The Inside Story of BitTorrent Inc's Collapse - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/the-inside-story-of-bittorrents-bizarre-collapse-a0766a5442d7?gi=95fa4b218476 <comment><USER2> This is a dupe.

Here's the first post.

* The Inside Story of BitTorrent Inc's Collapse | Hacker News || [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375350)

This story has been posted at least 10 times in the last 4 days.

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Bizarre%20Collapse&sort=byDate...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Bizarre%20Collapse&sort=byDate&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

</comment><comment><USER3> Discussed previously at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13375350)</comment>


Ask HN: How you survived without Hacker News? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> I certainly didn't go to medium.

</comment><comment><USER3> "I white-male-gazed at the mirror"

</comment><comment><USER4> Life support, obviously</comment>


Appops reloaded – Istio, Kubernetes home-lab, Prometheus and pause-lab - <AUTHOR> https://tinyletter.com/mhausenblas/letters/appops-reloaded-47 <comment><AUTHOR> Absolutely packed with tech this week from Michael Hausenblas. Good read and wanted to share.</comment>


Distributed Browser Expands Test Group, Introduces Developer Tools - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bittorrent.com/tag/maelstrom/

<comment><USER2> I gave the beta a shot. It's a chromium fork with added support for browsing to magnet links. Basically, it's making BT a Web protocol. Not a bad idea.

Performance is inconsistent so far. Sometimes the downloads stall or fail for no apparent reason. Sometimes I can't find any seeders. Sometimes it works great. (Same old bit-torrent!)

I have some optimism for it, but it's not ready yet.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the feedback. We'll definitely be focusing on stability and getting updates out as often as possible in the next few weeks. Definitely send in any other feedback you have if you continue to give it a shot.</comment></comment>


Microbiome interactions shape host fitness - <AUTHOR> https://nextjournal.com/csi/microbiome-interactions-shape-host-fitness/article <comment><USER2> Its an interesting article in that it is looking at fitness (of fruit-flies, the model system used in the study), not lifespan alone.

Going in, I was expecting all of these interactions would be like the GWAS (genome wide association studies) interactions. I was expecting maybe single digit (max) percentage changes in the overall fitness / lifespan / etc.

But, if I understand the article correctly [1], different combinations of gut bacteria drove variations in lifespan by up to ~20% (which is a HUGE shift), which makes me a little skeptical.

All in all, a fascinating, if very unclear study.

They are very interesting correlations, but mapping the cause-consequence relationship is probably one of the biggest challenges in modern biological research; in this context & diseases like (many) cancers. In an ideal world, we really would like to have that degree of understanding to be able to develop effective, targeted cures (the holy grail of modern medicine?)

Finally, there's a lot of 'buzz' around microbiomes / microbiomics etc, etc. But I think one needs to be cautious in interpreting these results. This twitter thread [2], on an article / paper claiming modulation of schizophrenia by gut microbiome, is an articulate criticism(IMO) of such a claim.

In general (not the fly paper referred to in [1]), I think a significant fraction of microbiome / trait association studies, as exemplified by the schizophrenia study discussed in [2], are just throwing stuff up & seeing what sticks; and they are.. perhaps not the most rigorous of ways of doing science..

Finally, a slightly older, but still good article in NY Times that discusses some of the issues around the hype, etc. [3]

[1] [https://www.pnas.org/content/115/51/E11951](https://www.pnas.org/content/115/51/E11951)

[2] [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1095012297200844800.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1095012297200844800.html)

[3] [https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/upshot/exciting- microbe-r...](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/06/upshot/exciting-microbe- research-temper-that-giddy-feeling-in-your-gut.html)

[multiple edits to improve readability :~]

<comment><USER3> >But, if I understand the article correctly [1], different combinations of gut bacteria drove variations in lifespan by up to ~20% (which is a HUGE shift), which makes me a little skeptical.

just one example - [wrong makeup of] gut bacteria association with type 2 diabetes in humans (there are a bunch of studies like this [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4880177/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4880177/) ). Diabetes would cause lifespan variations on the scale of those 20% easily. Beside diabetes there are other similarly well pronounced/acute/severe effects as well as less pronounced "chronic" style effects and thus 20% may easily be on the lower side.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was trying to research the best probiotic to start taking (for humans not fruit flies) and I became totally bewildered... any recommendations or research from hacker news welcome!

<comment><USER5> Why not yogurt/buttermilk? It was recommended to me though I dislike both and have never taken them in my life. But I suffer from chronic mouth ulcers and most doctors I consulted say it is because I avoid natural probiotics found in yogurt etc...

<comment><USER6> Unfortunately television advertising often has just as much an effect on doctors as it does the regular person. Despite what they often say, most supermarket yogurt/buttermilk often loses all of its probiotic bacteria during the processing of it, to make it safe to eat. Along with that, a good majority of people are lactose intolerant and only some, but not all, lactose is broken down in the fermentation process. If you have any inflammatory symptoms, like ulcers, I wouldn't personally recommend dairy sources; but there are loads of great alternatives!

My personal supermarket favourites are sauerkraut, tempeh, kimchi, miso (I put miso paste in everything...), kombucha, and pickles. Basically any fermented food really.

I recommend trying to make some of your own if you find the time. I make dosa quite often on the weekends, which is a kind of delicious Indian pancake. Also tried my hand at making Natto, which is this strange but delicious sticky soybean thing. Had Salgam in turkey which was amazing too (it's a weird salty, spicy, fermented pickle juice).

Check out Wikipedia for a reasonably complete list: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fermented_foods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fermented_foods)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> As a child, one gains some immunity factors from ...the dirt.

<comment><USER8> Eating dirt is probably not a preferable option for most adults but we can certainly eat things that are grown in it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The variety of life is huge. What will you grow in your garden? more than your count equals. You are a city of life in yourself. Live long, enjoy.</comment>


Announcing Our Worst Passwords of 2015 - <AUTHOR> https://www.teamsid.com/worst-passwords-2015/ <comment><AUTHOR> This is the original article that this post's [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10930397](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10930397) article has a link to through another article which then finally references this one.</comment>


Brain to Brain: The Therapist as Neurobiological Regulator (2010) [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://www.janinafisher.com/pdfs/regulator.pdf <comment><USER2> The way we position our bodies dramatically influences -- and is influenced by -- our subconscious. This article has a lot of really interesting applications in psychotherapy of the body influencing the mind!

This article reminds me of a book I read a few years ago, Joe Navarro's "What Every Body Is Saying" [1]. If you're in the business of working with people more than programs, this book might be useful, but even if not, a lot of it was a good intellectual curiosity. There were plenty of things that I got to try noticing and playing with on my own body; for instance, how I hold my hands in any given situation (palms out? palms in?) is a good indicator of how comfortable I am, and it's an interesting experiment to "force" myself to place my hands somewhere other than where they naturally lie, and just lightly observe how it makes me more or less comfortable. (If you're bored in a meeting, I highly recommend giving it a try.)

Thanks for this link.

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/What-Every-BODY-Saying-Speed- Reading/d...](http://www.amazon.com/What-Every-BODY-Saying-Speed- Reading/dp/0061438294)

</comment><comment><USER3> Very interesting the implications of adding more neurobiological feedback in the context of therapy. Might not have enough context unless you're in or around psychotherapy. Crossdiscipline is really the only way to get at the complexity of humans - if you totally ignore the social individual aspects for repeatable data you're missing a very large part of the picture, and vice versa.

<comment><USER4> I found the article fascinating enough even without being in the field. It was so interesting, in fact, that it made me reach out to a psychologist friend of mine and ask for a referral.

<comment><USER5> I'd never heard of 'sensorimotor psychotherapy', but it sounds a lot like 'somatic experiencing', with much the same model of how the nervous system stores trauma and can recover from it. So you'd likely find that interesting too. Peter Levine's book "In an Unspoken Voice" is probably the best starting point.

<comment><USER4> Thanks! Purchased.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Why Uber/Lyft's 5-Star Rating System Needs an Overhaul - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@jtoeman/why-uber-lyfts-5-star-rating-system-needs-an-overhaul-530062dd550

<comment><USER2> Firing for getting nothing but 4's (avg=4) seems wrong (even if they have enough supply that they can afford to do that). Firing for getting 80% 5's and 20% 1's (avg=4.2) seems reasonable.

From Uber's FAQ: "We suggest that a partner never asks a user to "rate me five stars". Historically, partners have received lower ratings after asking for 5 stars. If a partner provides exceptional service, the majority of time he/she will be awarded five stars!"

This seems to ignore the fact that exceptional service is, well, exceptional.</comment>


Ask HN: Please critique my VR/AR IDE idea - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/manugill/eye <comment><AUTHOR> I've been working on this on and off for a few months but never tried to explain it in words. Would appreciate any feedback/critique.</comment>


EpiPen Maker Mylan Tied Executive Pay to Aggressive Profit Targets - <AUTHOR> http://www.wsj.com/articles/epipen-maker-mylan-tied-executive-pay-to-aggressive-profit-targets-1472722204 <comment><USER2> > The company, based in the Netherlands but managed from Canonsburg, Pa., > outside Pittsburgh, has grown from a sleepy generic maker to a global player > with $9.4 billion in revenue last year. Pay has grown, too. Ms. Bresch, the > CEO, earned $18.9 million last year, up from $9 million in 2013. [...] Ms. > Bresch was found to have wrongly claimed to have an M.B.A. degree from West > Virginia University.

A company based in Netherlands, managed from Pittsburgh, by a person who lied about their credentials, is now modulating the rate of asthma deaths from anaphylaxis of American children. Yap. As Hunter S. Thomson said, "in a democracy you have to be a player". She is a good player...

Yet anyone dare mention nationalized medicine or price controls and that is met with pejoratives like socialism, anti-Americanism, and anti free market. "But you can't do that! You'll upset the free market Gods".

Somehow we manage to keep spending trillions on things like F-35, we manage to build tanks nobody needs ([http://www.military.com/daily- news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tells...](http://www.military.com/daily- news/2015/01/28/pentagon-tells-congress-to-stop-buying-equipment-it-doesnt- need.html)), send billions in foreign military aid to countries in the ME (Israel $3B+ and Egypt $1B). Yet anyone dare suggesting price controls for EpiPens -- and oh no, socialism will kill us all.

<comment><USER3> > anyone dare mention nationalized medicine or price controls

Uh, the US medical system is full of price controls on pretty much everything that is a "service" and not a product.

> Somehow we manage to keep spending trillions on things like F-35

Yes, these are a horrible and unconscionable waste of resources and blight upon the world. But the American left is just as much in favor of military excess as the American right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Investors seeking profits? The horror!

Profits are what caused investors to create these companies in the first place, so without that we wouldn't have EpiPens.

In this particular case, there is an anti-trust argument to be made (after the generic got pulled), but drug development is a side-effect of investors seeking maximum returns. If anyone here thinks there is a better system for drug development, I think we'd all love to hear it.

<comment><USER5> Exactly. If you decimate pharma companies' profits, you kill their incentive to innovate. You can't have it both ways.

<comment><USER6> Let the NIH and DARPA innovate and be done with the sham for-profit pharma is.

<comment><USER5> The NIH and DARPA are more than welcome to compete with the pharmas and offer lower prices. This is exactly how capitalism works.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's interesting how clear political ties between Mylan and Democratic party are swept under the rug. Also the Mylan CEO was instrumental in ensuring that FDA didn't approve any competing products because more regulation is always good. Warren, Clinton et. al. are all Pharma funded politicians. Don't get me wrong I think Obamacare is great but had this been case related to an oil company, there would have been 20 different Vox, Atlantic articles blaming Republicans.

However this time since it does not fits the optimal political pattern the outrage is far more silent.

<comment><USER5> If that's so newsworthy, then why hasn't Fox News brought it up? I think it's pretty well known that conflicts of interest are rampant throughout the government across party lines. I don't think there's any liberal conspiracy going on here.

<comment> at-fates-hands >> then why hasn't Fox News brought it up?

They've been on it since the 23rd and have reported on it nearly every day:

[https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&e...](https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome- instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=fox%20news%20mylan%20epipen)

<comment><USER5> I think you need to reread my comment and the OP's. We're talking about reporting the pharma ties among the Democrats.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This whole thing related to such excessive pricing for such an essential thing in life for some, so vividly shows the ugly side of capitalism.

<comment><USER3> > the ugly side of capitalism

True if you mean the thing we call capitalism in the US.

The only reason the price of a $1 piece of plastic can possibly be so high is because of a very noncompetitive situation created by various cronies and abetted by regulators.

Let's call it what it is. It's not capitalism, it's simply a corrupt regulatory system and firms that have learned how to exploit it to their advantage. it's nothing like a _market_ that allows competition, and the regulation is nothing like a fair referee that allows the best player to win.

Under _actual_ capitalism, there would have been price competition and perhaps (gasp) a startup would have started selling epi pens for a reasonable price just as Google started offering massive email storage for a reasonable price, etc.

While I understand the emotional reaction that it is "essential for life" (I have family members who rely upon them), let's blame what is actually at fault, _laws_ that allow firms to do this sort of thing and _prevent_ solutions from emerging.

<comment><USER9> > perhaps (gasp) a startup would have started selling epi pens

The first version of Soylent lacked _iron_ because Rhinehart couldn't be bothered to Google basic nutrition requirements.

We've tried the no regulation medical market. The term "snake oil salesman" exists because of it.

<comment><USER10> You're talking about different things. Foodstuffs can and should be regulated to a reasonable degree, and they are regulated, not only by the FDA but also by state departments of agriculture and local departments of health. Whether an early iteration of Soylent should've been legal or not is beside the point.

The point is that, iirc, Mylan has a government-granted monopoly on the EpiPen via a patent for the injection mechanism. That means Mylan is the only company that is legally allowed to manufacture it in the United States. In addition, it takes millions of dollars to bring a treatment through the slow FDA approval process (though it's not clear if this is necessary to compete with EpiPen), so even if someone was somehow able to circumvent and/or license any patents Mylan may hold, it'd still take herculean resources to bring a competitor to market.

That's what the grandparent is talking about. The EpiPen can be so expensive because no one else is legally allowed to sell a substantially similar device without Mylan's permission. When the consumer has only one option, _especially_ for something as crucial as a life-saving medication, things are really bad, whether the economic system that consumer is living under calls itself "capitalism" or something else.

We've got to fix our intellectual property laws, both patent and copyright. A large part of the Fortune 500 is only there because of the excessive legal monopolies that we've granted through intellectual property (which means it'll be basically impossible to fix).

<comment><USER9> > The point is that, iirc, Mylan has a government-granted monopoly on the > EpiPen via a patent for the injection mechanism.

No, they don't. The EpiPen's patent is long expired. [https://www.google.com/patents/US4031893](https://www.google.com/patents/US4031893)

<comment><USER10> I know that some patents on the device have expired. However, there still seems to be frequent reference to Mylan's current eligibility for patent protection. Here's one such reference from a New York Times editorial, published today [0]:

> _Today that same tiny, lifesaving bolus of epinephrine — used mostly to > treat severe allergic reactions — is delivered via sometimes elaborate > devices called auto-injectors. Though the medicine itself hasn't changed, > the delivery devices have been protected by patents, enabling drug makers to > charge ever escalating — sometimes prohibitive — prices for one of the > oldest drugs in medical use._

It doesn't say which patents specifically may cover the EpiPen, but as far as I can tell, the consensus is that the device is patent protected. I would love to know if there's definitive evidence either way -- specifically which patents Mylan claims to be protected under, or whether this is in reality just a common assumption/myth.

[0] [http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/opinion/sunday/the- lesson-...](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/opinion/sunday/the-lesson-of- epipens-why-drug-prices-spike-again-and-again.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Because no companies tie executive pay to profit targets.

<comment><USER6> Nobody dies if you can't afford Tide.

People forgoing medically necessary healthcare and medication is where the problem lies with aggressive profit seeking where demand is inelastic.

Now, if the US government would simply allow imports of equivalent medications and devices when this sort of rent seeking occurs (from other first world countries where the price is set through a single payer system), we wouldn't be having this conversation.

<comment><USER11> The opposite of rent seeking is not prices set in monopsony systems.

<comment><USER6> True, but it's what's called for in what shouldn't be a marketplace: healthcare

<comment><USER12> Why shouldn't health care be a marketplace? You can live without health care far longer than you can without food, which is, like, the canonical marketplace.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Companies are neutral. "The company" didn't make this decision. It was the board of directors, flesh and blood people. The board of directors was elected by shareholders. Who are the shareholders?

[http://investors.morningstar.com/ownership/shareholders- majo...](http://investors.morningstar.com/ownership/shareholders- major.html?t=MYL)

Largest shareholder: Vanguard Health Care (5%) ... which is in turn owned by STAAR Alternative Catagories.

[https://www.zacks.com/funds/mutual- fund/quote/SITAX](https://www.zacks.com/funds/mutual-fund/quote/SITAX)

And STAAR Alternative Cats is managed by one J Andre Weisbrod.

<comment><USER14> If the largest shareholder is a mutual fund, then the shareholders so far removed from the actual situation that I think the onus for ethical decision- making falls on the executives and the board of directors. They're the ones with the knowledge and focus to be able understand the consequences of their decisions on the people who rely on their products.

<comment><USER15> I hope at least they don't depend on constantly increasing stock prices, otherwise they are likely the source of the problem in the first place.</comment></comment></comment>


As the FAA finalizes the 737 Max's return, is Boeing's jet now safe? - <AUTHOR> https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/as-the-faa-finalizes-the-737-maxs-return-is-boeings-jet-now-safe/ <comment><USER2> You would hope that Boeing has went into excruciating detail about explaining how it happened before and exactly how they have fixed and verified that it cannot happen again and that they have not broken anything that was working in the previous version.

You would hope!</comment>


What's in a name – Tips for naming your startup - <AUTHOR> http://000fff.org/?p=68

<comment><USER2> Perhaps the title should be, "What's not in a name - things you shouldn't worry about when naming your startup".

<comment><USER3> Definitely. A name does not make you, it might just be the "dot on the i" but your actual quality decides about your success.

<comment><USER4> Up to a point. There are some things that the right name can help with:

\- It gets really boring to have to spell your name out to everyone you meet and talk to. Therefore having one that is unambiguously easy to communicate will save you hours at the boot strapping stage where one of the primary forms of marketing is talking to a lot of people at a lot of events.

\- Having a name that can only be spelled (or, mostly only spelled) one way will stop a potential competitor stealing traffic. You don't want to be PlayBlox.com when PlayBlocks.com gets bought up by an offshore competitor who you can't sue. Equally ColourLite.com would suck as a name with potentially four common variants to buy or lose traffic to.

I certainly think that memorability is overrated. Generally the second time I meet people the conversation goes like this:

"Hi, I'm the guy from X..."

"Oh, that's the thing for figuring out how to do nasty projects, right? I remember you. How's it going?"

No recollection of the name at all. Of course it could just be a bad name! :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Not sure if I should take naming advice from the guy who registered 000fff.org ;)

<comment><USER6> Me too, my first thought .. 000FFF is blue not B&W.

Names: Zyp, love it; Metallica, very masculine and "metal" perfectly 80s, hard edged; Flickr defines web-2.0 naming, was it the first, it's a better name than Flicker IMO regardless of the reason for the choice.

In the commnets " _I'm not any less of an entrepreneur because my name is Joe._ " - except that introductions would be a lot harder if your name was something unpronouncable, maybe a series of clicks (Khosa (sp?)) or something that sounds like swearing in your propositions native language.

IMO names matter a lot and no amount of interface will fix a bad name. A terrible name on the other hand you can work for ironic advantage.

<comment><USER7> #000 is black and #fff is white, at least in CSS notation.

<comment><USER8> #000fff is blue (with a hint of green) in css notation.

<comment><USER7> I am aware of that. I'm merely putting forward an alternative explanation, which, in my opinion, is more plausible than that, considering the site's title.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Key advice missing from this is to be dilligent about Trademarks. I've seen a friend's company burn through $250K in trademark law suits. They are transitioning from the startup to small business stage so it can be absorbed, but would kill an earlier stage venture.

</comment><comment><USER10> In their early '80s book on 'Positioning' and cutting through the mass of advertising consumers see, Jack Reis and Al Trout use the example of executives who are known by their initials (TJ, AR etc - they use real examples, but I don't have my copy at hand).

Anyway, they demonstrated that a lot of junior executives started using initials as well, without success.

The Junior people saw the execs with initials and thought Initials = Success.

Of course, in reality, that equation is Success = Initials. Be successful first - your name is less (hat tip, notauser) important.

I like that that 25+ year old research has a modern-day equivalent.

</comment><comment> daniel-cussen To a certain point your name matters because it can make it hard to spread by word of mouth and if it's downright stupid, that can reflect poorly on founders.

Beyond that, it's pretty much the color of the bikeshed:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_Law_of_Triviality>

<comment><USER6> _it's pretty much the color of the bikeshed_

I've not heard that expression but changing the colour of the walls in a room alters the behaviour of people in that room including how long they stay. I'd say the colour of the bike-shed matters.

<comment><USER11> And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the problem.

<comment><USER6> What do you mean, me? Or human psychology?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > If you are not in the business of domains no domain name is worth more than > $50.000

And related to that: A domain name is (almost) not real estate.

What would inner-city real estate cost if a city had an endless supply of perfectly nice cheap houses all within a ten minute subway ride away? This is essentially the case with domain names.

<comment><USER6> I think your analogy is very poor - indeed I'd say if an analogy can be wrong, this is.

The proximity of the location of a dwelling to the city is analogous the the beneficial qualities of a domain name. Memorability, zeitgeist, aptness, etc.. The unity of each name is responsible for the cost of obtaining it (second hand) as much as the proximity of location to an economic centre is responsible for real-estate costs. Both are scarce.

Your analogy is good for one thing, both situations are impossible: you can't allow everyone the same domain name and you can't enable everyone to occupy the same physical space.

<comment><USER12> The point I was trying to convey with the analogy is exactly that of (the lack of) scarcity in domain names.

Especially pre-bubble there was this real-estate-scarcity angle on domain- names: if you have a website about shoes, you need shoes.com, or you'll never be leading. But today we have Zappos which is a name I'm certain was purchased for $2.99 back when they launched and is developed into a first-class business today. If they'd insisted on getting shoes.com, chances are they might never have launched.

<comment><USER6> No scarcity, great. I'd like Zappos.com then please for $2.99 ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Carsonified had a good post on this back in 2007, and so did Kevin Rose and Tim Ferris.

[http://carsonified.com/blog/business/how-to-name-your- compan...](http://carsonified.com/blog/business/how-to-name-your-company/)

<http://vimeo.com/3934635>

When it comes to consumer goods and services, short, sweet, and memorable should be your 3 primary objectives IMO. Be careful not to be to descriptive with the name or logo design, it can be problematic if/when you try to expand into other markets or grow new products that are different from your existing focus.

</comment><comment><USER14> Most of these obscure short names are chosen because #1 the domain is available and #2 they're hoping they can somehow brand them.

Name does play a role in the success of your company. However if your product sucks then a good name isn't going to fix that. If people can't remember or spell your name, that can kill your word of mouth marketing.

When a startup begins seeing success and can afford to buy a better name then in many cases re-branding is seriously considered.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great post. I would also say: 1) don't get caught up in any one name 2) having too descriptive of a name can be disastrous as you won't have as much flexibility 3) have fun with it!

</comment><comment><USER16> 000 black fff white

<comment><USER6> Who knew!

Perhaps you should go on to say it's hexadecimal RGB shorthand and that when concatenated it should be interpreted as the long hand which gives rgb(00h,0Fh,FFh) which is blue with a little green.

Shorthand hex notation is commonly used in HTML styles, eg p { color:#000; } gives paragraphs black text.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Mostly very good points. Maybe want someone else to proofread before posting that, though. To != too. Where != were.

</comment><comment><USER18> This really helped out! Thanks guys.</comment>


Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away? - <AUTHOR> http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/metascience/funding/bollen-grant-money-allocation-2017.html <comment><USER3> Sounds to me like they want to replace the current grant process with something that resembles Google's peer bonus system. Popular sorts will get the lion's share, renegades will get peanuts.

And this would compound existing problems in the tenure system wherein the decision to grant you tenure is in part determined by your competitors at other universities. Imagine, for example, if your promotion at Google were in part decided by Jeff Bezos.

In my own post-doc experience, I caught a National Academy of Sciences member at Johns Hopkins faking data 20 years ago this year, and he decided to threaten me over it. Since no one stood up for me at the time, I left for tech a month or so later. And it's a shame because the method that exposed him was an early form of adversarial search that's now all the rage with Deep Learning. I don't see how a grant system based on a Mean Girls(tm) model of funding allocation would have prevented this.

<comment><USER4> > In my own post-doc experience, I caught a National Academy of Sciences > member at Johns Hopkins faking data 20 years ago this year, and he decided > to threaten me over it.

That's a bold claim.

Do you have evidence to support this claim? Or a name? Could you point us to the data set they faked? If others aren't able to reproduce their data (under the same circumstances), that's fraud.

<comment><USER3> There's no benefit to me in outing the professor at this point so I'm not going to do so. If you feel that undermines my credibility, I'm OK with that. I don't need a lawsuit.

But the reason my own research was never published was that my post-doc advisor demanded my work achieve the same Nobel-prize worthy result that this professor was claiming to have attained. To put that into perspective, imagine if the requirement to submit a machine learning paper to arxiv was building SkyNet. And this was a status quo requirement for publication so researchers tended to make bold claims about doing so, all of which eventually got debunked, and there still hasn't been a Nobel prize for the achievement yet 20+ years later. There has been significant progress though.

The professor went on to complete a long and successful career but the work in question was exposed as bogus shortly thereafter by a competition that was the equivalent of ImageNet for the field. It was yet another example of predicting the training set in an age when people didn't really understand yet why that would be a problem. And it wouldn't have amounted to data fakery except that said professor denied there was any issue whatsoever when I presented counterexamples to the model located by adversarial search and then proceeded to threaten me professionally, paraphrasing: "Your data could take me down, and if that happens, I'm taking you with me."

It's mostly behind me now, but I bring it up in this thread because I don't see how this new model of funding would have prevented this or a myriad of other issues with science funding.

<comment><USER5> Whistleblower. Announce it annonymously, or just do it. Seriously, we can't get bullied like this. If we let this go, we will repeat the fraud research Harvard scientists did after getting paid by the sugar industry and hundreds of other scientists willingly to write paper with subjective evidences and conclusions because they were paid to write in certain way. We need to stand up. I am willing to support you if you have concrete evidences.

<comment><USER6> You're really underestimating how much this happens. One incident is a drop in the bucket, and there won't be a whistleblower every time.

IMO the only way to fix it, especially in CS type disciplines, is to make it a requirement for publication that all the code is available and easily reproducible.

For other disciplines, I don't know the answer. At its core, this is a problem of very high competition and of failures being unpublishable. Really, it's not a great thing to out highly respected scientists who fabricate -- even though they richly deserve it -- because it erodes public confidence in science. It would be better if we could find a way to prevent these things before they happen.

<comment><USER5> I totally understand the institutional and establisment power in place and how many folks out there are on the same boat as this said JHU professor. But this is why we need to blow at every chance we have. We know how policy change takes time at the scale of universe. It takes forever. This is how corruption is defeated or we attempt to defeat corruption in society. Ideally we take out the top guys then all the way down. If we maintain the position that "the wrongdoer is too famous", "he/she is not alone and not fair to single one", then don't bother have peer review journals. I know exactly how corrupted some of the peer recviews can be to be honest. But that's the whole point. If we don't start holding people accountable, espeically the PI, the bad seed will grow and more bad seeds will blossom. Stop the bleeding. This JHU professor is famous so what? Grow up and admit the wrong. He/She is just scared of losing his/her honor and this is exactly what we need to do. Strip the crown and start encouraging people to publish code and dataset openly.

If this professor is famous, you can bet he/she most likely didn't do the actual research. It's almost always the graduate students on the co-author list did the research and then sign by the professors. If a professor mentoring can't admit the wrong how can he/she be a good mentor? If he/she instruct the students to take a shortcut, well, guess what, this is real bad. Do we want more bad seeds? Lead by examples. Let's not do more sloppy and dirty research. Someone who brag about his/her successful research but knowing the data is fake is a sad person. Academic is tough - totally understand that. Professor's tenure and salary often tie to the amount of grants they can bring in and the stress is too much for one to do research with ethics and dignity. But this is why we need to hold people accountable, and reform research. This is a complex issue, but it takes courage. I hope powerful researchers and the leaders on research committees on various government agency will start improving the system.

<comment><USER6> I said nothing about fairness. If I thought it were practical and would help, I'd advocate outing every single one of them. I have less than zero sympathy for them. And I totally agree that it is really screwing up science.

But to use an analogy, if you have a few weeds in your field/garden, you can pull them. If you have a lot, you need a systemic solution like pesticide. Remember also that the most senior people are close to retirement and if eliminated will in many cases just be replaced by other sociopaths.

The worst case scenario for this guy if the whistle were blown would be that he takes early retirement, goes home to enjoy his pension, and probably comes back as part-time/emeritus.

People would say, well, it's bad that he fabricated this one time, but his contributions to the field as a whole outweigh this one minor lapse. That's a big difference between when senior and junior people are caught in these situations. He would still maintain a lot of respect and connections -- more than enough to make good on his threat to totally screw GP's career.

<comment><USER5> I agree and I am no saint either. My thought is don't let a bully win. Sure he may go home with an early retirement or just hide behind desk teaching who knows. But his reputation deserves to be punished. Perhaps no one would remember but that's a stain he needs to live up to. How fan we be so sure his other contributions are questionable? I am the type that can't stand at bully coming at me and I will go head to head. I am sorry if you or others have to go through these science bullies. Often we critize people demoting science in climate change and yet we ourselves can't do true science either

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >Allocating money on the condition that some must be given to other researchers would create several downstream benefits. Scientists who maximize the ability of other scientists to produce their own new and useful results would have a big advantage in this system. Jerks would be punished appropriately.

Feels too naive to me - jerks in powerful posts will be rewarded by this system. If I know you sit on the committee to decide on thing X I'm very interested in (let's say, access to a new computation cluster), I'll contact you and hint how favorable inclusion of myself will result in more of my 'share' towards yuo. Jerks tend to thrive in such a system since they look for opportunities where they can control the lever, any lever. It doesn't create a more friendly environment, it amps up science's political game, where people _look friendly_ but stab you in the back, without your knowledge.

<comment><USER8> Damn, I'm a tenured professor and reading through the comments it seems like I'm the only one who thinks this is a good idea at some level. The reasons I think it probably wouldn't work are things I haven't seen anyone mention, though.

This is really not too different from the current system, except for one critical thing, which is that instead of decisions being based on nepotistic review panels, they're based on everyone. So this has the benefit of everyone getting funding, and decisions on who to fund based on some highly democratized process rather than the old boys club.

The issue you're raising is important, but making funding decisions totally anonymous would help. Of course, I don't know that you could make it totally anonymous, and what you're suggesting would still be an issue, but anonymity would go a long way. Also, the thing you're suggesting would probably still happen anyway even in today's system.

The problem in my mind is deciding who gets to participate in the system. Everyone who's a tenured professor? Tenure-track? What disciplines? My guess is this would just shift the funding decision from a per-project issue to a per-researcher issue.

My favorite idea for remedying the current process is to randomize rewards. That is, everyone above the median gets thrown into a pool and everyone has X% chance of being funded.

Also, I'd like to see "term limits" and more randomization of review panels. Make it more akin to jury duty, where, if an institution receives federal funding, their researchers are all put into a pool, and review panels are randomly selected for fixed periods of time.

Finally, indirect costs need to be eliminated, sharply curtailed, or reorganized to require explicit justification. Republicans are finally drawing attention to this, and they're right: it's slush funding. Universities wouldn't give as much of a crap about funding if it weren't a profit margin for them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> This proposal is a simple, appealing way of solving the problem, but I doubt it would work well over time, because, like all efforts to control human behavior via a simple set of rules, it will end up being gamed by human beings.

Campbell's Law: "The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor."[0]

Ultimately, I believe, we'll need human moderators to (1) detect and prevent abuse of the rules, and (2) modify the rules when they stop working.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law)

<comment><USER10> Indeed. Especially in such a simple scheme, e.g. if they find people aren't giving away enough money and try to incentivize it, people will just form cycles. If you start doing triangle-detection on the graph (as a stand-in for some arbitrary regulatory measure), they'll just make longer ones.

And beyond pure greed and the political aspect, there are professors that also have pointless grudges.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> If you want to pull together a bunch of money for a large experiment, you're still going to have to write documentation to argue your case, and spend lots of time arguing that case.

Continued funding will require perennial marketing to your peers.

It democratizes science funding, but as in pure democracy, it forces each citizen to spend much of her day at the forum.

My related pet hack: Give researchers a shareholding ability for existing grants, letting them go long and short each project, should they choose to do so, perhaps in an imaginary currency. At the end of each cycle, allow researchers to re-allocate their "capital". The key difference from the article's proposal is that the researchers can retain their "capital" for future use.

It is the shorts I'm most interested in -- people who can accurately predict which experiments _won 't_ work in their proposed timelines are the people who I want evaluating grant applications.

<comment><USER12> If you just shorted everything you'd come of pretty good on average.

<comment><USER13> The way this would work out is that you win very small amounts when correctly shorting, but lose big amounts for incorrectly shorting. Shorting everything would work out to a small overall loss.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> One quibble that I didn't see addressed but possibly overlooked: who chooses who is considered a scientist worthy of getting the initial block of $$ in the first place? There will still need to be an application for that status at some point.

<comment><USER15> I was wondering the same. In [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.1067.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1304.1067.pdf) they say "chosen according to some criteria like academic appointment status or recent research productivity".

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> This definitely seems like a rich get richer sort of situation and will lead to patronage machines.

</comment><comment><USER17> Why not have part of each grant be placed into a fund for replication studies, or even directly allocated to other independent teams to replicate the study. Might do some fields rather well.

</comment><comment><USER18> I agree with the posts that this would just give more to jerks who game the system. Although what if there was just equal distribution. You could form coalitions for more resources or you could _just use the small amount for exploratory research_. Get 10 people together for a large grant 100 for a mega grant. This collaboration is required regardless if you want larger grants.

I would like to see a small pool of grant money go out like this. Or maybe the lower scored but not grant winning get 1/10th allocation with no requirements to do a small scale study or act as a bridge.

Imagine how amazing technology could be if we swapped the war budget with the health and science budgets.

</comment><comment><USER19> Everything people object to in socialism would apply to science funding. It would be like giving everyone a percentage of the GNP and hoping their innate altruism would redistribute the money to worthy recipients based on individual judgments of merit.

Those who think scientists would act differently or that scientists aren't otherwise-ordinary human beings with specific areas of talent, should read the history of Nobel Prizewinner William Shockley (a very public racist). Or the ugly and public priority fight that Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin fought with respect to the Polio vaccine, which resulted in neither being considered for the Nobel Prize.

</comment><comment><USER20> The challenge in research is to create variance.

New mechanisms that explicitly favor assumption breaking research will generate variance that a scientific community can sample from to generate progress. The impact his will have is to entrench the current paradigm.

New mechanisms should explicitly favor developing researchers rather than made researchers, to fund the research that is relatively valuable - <USER2> research. Mechanisms that optimize for the largest return on the margin, instead of optimizing for name recognition / popularity, which is already pareto distributed.

</comment><comment><USER21> I don't see how this will not lead to - rich gets richer - phenomenon. Scientists who have highly cited papers are by definition already well established (full professors in tier 1 institutes who are already well-funded or might be occupying an endowed chair position). Do they really need tons of grant money to do further research? As per this scheme, they will be the ones getting the share of grant money.

And currently scientists in academic institutions are already giving more than 50% of their grant money as overhead cost to the institution.

</comment><comment><USER22> They should require that who the fund get disbursed from, and to, and the amounts, be part of the public record. The quality of results, and year-after- year funding to the original researches (the ones who selected who the disbursement goes to) should be related to the success of the research. This would massively crowd-source successful grant creation, and make the market into a winners market.

The record would make things like gaming and collusion clearly visible after the fact.

<comment><USER23> Wouldn't it be better to make the donation piece more like a secret ballot, i.e. make it hard for anyone to find out whom a given scientist funded? That would make quid pro quo arrangements less likely because one party wouldn't be able to determine if the other stuck to the agreement or cheated.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> The fundamental problem isn't that grant funding based on peer-reviewed evaluations of research proposals is a bad idea. It's that:

1\. The pie has shrunk a lot because federal funding of research has seen a huge decrease when measured as a fraction of GDP.

2\. There's also a lot of political pressure to not "waste" public money on research that doesn't yield useful technology _NOW_.

3\. But at the same time, there's an ever-growing supply of people who love doing science. These people are willing to do pretty much anything to get and maintain an academic research position, because like it or not, academia is still the among the best places to do high-impact research.

So there simply isn't enough money to fund all the good ideas, BUT there's political pressure to fund only sureshot research, and an oversupply means that scientists are doing what it takes to be productive in their academic positions.

The obvious solution is to increase federal funding for research. Accept that not everything is going to pan out as intended. It's not like every product a company makes is going to be profitable, so why should we expect science to work any differently? And then just wait! Some of this research will in fact succeed and we'll see the next internet happen.

</comment><comment><USER25> References a Science article titled "With this new system, scientists never have to write a grant application again" ...

> In Bollen's system, scientists no longer have to apply; instead, they all > receive an equal share of the funding budget annually—some €30,000 in the > Netherlands, and $100,000 in the United States—but they have to donate a > fixed percentage to other scientists whose work they respect and find > important. "Our system is not based on committees' judgments, but on the > wisdom of the crowd," Scheffer told the meeting.

> Bollen and his colleagues have tested their idea in computer simulations. If > scientists allocated 50% of their money to colleagues they cite in their > papers, research funds would roughly be distributed the way funding agencies > currently do, they showed in a paper last year—but at much lower overhead > costs.

[http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/new-system- scientists...](http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/new-system-scientists- never-have-write-grant-application-again)

</comment><comment><USER26> "If scientists allocated 50% of their money to colleagues they cite in their papers, research funds would roughly be distributed the way funding agencies currently do"...assuming scientists didn't change their citing practices to exploit the new incentive structure.

Still think it's a pretty interesting idea, but they should probably team up with some game theorists.

</comment><comment><USER27> My limited experience tends to suggest there is a geographic mafia involved as well. If you are on the west coast and just need money, you are probably better off pitching local industry because the east coast PIs have a older, more established network system that effectively locks up a lot of government grant funding.

I have applied for grants that might as well have been written for my group, very niche, and been denied, multiple times. One of my advisors actually told me "Do you know how to deal with the mafia? You make your own mafia."

I consider an NIH R01 to be equivalent to a degree from Harvard: it's the imprimatur, not the money (or, for Harvard, the education), that is different.

</comment><comment><USER28> I think they would end up finding 8 or 9 dudes playing beer pong at a chalet all year with the money. They wouldnt actually "find" that, but it would be the internal outcome. And to of course a bunch of doctored papers with fake results.

</comment><comment><USER29> Crucial question whose answer I didn't catch while reading the articles: how do you determine who is considered a "scientist"?

<comment><USER19> > ... how do you determine who is considered a "scientist"?

In the same way we do now, using a system that would overlook people like Einstein, a patent clerk who hadn't finished his Ph.D., who published articles having no supporting empirical evidence. In fact, there was little concrete evidence supporting his ideas until 1919 (a solar eclipse), which would eliminate him from consideration for the "scientist" label in modern times.

Or Alfred Wegener, a mere meteorologist who had some crazy ideas about the continents floating around and who was shouted down by the real scientists during his lifetime (reliable evidence for plate tectonics only appeared long after his death).

Ironically enough, both stories support a foundational principle of science -- that evidence trumps eminence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> > Should we move to a system where every scientist gives grant money away?

Who is this we who has the power to completely change the grant system?

</comment><comment><USER30> Why so many complex suggestions when we have not shown that any system is better than the lottery approach. Unless you can show that your grant allocation system is better than a random number generator why should we use anything else other than dice.

</comment><comment><USER31> If (academic) politics weren't bad enough in the basic sciences!

(hopefully HN readers understand the differences, as well as similarities, of academic vs governmental politics. Seems like the distinction is lost in the general public).

</comment><comment><USER22> One think to stop collusion and gaming is that who they select their grant to go to should be part of the public record. After-the-fact analysis could quickly show gaming or other nefariousness.

</comment><comment><USER32> This sounds a lot like the Valley angel investor system.

</comment><comment><USER33> We need to reduce administrative overhead.</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best (price, speed) web hosting? - <AUTHOR> I'm currently using 1&1 but after a spurious charge I want to switch to the fastest and cheapest web host out there. I don't need any website builder programs or that junk. Just hosting (php, sql). Thanks. <comment><USER2> I use stormondemand.com. Over a year ago I unixbenched it, EC2 and Linode, and it clearly won. Only problem is that they don't innovate...it's where AWS was when it started..no queue, email, s3, ebs, ... At least they have dedicated boxes, so you can build a hybrid solution.

Linode is pretty great too though. I only have 1 box there, but I've had up to 6. Never had a problem.

I never know how to say this without sounding like spam, but <http://webhostingtalk.com> is a really popular and good community for anything related to hosting. I suggest you check it out.

</comment><comment><USER3> Like others here I used BlueHost for a couple of years. But for the last few years I have used HostMonster, which is owed by the same folks a BlueHost. Basically companies provide competitive features at first, but don't seriously upgrade what they provide over time. So I liked the feature set provided by the newer HostMonster better that that of BlueHost. Unfortunately HostMonster hasn't upgraded their Ruby on Rails support in a couple of years and so I now have an account with Site5 for RoR, but Site5 doesn't have the sort of reliable up time that HostMonster has.

</comment><comment><USER4> Do you want managed or unmanaged?

I would say webfaction is by far the best managed host bang for the buck.

If you're looking for unmanaged then linode is probably the way to go.

<comment><AUTHOR> Never used unmanaged. How hard is it for newbs to install, update, patch and all that?

<comment><USER4> Just a heads up a LAMP stack on Ubuntu can be done in under an hour and half. I recently setup a LAMP stack and never setup a LAMP stack before in less than two hours.

I have some sys admin and nix experience. If I were you, unless you knew you wanted to learn how to setup and scale apps (sys admin), I'd go with webfaction

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Check out the specials listed on WebHostingTalk.com.

I use unmanaged dedicated servers.

Going price for a dedicated Quad Core i7, 12 GB of ECC RAM, 4x2TB is under $150/mo. That's a wicked cheap price for those specs.

Obviously if you are going from $10/mo hosting, you won't bite the bullet on a $150/mo server, but it's the only price point I know.

</comment><comment><USER6> Linode is the fastest if you are looking for speed and their plans are pretty cheap comparatively.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd definitely recommend linode, it may be unmanaged but their user guides are amazing, I've had no problems setting up a LAMP stack with SSL and Hardened PHP.

If you opt for Ubuntu server then the Aptitude package manager makes installing and updating software ridiculously easy.

</comment><comment><USER8> I am loving bluehost (<http://bluehost.com/>) right now.

I tried Netfirms before, it was good but not cheap. I tried Godaddy too, cheap but not good AT ALL.

bluehost has been fast enough for me and cheap.

<comment><USER9> Second that, Bluehost is great and support are very helpful. For content based sites like mine it works just fine, haven't had experience running anything major or any major traffic spikes but from my experiences they would be able to handle it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Prgmr.com is the best bang for your buck, and operated by a HNer.

</comment><comment><USER11> I resell accounts on Rackspace Cloudsites (very reliable and fast). If you e-mail me I could hook you up with some cheap hosting.

</comment><comment><USER12> bluehost is really cheap however don't expect huge speeds and "unlimited" stuff - it works ok for a company website and 20 emails or so. the have php and sql and web email and IMAP. Drawback is that it's US based so uncle Sam can check your emails whenever they want.

<comment><AUTHOR> Ok, yeah I want blazing fast, so bluehost is prob out.</comment></comment>


Can an exhibition of her intimate possessions bring us closer to Frida Kahlo? - <AUTHOR> https://www.newstatesman.com/Frida-Kahlo-Making-Her-Self-Up-VA-review <comment><USER2> Wow. EPIC unibrow.</comment>


Self-driving cars are bullshit - <AUTHOR> https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/16/combat-wheelchairs/#car-wreck <comment><USER2> Yes, but self driving electric (tri)bicycles might be more practical, at least for urban commuting.</comment>


How to spend $100K in your 1st year as a startup - <AUTHOR> https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-spend-100k-your-1st-year-startup-kyriakos-kokkoris-phd <comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the comment/guideline. First time posting something here, my mistake. Nevertheless, this post is about how we spent $100K as a startup in our 1st year. We visualised all the money that we spent in 2015 in a nice infographic (18% R&D, 12% PR&Marketing etc) so we can show it to our current and upcoming investors to increase their trust towards us and our credibility as young entrepreneurs. Transparency is always a great thing. This post could be a good example for fellow entrepreneurs to get an idea how to plan their budget (definitely will depend on what, where, who and how but it can provide good hints). To also see where you could save money and where to spend more to make your startup better. No one can predict if this is the right way to do it but in our case, this year we will save money on R&D and Operational Costs and spent more in Sales & Marketing to increase revenue. Any feedback would be more than welcome. Cheers.

</comment><comment><USER2> Please don't change the title to make it a question.

The title of your post is "How to spend $100K in your 1st year as a startup.", the main topic is "In this post, I would like to focus on how we spent our first 100K" and nowhere do you describe how you visualised it.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)</comment>


Thoughtbot's Playbook for developing apps - <AUTHOR> http://playbook.thoughtbot.com <comment><USER2> First: thanks a lot for coming with all this.

Now, some comments around navigation:

* Keep the left menu open for the section I'm currently viewing so I can easily go to the next subsection.

* Without JavaScript the drop down menu doesn't work.

* It would be nice to be able to have all items in navigation always displayed.

Edited for list presentation.

</comment><comment><USER3> They talk about Continuous Integration and how its speed is really important; I can vouch for that. We spent months making Circle (<https://circleci.com>) the fastest CI around, because our customers really needed it. Between parallelism and low-level tweaks we've reduced 90 minutes builds to 10 minutes, and the difference to productivity is unreal.

</comment><comment><USER4> I'm sure this is partially by design, but it's not apparent that this is actually the front cover of the book, and the most noticeable thing about the page, aside from the credits and such, is the "Buy It Now" button. This might spike your bounces.

<comment><AUTHOR> (I have no relationship with thoughtbot and not sure if any of them post here. Just thought it was a URL worth posting.)

For anyone who might've missed it, the content index is on the left side. From the pages I've read so far, it seems that there's some useful information in there.

<comment><USER5> If they care enough to read their traffic / referrer logs, they'll be here soon enough.

<comment><USER6> Hello :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Julian Assange planning to hand himself in for health reasons - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/media/live/2014/aug/18/julian-assange-press-conference-at-ecuadorian-embassy-live-coverage

<comment><USER2> After spending two years confined to the same small building, I would imagine the toll it's taken on his mental health will be as great, if not greater, than that of his physical health.

</comment><comment><USER3> Also because he's legitimately wanted for questioning about rape and fled to escape justice while simultaneously demanding people be accountable to justice.

He's a fucking hypocrite of the worst kind, and his antics probably hurt Wikileaks more than anything else.

If you're willing to recklessly endanger others but try to cause international incidents when you are wanted for questioning then you are a douchebag.</comment>


Facebook has auto-enrolled users into a facial recognition test in Europe - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/20/just-say-no/ <comment><USER2> To save time, they can already put out the PR release saying that they're sorry, that they didn't expect this, that anyway everything is very clear in paragraph 2.4.5.C.& of the Terms & Conditions, and that it won't happen again.

<comment><USER3> Right... And don't forget the part about how your privacy is important to them and they think about it a lot.

<comment><USER4> The tech industries proverbial "thoughts and prayers"

<comment><USER5> Most of the HN community despises regulations against tech companies, but it seems like nothing short of strong regulations and severe financial penalties will rein in the bad actors. We can't expect the companies and their CEOs to act out of the goodness of anything save for their pocketbooks. We've lost the presumption of good faith

<comment><USER6> I think bad PR and vicious backlash from the consumers against foul play is a stronger deterrent than some one time fines.

<comment><USER7> It's arguable whether bad PR and vicious backlash are working, or happening. As evidence I present... well, here we are.

Edit: added a word

<comment><USER8> I think there are no 'obvious' repercussions to the privacy and security issues that are affecting the general public.

For example, lots of companies have been hacked(Target, Equifax), and AFAIK there hasn't been credit card fraud on massive scale that has been reported in the media. It kinda makes people think that media is over inflating the issue(which it lots of time does), and just not care. We have been hearing about how this data will be used to say deny loans etc. but nothing has happened.

I mean even Snowden spying scandal just revealed the extensive spying. What exactly are the agencies doing with the data and how that negatively impacts me is not really clear for a general person. And I am speaking as somewhat tech literate person. Why exactly would an average person care?

Giving up privacy has, I think, almost become 'normal'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The GDPR states you can only offer opt in and NOT opt out. This is not an opt in method, no matter how Facebook spins it. I hope the EU pulls them on this :)

Going by [http://techblog.bozho.net/gdpr-practical-guide- developers/](http://techblog.bozho.net/gdpr-practical-guide-developers/) anyway

<comment><USER10> I'm confused, didn't you opt in when you clicked the checkbox to agree to Facebook's T&C?

<comment><USER11> Yes, you did. This is just another clickbait headline. GDPR - _when it becomes active_ \- will outlaw the opt-out strategy. But there is nothing legally wrong with it _today_.

<comment><USER12> No, the existing privacy legislation already requires opt-in for processing of biometric data; GDPR makes many things stricter, but much of it is already a legal requirement.

<comment><USER11> Apparently Facebook's well-trained legal team disagrees with your assessment of European law. Facebook isn't stupid; they wouldn't have done this if it weren't legal.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> This was originally misreported, and has now been updated. It appears users have _not_ been auto-enrolled.

Article title is now "Facebook starts its facial recognition push to Europeans".

From the correction:

" _This article was updated with a series of corrections after Facebook confirmed the notifications are in fact the rollout of its new consent flow, not part of the earlier tests. It has also told us categorically that no users were auto-enrolled in facial recognition tech in Europe — even in the test. So we've updated this article accordingly._ "

</comment><comment><USER11> Opt-in doesn't take effect until May 25, so there's nothing legally wrong here. It's also not disingenuous for Facebook to explain the benefits of the service to the user so that they understand the impact before they disable it.

TechCrunch has been one of the leaders of the anti-Facebook bandwagon recently, so it must be serving them well. I'd imagine they are getting lots of clicks to these articles, and, ironically, are making substantial amounts of money from showing lots of highly targeted ads on them. They are also undoubtedly using just as many if not more third party tracking tools than the sites they like to skewer for this practice. One would be wise to read their anti-Facebook articles with the understanding that they have an economic incentive to play to their audience by placing a negative spin on everything the company does.

<comment><USER14> > _there's nothing legally wrong here_

This attitude is mirrored at Facebook, in Zuckerberg and throughout its culture: Abuse the user to (and past) the limits of the law. It is why nothing will change until the EU or the DoJ break Facebook up.

<comment><USER11> Has there been a proven (in court) accusation that Facebook has "abused users" "past" the limits of the law?

<comment><USER14> > _Has there been a proven (in court) accusation that Facebook has "abused > users" "past" the limits of the law?_

Many times. The FTC consent decree [1], the violations of Belgian law [2] and the violations of German law [3] come to mind. (In each case, a court ruled or supervised a settlement. In each case, Facebook continued breaking the law.) There are many more.

Facebook's culture is broken. The precedence for such lawless cultures is they get broken up or they go Enron.

[1] [https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2011/11/faceb...](https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press- releases/2011/11/facebook-settles-ftc-charges-it-deceived-consumers-failing- keep)

[2] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook- belgium/facebook...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook- belgium/facebook-loses-belgian-privacy-case-faces-fine-of-up-to-125-million- idUSKCN1G01LG)

[3] [https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-facebook-court-case- pri...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/germany-facebook-court-case-privacy- settings-terms-of-use-brought-vzbz/)

<comment><USER11> With regard to the FTC, the agreement with them was reached specifically to keep it out of court. No judge or jury ruled on the merits of the allegations. A judge may have been involved, but only to approve the terms of the settlement. To my knowledge no US court has ever made the kind of finding you were implying they have.

With regard to the European countries, I guess I should have been more specific in my question in limiting it to the US. Finding of fault by European courts/governments against large US corporations is nothing new and doesn't imply any illegal intent on the part of the accused. Cash-starved, often socialist governments found throughout Europe will always find ways to use their broadly written laws to obtain badly needed government revenue from US corporations. In fact GDPR is just a massive expansion of this strategy.

<comment><USER14> Convenient that all the courts and regulators, acting under court supervision, that have ruled against Facebook are illegitimate. First time, too, I've heard of modern Germany being referred to as lawless.

<comment><USER11> I didn't refer to Germany as lawless. In fact they have gone the other direction - they have laws on the books that are so broadly written that any foreign corporation can be caught up in them without intent to violate them. It's also rather convenient that with GDPR, Europe has created a sweeping regulation that happens to disproportionately affect and is sure to generate massive fines from deep-pocketed corporations based _outside_ of Europe. Do you think that is a coincidence?

<comment><USER14> > _Do you think that is a coincidence?_

Facebook broke laws, was fined by courts and regulators in multiple countries, kept breaking laws, made a mess on both sides of the Atlantic, lied about what happened and then tried to throw it under the rug. Meanwhile, leaks from inside show zero repentance or even cognizance among employees of something having gone wrong.

The EU is addressing this failure with regulation; we'll solve it more decisively by breaking Facebook up.

<comment><USER11> _we 'll solve it more decisively by breaking Facebook up._

Good luck with that. Facebook is not based in a socialist country. In Europe, by now they'd have undoubtedly been broken up or even taken over by the government, with revenues either flowing directly to the government or collected through high tax rates, fees, and fines.

That is not the case here, where Facebook is based. I barely use Facebook for personal purposes, but I respect their right to exist, innovate, and make a profit. I also have a sense of logical personal responsibility that seems to be missing the the anti-Facebook folks. When I share something publicly, I fully expect that it will be...shared publicly. When I agree to be bound by the terms of conditions of a website...I agree to be bound by their terms and conditions. Somehow that is lost on all the people whining about it. How can anybody do business with or even employ people that publicly state that they do not recognize contract law?

<comment><USER15> >> In Europe, by now they'd have undoubtedly been broken up or even taken over by the government, with revenues either flowing directly to the government or collected through high tax rates, fees, and fines.

Large companies based in Europe that haven't been "broken up and taken over" by "the government":

      Royal Dutch Shell (UK & Netherlands)
      BP (UK)
      Total (France)
      Volkswagen (Germany)
      Daimler (Germany)
      BNP Paribas (France)
      Carrefour (France)
      Banco Santander (Spain)
      Fiat (Italy)
      BMW (Germany)

etc. etc. etc.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_compa...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_companies_by_revenue)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I still have a Facebook account (which I'm slowly backing away from), here's how I (hopefully) poisoned their facial recognition data.

My profile photos have always been untagged group photos or me in a Halloween costume, etc.

Upload stock photos:

1\. Go to [https://www.shutterstock.com/search?searchterm=person+model&...](https://www.shutterstock.com/search?searchterm=person+model&search_source=base_search_form&language=en&page=1&sort=newest&image_type=photo&measurement=px&safe=true) Play with the search terms to get people sort of like you.

2\. Download a few dozen images (or more). The site gives you the options of finding other photos of the same model. I figure it's probably good to have the poison data be somewhat self-consistent.

3\. Upload them to Facebook and tag yourself and your friends in them. I kept them in a non-public album, so I wouldn't spam my feed with this stuff. I suppose I could make them public later, once they're a little old.

4\. I've also done this on my girlfriend's account, as well as a couple close friends.

Reverse tag:

When I used to upload and tag real group photos, I'd swap the tagging (e.g. tag a friend as myself and myself as my friend).

I also try to keep the volume of poison photos far larger than real ones. I don't personally upload and tag any photos of myself anymore.

I've always kept the facial recognition stuff like this turned off, but I don't trust Facebook to not to reverse the setting just because it wants to. Eventually I want to delete my account, but I can't just yet due to event invites.

<comment><USER17> You're likely just putting a lot of effort into helping them test an edge case where tagged photos really don't match. You're probably doing them more of a service than all the normal account users.

<comment><USER16> I'm not so sure. If that was really a case they cared about, it would be easy for them to generate their test cases themselves.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> I am glad, I do not need to worry that much about these things, thanks to my /etc/hosts file[1].

[1] One of many versions: [https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f...](https://gist.github.com/thomasbilk/1506210/2d20f47bbcca75b2f78d6909c1637501000d846f)

<comment><USER19> If the bits going through your router were the only way Facebook gathered data about you, that would make sense. But it's only one way. You don't even need to have a Facebook account to have a Facebook profile.

<comment><USER20> So how is Facebook filling up my profile with no input data? They might create _a_ profile based on data my friends publish, but they won't be able to connect it with my IP or my identity.

<comment><USER19> There's a whole Google full of information on this.

<comment><USER20> I found none, that's why I'm asking. There is technologically no way to connect me (my browser/phone that sends no information to FB) and my "profile" made up by a few photos of me that my friends have uploaded.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> I'm in Europe (England) and when i fired up facebook on my phone this morning, i got the option to opt out of this. The accept it button was the default and obvious button to click on though.

<comment><USER22> Does GDPR apply in the UK post-Brexit?

<comment><USER23> Yes, it's already been passed into uk law

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Cultural rot, combined with an unrepentant leader, means the company can't be saved.

</comment><comment><USER25> Am I the only person who is getting annoyed at these increasingly hysterical articles shrieking about Facebook's supposedly deceptive practices?

Because for christs' sake, Facebook is one of the most OPEN and transparent tech companies around when it comes to data privacy. Many companies out there are far shadier when it comes to this stuff.

Let's face it, no one wants to pay for Facebook. Personal data for advertising is pretty much the only way Facebook can exist.

<comment><USER26> The news media has a way of using the "wave". The barrage of articles with FB caught with it's hands in the "cookie jar" will contiue piling up. And a lot of them are just trying to get on in the action but some - like this one here - are genuinely upsetting and need to be reported.

The issue here is not the business model of FB but the sneaky ways it tries to make it seem something completely else. While the audience here at HN and similar forums are more than aware of the business model, I'm pretty sure if I asked my mum about it, she'd draw a blank or would not be completely informed. It's to a population like this who are most likely to fall for dark UX patterns and other shady ways FB uses for getting an uninformed consent.

And that's not right. I think, the outrage is not about the business model as much as it is about (un)informed consent. Sometimes - like in this story - almost while cocking a snook in the face of regulatory authorities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> What's with the clickbait title? The title from the article is:

"Facebook starts its facial recognition push to Europeans"

Did it change? Please change. @dang @sctb

</comment><comment><USER28> Is this a joke? Is Facebook becoming a parody of itself? Are the inmates running the asylum?

Irrespective of the legality, it's bizarre that they would roll out some creepy, facial recognition right now...especially in Europe.

</comment><comment><USER29> There are way too many emotions and little facts provided in this article, it's a really hard read tbh.

</comment><comment><USER30> "Art. 7 GDPR Conditions for consent

4\. When assessing whether consent is freely given, utmost account shall be taken of whether, inter alia, the performance of a contract, including the provision of a service, _is conditional on consent_ to the processing of personal data that is _not necessary for the performance of that contract_."

A question to ask of Facebook is whether collection of such personal data as facial recognition is _necessary_ to provide the service the user wants.

For example, if the user wants to keep in contact with a friend through Facebook, is facial recognition _necessary_ for Facebook to provide that service?

If it is not necessary, and Facebook asks for consent anyway, then should the user be able withhold consent and still receive the service she wants.

If not, under Art 7(4) is there an argument that consent was not freely given.

Facebook could try to argue that facial recognition is "required" to provide the service, but what if the existing user only wants the service she enjoyed in the past (without ever having to consent to facial recognition).

In sum, is it possible for users to reject new "features" and still receive the service they want, if those "features" are not _necessary_ in order to provide the service.

Are facial recognition "necessary" to provide the service to users that users want or is it necessary to provide service to advertisers that advertisers want.

Who wants facial recognition? Is it the users choice.

       Do you want to turn on facial recognition?

       [ ] Yes
       [ ] No

</comment><comment><USER31> This doesn't sound substantially representative of my experience of being presented with this earlier today.

As far as I can recall, I was presented with two options: enable facial recognition; and reviewing my other options (which I clicked), which were something like confirming my decision to decline, and downloading my data and closing my account. It was a fairly brief process, so my memory isn't precise. I do recall that I wasn't automatically enrolled into facial recognition, though - I had to make a conscious choice either way, and although it was obvious that Facebook were encouraging me to opt in, it didn't feel like I was being tricked or coerced (perhaps save for the example of safeguarding my identity).

The process I went through in my desktop browser was not the same as the one I've seen for screenshots of the mobile process.

</comment><comment><USER32> _Not only is the tech turned on, but users who click through to the settings to try and turn it off will also find Facebook attempting to dissuade them from doing that — with manipulative examples of how the tech can "protect" them._

Facebook is such a bad actor, I hope that politicians figure out that they could make a name for themselves kicking them in the teeth. Hopefully GDPR can come in and hurt them too. I realize that the default attitude of many in tech is that most people don't know or care about this, but I think they're wrong. People do care, but it takes time and repetition to make the point stick. Helpfully Facebook only has two speeds: scumbag, and turbo-scumbag.

All around the world, we need to start electing politicians who understand technology, know what dark patterns are, and can intelligently fight for us.

<comment><USER33> > I realize that the default attitude of many in tech is that most people > don't know or care about this, but I think they're wrong.

I agree, and I think the actual problem is that a majority of people don't know why they should care, or even know that they should in the first place. "I have nothing to hide" is something I hear far too common, after all.

<comment><USER34> It's actually a bit worse than just that, and something akin to tragedy of the commons.

The people who actually _do_ have nothing to hide (by which we mean, "the dirt on the individual is so pedestrian that even if it takes zero effort to find it, nobody wants it") stand to benefit from the features and interactions these tools enable. Those who do have something to hide become second-class citizens, forced to do things the slow, manual way that other people can automate away by trading out their privacy.

We head into a techno-underclass dystopia if we let individuals decide to adopt privacy-compromising technologies, because those with worthless privacy can gain the benefits and will not refrain from doing so to the relative detriment of those who cannot.

Personal opinion: "It's not my problem you can't participate fully in our society because X" is a very American opinion, which is why I think there is such culture clash between Silicon Valley corps and the EU.

<comment><USER3> You just gave me another way of thinking about it, thanks. Although I also think the benefits of social media might be overstated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> This cascade of privacy scandals seems quite well timed on Facebook's part; if all the blatant issues get publicized then "resolved" just before GDPR's May 25th start then they can extract the maximum value while facing no penalties. How annoying!

<comment><USER36> Facebook is categorically in-capable of cleaning up their mess. There is no way they will get all their blatant issues out of the way in the next 35 days.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Logging in today, from europe, I received a modal about some updates.

It stated that there are some updates i'll need to review:

One of them, the facial recognition feature.

""" Here's what we'll ask you to review: An option for turning on face recognition """

Full modal can be seen here: [https://img1.picload.org/image/dogcpgci/selection_122.jpg](https://img1.picload.org/image/dogcpgci/selection_122.jpg)

Clicking Get Started I received some information on GDPR and their data usage:

[https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprra/selection_123.jpg](https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprra/selection_123.jpg)

[https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprrl/selection_124.jpg](https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprrl/selection_124.jpg)

Clicking "Manage Data Settings" I was given some examples on data usage:

[https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprri/selection_126.jpg](https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprri/selection_126.jpg)

Clicking "Continue" I received this modal, with 3 datapoints that are used.

[https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprrw/selection_127.jpg](https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprrw/selection_127.jpg)

Obviously, Facebook processes more data than these three. It has never really been a dating app and that is definitely not one of their main focuses.

Anyway, I went on to remove my "Interested in" datapoint. Prompting an "are you sure" modal:

[https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprdr/selection_128.jpg](https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprdr/selection_128.jpg)

After clicking remove this single datapoint was removed:

[https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprda/selection_129.jpg](https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprda/selection_129.jpg)

I expected this flow to continue, but looks like that was it. I decided to stop here and not "Accept with changes". There was NO chance to opt-out of the facial recognition program:

[https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprdl/selection_130.jpg](https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcprdl/selection_130.jpg)

They're obviously trying to go with "these three groups of data are protected and need opt-in". The rest, yeah - we need that to provide the service.

I also have another tab open, that works, so I'm not really blocked from using the site. At-least for now.

Edit: opening Facebook in new tabs, no longer starts this modal, even though I haven't accepted the new changes.

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

Edit 2: Went looking, and googling, trying to opt-out of the facial recognition program.

Here are the options I have under Privacy:

[https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcpapr/selection_131.jpg](https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcpapr/selection_131.jpg)

Here are the options I have under "Your Facebook information":

[https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcpapa/selection_132.jpg](https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcpapa/selection_132.jpg)

Clicking "view" under Managing your information I get this very (un)helpful help page:

[https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcpapl/selection_133.jpg](https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcpapl/selection_133.jpg)

Choosing Facebook I get these options:

[https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcpapi/selection_134.jpg](https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcpapi/selection_134.jpg)

Choosing "Change my face recognition settings", the send button is still disabled, but I get this very helpful link to "also edit your face recognition settings", the link points to "[https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=facerec"](https://www.facebook.com/settings?tab=facerec"), but actually takes me back to my "General Account Settings":

[https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcporl/selection_136.jpg](https://img3.picload.org/image/dogcporl/selection_136.jpg)

As far as I can understand, there is no way to change face recognition settings in the flow I received from the A/B testing gods. Might have something to do with me not agreeing to the changes in the first modal.

</comment><comment><USER38> In Europe after all the stuff they just went through implementing the new privacy stuff for them? Someone must have missed the memo.

<comment><USER39> Facebook is very good at missing memos. It makes them quite a bit of money.

<comment><USER40> am I the only one who is cynical enough to think that they might be doing the face recognition already for a while. its that with GDPR they may have to disclose it so they are making a pretext that we just enabled it please feel free to opt out now that we have trained our models anyways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I had a huge in-you-face, fixed notification in messenger telling me about new terms, and it asked me about face recognition and I had to answer if they were allowed to look for my face, with no default answer chosen.

This did not feel like they were trying to trick me into anything.

</comment><comment><USER42> Who will be auditing Facebook to ensure they actually comply with GDPR?

E.g., I live in the EU and send over a delete request. How do I ensure my account's data was actually deleted? Am I supposed to just trust Facebook?

<comment><USER43> yes. how would you enforce that? fb can keep your data in a server in hawaii that nobody knows about.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> I sincerely hope Facebook continues making stupid moves like this, because they've spent over a decade earning the right to be the first company to be "made an example of" via the GDPR. It would be a shame to see their years of effort go to waste.

<comment><USER45> It would not surprise me in the least if Facebook was the primary example used by GDPR creators while crafting the regulation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> "In general" this would be something Zuck's team can look at.

</comment><comment><USER47> Have we reached peak facebook yet? Is there a name for these serial outrages that pop up every 2 months? I get it, it's good clickbait but does it need to follow us here in HN?

<comment><USER48> facebook is the next AOL, geocities, friendster, myspace etc. You never hear anyone saying I'm going to cancel my 'Search' account. The kinds of things you are seeing now happen with 'social media', not algorithmic search companies.

<comment><USER47> i m referring to outrages. before facebook it was net neutrality, before that, something i dont remember. it has become a media pattern.

<comment><USER49> _Good_. That's generally the only way the general public can counteract the abusive behavior of entrenched and powerful organizations.

A common tactic used by large businesses is to _stay silent_ and ignore public outrage, because the public usually doesn't have the time, money, or energy to _maintain_ the pressure of the public voice against a single target. By ignoring the outrage most of the time the public moves on to the next scandal and the original abusive behavior can continue unchallenged as the "new normal".

If you're seeing a pattern of outrage, that's a sign that people are _very_ angry and might - if luck is on their side - actually force one change in the public interest.

For a longer explanation of this topic, I recommend Jim Sterling: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6lvDL4cNdM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6lvDL4cNdM) (strong language)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Why is it ok to be filmed and face recognized by surveillance cameras on train station but it is wrong when Facebook does it?

In my opinion I don't need to use facebook and give them my data voluntarily but I kinda need to use the train and nobody is asking me for right to do face recognition.

<comment><USER51> Who said it was OK to be face-recognized at train-stations? I don't think that is/should be right either

<comment><USER50> Germany did yet you don't see people making a fuss about it. As much as I hate Facebook I think a lot of people just complain about it cos it so high profile. But if you don't care about privacy everywhere, what does make Facebook special case?

<comment><USER52> People certainly made a fuss about the face recognition trial in the train station.

But we Germans seem to be irrationally against data collection by companies compared to government data collection. Google street view was another case that made this apparent.

<comment><USER50> Exactly my point, personally i am much more worried about government surveillance, my point was that facebook is an optional thing and very little people really need it (places where facebook is internet) as compared to real environment around you in which you live.

And to me that is really surprising, GDPR allow government almost free hands when it comes to data collection, which for me is the scary part.

i might be going around this the long way but english is not my strong side.

<comment><USER52> The requirement to use facebook is not a legal one, but a social one defined by friends and family members who insist on using it (a.k.a. the networking effect).

In theory, governments can define and implement draconian checks on how collected data is processed by itself. People seem to trust that theoretical ability more than companies claiming to implement rigorous standards, but can do so without direct outside oversight or control. This is independent of whether it is actually true.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> FindFace in Russia had a feature where you could take a photo of anyone and it would look up their VKontakte profile. Would be _nice_ if Facebook did this. [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3595026/The-e...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-3595026/The- end-anonymity-know-App-allows-people-S-social-media-profile-just-taking- photo.html)

[https://findface.ru](https://findface.ru)

</comment><comment><USER54> Ok, so I now have the following question: what if I'm evil (that kind of evil person none can imagine would exist on Facebook), and I impersonate for example someone else - like my ex for example. Will I get notified about every photo they upload of "me"? Isn't this decision going to be a total privacy clusterf __* even beyond what is currently imagined? Or won't they show me pictures of "me" that were uploaded privately by others at all - then this feature doesn't make sense. Please help me understand</comment>


A funny and unorthodox way to encourage strong passwords - <AUTHOR> http://www.nakedpassword.com

<comment><USER2> I like the idea, but it is somewhat sexist. How about something more neutral, like a litter of kittens that gets larger as your password grows?

</comment><comment><USER3> Make it a game:

* 1 point for each number

* 2 point for each letter

* 3 points for each symbol

* first of each class counts for five (caps count as a separate class)

"your password score is 32 points, which places you in the top 10 percent. User bschnier is ahead of you by 10 points."

</comment><comment><USER4> Dup:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2262693> <\- Many comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270294>

</comment><comment><USER5> This just links to a SugarCRM login page...?

<comment><USER6> yeah, I get that too, but here's what you are supposed to see: <http://www.swiss-miss.com/2011/02/naked-password.html></comment></comment>


Ask HN: What are the scientifically realistic (or accuarate) sci-fi novels? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> "Seveneves" by Neal Stephenson was a great read. (The last third is almost a different book and can be skipped imho). You mentioned you liked The Martian so I think you'll like this one.

<comment><AUTHOR> Great I will give it try. Thanks.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I think, by definition, science fiction assumes some technology that we don't have (not realistic?). P.K. Dick was famous for writing novels that included only one small leap in technology and showing how people would respond to them. His book, "The World Jones Made" doesn't include any particular high tech but is terrific nonetheless. Isaac Asimov tried to do this, too. "Foundation" comes to mind as a book that seems entirely realistic.

<comment><AUTHOR> nice suggestions, thanks! I have read Martian and it is so far the most accurate novel that I have ever read. I am looking for a similar taste again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez. You won't find a better book about near term impending tech.

<comment><AUTHOR> Added to the shopping list.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Ptetty much anything by Arthur C Clarke. Not very recent, granted, but Clarke was a scientist and it shows. IIRC, he came up with the idea of communications satellites and the space elevator... Pretty accurate predictions :D</comment>


Remote video eavesdropping using a software-defined radio platform - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/martinmarinov/TempestSDR <comment><AUTHOR> I was just looking to find an SDR based implementation of VGA based van eck phreaking and found this,

which looks very interesting.</comment>


From idea to profitable .com in 24 hours - <AUTHOR> http://noehr.org/2008/02/from_idea_to_profitable_com_in_1.html

<comment><USER2> Is that the new definition of profitable?

Seriously, I get that it's a catchy headline, and the fact that money coming in the door on the first day is a good thing, but calling it a profit is a little bit on the newspeak side of things, no?

<comment><USER3> +1 for 1984 terminology

<comment><USER4> ++1

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> 24 hours? i can make you a profit with a lemonade stand in 2 hours.

guess what? it's not scalable.

<comment><USER3> This is not to say that lemonade stands are scalable but Alex's Lemonade Stand is an amazing story...

"Alex's Lemonade Stand Foundation (a registered 501c3 public charity) is a unique foundation that evolved from a young cancer patient's front yard lemonade stand to a nationwide fundraising movement to find a cure for pediatric cancer. Since Alexandra "Alex" Scott (1996-2004) set up her front yard stand at the age of four, more than $17 million has been raised towards fulfilling her dream of finding a cure for all children with cancer."

<http://www.alexslemonade.org/>

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I know a couple artsy folk... just spammed your site to them. Good luck!

</comment><comment><USER7> If it is a banner exchange with other free users, where exactly does the AdSense come into play?

</comment><comment><USER8> Yet another banner exchange... I guess it's a niche.

</comment><comment><USER9> $1.31 for 24 hours! Do you freelance?</comment>