give you nice > overhead pictures from pages that do not include the word 'overhead.'_

The title of the parent is not quite accurate either. Quoting a single word has been there for a while, and has always meant "Do not substitute this word; search for this word exactly". Where + meant "always include this word in the results".

I really wish Google had an options page for less 'clever' searching: I want +, I want to "quote phrases", it'd be great if I could bracket some terms, and I don't want any substitutions. And I really don't want any of my terms silently dropped or subbed.</comment>


Microsoft Made a Pretty Good Smartwatch, Back in 2004 - T-A http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-04/microsoft-made-a-pretty-good-smartwatch-back-in-2004

<comment><AUTHOR> Microsoft has been ahead n a lot of things. I had WebTV back in the 90s way before all of these internet connected TVs came out.</comment>


Korean Beauty Contestants – Face Morphing - <AUTHOR> http://jbhuang0604.blogspot.com/2013/04/miss-korea-2013-contestants-face.html <comment><USER2> I wonder whether this analysis supports the assertion that these were photoshopped?

[http://kotaku.com/blame-photoshop-for-koreas-beauty-queen- cl...](http://kotaku.com/blame-photoshop-for-koreas-beauty-queen- clones-482285894)

<comment><USER3> I wish this comment stood out more but HN has eliminated displaying of points.

<comment><USER4> Huh? Points haven't been displayed on comments for at least 18 months.

<comment><USER5> Yes, that was his point. At some point in the past, points were displayed on comments. But, as you pointed out, now they are not.

<comment><USER6> That's a nice point about points.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's worrying how this keeps getting upvoted despite having been debunked before it even hit HN, and the top comments on both HN and the original post pointing to the article that debunks it.

This is one scenario in which HN could really use downvotes.

<comment><USER8> For me it doesn't really make a huge difference if plastic surgery or photoshop are the culprit. So these women don't actually all look like clones, they're just _presented_ as clones; great.

<comment><USER9> That's actually a really interesting point about the cultural backdrop of the photos being produced.

<comment><USER8> I think many small changes - each of them incremental, and rather innocent in and of itself - to maximize "market appeal" (where the market is some kind of faceless statistical blob), can also lead to this. If you don't know what you're doing and why you're doing it, and/or if it's not something you really can believe in, it will show, in some form or another.

Sure, I can't blame anyone for not believing in their job of photoshopping fashion pics.. but what I find much more unsettling is that young people do get influenced by this stuff, wether they know/want it or not, and wether the people pushing the stuff believe in it themselves or not. But it's not just fashion, our societies are half-assing a lot of things on a massive scale. Too many hustlers, too little pride in work :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> All I see is lots of makeup. Might it more accurately be called a Korean Face Art Contest?

But really, if we're trying to compare physical beauty, wouldn't the contest require 0 modification of it? This would likely include banning makeup, any form of plastic surgery, unnatural hair modifications, and clothing that is overly supportive. Is there even such a thing? A cursory Google search suggests no. Even so called "natural beauty pageants" apparently permit caked on makeup, fake hair, fake teeth (not just orthodontics), etc. I don't see a point to these beauty contests, in that case. They say nothing about the person at all.

<comment><USER11> Look here:

<http://i.imgur.com/7kdgJ32.jpg>

Particularly at #18, where it's most obvious. These pictures have been photoshopped to give the ladies the elfin look that's popular right now in Korea.

<comment><USER12> Some of the real faces have a lot of character - and they were all turned mindless-looking by the photoshopping.

<comment><USER10> I would argue the same is, or rather can be, true of makeup, in general.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> neat, but eigenfaces is really overplayed and outdated, there's lots of better face recognition algorithms that can handle a bit of distortion/deformation that really plagues principal component methods

<comment><USER14> Interested to read about the better algorithms if you have some good resources.

<comment><USER15> Part of the problem with eigenfaces is that they are really sensitive to variations in pose, which, as the author notes, are present in this data set. The article doesn't actually compare the variability among these faces to the variability among a control population of Korean faces, so I don't know to interpret the results anyway, but my guess just by looking at the eigenfaces is that they are capturing pose variation in addition to variation in facial structure.

Check out the results page on the Labeled Faces in the Wild site for some better algorithms that are more robust to changes in pose, along with their performance on a sample data set: <http://vis- www.cs.umass.edu/lfw/results.html>. Eigenfaces are the worst algorithm tested. Amazon Mechanical Turk is better than all of the algorithms, even if you show only the face itself OR show only the remainder of the photograph that doesn't include the face.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I do recall a certain cynical Korean friend of mine quipping, "girls who go to the same plastic surgeon look more similar than their own sisters"

</comment><comment><USER16> When you look at them individually they don't look very similar. It's mainly the makeup that highlights the same parts of their faces so when they're flashed all together (eyes in the same spot) it wrongly appears they all look the same.

</comment><comment><USER17> The background of the post aside, I find the main idea interesting and fun. Whatever the validity of the original argument is, I don't think the goal was to actually prove it, but more to play with maths and code to do something cool.

</comment><comment> guard-of-terra "Recognition" should be replaced by "Morphing" in title.

Currently it makes no sense.

</comment><comment><USER18> So... like even in the of-course-it-is-what-are-you-completely-naive photoshopped press photos, they don't really look that similar?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> South korea has a far lower genetic diversity then a lot of european countries, and America for sure. In a totally non-racist way, the "all look same" stereotype may have more truth than it does for a lot of other countries.

<comment><USER19> This is quite easy to test: just take 20 beauty queens from North Korea and see what diversity you get. I believe the genetic diversity in the two countries is about the same, but they have been isolated for around 50+ years, so there is some great science to be had once North Korea opens up (think Iceland).

<comment><USER20> "Beauty queens" is a terrible group to sample from. It is not in any way whatsoever random, which is what you would need to study. "Beauty" has many subjective components, which can change rapidly.

<comment><USER19> But that's not the point. Take 20 girls from each country who are considered by some popular standard to be beautiful, and measure variation. Since I'm assuming plastic surgery is not that widespread in DPRK, the results would be interesting, even if not very useful.

<comment><USER20> But you aren't just measuring variation in the population. You're also measuring strictness of beauty standards.

<comment><USER19> No, we just measure variation according to some algorithm. The beauty is subjective based on standards, and the results would definitely be biased by that subjectivity.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> "Here we can see that the eigenvalues vanish after 7, suggesting that the rank of the image data is 6."

Does this mean there are only 6 different faces shared among the 20 girls?

<comment><USER22> That's one way of putting it. A rank of six implies that if all of the faces were represented by a matrix (e.g. with 20 rows, one for each face), the dimensionality of the column space would be six. That is, all 20 faces could be represented by linear combinations of six orthogonal faces.

OP implies that six "eigenfaces" faces represent an eigenbasis for the space of all 20 faces (that they are eigenfaces doesn't necessary imply that they form an eigenbasis, not every vector space has sufficient geometric multiplicity to have an eigenbasis).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> It's all in good spirit, but I can't help to note that it wreeks of the old racist trope "all <insert ethnicity> look the same" [http://healthland.time.com/2010/11/24/they-all-look-the- same...](http://healthland.time.com/2010/11/24/they-all-look-the-same-how- racism-works-neurologically/)

And perhaps also a bit sexist? I dunno, maybe I'm overly sensitive.

<comment><USER24> When it's actually got a foundation in math, it stops being a racist trope and becomes a valid scientific inquiry.

Sexist? Overly sensitive would be one word for it.

<comment><USER25> The analysis uses math, but that doesn't make it scientific. In particular, there's no comparison to the similarity of a sample of faces of normal Koreans, westerners, or beauty contestants.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I suspect it helps that these women are absolutely caked in makeup. Plus, averaging out pictures? It gave them an afro. How many Koreans wear afros?

<comment><USER27> it's called an ahjumma perm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Small correction: I saw this somewhere on the web yesterday, and it turns out that these are Miss Taegu contestants, not Miss Korea.

</comment><comment><USER29> Even with caked makeup and extremely photoshopped pictures they dont even look that similar.</comment>


Draft of German copyright reform proposes memes should only be up to 128 pixels - <AUTHOR> https://imgur.com/gallery/EOWUgv0 <comment><USER2> Proposed bills rarely go anywhere, and so do not count as on-topic for HN unless there is something intellectually interesting about them—which there rarely is, since the reason they get picked up and broadcast is always sensational. This one is described as a "discussion draft", so it isn't even a bill.

</comment><comment><USER3> there's a bizarre trend in Germany in the last few months for legistlating completely unneccesary things. This is a great example.

Additionally today they announced that while profits on stock trading (specifically derivatives) can be taxed fully, losses can only be accounted for upto 10.000€

Berlin is trying to freeze rents for the next 5 years and make it possible to retroactively lower rents to the level of 2013.

This kids, is what it looks like when a government is too scared to solve bigger structural challenges (digitization of the beauraucracy, switch to electromobility, better competitive environment for startups, questionable pension system, unneccesarily high taxes that keep leading to surpluses, I could go on) - and instead keep themselves occupied with non-issues that are PR heavy. Schade.

<comment><USER4> Compared to the US, Germany is more regulation heavy in general. Many of those regulations seem fine or even great, there are definitely ones that weird me out a bit as an American living here though, like legally enforced quiet hours on Sunday, days where it's illegal to dance, and really just the large amount of government-religion interaction.

<comment><USER5> I don't know. The US does seem to also have its fair share of strange, overbearing laws to the point where you can easily find "weirdest us laws" lists online:

[https://www.businessinsider.com/weird-us- laws?r=US&IR=T](https://www.businessinsider.com/weird-us-laws?r=US&IR=T)

<comment><USER6> Those are generally on the books because they are unenforced, so nobody even thinks to remove them. Were they enforced, they'd be struck quickly. Sometimes that even happens.

Are the ones in Germany enforced? Honest question, I don't know, and I'm interested in the answer.

<comment><USER7> Quiet Hours on Sundays? Definitely enforced.

Dancing Ban? Usually not unless you're either A) a very big venue or B) a public place like a school. But for either cases it wouldn't matter much since most of them are closed on those days since they are usually national holidays anyway.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> What a meme. Maybe they can just cut up the meme in chunks of 128x128 and display that instead. Its not a full image but a lot of tiny ones

<comment><USER9> How do countries like Germany handle it when someone meets the letter of the law but not the spirit of it?

<comment><USER10> Not at all. In fact I would call doing that the most German thing you can do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I'm imagining sites returning a quantized blocky 128x128 image if you have a German IP.

<comment><USER12> FWIW, that would be great.

If the link tax ("Leistungsschutzrecht") gets implemented on a European level, I also hope that Google (and all other search engine provider) then just return search results with the maximal allowed word count.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand all the mock outrage; memes are already illegal in most cases at any size and copyrights are currently being enforced with takedowns in some cases. It seem like the title & text is trying to be intentionally inflammatory. It's already illegal to use someone else's image without permission, unless you're covered by fair use (which memes are not automatically). Memes just happen to not be very enforceable by anyone who's not a large corporation. The text seems to suggest that Germany is proposing an _exemption_ to copyright infringement when the images are small enough. Isn't that a good thing, and more freedom than internet memers have right now?

<comment><USER14> Memes would almost always seem to fall well into Fair Use protections, under both US and wider Berne law.

<comment><USER15> I would say that's highly questionnable under Berne, and are fairly untested under US Fair Use protections.

As most of them are stills, and use the entire still, there's no defence of a partial use of the work. Under Berne the key test would be if it was prejudicial to the copyright owner's economic rights, and it would be hard to argue the image had no economic value if it was being used in a popular meme.

I do think the parent's comment that memes could be actionable in a great many situations in most jurisdictions but rarely get such in practice has merit.

<comment><USER16> > _Under Berne the key test would be if it was prejudicial to the copyright > owner 's economic rights, and it would be hard to argue the image had no > economic value if it was being used in a popular meme._

Isn't that backwards though? Doesn't the Berne Convention say that exemptions to reproduction of copyrighted works can't be prejudiced against the economic interests of the original author?

Memes don't really infringe on the original works. Seeing an image of Peter Parker with some text on it doesn't really compete with the Spiderman movie, does it?

<comment><USER13> > Memes don't really infringe on the original works. Seeing an image of Peter > Parker with some text on it doesn't really compete with the Spiderman movie, > does it?

That is faulty, incorrect logic, and the law (both US copyright and the Berne convention) does not agree with you. _You_ don't have the right to decide what is in the interests of the Marvel franchise, Marvel does.

Images of Peter Parker are being actively used for ancillary marketing purposes, and they can easily show that infringing use of their copyrighted image is diluting their brand and/or causing some financial harm.

BTW I'm not worried about Marvel, I'm more worried about the many smaller independent businesses, and individual creators, that lose control of their work and have no practical legal recourse.

<comment><USER16> > _You don 't have the right to decide what is in the interests of the Marvel > franchise, Marvel does._

That doesn't sound right though. Wouldn't this mean that any time a large corporation used somebody's copyrighted works that they're stepping on a huge minefield, because it's now up to the individual to decide what is in their interests?

I'm pretty sure that even US copyright law weights whether the potential copyright infringement creates an alternative product for the market.

> _and they can easily show that infringing use of their copyrighted image is > diluting their brand and /or causing some financial harm._

That's trademark law not copyright. It's a different matter, because trademarks have to be actively defended.

> _I 'm more worried about the many smaller independent businesses, and > individual creators, that lose control of their work and have no practical > legal recourse._

Then you're worried about the wrong thing. They will never have practical legal recourse as long as the legal system is based on spending a lot of money. We can't even get criminal law to work with this. What's the chance that we would get civil law to work with it?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> German copyright law is already overly draconian and holds the country back.

<comment><USER14> Which is of course ironic given the history:

No Copyright Law: The Real Reason for Germany's Industrial Expansion?

 _Did Germany experience rapid industrial expansion in the 19th century due to an absence of copyright law? A German historian argues that the massive proliferation of books, and thus knowledge, laid the foundation for the country 's industrial might._

[https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no- copyright-...](https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/no-copyright- law-the-real-reason-for-germany-s-industrial-expansion-a-710976.html)

<comment><USER17> As was true for the USA, China, Japan....

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> If it's not clear (the article does say "if not[,] you will need to get a license from the creator"), it's because most memes and GIFs take a copyrighted image/clip before adding a caption to it.

E.g. in the article there is an image from the copyrighted work "Dawson's Creek".

<comment><USER19> > E.g. in the article there is an image from the copyrighted work "Dawson's > Creek".

The image doesn't supersede Dawson's Creek. My understanding is that this template is lampooning overwrought acting on the show. Isn't this covered under transformational fair use in the United States?

<comment><USER4> Probably, but did you miss that this post is about German law?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Some great memes are going to come out of this

<comment><USER21> A shame we can't read what they say...

<comment><USER12> I guess bitmap fonts will make a comeback.

128x128 is about 1/4 of a 320x200 screen. That's a lot of space, actually.

Also imagine how much faster webpages would become.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Device pixels (resolution) or viewport pixels (like in CSS)?

I mean OS manufacturers could just change the way viewport pixels are calculated in their viewport rendering, which makes the law redundant. And relying on device resolution doesn't make any sense for modern devices with hidpi displays.

<comment><USER23> I'm guessing they are only thinking of raster images, like excerpts of photos or videos.

<comment><USER24> > I'm guessing they are only thinking of raster images

Someone somewhere will come up with a JPG to SVG or CSS converter for images, if it doesn't already exist.

<comment><USER23> There are easier ways to get sued.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> actual article (in german) [https://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht- memes-sollen-...](https://www.golem.de/news/leistungsschutzrecht-memes-sollen- nur-noch-128-mal-128-pixel-gross-sein-2001-146101.html)

<comment><USER26> Leistungsshultzrecht is the "Link tax" so this shouldn't apply to "memes" but to snippets of news

(Of course, the link tax is BS, but it's not exactly related to memes)

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> This is only for commercial usage, private and non commercial is explicitly exempted.

<comment><USER20> Commercial... memes?

<comment><USER28> Well, commercial use of memes, like, say a company liek Reddit or Imgur that profites from the use of memes (let's not go into their revenue or business model in detail now). So in reality ALL memes are commercial (unless you host yourself, I would guess).

<comment><USER23> Maybe this will help Mastodon and other FOSS social networks to become popular in Germany.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> What about SVG?

<comment><USER30> Maybe this was the goal... Higher quality vector memes!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Who's pushing for this? Meme's are free advertising for the rights holder.

It's like media industries love to hurt themselves. They've already brought back mass piracy by fragmenting streaming services, next they want to kill any chance of their content going viral I guess.

<comment><USER32> > Meme's are free advertising for the rights holder.

Unfortunately, artists can't make a living from free advertising.

Anyway, the "Germany to ban memes" is just a spin on the story to generate clicks and outrage (similar to the EU copyright directive some time before). This legislation is about commercial use of images. The 128x128 pixels is what the law would consider a "thumbnail" image that can be used without explicit license from the copyright holder.

Perhaps a more correct headline would be "Germany to unban memes smaller than 128x128 pixels".

<comment><USER33> > Unfortunately, artists can't make a living from free advertising.

They also don't make money when the meme is 128x128 pixels or not used at all. What is your point?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Just like nobody needs more than 640 kB RAM.

</comment><comment><USER35> The EU is a nightmare of over regulation. No wonder the U.K. is leaving. They can't just leave people well enough alone.

Imgur has recently started displaying a GDPR cookie notice modal over the entire page on their image only URLs. I feel like I can't escape the EU's ruination of the Internet and I have never stepped foot in the bloc.

<comment><USER36> I strongly disagree. There might be a tendency to over-legislate in some areas (after all, there is now an exposed central authority that can be lobbied by special interest groups) but on the whole, the EU has been a strong positive influence on the continent of Europe and Britain is facing a serious self- inflicted wound as a result of Brexit. I say this as somebody who has dual citizenship in both a EU country (Italy) and the UK.

<comment><USER37> The EU has a huge problem of people who have absolutely no idea what they're voting for. The cookie law was a very obvious example of that. The EU parliament is a mix of politicians who vote for what they want and ones who very obviously vote for whatever their party's or their corporate connections want. The moment any kind of technology is involved, the first group doesn't know what they want and so the second group can out-vote the crap out of them.

So yes, they have done a lot of good, but only in fields they understand. In fields they don't, however, they are a much too powerful weapon in the hands of (effectively) the highest bidder.

<comment><USER23> In what way is the "cookie law" a result of voting for whatever their party's or their corporate connections want? Which corporations benefit from that?

<comment><USER37> The cookie law is so incredibly stupid and ineffective, my best explanation for it is that it was made by people who didn't actually want more privacy for users, and the ones who did, voted for it because they didn't understand how useless it was.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> _-___________-_ Link is a 404 (and the imgur 404 page breaks the back button!)

</comment><comment><USER38> makes sense in terms of storage space, when you know the energy and environment costs for this

</comment><comment><USER39> There should be a recycle redemption tax on memes so there's an economy to pickup outdated, displaced and discarded memes for their return value.

</comment><comment><USER18> I wonder if this stupid compliance trick works: encode the image in base64 (or whatever, maybe something more dense), output that as plain text in the page, tell users they need to install a browser extension that recognizes these parts, decodes them and puts the image in place of the text.

Just for kicks the browser extension is open source and is maintained by anonymous..

<comment><USER40> It sounds like you're falling into a common pitfall of interpreting laws in terms of purely technical details rather than their intent.

I recommend reading What Colour are your bits [0].

The major point that it tries to get across is that as software devs, we think in terms of data and computers. The law doesn't. The law says "you can't have an image like X", and you immediately think "hah, well, arbitrary base64 encoded data isn't an image." The law doesn't care about that though. If the law says you can't display an image like X to users, then it doesn't matter what weird layers you go through. It doesn't matter if you stitch together 1 million 1-pixel images, or if you have them install a browser extension, it just matters if you intended for them to be able to see that image, and then they could see that image.

The blog-post I linked does a much better job of explaining this, and I recommend reading it.

[0]: [https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23](https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)</comment></comment>


Show HN: My Saturday night project: Supercoinflip - <AUTHOR>

When I have a hard time deciding which restaurant to go to w/ friends or my girlfriend, I usually fire up coffee and do something like:
choices = ['pho', 'gyros', 'pizza', 'burritos'] console.log choices[Math.floor(Math.random()*choices.length)]
Supercoinflip is meant to save me some typing (although I went back and forth on the styles enough that its payback time is probably in the 10s of years).  It is written in coffee/sass, compiled into a single static html file, and then run on heroku w/ rack.
http://supercoinflip.com <comment><USER2> How about allowing me to type each item separated by comas?

<comment><AUTHOR> I actually had thought of that too, but wanted to keep the instructions as short as possible. Maybe commas separting choices w/ enter submitting the form would work better though? I will play around w/ that if I do any updates.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> clickable: <http://supercoinflip.com></comment>


Cassava crisis: the deadly food that doubles as a vital Venezuelan crop (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2017/jun/22/cassava-deadly-food-venezuela <comment><USER3> There's a great book, _The Secret of Our Success_ , about many things including how humans have adapted to many environments and Manioc is a fascinating example in that. If you just soak Manioc until it no longer tastes bitter you'll still be slowly poisoning yourself with SCN–. You have to soak it for as long as your ancestors did if you want to live to old age. And somehow people figured this out and managed to avoid taking shortcuts despite not understanding the reasons for what they did. More precise copying between generations, in both genes and culture, allows the accumulation of more total complexity though change comes more slowly.

<comment><USER4> Reminds me of how I recently learned via the Internet that cooking kidney beans with a slow cooker could be hazardous.

<comment><USER5> Googled this as I never knew either. Basically red kidney beans need to be cooked at greater than 100c for 10min to remove a toxin. Not all slow cookers reach this temp, hence the issue.

<comment><USER6> This is only for dried beans, canned beans are pre-cooked.

I used to be really paranoid about canned kidney beans and getting poisoned for a long time. Then I discovered that the rule only applies to dried beans, and fresh I guess as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is Cassava flour expensive in the countries where it is grown? In Western Europe and Australia, it seems to be priced at approximately $9 AUD / €6 per kilogram of flour and only available from selected specialty retailers or health food stores.

Given it is such an important staple for 700 million people worldwide, made me wonder whether its 'uniqueness' attracts a significant cost addition. Or maybe the flour is (relatively) expensive, and not the tubers or edible parts of the plant?

<comment><USER8> > _In ... Australia ... only available from selected specialty retailers or > health food stores._

It can be found in the major supermarkets [https://shop.coles.com.au/a/a-qld- fnq-townsville-aitke/every...](https://shop.coles.com.au/a/a-qld-fnq- townsville-aitke/everything/search/Tapioca) [https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/search/products?searchTer...](https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/search/products?searchTerm=Tapioca)

<comment><USER7> Sort of. Of the links you provided only one of them - at Coles New World! - <USER2> for Cassava* Flour: [https://shop.coles.com.au/a/a-qld-fnq-townsville- aitke/produ...](https://shop.coles.com.au/a/a-qld-fnq-townsville- aitke/product/bobs-red-mill-whole-tapioca-flour) and online. I've never seen it at my local Coles or Woolies (or Aldis, or Foodland, or IGA, etc)

The others are Tapioca starch or other products- not the same as flour.

* and even then it is called Tapioca Flour so may not be the same thing as Cassava Flour. It is some times difficult to distinguish between Tapioca (starch-heavy?) and Cassava (starch-moderate?)

<comment><USER8> You missed the "arrowroot" flour, which is actually tapioca flour [https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/226010/mc-...](https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/226010/mc- kenzie-s-arrowroot-tapioca-flour)

There seems to be a bit of disagreement out there but most of the things I've read say the flour and starch are the same thing.

<comment><USER7> Thanks, good to know about the Arrowroot flour being Tapioca flour.

Yeah, it is confusing determining what is flour and starch. Doesn't help that there are a variety of names eg Yuca (but not Yucca!), Manioca, Cassava, etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The star of my favorite "mystery illness" article:

[https://www.damninteresting.com/the-curse-of- konzo/](https://www.damninteresting.com/the-curse-of-konzo/)

"Polio outbreak. Memba District. 38 cases. Reflexes increased."

</comment><comment><USER10> Apple seeds also contain small amounts of Cyanide. A couple seeds won't hurt you, but I heard a story about a guy that roasted them like pumpkin seeds and died after eating a couple handfuls.

</comment><comment><USER11> > crisis

> The last reported fatal cases of cassava poisoning occurred in February > 2017.

Crisis? This article is so over the top it's not even funny.

<comment><USER7> The article is from June 2017, and it does state that "At least 28 people have died as a result of eating bitter cassava", but the word 'crisis' - at least referring to any major problem outside of Venezuala - does seem a little bit hyperbolic.

<comment><USER12> It is very well a crisis if people die en masse because they have to resort to (potentially) toxic black market foods.</comment></comment></comment>


An open letter to founders - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@crispr/an-open-letter-to-founders-and-investors-b6e955a9d21a#.bxs36lghs <comment><USER2> This is the problem. No one pays attention to these things from happening. Thank you for posting this.

We found it linked from our post. 700 views later, and a lot of positive feedback we feel good in having done the right thing in speaking out.</comment>