LinkedIn Ordered to Face Customer E-Mail Contacts Lawsuit - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-06-13/linkedin-ordered-to-face-customer-e-mail-contacts-lawsuit.html <comment><USER2> Ugh definitely. The awful thing is that they harvest your email from someone's address book and then bombard you with "people you may know" on your actual legitimate Linkedin account(tied into that email).

LinkedIn is a ghetto of recruiters looking for no benefit contract employees("Oh we see you are an EXTREME CUTTING EDGE WEB2.0 NINJA, would you like to take a $50k contract job?"). Does this work on anyone? I can't imagine any legitimate "superstars" actually respond to these folks.

Edit: the really awkward thing is when it starts recommending you one night stands from years ago just because you may have at some point exchanged an email.

<comment><USER3> I've always been puzzled by people who hate on recruiters contacting them through LinkedIn.

If you dislike it so much, why don't you delete your LinkedIn profile? It's obviously there to facilitate exactly this kind of behaviour, so I don't see why there's any issue around it.

To the contrary, I see these kinds of complaints as being a common form of humblebragging in the developer community. It comes across as: 'Gosh, isn't it tough being contacted by these recruiters all the time because my skills are under such high demand in the labor marketplace. Deleting that one email every few weeks sure does some serious damage to my psychological well-being.'

The substance of this article is about email spam generated by LinkedIn itself. I think we should focus on that, and on the broader issue of where the limits are for email invitations in web applications. The issue this has highlighted (for me at least) is that it is easy to do damage to the reputations for others by putting their names on emails they didn't ask to be sent. This doesn't just mean losing users, it actually means souring and sometimes ruining the valuable relationships that users have with their colleagues and friends. There's a lot of trust and power inherent when someone else's name is put on an email and that isn't something to be sneezed at.

<comment><USER4> I thought the purpose was to keep a list of professional contacts I know.

I don't expect to be contacted by recruiters I've never met before on an almost hourly basis during the week.

For my company, this is a genuine nuisance and most of our phone calls are from clueless recruiters offering candidates that don't even have the skills we're looking for.

Even if we needed a recruiter, I'd hardly choose one that called out of the blue. It's getting to the stage where we have to put warnings for recruiters not to contact us because we get so many it's harming our productivity.

So that's why I hate on it.

As an employer, I can say I've never had a good recruitment experience even outside of this situation.

However, I don't expect them to stop any time soon. If this is also a problem for anyone here, the best result is to quickly politely tell them you're not interested. Perhaps ask where they saw your details. Put a note there. Don't stay on the phone for the inevitable questions they've been trained to ask to keep you on the phone. Just say no if you value your time.

<comment><USER4> Just to follow on from this... perhaps to understand my acrimony, people from outside the UK might be interested to know that at times it seems as if we have an economy powered by an army of unskilled 'service sector professionals' calling the entire population trying to sell recruitment, utilities and PPI claims.

For many of us 'Were you mis-sold PPI?" is almost a daily question via SMS.

The sad thing is that at some level it must work.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> LinkedIn is a classic example of how a company must shift from serving their customer to serving their investors after they go public.

They used to be a very useful service.[1] But the closer they got to their IPO the more the started doing things that were clearly in the best interest of generating more page views regardless of how valuable those things were to their users. To my mind this lawsuit was brought about because of that very behavior.

1: Not accounting for the recruiters who have plagued it. Something LinkedIn could probably deal with but they don't want to because that would affect page views.

<comment><USER6> Presumably they try to drive up page views in order to make more revenue. Are you saying that they wouldn't do the same if they were still privately held?

Maybe after their IPO the thought is that they're no longer going to get magical money raining down on them, so they actually have to try to generate more profit?

Although it must be hard for people with option grants when there's a P/E approaching 1000 and you need the price to keep going up to do well.

<comment><USER5> I'm saying they drive up page views in ways that are independent of the value those things provide to their users.

I'm not against increasing revenue. I'm against scanning my contacts list without my permission so they can invite my friends. What value does this provide to me? None. What value does it provide to them? A ton because if even a small percentage of my contacts signs up then LinkedIn has just increased page views and thus, revenue.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hope that LinkedIn lose that suit. I had tonnes of people with me in their address book bombarding me with LinkedIn invitations - it'd make me feel better about that.

</comment><comment><USER8> My favorite LinkedIn feature is how invitations are not sent by linkedin.com, but your friend/colleague/etc. This way, marking it as spam doesn't hurt them.

I had to go through several rounds of customer support to get my information off of their site. "You don't have an account" they would repeat - of course I don't, which is why it bothers me that I still get invitations and show up in your "recommended" lists.

Not to mention the fake endorsements.

<comment><USER9> There's protections against this sort of thing that major isps implement. You can't just set your from address to whatever you want. Well you can, but it would be likely be rejected, or at least wouldn't reach your target's inbox.

<comment><USER6> SPF allows you to fake the From header, so long your Return-Path is your own domain and passes checks. DMARC can pass if SPF passes. To end users, there's no discernible difference when there's another Return-Path domain.

DKIM does allow you to force the From header to be signed, so hopefully that'll continue to pick up steam. It does break some things, like some mailing lists, and that probably contributes to why it's taken so long to get such things going. There's also a lot of "business critical" software out there that just assumes it can send as any user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> _While Koh agreed to throw out claims based on federal wiretap and stored communications claims, she said LinkedIn may have violated California's right of publicity, which protects against the appropriation of someone's name or likeness, without their consent, for commercial purposes._

</comment><comment><USER11> From the article I understand the suit is by LinkedIn members whose contact book was (in their opinion) abused to send these invitation emails to non- members. On the face of it that's a reasonable claim and seems they should prevail.

But also: How about the recipients -- who are getting repeated unsolicited commercial emails? How does this activity not violate CAN-SPAM? Shouldn't LinkedIn be subject to fines?

Edit: Although I don't terribly mind the downvote, especially if it was accidental -- I did read the whole article and had a genuine question.

</comment><comment><USER12> I logged into Linkedin recently for the first time in a while, and I was APPALLED to find that they had suggested the psychiatrist I saw during college for depression as a contact. They must have mined out her contacts info. This stuff is extremely sensitive and should be confidential, but Linkedin totally disregards that.

<comment><USER13> Hang on: why is your psychiatrist leaking identifiable information to anyone?

The problem there is the (criminal?) failings of the psychiatrist, not of the scummy behaviour of LinkedIn.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> For anyone talking about receiving too much LinkedIn spam it was revealed to me on HN that they actually have a do not contact list. I sent them an email listing off my email addresses a little while ago and they've honoured it.

[https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/426/](https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/426/)

<comment> o0-0o This same process did not work for me, at all. My dead relatives I emailed years ago are always in my recommendation list. I never connected to an external account, and have repeatedly tried to contact linkedin with no response. I'll gladly be a counterparty to this suit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Linked-In used to put up a message wanting to "verify" my email address and ask for a password. I made it a point to never ever give them my email password because I thought they'd help themselves. Anyone know if they do? I also gave my linked-in account it's own password in case they might try do something crappy like trying to get at my email assuming its the same password. It's not just them, half the apps on Google Play want access to my contacts, texts, and/or location - stuff the app itself has no use for.

<comment><USER16> Ideally, you should be using a unique password at every site. There are plenty of secure password storage tools to help you keep track.

That way, even if there is a site breach, your other accounts are not at risk.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Its about time LinkedIn got call on this. They have been doing this for years.

</comment><comment><USER18> LinkedIn is the worst offender when it comes to SPAM. I've turned off all possible settings to recive 0 emails still get multiple messages everyday :(

</comment><comment><USER19> I'd appreciate if they let me unsubscribe from their damn emails on a catch all account where I get a former employee's emails. They make you log-in to opt out and I'm not about to reset the guy's password in case he still uses linkedin.

<comment><USER20> They don't make you log in. Use this form [1] and they'll blacklist your email address system-wide [2]. Be sure to include any spelling variations (e.g. an optional dot) that may be in your contacts' address books:

      Please add my email addresses to the Do Not Contact List:

      firstname.lastname@example.com
      firstname.lastname@example.com
      email@example.com

      Thank you,

      Andrew

I did this in April and haven't since received anything but a confirmation from their customer support.

[1]: [https://help.linkedin.com/app/ask/path/dnca](https://help.linkedin.com/app/ask/path/dnca)

[2]: [https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/426/](https://help.linkedin.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/426/)

</comment></comment><comment> nevi-me I used to be on LinkedIn, but deleted my profile a year and half ago. I still get e-mails about invitations from people who know me, and whenever I choose to unsubscribe from them, I still get them.

The scary thing is that when you click through the link to confirm, they used to ask you to 'change a password' implying that a ghost account in your name already exists. I just checked it now, and it just offers me to create an account instead.

</comment><comment><USER21> While it may be a worthwhile case my solution to the few linkedin emails I received was to mark them as spam and move on.

<comment><USER22> I had to create a rule in gmail. Marking them as spam didn't seem to work too well and still a lot slipped through. Now anything that has linkedin.com in subject, from, to, and body is automatically deleted.

<comment><USER23> That's going to cause problems for you one day. Some people put their LinkedIn in their signatures.

<comment><USER22> Maybe, but to be honest, haven't had one complain of not replying to emails yet (Except from recruiters).

Maybe I'm just not involved in a lot of circles with folks that do that (looking at signatures of most of my emails, most just have name, email and phone)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I don't know how many times I've accidentally sent emails to random people asking them to join LinkedIn because the button looks like the one for connecting with someone already on the site, two different things.

</comment><comment><USER25> Relevant [http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/27yldl/snoop_find_infor...](http://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/27yldl/snoop_find_informations_about_an_email_owner/)

</comment><comment><USER26> As much as I rely on LinkedIn they have a HORRIBLE approach to user privacy. Hope they get hit hard and learn a lesson.

</comment><comment><USER27> It's a virus with a EULA.

</comment><comment><USER28> eat it linkedin. You're a bunch of shitty jerks.</comment>


Start Your Own ECommerce Business Instead of a Seller in Amazon - <AUTHOR> https://shopygen.com/start-your-own-ecommerce-business/ <comment><USER2> Great staff!</comment>


Ask HN: Which GitHub repo has the most open issues? - <AUTHOR> Any way to find that out? <comment><USER2> Why would that metric be useful? Geniuenly wondering. I learned in the past that open issues are not indicator of how useful the library is.

Example: Worked on a project that used a library with 150 open and 3500 closed issues. Turns out it was a disaster we had to replace. It was disaster mainly because most closed issues were closed by a bot after 14 days and we didn't realise this.

</comment><comment><USER3> [https://github.com/rust-lang/rust](https://github.com/rust-lang/rust) currenly has 4738 open and 25,000 closed.

[https://github.com/golang/go](https://github.com/golang/go) currently has 4412 open and 27,000 closed.

[https://github.com/npm/npm](https://github.com/npm/npm) had 2166 before moving to community,forum.

[https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs](https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs) stopped at 1823 open.

[https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch](https://github.com/elastic/elasticsearch) currently has 1734 open and 18,000 closed.

<comment> egor-n [https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues](https://github.com/flutter/flutter/issues) has 5491 open and 14800 closed issues.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A very useful resource: [https://www.codetriage.com/](https://www.codetriage.com/)

</comment><comment><USER5> [https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues](https://github.com/ytdl- org/youtube-dl/issues) has 2,350 open and 14,371 closed</comment>


Go Is the New Ruby - <AUTHOR> https://00f.net/2019/10/28/go-is-the-new-ruby/ <comment> mkr-hn Go really is the easiest language I've used. It installs with no fuss. The VSCode extension sets everything up and works perfectly. The library documentation is so clear that it usually answers any question I have without having to dig up blog posts and without dodging top search result Stack Overflow pages closed without answering the question. The highly opinionated nature means I can go into any Go code base and make sense of it quickly.

<comment><USER2> Go is the new Java.

It runs everywhere, is easy to learn and use and people who don't get it hate it with passion.

Anyway, comparing go documentation with rust docs, I'm surprised anyone can get any work done with rust.

<comment><USER3> > Anyway, comparing go documentation with rust docs, I'm surprised anyone can > get any work done with rust.

That's an unexpected comment. Rust has among the best documentation I've seen, and arguably the best ecosystem around documentation, which helps a lot and encourage third party developers to write high quality doc. I understand when people complain about the learning curve (like this article, because fighting the borrowchecker is only a thing while learning) but docs, really?

<comment> mkr-hn For comparison:

[https://doc.rust-lang.org/std/fmt/index.html](https://doc.rust- lang.org/std/fmt/index.html)

[https://golang.org/pkg/fmt/](https://golang.org/pkg/fmt/)

I don't know why I find Go's version easier to follow, but I do.

<comment><USER4> Context: I wrote most of the stdlib docs

the fmt docs are... not ideal. That said, there's a _lot_ there, and it's all useful, but it's just tough. Frankly, I just punted on improving them, and haven't taken the time to do so in the years since.

<comment> mkr-hn It seems like enough people find their way around them. Refinement might make them easier for people like me with less experience navigating language documentation, but that might come at the expense of developing the language. Priorities are important. Especially since Rust doesn't have Google's resources.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't really get the affinity of Go and Ruby. The most similar thing I could say about them both is that they're both not Java. This makes sense from a hiring sense, either your hiring from the large Jvm/.Net pools or you're not.

I suppose both Ruby and Go have less steep learning curves compared to Java/Kotlin/Scala.

I can't wait until Go v2 gets generics then I can use it like other statically-typed compiled, gc'd languages. At the rate of Go language development, Java might get coroutines and value-types before then.

I haven't used Rust but I read the "Rust where the compiler constantly shouts "fuck you"" quote differently. I read it as, where the non-existent Ruby compiler will shout "fuck you" in production.

<comment><USER6> The affinity for the author is in the last line,

"Go has become the new Ruby. A language I use to get things done, and enjoy programming again."

Good for him

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I enjoy learning new languages. In my day job I spend most of my time writing JS (ReactJS specifically) building dashboards and other internal business tools. Sometimes I need to build API's or perform tasks that just cannot be done in the browser and I take the opportunity to experiment with other languages.

A few examples:

\- We purchased a cheap USB duplicator (10 slots) to copy the contents from a master USB to the clones. It worked, but wasn't a great solution. It was slow, error prone and when it failed you never really knew what USB was having the issues (or what went wrong). Using a Golang backend and ReactJS frontend I created an alternative which had a nice GUI showing what files were copying, the percentages complete, error messages, etc. It was a far better solution and using Goroutines it was fun. We ended up scaling the system to 100 USB's at a time and that was fun to watch (lots of blinky lights :D). The solution didn't take much time to write (Golang was quick to learn) and we finished the duplication WAY sooner than the due date.

\- We needed to automate a bunch of DNS stuff with CloudFlare. I ended up creating a parser for a custom config we wrote, hooked it up to CF's API and we ran it as a service. The language I used for this project was Nim[0]. I liked the syntax and the final binaries were TINY and FAST.

\- More recently I was approached by an IT guy at the company that manages all of our software licenses. He showed me this command line tool he uses to query all licenses and goes through the cryptic output trying to figure out what licenses were being used, by whom, etc. I ended up using Go to parse the command and serve a ReactJS application with all sorts of bells and whistles (reports, history, alerts, etc). Since the application is browser-based he can even use it mobile which he loves.

\- I've been working on some prototype BLE Mesh stuff in C, but that is a ways out and not yet worth mentioning much more.

Rust has held my interest for a while as well, just waiting for the right project to come along.

[0][https://nim-lang.org/](https://nim-lang.org/)

<comment><USER8> On top of ReactJS, what else do you use to build dashboards and internal business tools?

<comment><USER7> I typically do everything custom these days. In the past I would use Bootstrap, Semantic or one of the many other CSS frameworks but I found that I add a lot of size to my applications when I only used a few things from it. Most features (sidebars, grids, menus...) are simple enough to just implement on your own. I was a graphic designer that moved into development so I feel I have a pretty good sense of design and UX.

I do however use various charting libraries out there for ReactJS as they are typically quite well done and small in size. If I need something a little more custom I'll install D3 and build it out.

For backend I have used Node/Express quite a bit to serve API's and such. But as mentioned in my previous post lately I've been using system programming languages a lot more for building backend things mostly as a learning exercise and because I have the freedom to do that in my job.

Building out these tools and seeing them being used daily from nearly all employees in a ~400 person company is really rewarding. It really gives me a sense of appreciation for the work I do and I get a lot of good suggestions on how to improve the applications that in turn improve the work these employees do.

Other things I've used in the past for various projects include Ionic Framework & PhoneGap (mobile app), Zephyr RTOS (BLE Mesh Programming), React Native, Angular, Electron (Visitor Check In/Out Kiosks), and lots of CSS frameworks (too many to name).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> "All languages suck, but they all bring interesting concepts as well, that can overall make you a better programmer."

True on so many levels. Learning other languages means learning a new way of thinking due to the reasons those languages were created in the first place. Even if you never change the language you use daily, learning other languages and doing small projects in them will make you better in your "home" language.

<comment><USER10> Not true, There are lots of languages that bring absolutely nothing to the table in terms of making you a better programmer. Take something like Elm, it doesn't make you a "better programmer". It does make your program better by being statically typed. Kinda like typescript doesn't make you a better programmer than if you use javascript, but it makes your program better. You can say this for a lot of languages.

<comment><USER11> I don't agree with this. Using typescript really helped me understand the value of types, which wound up radically changing the way I read and write vanilla JS. I'm much better at recognizing and preventing bugs in vanilla JS because typescript has changed the way I think about JS.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The key point of the article is that Ruby and Go are similar for being very developer friendly and productive languages. It is not about keyword arguments or the expressive power of the language or something similar. Although it's not explicitly mentioned why Go is the new Ruby, given that both are equally productive, I would assume that it's because Go is much faster where it counts.

</comment><comment><USER13> I kinda throught Elixir / Phoenix was the new Ruby / Rails. Nice read none the less.

<comment><USER14> Indeed. For scripting languages, it's usually Python people moving to go and Ruby people adopting Elixir.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> More like Javascript is the new Ruby and Go is the new Java.

</comment><comment><USER16> Moving to a new job with Perl and Go. I know neither of them. This article has me excited!

</comment><comment><USER17> > But, just like in Java, if I need speed, I can preallocate and reuse memory > to avoid hitting the GC.

No, you can't. Language constructs in Go allocate in ways that are not immediately obvious. When the GC runs, it still has to scan all of that memory, regardless of whether you preallocated it or not, which is especially unfortunate with a non-generational garbage collector like that of Go.

Also, I have to say that I really don't get it when people say that they have to think about the borrow checker for a long time before writing a program in Rust. That's not the case for me or anyone else I know.

<comment><USER18> One possibly useful thing to know is that the Go GC doesn't scan non-pointer memory, so if you have big strings, byte arrays, or structs that don't contain pointers, they don't need to be scanned.

Also, while the garbage collector may not be generational, it's mostly concurrent. Looks like GC pauses are below 1ms now?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > For me, Go has become the new Ruby. A language I use to get things done, and > enjoy programming again.

Despite my annoyance with the direction that Go's taken since 1.10, this line really resonates with me.

TL;DR

Windows + PHP + slow laptop drove me to put away my childish anti-Google fears for a weekend and try Go, and for the first time since I started coding (with Pascal) I enjoyed programming.

Cool story:

Around late 2010, after a few years of using (btw, Arch) Linux exclusively, I was given a slow Windows laptop for work. The laptop came with Windows Vista IIRC and the whole experience of writing PHP code on an unfamiliar OS combined with a slow laptop was just misery - it was even worse than my memories of Windows ME/XP.

I tried everything to get a familiar Linux env going: Cygwin, msys, KDE... and it just added insult to injury.

Anyway, soon after, it was Go's birthday so it was in the news again and one weekend I decided to put away my childish anti-Google fears and try it and I never looked back.

Something about the simplicity, its lack of CMake, Makefiles, latest build- system-of-the-week, dynamic linking hell, C++ complexity, D and its 2 std libs, etc. was a breath of fresh air.

Before even falling in love the the concurrency primitives, I started writing "bash scripts" in Go - something I do to this day. I even started writing prototypes in Go to then port them to PHP and Python because I could write the inefficient, naive, brute-force code to validate an idea... and it'd still end up being faster and use less memory than the code the was deployed to production.

I later also discovered that my shitty naive linters written in Go that parsed and checked whole PHP packages every time I saved a file ran near instantly compared to the heavy disk-destroying IDE indexing - it was crazy.

</comment><comment><USER20> I thought Crystal was...

[https://crystal-lang.org/](https://crystal-lang.org/)

<comment><USER20> as for rails, pick your poison

[https://luckyframework.org/](https://luckyframework.org/) [https://amberframework.org/](https://amberframework.org/) [https://spider- gazelle.net/](https://spider-gazelle.net/)

<comment><USER5> I tried Lucky, Amber, then finally Kemal which is more of a Sinatra. It was the only thing that compiled fast enough to feel productive.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Then what is the new Rails?

<comment><USER15> You can't have Rails in Go.

I mean you can, but "go advocates", would crap on your work with an endless litany of articles about why whatever you wrote shouldn't be used because it's not the "go way". Remember Martini? That's right you don't.

Fortunately for Go, the biggest pain in the ass when it comes to web development is kind of a solved problem with the use of JSON support in SQL Dbs. All you have to do then is un-serialize directly from the DB, which helps getting rid of ORM when building object graphs.

<comment><USER22> I have no idea where all this salt comes from about go advocates, but there are plenty of Rails-likes in Go that are accepted and used by the community. Buffalo is probably the most Rails-ish (from a glance, I've not use Rails extensively), and it's maintained/advocated for by folks who have long been pillars of the community. Martini was effectively replaced by Gin ([https://github.com/gin-gonic/gin](https://github.com/gin-gonic/gin)), which is still heavily used.

<comment><USER15> Martini wasn't replaced by Gin, 2 different developers.

Buffalo uses code generation sure, but it doesn't make an extensive use of interface {} like Martini did, thus can't really be compared to Rails in terms of polymorphism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A statically typed compiled systems language with anachronistic C semantics and a regressive package dependencies system is never going to be a new high level DSL oriented scripting language. A far better take is that Crystal is the new Go, because it mixes the benefits of a high level language with the benefits of a lower level language, and learned a lot more of the lessons from the ruby and node ecosystems about how to manage code dependencies.

<comment><USER24> I mean this to come of in a non antagonistic way, but did you read the article? You seem to be refuting the title of the article without addressing any of the points made within it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> I wonder what the authors thoughts is about not having a secret annotation for wiping secrets.

</comment><comment><USER26> Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave?

</comment><comment> fleur-de-lotus I don't understand the comparison with Ruby. Go, as a language, is underpowered by design. Ruby is "overpowered". Ruby should better be compared with Kotlin and Swift.

</comment><comment><USER27> In more ways than one.

</comment><comment><USER28> Go is not the new Ruby.

Ruby has keyword arguments and optional arguments with defaults.

Among [many] other things.</comment>


Hints of an unexpected new particle could be confirmed within days - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/is-particle-physics-about-to-crack-wide-open <comment><USER2> What a shitty article. First of all, the excesses presented in December are more noteworthy because they demonstrated how much information flows between the supposedly "independent" general experiments. In December the global CMS excess (the one that matters) was 1.2 sigma, but heyoo a little bird told us ATLAS sees a 2 sigma global excess at the same place so into the slides it goes! So much for independence...

Since then there was an update in march where ATLAS still sees a global significance of 2 sigma and CMS is down below 1. Local significances are up though CMS has pushed their 2.6 to 2.8, and ATLAS has gotten their 3.6 sigma into 3.9 (Both have also added a new model for interpreting this, I'm just giving the largest sigma values reported). The reason improvement is so modest is because there hasn't been any new data on account of the LHC being set in the "off" position.

Anyway, the reason the OP article is such crap is that it doesn't mention any details about the rumour it is so clearly based on. Perusing more technical rumourmongers I find a mention of a 4.7 sigma excess in an ATLAS analysis that wasn't approved in time for the big conference in March. So if the article is based on that rumour, it is about three months old by now. But we can't tell, since the author wusses out on even saying what detector will "CRACK PARTICLE PHYSICS WIDE OPEN"... -_-

<comment><USER3> 5 sigma or it didn't happen!

(And thanks for the great summary.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Unfortunately, this sort of linkbait headline has become typical for Scientific American (which is one of the reasons I haven't subscribed for years). As has already been pointed out in these comments, the Standard Model is already believed to be incomplete by particle physicists, and discovering a new particle in this general energy regime is exactly what everyone has been hoping for for a couple of decades now. Yes, such a new particle is not included in the Standard Model--because there hasn't been any experimental evidence for one. If this discovery pans out, particle physicists will finally be able to start model building again the way it was done when the SM itself was built: based on good experimental data.

<comment><USER5> I don't understand what's wrong with the article headline. For years, the theorists were ahead of the experimentalists and were just waiting for the Higgs to be confirmed while they simply speculated about what might be next.

This, for the first time in a long time, would put experimentalists ahead of theorists. That could easily 'crack wide open' a new set of theories to explain the possible particle. Hardly click-bait here, IMO - the content is sufficiently exciting relative to the headline.

<comment><USER4> _> I don't understand what's wrong with the article headline._

"Crack Wide Open" implies, to me, that this discovery somehow shows that particle physics is on a wrong track and needs to drastically change course. (In other comments I've pointed out statements in the article itself that give the same impression.) That's not the case at all. Particle physics has been stalled because of the lack of new experimental data to help theorists extend their models. This discovery, if it pans out, will help particle physics to start up again, exactly as particle physicists have wanted to do for quite some time.

<comment><USER6> "Crack Wide Open" does not imply that at all. It implies a difficult problem that suddenly yields. When the police officer on the murder drama says this clue will "crack the case wide open", he doesn't mean they've been doing their police work wrong.

<comment><USER4> _> "Crack Wide Open" does not imply that at all._

In isolation, it might not. Taken by itself the phrase is open to multiple interpretations. But in the context of the article as a whole, I think it does.

<comment><USER7> I agree with jessriedel. I don't think the implication is there.

I also think it's generally bad for discussion to do what you are doing, which is to latch on to a very specific interpretation of a single phrase, and pushing to get everyone else accept that interpretation, instead of taking other comments as additional information about how the words can be interpreted and allowing for those different interpretations to coexist.

<comment><USER4> Personally, I think that what is bad for discussion is to do what Scientific American did, which is to talk about a scientific discovery in terms that make it seem much more radical than it really is, for no reason that I can see beyond trying to attract readers. The headline is only one aspect of that, as my other comments in this discussion (not just this subthread) should make clear.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "It would be bigger than the detection of the Higgs boson, which was just confirmation of what was already known."

This is so wrong. Finding the Higgs where it was expected was very important because otherwise "what was already known" would have been false.

<comment><USER9> I think the difference that the author wants to stress here is that this new particle would be something that no one has predicted. The discovery of the Higgs, on the other hand, was an experiment that confirmed a theory which had been formulated several decades ago. And while this is also an amazing achievement, finding a particle that can't be accounted for with our current theories is much more exciting (to me at least), as it means that our current understanding of particle physics is fundamentally or at least partially wrong.

This, I think, is exactly the kind of discovery that people expected from the LHC: Something new and exciting that invalidates our current theories and gives us a possibility to devise / test new ones against real experimental data. After all, the real shortage in particle physics is not the number of theories (we can invent a quasi infinite number of them), but the data against which we can test them.

<comment><USER8> As I see it, before the Higgs was seen, this search was also a search for "new physics", because if Higgs was wrong, a lot of new physics would have been needed to explain the things Higgs was trying to explain. It's just that everybody was expecting a confirmation because all of the rest of the SM turned out to be right so far, so nobody really expected new physics to come from there.

Now since the last chance of "new physics" due to the lack of a signal where a signal should have been is gone, everybody turns their hope to finding a signal where no signal was expected. This is of course totally legitimated, but it doesn't take away any of the importance of the former.

I would love to see something new too, but if the SM explains everything we are able to measure today just fine, then be it. Then the SM is all we need, until we are able to measure more. It's just like the people in the 19th century: they had to go with Newton because they couldn't measure anything beyond Newton. But on the other hand, back then Newton was all they needed, because Newton could explain everything they saw.

<comment><USER10> > people in the 19th century: they had to go with Newton because they couldn't > measure anything beyond Newton

As far as I know in 19th century there were already the measurements and the calculations resulting from them that didn't match Newton's model.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbain_Le_Verrier#Precession_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbain_Le_Verrier#Precession_of_Mercury)

By the way, Le Verrier also discovered Neptune just by studying the measured movements of the known planets.

<comment><USER8> I stand corrected. Please read my sentence as: "in the 18th and early 19th century".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Any physicists around to elaborate on the prevailing theories for this? The article isn't exactly heavy on the details...

Is this suggested particle something like the muon-equivalent of the Higgs?

(edit: I've found [http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-new-boson- at-750-g...](http://resonaances.blogspot.com/2015/12/a-new-boson- at-750-gev.html), which at least has more details and more speculations)

<comment><USER8> I am not a physicist, but you can already read tons of crack pottery about the bump all over the internet, while most serious scientists are still waiting for the confirmation of the bump. But if it goes away unconfirmed, and odds are still high for that, it will be silently buried.

<comment><USER12> Wouldn't retractions need to be issued and explanations given?

<comment><USER13> Retractions of what? There have been no (serious) publications regarding this yet. Presenting experiment data is just that, stating what was measured, not necessarily saying why.

<comment><USER12> "it", according to the post I responded to. Admittedly, it was never defined, but seemed to be used in place of "claims by the few serious scientists who are not waiting for confirmation".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For those of you have heard about this back in December, there is no new data at the moment. The only update is that CERN is firing up again; hopefully we'll hear an update in the next several months or so.

</comment><comment><USER15> I agree with the other comments that this is a bad article, but I want to highlight yet another bad quote.

> _But this particle is not the Higgs boson: it is six times more massive. > Nobody had predicted anything like this._

This is false, there are a lot of alternative expansions of the Standard Model. Each one include a few new particles that are difficult to find because it's necessary to use a bigger (or much bigger) particle accelerator.

For example, the first paragraph of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Alternative_models](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson#Alternative_models) explains a theory that predict a family of 5 Higgs bosons. The lighter one is(would be) the one we had seen. The other 4 are unobserved yet (don't exist because the theory is wrong).

</comment><comment><USER16> No. As per Betteridge's law of headlines [1].

Joking aside, while the article has some content, the headline is definitely tending way to much towards click-bating.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines)

<comment><USER17> > Who will win the US presidential election?

> No.

I have no idea why people insist on quoting an obviously nonsensical formulation of this aphorism. It clearly can only be applied to headlines phrased with yes-no questions, so saying it applies to " _any_ headline that ends in a question mark" is false.

<comment><USER18> I am sure that we can institute an HN corollary that states that for any headline in which there is a question mark in the title, someone on HN will quote Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

Forgive me if this has been done already.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> When the headline is a question, the answer is always no.

Even if this does mean new physics it doesn't mean the standard model will 'fall'. It will simply be expanded.

<comment><USER7> > When the headline is a question, the answer is always no.

People keep saying this, but it's so obviously false to me I don't understand how a thinking person could believe it.

<comment><USER11> It's still a good heuristic. When presented with a question as headline, I immediately answer it with "no". If I still want to read the article when the question has been answered, that might mean I'm genuinely interested in the topic.</comment></comment></comment>


I scaled revenue to $50MM/year as CEO. My big secret to marketing success - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cgherb/marketing-r-d-how-to-solve-your-conversion-rate-and-cost-per-acquisition-56827da30e01 <comment><USER2> This is cool - thanks for sharing!</comment>


Astronomers claim to have seen the merger of two black holes within a third - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/science/black-hole-collision-ligo.html <comment><USER2> It is not about three black holes colliding at the same moment, but about a three massive black holes in three colliding galaxies that one day, in the far future, probably will collide and about a possible effect that two black holes at a close distance might come together sooner in the presence of a third black hole in the vicinity. So, not even discussing the possibility that they may merge at the same moment.

<comment><USER3> > ...at the same moment.

As an aside, this is a rather funny phrase to be using about objects so massive that time and space actually switch roles inside their event horizons compared to the normal universe.

I don't feel like I can explain it very well, but here is a video that does so: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KePNhUJ2reI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KePNhUJ2reI) (Skip to about 5:15 for the good stuff.)

<comment><USER4> _> time and space actually switch roles inside their event horizons_

No, they don't. This is a common misconception based on a mathematical artifact of one particular coordinate system.

 _> here is a video that does so_

This video is actually quite misleading, because in the diagram it shows of a black hole at around 7 minutes ish, it is using coordinates in which the artifact I mentioned above does _not_ occur, but then mislabels the coordinates in the part of the diagram inside the horizon to make it seem as if it does.

<comment><USER3> My understanding of the explanation and the video was that they don't literally switch roles, in the sense that you could then travel backward in time, or couldn't alter your position with respect to the singularity. It's more that, in terms of light cones, inside the event horizon, you can move in space in such a way encountering photons from the past, which is somewhat _like_ travelling back in time. So, in a sense, the "arrow of time" doesn't work inside the black hole. But, since all world lines do eventually end at the singularity, which basically means that no matter what you do, you're always moving toward it, space becomes time-like in the sense that there's then an "arrow of space," analogous to the "arrow of time."

I found the mathematical explanation of sign flipping to be fairly easy to understand. One thing in particular that equation makes clear is that at the instant you cross the event horizon, whatever metric you're using is going to become degenerate. That makes some sense, because you're literally crossing over into a different realm there, but, it doesn't seem physical to me, unless it's not actually physically possible for matter to literally fall _into_ a black hole; rather that matter we perceive as falling into it gets smeared out across the event horizon, its information being "painted on" to the event horizon. (This reminds me of the "black hole information paradox," but I'm not sure exactly how it all plays into it. For small enough holes and small enough particles, I would guess there is some interaction between the particle approaching the event horizon and Hawking radiation pushing back on it, kind of like solar wind does. But, that's pure speculation.)

Physically, the thing that made the most sense to me was that of the 4 spacetime dimensions, outside of a black hole, the one we have designated as "time" is so designated because it doesn't behave like the other 3, because we can only travel in one direction along it. Inside the event horizon, it's clear that one spatial dimension corresponding to the vector extending outward from the singularity to your position acquires this property.

Because they only did the example of a Schwartzchild black hole, I'm sure this all goes out the window in case of a rotating black hole, in which you no longer have a point singularity, but a ring singularity [0].

Since I have never specifically studied GR, all my actual black hole knowledge comes from intuition derived from a differential topology course. But, that intuition is telling me that something similar happens in this general case, except that space never actually becomes time-like. World lines do all still end at some point on the singularity, and you can still get weirdness encountering photons you might think you couldn't, so, my physics layman's intuition is telling me what you have is basically all 4 dimensions acquiring a similar character. That is, spatial dimensions start becoming somewhat time- like, and time starts becoming somewhat space-like.

Differential topology gave me a really crude understanding of what goes on here, but, I do understand that black holes are fundamentally simple objects. They only have three properties: mass, charge, and angular momentum; so, you should be able to describe them fully from any reference frame outside the event horizon using those 3 variables plus the spatiotemporal location of the hole.

At that point, if you have a universe with nothing in it but your one, lonely black hole, you have a static universe. If you introduce matter, you could theoretically model interactions between all the particles of matter in your toy universe, and the black hole. If you constrain the number of particles enough, you should be able to at least approximate how this idealized universe evolves.

Is this a fair interpretation, or am I way off base?

<comment><USER4> _> black holes are fundamentally simple objects. They only have three properties: mass, charge, and angular momentum; so, you should be able to describe them fully from any reference frame outside the event horizon using those 3 variables plus the spatiotemporal location of the hole._

Yes, this is correct.

 _> At that point, if you have a universe with nothing in it but your one, lonely black hole, you have a static universe._

Yes. (More precisely, it's static outside the hole's horizon.)

 _> If you introduce matter, you could theoretically model interactions between all the particles of matter in your toy universe, and the black hole. If you constrain the number of particles enough, you should be able to at least approximate how this idealized universe evolves._

Approximate, yes. But there are no exact solutions known for such scenarios in GR.

(Also, a minor point, GR models matter as continuous--"point particles" don't really exist in GR except as "test objects" that can move within the spacetime geometry but do not act as sources for the curvature of the geometry. Continuous matter is described by the stress-energy tensor.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> > an invisible collision of invisible objects — black holes — had become > briefly visible

> it would mark the first time that colliding black holes have produced light > as well as gravitational waves

Can someone with a better understanding of astrophysics dumb this down for me a bit? Black holes, by definition, don't let light escape. That's their _thing_. So how did this collision produce light visible outside of them? I mean, are we talking about a naked singularity? (Someone let Joseph Cooper know).

Or is it just that something nearby the collision but outside of the event horizon started producing large amounts of light?

<comment><USER6> Black holes have gravity. That gravity means things orbit them like a star. (Dust, rock, gas, bits of planets etc.) When two black holes merge that orbiting stuff collides really really fast. The light comes from that collision and subsequent heating, not from the actual black holes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> The word "claim" seems unduly negative. Why not use "report"? For example "Astronomers report merger ..." Also, the title also seems to imply that the two black holes are within a third black hole; wtf? I suggest as title "Astronomers report merger of two black holes as the pair orbited a third black hole".

Of course this is far from the title and focus of the paper, which is about the EM counterpart...

</comment><comment><USER8> Either the title is incorrect or they're making the much greater claim that they've retrieved information that escaped a black hole.

</comment><comment><USER9> Wondering what is so special about black holes?</comment>


Google's effort to get ad-avoidant site visitors to pay flounders - <AUTHOR> http://digiday.com/publishers/one-year-publishers-not-blown-away-google-contributor-adoption-rate-low/ <comment><USER2> The value for the user isn't there.

Netflix: $8 = no ads

Google Contributor: $10 = _half_ as many ads on a few websites.

uBlock is free for no ads. You have to be better than _that_. The web is a weird place. I think people, abstractly, might be fine paying for good content. Part of the problem is that the internet is brimming with garbage, and no one wants to pay for garbage. If a user incidentally visits a site and it isn't what they were looking for, they don't want part of their monthly ad- bidding funds to go to that site.

I fear that since things have been free for 20+ years, people aren't going to ever pay for written content. Maybe if we are forced to pay for every view, we'll think twice about where it comes from and not waste money on clickbait. Probably not.

<comment><USER3> I wish there was an easy way to make micropayments for articles, in the vein of Amazon's one-click feature. Go to an article, hit a paywall, click a shiny ¢5 button, done. If the micropayment was small and I didn't have to enter my CC info more than once, I'd do it all the time. Unfortunately, this would be contrary to the way commerce works on the internet today. In order to maintain security, it would probably have to be the browser, not a third-party service, that handles your CC information. A new browser commerce protocol would have to be created, and every platform vendor would have to support it. So it would probably never happen.

> I fear that since things have been free for 20+ years, people aren't going > to ever pay for written content.

Advertising really muddles everything and makes content feel "free", even though it's clearly not. Content producers should do a better job of making it clear that if users don't pay, they won't get their content.

<comment><USER4> Flattr sort of tried to do that. It never caught on, unfortunately.

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

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Fighting my way through the article, looking for some info I read this:

...uptake has been slow... ...the idea has gotten little interest from readers... ...The adoption rate is very, very low... ...a tiny percentage of the site's overall inventory... ...has not been a meaningful driver of revenue... ...the number of paying subscribers hasn't been huge...

Dudes! Instead of repeating the same foggy sentence over and over and over to make an article out of a simple number - how about giving a simple percentage of how many readers have signed up and be done with it?

<comment><USER6> Exactly! I thought I was getting senile reading that article...

</comment></comment><comment> ryan-c The last time Google contributor got brought up, I mentioned I'd be happy to participate so long as I wasn't being tracked and could still block any remaining ads. As is, it seems that running adblock would prevent contributor from paying any of the sites I visit so I don't see the point.

I actually don't even run an adblocker any more - I just use a javascript blocker set for "default deny" which seems to work just about as well as a real adblocker.

<comment><USER7> How do you propose they pay websites you visit without tracking which websites you visit?

<comment> ryan-c I should have been a bit more clear - obviously they need to know who I am, and they need to figure out billing, but they don't need to keep any long term records or use those records for anything else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> $5 a month to see 15-25% fewer adverts seems like a bad deal, when I first saw this announced I couldn't see any way of it working.

Google being financed by advertising is interesting, on one hand they pump a lot of money into security (and lead the field in a lot of areas) but on the other they take in a lot through scammy adverts. Just Google 'Chrome' on a new computer and you will be faced with a whole bunch of "Download Chrome from download.safe-webbrowsers.com" that are designed to trick less technical people into installing crapware. Same for the endless diet pill and 'one weird trick' adverts that scam people into eating the pill equivalent of crapware.

On a side note that title took me a while to process, I was wondering what flounders are and why on earth visitors should pay them.

<comment><USER9> Surely you're familiar with flounders! ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flounder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flounder)) And they're in decline these days; paying them, to help keep up their population, would make sense. :)

(If Google wanted me to pay flounders, I'd do it; but paying for ad-blocking? I'd rather just block Google APIs with NoScript.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> This seems to be a service that costs more than all other ad-blocking services and blocks vastly fewer ads than those services.

Additionally, it is run by the company that people who would be concerned about ad trackers are probably the most concerned about.

I would be shocked if it gained any traction ever.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'd be more likely to pay in exchange for no ads whatsoever than to pay money and continue to be exposed to essentially an unaccountable 3rd party (the ad network) when it comes to security issues like being served malware when that 3rd party gets hacked.

If micropayments were a thing I'd be willing to pay $1 for a day pass to view an article on an infrequently read website as opposed to paying $50/yr which is a complete waste of my money.

<comment><USER12> Micropayments are hopefully becoming a thing: [http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/11/tipsy-a-simple-chrome- exten...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/11/tipsy-a-simple-chrome-extension- bets-on-readers-who-want-to-pay-a-little-for-the-content-they-consume/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> I use Google contributor, but only because I want something like this to succeed. I don't actually like the implementation they have. The biggest thing for me? I can't see where my money is going. At the end of the month, I want a breakdown of where my money went.

I want to know that when I went and visited John Smith's blog, he earned $0.13 from that visit. Contributing feels good when you know where your money is going. It's like a charity - you want to know your money went to a cause you care about. Right now I think Patreon has a better model, but I like the smaller increments that Google Contributor offers.

<comment><USER14> They do give you a breakdown of where your money went at the bottom of their website (when logged in): [https://contributor.google.com](https://contributor.google.com)

It would be nice if they offered to e-mail this to you once a week/month or provided more detail. Even better would be for them to show some of that information in the place of the ads you've purchased.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Here is an alternative that actually makes sense for users and content producers, instead of favoring Google's ad business:

[http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/11/tipsy-a-simple-chrome- exten...](http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/11/tipsy-a-simple-chrome-extension- bets-on-readers-who-want-to-pay-a-little-for-the-content-they-consume/)

</comment><comment><USER15> Pay flounders?

Sounds fishy to me.

<comment><USER16> My brain has a kernel panic every time I try to read the title.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Did Google's marketing department not the memo? Literally nobody outside of the tech circle has the faintest clue what Google Contributor is.

</comment><comment><USER18> If AD Blocking becomes too prevalent I feel bad for the internet. There just seems to be a large contingent of people who just don't want to pay for content.

<comment><USER12> Ads don't pay that well. A small subset of people willing to pay are able to support the content. There will always be freeloaders, but it costs almost nothing to publish content.

As adblocking becomes more prevalent, the garbage-y sites will die, and the market will pay for the content that's actually good. Sounds like a good thing to me.

<comment><USER19> I don't understand how you can square the idea that the market will pay good amounts for content with the fact that ads are _ubiquitous_ , not just something found on low-quality sites. If ads weren't the best way to make a living, why wouldn't quality publications like Ars Technica just ask people to pay?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Is there any reason why someone just doesn't make an adblocker that surreptitiously clicks the ads so everyone gets paid _and_ gets to keep their sanity?

<comment><USER21> Because that's considered ad fraud. There're websites specifically doing this such as have a silent video ad playing in a hidden div and try to get paid for it. But the ad network is not stupid enough to pay for this kind of fake "impression" where users don't even see the ad. In addition, this kind of action will lower the advertising value of the website. So in the end, even for the website itself, it's more harmful to have adblocker click on ads rather than just block it.

<comment><USER22> Ok wait, fraud? That's a bit strong don't you think? The person running this hypothetical plugin doesn't have any agreements with people to do or not do anything with ads on a page. There is no obligation from someone viewing an ad to not click on it for any reason.

That said, if you wanted to cause the ad industry to implode, you could do a lot worse than creating a plugin that does precisely this and having it reach critical mass.

As a bonus, it would completely screw up the analytics attached to your tracking cookies/IP address.

<comment><USER21> Well "ad fraud" is an official name for this kind of behavior. Consider in an advertiser's perspective, I pay to get someone see my ad, and I even pay more if people click on it. Now I've paid the click price but my ad is not seen by any real person. That is fraud.

It might not be the user who use the adblocker committing the fraud, but that user is getting involved. And the website ( unfortunately might not have any control on this entire thing) is pulled into this chaos by the user and adblocker, and will get harmed.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Privacy Policy at the Outset - <AUTHOR> https://www.theoutset.net/privacy/ <comment><AUTHOR> Background: I decided to write my own privacy policy for a personal side project of mine. It ended up being an interesting exercise for me, and I thought I'd share the final text.

It's a simple, static website put together with Jekyll; nevertheless, I realized that I do come into contact with user data in the course of publishing this small side project. Writing my own privacy policy, instead of pasting in from boilerplate, forced me to think about all the user data that I might come in contact with, and explain both the technical background for laypeople and my rationale for collecting the data in the first place.

<comment><USER2> If this was for the purpose of GDPR and not just informing users I don't believe your website is GDPR compliant. Thank you for being transparent however.

<comment><AUTHOR> This is actually one of the reasons I posted this, because I'm not sure, I'm not a lawyer and while I'm hopeful I got it right, I'd love guidance if I got it wrong.

Can you elaborate? What am I missing / what would I need to do to be GDPR compliant?</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Look Away to Pause YouTube (Experimental Chrome Extension) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/Hemmingsson/Face-Pause <comment><USER2> Next iteration of this will be ads that won't be "done" and give way to the actual content until you have looked at them, blinking at a normal pace, following the ad action (faces, etc.).

And answered some questions about the and, even :)

<comment><USER3> Nice distopia but not realistic imho. Just compare the percent of sites that display ads and the one that try to permitt accessing the actual content if detecting an adblocker. I think the future of ads will be making the user actually want to see the ads/ making the user not recognize the ad as an ad.

<comment><USER2> Well, specifically for YouTube (what we were discussing above), you already can't skip some ads, while others you can only skip after some seconds of reproduction. Some ads even cut into the middle of the content, just as in TV commercials. And as it is part of the content delivery mechanism, my browser adblocker can't deal with it.

For the moment, youtube-dl works, but it is not ux friendly if you want to browse unknown or related videos instead of downloading a specific one / list.

I agree with the fear that the ocurrence of sponsored content, "educational ads", in-video placement and all those sneakier versions of ads, that you sometimes don't even notice, will grow a lot in the near future.

<comment><USER4> > you already can't skip some ads, while others you can only skip after some > seconds of reproduction

Both of which[1] got me to install an ad blocker and back that up with a pihole at home. There'll always be a way past ads, or an alternative to the site they're on. It's a big internet

[1] Actually it was more the ad volume that did it. I'm alright with ads if they're not ridiculously frequent but when they're twice as loud as the video I'm watching I'm gonna get rid of them

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Nice project, but kinda projects a "not so good" future.

This level of image detection could be expoilted heavily from companies, potentially introducing inconvenience and security issues.

</comment><comment><USER6> So you have to keep neck straight to watch the video? I like the concept but still i don't see it as something that would be useful for the user.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, unfortunately the FaceDetector API can't recognise your face if you tilt your head a bit :/ I hope this will get better with time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Wasn't this an episode of Electric Dreams? So we are going full Phillip K Dick now.</comment>


A Neuroscientist Uncovers A Dark Secret - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127888976&ft=1&f=1001

<comment><USER2> It makes sense that one who felt a certain sense of curiosity about the act of being a serial killer would work in a field that studies them. The conclusion that the researcher and his subjects share certain traits is, to me, hardly surprising.

I wonder if the researcher's brain scan is a product of his environment or an inevitable genetic conclusion.

<comment><USER3> > I wonder if the researcher's brain scan is a product of his environment or > an inevitable genetic conclusion

I also often wonder if small governments are better for society than larger governments.

While its common for people to take sides on those matters, it's likely the answer is somewhere in between the two.

<comment><USER4> No, it's likely the answer is _not_ somewhere in between the two. The fact that people arguing different sides, if they're interested in convincing others, will moderate their opinion, and that they'll also have their opinion moderated by the prevailing opinions of society, isn't even the cause of this -- but it does make it worse.

Take, for example, estimates of a physical constant. Suppose two people independently estimate a constant. The probability that they'll miss on the same side of the true value is at least 0.5. If the probability of an arbitrary person underestimating the constant is x (and the probability of getting it correct is 0, since it's a real number and there is a continuum of choices), then the probability of both missing on the same side is x^2 + (1-x)^2, which is greater than or equal to 0.5.

Now take those two people and have them talk to one another. If one of them convinces the other their measurement method is more accurate, both will end up agreeing on the same estimate, and thus both will miss in the same direction. It's very unlikely that somebody will look at another person's estimates and reasons for them, and then decide to change their estimate away from that person's. So when they communicate, it's even more likely that the truth will not be in between their estimates. This effect is much worse with politics, where people tend to avoid conflict and everybody grows up in a similar culture.

There is a famous graph somewhere with monotonically increasing estimates of a physical constant over time. Imagine that here.

Now consider politics. Suppose you've got a bunch of people with different kinds of opinions. It might be the case that, over time, the objective truth (when there is one) influences their opinions. Does this increase the probability that the truth is in the middle? It might decrease the variance of their opinions -- with evidence about the truth, they'll end up believing something closer to it. For example, I'd say that evidence about the truth has caused people to have more accurate opinions about the effect of political parties claiming to be Marxist. However, they're still equally capable of overestimating or underestimating the truth.

What conditions might cause the truth to be likely to be in the middle? One would be where the truth is something people can get an approximate idea of, except that the variance in the people's circumstances will make them likely to miss in opposite directions. I suppose this is the kind of situation people often imagine. There's two assumptions here: that the influence of their circumstance outweighs the accuracy with which people generally could have estimated the truth, and that their circumstances would pull them away in opposite directions.

Right now you could compare big government conservatives versus big goverment liberals. Is the truth in the middle there? What about slave-owners versus abolitionists who wouldn't dream of letting their daughter marry a black man? Is the truth in the middle there? And people who think only male landowners should vote versus people who think all males should vote?

Given people's tendency to have opinions almost identical to their neighbors', it's likely the correct answer, for whatever answerable question is being asked, is far outside the contemporary political spectrum. Or are we the chosen generation, right about everything?

<comment><USER5> I think the case for big vs small governments is instead "not enough information." Big vs. small isn't really as important as are how the gov't is implemented and the culture/attitudes of the governed.

As far as the brain scans go, science isn't nearly at the point to even hazard guesses at random high-level behaviors like "will murder." We've really only had success when behaviors in insects just so happen to be controlled by a single gene. Here, I doubt there even is a single "murderer" gene, especially since "murder" is such a random, infrequently displayed behavior.

<comment><USER6> Don't forget the _size_ and _homogeneity_ of the governed.

<comment><USER7> Should small people be governed different than tall people?

(Sorry, could not resist.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It is interesting that the author describes three ingredients for psychopathic behavior, and that he was missing the third: abuse during childhood. In rats, the quality of maternal care was shown to cause long-lasting effects in the brains of the offspring, particularly in areas that respond to a neurotransmitter called oxytocin:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin>

Rats that receive high levels of maternal care when pups have higher sensitivity to oxytocin in certain brain areas. This is significant because oxytocin is implicated in prosocial behaviors, such as pair bonding and maternal behavior.

Recent experiments with humans showed that the inhalation of oxytocin increases people's ability to trust and empathize with others. So, my guess is that a 'normal' oxytocin system might be able to counter the negative antisocial effects of the first two ingredients described in the article. The author might want to take a look into his own oxytocin system next.

<comment><USER9> Wonder if oxytocin is regulated enough to stop car dealers and pick up artists from wearing it as cologne. Also can you source the inhalation comment? The wikipedia article is contradictory e.g. "(for injected cows) It is a mistaken notion that oxytocin produces extra milk. Although it increases milk flow, it can also cause painful contractions in the animal's uterus"

<comment><USER8> Here are the research articles about the effects of oxytocin on human social behavior: Trust: [http://www.socialbehavior.unizh.ch/static/home/heinrichs/dow...](http://www.socialbehavior.unizh.ch/static/home/heinrichs/downloads/Oxytocin_Increases_Trust_in_Humans_Nature.pdf) Empathy/generosity: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2040517/>

Both studies use intranasal inhalers to deliver oxytocin to the subjects. I doubt that you would be able to deliver sufficient quantities by wafting it in the air. If anything, it would have a stronger effect on the stop car dealers and pick up artists themselves, so THEY would trust YOU more :)

About the wikipedia article: when I mentioned the effect of oxytocin on maternal behavior above, I didn't mean specifically on breastfeeding or lactation, but on the general care that is given by mothers to their pups (such as grooming, bringing them to their nest, etc.).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> We've seen articles before here (I _think_ it was HN) that dealt with psychopathy. But those, if I remember correctly, focused on the lack of a conscience, noting that some psychopaths are violent, and others are not, while all have little regard for their impact on others' lives.

I wonder how these two concepts connect up. I seem to remember that tests for the other version of psychopathy were entirely behavioral in nature. This guy talks about genes and brain scans, but he is interested primarily in tendencies toward violence and murder.

So, are we talking about the same thing here, or not?

<comment><USER11> Yeah, some things I've read have linked psycopathy with an inablity to feel empathy, and what makes someone a killer is also having poor impulse control.

I feel like to a certain extent that lack of empathy would help your career quite a bit (like if you were a Berkeley professor) I'd like to know if this guy exhibits any of the other behavioral traits associated with psychopaths.....

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Interesting, but as the article says, it's a young field. Far too young to draw any meaningful conclusions, but...certainly interesting.

</comment><comment><USER13> He also gave a TED talk on this very subject: <http://blog.ted.com/2009/07/psychopathic_ki.php>

</comment><comment><USER14> Reminds me of Minority Report.

<comment><USER15> It only depends on how you look at it. Someone born with any disability has the cards stacked against them, but it doesn't necessarily define their entire life. People just tend to focus on it because it's a huge 'difference' that they, themselves, don't have to deal with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I'm hoping that parts 2 & 3 will explore the other responsibilities of the orbitofrontal cortex, and flesh out the discussion a bit more. It's been a while since I took cognitive neuroscience, but I remember this area also being involved with decision making, and balancing risk and reward. He didn't become a murderer, but from the discussion so far, I'm guessing he also didn't become a drug addict, or a compulsive gambler.

</comment><comment><USER17> "You start to look at yourself and you say, 'I may be a sociopath.' I don't think I am, but this looks exactly like [the brains of] the psychopaths, the sociopaths, that I've seen before."

That is exactly what a sociopath would say to an NPR reporter.

</comment><comment><USER15> I found the conclusion of the article to be a bit much. The entire article reads as a science/human interest piece on this guy, and then the conclusion is, "Should we feel empathy towards murderers and rapists due to neuroscience?"

<comment><USER18> I don't think he means empathy as in "well, guess we can't fault them for their behaviour, so let's let them go" but rather that they got a bad roll of the dice, and that sucks, (but we have to lock them up or control them anyhow...)

A different but illustrative analogy is a dog who's been abused, or chained in a small yard, and that dog attacks a small child. I will have _empathy_ towards that dog, and I'll still want it destroyed.

Empathy and societal self-preservation can both exist simultaneously.

<comment><USER15> When I read it, it came across to me as scare-mongering that we'll be "letting all of these murderers and rapists loose" because the court won't hold them accountable due to neuroscience, which seemed to come out of no where at the end of the article. That's why I found it to be so out of place.

<comment><USER19> Maybe it was editorialized into the article? It doesn't seem to be a quote from Fallon himself, but more an outlook by the article's author (Barbara Bradley Hagerty). A Google search of her finds some very negative detractors:

[http://atheism.about.com/b/2004/05/21/outing-barbara- bradley...](http://atheism.about.com/b/2004/05/21/outing-barbara-bradley- hagerty.htm)

Though it's mostly ad-hominem, it does quote a verifiable lapse of journalistic ethic: "a report on the Christian Science Church, in which she did not disclose that she was herself a former member of the Church"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> My biggest concern is that he's focusing on one part of the brain, there are several other parts of the brain, such as the right parietal-temporal area that result in sociopathy and impulse control problems.

</comment><comment><USER21> some genetic frontal lobes deficit or just Asperger's syndrome + childhood abuse + violent environment = psychopath. That's why no one count psychos in Russia. ^_^

</comment><comment><USER22> Don't liberals hold contradictory views with respect to this issue?

On the one hand, they believe in civil liberties. On the other hand, they also believe in science.

These two things tend to clash and will do so more frequently in the future as scientists learn more about the brain.

<comment><USER23> With respect to _what_ issue? We already have laws for dealing with mentally ill criminals.

<comment><USER22> What if science gets very good at predicting who will commit crimes?

Would you still value civil liberties then?

<comment><USER23> Absolutely. I value living with relative freedom in a surprising world more than I value safety or justice.

I feel compelled to point out that few humans would consider it ethical to punish someone for something they haven't done. I'm sure you don't consider it ethical, either, so I don't see what the point of this line of reasoning is.

In addition, this has nothing to do with the article, which makes no claim to prophecies or predictions.

<comment><USER22> Why is it ethical to punish someone after they have committed a crime if they had little say in the matter?

In both cases, some method should be used to ensure that a crime does not happen (e.g., using mandatory medication, isolation, etc.).

<comment><USER24> There is a critical distinction to be made between mental defects that compromise one's ability to think rationally vs defects that simply overpower one's motivation to act in a rational way.

If you can think straight and accurately perceive your environment, you are responsible for your actions. As a rational being, your plight is to see beyond all those powerful monkey emotions and do what you know is right. Welcome to humanity.

If you really are out of your mind and your brain is just playing tricks on you, you're off the hook morally, though if it can't be fixed then ultimately you can't play in the human sandbox, sorry.

Since none of us are even close to perfect rational-observation machines, we have to cut ourselves some slack. How much slack is an incredibly difficult decision, but that's the decision at the core of our practical ethics.

Without making some distinction between motives and choices, our ethics are pretty meaningless.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Jaron Lanier: "Long Live Closed-Source Software!" - <AUTHOR> http://discovermagazine.com/2007/dec/long-live-closed-source-software/

<comment><USER2> If you look at the software that people actually use to do things -- compose music, design an airplane, edit a video, design a logo, lay out a brochure, etc., virtually anything besides computer programming -- the best-of-breed tools are proprietary and exist only on proprietary platforms (typically Windows or Mac).

This is because to just about everybody except computer programmers, the interface is the application, and considerable time and money have been invested in things which are more important than beautiful code -- things like usability, "looking pretty", and functioning in a way that mirrors how the intended audience things. This is something that programmers are notoriously poor at; for example programmers-who-are-also-musicians are likely to come up with music tools that make sense to them but utterly baffle nonprogrammer musicians. (Think Csound, Rosegarden, etc.)

Things like AutoCAD are innovative not because they contain fancy new algorithms but because they enable large chunks of the population to do things that they couldn't do before. And AutoCAD is proprietary, expensive, and runs only on Microsoft Windows.

In short, it's looking more and more like proprietary software is what has brought us real freedom.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is this a joke? PageRank (academic paper, right?)... Flash (what kind of ace in the hole for closed source is that??)... And closed development is not necessarily closed source! And the iPhone running Linux would not make it a worse (or necessarily better) product. They would have to release their modified kernel code but that is it. How would this effect the final product? This has to be a joke article, or this guy is truly ignorant. Yet, he claims to support open source at times...

<comment><USER4> I find it highly amusing he's comparing highly exspensive hardware [iphone] to software that many people make in their spare time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> _An honest empiricist must conclude that while the open approach has been able to create lovely, polished copies, it hasn't been so good at creating notable originals._

Hmm. <http://www.well.com/~jaron> seems to be running Apache, which I think has always been notable open source software.

As for being "original", its only predecessors are NCSA's httpd and Tim Berners-Lee's original httpd.

Apache is much more "original" than the iPhone, which seems to me a "polished copy".

</comment><comment><USER6> From what I can tell, this guy is a stoner who never actually does anything.

His webpage is ugly as shit (he has no taste, which you have to have if you're a do-nothing spectating whiner), too.

His arguments are bullshit. Nearly all implementations of advanced programming languages are open source and Google's core Internet-scale infrastructure is built on customized open source software.

<comment><USER7> "Google's core Internet-scale infrastructure is built on customized open source software."

Yes, but Google infrastructure isn't considered as innovative as Pagerank, which is proprietary.

I personally disagree that ranking pages by the amount of sites that link to them is properly patentable in terms of being non-obvious to an engineer skilled in the area, but that's off topic.

PS. Your whole post should be: "Nearly all implementations of advanced programming languages are open source and Google's core Internet-scale infrastructure is built on customized open source software." Everything else is playing the man.

<comment><USER6> PageRank is indeed proprietary, but it's proprietary more like a trade secret rather than proprietary like proprietary software that gets put on your computer and you have no idea whether, e.g., it's calling home and violating your privacy.

The guy is pretty annoying and I can't resist taking cheap shots at him, sorry.

<comment><USER8> "The guy is pretty annoying and I can't resist taking cheap shots at him, sorry."

Especially when he introduces terms like "encapsulation" and "testing" that don't seem to be connected to anything other than his bad analogy. I can't figure out what he's on about and I'm not especially motivated to, since I'm pretty sure he's looking for a pattern where none exists.

It looks to me as if inspiration and invention have happened throughout history independently of the circumstances of being employed by a company seeking to make patented and copyrighted products out of them, or being a hobbyist committed to sharing software.

PageRank is a ridiculous example. Isn't it proprietary specifically to try to gain an advantage over Google spammers? And why would a hobbyist start a PageRank-like project in the first place? I'm not convinced Google's decision to keep it secret is optimal, given the success of free and open email spam filters, but they have enough smart people working there to come up with a reasonable solution to the problem anyway.

Speaking of spam filters, I'd say those represent a far better example of innovation than anything Lanier could think of, and virtually all of that innovation has happened in free software.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The author doesn't really seem to get what Linux does:

 _My guess is that a poorly encapsulated, communal gloop of organisms lost out to closely guarded species for the same reason that the Linux community didn't come up with the iPhone: Encapsulation serves a purpose._

Since when did Linus and friends come up with hardware? Does he mean the "community of people who rely on Linux as the core of their product offering?" -- would he then include Apple in the BSD community?

By his own criterion, Apple would be the perfect shop for OS innovation -- but I guess they just weren't feeling innovative that day and switched to FreeBSD instead. By doing so, they got the benefit of _evolution_ \-- not as snazzy as innovation, but something open source has excelled at for its long life.

<comment><USER5> Good point about Apple and OS innovation.

Wasn't Apple the company that had nearly a decade of abandoned "next generation" operating systems (Pink, StarTrek, Raptor, NuKernel, TalOS, Copland, Gershwin) before finally buying NeXT (based on open-source Mach from CMU) and later establishing a cooperative coexistence with FreeBSD.

<comment><USER9> Innovation is often understood to mean one of two different things -- pushing boundaries and changing the world, and filling a niche that no one else is filling. They are different things. I'm sad to say it, but I think the first kind is often rooted in dreamy hubris, and thus fails; while the second one -- which is all about a willingness to serve -- does not appeal to the pride of entrepreneurs and will always be in demand in consequence.

The pace of innovation in computing will never again match that of the sixties or seventies -- lots of stuff has been built, has proven its value and been recorded in the Book of Wisdom. Whenever you think, "I know, let's build a such-and-such...", nowadays, you can be pretty sure it's been done at least half a dozen times. We really should emphasize looking back, to learn from history -- now that there is some.

As far as I can tell, the only computing field that does a good job of that is system administration -- experience, mentors and an appreciation for the "old ways" make up an integral part of that discipline.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The vast bulk of software is proprietary.

Some software is very generic and has a 1:100,000,000 ratio between itself and potential deployments. The same linux distro can work for billions of people. This kind of wild efficiency allows free software to be viable in a bottom- line sort of way--selling books, consultations, support, etc.

Most software has a ratio like 1:1 (custom software) or 1:10000 (industry- specific stuff). Open source is just completely impossible here. People need to make money, like it or not.

<comment><USER9> Most software is not innovative, though -- and innovative software has rarely been incentivized correctly. (How much is Xerox making for inventing the Macintosh?)

The author is one of many criticizing Open Source for failing to kick UNIX out of the white room, the sort of thing that, in its scope, would definitely be one to millions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yeah, I've been wondering about Richard Stallman lately too. His searing experience was seeing the LISP world going commercial and closed... why did he choose to copy Unix instead? Was it just to piggyback on Unix's incumbency? That wasn't so strong at the time anyway. I should re-read Steven Levy's book "Hackers", the answer is probably in there.

<comment><USER12> I thought the thing that pushed Stallman into open source nirvana was that he couldn't get code to printer drivers to make the printers work in his lab.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's as if the entire article is one long troll.

</comment><comment><USER14> What does this guy do other than write articles where he name-drops?

<comment><USER12> He used to be a big deal when Virtual Reality was a big deal. Nowadays, I guess he writes articles where he name-drops. Having said that, I enjoyed reading his article.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Another way to think about whether closed-source sometimes has a place:

What if, by law, all software had to be open-source? Do you expect there would be more, or less, innovation? More, or less, diversity of implementation?

(I love open source but think the prospect of outsized returns from secret/proprietary codebases attracts _some_ innovation and diversity we wouldn't otherwise have, especially in places where software creates a core competitive advantage -- investing, Google-scale cluster operations, domain- specific expert systems, etc.)

<comment><USER9> Well, what if, by law, you had to ship the source when you ship the software? That's as much as any Open Source license demands.

Software As A Service remains completely protected -- would it be so bad if people who wanted to cash in had to offer services instead of products?</comment></comment>