Better and worse ways to spot a liar - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150906-the-best-and-worst-ways-to-spot-a-liar?ocid=fbfut <comment><USER2> _Clearly, such tricks may already be used by some expert detectives – but given the folklore surrounding body language, it's worth emphasising just how powerful persuasion can be compared to the dubious science of body language._

It strikes me to the degree that the folklore is mixed with the (so called dubious) science. I was always interested in the topic, and had indeed read a book when I was teenager, with ideas such as the iconic example of Clinton touching his nose.

About 5 years ago I went to the topic again; learned that one of the biggest authority in the topic was Paul Ekman and read a couple of his books

Surprise surprise, the main takeaways were ideas such as:

 _(...) not to jump to early conclusions: just because someone looks nervous, or struggles to remember a crucial detail, does not mean they are guilty. Instead, you should be looking for more general inconsistencies._

Or

 _There is no fool-proof form of lie detection, but using a little tact, intelligence, and persuasion, you can hope that eventually, the truth will out._

Ekman repeated all over the place that there is no body language for lies, only for emotions, and that the emotions can have a variety of causes. And that was already clear the last century! If some security entity has bought something that promised to spot lies, it was probably folklore-based and no science-based.

</comment><comment><USER3> "Thomas Ormerod's team of security officers faced a seemingly impossible task. At airports across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their history and travel plans"

It is so sad that nowdays it is not seen as absurdal that some kind of policeman is asking passangers about their travel plans. The journalist get excited that new methods of catching "cheating passangers" are beind developed.

Apparently in the brave new World we have created this is considered normal.

<comment><USER4> Have border guards not always asked those questions? I'm pretty sure it's been like that since before the 20th century.

<comment><USER5> Border guards and passports as we conceive them didn't really exist until the 20th century. The historian Paul Fussell wrote in his book _Abroad_ :

"[B]efore 1915 His Majesty's Government did not require a passport for departure, nor did any European state require one for admittance except the two notoriously backward and neurotic countries of Russia and the Ottoman Empire."

And it wasn't until 1945 that Americans were generally required to hold a passport to travel abroad during peacetime. [1]

[1]: [http://www.archives.gov/research/passport/index.html](http://www.archives.gov/research/passport/index.html)

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I was vaguely aware that it was around the turn of the century that these things came in.

An american in 1940 may not have needed a passport to leave, but would they have needed one to get in somewhere else? Surely the nations of europe at that time would have been suspicious of basically everyone?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This seems to me like the technique that is already employed by Israeli airport security agents. They have a normally-flowing inquisitive conversation with every passenger boarding flights to or from the country, and they are very good at detecting when the details don't add up or when the person is acting too uncomfortable.

<comment><USER7> I do wonder, and this is a serious question. Why would someone trying to be deceitful because they have something very serious to hide even take the chance on speaking with a security agent? I'm not suggesting they "plead the fifth," but rather carry a card explaining that they are mute. Doctors papers are easy to forge.

If the incident leading to the condition happened recently, then that would be an excuse for not knowing sign language. Yes, they may still need to write their answers, but it is universally accepted that most people don't like to write so they could keep their answers brief without raising suspicion. By writing slowly, they may even drive the interviewer to the point they cut the questioning short. Very serious bad guys could even get a botox injection beforehand, paralyzing their lips or get their mouth wired shut.

My point is that at the end of the day, the goal here is to catch very serious bad guys. Any truly dangerous person with the intent and actual capability to do something very bad should have tools of deceit on par with their capabilities for harm up to and including getting one's mouth wired shut. Note that for this discussion I'm discounting "shoe bomber" types as not really having a capability for harm. I suppose that at the end of the day, that's who techniques like these are aimed at in the first place. Alas, there is no such thing as perfect security.

<comment><USER8> I think questions at a border don't really fall under the fifth, as you're submitting to them voluntarily because you want to get in the country. You can refuse to answer any question, of course, but then the border agents can refuse to let you into the country.

I'm not sure if the goal is solely to stop "truly bad guys" who want to bring down a plane from getting on it, but rather make a note of anyone who might be traveling under false pretenses for any number of reasons.

<comment><USER7> >I'm not sure if the goal is solely to stop "truly bad guys" who want to bring down a plane from getting on it, but rather make a note of anyone who might be traveling under false pretenses for any number of reasons.

This is what I'm afraid of. Is travel on a plane now squarely reserved for the honest or those with nothing to hide? There are plenty of very legitimate reasons to travel under false pretenses, including it would seem, hiding from one's own government because of some irrational administrator who decides to use air travel restrictions to carry out a grudge. The restriction on travel, especially within the US as applied to US citizens is very disturbing as it represents a fundamental erosion of our freedoms. Take a look at this case as just one example:

[https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/united-airlines- stops-...](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/04/united-airlines-stops- researcher-who-tweeted-about-airplane-network-security)

<comment><USER9> > Is travel on a plane now squarely reserved for the honest or those with > nothing to hide?

Not at all. They'll still _let you on the plane_ after grilling you. They just want to know that you're hiding something. For future reference.

<comment><USER8> It's hard to tell sarcasm over this medium, but are you suggesting that being asking someone questions about their travel plans and retaining notes derived from to the answers is not an appropriate power to give the TSA? Is there any country in the world where airport security doesn't have this power, and is it practically feasible?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not sure if trying to "trap" the liar is always the right way to go. Once I had to work with a freelance web master and we were trying to cancel his contract and make him transfer the domain name to us (an association I was working for). I confronted him by asking politely for a written copy of his contract because I thought he was lying about the length of the contract. He was insulted and claimed there was a verbal agreement several years ago. I don't know if he was right or wrong about that, but after that he would make up things about basically anything (such as, that changing the owner/registrar of our domain would cause his other customers' files to be deleted etc.). We now offered him money to break out of the "contract" early, but now he was already stuck in his lies. If he would say that it was technically possible to move the domain name, he would also expose his earlier lies.

After almost a year of arguing with him, he offered to transfer the domain before the end of the "contract". But for "technical reasons" it had to be done after the hosting company had shut down the web site and e-mail, which caused some downtime for us. In retrospect it would have been much easier if I hadn't questioned him in the first time.

<comment><USER11> Are you sure he was a liar and not just an idiot? I had a boss who had some similar really deep-seated beliefs about the technical aspects of domain registration and hosting that he would stubbornly refuse to be corrected on. Oddly enough he's now running his own web development business...

Edit: Don't get me wrong, he was a pathological liar as well ;)

<comment><USER10> Perhaps, and I had this in mind when I talked to him. But it was also non- technical stuff. For instance, one time he said he was on vacation for a month, but then I talked to his friend the day after who insisted that he was not on vacation. And he claimed that a support person of the hosting company had said that the domain couldn't be transferred without deleting all his customers' files. When I asked the support directly, they said it was no problem at all. But I don't think he was doing this for the money (it wasn't much), I think it was more like saving his face, like IshKebab suggested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> > According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a > correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy. Most people might as well > just flip a coin.

Oh the irony surrounding statistics and how often it is used to lie - case in point: the mode is completely absent and some useless factoid is presented instead.

That's not to say that argument is false ("you can't use body language"); merely that because of the useless information we don't know if it's true either.

<comment> B-Con Without knowing the experiment details (number of trials, ratio of people laying vs telling the truth) we don't know if 50 is actually significant. What's the curve of success for participants assuming random guessing (in line with the proportion of liars)? Is 50 to be expected?

My first thought is that with 20,000 participants, sheer chance will give you a handful of outliers, and 50 at 80% accuracy doesn't sound very high unless there were a very large number of trials per participant.

<comment><USER13> By my math, if each participant faced 25 trials, and each participant has a 50% chance of success on each trial, then you'd expect 40 people to get a score of 20+ (80%) just due to chance. To give an idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> There are ways to work around this. The key is to not lie, but to tell a _different_ truth. I used to do this in high school, when my parents were grilling me.

Friday night: go out with quiet friends. Saturday AM questioning: "How was your evening?" "Fine". "OK".

Saturday night, go out with less quiet friends. :) The Sunday AM questioning was rather more rigorous.

So I described what I did Friday. There were telling hesitations, of course. But 90% of the questions had immediate and honest answers. Just with the day changed.

<comment><USER15> Wait until you are a parent and see if you are so easily fooled. Then ask your parents how much they really knew.

<comment><USER14> What makes you think I'm not already a parent?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> You will find the techniques described in the article used when you are traveling into Israel. I've gone through this many many times, and am still often taken aback by the weird questions I sometimes get asked by their officers. Still, the whole process is rather smooth and I've never been detained or even treated unfairly.

<comment><USER17> The way I see it there are at least two possible ways to "fight" against this, that is if you're on the liar's side.

The first one is to offer to whoever is questioning you a "local maximum" victory, i.e. to pretend to hide a smaller lie compared to the bigger one you're supposed to be hiding. In the case you mentioned, you could pretend to be "covering up" the fact that you've been cheating on your SO, hence all the non-concordances related to your past locations. When the guys questioning you finally realize that you're lying on something, they'd think you had been doing so out of fear of not being seen as an unfaithful spouse, when in reality you want to blow things up (just to give an example). The downside to this strategy is that this fails when the "admission criteria" is 0 and 1, you're either a liar, which means you're out, or not, which means you're in. The one mitigating factor is that almost everybody lies all the time.

The second strategy is to be so good at this as to believe in your lies/stories you're telling. This is a little sociopath bordering on schizophrenic, but I've seen some people doing it almost to perfection (granted, the stakes were not very high). The one weak point of this is that you have to know exactly when and how to push the on/off switch.

<comment><USER14> > The second strategy is to be so good at this as to believe in your > lies/stories you're telling.

That is harder than it sounds. Even sociopaths have a hard time outright lying. Or keeping lies straight.

The technique being used here is one of _consistency_. Is your story consistent? Does it have all of the details one expects from a normal story? Are there any hesitations when recalling the story?

It is _very_ difficult to come up with consistent and detailed lies on a moments notice. The better approach (used by lying CEOs on news shows) is to have a _different_ story that you tell in detail.

<comment><USER18> If you have time to prepare your lies then it just requires a sort of reframing.

Do all your imagining ahead of time. Walk through and construct the lie. Fill in the details. You're not just imagining this one thing, you're imagining an entire alternate reality where this thing is true and all the implications that follow from that.

When it comes time to answer questions the person is asking about the alternate reality you've imagined. No need to make things up - just recall back.

I guess I'm saying the same thing as you, just in a different way - don't make something up on a moments notice, just have a different story that you tell.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The paper itself: [http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000030.pdf](http://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/xge-0000030.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER20> I read "What every body is saying" by Joe Navarro, an ex. FBI agent a few years back, and one of things it spent a lot of time on was tearing apart the notion that we can recognise liars by body language without knowing them well first. People do have "tells", but as the article says, they vary wildly from person to person.

They're still interesting to look out for, though, as they're helpful hints to let you direct your conversation to probe at areas that makes someone nervous and/or to figure out what someones different tells means.

<comment><USER21> I think poker is another area where people think that the ability to identify "tells" or read people's body language is what matters most, but are mistaken. When really you are rarely going to have played enough with a person to identify a tell, know what an identified tell implies (lie or truth) exactly, or experience an identified tell and its truth value in a spot where it would have changed the outcome.

<comment><USER22> I believe you are quite wrong. Tells are real and they work, although they do differ from person to person, and expert opponents might deliberately give deceitful tells. Source: used to play a lot of live poker.

<comment><USER21> I played professionally for a number of years. A lot of Internet and live. I also have a large number of friends from the scene as well.

That's fine if you believe that, but it is possible to be a winning live player and not use tells. Tells being used are more anecdotes than typical situations that come up.

At live poker, the number of hands ranges from 15 to 30 per hour. Most hands don't go to showdown, so you simply never get the information you need. Unless you are playing higher stakes with a smaller player pool, or a small home game, you may not have the same opponent at your table for a long time even if they're a regular.

Giving off tells assumes that opponents are perceptive enough to notice, or naive enough to fall for overly obviously tells. This is asking too much for a lot of weaker opponents. And most people won't be involved in the hand and paying attention.

The most useful "tells" may not even qualify as such. They're usually weak or bad players trying their hand at bad acting in a way that tends to be obvious after you've played enough.

You also run into the problem that even amateurs can familiarize themselves with tells and try giving off "reverse tells" which reduces it to a game of "leveling".

Most of the time the best decision is irrelevant of whatever behavior an opponent is perceived to be exhibiting. If I'm following through on a bluff against an opponent on a flush draw (comes 35% of the time if they see the turn and river), and their draw comes in and they sigh "guess I'm beat" and shove into me on the river, I can't call with ten-high.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Spotting petty liars is the least of one's problem. As normal people expose more information in the Internet, it becomes increasingly difficult to be a liar, almost impossible.

Still, the 'big lies' are just getting stronger and these techniques are useless on them. How many political identities can be dismantled by 'surprise'?

</comment><comment><USER24> But they tested it with fake liars, who, in my humble opinion, are less likely to exhibit emotions, and more likely to be too lazy to come up with good details on the fly for back stories.

Maybe it is just me that is sweatier and wilier when stressed.

</comment><comment><USER25> "Lying is a skill like any other, and if you want to maintain a level of excellence, you have to practise constantly." Words every founder should live by.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1jhCrqVtg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS1jhCrqVtg)

</comment><comment><USER26> From what I understand you typically need a 'base-line' of normality to know when someone has deviated from that. People can get nervous or make mistakes at any point. The best way to set the base-line is to have a general conversation to put them at ease and then ask the more consequential questions. This could lead to longer queues though which would be an unfortunate side effect.

TL;DR

Use the deviation from the base-line to work out if someone is lying.

<comment><USER27> Incidentally, this is how I interview people. Random BS for 5-10 minutes followed by interview questions. It also works for one on ones with staff to tell a recent funny anecdote about some subject they're interested in to get them to breathe and open up a little.

<comment><USER26> I do the same when interviewing. I came across this technique when looking at a Body Language course hosted by Vanessa Van Edwards. Most of it was superfluous but I thought the parts around 'reading' the truth from non verbal clues was very interesting.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> Seems to bear a lot of similarity to standard deposition/examination technique. Because a lot of important things are decided on a paper record the standard techniques involve asking open ended questions and drilling down to details, often going back to cover the same ground again, hoping to elicit testimony that's implausible or contradictory.

</comment><comment><USER29> So, what's the rate of false positives, given that only 1 in 1000 is a true positive?

<comment><USER19> From the source: "CCE agents identified 24 times more mock passengers (66%; 60% at Month 1 and 72% at Month 6) than suspicious signs agents (3%; 6% at Month 1 and 0% at Month 6)" ... "base rates of identification of genuine travelers identified as being deceptive in the 6 months before the trial (1 in 1,247 passengers) did not differ during the trial with suspicious signs (1 in 1,219 passengers), or CCE (1 in 1,295 passengers)"

So my reading is 2/3 mock passengers identified as true positives, 1/1000 real passengers identified as false positives.

(With some provisos as noted in the paper)

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Lie detection via facial cues / body language strikes me as the sort of thing best done with a neural network: thousands of tiny noisy cues each with very weak correlations that need to be combined with solid statistics. Humans can't process this many cues at once and bias drowns out the signal, but a smart NN hooked up to a powerful camera is another story.

The 'active' method in the article is useful, but has a limitation: you need to be able to ask questions in real-time.

Collating the answers and automating truth evaluation would be a pretty interesting AI problem. It should also be possible to have an AI formulate the statistically optimum questions to ask, Akinator style.

P.s. That would be the killer app for Google Glass, right there. Would also increase chance of being thrown out of pubs by 1000%, but hey.

</comment><comment><USER31> Any pointers on how to flip this around and purposely use body language to consciously reinforce what I'm trying to say rather than accidentally undermine it?

</comment><comment><USER32> The whole procedure seems to hinge on catching some people assigned to engage in a naive effort at deception - people who have constructed a story from whole cloth. It seems likely that anyone attempted a sophisticated act of deception wouldn't invent a story but rather take their true experiences and rearrange them to fill holes where things they wouldn't describe are, giving them an unlimited number of true details to recite. Spending some time on learning the rearrangement would give someone a stronger grasp of their supposed itinerary than the average person has of their actual itinerary.

Which is to say this probably catches confused people and people hiding harmless but embarrassing facts but probably isn't useful against "determined evil doers".

</comment><comment><USER33> Cops have been doing something like this for a long time. Most times I have gotten pulled over for simple speeding there is always a question about where I'm going, where I'm coming from and sometimes a few more "casual" questions as well. And I'm not even suspicious looking.

I also wondered why where I was coming from had any relevance to the speed I was currently driving but always sort of figured it was some kind of fishing technique.

</comment><comment><USER34> Reading this article reminds me of how the STAR interviewing technique manages to drag truthful answers out of candidates about what you really want to know about them:

[http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-carniol/inside-the- star-i...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-carniol/inside-the-star- interview_b_3310122.html)

</comment><comment><USER35> TL:DR - mostly listen and give them enough rope to hang themselves.

</comment><comment><USER31> In the 3-season TV show _Lie to Me_ (IMDB: 8.0), the protagonist relies on "micro-expressions" to catch criminals.

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

<comment><USER36> Great show. But the article does mention micro-expressions:

> Even if we think we have a poker face, we might still give away tiny > flickers of movement known as "micro-expressions" that might give the game > away.

but then goes on to say: > ... this too seems to have been disproved.

<comment><USER20> Basically all kinds of things can indicate stress factors. Stress _can_ indicate lying, but it can also indicate a whole host of other things such as someone getting frustrated about the entire situation, or worried that you seem to think they might be lying...

You can spot liars based on body language, but then you first need to _know_ how that specific person reacts in normal situations vs. when they're lying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> > Study after study has found that attempts – even by trained police officers > – to read lies from body language and facial expressions are more often > little better than chance.

Yet juries in rape trials supposedly do it all the time...or don't they?

<comment><USER38> Why single out rape trials specifically?

<comment><USER39> Rape is interesting in this regard because it is an especially severe crime that might be very hard to proof. Murder has a body and a weapon, but rape might be indistinguishable from consensual sex, when you just look at hard physical evidence (medical examination, text messages, ...). If you want to give justice to most rape victims, you have to decide who is lying, and who is saying the truth.

<comment><USER40> Most white collar crimes also fall in that category. Was it pure negligence or was it engineered ?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> I would guess that the success of these methods is also dependent on the stakes. Asking how honest someone is might get them to confess a small misdeed, but not a nafarious plot.

The general technique is probably effective though.

</comment><comment><USER42> These sort of things really bother me, because they cause me a lot of trouble.

I am really uncomfortable in front of people, and no matter how honest I am, I am show my discomfort in interacting with people quite a lot. I look around the room while talking to people, I shuffle around, sometimes I sweat just talking about the weather... I have social anxiety obviously, but it's awkward to start a conversation with anyone by saying, "Oh hey, this interaction is going to be really awkward because I have social anxiety." I tried it for a while and most people seemed to just blow it off.

It's caused me quite a few issues with friends who frequently think I'm lying when asked 'truth-seeking questions. More importantly authority figures tend to misinterpret this as me being deceptive or uncooperative.

\---

The most recent example was a police officer that came to my house to see if I had seen my neighbor's car recently. The car had been stolen and they were trying to determine the last known time it was present. As usual, during the rather normal questions I was rocking back and forth, chewing on my nails and shuffling my feet. I'm painfully aware of these things and consciously try to stop each little tick, one by one.

It didn't take long for the officer to ask why I was so nervous, and the he promptly switched the subject and asked if I had any hobbies. I'm fairly obsessive about my hobbies, and I pretty much immediately started rambling about what I was doing. I suspect I stopped most of my 'nervous ticks', because he interrupted my ramble to ask why I was lying about not having seen the car lately.

It was extremely offputting, since I wasn't lying. I got really nervous again, and started thinking about how I 'screwed up' the interaction. Instead of responding to his question I simply told him that I had really bad social anxiety and this questioning was really difficult for me. That didn't help at all.

I ended up with another officer at my door, with more questions that I had no answers to, and I became more and more nervous. Needless to say this went on for ~30 minutes just standing at my front door until I suppose they realized that I was either telling the truth, or was a completely unreliable witness (I was!).

\---

Things like that aren't rare for me. It sucks, and early in my life it caused me to simply lie a lot. People almost always thought I was 'up to something' or 'not telling the true', so I would just go with it. I eventually learned the value of consistent honesty, but I am treated the same regardless.

It goes without saying that this being in my head during every single personal encounter causes me even more anxiety and unsuredness about my responses to someone.

edit: I noticed I actually started rocking back and forth and itching my head randomly while writing this post... bleh.

<comment><USER43> Yeah, I used to struggle with social anxiety a fair bit, so this is familiar to me. It's true that many liars are anxious, because they're afraid of getting caught. But I became afraid of getting falsely accused, which tended to make me anxious at exactly the same times liars would be. Which in turn would trigger a wave of anxiety about the pattern, making me excruciatingly aware of the whole mess, making me yet more awkward.

I'm sorry to hear how much trouble it causes you. It's a miserable experience.

<comment><USER42> Yeah, I have this feedback loop as well. When put in a position of thinking that someone is evaluating whether I'm telling the truth or not, I become fearful that they will falsely think I'm lying... then the loop begins.

I think that the irony is that if I wanted to lie, I could probably get away with it since I give off such mixed signals when saying _anything_. True or false, I just fall apart.

<comment><USER43> Totally familiar, and totally awful. I don't miss it.

If you want to correspond further about this, feel free to drop me an email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> I grew up very deaf. I went to mainstream schools, I did everything everyone else would do... except hear much at all. I wore hearing aids which helped somewhat, but that just makes all that jumbled noise louder, which isn't that helpful.

I was deaf since birth. So at a very early age I picked up body-language, micro-expressions and of course lip-reading which were rather an integral way for me to communicate!

> "The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour – there is no universal > dictionary of body language"

Um. Yes there is. Everyone uses body-language. Everyone uses their mouth, their eyes and their hands. Take in sign language. While it's not the same in every country, someone fluent in any sign language can understand BSL (Brazil Sign Language) or NZSL (New Zealand...), ASL etc. Why? Because sign language is the most literal thing you can think of. If I look at someone and point to them, then point to someone else, what do you suppose that means? The only issue is local dialect/slang which is easy enough to figure out.

I'd like this BBC article to try this on deaf people and see what the results would be. It would be extremely different. Even for people who just wear hearing aids: a frown, does not mean anger... it means they're trying to understand you. If that person misheard a previous question, but then didn't mishear it the second time then... are they lying? No.

For myself in particular, when I was trying to have conversation with people I had a few difficulties. For this, think of dyslexia, say the brains language processor. For some people with dyslexia an example sentence could look like: "I ___ to ___ shop ___ the ______ ____ ___ car". It's exactly the same for someone who is deaf. However, they need to be working that language processor in their head 300% capacity. Not only are you lip-reading, using sound from your hearing aids, you're factoring in context, location, the person talking to you, body-language and so on. So a deaf person, will then fill in those blanks in my above example and hope they got it right. Except, by that stage, more has been said and you're now trying to remember what was said just a few minutes ago. Then you're defeated.

However, if you watched my body language in ann airport you'd probably shoot me or whatever customs does. I'd be the ideal 'liar' that this BBC article refers to.

Since I got my cochlear implant, (I jumped from 4% hearing to something like 80% upwards) my world has grown incredibly. Not only do I have my previous skills, but I can now add verbal input into my once stressed language processor. It's incredible what I can pick up on. Now that I have that extra sense/input, I find that I can tell whether someone is not being truthful or honest. Another poster here said that "give them enough rope to hang themselves with" and that's very true. Someone rambling? Watch their hands. Someone straight to the point, confident, and uses no body language -- very confident of themselves. So simply throw them off. Does their attitude change? If it does, what does that mean? Context comes into play here, and customs simply don't have the time. Nor will Police.

Someone trying to explain the minute details of their drive to work, watch their eyes and see where they go (looks you in the eye, wall, phone?). Then stop. Who exactly remembers details that they've got no reason to remember? So they'll tell the short version, 'cos they have done it 1,000 times. Then if you're probed such as this article says... you'll end up getting anxious, and contradict yourself. "oh, maybe I did take Stuart Street...".

I am a firm believer that body language is really a good way to determine language nuances, even in different languages. It works. I've been friends with people who didn't know English, but I could communicate with them effectively enough. Giving someone a few weeks of body language training, is going to do squat. Getting experts, again I'm not sure -- have they ever had to _rely_ on it? Perhaps they should wear headphones with whitenoise and interrogate people, with someone who is listening -- and compare notes.

I kind of feel like writing a blog post to refute this article, with proper examples etc. Would anyone be interested?

I apologise if I sound disjointed it's 3am in NZ right now, and I just had the need to go "no this is not quite right".

P.S. When I went to Singapore, a customs person glared at me and nodded to the guy with the gun and so I smiled and I said, "Hi! I hope you haven't had a horrible night so far -- hopefully my documentation is in order and you'll not have to deal with boring stuff!" and she went from >:{ to :-) and nodded to the gun guy walking behind me, who turned around back to his spot. I got all that from a split second glance. It's actually even easier for me now with my implant to do this sort of thing in case actual spoken communication is required.

EDIT: As per article, it is common sense -- but you need to know someone well enough to take judgement, which these guys have no time for. Speaking for myself, I learned over a long period of time to do that as quick as possible. Otherwise, I'd have been left to fail.

<comment><USER45> > Because sign language is the most literal thing you can think of. If I look > at someone and point to them, then point to someone else, what do you > suppose that means? The only issue is local dialect/slang which is easy > enough to figure out.

I asked someone who was studying ASL about the differences between sign languages. She pointed out that they _do_ commonly have different signs which might be very abstract and non-literal, often because they arose in different schools for deaf people (or different regions with a very high incidence of deafness) in earlier eras.

However, some of the sign languages have some etymological relationship with one another, especially French Sign Language (LSF)

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language#Classification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_language#Classification)

Those relationships might be something that reinforces the impression that all sign languages are inherently related, but there are also sign language isolates that don't have an etymological relationship to other sign languages (although if they've had later contact with other sign languages, they could have loan vocabulary or other contact influences).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sign_language_isolate...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Sign_language_isolates)

Edit: I don't mean to suggest that people who know different sign languages couldn't communicate at all, but I expect that someone who knows one wouldn't be able to understand a signed conversation between native signers of an unrelated one.

<comment><USER44> Join a Facebook group called "Deaf World Love Sign Language V.I.P" (signers from all over the world. can't even comment in the same language)

If you know sign language, you can pretty much understand what they're saying. The first time I noticed I understood someone in Brazil, talking about work, I didn't notice that... I was understanding them. I didn't understand certain stuff -- slang --.

Yes, abstract and non-literal. It's because of the PC brigade. Growing up... things were a whole lot different. It's still pretty much literal.

<comment><USER45> It would be really interesting to see someone sign the whole Swadesh list in different sign languages and try to see the level of similarity.

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

Edit: oh, there's already a special Swadesh list for comparing sign languages because of "overestimation of the relationships between sign languages, due to indexical signs such as pronouns and parts of the body". (Those signs are the ones that are most likely to be shared because they're likely to arise independently or have an inherently obvious meaning.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> i lie every time i go on vacation by myself. after having to explain myself one time for absolutely no reason, now i just don't even bother. apparently traveling alone for pleasure is highly suspicious.

i tell them i'm traveling on business, or act vaguely rude to the border agent with very curt responses. apparently they're good at filtering the real liars because i've never been hassled since.

</comment><comment><USER47> Crossing into the US from Canada, its seems that boarder officials have always asked those type of questions.

</comment><comment><USER48> Can an informed liar counter this technique?

It would be really cool if the liars were rehearsed in the technique.

</comment><comment><USER49> Good lies are mostly truths...

</comment><comment><USER50> I consider myself one of history's finest liars.

</comment><comment><USER51> lying is an art, and only an artist can see that art.

</comment><comment><USER52> > _Ironically, liars turn out to be better lie detectors._

What is ironic about that? If I understand how to lie to other humans, why is it anything but expected that I would be able to recognize that skill in other people?

<comment><USER53> If you as a liar are good at detecting liars, then wouldn't it be logical that you could detect honesty as well, being the opposite?

Well then take the opposite. What about honest people, do they recognize honest people better? I don't know, just asking, wondering. It could even be that honest people recognize honesty better than liars, while at the same time liars are better lie detectors.

Then there has to be a middle group I guess - what are they?

<comment><USER54> The difference: lies pretend to sound honest, while honesty doesn't pretend to sound like lies.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> One thing's certain. The U.S. Government wasted billions of taxpayer money training TSA agents--often recruited from ads on pizza boxes--in useless behavior analysis techniques.

<comment><USER56> You want to see useless security theater, go to China. Every building has a live-on-site guard who's entirely unable to detect or prevent thefts, won't intervene in a fight, or do anything other than lock the doors at night. Some of them wear military style clothes and have prominently displayed riot gear (shields and sticks), despite being clearly too frail to actually hold back anybody determined. Train stations x-ray your bags, not just for going to the train but also for access to the ticket office. They don't notice/care if you go through with kitchen knives in your bag, despite the recent terrorist attack that was done using knives. You can sometimes bypass the X-ray by just walking past and refusing to put you bag in it too! A Beijing train station has a podium outside with a soldier standing on it holding a stick. Not sure what that's for.</comment></comment>


Hacking Exposed - Exploiting Embedded control systems - <AUTHOR> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7X1NSziWRg

<comment><AUTHOR> This is a presentation about hacking embedded systems, in particular the kind of stuff that runs the energy grid and a variety of critical infrastructure systems.</comment>


LG develops first 5" 1080p panel for smartphones - <AUTHOR> http://view.koreaherald.com/kh/view.php?ud=20120528000359&cpv=0

<comment><USER2> Should kick ass for use in this puppy:

[https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/2031358906908057...](https://twitter.com/#!/ID_AA_Carmack/status/203135890690805762/photo/1) [http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=14967](http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=120&t=14967)

</comment><comment><USER3> How about making batteries that can make your phone run for more that 8 hours straight now? I'd buy the phone that would give me a week of uptime (and that is not a 3310).

<comment><USER4> The Razr Maxx has incredible battery life, not quite a week of uptime but a good 3 days of normal use.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Now that we have gorgeous displays, I'd like to see manufacturers compete over a new metric: Smallest Total Bezel Area.

The bezels on all phones today are just too damn big. The top bezel should not be taller than ~6mm (enough for speaker, camera and sensors) and the bottom should not be more than 4mm (enough to round the phone) and the side bezels should basically not exist at all.

<comment><USER6> That would affect the user experience of the device. How would you hold the device? How would you play games?

HTC Sensation is an whole-screen device, but the user experience is really bad. I prefer iPhone 4/4S design any other day.

<comment><USER7> The bevel could be virtual - painted on by the OS or application but not accepting touch inputs. Perhaps even custom to the user preferences. It could go away for certain uses cases, like full screen video. It could even have function buttons rendered on it that are context dependent.

<comment><USER6> Sure, this might work. But the extra pixels needed for the bezel will consume battery with current technology. Also, a new kind of proximity sensor have to be developed for these use cases. It will be really annoying to set the virtual bezel manually all the time.

<comment><USER8> Not on AMOLED. Remember that AMOLED does not use any power to display blacks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> So why is it that we're still stuck with 1920x1080 on our desktop displays? And don't even get me started on laptops!

<comment><USER10> For the longest time, operating systems didn't really work in High DPI. At Apple, a lot of the designs relied on pixel art, and scaling it looked terrible. There are breadcrumbs for scaling in OS X that date back to Tiger or Leopard.

This is one of the reasons why the iPhone4 straight up doubled the resolution even though it made for kind of a wacky display resolution (as opposed to 1024x600 or something more standard like that)

Mountain Lion is supposed to finally get all that HighDPI stuff right though, according to the rumors.

I'm only really familiar with the Apple side of things though, maybe Metro has similar design considerations in mind.

<comment><USER11> _For the longest time, operating systems didn't really work in High DPI._

Back in 2000 I was using 1920x1200 on a 12" laptop. I was running both WinXP and some version of Ubuntu, and they looked fine. Every since then I've had WUXGA screens and displays, until very recently when Dell and Lenovo decided to bail and move to the 1920x1080 short screens.

It's a step backwards.

<comment><USER10> I think your definition of 'looked fine' is a lot different than Steve Jobs' and people who need bifocals.

My guess is that your task bar in XP must have been less than a centimeter tall, the system font less than a millimeter tall. I know there are a lot of people like you who value having more on the screen like that, but realistically, that's not a very large market niche.

The goal at Apple was to keep roughly the same dimensions for interface elements while increasing the sharpness of text and icons. If the user wanted to, they could reduce the font size in whatever application they were using to make practical use of the increased pixel density.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> This reminds me of the BadAstronomy writeup about Jobs and the resolution of the iPhone 4: [http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/re...](http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/06/10/resolving- the-iphone-resolution/)

<comment><USER10> Ya, I was thinking the same thing.

At 440ppi, this seems like overkill, considering someone with 20/20 vision only needs around 300ppi for things to be acceptable.

I was hoping with the retina marketing blitz, Apple would put the density comparisons to bed and we could start thinking about displays with wider colour gamuts, wider viewing angles, better outdoors performance, 3D, mini projectors, etc.

I understand hard numbers like ppi are easier to compare between and display in huge letters in a BestBuy flyer, we called them 'checkbox features' at a place I used to work at, but at some point they distort the overall quality of the product. For example, the Pentium 4's clockrate and megapixel ratings on cameras are cases of a checkbox feature actually decreasing the quality of most products in the market.

<comment><USER13> Interestingly, in high-end printing, 300 dpi is considered unacceptably poor, most print shops will simply refuse to print artwork at 300 dpi. 600 dpi is usually what's considered minimally acceptable for artwork and around 1200 dpi for lots of text.

<comment><USER10> DPI is very different though, a screen sub pixel can vary in luminescence (typically index in most displays with 6bits of accuracy, minus crappy colour gamut on the display) whereas a printed dot is limited to the ink colours used.

Some printers overlap dots, print thicker dots, and have other tricks to work around this aspect. I don't know as much about this area, I've worked mostly in graphics, but my understanding is that because the colour gamut for each printed 'pixel' is less expressive, you need more dots in the same area to get a similar result.

Furthermore, dpi expresses printed 'dots' whereas a pixel on most displays can be considered three fixed 'dots', one for each display channel. Although lately, some LCD substrates are cheating a little and displaying only 2 subchannels per pixel.

Anyways, that's everything I know about dpi, as I said, I'm more versed in video rather than printing. So take this with a grain of salt: I think you need to multiply PPI by 3 to get DPI, ignoring cleverness on the part of either display or printer manufacturers.

<comment><USER13> That's basically right in some cases.

For example in full-color (4 color) printing you essentially need 4 dots (halftones) to make any color. However, they aren't all necessarily lined up in a grid like pixels (it's an analogue medium). But simply dividing 1200 dpi by 4 doesn't really provide a correct calculation for the resolution at the end.

<http://blog.savvydog.com/?p=106>

And then you actually get into measuring with LPI (lines per inch) which can easily go above 300 for things like good magazines (though around 130-150 is more typical). 130-150 _is_ actually around the retina display's 300dpi (a good conversion estimate is that 1LPI=2DPI but some will go as high as 3DPI).

Black and white (non-process) printing can be very different and uses solid colors. Higher quality artwork is necessary for this. That's where the 1200dpi comes into play. Fine books, black and white artwork, etc. need artwork at 1200dpi and the LPI can easily go above 500.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Surely we've got to be hitting the limits on what the eye can perceive. Why don't we focus on color/contrast?</comment>


Flying a Drone in First Person View Using the Oculus Rift - <AUTHOR> http://laughingsquid.com/flying-a-drone-in-first-person-view-using-the-oculus-rift-virtual-reality-headset/ <comment><USER2> This is cool, but the Oculus is not the optimal tool for the job right now.

I'm in the FPV hobby for over half a year and fly quadrocopters and model airplanes using video goggles. The Rift currently has one important problem that, until overcome, will prevent it from gaining traction in this area: latency. It doesn't have an analog video input, and having to digitalize and process the video for the Rift introduces a delay into the signal that makes controlling your model uncomfortable at best, impossible in many cases.

Because of this problem, pretty much everybody uses analog video for FPV these days. There are goggles on the market made specifically for the job: FatShark series, the Zeiss Cinemizer HD and others. Some of them are HD and 3D capable (Cinemizers), many are fitted with built-in motion trackers (e.g. FatShark Attidude SD) that are easily bound to servos on the model controlling camera movement (pan-tilt setups), and there are external motion tracker modules easily used with the goggles that don't come with them. With no delay, flying even very fast aircraft is actually much easier in FPV than using traditional line-of-sight control. The latency problem is worse than it might sound: e.g. the GoPro cameras introduce a very small delay on their analog outputs (<50ms), and even this is absolutely noticeable by an experienced pilot in FPV flight and influences the control the pilot has considerably; the best latency currently achieved with various FPV setups using the Oculus Rift is in the 200ms region.

Another advantage of using "traditional" motion trackers over the Oculus Rift is that they output PWM signal, ready to be fed into your R/C transmitter and then used on the model with servos to move the camera.

Now, I understand that HD and 3D is eventually the future of this hobby, and the Oculus Rift might very well at some point become a very viable goggles and motion tracker assembly. But until the latency issue is solved, it's not going to gain a wide audience.

<comment><USER3> I used to fly RC airplanes back when I was in high school. I've been out of the loop for 20 years now... are there good sites to re-engage the RC world and/or get into FPV?

<comment><USER4> I recently got into the hobby and found that Youtube was honestly the best source of information. There's a channel called RC Model Reviews that's particularly good. It's run by a guy named Bruce Simpson that's a bit of a crazy old Kiwi but he has a ton of really solid explanations of nearly everything you need to know getting started out.

One cool thing is that the past couple of years have seen some serious disruption in the field. Open source firmwares for controllers are a thing now, and it's had nearly the same effect on RC that the WRT54G had on the consumer router business - you can now do things with very cheap hardware that used to cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

Some links for you:

ER9X Firmware - [https://code.google.com/p/er9x/](https://code.google.com/p/er9x/)

FrSky, a company doing a lot of interesting things in terms of radio equipment - [http://www.frsky-rc.com/](http://www.frsky-rc.com/)

The aforementioned RC Model Reviews - [http://www.youtube.com/user/RCModelReviews](http://www.youtube.com/user/RCModelReviews)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oculus is perfect for this.

I was really hoping the cameras would be mounted on a 3-axis gimbal, with each axis controlled by the Oculus motion sensing.

The Oculus is a great option for for first person flying, even with using it as a regular 2D display, $300 is pretty cheap compared to most head mounted displays.

<comment><USER6> The latency of physically moving cameras with head tracking would be horrendous. Perhaps if you also used wide-angle/fisheye lenses and somehow synchronized the virtual panning with physical panning it would be workable, as long as you don't move your head too quickly.

<comment><USER7> The control doesn't have to be 100% absolute. You can have the video 'projected' within a 3D environment and adjust it's position within that environment based on the camera's physical movements, but you can let the 1:1 tracking from the headset overshoot the boundaries so the user doesn't get too much of a jarring experience. It would feel as if they were in a cockpit.

<comment><USER8> Trying that approach will probably result in people throwing up. In an immersive environment even short latencies are extremely disorienting. When I first started recording audio for film, the industry-standard recorders used Digital Audio Tape and there was a switch to monitor either the live feed from the preamps or the recorded feed from the tape (so you could be sure you were recording - you'd be surprised how easy it is to mess this up over the course of a 12-hour workday).

The latency was small, on the order of 10-12 milliseconds, but it took me months to overcome the weirdness of opening your mouth to speak but not hearing anything until ~1/100th of a second later. I shudder to think what it would be like to have this in your visual cortex but with a longer delay and also while your eyes are telling you that you're floating above the ground.

<comment><USER5> I think you're right. Latency is very disorientating.

Here's how I would do it: The craft has two wide angle cameras. The Oculus viewer is at the center of a sphere in 3D space. Project the video feed onto the inside of the sphere, and keep the position of the feed anchored to where the camera is currently positioned in relation to the craft.

Moving your head moves the frustum immediately, and the camera position lags behind, so if you moved too quickly (say, turned 180 degrees) the frustum moves right away, but the video only comes into view after the cameras are repositioned. There could be numbered checkerboard or other pattern shown wherever the video feed is not projected, so spatial disorientation is minimized.

That way you get the cockpit feel and immediate movement in the Oculus, but avoid the uneasiness that latency would give with a more simplistic approach.

Another option would be to use 360 degree cameras to fill up the entire sphere, and then use the binocular cameras to provide high detail.

<comment><USER9> So, kind of like ghetto dual-paraboloid mapping?

<comment><USER5> Yes, exactly.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is really cool. A few buddies and myself got this setup working with an AR drone and a Rift a few months back. I'll try to get videos up somewhere soon. If you are into this kind of stuff and in the Bay Area check out this meetup: [http://www.meetup.com/SF-Drones-Startup- Meetup](http://www.meetup.com/SF-Drones-Startup-Meetup)

We had the people from Velodyne who make the 3d Lidar for googles self driving cars present last night and demoed their newer 1kg unit.

</comment><comment><USER11> This really doesn't seem impressive. Why the heck do they even make the copter fly around with a WHOLE GODDAMN LAPTOP, this is about as wasteful as you can possibly get…

Something better which I've already seen is a gimbal[1] (which you can build for <100€) with one or two (for 3D) gopro cams. Weighs less and is way more awesome.

[1] [http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2013/04/freefly- system...](http://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/2013/04/freefly-systems- movi-02.gif)

Addendum:

This is the sort of steadiness you get with a gimbal btw: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmSFZydbVnc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NmSFZydbVnc)

</comment><comment><USER12> People having been flying with a FPV headset on RC planes for a while, but hopefully the Rift will be a cheaper and better quality option. Also, this makes it easier to make a rotating camera using the Rift's integrated IMU, for that truly immersive experience!

<comment><USER10> I'll second this. The IMU (And Rift SDK) is really really good. I can't wait to get my hands on the HD version of Rift.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Looks like fun. A shame the left/right views aren't on opposite sides, then one could view it cross-eyed to get the 3D effect without glasses.

I wonder if it would make you nauseous looking through the Occulus?

</comment><comment><USER14> For those of us with 3-D stereographic displays or TVs, anybody know if there's an mpo file of this test?

</comment><comment><USER15> Does anyone know which RC drone are they using for this?

<comment><USER10> I think this is the drone they are flying with... [http://blackarmoreddrone.com/store/](http://blackarmoreddrone.com/store/) Probably just a touch out of the hobby market price range with a $49k base. I think that's US dollars but I'm not 100pct sure.

<comment><USER16> They're based in Sweden I believe, so even if it was in Krona it would still be around $7,500 USD, which is still pretty pricey. Though based on their website (which doesn't appear to use geo location by ip) I think it's USD as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> What is the point of this?

The cool thing about the rift is how modern components and graphics capabilities allow for a light VR device to provide a very immersive experience.

This is basically being used to show video from the drone's camera. No stereoscopic image, no controlling using the gyro/accelerometers. Also, low latency, that is one of the most important aspects of what makes the rift experience interesting, certainly wasn't part of this experiment.

No point in posting a video showing new/trendy devices being used in such a meaningless way, just for the sake of combining cool toys

<comment><USER18> > No stereoscopic image

Did you even click the link? Of the three sentences, the second one starts out with "Using its two cameras", and the two cameras are shown within the first 10 seconds of video.

>What is the point of this?

The stereo view allows for depth perception in flight. They're getting fish eye lenses, and one thing that's hard to express about VR helmets like this one is the sense of space around you, even without stereo vision. This will create a feeling of flying that no monitor could ever hope to achieve.</comment></comment>


Tim Cook: Apple Will 'Never' Make a 'Crappy Product' - <AUTHOR> http://mashable.com/2013/02/12/tim-cook-goldman-sachs/

<comment><USER2> A phone that doesn't work properly when you hold it is pretty crappy.

</comment><comment><USER3> One "word": iTunes

</comment><comment><USER4> Ping!</comment>


Meet Sense: the health center in your home - <AUTHOR> https://vie.live/ <comment><AUTHOR> I'm Patrick, Co-founder at Vie. Let me know if you have any question or feedback. Thanks :)</comment>


Homeless Coder Learned to Code and Launching an App - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/leo-the-homeless-coder-2014-5 <comment><USER2> Title: _8 Months, After Learning To Code And Launching An App, Leo The Homeless Coder Is Still Homeless_</comment>


Neural Network Powers Lego Brick Sorter That Can Recognize Every Piece Ever - <AUTHOR> https://gizmodo.com/a-neural-network-powers-this-lego-built-brick-sorter-th-1840265085 <comment><AUTHOR> What kid wouldn't have killed for this? Would have saved lots of younger siblings from hours of "here, you find all the black 2x2 pieces while I build"</comment>


Install Snowplow Analytics on the Google Cloud Platform - <AUTHOR> https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/install-snowplow-on-the-google-cloud-platform/ <comment><AUTHOR> Snowplow Analytics[1] is a really great tool for web analytics, especially for companies that want to _own_ their data or have privacy concerns. It's pretty straightforward to replicate a lot of the reporting that you can do with Google Analytics, while giving you full access to the clickstream data that hampers more custom analysis within GA (at least in the free version, the premium GA360 product allows raw access to the clickstream data Google Analytics collects[2]).

[1] [https://snowplowanalytics.com/](https://snowplowanalytics.com/)

[2] [https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3437618?hl=en](https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3437618?hl=en)

<comment><USER2> You can in fact use it to get the raw GA clickstream data into a database, in real-time. You send in a copy of the GA data alongside sending to Google.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for stating that directly! Re-reading my comment, it didn't come off as clearly as intended. And in fact, Simo also has a guide that walks through doing precisely what you mention[1].

What I meant was that with a standard and free GA installation, barring a paid GA360 subscription, you can't gain raw access directly to the GA clickstream _from_ Google. And GA has a lot of unintuitive assumptions in their data processing that people only tend to become aware of once that assumption spectacularly breaks down for their use case, and you can't do any post- processing to account for it historically, because you can't access the clickstream data.

An alternative to paying for GA360 would be to duplicate your clickstream to Snowplow, using a technique like [1]. Which allows you to both leverage the GA interface and integration for run-of-the-mill needs where it works, and fall back to the duplicated data within Snowplow once you hit a wall inside of GA.

It's a really successful, cost effective, low-friction method I've used in organizations with a really immature analytics environment that's expected to mature over time. The familiarity and accumulated knowledgebase around GA makes it easy to get started, then cut over to Snowplow as needs and use cases evolve, before eventually hitting a critical point where the investment in GA360 finally makes sense. It creates an incredibly low-friction maturation process for end users, since the data models and historical data are consistent throughout. So there's minimal change management and consistent reliability related to any modeling, reporting, use cases, knowledge/training/skills transferability, etc that you've built up internally. It's analogous to abstracting the backend architecture behind a consistent and stable API, so you don't break anything along the way.

[1] [https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/automatically-fork- googl...](https://www.simoahava.com/analytics/automatically-fork-google- analytics-hits-snowplow/)</comment></comment></comment>


Ask HN: Technologies to use for a pet project - <AUTHOR>

I have been out of side projects for a while and been only working at Java (server side). Hence I have no idea what new technology is out. So to learn new technology + build a pet project I need your suggestion.
The project I want to build requires
- A neat UI (I like Vaadin but not sure how good it is)
- Cross platform UI compatibility - Server Side to do transactions, printing on different machines, Roles management etc
Thanks. <comment><USER2> COBOL on COGS? [http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM](http://www.coboloncogs.org/HOME.HTM)

All joking aside, nobody can really tell you what tech to use. Everybody is just going to reply with their personal favorite, if they reply at all. At the end of the day, you just kinda have to pick something and give it a try.

My vote would be Groovy and Grails, with whatever cool javascript thing on the front-end that you might want to play with, maybe Angular?

But some other "trendy" things that are popular these days include node.js, Meteor, Scala/Play, Clojure and Go. Giving any of those a shot would probably be a good use of your time.

<comment><AUTHOR> finally someone replied. thanks for your input. I do want to use Angular.js but i am not sure if it is compatible with vaadin or not.

Btw, why Groovy on Grails ? Any specific reason ? I want to learn something which can land me a better job (if i want to cash that skill). So is GoG more popular or RoR ?

<comment><USER2> _Btw, why Groovy on Grails ? Any specific reason ?_

No, that was me doing what I said everybody would do - recommending my personal pet favorite. :-) I just happen to really like Grails as a framework for developing web-apps and Groovy as a language. The combo hits a "sweet spot" for me in terms of productivity and ease of use, and leverages a lot of pre-existing knowledge of the Java / JVM ecosystem that I already had.

From a pure "market demand" standpoint, my guess is that RoR or even Node is going to be more valuable than Grails, but I haven't empirically validated that - it's just a hunch. In my case, I'm using Grails in the context of a startup I founded, so it doesn't matter to me what the market is screaming for - it just matters what I can use to Get Shit Done. :-)</comment></comment></comment>


GitLab: Why Prometheus is for everyone - <AUTHOR> https://about.gitlab.com/2018/09/27/why-all-organizations-need-prometheus/ <comment><AUTHOR> We make heavy use of Prometheus and Grafana at my company. We're increasingly relying on them more and more.

I found this to be interesting insight into how a bigger organization uses these tools. In particular I liked how they show their Grafana dashboards, which I can compare and contrast to our own dashboards.</comment>


Communicate Often - <AUTHOR> http://chriseidhof.tumblr.com/post/10405390790/communicate-often

<comment><USER2> I am agree. Its a tension management mantra for me. When I feel something is taking more time due to a technical problem, I manage my tension by telling it to client. And they understand things.</comment>


www.torproject.org certificate is invalid - <AUTHOR> https://www.torproject.org/

<comment><USER2> My perspectives notaries all show the same cert in place for the past 195 days:

[https://www.schulte.org/tmp/20141022/torproject27364553/torp...](https://www.schulte.org/tmp/20141022/torproject27364553/torprojectperspectives-2014-10-22-11.52.04.png)

Also you can see the raw XML output here: [http://perspectives1.schulte.org:8080/?host=www.torproject.o...](http://perspectives1.schulte.org:8080/?host=www.torproject.org&port=443&service_type=2)

Looks good from here.

</comment><comment><USER3> Seems valid here. Qualys SSL Labs agrees with the validity of the certificate [https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=torproject.or...](https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/analyze.html?d=torproject.org)</comment>


Google IO : Android Announcements  - <AUTHOR> http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/android-momentum-mobile-and-more-at.html

<comment><USER2> "To start, we're jointly announcing that new devices from participating partners..." (Verizon, HTC, Samsung, Sprint, Sony Ericsson, LG, T-Mobile, Vodafone, Motorola and AT&T) "...will receive the latest Android platform upgrades for 18 months after the device is first released, as long as the hardware allows."

That to me is the most significant of all the announcements listed.

<comment><USER3> It is still a tad vague to me. "As long as the hardware allows" seems like it provides some wiggle room for carriers to squirm out of any responsibilities to honor this.

Additionally, it only says that the devices will receive the latest upgrades for 18 months after the device is first released, which is problematic in many regards. If you get a phone the day it releases and are forced into a two year contract (which you almost certainly will be if you are going with a carrier), then for the final six months, or 25%, of that contract period, the carrier is not required to allow for you to receive Android upgrades. That instantly devalues your device. And what if you get a new device, but not until six months after its release? Well, then your carrier is only required to permit the upgrades for the first year; the last year is back to same old, same old.

And it says nothing about how timely the upgrades are. As it currently reads, all it guarantees is that for a year and a half after the device is _released_ , carriers must _eventually_ allow your device to upgrade to the latest version of Android. It is not a long enough time to cover an entire contract period and it has a little clause that is open to interpretation by all parties involved.

Edit: I'm writing this from the perspective of an American consumer. I do not know anything about the way that carriers and their mobile contracts work elsewhere.

<comment><USER4> Phone makers are slow to release upgrades because it takes resources to test and modify new Android releases (many of them are modifying the UI for a differentiated experience).

I don't see any reason why the likes of Samsung, Motorola, HTC would go through the trouble of releasing an update just for a couple of customers, ignoring the rest.

<comment><USER5> Its simple when the OEM gets approved by a Mobile Operator at least for the USA ones the MOs are negotiating an update fee that they pay OEMs for that very purpose..

So its probably set up as 3 Major version updates as Google/OHA members want that kept at every 6 months..hence the 18 month time limit..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> So what all is Ice Cream Sandwich about? It's simply bringing Honeycomb to the phone? It seems like a long time to move working code to a smaller form factor (and with QHD, similar resolutions).

<comment><USER7> All indications are that Honeycomb was a rush job in an ill-advised attempt to beat the iPad 2 to market. There's probably a large amount of refactoring needed to support phones, and of course there will be new functionality as well.

<comment><USER8> I wonder how it'll work with regard to the "phones have the four hardware buttons, tablets don't" thing.

Also: in the Apple world, many apps look/work very differently between their iPhone and iPad versions. Can anybody say anything about what guidance is given as far as when an Android app should "switch"? In other words: suppose I make an app that runs great on my 3.5" phone, then I make a more tablety version of the app that runs great on my 10" tablet... which version should run on a 5" or 7" screen?

<comment><USER9> Ideally, you should be using the various SDK options for handling various screen sizes and densities so that you don't have to care about what the actual size is. The SDK can handle a lot of the ambiguity for you.

[http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support...](http://developer.android.com/guide/practices/screens_support.html)

[http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals/fragm...](http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/fundamentals/fragments.html)

[http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/providin...](http://developer.android.com/guide/topics/resources/providing- resources.html#AlternativeResources)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Bladeless Drone: First Flight [video] - <AUTHOR> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L6FSdUmEpg <comment><AUTHOR> It's not actually bladeless, just using four high-power ducted fans buried inside carbon fiber tubing. But the idea is to have no exposed blades, to improve safety.</comment>


Google Confirms Gmail Speed Issue, Says It's Now Fixed - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/05/gmail-speed/ <comment><USER2> It is interesting to see GMail advocates saving a few seconds a day by using this and that features of GMail, while itself getting slower and slower over the time. I find myself stupid to wait 10 seconds just to load up GMail to quickly look up something. Why I am wasting these 10 seconds loading up a webapp when 99.9% of the time I am using my own computer?

You say running a desktop email client with GMail IMAP? The fact is I got tired of GMail's way of doing IMAP. I cannot remember how many times I try to make the `delete` key to actually trash an email in Mail.app. It's an even bigger mistake with its Push Email on iPhone. So half-baked IMAP and half- baked Exchange.

Finally, I could not stand it any more and moved over to MobileMe and cannot be happier. I still use the same GMail address and simply have GMail forward everything to my MobileMe account. This way, I get to keep my email address and take advantage of GMail's nice spam filter. I know GMail has IMAP and can do Push email and this and that, and after you configure this and that, it will work; but I am not a fancy person and just want to read, delete and send email, from my three Macs, an very old iPhone and an iPad. My days of messing around with kernel modules are over, and I guess I am old enough to start enjoying the almost-zero-configuration of MobileMe on all my computing devices.

<comment><USER3> Gmail loads within 1-3 seconds for me. Not only that, I VERY, VERY rarely close my browser, not even once a day if I can help it. So my mail is always available for me. Priority Inbox is amazing, as well.

In regards to iPhone: Simply get an Android phone. Flawless Gmail/GoogleApps integration; native support for colored labels, calendar, etc. I wouldn't clal it half-baked IMAP, more of, half-baked clients that don't support Gmail properly. Remember that traditional email uses folders; Gmail uses labels. They are FAR superior in every way. If a client doesn't support it, find a new client.

And I've never used MobileMe, but why add another point of failure to email? It's something that is typically very important to people, even more so probably the people who visit Hacker News.

<comment><USER4> "Simply get an Android phone".. In your reply replace Gmail with Exchange and Android phone with Outlook and we would bring out the pitchforks decrying vendor lock-in. Exchange works fine for my work email, IMAP works fine for my Yahoo account and somehow it is the client's fault it doesn't "support Gmail properly". Of course, this data is equally meaningless as yours as the sample size is 1.

<comment><USER3> When you change the way IMAP works for the better (a feature), then yes, the client should support it. If it doesn't, it's not a fault of the service, it's a fault of the client.

I mean, have you ever used labels? I mean, REALLY used labels?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't seem to have any reliability issues, however, it's probably because I'm a Google Apps premier user. If I'm not mistaken those accounts have higher uptime and reliability.

</comment><comment><USER6> This issue may be fixed, but Gmail's slowness is definitely not fixed. And affects way more than 2% of people on Gmail.

<comment><USER7> Like Michael, neither have I ever experienced any speed issues, although I don't sort or filter things. Gmail loads in less than a second, and opening an email appears effectively instantaneous.

<comment><USER3> On the topic of filters: I have over 200. It's more reliable than spam filtering (in the sense that I know I wont ever get an email from them again, and I don't have to worry about if that link is going to put my email on some "verified" to-spam list). So I doubt filters have anything to do with it ;) That's all handled on Google's backend.

On a side note, I do recall a few theories that were related to account age. Accounts opened around the same time seemed to be affected (as I read, anyway). This is a possible situation, however, it's almost impossible to know for sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Not so much so. Still takes me about 10 seconds to login via the web on a fast connection. I rarely use the web interface so I don't really care but I can see how this is an issue for some people. Google Notifier is probably the best solution for now.

<comment><USER9> I think it further proves the point that when you are no longer the underdog, it is hard for you to compete, stay fast and nimble, and stay innovative. Buzz and other Google-initiated (not acquisitions) forays into competing products have been disappointments. AdWords is no longer easy to use from the customer standpoint (and by the way, you searchers and AdWords supported email users are not the customers--you are part of the product being sold), that we have had to hire a full time guy to manage our AdWords campaigns and utilize outside AdWords consultant services.

I won't say Google has lost its touch, but even its searches are not producing good results for esoteric queries.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> For me at least, they fixed it by reverting to the backup HTML version:

[http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=44c9d...](http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/gmail/thread?tid=44c9d99f2a541b58&hl=en)

In a nutshell, using FF 3.6.12 on Ubuntu 10.04 x64, with _all_ addons disabled, gmail will only load the backup HTML-only version. No ajaxy goodness. Even if I manually select the standard interface, it refuses to use it and references the browser upgrade recommendation page.

Anyone have any idea what the problem could be?

<comment><USER11> Go to _about:config_ and search for _dom.storage.enabled_

Toggle it on/off/on (and back to whatever you have it set to)

Then regular mode will work again (may need to refresh page)

Gmail hosed something, relying on local storage in Firefox?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I think "reach out to" as a weird, touchy-feely synonym for "contact" is my least favorite business buzzword. I can't take anyone who says it seriously. I immediately assume they are full of shit.

<comment><USER13> I hadn't realized until really recently that it had accumulated this buzzwordy usage, so I used to assume the person writing just wasn't very good at English and had misunderstood the connotations of the phrase.

Unless I've been completely wrong about its meaning for years, "reach out to" implies more of a process, rather than simply asking a question. If you say you plan to "reach out to the city's troubled youth", people would assume you meant something more than just asking some troubled youth a few questions.

In this case, I don't see what's wrong with saying: we asked Google why Gmail has been slow, and this was their response. "Reached out ... with the following statement" feels sorta like an oxymoron.

<comment><USER12> >If you say you plan to "reach out to the city's troubled youth", people would assume you meant something more than just asking some troubled youth a few questions.

I agree. That's an example of its original usage which was meaningful, though vague.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Ok, some of you dont like Gmail, but i guess lots of people would be happy to hear and try a good alternative, with same features or more (custom filters, labels, powerful search, beautiful clever spam filter, accessible from any computer, phone sync, contacts manager, chat, etc).

Really, I cant see me working with another email provider, and being enclosed to one is not usually a good choice, it would be nice to try other alternatives

</comment><comment><USER15> Ehm, sadly: No.</comment>


Show HN: Huge list of React.js projects - <AUTHOR> https://gist.github.com/sAbakumoff/7b8510adcb16bded189d747e34f5e114 <comment><USER2> What's the difference between this and typing 'react' in GitHub's search? What I would really love is a list of curated, quality, complete implementations that follow good practices, testing/documented code etc. that you can use as a reference for your own projects instead of just everything.

<comment><AUTHOR> The point was to select the end-user applications projects, like "An extensible desktop mail app built on the modern web" and only highly-rated ones - the 1st in the list has more than 20K stars, the last one has 13 stars. I just saw the question in HN - [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12802121](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12802121) and wanted to contribute for broader audience. The technique of selecting the repos is described in [https://medium.com/@sAbakumoff/react- entourage-6d51e7df9944#...](https://medium.com/@sAbakumoff/react- entourage-6d51e7df9944#.720g4f8b4)

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The list is quite popular, so I updated it to include all the projects that have at least 1 star. It now has more than 5K projects. Please update the forks accordingly.

</comment><comment><USER3> How can I add my react.js project to this list?

<comment><AUTHOR> I can add it if you want, or you can fork the file and maintain/share your own copy of the list

<comment><USER4> out of interest, why did you do this as a gist rather than a project? That way, people could have raised pull-requests to add their project to your list.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good question..I didn't think that this thing will be widely noticed, so I just copy-pasted the content to the gist as it was the easiest way to publish md file..

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I would love to star gists from mobile...</comment>


Let's Map the Silicon Valley Startups - <AUTHOR> http://mappedinsiliconvalley.com/index.php

<comment><USER2> A similar (far more complete) effort in NYC: [http://mappedinny.com/](http://mappedinny.com/)

<comment><USER3> I love it. Thanks for this.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the support everyone. It's the first website I've made and worked on so I'll be updating everything but it might take a little while. Glad to see such a positive response. Keep pointing out the mistakes so I can get them fixed!

</comment><comment><USER4> Great job! Just a devil's advocate question.. why do you guys think that these locations matter anyways, besides for mere curiosity of seeing them on a map?

[I'm thinking of doing some research about this, that's why I'm asking]

<comment><USER5> It is great if you want to optimize for commute when looking for a job.

Obviously, location isn't the only factor that matters when choosing a job (otherwise you might as well work at the corner McDonalds) but if you know that your next job will have a great commute and/or be located in a convenient place for your non-work life, it has some positives going in. Also, if an area has a huge number of interesting companies in it, chances may be good that it contains an interesting company that would be a good fit for you, one that you might not have otherwise been aware of.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Nice simple, well implemented idea.

I have a question which often comes up when I hear about "startups" on HN or in mainstream media. When is a company no longer a "startup"?

I know it's been addressed before, and there is no shortage of answers around [0]. But I can't help but think that, given my intuitive understanding, companies such as Atlassian are no longer startups.

[0] - [https://duckduckgo.com/?q=when+is+a+company+no+longer+a+star...](https://duckduckgo.com/?q=when+is+a+company+no+longer+a+startup%3F)

<comment><USER7> Well, there's two parts to this question really. What makes a newly founded company a startup in the first place, and when does such a company stop being a startup?

The other comments addressed the first part (scalable business centered on growth), but the second part is a bit more nebulous. pg gave an off the cuff answer at YC's Work For a Startup day which was pretty insightful: "When politics starts working."

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> There's at least three errors on the map: Ludei, Leanplum, and Driveway Software are all listed at 181 Fremont st, the _former_ home of RocketSpace [0]. RS is now at 225 Bush and 180 Sansome.

[0] [http://rocket-space.com/](http://rocket-space.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for pointing out the mistakes! Fixing them now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Nice work, Here here are some additional tips :)

1\. Overlapping markers problem can be resolved in a nicer way 2\. markers will look nicer if replaced with vectors (svg) 3\. instead of loading all companies to the client side you could load them through ajax and win some performance

</comment><comment><USER10> These are always fun. I did one 7 years ago for all of Web 2.0[1]. Didn't crunchbase ever produce a mapped view? I thought they had at some point.

[1] [http://www.ryan-williams.net/web20map/](http://www.ryan- williams.net/web20map/)

</comment><comment><USER11> A lot of the links are not right.. for example https//www.tripping.com is missing the colon after https, so the site can't load.

Other than that, great idea! This is super useful when looking at potential companies for job opportunities.

</comment><comment><USER5> Crunchbase Maps also does this: [http://www.crunchbase.com/maps/city/San%2520Francisco](http://www.crunchbase.com/maps/city/San%2520Francisco)

<comment><USER12> This is only for San Francisco. I think what they are trying to do is to unite all of silicon valley on an easy to use, HTML5 driven user interface. Crunchbase on the other hand, appears to have limited functionality and is sparsely populated. Crunchbase' main product is not its company map, whereas MISV has the potential to build out a platform that can provide real utility for job hunters, investors, interns, etc.

<comment><USER5> I mentioned Crunchbase maps since that was the first site that I was aware of that did this kind of thing. It is certainly possible to do it better.

>This is only for San Francisco.

I just linked to the SF map (notice the URL); maps exist for other areas, too.

>Crunchbase on the other hand, appears to have limited functionality and is sparsely populated.

Functionality-wise, the sites are pretty similar except Crunchbase maps doesn't list jobs (location-based job search engines do exist, though) and to alter information you need to go to another part of the site. Crunchbase maps obviously looks aged and doesn't even include all data points on the same map so this site is better in that regard.

However, if you include the non-SF maps Crunchbase maps has much more data than this does (at least right now and some of that data may be outdated.) They also offer a RESTful API and might (not sure) allow you lots of flexibility for using that data (worth looking into at least).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> They show Double Dutch being down here in Santa Cruz, yet it is in the city. Even on the map, they show the address as:

2601 Mission St, San Francisco, CA,

So, something is goofy.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey, something is going on with the addresses. I am verifying each one and correcting the errors. Thanks for pointing these errors out!

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> We are also working and looking to map tech companies in general, not only startups at [http://www.thetechmap.com](http://www.thetechmap.com)

</comment><comment><USER15> In touch with Shane @ Startup Genome? [http://www.startupgenome.com/](http://www.startupgenome.com/)

<comment><AUTHOR> messaged him, no response.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Startups in and around Tel Aviv: [http://mappedinisrael.com](http://mappedinisrael.com)

</comment><comment><USER17> Let's not forget Portsmouth, NH... heh [http://seacoast.io](http://seacoast.io)

</comment><comment><USER18> [http://TechBritain.com](http://TechBritain.com) is doing that for the entire UK

</comment><comment><USER19> Great app! Very cool to see where all the start ups are. Also, this is useful for job hunters.

</comment><comment><USER20> I know where several startups are located. Wish I could bulk add.

<comment><USER21> You can. Please email your information(in whichever format you prefer) to email@example.com and we will be happy to add them all to the database. Thank you so much and we hope you enjoy the site

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> what an incredible idea. this is such a great way to easily put startups in touch with the rest of the world!

</comment><comment><USER23> what's up with the peninsula being so empty?</comment>


Turing's Euclidean Stroke of Genius - <AUTHOR> http://syntax.wikidot.com/blog:11 <comment><USER2> To most mathematicians, valuing intuition is not a new idea. While one of the most distinguishing qualities of mathematics is its rigor, to focus on this quality misses the big picture. Henri Poincare, arguably the greatest 20th century mathematician, said it best: "It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition we invent." This theme is echoed in many of his writings about creativity in mathematics.

Turing's argument is beautiful and elegant, undoubtedly one of the gems of modern mathematics. However, the reason you don't see the intuition behind Turing's argument taught is that there is too much material to cover in a general theoretical computer science course. You need to be able to master the known material, to stand on the shoulders of giants, to make new advances in the discipline. This may not necessarily be the best way to encourage creativity and insight in computer science, but the hope is that interested students will delve deeper (like the author) and discover insights for themselves.

Lastly, at least among many mathematicians, Turing may be up there with Euclid among the demigods of mathematics, but there are those that lie still higher, people like Gauss and Euler who have yet to be matched in terms of mathematical output and impact.

</comment><comment><USER3> I don't think the greatness of Euclid (or more precisely, he and the many unnamed predecessors of whose work he was the compiler) was that he came up with especially user-friendly axioms. What other axioms would someone who was less skillful at coming up with user-friendly axioms have produced instead?

<comment><USER2> Perhaps somebody would have discovered hyperbolic or other non-Euclidean geometries before Lobachevsky? Through the lens of modern mathematics, non- Euclidean geometry seems like such a simple extension/modification of Euclidean geometry, yet it was only explored and developed in detail in the early 19th century.

<comment><USER4> Well it took more than a thousand years for the belief of a spherical Earth to be accepted. It's hard to imagine a new type of geometry when you believe the Earth is flat.

<comment><USER3> Actually in ancient times they knew the world was spherical. It's debatable how many people really thought it was flat even in the darkest of the dark ages.

<comment><USER4> Hmm. You learn something new every day.

Turns out that you can actually measure the Earth's circumference pretty easily with some basic geometry. You can see the distance at which a ship starts to disappear on the horizon and are able to get a relation of distance to angle drop.

It's odd how they teach that the round Earth theory started with Copernicus.

Let me try another stab at figuring out why non Euclidean geometry took so long to arise: I'm under the impression that a large portion of Greek geometry was based on construction using a compass and protractor. Seeing that it is difficult to use those instruments on spherical or hyperbolic planes they never went beyond Euclidian geometry.

<comment><USER2> On top of that, you don't even an ocean to measure the Earth's circumference. Eratosthenes of Cyrene (born in the 3rd century BC) calculated the circumference of the earth fairly accurately using the angle of elevation of the Sun measured from two different cities. Note that implies that a round earth was common knowledge to the Greeks even at this date.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


"Scientists are leaving Amazon reviews and it's amazing" - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2018/01/30/fits-neatly-inside-a-lizards-cloaca-scientists-are-leaving-amazon-reviews-and-its-amazing/ <comment><USER2> The article begins with a truthful disclaimer that's also amusing.

>Disclaimer: The Washington Post is owned by Jeffrey P. Bezos, who also runs Amazon, though we really don't think we're doing the site any favors with this article.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> #reviewforscience—[https://twitter.com/hashtag/reviewforscience?src=hash](https://twitter.com/hashtag/reviewforscience?src=hash)

</comment><comment><USER3> I hate titles that have phrases like "and it's amazing"...

<comment><USER4> Particularly when it should be "and it's mildly amusing."</comment></comment>


Xkcd - Height - <AUTHOR> http://xkcd.com/ <comment><USER2> Permalink (Article Link goes to Homepage): <http://xkcd.com/482/>

Direct image link: <http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/height.png>

</comment><comment><USER3> This comic is just begging to be turned into a poster.

<comment><USER2> <http://store.xkcd.com/#HeightPoster>

If the # doesn't work, scroll down about 3/4 of the way, it's the first poster. Personally, I'd rather have the online communities poster.</comment></comment>


Had Assange been publishing Chinese state secrets... - <AUTHOR>

Had Assange been publishing Chinese state secrets, - and - If the secrets were heroically obtained by an anonymous democracy-loving Chinese soldier at great risk to his life, - and -
if the Chinese government asked Amazon to take down Wikileaks and also hinted to Paypal/Mastercard/Visa to do the same, - and - If an arrest warrant for Assange was issued on unrelated charges, suspiciously at the same time as the leaks,
What would the editorials in the free-world be talking about? The rights of the Chinese government or Assange's fearless voice of democracy?
Would the US and Swedish diplomats be figuring a way to get Assange extradited to China -or- would they be drafting a sure-to-win Nobel Peace Prize nomination?
What would White House and Downing Street say, about Chinese govt. claims of their troops lives being in danger?
Would the common public be suspecting Assange on the assault case or would they be sure that China is foisting upon him, a fabricated case?
It would have been good to have George Orwell and Aldous Huxley on HN. And yes, Noam Chomsky too. <comment><USER2> I think your analogy is flawed. Are Chinese and Swedish diplomats figuring out how to extradite Assange to America?

I am not inclined to uncritically believe Assange since he misled us about the nature of the charges against him.

<comment><AUTHOR> Analogies have limited reach, agreed :) The script has changed a bit now. It is the US & UK diplomats working secretly. Since they are working secretly, we do not know what they are trying to do, but it is quite possible they are not thinking of his welfare.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> He would already be dead.

<comment><AUTHOR> Unless he was operating out of a safe haven nation.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a hitch in your logic: The US IS the good guys: Freedom-loving, freedom-protecting, doing what's right good guys. China is an oppressive murderous communist regime. The US is good, China is evil.

So your premise doesn't hold up.

<comment><AUTHOR> Bob, my logic is probably illogical. And my premise may hold only in a limited context.

But how does one logically prove a statement of the kind "X is good" (independent of "Y is evil"). Mathematically (predicate logic wise) speaking, Proof by intimidation, Proof by personal-belief and Proof by assertion / repeated-reassertion don't hold up either.

Consider this philosophy: I am good. Because I believe that to be true. Thus, what's good for me is good for the rest of the world. And anything else is bad. So, I now use my might whichever way to annihilate the bad.

Anyway, (ostensibly) the US has taken upon itself, the role of championing freedom and democracy across the world. There are probably no better beacons than its founding fathers, to guide its actions while playing that role.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> What furthers US interests furthers Good; the US is Good and its purposes noble; the US acts for the Good of the world and disagreement with the US is Evil.

As a democracy, Americans elect their officials. As leaders of a force for Good, these officials act with noble purposes; embarrassing them hurts Good and is therefore Evil.

<comment><AUTHOR> :) Yes, your satire more or less captures the broad argument of the govts involved/affected, against wikileaks. (I just took the liberty to assume it was a satire and doesn't mean the verbatim).

<comment><USER6> I assumed the same Vijaya</comment></comment></comment>


Tidl: Smart portfolio–resume tool based on Moments. Now with company profiles - <AUTHOR> https://tidl.es <comment><AUTHOR> Here're some more articles about us:

Our values: [https://medium.com/tidl/tidl-what-we- value-3a05be1c23c#.t1u5...](https://medium.com/tidl/tidl-what-we- value-3a05be1c23c#.t1u5xyn0p)

Company profiles: [https://medium.com/tidl/launching-company-profiles-on- tidl-5...](https://medium.com/tidl/launching-company-profiles-on- tidl-5f1bc97db2f0#.rhnuhz9pw)</comment>