A vast hidden surveillance network, powered by the repo industry - <AUTHOR> http://betaboston.com/news/2014/03/05/a-vast-hidden-surveillance-network-runs-across-america-powered-by-the-repo-industry/ <comment><USER3> I'm curious - how exactly would one refute the following argument put forth by data brokers and repo agents?

> _But Digital Recognition and other so-called "data brokers" who collect > plate scans are fighting Hecht's bill, arguing that repo agents are not > invading privacy when they scan a license plate, which is available for all > to see. The data brokers do not disclose the owner of the plates, they point > out, though customers such as banks, insurers, and private investigators > have ready access to that information._

<comment><USER4> The scan of the license plan is not really the issue, it's the collecting of the scan, tagging it with GPS, and aggregating the scan into large, permanent databases that can be accessed by both government and private corporations.

If all you do is scan a plate and display "car payments past due", or discard the scan if the car is not wanted, it's not all that different from a human looking for a car.

But these folks are creating historical databases that capture everywhere you have ever been. These sorts of databases can be mined retroactively to discover all sorts of sensitive information, similar to what was pointed out by Justice Sotomayor in the recent GPS tracking case, U.S. v. Jones:

"GPS monitoring generates a precise, comprehensive record of a person's public movements that reflects a wealth of detail about her familial, political, professional, religious, and sexual associations. See, e.g., People v. Weaver, 12 N. Y. 3d 433, 441-442, 909 N. E. 2d 1195, 1199 (2009) ("Disclosed in [GPS] data . . . will be trips the indisputably private nature of which takes little imagination to conjure: trips to the psychiatrist, the plastic surgeon, the abortion clinic, the AIDS treatment center, the strip club, the criminal defense attorney, the by-the-hour motel, the union meeting, the mosque, synagogue or church, the gay bar and on and on"). The Government can store such records and efficiently mine them for information years into the future."

While the government can currently look up your license plate information, or track you manually, they are limited by their resources. (From Alito's opinion in U.S. v. Jones: "But it is almost impossible to think of late- 18th-century situations that are analogous to what took place in this case. Is it possible to imagine a case in which a constable secreted himself somewhere in a coach and remained there for a period of time in order to monitor the movements of the coach's owner?") A nationwide database of historical location information -- that may not currently require a warrant under the 4th amendment to access -- is ripe for abuse. Letting private companies access the data is also scary.

These data brokers are probably right that they don't currently violate any privacy laws, however. But that just means we need to change the laws, as I think this most definitely needs to be a violation of privacy.

<comment><USER5> I don't see how quantity suddenly transforms a permitted thing into a forbidden one.

If I don't need your permission to look at your car's licence plate on a public street and write down when and where I saw it, or simply take a photo of said licence plate (as photos currently include timestamp+location) - <USER2> the situation doesn't change in any way and I still don't need your permission even if I did the same for a thousand cars this morning, and my buddies did the same thing for ten thousand cars more.

<comment><USER6> Can you understand how individual letters may not be copyrighted, but an arrangement of them into a large text may be?

<comment><USER7> No, I can't. It's actually a big philosophical/legal issue involving "illegal numbers"[0], definition of copying and colour of bits[1].

Don't make problems simple and obvious when they're not.

[0] - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number)

[1] - [http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23)

<comment><USER6> My argument was by analogy, but you've taken the analogy beyond its breaking point into another domain.

A single fact about a person at a particular place is not much more useful than knowing the placement of a single letter in a word. But if you know the placement of several letters in a word, you can guess the word - and that has a whole bunch more information [1]. Similarly, know several facts about a person's path, more information comes to light that is not evident from single facts alone, in a way that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts; place of work, school of children, likely friends, relatives, partners, potential medical issues, possible infidelity.

The issue you're getting at is a philosophical issue related to the sorites paradox on one hand, and the zero marginal cost of duplicating information on the other. The former is somewhat related to the issue at hand, but the latter definitely isn't.

[1] Semantically, not by Shannon, for the autistic nitpickers out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Terrifying startup prospect: Imagine a small dashcam-like consumer device that was able to perform the same type of license plate recognition coupled with GPS location. A data collection company could provide these devices for free or at a low cost to anyone, and then pay drivers for every license plate scan their box sends in.

Obvious downfall: someone will figure out how to spoof a GPS signal and randomly generate license plate images on a computer monitor and make a bunch of money for uploading junk data.

<comment><USER9> You're hinting at another major problem in this area, too:

It's not just that ppl have the data and use it for amoral/unfair purposes. It's that people come to _trust_ the data, _believe_ in it and use it to make decisions. This is disastrous b/c there are huge margins of error.

Errors are possible at all levels in systems like this, including sabotage and incrimination and your suggestion of junk data.

E.g. in the motorcycle example cited above. It's quite possible a motorcyclist needed to stretch their legs, so they pulled into a driveway for a moment, stretched, then google snapped a photo, then it was used as evidence. It's not likely or common, but it's utterly possible and not anticipated by these systems.

<comment><USER10> For the EU, Data Protection Directive 95/46 (and the incoming changes from 2012), attempt to offer protection against automatic decisions.

In that document there is the concept of consent and that the consent can only be for the purpose the data was collected for. So should some clever company sell widgets at a loss to collect data and should that data then have an extra purpose in aggregate that does not fall into a protected area (like national security, government functions and all that) and the person did not consent to that reason, then you should (in theory) be able to bubble that argument up to the relevant courts for further inspection.

That's the theory, how well that works in practise... only time will tell.

<comment><USER5> In the licence plate situation the point would be that this isn't personal data, and thus the data protection directive and the consent requirement doesn't apply.

In the motorcycle example, there is no personal data involved whatsoever - it's just a photo that some motorcycle was there; again, DPD doesn't restrict anything at all for such cases.

<comment><USER10> Did you read my comment or just scan the second paragraph and assume I was saying license plates weren't public data? I was talking about automated decision making using collected data, I was not saying license plates were or were not public information (in fact, I have previously made some of the same points you are, that a license plate is public information and that an individual has no expectation of privacy in public).

So if a private company were to automate the collection of license plates and therefore have a trove of information that included times and places a car was and then that system was to grow so that insurance companies used that information so rates could be calculated through Bayesian classification using that data to determine risk, then that would be an automated decision based on that data AND THAT is protected (in theory) by that directive and the laws based on it in the member states.

That was the point of my comment. Automated decisions are protected unless you consent to them.

<comment><USER5> Okay, yes, automated decisions are prohibited in EU when based on unverified, unconsented data - that still doesn't prohibit from automatically gathering that data without consent, storing it forever, distributing it to third parties, and having then some human be interested or prejudiced to you based on that info.

<comment><USER10> Yep. All of that could happen as far as I can see, which again, is why my comment was specifically talking about automated decision making.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I think the first commenter on the site said it all :

"the systematic exploitation of private personal information by corporations and government is the modus operandi of a surveillance / police state.

Already this is being abused for corporate espionage, political benefit, and a host of criminal enterprises.

The manufactured pretext that all these erosions of privacy are ok because "we found bad guys" has been the same bogus justification for every single abuse known to history.

A simple extension of this illegal principle in practice means privacy and Constitutionally protected rights are null and void.

Jobs! Fraud! Crime!

"We'll keep you safe!" "We'll save insurance companies money!" "We'll catch criminals!"

They don't mention that they'll abuse this in an untold array of intrusions and privacy violations... for their commercial and political benefit."

<comment><USER12> Although I'm very much miffed by the excessive surveillance of every country these days I don't find this to be the same. Companies and organizations do have the right to check up on people's activities in some manner. If your car wasn't paid for and it belongs to the bank now, I think the bank has the right to know where it is to repossess it. I think this is one of the ugly truths of reality rather than a matter of abusive behavior.

<comment><USER13> "Companies and organizations do have the right to check up on people's activities in some manner. If your car wasn't paid for and it belongs to the bank now, I think the bank has the right to know where it is to repossess it."

What you are referring to is part of the agreement you make with the lender in which you agree to keep them updated on changes of address, a violation of which they have constitutionally legal methods to address.

So please, elaborate on why you think lenders have a right, beyond the normal legal and reasonable updates of contact information, to "check up on" my activities in any way whatsoever.

This sort of slippery slope reasoning that is very, very dangerous for the peoples rights.

<comment><USER5> Ignoring the legal issues, I believe we have to come back to the old analogy of Global Village that illustrates the coming reality.

Imagine living in a village a hundred years ago. There is no practical anonymity, everybody knows who you are, what you do, and they tend to share many parts of what they know. The shopkeeper knows all your purchasing habits, the bored old lady living on the corner knows where everybody is going at what times, and if you buy condoms then the pharmacist likely knows with whom you'll be using them. If you'd get judged by a jury of your peers, they would know you and the witnesses since birth, and take all of it into account.

Like it or not, I feel that this is the social model that our changing capabilities will bring - and it's not entirely a disaster; for pretty much all time the civilization was like this, the anonymous faceless metropolis is just a recent change; and USA constitution was already written for an environment like that, and not the current (temporary?) one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I am simply against any law that would prohibit the public from this type of information and restrict it to only law enforcement.

If its not right for a public company to assemble such records it should be doubly wrong for law enforcement. I tire of passing the police cars festooned with cameras pointing in every direction. What guarantee do we have that the data is any safer in their hands? We don't and the reason is that a law that might offer protection today doesn't have to be in that form tomorrow or after some obscure judge rules otherwise.

So I am all for it on the grounds it puts on equal footing with government officials. We should be able to track them too which is most likely the real reason there is a law coming to prevent gathering by private individuals or companies

</comment><comment><USER15> I really, really want to say that I think this technology is a bad idea. But I don't. I don't think that the technology is the problem here, as Digital Recognition said they are not _technically_ invading privacy since the license plates are available for everyone to see. And if you outlaw it, whats stopping a few crooks organizing their own underground data collection and selling the stuff on a black market? Rather, I'd prefer to see a different way of "licensing" cars. Maybe some kind of RFID chip that can only be read by law enforcement? I know its quite unlikely something like this will ever happen, but anyway.

<comment><USER16> > I'd prefer to see a different way of "licensing" cars.

How about an LCD screen that shows a captcha image of the license number? The captcha image can be regenerated after a set interval, for example, a day.

Edit: This would have the benefit that humans can still read it, but making it difficult for OCR.

<comment><USER17> Well, consider that a government agency would still have to keep a database of what captcha tags were assigned to you on any given day at any given time, then it wouldn't be difficult to tie the two together. At that point you don't need to decipher the captcha, just compare pixels.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I think the article nails it on the head when it talks about technology getting ahead of social/legal controls.

I'm sure when license plates were devised, no one thought ahead to the day a single unregulated for-profit company could automate the scanning and geolocation of many millions of vehicles a year.

<comment><USER19> There are legal controls in some places. The EU has had Data Protection law since 1995. There was a lot of history in Europe of organisations (usually countries) collecting massive amounts of data on people.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> "ban most uses of license plate readers, ... making exceptions only for law enforcement, toll collection, and parking regulation."

That is the worst thing. Either allow everyone or no one. Giving more and more capability to special interests is how we have gotten into being a surveillance state and become very unbalanced authority / responsibility between different segments of society.

<comment><USER21> I'd allow law enforcement, with the strict rule that the scanner system would have to immediately throw away any plate that they hadn't received a warrant to search for. So they could have the scanner operating at all times, but they'd never get a notification until they happen across one of the (very few) cars they're specifically allowed to track.

<comment><USER20> Ok, but then why not same rule for others, such as repo?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Is this discussion any different than the one we had a couple decades ago when credit/debit cards went from occasional use to primary currency? There was _huge_ outcry about how everyone would be tracked, how every purchase you made could be aggregated and monitored and tracked and sold and leveraged, how personal problems could arise when a spouse or lawyer saw inappropriate purchases on bank card records, etc etc. Today, we still acknowledge those problems - while using those cards, having just given in to the sheer convenience of its regardless of the data mining that occurs.

I still think the killer app for Google Glass type products is face & license- plate recognition, aggregating data and pulling it up for you a la augmented reality all the time. The devices & services would be cheap unto free by companies accumulating that data.

<comment><USER23> > _I still think the killer app for Google Glass type products is face & > license-plate recognition, aggregating data and pulling it up for you a la > augmented reality all the time. The devices & services would be cheap unto > free by companies accumulating that data._

I've thought about this a lot (because my startup wants to move into this space in a year or so, depends on the progression of wearables like glass) and have drawn the conclusion that the reason the facebooks and googles of the world while being technically capable of executing such an idea, they might see as even trying to do such (based on them basically creating walled gardens around information of which one needs to create an identity to access) would amount to a public flogging of them and maybe no clear way to monetize such capabilities now (just look at foursquare stumbling along trying to do such, and that's without facial recog).

But as you note, the technology is here, it's only a matter of time before someone can adopt such and gain usage by the masses. I personally think that the data collected from such if made publicly available, will make the the outcry over surveillance state moot since such capabilities are slowly creeping their way to the masses… I can only imagine the outcry from the church when the printing press started to take hold in its abilities to spread information to the masses…

<comment><USER24> Surveillance carried out by individuals and corporations, even if universally available, doesn't make surveillance by governments any less bad. The printing press was an instrument of giving; surveillance is an instrument of taking.

<comment><USER23> I didn't say anything about it becoming "less bad", just that the discussions will mostly be purely academic and of little value to the avg person (to them gov surveillance < miley cyrus|beyonce|justin beiber|shinny new iphone app|that college degree) surrounding those capabilities under the situation I put forth, especially if such masses find any utility in having access to such information.

Edit for 1st comment: Looks like 4sq found it… and I'm sure there's room for others to follow… [http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/05/foursquare- revenues/](http://techcrunch.com/2014/03/05/foursquare-revenues/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> This is quite interesting. On the one hand, I do understand that autoloans are very easy to default on. So there should be some method for loan companies to get these vehicles back. However, I also think that loan companies should more carefully screen their applicants. Of course, that would mean that loan companies make less money on loans and fees, and that they lose money on reselling cars that are already partially paid for. So I'm conflicted. But I don't think that the mass collection of data is the way to go, ever. And I wonder about the legality of putting up a "fuzzy" license plate. Say if your plate number is 123-AB12G or whatever, you simply write on a piece of cardboard "One Two Three Dash Aye BEE One Two Gee." I'm sure there's legislation against that, though.

<comment><USER26> Strict screening will make it harder for the poor, who have poor credit, to buy a car. Tracking vehicles will make lenders less paranoid about lending, which will enable less wealthy households to lend. IMO if you're wealthy ( like the vast majority of the readers of HN ) you should be able to opt out of tracking for an additional financing feel whereas the poor should still be able to voluntarily subject themselves to tracking in exchange for a more favorable rate. Personally I wouldn't care if the bank is tracking my car while it's not paid off, so I'd go for the lower rate anyway.

<comment><USER27> The "Buy Here Pay Here" car sales lots that sell primarily to low-income folks often install tracking equipment in the vehicles they sell as a part of the deal.

Ken Bensinger's 2011 LA Times series about the practices of Buy-Here-Pay-Here car sales businesses:

"A vicious cycle in the used-car business" [http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/30/business/la-fi- buy-h...](http://articles.latimes.com/2011/oct/30/business/la-fi-buy-here-pay- here-part1-storyb)

Fairly depressing.

<comment><USER28> To me, used to the abusive interest rates here in Uruguay, 20% sounds really good.

And while the tactic they used to repossess the car was pretty shady, they were in their right. And 25% default rate is tough.

It's depressing, but the alternative would be leaving people with no financing options.

A NGO or maybe a startup that helped people balance their economies would be doing a lot of help, in the U.S. and everywhere. I've read about some that try to disrupt lenders, including a Y Combinator backed one (LendUp).

[http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/12/lendup-raises-14m-from- goog...](http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/12/lendup-raises-14m-from-google- ventures-data-collective-to-disrupt-payday-lending/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> >repo industry

When I saw the title, first think to cross my mind was "what the hell does GitHub have to gain from it?"

<comment><USER30> Correlate an account with a license plate, and now you can have not only an approximate dataset of where people tend to be while commits were made (which you can get with _far_ less precision from IPs), but a decent idea if that location is their home, a business (locating new stealth-startups and identifying their employees by finding new clusterings of people making personal commits during lunchbreaks in a new office?), etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> This information is all public, it is only becoming more searchable and cross referenceable by computers.

Where have we seen that before? Many years ago when facebook first revealed the Newsfeed. There was a huge backlash, to which Mark Z personally wrote to all users, "Relax, breathe, we hear you." He went on to explain that all the info in the newsfeed was already public, just better accessible to us for consumption.

The inexorable march of technology proceeded unabated. The next few years produced the slogan "privacy is dead" on the social networks. So many people now post mundane details of their lives IN ORDER for others to read and to collect "likes".

Fast-forward to last year: Graph Search comes out, to help us all find what we're looking for using only the data available to us, and facebook doing the searching. No big splash this time. The graph search is arguable much more dangerous to privacy than ever:

[http://gawker.com/5978327/men-interested-in-men-in-tehran- an...](http://gawker.com/5978327/men-interested-in-men-in-tehran-and-other- dangerous-real-facebook-graph-searches)

And the inexorable march of technology continues. Remember - it's not that you're caught on camera in a public place that's scary. It's that later, all the information can be cross referenced and mined for any purpose.

Should I write a blog post about this?

</comment><comment><USER32> Eventually, our new found love for collecting lots and lots of data about everyone and everything would come back to haunt us, making some billionaires and a vast majority living under surveillance. Sketchy but probable.

</comment><comment><USER33> Easy fix: pay for access to the DB and a few others like it, plot the movements of congresscritters, judges, DAs, et al. and publish. The brokers will be swimming in injunctions by the end of the week.

</comment><comment><USER34> Would be awesome if someone reverse-engineer it: an app that alerts you when a repo truck is around the corner. Imagine all those pissed off truck owners being angry that their publicly available information has been scanned and delivered via alert system to someone trying to hide from a repo truck.

</comment><comment><USER35> Is there any legal way to make a license plate not easily photographable, perhaps with a bright led?

</comment><comment><USER36> It's interesting that in a software world the difference between good and bad systems can be a single bit, leave debug=true and accidentally record all your keystrokes, or your wifi packets, or store info permanently instead of temporarily.

</comment><comment><USER37> And unfortunately, the data brokers can even argue that the system includes an identity reset just like iOS - just request a new plate from your state...

However, this won't work, as linking the two records is trivial via DMV records...

</comment><comment><USER38> I see a potential market for a mechanical device that automatically covers up the license plate when the car is parked & turned off.

Pull into parking space in the mall. Cover up your license plate. Or, better yet, put an image of random numbers.

Ta da!

<comment><USER27> It will earn you a ticket in most states, at least on a public street.

I am, and have been, very interested in countermeasures that obscure plates to non-humans. Bright IR to severely overexpose, shuttered lenses or pulsed LEDs that create severe beat-frequency disruption of the image, some magical thing that causes the characteristics of a plate (retro-reflectivity is a key signature, I think) to not look like a plate to an ALRP so that it won't even think to try and capture, etc.

—I mention retro-reflectivity only because within the last few years Washington state has required that license plates be replaced every three years rather than just getting new tabs as it had been forever. I asked a DMV engineer why this policy was put into place and he replied that it was due to decreasing reflectivity over time. Perhaps coincidental but the policy was instituted right about te same time ALRPs started to be used by parking enforcement and police.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> the privacy as we know it has been obsoleted by technology, just like many other things in the past and will be in the future.

Instead of trying to save terminally ill patient - privacy - we need to look into the future. The real fight is who owns the data, not whether the data is collected. For example can we just force that all the data anybody has about anybody is to be public?

<comment><USER40> Privacy returns when all surveillance becomes a two-way channel. If someone watches you, you would know who it is and can watch them right back, change your behavior for as long as they watch, or demand that they stop entirely.

The problem we are having now is not just that people are watching us, it is that we also don't know who they are or when they are doing it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Back into parking spaces. Of course in some states you are supposed to have a license plate in the front of your car as well

</comment><comment><USER42> Where exactly do they get their scanner tools from? I always thought these were police/3 letter agency only?

<comment><USER43> The article says they cost 10,000-17,000 which surprises me. Surely an iPhone would be enough technology for this?

<comment><USER19> In the same way an iphone can be good enough for your wedding photos?

These are high quality cameras, that have to work in large range of weather and lighting conditions. This cost might also include the software to OCR and store the details.

<comment><USER44> Parent's point was valid though, I can't imagine these devices to cost more than $170 in a couple of years, making this discussion quite relevant.

<comment><USER45> Until the cost of grinding glass comes way down, this won't be true.

<comment><USER30> They don't need pictures that look nice. They just need to extract information from them. Better image processing will facilitate this.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Thankfully this sort of behaviour is illegal in the European Union, under the Data Protection Directive.</comment>


Ask HN: Can you make a voting/rating system without logins? - <AUTHOR>

Posterous has done well eliminating the login hurdle.
Has anyone been able to do this for a voting/rating site?
I've been thinking about this for my site BuyersVote.com.  I let people do some actions (like start a new category) without logging in, but rating I haven't figured out how to avoid abuse without logins.  Offering logins with OpenID (and rpxnow.com) reduces the hurdle significantly since people don't have to create a new account, they can use an existing one, but it's a hurdle none the less.  Thanks for any tips! <comment><USER2> OK, I'll bite and say it...

...no you can't make a _credible_ voting or rating system without a login.

It's too easy to game the system to create repeat votes via cookie burning, ip rotation, etc (see the other responses).

Forcing someone to be logged in and then only allowing one vote per poll helps keep all but the most persistent griefers.

To that end, be aware account creation can be automated and unlimited unique email addresses created from one domain.

However, the difference between gaming the system by creating lots of fake accounts and gaming the system via cookie destroying/IP rotation is that the former is easy noticed within your system - assuming you have built such checks in place. It's also lets you easily remove the offending over-votes to restore calm to your survey/poll/etc.

<comment><USER3> polldaddy and sodahead both allow voting without logins. i think it's a probability game. yes, occasionally you get someone going overboard to cheat, but you make up for it in non-annoyed one time spontaneous voters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> You can use a fingerprint which consist of geolocation and Useragent. If you use javascript you can enhance the fingerprint with further data like screen resolution etc. It's not perfect, since some computers might generate the same fingerprint, e.g. corporate networks where everyone uses the same system, but then again, they are also using the same IP.

The fingerprint does not eliminate every attempt of cheating, but the method does not rely on cookies and just changing your ip-adress by reconnecting is also not helping, because you use the geolocation and not the IP. TOR, or just changing Proxies would still work, as well as using different browsers.

Another method I can think of are flash cookies. Most users don't know about them. Let users vote as often as they like, but only count them once. In order to make sure they believe their votes count you can display the result personally for them and include their additional votes, so they won't go looking, how they are recognized.

And if a user does not know about flashcookies it's pretty much impossible to cheat the system - and the flashcookie remains the same regardless of the browser you use.

<comment><USER5> "TOR, or just changing Proxies would still work" it's worth noting that from TOR, you are hitting their site from some exit node - which may very well repeat

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> At <http://tagdef.com> I let users both add content and vote without login in. It uses IP-addresses for keeping track of votes.

This has all the flaws that other people here have pointed out (multiple users behind same IP etc), but I feel that the advantage of being easy to use is greater than these disadvantages. It serves it main purpose (most of the time), of putting good content on top (see e.g. <http://tagdef.com/ff>) and hiding bad content.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep it might be worth the tradeoff. Or incorporate the fingerprint mentioned above, to mitigate the IP problem.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Sure, but at some level you're going to have to limit on IP, which means that people behind proxies or NAT are going to (unfairly) not have their votes counted.

</comment><comment><USER8> I've found openID to be far more painful. I decided that I just can't risk making my Google account more powerful in case it gets suspended (for whatever reason, valid or not). So, what a pain to research how to make it work, what implications there will be, etc. I was very excited to try Stack Overflow's software, but it requires an openID and I just haven't gotten around to deciding what to do.

<comment><USER9> This is easy to fix, just make your OpenID your own domain, or a subdomain of it (<http://id.example.com/>). The OpenID standard lets your delegate to your provider of choice with a couple of link tags. If it gets shut down or you find a better one, just switch. The websites you authenticate to won't care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> In addition to the things people have already mentioned, I'd suggest combining all of them, and more, into a credibility score. If your application doesn't involve a strict tallying/reporting of votes, they you can use the score to do weighting, otherwise, you'd use it to discard votes below a certain threshold.

For the JavaScript fingerprinting, I wonder if there are ways to probe for bugs that characterize different browser versions both for a richer fingerprint and to detect spoofing of the useragent.

Other things that can fit into a credibility score: B computational JavaScript payload to impose more costs on automated abusers. Elapsed time between when the voting form was returned, and when the vote was submitted.

On the IP front, keep in mind the ability to correlate not just IP, but also netblock.

</comment><comment><USER11> An example of a site that doesn't require you to login to vote that's widely used is PollDaddy.

Sadly, it's extremely easy to game it. See <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=913966>

</comment><comment><USER12> Allow people to vote as many times as they want (allow them to click as many times). Normalize voting patterns based on items of known qualities, and account for the fact that people know you'll do this. Then let people click as many times as they want and you just might get accurate results if done right.

Btw, I have not tested this. Use this at your own risk.

<comment><AUTHOR> This seems like a confusing user experience. Even users who weren't trying to game the system would see they could click it as many times as they want and might try.

<comment><USER12> I guess the idea is to account for the people who will try to game the system. Hey, it may not be a good idea, but it's unique right?

At least theoretically speaking, if we can model and predict human behavior, then the best way to do it is to let humans behave as naturally as possible, and model a rating system based on that behavior.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Do you do anything extra to verify an OpenID account? It's probably easy to set up a bunch of domains with fake openid servers, so I would expect that to be susceptible to abuse too unless you have some extra step to make sure the voter is human.

<comment><AUTHOR> Don't have anything in place right now, that is a good point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I've seen voting tools that apparently track by IP address. Not infallible, but maybe no worse than using a unique account name, since accounts are typically easy to acquire (unless you are track them by IP address as well :) )

<comment><USER3> yeah but at least this requires work. at least you're putting the barrier up of having to login over and over. if you do detect login abuse voting, you simply ban the IP and throw up a message saying "you've been banned for..." my experience is that fake account voting is way way less frequent than double IP voting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> i've done this on Pikk, what i do is set a cookie as an identifier and then without login, forbid double ip-addressed based voting. upon login, if there is a cookie set, i go and harvest the votes and convert them to the logged in user. so the table Votes has a user id and a cookie user id. hope this helps. check out www.pikk.com and let me know if this is what you mean.

<comment><USER11> Actually, this is very easily gamed:

1\. Fire up Chromium in incognito, and once you've voted once, just close it again and open it again to vote once more. Rinse and repeat.

2\. The ip choice is smart, but there are ways to get a dynamic ip every [insert time interval].

One could perfect this to an art really. Get your ip to start changing, have Chromium open on a hotkey, use ctrl+shift+n to go incognito (or just have it auto-load in incognito), have the poll set as your homepage. You can clock alot of votes this way.

Logins are best.

<comment><USER15> _One could perfect this to an art really. Get your ip to start changing, have Chromium open on a hotkey, use ctrl+shift+n to go incognito (or just have it auto-load in incognito), have the poll set as your homepage. You can clock alot of votes this way._

If someone's willing to go to that far of an extreme to game a vote, I don't think a login system would do much to stop them either. You can just as easily create new accounts with the new IP and a fake email address.

<comment><AUTHOR> Your're correct that it could be gamed with multiple email addresses as well. It would just take a little longer. Going to click a confirmation link, a captcha, etc.

<comment><USER11> Exactly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


A biosynthetic dual-core cell computer - <AUTHOR> https://www.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2019/04/biosynthetic-dual-core-cell-computer.html <comment><USER2> you can find the primary publication here

[https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/15/7214.full.pdf](https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/116/15/7214.full.pdf) [PDF]</comment>


Our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models - <AUTHOR> https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/05/11/1001563/covid-pandemic-broken-ai-machine-learning-amazon-retail-fraud-humans-in-the-loop/ <comment> Pick-A-Hill2019 Oh this made me chuckle... A.I. is also having to learn and adapt to the 'New Normal'. I feel its' pain

</comment><comment><USER2> Like jaywalking some day it will be illegal for humans to engage in behaviour that violates established ai models.</comment>


Release of LispWorks 6.0 with SMP - <AUTHOR> http://www.lispworks.com/news/news28.html <comment><USER2> I'd say "finally!". CL is getting left behind by languages like Clojure because there is no consistent SMP story. I wonder what Franz's response will be, I remember discussing SMP with them a couple of years ago (as a paid customer in a support call) and hearing that it's a very complex issue and no date can be provided. They recommended running several VMs communicating over TCP/IP, which wasn't really a solution at all.

<comment><USER3> Why were threads inadequate? (There's no GIL in most implementations, IIRC).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find it interesting that Solaris x64 is lumped with Linux/OSX/FreeBSD, not listed under "Lispworks for UNIX."

It has a richer featureset than the SPARC port, too.</comment>


Teaching Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to Play Go - <AUTHOR> http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.3409

<comment><USER2> I would be _extremely_ interested in seeing this used as a pruning function for a state-of-the-art MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search) Go engine.

As it stands, your generic MCTS algorithm expands a game tree of nodes, and gives more attention to more promising branches, but it still must give attention to other branches to find out if they are promising or not (exploration vs. exploitation).

In the paper, they get the right move (right as defined by what an expert human would do) 44% of the time, but they also say the right move, if not the #1 choice, is often in the top few choices. According to their graph it's in the top 10 choices about 80% of the time, and in the top 30 choices about 98% of the time.

If in MCTS you could prune the branching factor of your tree search down from 300+ to ~30, that could be huge.

=====

I'd also be interested in seeing it used as the playout function of an MCTS engine.

As it stands, most playout functions use random, or random+quick heuristic to playout thousands (or millions) of random games to rate a position. I imagine if you used this, which can output an entire probability distribution of moves, you could do significantly better than random with a fewer number of games.

<comment><USER3> Integration in MCTS should be straightforward. And I would be surprised if the author's hadn't done it already. Normally, no actions are pruned away per-se. Instead, the available actions are initialised with a utility value [1] from an external oracle, i.e. the neural net. From then on, the normal MCTS procedure continues until the time or memory runs out.

[1] ..and a faked visit-count. So the algorithm beliefs that the action was already evaluated n times, which resulted in the given mean utility.

<comment><USER2> I don't think they've done it yet -- in the conclusion they say:

        The most obvious next step is to integrate a
        DCNN into a full fledged Go playing system. For
        example, a DCNN could be run on a GPU in parallel with
        a MCTS Go program and be used to provide highly quality
        priors for what the strongest moves to consider are. Such
        a system would both be the first to bring sophisticated pat-
        tern recognitions abilities to playing Go, and have a strong
        potential ability to surpass current computer Go programs.

I agree that the integration should be exceedingly straightforward. I've written MCTS implementations (though not a Go implementation -- I used it on Connect 4 and other easy-to-code games), and it seems like you'd just plug it into your already-existing bias function.

The authors didn't mention my idea about using the probability distribution output from the network to guide the random playouts, which I would also be interested in.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a thread on this paper on the computer go mailing list. It's a quiet list, but features authors of several of the best programs.

[http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer- go/2014-December/0...](http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer- go/2014-December/007010.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> In the thread discussing this work at computer-go list, Aja Huang wrote: "Chris Maddison also produced very good (in fact much better) results using a deep convolutional network during his internship at Google. Currently waiting for publication approval, I will post the paper once it is passed."

[http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer- go/2014-December/0...](http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer- go/2014-December/007017.html)

</comment><comment><USER6> I wish there was something using DNNs that users could train and use without writing code or connecting to some centralized service. It would help to get the "feel" for how good these algorithms are. Something moderately general- purpose, I mean. However, it seems that mapping them to the problem domain is an art in itself.

<comment><USER7> Mapping DNNs to a problem domain is an art, but it is easier than the "feature engineering" required to use other forms of machine learning.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> For those (like me) wondering how strong Feugo is, I found this: [http://www.gokgs.com/graphPage.jsp?user=fuego19](http://www.gokgs.com/graphPage.jsp?user=fuego19)

</comment><comment><USER9> An interesting Wired article on the topic: [http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the- world-of-computer-go/](http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/)

</comment><comment><USER10> It should be pretty neat to see where this goes. I'm particularly curious what it would take to bridge the gap from 4-5 kyu play to dan-level rankings. I believe there are computer go programs that play around 5-dan level (e.g. Zen19D, CrazyStone), using Monte Carlo, of course. Will the techniques in this article be able to scale up to that?

</comment><comment><USER11> Happy to see that this paper is freely available for all to download and read!</comment>


More Companies Plan to Put R&D Overseas - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703803904576152543358840066.html

<comment><USER2> As far as outsourcing stories go, I find this one to have a very nice silver lining for developed countries.

R&D is not factory floor oppressive work for people who have no options and often little political power. It is the domain of the intelligent; people with options who are more fully aware of what their options are. IOW, a true middle class. The more the thinking class grows the better all of us are.

R&D is not a zero sum game like manufacturing. With manufacturing there is only so much demand for the manufactured goods; only so much material with which to make the goods etc. With R&D the only limiting factor that comes to mind is the size of R&D budgets. It is relatively easy to increase the size of that pie if R&D brings results.

This class of people will be in a better place to act on opportunity as well compared to the low payed laborers whether it be to move to more developed countries once they have some valuable experience or to take their ideas and experience and create enterprises on their own or to simply demand higher compensation with these other options in mind. I'd bet they'd also have more political clout as well.

In short, more R&D in these countries will accelerate parity with their counterparts in more developed countries and might even pull their labor class with them.

<comment><USER3> > R&D is not a zero sum game like manufacturing. With manufacturing there is > only so much demand for the manufactured goods; only so much material with > which to make the goods etc.

The material wasn't really a problem in most industries since early 1950s. The demand is also permanently growing, with population levels increasing, wealth being created etc.

R&D however always follows manufacturing, it's just the nature of their relationship. It can not last long in ivory tower, no matter what politicians tell.

<comment><USER2> "the demand is also permanently growing" I'd argue that nothing is 'permanently growing' but I get your point. That increase in demand, however, is not pulled out of thin air, it is deeply tied to a limited phenomena -- it is far more inelastic.

"R&D however always follows manufacturing, it's just the nature of their relationship" This is true but R&D leads to whole new markets with explosive growth as opposed to commodity plateaus and slower incremental growth based on population or other rate limited market phenomena.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Wait, wasn't R&D the piece of a corporation's work that was going to stay in the US, because every worker here was talented, good at problem solving and so forth?

<comment><USER5> Soon most of the management will be outsourced as well. It makes sense to have someone who understands the culture of the workers.

<comment><USER6> Not too wise.

Google for "787 Dreamliner outsourcing". It was costly experience for Boeing.

<comment><USER7> WSJ article seems to be talking about offshore R&D work, not necessarily outsourced R&D work. 787 Dreamliner problems seems to be due to outsourcing to contractors and subcontractors (combined with offshoring): [http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/15/business/la-fi- hiltz...](http://articles.latimes.com/2011/feb/15/business/la-fi- hiltzik-20110215)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As someone who has gone through offshore outsourcing and offshoring, I can offer a couple of thoughts.

1\. Just like in the US, quality is dependent on the people you hire (duh).

2\. In India, unlike the US, it seems the more oversight you offer (while observing #1), the better the results. In the US, you generally hire smart people and get out of the way. In India, I found it was necessary to do high touch dev....I don't think this is a result of developer quality, but rather shared understanding and culture. In the US you can say "we are doing X b/c of Y sorta like Z" and usually you can get to the point without being too explicit. That is lacking, making MORE effort needed to communicate. Again, not a bad thing, just a point.

3\. I never, ever understood thinking offshoring to a place that doesn't speak your native language (well) AND has a huge timezone offset was a good idea.

The absolute best experience I had and will constantly advocate for US companies is to use New Zealand. Native English speakers, 4 hour (and 1 day) offset from SF... a place your developers would LOVE to visit to train people. About a 1/4 - 1/2 the cost situation as well, so bang for the buck is usually much, much higher than China, India and Vietnam where timezone and language is usually a problem.

</comment><comment> M8R-jt5iq1 Note the bit about Infosys establishing comprehensive training programs, implying they are taking STEM graduates and bringing them up to speed on the current technologies. 30 years ago Intel had training programs (I don't know if they do now). So did Apple in the late 80's. (n.b., I was employed by both). Now the expectation for many large employers is that the applicant have already mastered the technologies. "No training for you!"

How much is attributable to "R$wages + R$cost of training" < "US$ wages" I cannot say.

</comment><comment><USER9> I think there is a little bit more to this atricle than just a simple push for moving r&d to emerging markets to get cheaper labor. For example, I heard some pharmaceutical companies bhave started developing labs in Russia, not to reduce costs, but as a way to make it easier to get past a lot of beaurocratic red tape. I had heard there were some laws requiring the company to use only Russian companies in the transportation of their pills, the pharma used some companies not approved by the state, and thus were slapped with some big antitrust suits. In order to make the suits go away, they set up a big, rather costly, lab facility, and then they didn't have to worry any more about these regulations. (I heard the story recently on NPR, but I can't find a link to a written story about it).

I guess what I'm getting at, is that I wonder how much of these R&D facilities are being set up as a way to reduce costs as some people are speculating, and how many are being forced in order to side step red tape and continue pushing their products into new markets?

</comment><comment><USER10> This should be a wake up call. What about north american universities? Aren't they the best?

Maybe, but they're not affordable to every american. This countries subsidize upper studies so their citizens can access this kind of education.

I think is just a matter of priorities. Instead of spending so much on X thing, spend more on scholarships for the top students in the country in specialized science areas. Universities know how to compete.

</comment><comment><USER6> "Five years from now, Mr. Wadhwa said he believes Indian workers will be developing software on par with programmers in Silicon Valley."

Russian/Estonian/[insert any country] are doing that for a while. Just not in their own country, but in Silicon Valley (50% of Silicon Valley startup has at least one founder that's not from USA). For creme de la creme products you need more than just good Indian "worker".

<comment><USER11> And those countries produce the top super-models too.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I thought part of the globalist/"free trade" snake oil was supposedly that we ship the dumb jobs to the third world, and all of us here in the US become programmers and scientists though some magic process.

</comment><comment><USER13> I've kind of always felt like R&D is the heart and soul of silicon valley. It'll be a shame if things pan out this way.

</comment><comment><USER14> The giant sucking sound has become deafening.

<comment><USER15> Capitalism in the U.S. is not new. That sucking sound has been around for over a century. Maybe two.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> PSA: outsourcing, offshoring, and offshore outsourcing are all different things.

What the WSJ article was describing is offshoring.</comment>


On the trail of the elusive successful psychopath - <AUTHOR> http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm?volumeID=27&editionID=289&ArticleID=2542 <comment><USER2> How on earth could you find it challenging to find a successful psychopath? Have you never heard of Goldman Sachs?

Or what about the guy who ran Sunbeam into the ground? He is actively a self- avowed psychopath obsessed with predatory behavior.

<comment><USER3> Yeah, psychopaths are everywhere. Why don't they just interview <someone I dislike>?

/s

Seriously though, what is the point of this comment? Surely you already know that they are talking about rigorous, publishable research, not just "Goldman Sachs are evil lol".

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've some responses about multiple posts, so rather than comment individually I'm making a general comment.

First, I also think it's simple to find "a successful psychopath". Take the case of one Bernard Lawrence Madoff. Let's look at some criteria from the article:

       charm --- yes, clearly charmed people into "investing"
       with him, "charmed" his way into being the chairman
       of NASDAQ

       dishonesty --- yes, c.f. 150 year jail sentence

       lack of remorse --- I've never read of any on his part,
       have you?

       lack of empathy --- yes, otherwise how can you steal
       so many people's life savings?

       poor forethought --- yes, the scheme was so simplistic,
       so harebrained that the SEC ignored warnings, probably
       because no rational person would believe it!

Second, as for "examples of psychopaths working together", isn't that pretty much the definition of "organized crime"? Most of their schemes are very simplistic, they certainly lack empathy for their victims, etc.

Finally, I think it's too restrictive to limit the discussion to "rigorous, publishable research". How can you rigorously investigate 99% of these people? That's not possible. E.g. in Madoff's case his pathology was easily identifiable in hindsight, but researchers aren't just wandering around looking for businessmen to study. And certainly most "criminal masterminds" (gotta love that phrase) won't allow themselves to be contemporaneously "researched". Tony Soprano was the fictional counterexample, which is a big reason why that show was so charming.

So "rigorous" research is pretty much limited to dead or uncooperative people. And if that's the case, just how "rigorous" is it? How do you understand Madoff's psyche without his cooperation? And yet he's clearly a psychopath. And clearly successful, seeing as he pulled it off for not years but decades.

<comment><USER5> Madoff is not what we could call a _successful_ psychopath.

<comment><USER4> I disagree. Here's Wikipedia:[1]

       federal investigators believe the fraud began as early as the
       mid-1980s and may have begun as far back as the 1970s
       ...
       The amount missing from client accounts, including
       fabricated gains, was almost $65 billion

Bernie could have been conning people for over 30 years, and he was in his 70s when it ended. If that's not "successful", then you must agree that _no_ Ponzi scheme can _ever_ be successful. (Even Social Security will eventually collapse).

If I were in Bernie's shoes, I think what would pain me the most is that both of my sons were dead, and that one died as a result of the Ponzi scheme (and was it really suicide?). But then again, if Bernie is really the psychopath I think he is, he might not really care about even his own children.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Madoff)

<comment><USER5> I meant a person with psychopathic traits but who didn't harm (screw) anybody.

<comment><USER4> In my best Emily Litella voice: "Oh, that's different. Never mind!"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> If I didn't respect their privacy, I could point you to one right now.

In fact, figuring this out was a source of significant enlightenment for me. (Thanks, Internet!)

I wouldn't describe them as an unqualified success, but they are very good at getting what they want -- and leaving the rest behind.

I can't imagine that they (speaking generally) are _that_ unusual.

Separate from my own experience, and I haven't read it yet, but a relative has recommended the book, _People of the Lie_. I don't know whether their experience was with a psychopath, but the title grabbed my attention.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've been curious if there has been examples of psychopaths working together, presumably because it would be more optimal. Also, I'm pretty curious if/how they can identify each other.

<comment><USER8> I have struggled (yes, struggled) with psychopathic traits for most of my life. Maybe I can provide some insight.

It's hard for psychopaths work together because they don't see the value of people beyond being a means to an end. If you want an example: I would have no mental qualms with killing my friends or family if there were a tangible benefit and no repercussions. Thankfully for everyone, there are repercussions, and there should be.

The problem is that a psychopath will screw you over when it's advantageous for them to do so; history, bonds, an even what most people would consider "morality" don't really factor in. Everything is just a reasoned calculation.

Two psychopaths working together would require some sort of framework keeping the two from screwing each other over when the opportunity arises. In practice that's really hard to accomplish

As for how you can identify a psychopath. If you could readily identify me as a psychopath you see how that would be a problem in my relationships. Nonetheless I'm certain I have brushed up against one or two. Although I liked them as people, we never clicked because were obsessed with our own domains. I appreciated how no-nonsense they were about the world and didn't let emotions affect their judgements, but I also had no interest in their schemes (though I did respect them) when I had my own schemes to worry about.

If I ever marry, I don't think it will be with another psychopath.

<comment><USER9> > _I would have no mental qualms with killing my friends_

What is the definition of "friends" that you're using? Presumably, people who think they are your friends, because they don't know.

> _Although I liked them as people ..._

... you would still have killed them if there were no repercussions, and some tangible benefit. Hmm, what is the working definition of "like" here?

Usually when normal people like something, a big element of what that means is wishing for its preservation.

Also, how can you say "like them _as people_ " if you don't see the value of people beyond being a means to an end? By this reasoning, your use of "like ... as people" should be synonymous with "like ... as means to and end". In that case why use the term "as people".

The ordinary meaning of to "like someone as a person" is quite opposite to seeing them as a means to an end.

<comment><USER10> > Usually when normal people like something...

Yeah, that's the problem right there. You're thinking "normal", and the GP said he struggled with psychopathy. Your "normal" doesn't apply in his world.

<comment><USER11> Psychopaths don't "struggle" with psychopathy -- they either a) lack the introspection to realize that they're psychopaths, or b) just don't care. That's part and parcel of being a psychopath.

I'll grant the OP "pyschopathic traits", but the rest of his/her post seems to try to support full-blown "psychopathy" rather than just "psychopathic traits". The post might be suggestive of extreme narcissim and/or attention- seeking behavior, but a real diagnosis of psychopathy would require a lot of other traits as well -- and would require an extensive (verifiable) history. See Hare's checklist.

<comment><USER5> I must disagree. First there are different level of psychopathy making it a fuzzy set. Second I have heard of people diagnosed as psychopaths and indeed struggling to remain socially adequate in order to avoid to be caged in psychiatric hospitals. In this way cold logic is used as leverage to induce socially compatible behaviour.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The byline - "On the trail of the successful psychopath Sarah Francis Smith, Ashley Watts and Scott Lilienfeld" \- is a good, short example of the importance of punctuation.

</comment><comment><USER13> If you think about it, if you want to do a startup, you basically have to become a psychopath, because you constantly have to tell yourself that everyone who is getting a job is doing it wrong, which is 99% of people, you have to be willing to lose everything, not be afraid of anything and you have to push yourself out of the comfort zone all the time.

But I think it boils down to what the core of a person is. If you are just a normal person that can emulate the behavioural patters of a psychopath, then you are a normal person.

If you are a psychopath at your core, because that's how you were born and you can emulate the behavioural patterns of a normal person, you are a psychopath.

While I can imagine that there are some of the latter category that start a startup,I think you need to be of the first category to make it through the entire startup grind.

<comment><USER14> You really don't have to become a psychopath to start a company. Many people do it all the time while going to school, raising a family, working other jobs... Now they may just be opening up a restaurant or dry cleaner rather than a high-tech CRUD mobile app which makes their "startup" less sexy than one run by Ivy Leaguers who swear by not-sleeping, setting dogs on fire for fun and mainlining Thai crank as their secret to success.

Those people advocating for crazy off-the-wall "one weird secret" cargo-cult schemes succeeded in spite of themselves, and not because of.

So really, becoming a psychopath is probably the last thing any aspiring business person should become. It won't help you balance the books. It won't bring in new business. And it won't help form and maintain lasting personal relationships that are the real secret to business success.

<comment><USER8> Not that I agree with the grandparent's sweeping statements about psychopaths, but your comment also makes a sweeping statement that "becoming a psychopath is probably the last thing any aspiring business person should become". No evidence is provided in either case.

It's also pretty insulting to both psychologists and psychopaths alike that you think a psychopath is just something you decide one day to become.

It's also jarring that in one paragraph you bash crazy "one weird secrets" to success, when in the next paragraph you claim that the one weird secret to success is "personal relationships".

<comment><USER14> My response was tongue-in-cheek because the original supposition that someone should become/becomes a psychopath while finding success with a startup is so ludicrous.

You've made a number of unsupported suppositions about my intentions, how frightful!

I forgot where I was though, when I posted that bit of dry humor. Self- important "founders" or at least "founder wannabes" is super serious guys!!!!</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Parents how do you limit your kids time playing the computer? - <AUTHOR> My kids play on the computer all day (games/netflix/youtube) unless I stop them.  I'm seriously worried about them getting carpal tunnel, or posture issues.  I constantly nag them to take breaks and do something outside, but generally just let them do as they please, since they are at daycare / school all day.  The weekends though are bad,  I will force them to do something else if they have a marathon five hour session.    What do you guys do?  When I was a kid I was free to use the computer as much as i wanted, but the options sucked compared to today, so it was self regulating, you just got bored and went outside faster.  Kids don't get bored anymore. <comment><USER2> Happily, there's only 24 hours a day; that's the hard limit :-)

The only way out is to have more interesting outdoor activities: horse, skydiving, range shooting, orbital excursions, asteroid exploration and mining. Just saying.

Really do you think playing with a stick and a worm as our grand fathers did was more fun or more interesting than the dumbest iPhone game?</comment>


Ask HN:Is rule.fm a Sproutcore app? - <AUTHOR> http://rule.fm/ Its like like a Sproutcore app from the pics, does anyone know if it is? <comment><USER2> appears to be..</comment>


New site has users wager on news stories - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D8UEM5VG1.htm <comment><USER2> "Eccles figures most people who like to bet on events are more interested in the bragging rights of being right than in actually winning money."

Eccles must not know any gamblers. Without money there are no bragging rights.

You can bet on the news for actual money on Intrade, which already has trouble resolving some wagers properly.

<comment><USER3> I'm sure <http://www.longbets.org/2> seemed reasonable when it was made but not that it's 2008 it's not so clear. Who gets to choose the keywords?

<comment><USER3> Heh. Looks like they finally got around to making a decision. The blogs won.

[http://blog.longnow.org/2008/02/01/decision-blogs-vs-new- yor...](http://blog.longnow.org/2008/02/01/decision-blogs-vs-new-york-times)</comment></comment></comment>


Projects are the New Job Interviews - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.hbr.org/schrage/2012/05/projects-are-the-new-job-inter.html?awid=4711429804570248879-3271&goback=.gde_79104_member_114783947

<comment><USER2> > _Call them "projeclications" or "applijects"_

Really?</comment>


Show HN: ARCharts – Augmented Reality Charts for iOS - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Boris-Em/ARCharts <comment><USER2> Graph libraries for VR (where the system has total knowledge of the scene contents) and for more powerful AR devices are definitely needed in tons of industries.

That said, as someone who spends nearly every waking hour coding for VR and AR, I find it hard to believe ARKit graphing applications are anything but throwaway gimmicks because the ARKit's lack of semantic knowledge about the local environment means there is no way for it to attach the graphs to contextually meaningful world points without significant user input.

Without contextual placement, ARKit graphs are just a way to force the user to expend metabolic energy moving their phone around to view things that can and have been presented as well or better on a traditional displays for decades. Sure, it's cool the first time you see one, but ARKit is not how you're going to want to view your SEO conversion data, regardless of how fun it was the first time you imagined it.

I recommend moving this library into Unity and starting to establish it as the way to do graphs on systems that can have semantic knowledge about the environment.

<comment><USER3> Are you saying arkit cannot identify a car if I want to chart it's mileage over it?

<comment><USER2> Correct. ARKit can keep the chart fixed above the car if you put it there, but it can't yet identify it as a car nor can it distinguish your car from your partner's car, and if you close the app and leave the lot and come back, you're going to need to place the chart over your car again in almost any realistic scenario. The best you get at present is "here is the floor" and "there is a wall", neither of which help the app provide contextual relevance for you. This doesn't make for terribly compelling charting applications beyond the first 15 seconds of "that's so cool it totally works" (which is a pretty cool 15 seconds).

The HoloLens will likely be able to keep the chart over your car if you leave your garage and come back, but not if you move your car and probably not if you park your car outside in the sun (which swamps the spatial projectors and prevents proper environment scanning), and you still need to have manually placed it over your car in the first place.

<comment><USER4> I would suspect CoreML would play an important role in scene identification, which could certainly be used in conjunction with ARKit, don't you think?

Microsoft is investing a lot in computer vision, I'll be interested to see what changes they make to the next HoloLens' vision capabilities. Plane finding seems almost as good in ARKit as it was on HoloLens when I was developing on it (albeit the environmental understanding is limited/non- existent in ARKit, which as you mentioned is a big part of the equation.)

<comment><USER2> Fortunately plane finding is pretty easy even with something as simple as RANSAC[0]. I'm sure there are better algorithms now but ransac has been around forever and is nearly trivial to implement. It just doesn't easily generalize to "Siri, find my car"

[0][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sample_consensus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_sample_consensus)

<comment><USER5> Have an email? Would like to connect regarding ARKit

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> And finally 3D x-y-z bar charts make at least a little bit of sense when you can walk around them.

<comment><USER7> Definitely yes, but you have to look at them through your phone so I'm afraid it gets tiresome quickly. It's fish for the graph + raise phone + align and walk around the graph vs seat and flip the charts around by swiping the screen. I agree with the current top poster, it's a gimmick.

It reminds me of the narrow visual field of the hololens I tried months ago. I spent half of the time turning around and moving my head up and down to look for objects. Then they were pleasantly steady once I found them but the experience doesn't compare with the visual field we're born with.

Those ARKit charts look very steady too. I assume that fixing a virtual object in space is a solved problem and it's not an easy one.

<comment><USER6> I hope we will get there... This in lightweight glasses with great field of view.</comment></comment></comment>


Jellyfish WebGL demo - <AUTHOR> http://akirodic.com/p/jellyfish/ <comment><USER2> If you try to change the value by deleting the current value, the jellyfish vanish & do not come back even after typing a new value.

I have to add digits in front of the current value before deleting the existing digits, so that the field stays populated at all times, or the whole thing breaks. FYI.

Also if you put a really high speed, they sometimes swim off the screen & never return, even when lowering the speed. Pretty amusing.

<comment><USER3> A workaround for [0] is to reduce the count to 0 and bring them back.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Love it.

Put the count number up to 50 and fps dropped to 25-30 for a bit then went up to high 50s again, which is interesting.

Chrome, Win7 64-bit, Intel Core i7 2.7GHz 16GB ram

<comment><USER5> Probably because they're being spawned over time and your FPS goes back up once the units list doesn't change anymore.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Ok 60fps on my phone, that's impressive.

<comment><USER7> 16fps on my tablet. Still impressive seeing as many WebGL demos I've tried on it have either not worked or even crashed the browser. Samsung Galaxy Tab 2. What make and model is your phone?

<comment><USER8> 60fps also in my phone, a OnePlus One with Firefox and Android 5.0

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Looks nice on chrome osx; on ios it's also running smooth but there is something wrong with the texture or the culling which causes a big blue area to show up in the middle of the jellyfish especially when they are facing away.

</comment><comment><USER10> Does everyone realize that this came out years ago? And to date, it's still one of the most beautiful webgl demos out there. Most examples since have hardly been as cool. Let's hear it for genius!

</comment><comment><USER11> Beautiful, I love it. 60 fps in OS X 10.10.3 Safari.

Safari gets unresponsive when you "Inspect Element". I guess that built-in debugger still needs some work. A debugger should be usable, especially if user code is broken.

</comment><comment><USER12> In case it wasn't obvious (it wasn't to me at first): you can drag around to move the camera. Pretty awesome, and really good performance.

</comment><comment><USER13> Very cool, and very performant. I'd love this as a live wallpaper on Android :)

</comment><comment><USER14> impressive

I especially liked when I added 5 hundreds and collision resolution went mad, throwing jellifish around at incredible speeds

10/10 will watch again in 3d (does webgl suports any 3d tech out of the box?)

</comment><comment><USER15> Looks like server is dead

</comment><comment><USER16> Very beautiful indeed. I just realized jellyfish are a lot like mushrooms.

</comment><comment><USER17> buggy demo. Changing the values make the fish disappear and never come back.

</comment><comment><USER18> Where's the realism?

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm already humbled, but if you make them gently interact with each other, I will jizz in my pants.</comment>


Godt – Golang library for getting docker image tags - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Gnouc/godt <comment><AUTHOR> Why official docker client don't have list image tags feature?</comment>


IMF-wants to regulate cryptocurrencies - <AUTHOR> https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d3wney/the-imf-lagarde-has-a-dystopian-vision-for-the-blockchain-regulate-cryptocurrencies <comment><USER2> The first time I learned about Lagarde she was attempting something similar against online piracy. How has that worked out for her so far? That was before she became IMF head.

Also, why exactly should a US-influenced organization be in charge of regulating cryptocurrencies? Because it has "international" in its name?</comment>


Bacon linked to pancreatic cancer - <AUTHOR> http://www.planettechnews.com/medicine/item460

<comment><USER2> Of course, beware of the correlation therefore causation fallacy. It could be that people that chow on "processed meats" eating a lot of ... lets say ... sweets and it's sugar that's really causing pancreas problems. Maybe Steve Jobs' "fruitarian" style did him in. Fructose is Murder? Doesn't quite have a ring to it.

</comment><comment><USER3> These types of articles always remind me of "The Science News Cycle": <http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> subed this to reddit and they acused me of trolling</comment>


Why It's So Hard to Get Real - <AUTHOR> http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304168004575178831348022238.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEFTTopOpinion

<comment><USER2> The "authenticity hoax" is an intersting one, but the analysis is particularly shallow and consensual.

Basically he points out that the quest for "authenticity" is both opposed to progress ("consumer culture"...) and rather a quest of social markers. But he jumps to the conclusion that we should consequently "accept [modernity's] trade-offs". It seems like a typical example of paralogism: either your for us (our current implementation of progress, the powers in place) or you're against us. There's even a Godwin point as he gently critiques people who "see a market economy and consumer culture as sterile and false (...) and who defend the world's most repressive cultures". What??? If we're against consumerism we're for Stalin?

Nevertheless, what he points about "authenticity" is important as people who reject consumerism tend to throw the baby out with bath water and seek a return to an idealized past. The problem here is the lack of visible alternatives to our regimes (so, in some sense, the powerfull media and propanda industry).

However it is important to note that our overall interlinked and financiarized economy needs _a lot more progress_ to transform itself into a more decentralized and resilient system: that's where local culture, organic food, mixed cultures, and others enter into the picture!

<comment><USER3> _However it is important to note that our overall interlinked and financiarized economy needs a lot more progress to transform itself into a more decentralized and resilient system: that's where local culture, organic food, mixed cultures, and others enter into the picture!_

Yes. I agree. Moving away from old mistakes (e.g. suburbia and car culture) is not a departure from modernity. No one is going to ban cars, but it turns out that spending 80 minutes per day in one really sucks, and if we can build a society where people live closer together and can ride a train to work, that's progress.

In any case, the old regime is going to die. It's unsustainable, and it's already showing its cracks. This is why I don't invest in the stock market. It was a _great_ idea between 1930 and 2000, as American corporations managed to become increasingly dominant in modern life, but as that trend reverses, I expect the share of our economy held by the top 500 corporations (that's essentially what the S&P is) to contract.

<comment><USER4> Summary: there is no "one size fits all".

> No one is going to ban cars, but it turns out that spending 80 minutes per > day in one really sucks,

You're assuming that everyone in suburbia spends 80 minutes commuting. Some do, some don't.

You're also assuming that commute times are uniform and that minimizing them is the only goal.

In my household, commute time is 10 minutes by one person and 60 by the other. Moving closer to the 60 would move us farther from other things that are important to us.

> and if we can build a society where people live closer together and can ride > a train to work, that's progress.

You're assuming that people value living closer together. Some don't. They'll gladly pay extra commute time to avoid it.

I write "extra" because that time on the train/bus is also commute time, and it isn't necessarily better time than car time. Yes, some people do prefer train time to driving, but not everyone thinks that 30 minutes on a train (or bus) is better than 80 minutes in a car. (If you need to run errands or do something, the car wins.) And even fewer like the train/bus if it's the same or more time.

I think that people who don't like suburbia's tradeoffs shouldn't live there. The same is true of cities....

Not everyone is a DINK couple. Some people even drive because that makes it possible for them to quickly get to their kids in an emergency. (Parents value such things.)

<comment><USER3> I don't have a problem with driving. I like driving, but I wouldn't enjoy having to do it for an hour every day. It's car dependence that sucks about suburbia. When everyone drives because everyone has to do so, you get a mess: traffic, sprawl, loss of community, ugly places not worth caring about.

<comment><USER5> In which case the solution is just better suburb design. Make sure there's an area zoned commercial within twenty minutes' walk of nearly every house. Big enough to support at least a small supermarket plus a few cafes and restaurants, and ideally an elementary school as well. It's bad if you have to drive just to get milk and eggs or to take your kids to school.

I grew up in suburban Sydney and was always confused by why Americans derided suburbs so much; but then I saw American suburbs. All they need is better planning. Throw in some more commercial districts, and prevent the building of zillions of identical houses by discouraging a single builder from building hundreds of houses; instead sell individual lots to individuals who can then contract with their own builders.

<comment><USER6> The discussion of urbanism in this country has been falsely polarized. The anti-burbs imagine suburbs as necessarily this sprawling mess of wide boulevards and rows of gigantic, identical houses, while the anti-urban imagine city living as necessarily a soulless forest of skyscrapers. There is a happy middle here that isn't talked about very much, even though it is by far the most cost effective and pleasant solution.

Slightly OT, but if anyone here ever wants to witness a textbook example of suburbia run amok, creating a wasteland of little value to humanity: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mississauga>

<comment><USER4> > The anti-burbs imagine suburbs as necessarily this sprawling mess of wide > boulevards and rows of gigantic, identical houses while the anti-urban > imagine city living as necessarily a soulless forest of skyscrapers.

You're forgetting that many of the suburbians see cities every day because that's where they work....

What fraction of the urban crowd have a comparable experience? ("I grew up in a suburb and hated it" doesn't count.)

<comment><USER7> There are an awful lot of city people too who have to see the suburbs every day for work and are relieved when they get to go home to the city. I am thinking in particular of all the San Franciscans who work in the South Bay.

<comment><USER4> You really think that driving down 101 (or riding a WiFi bus) and to Castro Street for lunch shows you what living in the South Bay is like? Wowsers.

FWIW, almost all of suburban South Bay housing has a grocery store within 20 walking minutes. (There may be a spot in the middle of Atherton that doesn't. The rural areas of Woodside and Portola Valley don't.) I mention that because of the claim above about how to "fix" American suburbs.

<comment><USER7> I think that it gives as accurate an idea of what suburban life does as driving into the city to work gives of what city life is like, which is what I was responding to ("You're forgetting that many of the suburbians see cities every day because that's where they work.... What fraction of the urban crowd have a comparable experience?").

I don't think either group of commuters is getting the real experience of the place they are commuting to (the skyscraper forest is not the real city, and the office park is not the real suburb), but I think most members of both groups are legitimately glad when they go home and get away from a place that they don't like to be.

<comment><USER4> > I think that it gives as accurate an idea of what suburban life does as > driving into the city to work gives of what city life is like

Driving into SF and taking Muni takes you through and over residential neighborhoods.

Neither 101 nor 280 are elevated enough to see beyond the biz that line them.

<comment><USER7> It doesn't sound like either of us is going to convince the other of anything. I think what you can see from a moving car, especially from an elevated freeway, is irrelevant to understanding what life is like in the city, because the essence of city life is the pedestrian experience.

That said, there are plenty of important streets that people take to work in the South Bay that are also residential -- University Avenue, Embarcadero Road, Alma Street, Charleston Road, and so on. What makes the experience of these streets from a car less informative about the South Bay than the experience of Mission Street from a car is about San Francisco?

<comment><USER4> > That said, there are plenty of important streets that people take to work in > the South Bay that are also residential -- University Avenue, Embarcadero > Road, Alma Street, Charleston Road, and so on. What makes the experience of > these streets from a car less informative about the South Bay than the > experience of Mission Street from a car is about San Francisco?

That's an interesting collection of suburb streets because they're counter- examples to the claims made by urbanites about suburbs. (With the exception of University, they have restaurants, grocery stores, and so on within walking distance. Since University goes through downtown PA, one might guess that there's a grocery store within a block or two - which there is.)

I assumed that the urbanites making those claims were making them out of ignorance. If those are streets that they experience, my assumption is wrong.

> What makes the experience of these streets from a car less informative about > the South Bay than the experience of Mission Street from a car is about San > Francisco?

I can see that the houses are packed close together, where there are houses. I can see the apartments. I can see the street life.

Note that most workers experience some aspects of the pedestrian life at lunch. They walk by the restaurants, the neighborhood grocery stores, and nightclubs.

Not everyone thinks that having a couple of nightclubs within walking distance is a good thing. If you do, great - you should live near them.

My point is that there's nothing wrong with someone else having different priorities.

<comment><USER7> OK, it sounds like we may be in violent agreement then. University Avenue is a good place and the only trouble is that places like it are too few and too far apart.

<comment><USER4> > University Avenue is a good place and the only trouble is that places like > it are too few and too far apart.

What's your basis for "too few and too far apart"?

All of "suburb" SF Bay Peninsula has grocery stores and neighborhood restaurants within 20 minutes walking from residences. (The rural areas, Woodside, Portola Valley, the Santa Cruz mountains, Ladera, etc. don't.)

The same is true of the Sacramento valley towns that I know, Davis, Sacramento, Woodland, Roseville.

That's why I asked where these "grocery stores are miles away" suburbs are.

Downtown PA is arguably the worst (on the Peninsula) when it comes to grocery access by foot because its store is Whole Foods. (Atherton may be as bad. I don't know about Monte Sereno.)

<comment><USER7> The conventional wisdom is that people are generally willing to walk about 5 minutes. I think that is probably a little too low, but I don't believe people will generally walk 20 minutes (1 mile) except in the most interesting of places.

In the case of Palo Alto, Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park is 1.3 miles away. I have walked there once but am unlikely to ever do it again. In the other direction, California Avenue is 1.5 miles away, and then after that it's another 4 miles to Castro Street. People are certainly capable of walking these distances but I don't believe that they actually do.

<comment><USER4> > I think that is probably a little too low, but I don't believe people will > generally walk 20 minutes (1 mile)

That may be, but you get to argue that detail with the folks above. (We can then get out a map and see how much of the Peninsula qualifies.)

> In the case of Palo Alto, Santa Cruz Avenue in Menlo Park is 1.3 miles away.

So what? There are closer restaurants and grocery stores. (It's not possible to have everything within 1 mile, or even 10 miles.)

The requirement was that "a grocery store and restaurants within walking distance". Peninsula cities satisfy that requirement, even though, like everywhere else, there are restaurants and grocery stores that aren't within that distance.

For example, no one would argue that SF doesn't have restaurants within walking distance of most residences even though most SF residences are not within walking distance of Zuma.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Potter was co-author (with Joseph Heath) of _The Rebel Sell_ , in which they argued that the hip counter-culture rejection of competitive mass consumer culture is itself a primary driver of that culture, setting up fashion and lifestyle as positional goods and enforcing a fast turnover of consumer products in a futile collective attempt to stay ahead of the curve.

I'm a pretty left-wing liberal, and for me _Rebel Sell_ was a powerful antidote to the sometimes-ridiculous conceits and dogmas of the left - including the belief that mainstream culture is phony (think The Matrix or, more recently, Wall-E), the sheeple are all brainwashed, and the best thing the Hipster Elect can do for them is to try and wake them up.

</comment><comment><USER9> Authenticity: buy it by the bag.

My problem with many rejections of consumerism is that in fact they are rejections of the consumerism of people with fewer dollars and perhaps degrees. I hoped the peak of absurdity was reached when the NY Times Sunday Magazine featured the Reverend Billy, who does anti-Starbucks stunts. It did not seem to bother those who wrote in the following week that the magazine routinely features outfits in the fashion section that would cover the monthly mortgage on a pretty good house in much of the country.

</comment><comment><USER10> I get this feeling every time I'm in Whole Foods. It seems like everyone there looks exactly the same. Then I look at my girlfriend and think to myself "Damn, now I'm part of the stereotype".

Also reminds me of the Chicago term "Trixie". The Wikipedia entry nails the definition: "a "blond, late-twenties woman with a ponytail who works in PR or marketing, drives a black Jetta, gets manicures and no-foam skim lattes."[5] Trixies typically also have a small dog (a pug, puggle or shiba inu) and know all of the other neighborhood dog owners by their dogs name." I'm sure that nowadays Trixie only buys local organic produce.

</comment><comment><USER11> A. the authenticity movement don't like America's consumer culture B. brutal third world dictators don't like America

Therefore, the authenticity movement likes brutal third world dictators

</comment><comment><USER12> It hadn't occurred to me that caring for the quality of what my family and I ingest had anything to do with "authenticity", I thought it was all about trying to take care of ourselves and hopefully minimize the possibility of having to fix things after they are broken.

I for one, love modernity, buy some food from local sources, some others even from the "hippie" stores, other from the local cheapie chain supermarkets. It's always balancing quality, convenience, budget and our health. We all have a different sense for what is a good balance between those criteria.

Surely the author has a different perspective than mine, and may be right for even a majority of cases, there are definitely those that seek validation and some sense of self worth with their behaviour. Others, and this is my perspective, just want to be pragmatic and maybe not too stupid.

</comment><comment><USER13> You heard it here first: authenticity is fake! Fakeness is the new authenticity!

</comment><comment><USER3> I like tropical fruits too much to eschew anything that comes from more than 100 miles, but the "authenticity" movement has a point. Modernity is mostly a good thing, but it has its pitfalls. For example, eating 150 pounds per year of added sugars-- mostly high-fructose corn syrup-- is not healthy. Nor are hydrogenated oils good for the body, at all. Suburbia has been mostly a mistake (intended to be the "best of both worlds" between rural and urban life, but closer to the worst of both for the poorer 90%). Wal-Marts are generally bad for communities, as they eviscerate their business-owning middle classes. Finally, although I don't foresee "peak oil" in the immediate future, it's becoming more expensive (economically and environmentally) to produce it.

When the chips are down, almost no one wants to get rid of modernity. The anti-vaccine morons and the creationist loons and the Tea Party slobs are out there, but they're on the fringe. On the other hand, the concerns being voiced in the "authenticity" movement are legitimate; is it really good for us, as a nation, to have an economy that relies on an environmentally costly fuel that we have to import from religiously bigoted and psychopathic despots?

<comment><USER14> Walmart and suburbia have leveled American living standards. Now any old slob can own a house and fill it with the same sorts of things as their richer compatriots (though it will be made in China rather than Germany). Things didn't used to be this way-- and people complaining about the change are often rich enough to not need Walmart to maintain their lifestyle.

<comment><USER15> Is quantity of crap you don't actually need (admittedly, Walmart sells _a lot_ of necessities but the phrasing "own a house and fill it with the same sorts of things" doesn't scream "required for living a good, comfortable life"), how living standards are measured? This is sad.

<comment><USER14> What exactly is "required" for living a good comfortable life? It's easy to set the standard as long as it either doesn't apply to you or cuts out things you don't personally like.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/cantors-paradise/the-unreasonable-effectiveness-of-mathematics-in-the-natural-sciences-25bd8dc6429f <comment><USER2> Wigner's paper (discussed in the current article) can be found here: [https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.htm...](https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html)

Various discussions of Wigner's paper on HN:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19588971](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19588971)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954804](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13954804)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8520610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8520610)

<comment><USER3> Thanks, these look good.</comment></comment>


Apple hires economists to publish report in its favor ahead of antirust hearing - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-hires-economists-to-help-argue-its-app-store-commissions-arent-anti-competitive/ <comment><AUTHOR> Actual title - 'Apple hires economists to help argue its App Store commissions aren't anti-competitive' at the time of submission was 6 characters over limit and this was the best I could come up with. Please change it if necessary.

</comment><comment><USER2> I wouldn't say the commission rate is the biggest antitrust problem with the App store. Moreso the way Apple will copy functionality from other apps, build it into iOS, and change its TOS in a way to justify banning the incumbents from the app store.</comment>


A GNU-Readline-like library for .NET - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/tsolarin/readline <comment><USER2> Awesome! So we can stop copy-pasting this: [http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Aug-26.html](http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Aug-26.html)

<comment><USER3> Updated Jan. 2016!

[http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2016/Jan-14.html](http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2016/Jan-14.html)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Library author here. I would love if people took it for a spin and gave me feedback. Also contributions are welcome, I'm currently trying to figure out ways of testing deeper into the library.

<comment><USER4> Do you plan to support the equivalent of ~/.inputrc to configure editing options (specifically vi editing mode)?

[https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline-...](https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Readline- Init-File-Syntax.html#Readline-Init-File-Syntax)

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good one. Although, considering I built the library to allow developers build their own bash like experiences I think it might be better to leave it up to them to define their own editing config files

<comment><USER5> Hi, I'm the author of prompt_toolkit. A library that does something similar for Python. Don't hesitate to copy anything you need. It took me a few iterations to get the API as I wanted.

One thing I underestimated was the importance of having _all_ readline key bindings available. People are really sensitive when certain functionality that they are used to is missing. (And you've no idea how much functionality there is in readline until you have to implement it.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks jonathan, I'll be sure to take a look. Having feature parity with GNU Readline is something I'm hoping to have in the future, it's a lot of work but it's open source so Im sure I'm not alone :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> That's really cool. I was just looking at the ReadLine that the PowerShell team released the other day.

<comment><USER7> I use psreadline / conemu every day (it's been out quite a while). If you have GNU ctrl-R, up, escape underscore etc in your fingertips, you want it.

Windows users:

        Install-Package PSReadLine

Then add

        Import-Module PSReadLine

To whatever $profile is.

tonerdo: I don't really know .net very well, how would .net readline compare to psreadline?

<comment><AUTHOR> So PSReadline looks really good and it seems popular too. I haven't used it yet but I would imagine that because it's a Powershell module it can't be easily used in other .NET languages like C#, F# or even VB</comment></comment></comment>