How Does the Flu Kill People? - <AUTHOR> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-does-the-flu-actually-kill-people/ <comment><USER2> A few years back I got the flu, I think I was 16 or 17 at the time, I was healthy and in good shape before I got it.

I was literally bed bound for 3 or 4 days, it was a struggle to make it to the toilet and back to bed. I was sweating so much that my pillow and sheets were soaked. I think the worst part was actually the muscle aches, it wasn't painful but it was constant and unrelenting.

I was quite amazed at how violently it struck me down. There aren't many common diseases these days that will actually strike someone down in a developed country.

In retrospect it may have been a good idea to go to the doctor, especially after reading this article. Instead my parents left me at home to sleep it out and drink lots of lemon and honey, which is actually a completely ineffective cure.

<comment><USER3> Same thing happened to me in college when I was 21. Two days nearly completely bedridden and coughing so hard I thought I was bursting blood vessels.

I did manage to make it down the block to the college clinic, where they verified that I was their first influenza case of the season, prescribed me some cough syrup, and told me to take way more ibuprofen than it says on the bottle.

I was disappointed at the prescription, but after my first dose I was as happy and energetic as if ever been. Turns out the "cough syrup" was hydrocodone in corn syrup. Powerful stuff.

<comment><USER4> Opiates are cough suppressants.. which is also why in large enough doses, they're breathing suppressants.

<comment><USER5> That's not why they're breathing suppressants...opioids work at a part in our brainstem that modulates our breathing rate, slowing it down. You still breath, just less times per minute. That can be really bad for obvious reasons.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Why do so many US articles sound like a story frim Grandpa Simpson?

"It was a cold Wednesday, with the wind blowing from the north..."

I'm curious if this is commonplace, and if its native audience find it irksome in the online medium. I can understand this style in print, but very often I click an HN link, and hit back before finishing the first paragraph as it becomes clear the article is not written in the pyramid style.

<comment><USER2> It's the new standard for long form writing. They're trying to craft a story to keep the reader interested, they're trying to make it more human.

<comment><USER7> Which, in turn, has resulted in people learning to automatically skip several paragraphs of text, much like how people skip the intro portions of YouTube videos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The 1918 Flu Pandemic generally killed the youngest and healthiest. The theory is that that strain caused a larger immune response than typical flus, making it much deadlier.

<comment><USER9> The 1918 flu pandemic also came at the tail end of World War 1, when the youngest and healthiest were in incredibly close proximity and likely had compromised immune systems from a few years of warfare.

<comment><USER10> And people had had less food than normal Germany especially had major food shortages.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> 2017's flu season in the southern hemisphere was pretty bad - it hit teenagers and young adults more than usual. If the same strains are going to be active in this year's northern hemisphere season, I'd strongly recommend getting the vaccine.

</comment><comment><USER11> I JUST recovered from the flu (yesterday was my first day without fever). At it's worst, 102 degrees under a pile of warm blankets, with thermal underwear and sweatpants on. Was still cold.

I hesitated on taking medication to treat the symptoms because my understanding is that a fever is your body's way of fighting the virus. I let it run its course for a few days, before I started taking Ib Profin which was a SILVER BULLET for breaking the fever. Within 30 minutes of taking it (800) I was back to normal temp.

I wonder if I had taken Ib Profin from the start, would I have been stifling my bodies natural ability to defeat the virus? Would I have potentially increased my risk for developing secondary disorders as a result of the infection? I can't help but feel like letting your body run it's course (while being safe) is the best way to go... I am not a doctor, nor a virologist.

<comment><USER12> [http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1778/2013...](http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1778/20132570)

Some evidence seems to indicate you did the right thing. Anecdote: I do the same thing now (embrace the fever); I let my body overheat; I'm convinced it shortens the total suffering

<comment><USER13> Did you mean to link to an articulate that leads with the benefit to the individual is disputed and then focuses on the benefits to the herd?

<comment><USER12> I guess so? I believe the comment I was responding to claimed the positive/negative effect of antipyretic medications was nebulous; I at least found something that showed that was not the case

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If the problem is with the immune system reacting too strongly, could suppressing the immune system potentially help? Of course, you'd probably want to combine that with antibiotics, to fight any secondary infections that could develop.

<comment><USER15> Modern biologic immunomodulators have shown no benefit in survival in systemic inflammatory response syndrome. Steroids have not been assessed in SIRS specifically, though hey have been in sepsis and septic shock, where high dose steroids have been harmful and low dose steroids have been beneficial.

It's tough lobbing immunosuppressants at people with a rampant infection.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> TL;DR:

Based on autopsy studies about one third of people who die from flu-related causes expire because the virus overwhelms the immune system; another third die from the immune response to secondary bacterial infections, usually in the lungs; and the remaining third perish due to the failure of one or more other organs.

<comment><USER17> > and the remaining third perish due to the failure of one or more other > organs.

One of these organs is the heart-- the seasonal variation in influenza actually overlaps with an increase in acute myocardial infarction (AMI, or a 'heart attack'). Recent meta analysis has shown an odds ratio of ~2 for AMI in the setting of influenza.

Mechanistically, there is a suspected link between the virus and inflammatory changes in the blood vessels supplying the heart that destabilizes existing atherosclerotic plaques.

More here: [http://heart.bmj.com/content/101/21/1738](http://heart.bmj.com/content/101/21/1738) [http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1473309909...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1473309909702336)

Edit: The article mentions (viral) myocarditis as a sequelao f the flu-- this can also happen, but is separate from AMI

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I've often wondered this. Interesting article.

</comment><comment><USER19> In 2015 I did my longest fast ever. I went 12 days without food -- just water. I felt surprisingly normal for the first 7 days. After that I felt weaker and weaker. The weakness very much reminded me of the experience of having the flu. By the final day it felt as if I really did have the flu, though those symptoms would come and go, and disappeared quickly after I finally had some food.

The conclusion I draw from this is that some of the symptoms that we associate with viruses actually comes from the under-production of our normal enzymes. If you go 12 days without food, then your body starts to run out of the protein needed to make normal, everyday enzymes. And when a virus hijacks the machinery of your cells, and forces those cells to make virus proteins, the cells under produce the normal, everyday enzymes that are needed to live. And the symptoms of both experiences are very similar. So this aspect of a virus needs more study -- what is the result of not producing normal, everyday enzymes?

<comment><USER20> Out of curiosity, beyond the weakness, how painful / unpleasant was the experience ?

I've read in an account collated from a hunger strike participant that starving is a bit unpleasant the first few days and then pretty much OK (which I was pretty skeptical of); albeit apparently the more overweight you are initially the more unpleasant and painful it is, at first at least. Although of course 12 days is comparatively short. I'm still curious if you have anything to comment on this description though ?

I believe the source where I've read this account was here: [https://books.google.fr/books?id=ipQDHj1aAe4C&pg=PA111&lpg=P...](https://books.google.fr/books?id=ipQDHj1aAe4C&pg=PA111&lpg=PA111) . It's a fascinating, if a bit morbid, read. The guy stopped eating for 68 days, and ended up weighting 44kg.

<comment><USER19> As an example, on the 11th day, I decided to go to the Verizon store and get a new iPhone, because my old iPhone was having problems. So I walked to the iPhone store. I felt very weak, and I was sweating. The experience was surprising because I'd gone for a long walk on the 7th day and I'd felt fine. But by the 11th day, on a long walk, I felt like I was walking up a steep hill, even though I was walking on flat terrain. At the Verizon store I appeared normal and I had a good conversation with the sales clerk. Then I walked towards home. I felt much weaker on the way home. I stopped to buy water at a connivence store. The sales clerk asked if I was okay. I explained that I was sick. She said I looked sick.

I walked a total of 8 kilometers, which isn't much, but it felt like a serious hike. I felt very sick that night, and I fell asleep early and I slept for 12 hours.

But when I woke up in the morning, I felt good. I had energy and mental focus. And then that faded away over the course of the day. Which is the other thing about a long fast -- you still have good stretches, even after 12 days, but they become increasingly rare.

I think those people who go 2 weeks without food and then claim they feel great are simply taking for granted the fact that they are resting a great deal, and they expect you to take it for granted as well. Nobody goes 2 weeks without food and continues to have the same energy level, sustained over an entire day, as someone healthy who is eating normally.

<comment><USER20> Thank you for your response. I imagine in the case of a hunger strike in prison - which the above testimony was about - the fact that you're basically not moving all day must help with the weakness (not to mention slow down the actual starving due to lack of calories burning).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


One-Way Mars Mission Will Be World's Best Reality TV Show - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/04/22/mars-one-reality-tv-show/ <comment><AUTHOR> From the article:

" "[Six billion] sounds like a lot — and it is a lot — but imagine what will happen when the first people land on Mars. Literally every person on the globe will want to see it," Lansdorp said in Mars One's first press conference on Monday.

Lansdorp founded Mars One after seeing Olympic Games revenues. "Four billion dollars for four weeks, just because the world is watching," he said. (Editor's Note: Total broadcast revenue generated from each major program managed by the International Olympic Committee and the Organizing Committees for the Olympic Games was $3.9 billion for 2009-2012.) "</comment>


Hints of 'time before Big Bang' - <AUTHOR> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7440217.stm

<comment><USER2> This has fallen off the front page, but this article inspired me to give my own treatment of the state of cosmology, and the results mentioned here.

Read Cosmology in Ten Minutes:

[http://einfall.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/cosmology-in-ten- min...](http://einfall.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/cosmology-in-ten-minutes/)

Or on HN:

[http://einfall.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/cosmology-in-ten- min...](http://einfall.wordpress.com/2008/06/08/cosmology-in-ten-minutes/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, Dani!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I'd be interested in seeing the Phys Rev Letter on this one. I treat a lot of these ideas as bordering sci-fi, but PRL is a helluva journal.

The many-universe idea has been around for quite a while. They must have added something interesting. The anisotropy is probably pretty significant.

<comment><USER3> I assume it's this one:

<http://arxiv.org/abs/0806.0377>

which was submitted to PRL by those authors two days ago.

I'm a physicist, but not an astrophysicist or cosmologist, so I'm having trouble making head or tails of it. But most of the highly speculative stuff in the article isn't mentioned in the paper.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you! I'll have a look.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Crappy article. Here's the only new info:

"Detailed measurements made by the satellite have shown that the fluctuations in the microwave background are about 10% stronger on one side of the sky than those on the other.

Sean Carroll conceded that this might just be a coincidence, but pointed out that a natural explanation for this discrepancy would be if it represented a structure inherited from our universe's parent."</comment>


Solar system's solid planets and moons rendered as a single continent - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/1389/

<comment><AUTHOR> So ... Earth's moon has about the same surface area as Africa? This never occurred to me.</comment>


NetBSD now runs under Amazon EC2 - <AUTHOR> http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_now_runs_under_amazon <comment><USER2> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2319987> circular references rocks...

</comment><comment> tobias-ch Actually pretty much all versions of NetBSD run on CloudSigma as well as most BSD distributions. Not sure what the case is for EC2 but at CloudSigma you just FTP in a RAW ISO drive image. I found it pretty straightforward. I'm using FreeBSD primarily. See www.cloudsigma.com .

<comment><USER3> It has been my understanding that at least the fixed CPU instances on EC2 run on a custom Xen.</comment></comment>


Sun produced four solar flares this week, two X-class flares, the strongest kind - <AUTHOR> http://earthsky.org/space/two-solar-flares-one-an-x-class-within-22-hours?fb_comment_id=fbc_10150302992724004_18602280_10150304629349004#fdaf5a814

<comment><USER2> I didn't think Sun would ever do anything anymore since they got acquired by Oracle. Glad to be proven wrong.

<comment><USER3> If Sol (the Sun) got acquired by Oracle it'd be time to start worrying. Then they'd want to sue us for unlicensed use, patent infringement, and charge us support fees. ;-)

You got a smile from me today.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find this and near-future solar flares and coronal mass injections to be interesting experimentally. I'm waiting to see if any of them will have an effect on our tech. and the power grid. That and I'm waiting for the day I can see an aurora borealis in Chicago with my naked eye.</comment>


Concurrent garbage collection in Rubinius 2.0 - <AUTHOR> http://rubini.us/2013/06/22/concurrent-garbage-collection/

<comment><USER2> No Comment Yet? Anyone knows any major client using Rubinius in production?</comment>


Ask HN: Cyber criminals of HN, what is your tech stack? - <AUTHOR> I am reading American Kingpin, a non-fiction account of the Silk Road and its founder, Ross Ulbricht. Although the book doesn't go very deep on the technical aspects of running what was basically an e-commerce website, there is some basic information:
- php - mysql - running on a server behind the TOR network - pgp encrypted chat for employees to talk - bitcoin for transactions - bitcoind (php?) library
It made me hungry for some more details.
In any case, those of you doing things considered illegal by your government, what is your tech stack? Please also give us a vague account of what you are doing. <comment><USER2> This is a classic ("So, you want to be a darknet drug lord... "): [https://pastebin.com/GrV3uYh5](https://pastebin.com/GrV3uYh5)

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club)

</comment><comment><USER4> probably the wrong place to ask these questions.</comment>


Ask HN: Sports You Play Outside of Technology - <AUTHOR> I believe majority of the people here in HN would have heard the news about Kobe Bryant's death yesterday. This kind of hit hard as outside of technology, playing basketball is one of my go to outlet for my physical and mental well-being.
Basketball is an ultra-competitive, physical contact sport. But there's also that mental toughness that is required to strategize on how to outplay your opponent. It also serves as a good model on being able to play with your colleagues and making sure to adjust your game accordingly so that the team as a whole gathers the win (and learns graciously in defeat).
I want to know with our fellow HN people here, what other physical activity serves as your outlet and why.
Thanks, <comment><USER2> I compete in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I also train and do sparring in Muay Thai, but do not actively have fights.

Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) is a great sport, not only for the physical activity, but also as it requires constant learning and humbles you very quickly.

You learn to let go of your ego, regularly getting tapped out by smaller people, including women, and forces you to reflect on your mistakes and learn from them.

I feel as though it is equivalent to a real-life RPG, where you're constantly grinding and gaining experience and gaining abilities to take down better opponents. It's also a ton of fun and stress reliever after a long day at work.

It's always interesting to see the dynamic at the beginning of class where everyone is significantly more quiet, as compared to after several rounds of hard rolling and submissions. Everyone is in a great mood and talking to each other about how they were caught in an impressive and sneaky choke or asking for open criticism from others.

I feel as though this has translated well in my professional life, realizing that situations are not as bad and I believe and can take a step back, relax, and assess the best course of action.

Highly recommend giving it a shot if you want to be challenged to an extreme and learn every single day.

</comment><comment><USER3> I haven't played sports since being on the swim team in high school. Likewise, I have no interest in watching sports. Competitive sports creep me out a little.

My physical activity is bicycle-riding. I don't do it recreationally much, but intentionally got rid of my car in order to force me to ride a bike, to ensure that I get enough routine exercise.

</comment><comment><USER4> Intramural softball was my way of getting off the tush and being more active during the week (and because I love baseball). Runner ups in league play this year, which was awesome! I'm thinking of looking for a newbie friendly soccer team this summer, having recently come to appreciate the sport on a whole new level thanks to a new coworker who moved here from Portugal and schooled me on the mechanics of the game after work a few times.</comment>


Show HN: Bookmark for places - <AUTHOR> https://wandermarks.com <comment><USER2> This is a type of app that I've been waiting for. Somethng that allows me to organize my thoughts based on locations. This is perfect for creating a list of guides from places like Reddit for different destinations.

Is there already a feature to edit tags or have multiple ones? I have one which I accidentally marked as Indonesia rather than Bali. I can't seem to change it, but while on that subject I would really like to have multiple tags so I can look at all bookmarks based on city, country, continent, etc.

Either way it's an awesome service and my hats off to you!

<comment><AUTHOR> Mavilla,

Thank you for your feedback. I am currently adding support to filter views by city, country and continent. Will also add support to edit existing tags.

Please keep your feedback coming.

Cheers, Shubha

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hello,

Being an armchair travel bug and a software developer, I built www.wandermarks.com to keep track of all the places one would like to visit.

Wandermarks provides browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox browsers. Whenever you come across interesting travel content (Travel sites, Travel Blogs, TripAdvisor, Airbnb), you can save it with one click via the Wandermarks browser extension icon. Wandermarks will automatically identify the location being talked about and will bookmark and organize it for you!

Would love to hear some feedback.

Cheers, Shubha

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems interesting. Let me give it a try</comment>


Facebook Doesn't Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them - <AUTHOR> https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-doesnt-tell-users-everything-it-really-knows-about-them <comment><USER4> There must be many HNers who work at Facebook. Anyone willing to make a throwaway account and tell us how it feels from the inside for Facebook to be one the wrong side of so many ethical issues? It just seems like in so many dimensions they've been caught saying wrong things or appearing to outright lie, and I'm curious how developers who work for them think about aiding a company that seems to be so compromised at the moment. Now that it's fairly clear that the service doesn't serve any unique, unambiguously positive purpose, what world-changing mission can you possibly decide that Facebook is achieving these days?

<comment><USER5> It's easy to forget on HN, but there is far from universal buy-in for the notion that having or collecting data on people is unethical. Some may even consider it _noble_ to optimize and perfect the world and its institutions (including commerce, via efficient advertising) using large-scale personal data.

The impulse to make something better by applying a database engine that you might feel for business processes, can just as easily be felt for customer interactions or the world at large.

For an interesting (and very critical) look at this philosophy I recommend The Circle by Dave Eggers.

<comment><USER6> The US doesn't have the privacy parts is WWII in memory. Where govt workers had to scramble to destroy what data they could before it was seized, where fire fighters let document storage burn as long as possible because it had census data, where others where forced to go through govt. Data to sentence neighbors to death, and similar hero/horror stories.

I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of data, and doesn't treat it as the liability it is.

(What's the proper word for old data/information before computers)?

<comment> drunken-serval > I feel that the IT world is irresponsible in its collection of data, and > doesn't treat it as the liability it is.

A lot of that is due to a lack of training. There's two major ways new people come into programming.

1\. Go to college, get a computer science or engineering degree.

2\. Self taught.

Neither of those prepares you to deal with the ethics of information storage.

I happened to have an entire course on the topic but only because I took an Information Science minor with my Computer Science major. That course wasn't even an optional elective for me otherwise.

A computer science degree trains you for thinking how to do something. It doesn't teach you how to figure if you should do something.

<comment><USER7> You can be lucky if a college education in CS/SE teaches you about open source licensing, even more so if it deals with privacy in any way.

IMO every SE curriculum should contain a mandatory course looking into historical precedents how information was used in genocides and oppressive regimes (Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic are two of the most obvious examples but there are plenty others).

It's ridiculous how it took Trump to get elected for the liberal techies in my Twitter stream to realise that the US government has the power to do really bad things with all the data FB & friends have been collecting.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> You can replace "Facebook" with thousands of other companies. Everyone is doing this because the cost is low, its easy, and the return is massive. The sole service my roommate's company does is match your customer with data about them from countless other sources.

If you want a peek into a small section of this type of data, go build a facebook ad. You can see all the targeting options. You can upload a list of email and build a "look a like" audience of people who are similar to your customers.

A company called cartalytics will let a brand purchase lists of people who have bought a specific product in the past 6 months and show them ads. Ex. If you've bought a big mac (with a credit or debit card) in the last month, I can show you McDonalds ads.. but they are super expensive.

<comment><USER4> Apple, for example, seems quite committed to competing on the fact that they _do not_ do this...

<comment><USER9> Apple has plenty of its own ethical issues, starting with 350,000 Chinese workers paid $1.90 an hour in dubious conditions.

<comment><USER10> Well, that particular issue is not really Apple's "own" \- pretty much every single tech company on earth benefits from cheap foreign labor.

But then they'll tell you that these employees are very happy to work at such factories, because they make way more money than they would ever make on the farm in their hometown, and often work there a year or two to save as much money as they can before moving back to where they lived before.

(Apple actually does way better than most other companies on that front - <USER2> [http://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/](http://www.apple.com/supplier- responsibility/))

Does it open an entire rabbit hole about the ethics of globalization? Sure. Is it a strictly black and white issue? ...heh.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I know this is too late to get noticed much, but here's the truth:

This is a race-to-the-bottom. Everyone in this whole area has to compete with whoever is the scummiest exploiter unless they really go out of their way to sell their service with privacy and ethics as the top feature. So, some ethical niche services can exist, but meanwhile, everyone else is screwed, and network effects make any niche thing stay pretty irrelevant.

The only way to avoid races-to-the-bottom in a competitive market is with real enforceable regulation that outlaws the worst shit and requires truly effective disclosures otherwise. That's not easy, sometimes it's impossible, and it often has major negative side-effects and problems, but whether or not we determine that regulation is worth it or not, we know that races-to-the- bottom are a real thing, so we can give _some_ leeway that each company isn't actively _trying_ to be malicious — they are just competing in a race-to-the- bottom situation (and we can reject the dogmatic free-market people who deny that this and all sorts of other natural market-failures exist).

<comment><USER12> I agree that it's a race to the bottom but not that regulation is a way out. There are too many services employing too many engineers, and furthermore governments benefit from this massive surveillance. They pay for the results, and the direction in government today is towards less privacy, not more.

And if you do win the regulation battle, you only win it for the current generation of tech. There will be more, and every decade the power of information collection will get stronger.

I believe that we need to embrace the loss of privacy and ask ourselves how to transition to a world where one's personal history and daily life is freely available to the general public. I give it 30 years until we get there. The tech is certainly not going away.

<comment><USER13> >I agree that it's a race to the bottom but not that regulation is a way out. There are too many services employing too many engineers, and furthermore governments benefit from this massive surveillance. They pay for the results, and the direction in government today is towards less privacy, not more.

In Norway we have an independent administrative body of the government called Datatilsynet, known in English as The Norwegian Data Protection Authority. Wikipedia has a very short article about it in English [1] and a longer article in Norwegian [2]. For a translation of the Norwegian article, see [3].

Notably, the King and the Ministry may not instruct or reverse Datatilsynet's exercise of authority in the individual case according to law.

So while some parts of a government might want to maximize data collection and surveillance, it is still possible to have other bodies of the government work to protect the privacy of its citizens.

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

[2]: [https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datatilsynet_(Norge)](https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datatilsynet_\(Norge\))

[3]: [https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...](https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Fno.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FDatatilsynet_%28Norge%29&edit- text=&act=url)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> > Facebook Doesn't Tell Users Everything It Really Knows About Them

I've been saying this for years. It's pretty clear that if Facebook told regular users just how much they knew, those users would be seriously creeped out (though, these days, probably not creeped out enough to do anything about it). I expect that another example of this would be the ability of their facial recognition system and the breadth of the database behind it.

Users are Facebook's product, and they should expect to be treated as such. The Facebook site and associated services are just infrastructure designed to a) collect information on users and b) give advertisers optimal access to those users.

edit: also, obviously, Facebook is not the only company engaged in this sort of thing. It's all around us.

<comment><USER15> When you download the archive of personal data Facebook shares with you, it includes some facial recognition data. Specifically, it gives 3 "Threshold" decimal values. Does anyone know what these numbers mean?

I read up on "eigenfaces", and it sounds like Facebook is most likely subtracting my face from the mean and then projecting it onto N different face-like and orthogonal images to obtain numbers like this, and so these numbers would represent the weights used to reconstruct an approximation of my face from a linear combination of basis images. But N=3 is way too small for this method to be useful. It seems silly to share these values with a user but not tell them what it means.

<comment><USER16> Facebook has far more sophisticated facial recognition systems than Eigenfaces, based on deep neutral networks.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Facebook have to respond to Data Subject Access Requests in the UK, which oblige them to send you every piece of personally-linked information - for a maximum £10 fee.

I did this with my bank a few years back and got back a box file full of credit scores, lending decisions and other stuff they'd never normally expose. Facebook's data for a busy user is going to be enormous by comparison - <USER3> anyone done this lately (and published / summarised the results?)

<comment><USER18> Max Schrems filed a request via the irish Data Protection Commission a few years ago and explains the returned data at [1].

Since then, however, the commission seems to have simply stopped processing requests, without any legal justification to do so [2].

[1] [http://www.europe-v- facebook.org/EN/Data_Pool/data_pool.html](http://www.europe-v- facebook.org/EN/Data_Pool/data_pool.html)

[2] [http://www.europe-v- facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_...](http://www.europe-v- facebook.org/EN/Get_your_Data_/get_your_data_.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> That might explain a pretty creepy thing Facebook did the other day to me.

I just created a new Facebook account after maybe 4 years of radio silence. Two years ago, I had a job doing IT contracting; often I would go to businesses and repair laptops or run cable to a COM room. We had very very few residential clients since they weren't worth our time; the few that we did have were really just courtesy for doing business for so long. I went to one residents home a SINGLE time, hardly interacted with the man, and he definitely did not know my last name.

Guess who pops up on my "Suggested friends", with no mutual friends or place of work or any similar "liked" pages? Yeah, that one client.

Similarly, we worked in a small office in a cold storage facility, and Facebook also suggested that I add their accountant as my friend.

It's really creepy, but if Facebook was able to know that I worked at that employer then it's possible that it was able to make the connection.

<comment><USER20> The most common source of those suggestions is phone contacts. Anyone using the Facebook (or Instagram) app is sending them a copy of their entire address book to be used for network mapping purposes.

<comment><USER21> I don't know if this is still true given the permissions model on Android (don't know about iOS). I just checked IG and it only has access to storage. Contacts, SMS, microphone, etc are not enabled.

<comment><USER22> WatsApp can read your contacts.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> > "He said users can visit a page in Facebook's help center, which provides > links to the opt-outs for six data brokers that sell personal data to > Facebook."

The link provided is: [https://m.facebook.com/help/494750870625830?helpref=uf_perma...](https://m.facebook.com/help/494750870625830?helpref=uf_permalink).

LOL. The amount of personal information requested at those "opt-out" links is suspicious and/or ironic.

Examples of information requested to "opt-out" of the USA partners' reach include: Social Security Number (!), date of birth, "all variations" of full name, all recent mailing addresses, ... (!!)

<comment><USER24> I thought that at first too. But they want to make sure they're removing the correct person. I don't know how else they could do it.

<comment><USER25> They're surveillance companies, so they could probably figure that out based on device fingerprinting if they wanted to. Or they could just remove every record matching the request, since no sane person actually wants to be in their database. But of course neither of those things will ever happen, for obvious reasons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> >"For instance, opting out of Oracle's Datalogix, which provides about 350 types of data to Facebook according to our analysis, requires "sending a written request, along with a copy of government-issued identification" in postal mail to Oracle's chief privacy officer."

This is outrageous. Why is the onus on a user who never gave permission to a data broker in the first place? They deal in digitial domain when it comes to selling your data when it comes to consumers rights and concerns they operate exclusively via snail mail?

Don't expect this to change any time soon. These brokers have the US Electorate in their pocket. Bought and paid for.

<comment><USER27> It isn't your data. It is their data about you, which is a very important distinction.

Facebook and Oracle aren't the bad actors here, if you think there is a bad actor. The baddies are the people giving Oracle (and others) that data about you.

(And now I have to hang my head in shame for saying something that sounds like it is a defense of Oracle. They're baddies for many, many other reasons, just not this one)

<comment><USER28> If you're an EU citizen, by law, all data about you is owned by you, and only by you. That includes personal data, but also any intellectual property you create, and is irrevocable (you can sell usage rights, but never the ownership rights).

So, yes, they have a legal responsibility to not have that data about you, and you can at any point require any company to delete any and all data they have about you, or created by you, and any data derived from it (oops, does that mean training neural networks on your private data means they have to be deleted, too?)

<comment><USER27> That seems particularly absurd (which isn't to doubt you, but as much as I like the EU, they have some absurd policies). If you take a very narrow view of data as just bits on a hard drive somewhere, then this seems reasonable.

But if the ownership right to your data is centered on the information itself, and not the company part, that raises issues. I can't simply destroy the memory of reading the message you wrote - is someone to cudgel me until I do? If I write in my diary that I saw xyz person walking down the street and they had blue hair, could they demand that I destroy the entry? Would they have to know about the diary entry before they could make such demands, or could they simply say, "destroy all information regarding me"?

Further, as I understand it, municipal security cameras are in wide use, particularly in European cities. Could I demand that the city/town/council/etc delete all footage of me ever? Could I deny them permission to make those recordings?

And last but not least, how on earth would this stance on data ownership not ruin data retention? E.g. this would seem to open up a pretty big hole where I could commit fraud or launder money, and then demand that my bank destroy the evidence.

These are all awkward questions that come up when you try to protect very broad definitions of privacy. Privacy is a thoroughly unnatural concept; In the physical world, it takes a lot of work to do anything in private, and even then, you're just making it easier for people to avoid stumbling on what you're doing.

<comment><USER7> It's simple: you don't get to store data unless there's a technical requirement to keep that data stored to provide whatever service a user signed up for.

If a user didn't agree to their data to be stored in the first place, you don't get to retain it at all.

Whether you can discard data about a user "against their wishes" is likely covered by your terms of service. If you're a commercial hosting provider, there's probably a higher barrier than if you're a free doodling website. This has nothing to do with privacy, though.

If a user tells you to destroy their information, you need to destroy all information about them. There's obviously some wiggle room (e.g. if you keep a flat "view count" on an article, there's likely no way to argue that you should have to deduct the user's views but if you're keeping a record of "views" linked to user IDs the user ID may still be personally identifiable if it can be correlated with other data).

But most companies fail at deleting even the most obvious data. If you "delete" someone's account and they're unable to sign up with the same username or e-mail address again, you're likely not properly deleting information.

And that's if you even offer the option of deleting an account at all. It's horrifying how many (especially American but sometimes even EU) websites don't offer any such option at all or even simply offer an option to "close" an account, marking it as disabled but still retaining all data forever.

> Could I demand that the city/town/council/etc delete all footage of me ever?

Yes. Security cameras have strict regulations and generally recordings have to be destroyed eventually unless there's a good reason to keep them (e.g. they're part of a criminal investigation). This even extends to police cameras: if a police officer makes a recording (e.g. at a demonstration) and the recording isn't relevant to any investigation, you can ask for it to be destroyed ASAP (rather than waiting for them to destroy it). This also extends to other information like your name and address.

> I could commit fraud or launder money, and then demand that my bank destroy > the evidence.

There are special laws for financial transactions and criminal investigations. There is such a thing as a "permanent record" but it is clearly defined what goes on it and what doesn't (and at what point it has to be destroyed). There are also very strict laws for handling such information, similarly to the strict PCI rules for handling credit card information.

You're basically arguing that privacy is a slippery slope but in reality it isn't. Privacy may be an "unnatural" concept but the expectation of privacy is a human right (like, officially, as part of the UN Declaration of Human Rights). The EU actually has very few "absurd" policies -- most of them only appear absurd when taken out of context. I assure you that EU privacy laws are not part of them.

Except for the cookie notice. That's not only ineffective but outright ridiculous.

<comment><USER28> Well, the cookie notice also only is ridiculous if taken out of context.

You literally have the cookie notice in your post, too, as the law simply states:

If you collect any tracking data about a user that's not technically required, you have to let them opt in.

This obviously means tracking cookies have to be opt in, and that's how the cookie notice came to be.

Technical cookies, such as login cookies, are exempt, obviously, but other tracking methods, such as storing in localStorage are included.

<comment><USER7> True, but I would argue that the _idea_ of cookie notices is good but the execution is poor.

This is one of the few situations where a technical solution would have been better, e.g. having each cookie come with a specified purpose and letting the browser prompt per issuer and displaying the purpose to the user:

* 3 cookies from ads.google.com: "Personalizing the advertisements you see on this page" [Allow] [Deny]

* 1 cookie from share.facebook.com: "Social media integration" [Allow] [Deny]

* 1 cookie from analytics.example.com: "Anonymized site analytics. For more information see [http://example.com/privacy](http://example.com/privacy). We value your privacy." [Allow] [Deny]

* 1 cookie from www.example.com: "Keeping you logged in as kuschku on www.example.com" [Allow] [Deny]

But this would require passing an actual web standard and getting browser vendors on board (and Chrome has a conflict of interest making them unlikely to support it without sufficient pressure).

This would have satisfied the legal requirement without creating the obnoxious obligatory "Please click 'okay' or we'll keep showing this message on every page" experience we have now. It would also be less error-prone because the failure state would be "users might deny unjustified cookies" rather than "site will send cookies regardless" when not implemented correctly.

Besides, browsers already ask for permissions for things like desktop notifications or geolocation.

EDIT: I'm not saying this shouldn't have been passed into law. I'm saying the EU should have involved browser vendors and investigated a technical solution before making the notices mandatory. Compliance would have then be easier ("just add these headers") and adoption would have been faster ("it's easy to fix and it's the law").

EDIT2: Unlike the old Semantic Web problem of websites being liars I don't think deceptive purpose statements for cookies would have been a noteworthy issue because it would be literally against the law in the EU to deceive users. It would also have imposed the burden on the actual cookie issuers and created incentives for EU websites to hold their advertising providers accountable to comply with EU laws (rather than build a kludge around them to make their scripts opt-in).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> 1\. Of course! 2\. It's not too late to delete your account. Go for it! 3\. Block it all! [https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporatio...](https://github.com/jmdugan/blocklists/blob/master/corporations/facebook/all)

<comment><USER30> Unfortunately, one should not believe that deleting your account removes the underlying data. The actual operation is probably more like, "set a bit that prevents anyone from logging in to this profile."

<comment><USER31> True, but I deleted my account 2 years ago, so at least they have a lot less info during that time. Also, I don't miss it at all, not even a little bit. I think it offers no value for my time, let alone data. I am not sure why I am still on Twitter, but Snapshot has been entertaining and LinkedIn invaluable.

<comment><USER32> > at least they have a lot less info during that time

How do you know? If FB can't be trusted to actually delete your account (and they can't) how can they be trusted to stop collecting data on you?

<comment><USER33> Presumably if you've cleared your cookies and you use an adblocker, their ability to reliably track your activity goes way, WAY down.

In addition to the standard protections of the adblocker and privacybadger, I also generally set a full block on all content from facebook[.com/.net] and any identifiable facebook subdomains. I really have no use for facebook, so it is zero imposition on me, and if I ever want to view something on facebook, I can open up a new private window in an alternate browser as a one-off (or, if I'm feeling paranoid, spin up a VM).

<comment><USER32> All of those precautions are orthogonal to deleting your FB account. You can do all of those things without deleting your account (only log in using an incognito window). Deleting your account may or may not change anything with regards to FB's collection of information about you. There is simply no way to know because it is entirely up to FB what the semantics of deleting your account actually are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think this forum has to recognize a lot of work being done in the valley especially Google and Facebook is ethically questionable and seeking to brush it under the carpet or 'normalize' it perpetuates a dissonance. For starters the whole mythology of liberal freedom loving nerds sits in stark contrast to the reality of actively developing and enabling authoritarian technologies.

The curious consequence of the willful ignorance on one's own actions is the continued posturing and stark dissonance in expecting ethical behavior from other segments of society. If you can't behave ethically you can't expect it from others.

That level of dissonance is untenable and ultimately every intelligent person has to realize not recognizing and confronting unethical behavior is a race to the bottom and will reflect in every aspect of life around you.

</comment><comment><USER35> Is there anyone out there making a paid, zero advertising/data collecting social network? What if this service allowed you to buy access for 50 of your closest friends and family? I would think if it was executed properly and you provided a standard "I'm deleting Facebook and here is why, apply to join my paid for network group" post people would consider making the jump. I know there's a lot to Facebook and I wouldn't expect some new company to stack up feature for feature. Just give me chat, text/image posts and the wall and I will be happy that I can keep up with my close friends and family. I wouldn't be entirely surprised or disappointed if Apple attempted something like this on their Messages platform but I would just hope they'd make it accessible to all phone/computer/tablet users.

<comment><USER36> Facebook will censor/shadow-ban such a "good bye" post. It won't show up at most of your friends news feed. You also cannot advertise a competiting social network. The same goes fr private messages to more than a few people. Even if you try to write a seperate message to everyone, if it contains the same link or a similar text body, most of your friends will never see te message you wrote. That's all automatic. And for photos, they have a semi-automatic review process in place, with an army of contracted FTEs working in low paid countries to scan photos (there was a news story about that recently). I wouldn't be surprised if their other properties like WhatsApp and Instagram are monitored and censored/shadow-ban in a similar fashion nowadays.

<comment><USER37> Source for some of the parents claims: [http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/05/technology/facebook- tsu/](http://money.cnn.com/2015/11/05/technology/facebook-tsu/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Sort of related, have people noticed or have they officially announced that they are tagging photos on the alt html field with a description of the actual photo? It's pretty accurate with texts like "two people smiling, with baby".

<comment><USER39> [https://code.facebook.com/posts/457605107772545/under-the- ho...](https://code.facebook.com/posts/457605107772545/under-the-hood- building-accessibility-tools-for-the-visually-impaired-on-facebook/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's creepy how much companies know about you.

When I got married my husband pretty much immediately showed up as my spouse on my transunion credit report as my spouse. How did they know that? Our names are different. At the time we didn't have any loans together. We lived together but so do siblngs and roommates. We didn't register for any wedding registries or send out any announcements. Our wedding consisted of signing some paperwork at city Hall. They also marked me as "Active Duty Military or Dependant" (hubby is in the army so I became a "dependant" when we got married). So the only logical explanation is transunion can access DEERS, but I would hope the DoD doesn't allow random private companies access to DEERS... They DO have a website where you can lookup if someone is covered under the SCRA but dependants aren't covered under the SCRA and don't show up when queried (I tried).

Again this is my credit report. I didn't report a change in my martial status to any of my financial institutions. Not banks, not credit cards, and we already had a joint account for two years before we were married.

<comment><USER41> Marriage is a legal agreement, the fact that you "signed some paperwork at City Hall" is not at all a minor thing. The records are of course made available to credit reporting agencies.

I don't know why you think this would be a creepy thing, social security and credit scores are stongly connected to the legal and taxation system. Its only obvious that the information gets connected. If tomorrow you were to divorce and claim alimony/child support the wages and tax return of your spouse would be garnished, How would that be possible without linking SSN.

<comment><USER40> I don't know why you believe I am somehow confused about the legal agreement I entered into with my husband. I am not, I know what civil marriage is. I mentioned it to illustrate that we didn't have a venue or wedding planner so they couldn't have made a newspaper announcement for us.

Transunion is a private for-profit company; it has nothing to do with Social Security or the legal or taxation systems. Transunion gets its records from institutions that _voluntarily_ report to it, as a business arrangement, (credit card companies, mostly) or they pull from publicly available sources. They don't have direct access to any private government (or non-government) databases unless the owner lets them have access. The reason they collect information about you is for their own business purposes. We aren't talking about the IRS here.

In other words my spousal information got in some company's database somewhere which was relayed to transunion, probably through a few other company's databases. It was surprising that information got to Transunion that fast because, as I said in a reply to a sibling comment, marriage records do not appear to be publicly available in my state. It's creepy to know how fast, far, and wide random information about you spreads. It's also scary to think about how false information about you can spread.

After reading this article it seems like that information almost could have indirectly come from Facebook (we did update our status!)

<comment><USER41> I think you misunderstand just how tightly integrated the credit reporting system is with government. The fact that "Transunion is a private for-profit company" is immaterial. or that it "only" gets information via "voluntarily reports to it, as a business arrangement, (credit card companies, mostly) pulled from publicly available sources" is plain wrong.

Just because some information is not "publicly available" does not means Government wont share it with third parties, especially credit bureau.

As far as information coming from Facebook posts thats just ridiculous.

<comment><USER40> I'm not going to argue anymore because it's pointless but I'd like to see any hard evidence my state reports directly to Transunion because they have no reason to.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It's funny that a newspaper criticizes Facebook's data mining practices ... but when I opened the article on their website, my privacy badger addon told me that 16 scripts had been blocked (facebook!, twitter, google analytics, chartbeat, outbrain, pardot, ...). Then I read through the article and half way down they throw me a huge banner in the way telling me to like their page on Facebook :/ So basically they preach something and do something else, they are really a bunch of hypocrites!

<comment><USER25> This could also be seen as a newspaper operating as it should: one group is paid to report news, another is paid to sell ads, and they don't talk to each other. Things are more complicated in real life, more so now that the news people are under pressure to "generate viral content," but having creepy trackers next to an article about creepy trackers isn't necessarily hypocrisy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Ironically, I cannot read this article as I am immediately redirected to [https://www.facebook.com/plugins/share_button.php?app_id=229...](https://www.facebook.com/plugins/share_button.php?app_id=229862657130557&channel=https%3A%2F%2Fstaticxx.facebook.com%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter%2Fr%2FiPrOY23SGAp.js%3Fversion%3D42%23cb%3Df21dff110d4cfe%26domain%3Dwww.propublica.org%26origin%3Dhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.propublica.org%252Ff944895a89fb34%26relation%3Dparent.parent&container_width=0&href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.propublica.org%2Farticle%2Ffacebook- doesnt-tell-users-everything-it-really-knows-about- them%2F%3Futm_campaign%3Dbt_facebook%26utm_source%3Dfacebook%26utm_medium%3Dsocial&locale=en_US&sdk=joey&type=box_count&utm_mangled=fuckyeah)

(likely due to a script having a bad reaction with one of the browser extensions granting me a small illusion of privacy)

</comment><comment><USER44> I cant speak for other countries, but why do American people seem to trust companies more than they do the government? I mean, it is completely known that companies are here to make money, and publicly traded companies are here to please their investors so they will do whatever it takes to do that. They study us, classify us, categorize us, manipulate us. They spend billions in research so they can make that 'perfectly tailored' ad to get us to buy their product. They are constantly buying our data and selling our data, JUST to make their investors happy, and we seem to always just shrug it off.

'Meh.'

I am honestly more ok with the government having this data to keep tabs on me than these hundreds of other companies treating my personal info like it's a trading card.

<comment><USER45> I think the reason is that government is vastly more powerful than any single company.

<comment><USER44> Yeah that's definitely true, and it is what makes me question a lot of why they do what they do and distrust it generally. But would it be better if a company was vastly more powerful than the government?

Actually, I think some companies kind of are in some aspects. They may not have the military, but some definitely have a hand on the reigns.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Speaking of which, perhaps someone can shed some light on the suggested friends feature. Many people suspected it uses GPS/Wifi to perform location based friend suggestions, as well as contact book uploading. However, it doesn't really explain my own case:

I recently encountered a friend suggestion for someone that I only know online (IRC and later, Google Hangout). I don't really know who they are other than a name (as exposed by GHangout). I've never met them as they are in a completely different country. I don't have the facebook app and the messenger app is forbidden to read my contacts as per CyanogenMod's Privacy Guard. I fail to understand how FB can suggest this? The only possible reason I can think of is when they searched my name on Facebook. How else can they do it?

<comment><USER47> If they have your email address and they leaked it, then the same applies. You get reverse suggestions.

The sad thing is that you can be completely privacy conscious, but if just one of your friends, family or acquaintances uploads their contacts, and you're part of that upload, they've screwed your privacy via the back door.

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> When I read this article, I was expecting to see a description of what they collect from users. But the real controversial and creepy part is what's available from the data brokers.

The fact Facebook is aggregating all this to make for better advertising options is discomforting, to be sure.

The most concerning aspect of the article is that these data brokers are able to correlate my purchases. It seems inevitable that insurance companies will take all of these individual data points into account: "We're sorry Mr. Register, because you buy McDonald's every week we'll have to raise your life insurance rates."

<comment><USER49> I'm curious if it could be possible to buy this data on one's self. Maybe someone could start a company that would allow you to find out this information.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> This became painfully obvious when LinkedIn's algorithm started making extremely circuitous connections that freaked people out. People in a relative manner are painfully stupid, algorithms are ridiculously capable. The result is freak out. Facebook being psychologically aware, protected its users from the truth before it could be known. It was long ago that google's Eric Schmidt said "we are on the verge of predicting our users thoughts" google is just as slick as Facebook.

<comment><USER51> LinkedIn's incredible algorithm was reading your contact book without your permission before those kinds of permissions existed or had any sort of granularity between none and complete access.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> > One Facebook broker, Acxiom, requires people to send the last four digits of > their social security number to obtain their data.

This is just one of the many WTFs that Facebook apparently actively supports.

In what world, what possible explanation was this ever a good idea? Or a reasonable idea? Either the US SSN is like a password (it's not) then how did Acxiom get their hands on it, or it isn't (correct) and it doesn't serve the purpose for identification.

Letting this sort of crap run wild also affects what is considered "normal" or common privacy in other parts of the world, like the EU, it slides the window. Continuously pushing the boundaries against people watching helplessly as layer upon layer of foundations of surveillance are built. Authorities don't do much until adoption is way beyond the curve of network effect, or they do it weirdly. And by then people think it's normal or acceptable.

Already now, on countless popular sites, advertising transgresses heavily on not only guidelines but also law. Medical claims, product placement, child advertising, you name it.

What can we do to not make the lowest common denominator decide what's normal?

</comment><comment><USER53> How do the data brokers know whether one shops at dollar stores? Who is leaking our inforamtion to the brokers? Is the store or the credit card company releasing information to a third party? Store gets the customer name from the credit card. Credit card company knows that a transaction took place at the dollar store. Any other possibilities?

<comment><USER54> Visa requires at least some of their banking/prepaid partners to periodically upload customer data to an Acxiom FTP site. It's considered a "compliance" ask.

Source: helped write a microservice for said FTP upload.

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> I haven't had a Facebook account for years, and my phone number was never associated with it. Yesterday I visited the site on my laptop to look up the page for a tavern that's re-opening. 1/2 hr later I got a text from 32665 with a Facebook confirmation code. WTF; creeped the hell outa me. I replied with "stop" and received verification that "Texts from Facebook are now turned off." I visited their site again to request whatever data they have on me, but even though I checked the "I don't have a Facebook account" button for the request they insist that I log in to finish the process. Not sure where to go from here with it.

[edit] grammar

</comment><comment><USER56> It is easy to forget that FB is a media company and as such it is not only making money by selling ads but also by manipulating the masses. They may focus today on serving ads making $3.6 billions annually. Tomorrow they may focus on something else for example on serving fake news for manipulatig elections and making 10x more. The data they collect is only a means to an end and I am afraid I won't like the end when it arrives.

<comment><USER57> Good point. Their whole business model relies on addiction to the intoxication of getting likes, shares, approval. If fake news stories that achieve those better do the trick, it goes against their business model to prevent it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> > Of the 92 brokers she identified that accepted opt-outs, 65 of them required > her to submit a form of identification such as a driver's license. In the > end, she could not remove her data from the majority of providers.

So what exactly was the problem? She doesn't have a driver's licence?

<comment><USER9> Maybe she didn't want to share a lot of personal documents with companies that profit by selling her personal information. Obviously there's no reason for them to require a driver's license except to make it so inconvenient to opt- out that nobody does it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> I understand the general privacy concern but what exactly is the critic here? That facebook aquires data from external source? Aren't those external source the real problem?

</comment><comment><USER60> Why is it obligated to?

No, really. Why? Why on earth is it a problem what a company does internally with its own collected data? Why is this only being directed at Facebook?

</comment><comment><USER61> If everyone (like me) installed an FB ad blocker, then they'd not get a return on their investment for buying that 3rd party data.

</comment><comment><USER62> I'm operating on the assumption that some day soon there will be a market for personal services.

I know it sounds crazy now but people also thought no regular person would ever need a personal computer. IMO the next computing revolution is in personal appliances with OS (but black box, plug-n-play to regular foks) that serve up usable voice recognition and other SaaS stacks that replace the "free" data black holes currently in use.

</comment><comment><USER63> Who thought they did?

</comment><comment><USER64> Some day I'll need to reclassify all my cyberpunk books as non-fiction it seems. We are nearly at the point of having real-life equivalents of things like information brokers and a Central Intelligence Corporation. The funny thing is the real companies I've seen are more creepy than the over-the-top portrayals of your typical dystopian corporate future. Worse yet, they do a better job of automating it all vs. the typical human intelligence or hacking missions in those types of books.</comment>


IBM Wants to Make Mainframes Next Platform for Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.nextplatform.com/2017/02/15/ibm-wants-make-mainframes-next-platform-machine-learning/ <comment><USER2> I'll file this under "never going to happen".

IBM seems increasingly a flailing giant in its death throes. They produce "products" you can't buy without millions like Watson where their competitors are putting machine learning into APIs I can call for fractions of a cent.

Their MO seems to have become all hype and no substance. A company that once sold innovatives products now sells itself in the form of consulting services because they can't figure out how to make products people will buy anymore.

The internet runs rampant with stories of former IBMers leaving in droves, replaced by cheap outsourced labor. The magic smoke has left IBM.

The only good thing they sell that I'm aware of is softlayer. They should spin that off before it's consumed in IBM's race to the bottom... They should sell their naming rights to Accenture and get it overwith.

<comment><USER3> > IBM seems increasingly a flailing giant in its death throes.

IBM made almost 12 Billion dollars in net income in 2016 [1]. That's far from being on death row.

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

<comment><USER4> IBM peaked in 2012 and has had declining profits since then. Death throes is perhaps an exaggeration, but even IBM uses the term "turn around" when talking to investors.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> While I don't think mainframes will bring anything to the table that hasn't been seen before, there are many companies that like the guaranteed performance and upfront cost that mainframes provide. One thing that I didn't really understand until recently is that you're not buying hardware, you're buying very specific SLA for whatever software you're running.</comment>


Bitbucket is down - <AUTHOR> http://status.bitbucket.org

<comment><USER2> The status page says it's unreachable, but I can access it just fine...</comment>


Ask HN: Raising a "super seed" round from a prominent VC - <AUTHOR>

We are having a mild dilemma.
Some facts about us: - Raised angel funding 1 year ago - Still have 9 months cash runway at current expenditure - But would like to expand the team, which would significantly reduce this - Have a working simple beta version of our product available to the public - Attracting attention from VCs
We have two funding goals: either raise a small second angel round and expand the team where we are (not ideal location) or try and raise a series A and move the team to the US and expand, but we feel this is probably a bit early for us.
We've been talking to VCs and they are talking in the region of "up to $1m super seed round". This is very exciting for us, but $1m is way more than we need to expand here and probably only enough to move the team to the US, but not expand it.
There is also the issue of raising seed from VCs, Chris Dixon addressed the issue a few times: http://cdixon.org/2009/08/14/the-problem-with-taking-seed-money-from-big-vcs/
"The second nuance can be counterintuitive: the danger of taking seed money is positively correlated with the reputation of the firm. If a top VC invests in the seed round and then passes on the A, other VCs will have difficulty overlooking that the smartest money that knows the company the best isn't following on."
One of the VCs were are talking to is very high profile, and they also seem to be the most interested. It would be a dream to have them invest, but the more I read on the subject, the more potentially harmful it sounds.
If we raised enough to expand here, it would be like the VC buying an option, with a higher chance of them not following on. Chris seems to say that > $500k is still an investment, so less of a problem, but perhaps still not enough to make the next step.
So, raise a small amount and expand here but risk them not following on, raise as much as possible from them and try to make a move to the US work on a relative shoestring, or potentially turn down a huge VC and start again when we are truly ready for series A? What are your thoughts? <comment><USER2> Ive always found the logic of caution when taking a seed round from a high- profile VC to be a bit backward. I understand the logic of a negative connotation if they don't do a follow-on round, but that is both years away, and a problem that you can't control now.

You can take the investment from the high-profile VC now and use that investment to further your current funding round. You may not even make it to the next round of funding, or may not need it, so why shoot yourself in the foot now. Shoot yourself later!</comment>


Competitive About Your Meditation? - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/stressed-type-as-are-turning-meditation-into-a-competitive-sport-1528814126 <comment><AUTHOR> "Type-A people are descending on the ancient practice of meditation and tweaking the quest for inner peace to suit their hard-charging needs—racking up streaks and broadcasting their running tallies to the world. The result, for some: Meditation has never been more stressful."</comment>


A maze puzzle hidden within an Atari 2600 video game - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20190919-the-maze-puzzle-hidden-within-an-early-video-game <comment><USER2> A paper that actually talks about the algorithm and a quote that sums it up

[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.02035.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1811.02035.pdf)

> The basic maze generating routine had been partially written by a stoner who > had left. I contacted him to try and understand what the maze generating > algorithm did. He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out > of his brain, he coded it up in assembly overnight before he passed out, but > now could not for the life of him remember how the algorithm worked.'

<comment><USER3> This is of course just plausible deniability. The truth is that the video game with its impossible algorithm is a message left by a stranded time traveller as a means to help his mates locate him.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I hate to be a party pooper but I don't see any mystery here. The maze generator is a cellular automata with small amounts randomness thrown in. The rules were picked by hand and tweaked to get the desired look. The rules were encode into a lookup table, which was an unexciting, mundane optimization at the time.

I've written very similar code for my 6502 roguelike game.

<comment><USER5> Now try to create a routine that generates mazes with no dead ends on a system with _128 bytes_ of total RAM.

That 128 bytes includes stack. No graphics memory at all.

<comment><USER4> That's what I did :)

I coded my maze generators in 6502 assembly - the same CPU the Atari uses. Mine was for the NES, which is more powerful than the Atari (2KB vs 128B of RAM, for example), but I think I know what I'm talking about.

<comment><USER5> Programming these old constrained 8-bitters is great fun.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Reflecting back over my career, I think I can safely say that my most brilliant moments of engineering insight lay buried in code like this -- invisible and unknown, probably for the rest of time.

The idea that some day, some researcher may reverse-engineer one of these things tickles me.

<comment><USER7> In a game that has to ship, it's fine. In a product that needs to be maintained for a while at least, I personally try to avoid brilliant code. I'd like to say it's out of empathy for co-workers, but it's really to keep myself sane when I need to change my own code in 3 months time.

<comment><USER6> > I personally try to avoid brilliant code.

"Brilliant" code that is hard for engineers to understand is not necessarily brilliant code.

The things I consider to be my finest moments are not opaque in that way.

<comment><USER8> Perhaps why game devs don't call themselves software engineers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice article - but the BBC did get a major detail wrong. The mazes are _not_ always solvable - Figure 5 in the paper ([https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.02035](https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.02035)) explicitly demonstrates an unsolvable maze sample from the game, which can only be solved by collecting and using a "make-break" powerup (which allows the user to create or remove a wall).

They interviewed a co-creator who claimed it did always make solvable mazes, which is probably where the BBC journalist got confused.

<comment><USER10> The BBC article says "Every time the game is played, a reliably navigable maze is pumped out. Were the table's values random or even slightly different, the maze would likely fail to be drawn with a playable path through it." <\- the example in fig 5 IS in principle _playable_ \- the point I think is that the maze is not drawn in a way that would leave a player stumped even if they had a make-break at their disposal. i.e. Endless wall in the way.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> It's Cellular Autometa Rule 15, with some of the options changed to be random. (ie: "be the opposite of the cell to your top left"). This generates unbroken continuous wiggly lines varying between horizontal, diagonal and vertical within one quadrant.

Other than the random elements, there's one exception: 11001 -> 0, which directly leads to a nice downward branching structure.

</comment><comment><USER12> He probably Carmack'ed a hack.

</comment><comment><USER13> It's really silly to frame this as "archaeology". Archaeology is the study of long-past civilizations with only traces of clues left behind in buildings, trash piles, etc. This is a game written just a few years ago; you can just ask the folks who worked on it.

(I should add section 4 of the paper tries to explain why this is archaeology, with lots of stuff about "material culture". I did not find it convincing.)</comment>


Freelance Pricing: How does that work? - <AUTHOR> https://roberttisdale.com/freelance-pricing-work/ <comment><USER2> I don't have any problem with the math, just the anecdotal reality of the situation.

When I started looking for another job in my local area about three months ago, I wanted to contract thinking I could make more money. I'm covered for benefits under my wife so I didn't factor that in.

My "minimum salary" was $135K a year. As a W2 contractor (meaning the employment agency pays the employers half of Medicare and Social Security), and considering a 1760 hour work year:

2080 hours a year

-80 hours federal holidays

\- 120 hours paid time off

\- 120 hours between gigs

1760 hours would be about $77 hour as W2 or around $84 hour Corp to Corp.

Yes companies are paying at least $90-$100 an hour to recruiting firms but once they take their cut, it's hard to net the amount I wanted. If I don't go through a recruiting firm, I'm left hustling for gigs, competing with people who will work for a lot cheaper and I would have a lot more down time.

On the other hand, going through the same recruiters, it was relatively easy to get a full time job with benefits and the hiring company paid the recruiter 20%.

Besides, most companies aren't going to hire someone as a contractor who doesn't check all of the boxes. A company will allow an FTE to learn on the job if they don't meet 109^ of the requirements.

I'll see what things look like in a two or three years and stick my toes back in the water.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hey everyone, author here.

I wrote this article after spending a lot of time trying to figure out how I should charge for my services as a freelancer and was unable to find anything else that fit my needs.

I recently made some corrections to my math thanks to a suggestion from a Hackaday user (It's a good thing I'm not a freelance mathematician :P).

If you see any other issues, don't hesitate to let me know :).

Side note: On the off chance you have an IPv6 only address with no IPv4 gateway, my website is not currently IPv6 compatible (Thanks to Hackernews reader Raul for reporting this).

I've raised a request with my host and this will hopefully be fixed by the end of the year.</comment>


Graph Neural Networks – An Overview - <AUTHOR> https://theaisummer.com/Graph_Neural_Networks/ <comment><USER2> The article seems to be a bit light on details for an "overview" of GNNs.

It's an area I've recently been researching and they do seem to be gaining a significant amount of traction. If anyone is interested in additional reading material, I can suggest the very recent GNNs: Models and Applications (slide deck available on the website) [0].

There is also a fairly comprehensive GitHub repo on [1], though I personally haven't given it a detailed look yet.

[0] [http://cse.msu.edu/~mayao4/tutorials/aaai2020/](http://cse.msu.edu/~mayao4/tutorials/aaai2020/)

[1] [https://github.com/benedekrozemberczki/awesome-graph- classif...](https://github.com/benedekrozemberczki/awesome-graph- classification)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, you probably right. I am always puzzled about how much math to include and how deep to go on an introductory article. Thanks for your feedback

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Has anyone else noticed the connected layers in neural networks and then wondered if a more generalized topology such as a directed graph could be applied to neural networks the first time they were introduced to the concept some decades ago and then realized that they must not have been the first one to notice and therefore the layered topology must have some mathematical superiority over a generalized form but never found a concrete answer as to why?

<comment><USER4> > therefore the layered topology must have some mathematical superiority

Isn't it just that backpropagation on the layered topology is relatively straightforward?

That's not to say you can't write a backpropagation on an arbitrary digraph, but as you get to more and more complex digraphs, things will get harder.

I could be wrong on this.

<comment><USER5> > Isn't it just that backpropagation on the layered topology is relatively > straightforward? That's not to say you can't write a backpropagation on an > arbitrary digraph...

Moreover, any arbitrary digraph can be expressed as a layered topology (possibly with a lot of 0-weights). Since there's no fundamental difference you might as well work with whatever's easiest to compute with.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It should be noted that the described graph embedding related tasks are only a small subset of the tasks that GNNs solve. Many (if not most) graph learning techniques focus on more "local" tasks like node classification or edge prediction.

</comment><comment><USER7> At which NLP tasks are they state the art? The only one where they are really competitive is dependency parsing. (from my own disjonction of cases)

Also were there any new real SOTA on any NLP tasks since last summer? I feel like accuracy progress has frozen..

What I would love would be to get a notification/mail when a task from which I subscribed got a new SOTA (from paperswithcode.com obviously).

<comment><USER8> > At which NLP tasks are they state the art? The only one where they are > really competitive is dependency parsing. (from my own disjonction of cases)

At tasks that actually involve graphs presumably. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.00596.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1901.00596.pdf) [https://paperswithcode.com/task/graph- classification](https://paperswithcode.com/task/graph-classification) has a bunch of GNNs ranked #1

> Also were there any new real SOTA on any NLP tasks since last summer? I feel > like accuracy progress has frozen..

That's pretty normal for winter/spring, it's not conference season.

<comment><USER7> _it 's not conference season_ Weird ^^ Imagine that I'm a scientist and that I made a big discovery X during winter. But for audience/visibility I only want to publish my results on conference Y during summer. Somebody, right before summer make the same discovery than mine. How do I protect the fact that I am the first one discoverer if I publish after the second?

<comment><USER9> You post it on arxiv

<comment><USER7> So the answer would be the SOTA results are on arxiv but are posted on paperswithcode.com leaderboards only at conference time? Sounds unlikely.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Graph Neural networks are currently used a lot in the neural networks for drug discovery space. They significantly beat RNN and CNN baseline/complex versions equivalents on the same datasets(Tox21, QM9 efc).

<comment><USER11> Can you please share an example? I am in genomics and looking to get closer to the drug chemistry.

<comment><USER10> Happy to share decks and references to your email address. Please share your email address with me :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Watch the video, its much clearer [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWIeTMklzNg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWIeTMklzNg)

</comment><comment><USER13> Is there any tutorial using graph NN for biomed? I always wanted to learn more how graph NN is applied on the health/medical industry.

<comment><USER14> Look into RDFs and Ontology w.r.t. NNs. A very rich (though unproductive) history.</comment></comment>


A cartoon intro to WebAssembly (2017) - <AUTHOR> https://hacks.mozilla.org/2017/02/a-cartoon-intro-to-webassembly/ <comment><USER2> Two graphs, with hand-drawn style. Not the cartoon intro I was hoping for.

<comment><USER3> Yup, expected something more like the old Why's (Poignant) Foxes [https://poignant.guide/book/chapter-3.html](https://poignant.guide/book/chapter-3.html)

But anyway it's well written.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I was expecting to see a series of cartoons explaining a lot about WebAssembly as Julia Evans does from time to time.

</comment><comment><USER5> Not sure why the focus here is on the lack of cartoons. I am really enjoying this clearly written series of articles irrespective of the amount of cartoons.

<comment><USER2> Because the headline says "cartoon."

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> (2017)</comment>


The Dark Side of Resilience - happy-go-lucky https://hbr.org/2017/08/the-dark-side-of-resilience <comment><AUTHOR> > _In America, 75% of employees consider their direct line manager the worst > part of their job, and 65% would take a pay cut if they could replace their > boss with someone else._

And _this_ is one of the secret sauces of startups. Excel at valuing your staff in the midst of a crap-show and they will stick with you even though you can't match the compensation packages of large corporations.

Corollary: good management is imperative within a startup, or you'll loose an important value-prop as an employer.

<comment><USER2> In my experience (30+ years in all kinds and sizes of companies), the quality of management is the absolute worst in startups.

The secret sauce of startups is that in the very early phase there is no management. But once management becomes a necessity (a conclusion that is usually drawn at least two years too late), the shit show most startups turn into makes corporate life look attractive. Usually a mix between founders trying to manage (most entrepreneurs make bad managers) or early employees falling upward.

One of the main issues is that people who are thrive in the early stages of a startup tend to lack the #1 quality of a good manager: the drive to _make other people succeed_.

If you want to work for a good manager, startups are the last place to look.

<comment><USER3> _" In my experience (30+ years in all kinds and sizes of companies), the quality of management is the absolute worst in startups."_

Another datapoint: my own managers at startups were better by far than those at larger companies. Generally, the smaller the company, the better.

The absolute best was when it was just me and the company's owner working together. No corporate bullshit. In that instance, my manager didn't have to appease any executives above him. He just decided what had to get done and we did it. Very often I'd have meaningful contributions to make to the decision making process, and we'd decide what needed to get done together.

Try doing that in a large company where there are N levels of middle management above you, bullshit corporate policy and compliance to adhere to, people in different offices and time zones who haven't a clue about who you are or what you think making your decisions for you, and so on.

I can't even count the number of times when managers in larger companies that I've worked at have told me that they really want to do the right thing, but their hands are tied... so we do the wrong, broken thing because we don't have any choice. At startups there tends to be a lot more freedom, if we make mistakes, at least they're our mistakes, not ones forced on us by clueless/insulated upper management.

<comment><USER4> >The absolute best was when it was just me and the company's owner working together.

You're just reinforcing the parent's point that "[t]he secret sauce of startups is that in the very early phase there is no management."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The older I get, the more I realize that in most cases it's best to be in the middle of the bell curve.

That's not to say there's anything wrong with having the single-minded focus required to be one of the best in the world at something. But you have to accept that you'll miss out on other enjoyable aspects of life while you pursue your goal, and know if and when you should move on from it, or you'll wind up very unhappy.

<comment><USER6> Each standard deviation of excellence earned along any dimension extracts a greater toll on all others. It's good to have a specialty along one or two axes, especially given that you may not care much to be good at the grand lot of the other available skills you could attain. But to truly excell (3 or more sigma, let's say) is time-expensive.

<comment><USER7> Gambler's fallacy.

Far more likely to just be regression to the mean.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "You should quit your lofty goals and revert to those more practical in nature.", said no-one who ever accomplished something great

<comment><USER9> >"You should quit your lofty goals and revert to those more practical in nature.", said no-one who ever accomplished something great

"Never quit on your dreams," said most people who never achieve anything.

<comment><USER10> I'm going to dig the biggest hole ever. Is a lofty goal, or at least a deep one.

You might sit and plan and talk to people and make a buisness plan involving dump trucks and stay at your day job planning for ever.

You might make viable plans for digging a large hole, but they don't quite fill the great pit of your vision.

Or you might pick digging as big a hole as possible as a direction, and do the next thing.

Dig with a space until you get tired then hire a digger and learn to drive it. End up with a big pile of mud to get rid of and find out you could sell it. Who knew selling mud could pay for more diggers. Hire good diggers and drivers because you've done it yourself and know how it's done. Do the next thing, do the next thing.

Until one day out have a really big hole. Not the biggest, but pretty big.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> "In America, 75% of employees consider their direct line manager the worst part of their job, and 65% would take a pay cut if they could replace their boss with someone else."

It is happening because every company is super exploiting the workers to increase the profits, because we have a capitalist crisis

<comment><USER12> >"It is happening because every company is super exploiting the workers to increase the profits, because we have a capitalist crisis"

Eh, the statistics are better explained by the fact that most people (adults especially) don't like being told what to do. They'll be bitter about anyone handing them orders on a daily basis, especially if their manager isn't gentle or subtle in their managing. If a manager has enough emotional intelligence and empathy then they should be able to set direction and delegate without being disliked, but that ability is reserved for an elite few. Hence the statistics.

<comment><USER13> The problem is that, in most cases, managers are people who were good workers (and good at office politics) and who then got promoted into supervisory roles with little, if any, additional training.

<comment><USER14> Peter's principle and whatnot, but I think there is something deeper. The manager positions are designed, by definition of the word, to manage, and the top goal is to extract values from workers. Managers (and product managers in tech companies) are encouraged to create a `healthy` tension with line workers (software engineers included) in work estimation and commitments. This is supposed to make the work challenging enough, but not so demanding that burn out the workers. The best managers can do that by providing the intellectual challenges and motivational goals. Most resort to processes and plain OKRs though (reflected in the worst ever software tool, JIRA. Also any line manager who's got any clue, meaning who can provide technical/business directions, would be quickly promoted to directors (where they are supposed to direct :-).

Protip for frontline managers: The percentage of time you spend on JIRA is negatively correlated to the chance of being promoted to the director level.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> > If you think something's supposed to hurt, you're less likely to notice if > you're doing it wrong. That about sums up my experience of graduate school.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/love.html)

</comment><comment><USER16> This article is impressively thinly-argued for the usual standards of the Harvard Business Review.

Think of physical endurance. Focusing on physical endurance could lead you to pointless ultramarathons, or even trying to fly off buildings, but this is as a defficiency in goal selection. A man with the same physical endurance may choose to do something entirely different with it.

(My physical endurance right now is so much lower than it was two years ago that I take buses for city stretches across which I used to walk briskly. It takes more time, more money and is vaguely humiliating, at least to my own eyes.)

<comment><USER17> The situations described involve other character defects that can do more damage because of how resilient the person. You could say the same thing about flexibility or a good work ethic or conscientiousness. Anything can have a dark side if you package it with something bad.

The other character defects are the problem. You can be very resilient and empathetic and a good leader.

And we don't call a salad covered with sugary dressing "the dark side of lettuce."

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> > "Yet there is no indication that people actually act on these attitudes, > with job tenure remaining stable over the years despite ubiquitous access to > career opportunities and the rise of passive recruitment introduced by the > digital revolution. "

I have never seen a more grandiose, idealized view used to describe the modern job market than this blurb. Even in our very hirable field in tech we see a market rife with inefficiency.

I almost spit out my coffee reading "ubiquitous access" and then had to stifle a laugh at "passive recruitment".

</comment><comment><USER19> A bumper sticker I'd like, made from a Lily Tomlin quote: "I used to say that when I grew up, I was going to be somebody; now I realize I should've been more specific."

</comment><comment><USER20> this article's conflation of "resilience" with "well fit with corporate values even when those values become disfiguringly distorted" is a bit disturbing

</comment><comment><USER21> There is no such thing as "too much resilience". What a ridiculous article. Stopped reading it when they mentioned that people staying in their jobs despite hating it are "resilient". That's not the word I would use for it.

<comment><USER22> I agree with that, I think _resilient_ is not the correct term for what is described in the article, but rather _accommodation_ or possibly _rationalization_.

People will adapt to their circumstances in both directions: if things become worse, people can adapt to rationalize it as normal, whereas if things become better, people will become eventually complacent and want things to improve, even though things have already improved.</comment></comment>