Ultimate Writer: An Open Digital Typewriter - <AUTHOR> https://alternativebit.fr/posts/ultimate-writer/ <comment><USER2> I guess you know you're getting old when you start seeing people "invent" things that you saw people using every day when you were young.

 _> I came to think, maybe we should create a digital typewriter giving us the best of the two worlds._

What the author calls a "digital typewriter" is what originally used to be known as a "word processor" \-- a standalone, dedicated digital device with a keyboard and a (typically small, typically monochrome) display, running built- in software for editing text: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_(electronic_dev...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor_\(electronic_device\))

You would type on the keyboard and your words would appear on the display, where you could go back and edit typos and such if you needed to. The display usually only showed a few lines of text, but you could scroll up and down through the entire document using the screen as a buffer. Your work would be then persisted to some storage medium, often in later models a floppy disk. It wasn't WYSIWYG, but it was a vast advance over mechanical typewriters, for all the reasons the article mentions.

These devices had their heyday from the '60s through the '80s. They were eventually rendered obsolete by the arrival of the inexpensive general-purpose personal computer. All the functions of the word processor could be provided on the PC via software, and the PC's bigger, more colorful display made it a better environment for doing those things anyway. The programs people used to do word processing on PCs came to be known as "word processors" themselves. Eventually the dedicated devices stopped being made, and I guess over time people just forgot that there was once a word processor that _wasn 't_ software.

My mother was a writer, and I have many childhood memories of her sitting at her treasured Brother word processor. So perhaps I have more reason to remember the hardware word processor than most people do.

<comment><USER3> And they _keep_ reinventing it. I don't see a year going by without a Kickstarter or the like for one of these things. [https://getfreewrite.com](https://getfreewrite.com)

Further, we've had oodles of minimalist/cut down/focused/sensory deprivation gimmick word processors for the last twenty years, all essentially recreating the UI of every single DOS word processing program.

And yet, whenever professional writers talk about what they write with, it's almost always MS Word or some crappy screenplay program. Not some minimalist program, not some special piece of hardware, just the standard tool available. (Occasionally, their preferred text editor if they're a geek - just another standard tool.) Decades and centuries ago, they used word processors or typewriters or pen and paper because those were the available, standard tools.

Because a tool is just something to aid the act of writing, not a device for squeezing it out of you when you have nothing to say.

<comment><AUTHOR> You realize the author references the FreeWrite in the article and talks about the reason for this particular creation was to have an open source version that was cheaper.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> By far the more interesting part here is that they got a terminal to display on an e-ink screen. I've wanted to try that for a while now. If I could have my normal displays, plus and e-ink display as a terminal, that would really be sweet.

<comment><USER5> Might be interested in this kind of approach: [https://www.engadget.com/2013/04/02/kindle-paperwhite- raspbe...](https://www.engadget.com/2013/04/02/kindle-paperwhite-raspberry-pi- hack/)

It's still going to suffer with the e-ink refresh speed but depending on what you want to do in the terminal, you might be fine with it. Combined with a Pi Zero W (not available when the solution above was done in 2013) and the battery would probably last quite a while!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> A no-frills e-ink bash terminal machine would be a delight for working through a programming book in the park. If this were more portable and got longer battery life (24+ hours) I would pay a few hundred dollars for it.

<comment><USER7> I own a Yotaphone 2 which is a a dual-screen android phone. The e-ink screen is able to display the whole OS and not just some widgets.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> The alphasmart ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaSmart)) is similar particularly the Dana which runs palmOS.

I really like the 'banner' display format on those (it could be even wider, the full width of the keyboard). Using a standard format screen doesn't seem to offer much over a laptop with some kind of locked-down writing app.

Does anyone sell that format lcd (or e-ink) display - ie about 10" x 1.5-2.0" (250x50mm). Could they be made to order, and how would you go about it (and what min. quantities to expect, etc)?

</comment><comment><USER9> > Ben Kraznow found a way to implement a faster partial refresh which let you > refresh the screen in about 0.3 seconds, which is more than enough for a > text editing device.

Meanwhile, on the r/thinkpad subreddit they're complaining about ~15ms delays on keyboards(×): [https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/9j70v6/thinkpad_k...](https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/9j70v6/thinkpad_keyboard_firmware_worse_than_anyone/)

Granted, keyboard delay is to screen delay what an apple is to an orange but I still don't think I could live with a 0.3s screen delay while typing.

×) I know it's not _exactly_ a delay but since typing any faster will cause typos I'd say, effectively it is.

</comment><comment><USER10> I am trying to build something similar. I have a raspberry pi zero W, a 7.5 inch e-ink screen and some power electronics from adafruit. Have to find a good keyboard and figure out how to build a case.

I am looking to build something more portable and something with a cleaner design (no open wires/cables etc). An important design problem is how to match a 7.5 inch screen with a much larger keyboard. There is the design here, with a screen stuck in the middle of a large board - not very pretty looking. There is the [https://getfreewrite.com/](https://getfreewrite.com/) way, which is aesthetically more elegant, but the angle and location of the screen seems worse from an ergonomic perspective.

Does anybody have a better idea?

</comment><comment><USER11> I want this loaded with a bunch of text adventure games.

</comment><comment><USER12> That wrist position looks deeply un-ergonomic. Hate to think what it'll do long term writing like that.

</comment><comment><USER13> Freewrite creator here, nice project!

</comment><comment><USER14> Or you can just pick up a second hand AlphaSmart Neo like I did. Weeks of battery life as well.</comment>


Recursive Regular Expressions - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/recursive-regular-expressions/

<comment><USER2> Shouldn't

        my $regex = qr/0(??{$regex})*1/; # (1)

rather be

        my $regex = qr/0(??{$regex})?1/; # (2)

? Otherwise it matches many other strings (e.g. 001011) in addition to 0^n 1^n; you actually want it to match zero or one times instead of zero or more. Unfortunately the explaination why (1) works is a bit faulty.

I didn't know recursive regexes before, thanks for the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right! I just fixed this serious error in the article and updated the explanation. Thanks!

I was thinking about ? but wrote it down as * without realizing that * may insert several $regex$regex... thus breaking the regex.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> To sum it all up: most "regular expression" implementations are actually powerful enough to describe context-free grammars, which are essentially regular expressions mixed with balanced parentheses. The fact that the author manages to never use the term "context-free grammar" leads me to believe he's unduly surprised at his discovery.

<comment><AUTHOR> Well said. I will include this in the article. Couldn't figure out how to say it well before because they are still not equivalent to context-free languages, they are just sometimes powerful enough to describe some of the context-free languages. Therefore I didn't include it. I think only the regex implementations with recursion are context-free. Others are not, therefore I wouldn't say "most" of them are.

You're right that I was surprised because I hadn't heard of recursive regular expressions in Perl before.

Update: I just remembered that extended regular expressions can even recognize recursive languages. Here is a regex that decides if the number is a prime:

         perl -lne '(1x$_) !~ /^1?$|^(11+?)\1+$/ && print "$_ is prime"'

This goes beyond context-free, therefore I couldn't just say "context-free" carelessly in the article.

<comment><USER3> Technically, a CFG is the intersection of an n-balanced parentheses language and a regular language. Therefore, any regular language can be described by a CFG (but obviously not vice-versa).

I am completely unfamiliar with Perl and its regular expressions, but from your article and this comment I get the impression that they are Turing- complete, which would mean they're capable of describing any formal language as well as doing any "doable" computation. Is that correct?

<comment><AUTHOR> Just found this comment.

I am not exactly sure if they are Turing-complete. The code in (??{code}) can be anything, so I guess, they are.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Allison Randal, the chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine (that Perl 6 runs on) has one of the most under-rated views regarding this --

 _There's an odd misconception in the computing world that writing compilers is hard. This view is fueled by the fact that people don't write compilers very often. People used to think writing CGI code was hard. Well, it is hard, if you do it in C without any tools. I don't know anyone who writes CGI code in C anymore. If we wrote compilers as often as we write shopping carts, or web forums, or wikis, there would be just as many tools available to make the job easy. (And just like web tools, only 10% of them would be worth using. That's evolution in action.)

—Allison Randal, "Parrot Compiler Tools"_

Source: <http://www.lohutok.net/>

<comment><AUTHOR> Completely true. In fact nothing is hard in the computing world. Everything is doable. And if someone says it's not doable, they are not trying hard enough.

<comment><USER5> Write a program that determines whether or not any arbitrary program goes into an infinite loop.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can still try hard and cover many cases where it would go into an infinite loop. And then try even harder and cover even more cases.

<comment><USER5> And you still won't have written a program that determines whether any _arbitrary_ program goes into an infinite loop.

<comment><USER6> If we can write a program that translates said arbitrary program into the rules for an n-state, m-symbol turing machine, where n = (2|3|4|5) and m = 2, then yes - we can determine if the program terminates or not.

We can make some fuzzy guesses whether or not the program terminates or not in other state/symbol combinations.

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

If we ever did write said program that could determine whether any /arbitrary/ program is infinite, then we have solved the halting problem. And that would be quite something.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It's a neat trick but as the author says, it's probably too cryptic to use for "real" code.

Lua's LPeg lets you create simple recursive grammars to solve problems that are often hard with regular expressions (e.g., matching balanced parentheses). It's the one library from Lua I find myself seriously missing when programming in other languages.

<http://www.inf.puc-rio.br/~roberto/lpeg/lpeg.html#grammar>

</comment><comment><USER8> It's also supported in PHP preg_ functions, but instead (??{$regex}) you write (?R)

</comment><comment><USER9> (OT) I would have to upvote this even if it were only the regeXzibit pic.

</comment><comment><USER10> Perl6 already contains grammars.

Perl5 backported "named captures" from perl6:

      #!/usr/bin/perl
      use warnings;
      use strict;
      use feature qw(switch say);
      #use locale;
      #use re 'debug';

      my $expression = qr{
          (?(DEFINE)
                (?<expr>       (?&space)* (?&term) (?&space)* (?&opterm)? (?&space)* ; (?&space)* )
                (?<term>       (?&identifier)
                               | (?&number)
                               | (?&string)
                )
                (?<opterm>     (?&space)* (?&operator) (?&space)* (?&term) (?&space)* (?&opterm)? (?&space)* )
                (?<operator>   [=+*/-]                                          )
                (?<identifier> [A-Za-z_][A-Za-z0-9_]+            )
                (?<number>     [0-9]+                                           )
                (?<string>     (?&quote) ( (?&char) | (?&bsquote) )*? (?&quote) )
                (?<quote>      \"                                               )
                (?<char>       [^\\\"]                                          )
                (?<bsquote>    \\.                                              )
                (?<space>      [ \t]                                            )
          )
          (?&expr)
        }x;

      while (<>) {
      chomp;
      if ( /^ $expression $/x ) {
        say "Correct expression: $_";
      }else {
        say "Incorrect expression: $_";
      }
      }

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an awesome backport. Thanks for reporting.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> See also Structural Regular Expressions by Rob Pike:

<http://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/structural_regexps/></comment>


O(n) vs. O(n^2.2^n) vs. O(1) - <AUTHOR> http://chemoton.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/on-vs-on2-2n-vs-o1/

<comment><USER2> Same story submitted previously:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575321>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576043>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575557>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1580311>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1580943>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1625125>

<http://searchyc.com/protein+game?sort=by_date>

<comment><USER3> Interesting how many times this got re-submitted. That's got to be a record of a sort.</comment></comment>


Od(1) - <AUTHOR> http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/od.1.html <comment><USER2> I tried to find a use case for "od", wondering if it was similar to "xxd", and in doing so I found an article comparing "xxd" and "od", and their use cases are indeed similar.

Basically, when there's no prettier way to render a file, print the bytes.</comment>


Don't be a Grin Fucker - <AUTHOR> http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/03/28/dont-be-a-grin-fucker/ <comment><USER2> I'll bite, and take the counterpoint.

Most people aren't grin fucking you because of some inherent moral instability. They're doing it because fighting you over your idea that you're in love with isn't worth it to them. First example he gives, where Manager Bob is getting ignored -- what if the executive simply doesn't need or respect Bob's opinion? He doesn't need to prove to every non-exec that he thinks his idea is good. Unfortunate, but a fact of life in a hierarchical organization.

I like to think of myself as direct and honest, but the overwhelming social norm (at least from what I've seen, on the East Coast of the US) is to pick your battles. If you push back on everything you disagree with, you surprise people and quickly pick up a reputation as argumentative. This is especially true if you engage on issues outside your area of expertise. Programmers telling accounting how to fund benefits? HR telling programmers which hours are "proper" to work? Organizational grunts telling execs which markets to expand into? Even if the outsider is right, it's not worth the time of the expert to fight it, and they'll smile, nod, and hope you go away quickly so they can continue being productive.

By all means, you should stand up and call out the obvious bullshit, but the world is not black and white.

<comment><USER3> Nothing hinders the executive from saying "Sorry Bob, I have decided this and now we'll do it." - Instead he is basically lying Bob straight in the face. This has nothing to do with picking your fights, but all to do with being unable to stand by your decision and be straight about it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> That was a stunning long post with which to deliver the message "don't bullshit people; live up to your commitments".

<comment><USER5> I think the real point was the spread the term "grin fucker". At least that's what I took from it.

<comment><USER6> I concur. And I'll pass. "Acting with integrity" as compared to "don't be a grin fucker" hasn't exactly lost it's ring. The latter term is crass _and_ hard to say. Poor slang branding in a crowded lingual market, if you ask me.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This article is so much more than the tasteful use of the word "fuck." For example, this gem - "I mean Porter's Five forces is a useful framework but it's basically microeconomics with a pretty wrapper." Amen.

Unfortunately, not being a good grin fuck comes with consequences, and Mark's article is a little light on dealing with that backlash.

</comment><comment><USER8> Hate the title. Agree 100% with your point. I always speak up - to a fault.

<comment><USER9> Ha. Yeah, but titles work. Newspapers learned that years ago. Hope the title wasn't too offensive - just want to make a point.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I love this guys attitude.

When you are in business, you're not there to make friends. If everyone took this attitude, there would be no corporate bullshit, no pointless niceties, no pissing about on the phone for half an hour because the other guy can't get to the point, no wondering did you get the job or not after an interview just because the HR guy or girl can't say 'no', no polite rejections by VCs that seem like something positive etc etc

</comment><comment><USER11> Haha, grin fucking. Same thing happens in academic settings when students make up an excuse about their granny's death. I'm going to use this whenever students come up to me and tell me a sob story about doing better on the next test. I'm gonna say "Jonny, don't grin fuck me".

<comment><USER12> unfortunately, if they're not lying and simply trying to be even keeled despite the circumstances, then you'll be the asshole instructor with an unpleasant paranoia about being grinfucked.

(next time please use something less emotionally loaded such as "a dog eating their textbook" as your placeholder example)

<comment><USER13> In the context of grin fucking, I don't believe emotionally loaded language is inappropriate.

<comment><USER12> I decline to give this remark any sort of content rich reply

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I feel it is overly broad to completely eliminate "grin fucking" from your repertoire of responses. For example, when presented with a bs-er with powerful friends. GF-ing is a great option. Frankness is not always the best.

</comment><comment><USER15> He needs an editor.

<comment><USER9> I agree! Got any spare MIPS?

<comment><USER16> I do. Now following you on Twitter (wasn't before for some reason)... DM me if interested.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Paul's algorithm needs some work. this one shouldn't be first. Votes should count for more.</comment>


US customs and border protection is flying a surveillance drone over Minneapolis - <AUTHOR> https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/5dzbe3/customs-and-border-protection-predator-drone-minneapolis-george-floyd <comment><USER3> This was very predictable. Tools invented for military operations abroad eventually, predictably find their way back domestically.

Despite that, its a dangerous thing to happen. I am aware of how unlikely it is for the current US Government to use the drone offensively, but once you have a massive fleet of drones flying over the US, patrolling "troubling" neighborhoods constantly, the temptation to use those abilities rises significantly.

I hope that Congress takes action to outlaw this practice, but I have little faith it will happen. It seems like everyday the country is falling further into the pit of becoming an authoritarian police state.

<comment><USER4> Where do you draw the distinction between a drone (presumably unarmed) vs a police helicopter?

<comment><USER5> I think we first need to determine what is upsetting about this, specifically.

Is it that they are flying a UAV that was originally designed for military use?

Or is it that they are flying a UAV period?

What if it was a new UAV, designed just for law enforcement? No problems then?

Presumably this UAV has no weapons on it, so I'm unsure what the problem could be unless we just flat oppose former military equipment being used?

It's safer and cheaper to fly a UAV than a manned vehicled - helicopters crash routinely and need multiple crews to keep them on station for extended duration. If it was a decommissioned military UAV that's being repurposed - then the tax payer has been saved a great deal of money as well.

So, what specifically is it that we don't like about this situation?

<comment><USER6> >So, what specifically is it that we don't like about this situation?

The ongoing militarization of state level police forces without the democratic consent of the governed for a start?

<comment><USER5> > democratic consent of the governed

Just playing devil's advocate - but this is democratically consented to.

Your elected politicians have specifically allowed the sale or transfer of retired military equipment to state and local police forces, for multiple reasons but the least-of-which was cost savings vs. scrapping all the prepaid equipment.

Similar, but admittedly not quite the same, to the sale of demilitarized Humvees, tanks and fighter jets to civilians. Or NASA owning and operating former US Navy F/A-18's, B-52's and more... war machines now repurposed for peaceful training and aeronautical research.

<comment><USER6> Yeah in the same sense of how we all democratically opted in to mass surveillance or encryption breaking. Let's be honest the people who are at the receiving end of this technology haven't been democratically decided anything in a long time. What this actually is, is what Sheldon Wolin called inverted totalitarianism and when it comes to these police measures that's not even an exaggeration.

Just as a random question, how many people do you think know that these guys ([https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at- night...](https://longreads.com/2019/06/21/nothing-kept-me-up-at-night-the- way-the-gorgon-stare-did/)) are flying above American cities

<comment><USER5> The solution is to vote-out the out-of-touch career politicians then, no?

I have a suspicion, being a Senator for 40 years sort of removes you from the concerns of everyday Americans.

These are the same Senators (and Representatives) that vote for these measures. They'll never be the target of these surveillance schemes... and when they are, they throw a huge fit[1] because they're supposedly above all of it. They're the same people who ban guns from the public, but own operate and illegally traffic them themselves[2].

They're the same ones that don't have to be strip searched every time they fly, but I digress...

[1] [https://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/03/13/pelosi- alle...](https://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2014/03/13/pelosi-alleged-cia- spying-on-senate-committee-appalling/)

[2] [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2016/02/2...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning- mix/wp/2016/02/25/ex-calif-state-sen-leeland-yee-gun-control-champion-heading- to-prison-for-weapons-trafficking/)

<comment><USER7> It's not clear to me that the Senators voting for this aren't similarly situated to "everyday Americans." Remember when armed civilians stormed the Michigan Capitol and nothing happened? They aren't politically connected, etc. Maybe the folks who keep electing these senators correctly perceive that the power of the state won't be used against them, so long as they belong to the majority.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Native Minnesotan here — living in Minneapolis — that has lived on both coasts:

With all that's happening the last few days, please don't generally associate Minnesotans with the violent riots that have captured the attention of everyone. The peacefulness of the protests and gatherings has been overshadowed by the violence. There are countless examples of Minnesotans standing up to those who choose to loot and destroy the innocent. Those images are being overlooked.

What happened is awful. These violent riots, and the violent images aren't reflective of Minnesotans at large. The violence doesn't reflect how genuinely upset people in Minnesota feel about what happened and greater the movement at large. There will always be edge-cases as there is with any situation in any context. But for everyone that I've known, for everyone I've met and encountered with in Minnesota, when I look back at my time spent on either coast I always have found the people in Minnesota to be most great.

I have friends and colleagues asking me "what's going on with everyone in Minnesota?" and I have to explain to them that these images aren't representative of the place I call home and my neighbors I call my friends.

There are businesses that didn't do anything wrong which have have been effectively `rm -rf` because of a small group of bad actors. The Target on Lake Street didn't do anything. Banadir Pharmacy didn't do anything. Seward Pharmacy didn't do anything. The pawn shop didn't do anything. The WIC office didn't do anything. The liquor stores didn't do anything. MoneyGram didn't do anything. The tobacco store didn't do anything. Disrupting those businesses and the livelihoods of their employees and owners doesn't prove a point.

But burning down the precinct? Yeah, I can get behind that.

<comment><USER9> > With all that's happening the last few days, please don't associate > Minnesotans with the riots that have captured the attention of everyone.

I understand what you're going for, but this is a bad approach. People aren't rioting because they want to destroy things, they're rioting because they don't feel like they're being heard. What you're saying here reads as "don't listen to them, they don't represent us" which is ... exactly the point.

We need to collectively shut the hell up for 5 minutes and just _listen_. Maybe if we actually did that, these riots wouldn't be happening.

<comment><USER10> people do, indeed, riot and destroy things to steal and loot. That's the point. Notice it's not the police station being burned down.

<comment><USER11> Well, also the fact that a police station is filled with armed police might also be a reason.

<comment><USER12> So the rioters are hurting their fellow innocents because it's easy and less risky than going after the guilty? You're probably right, but it's not a flattering view of the rioters.

<comment><USER13> > hurting their fellow innocents

Are you talking about property damage, or actual violence like police killing unarmed black folks?

<comment><USER12> I am talking about the potential for injury (as always exists with fires, looting, and the like, here exemplified by the wheelchair-bound woman sprayed with a fire extinguisher), as well as the property damage, which often causes stress and emotional injury.

It's also easy to forget that the people most harmed by looting are usually members of the (original) victims' own communities.

<comment><USER14> Maybe if she didn't want to be sprayed with a fire extinguisher she shouldn't have stabbed shoplifters with a knife.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> FTA: "Unarmed Predator drones were first used within the United States in 2012, when the Department of Homeland Security flew one over the property of a cattle farmer named Rodney Brossart to surveil him, and to help end a 16-hour standoff between him and another rancher over a stolen-cattle dispute. The use was highly controversial at the time; since then, CBP has used drones hundreds of times, and has not kept very good records about their use."

That strikes me as a highly unexpected and odd situation to be the catalyst for "OK'ing" use within US.

<comment><USER16> False; Katrina & US border patrol was what officially sparked the call to (publicly) use drones in the US.

CBP has used drones with FAA approval within the US since 2006; which does not included any use prior to 2006 which remains classified.

SOURCE: [https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115491642950528436](https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB115491642950528436)

<comment><USER17> Odd question. The thing that I find odd about it is the jurisdiction of US border patrol here. Why would the government call them as opposed to, say, national guard? I am curious.

<comment><USER18> Probably because US border patrol has aerial surveillance vehicles and lots of experience in their use, and the national guard likely does not

<comment><USER16> They both have experience, US National Guard would require DoD approval to fly domestic missions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> The tracking website has some great info, like this RC-26B with electronic surveillance hardware headed for Louisville:

[https://tar1090.adsbexchange.com/?icao=adfd7f](https://tar1090.adsbexchange.com/?icao=adfd7f)

[https://www.flickr.com/photos/eigjb/3460872978](https://www.flickr.com/photos/eigjb/3460872978)

And this is the track of the drone over Minneapolis, which seemed to veer off around the time the story came out:

[https://tar1090.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae4bd7](https://tar1090.adsbexchange.com/?icao=ae4bd7)

<comment><USER20> Perhaps you or someone else knows, but I frequent the [https://tar1090.adsbexchange.com](https://tar1090.adsbexchange.com) website often and I see unusual tail numbers listed and I can't figure out why they are listed as such. They may not even be military aircraft but just small aircraft.

The tail number in this example below is _AE0B60 and registration is n/a

Here's an example screenshot of what I mean [https://imgur.com/a/A1p4N2c](https://imgur.com/a/A1p4N2c)

Does anyone what this is, or why they don't have 'normal' registration info on adsb?

<comment><USER21> That's an ICAO/hex code. The transponder ping always includes that information, and then tar1090 tries to look it up in a database for other information, like the registration. If it can't find it in the database, then it just displays the code.

Codes that begin with AE are military aircraft, which don't appear in any official (e.g. FAA) database. Enthusiasts have built somewhat ad hoc databases that include many, but not all of the military ICAOs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Am I correct in assuming this is actively recording footage that will be processed later to identify the paths of criminals?

edit: Interesting, I left this post an hour ago and it was getting upvotes, now it's negative with no negative responses. I wish the down arrow only worked on posts you replied to first.

<comment><USER23> You are correct, and you should be more worried about pervasive surveillance than about the government taking your guns.

<comment><USER24> I'm not sure why the concern has to be mutually exclusive. The magic of "and" vs the tyranny of "or".

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I don't really see the issue here with a surveillance drone to help keep the peace. I don't really care if it's "military technology" or not. Look, what happened was absolutely awful. People have a right to protest - and should, but peacefully. Riots, looting, burning buildings? Sorry, that's going to far.

If the government starts firing rockets at people from that drone - <USER2> that's another story. But that is _clearly_ not what is happening here.

<comment><USER19> Well this is what we get for not listening. If your family and friends were being executed constantly you'd give up and rage too. Everyone has a breaking point - republicans were about to riot over wearing a mask to protect their families; these people are rioting over being murdered and ignored.

Disproportionate and inconsistent application are also a huge issue here - where were the drones when domestic terrorists took over the statehouse? If this technology is only going to be used against black people, then yes, it an incredibly dangerous thing

<comment><USER26> If someone is unhappy about not being listened to and their response is to burn down half a neighborhood in my city maybe there was a good reason we weren't listening to everything they had to say. They don't seem interested in reasoning, only in taking what they want by force.

The armed protesters in Michigan were being jackasses but afaik they didn't start looting or committing arson (or even hurt anyone for that matter). There is no equivalence here, it's just as much a bullshit "both sides" argument as the one trump made three years ago.

<comment><USER18> Well, obviously that's not a reasonable _first_ reaction, but if all the reasonable avenues of getting people's grievances addressed have not succeeded, then it's kind of inevitable that it will escalate to unreasonable responses.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> It is always, always, always true that when something is sold as protecting you it actually exists to control you.

</comment><comment><USER28> There's some insane shit happening in Minneapolis but using an unarmed drone to get a better picture of an unfolding riot doesn't seem...that weird?

</comment><comment><USER29> I really respect ADS-B exchange choosing to not block anything like the commercial alternatives do. Those block anything military and many private jets etc from their views. Basically anyone who asks is excluded from view.

Of course anyone with a $10 RTLSDR stick can see this info too but ADS-B exchange make it much more accessible.

</comment><comment><USER30> At what point does this violate the Possee Comitatus ?

From my perspective militarizing the police crossed the line some time ago

</comment><comment><USER31> "The drone flown over Minneapolis is an unarmed version of the aircraft."

</comment><comment><USER32> This is almost quaint compared to what Persistent Surveillance Systems is doing over Baltimore right now.

[https://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2020/04/30/aerial...](https://www.bizjournals.com/baltimore/news/2020/04/30/aerial- surveillance-planes-to-begin-flying-over.html)

</comment><comment><USER33> Can a TV news channel operate one as well?

<comment> kube-system The requirements for broadcast news are usually satisfied by much cheaper UAVs.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> Are they going to launch a hellfire missile on these innocent unarmed black Americans too?

These people are poor, and are just afraid of getting killed and oppressed, by the predatory capitalistic and systemically racist American system.

</comment><comment><USER35> Surveillance of the police by the public is good, police body cams are good, but airborne public surveillance of everyone is bad? If so, why?

<comment><USER36> People shouldn't be surveilled by the government without probable cause.

<comment><USER37> I'm 100% in favor of the protestors' cause, but if you want probable cause, burning down a police station, housing unit, and nearby businesses certainly qualifies.

<comment><USER36> And what about all the other people caught in the dragnet? Most of whom presumably did nothing. These people have no idea if they are also being surveilled. I mean, who knows what else the government is doing "while they're there."

There are smaller aerial drones that could be used, which would capture the same _relevant_ footage, without the potentially miles-wide dragnet. That's my main objection here: innocent people shouldn't have to give up their rights because the government can justify it. A good justice system would do their best get the minimum amount of information necessary, in order to protect the innocent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Searching for contraband and illegal aliens no doubt [https://www.cbp.gov/about](https://www.cbp.gov/about)

</comment><comment><USER39> I see that there's a plausible connection, but the phrase "predator drone" is a bit of a loaded phrase. While Minneapolis is embroiled in riots, I think this article may be Stokes paranoia a little bit.

<comment><USER10> iirc it's the equally poorly named Reaper drone that is armed and the one to be worried about. The predator drone is basically an R/C police helicopter.

However, people have been freaked out about aerial surveillance for decades. It gets the clicks.

<comment><USER40> The MQ-9 Reaper is a larger counterpart to the MQ-1 Predator. They are both designed for military use, both capable of carrying weapons, and both appropriately named given their original intended purpose.

They're also both airplanes. Neither of them resemble a helicopter in any way.</comment></comment></comment>


Crunch Time at AOL - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2010/10/crunch-time-at-aol/

<comment><USER2> _And based on the price Cuban was willing to pay and the relative traffic stats of our two enterprises, I'd say TechCrunch in the current market is worth about $7.5 million._

And in one fell swoop he completely and utterly fails to take into account the difference in _brand_ exposure.

TC are a household name for almost everyone in tech.

(I'm sorry but I really think cringely.com is prime material to be banned from HN, literally every post that I get sucked into clicking through to read has me rolling my eyes in the first paragraph, the guy doesn't have a clue!)

</comment><comment><USER3> Funny I never thought about Google buying a media company. But I disagree with Cringly on one point. Buying Time Warner actually would, in some ways, be a better deal for Google then buying the media arm (AOL). The upside in buying Time Warner is that Google would get control of the cable pipes of the second largest cable company in the US (and the 3rd largest ISP). That's a lot of bandwidth to peoples homes the could get control of. It would give them a ton of leverage in the Net Neutrality argument. As well as tie nicely into their existing plans with YouTube and Google TV. I haven't looked into the AOL/Time Warner financials but if I had to guess TW is also the more profitable arm.

<comment><USER4> Time Warner and Time Warner Cable are not the same company. TWC was spun-off last year, and Aol is also no longer a part of Time Warner.

<comment><USER3> _doh_

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The real point of this article is not Marc Cuban, or Tech Crunch's valuation.

Mainly he's saying that Google wants to buy a media company. Personally, I don't see that happening.

</comment><comment><USER6> This guy is an absolute moron. TechCrunch is going to sell for LESS THAN 1x REVENUES??? Based on this idiot's shitty wannabe banker comp model?

<comment><USER7> I agree with you: it's completely nonsense to sell a company for anything less than 5x annual revenue. However, I'm not so sure about the TC annual revenues you refer to (>7.5MM/year). The only source I could find is a Wired article back from 2007 ([http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-07/ff_arring...](http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/15-07/ff_arrington)), where Arrington says revenues are about 200k/month = 2.4MM/year.

<comment><USER8> Arrington supposedly said it's around $10 million revenue.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-techcrunch- price-25-milli...](http://www.businessinsider.com/aol-techcrunch- price-25-million-2010-9)

[http://www.inc.com/magazine/20101001/the-way-i-work- michael-...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/20101001/the-way-i-work-michael- arrington-techcrunch.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article is non sense. Techcrunch $7.5m ?? The only goal of Cringely here is to brag that Mark Cuban was interest to buy a part of his business...

Even Calacanis said that Techcrunch worth around $25m...

<comment><USER3> _Even Calacanis said that Techcrunch worth around $25m..._

Of course he did - that's what he sold Weblogs Inc to them for...

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I so wanna make a pun on his name in regards to this article. The whole conceit is silly. It's like he's crying over spilled milk in regards to perceived relevance vs. actual relevance.

</comment><comment><USER11> He answers his own question - AOL paid a higher multiple for the TechCrunch brand's goodwill value.

That's not unusual whatsoever.</comment>


Show HN: Employee equity made simple - <AUTHOR> Hey folks,
I'm Florent, ex- YC founder (Skylights S16). I'm currently building https://quid.li with Justin (KPMG, Rocket Internet) and Gagan (Vetted, Origin Protocol).
Quidli allows business owners to create company equity plans and share equity with employees in just a few clicks.
We help business owners to fill all necessary details with user-friendly UX designed to help them understand the implications of their actions. Then, legally binding contracts are created and sent for signature to the appropriate persons via HelloSign.
Using Quidli, it's possible to complete, for free, an equity distribution to employees in less than 10 minutes. There's no need to involve a law firm or to spend a lot of time to understand all the legal details.
We're doing the following:
- For this MVP, we address only the case of C-corps in Delaware. This represents a majority of US startups so we can focus on making a great product for a single use case (YC style).
- Our templates offer the right degree of customization. There's less customizability than if you use your lawyer, but we boiled down the process to the absolute necessities so that using Quidli should be a no-brainer for startups.
- Our templates are built by a law firm we partnered with, and we put a lot of attention in being sure that neither a client company nor its employees will end up screwed by common pitfalls, like for example having to exercise options with no cash.
- Our process uses RSUs designed to vest at a company's exit. One of the main advantages is to protect the RSU owner from having to pay any taxes on their equity before their company reaches an exit event.
We just released our open MVP so we'd love to get feedbacks. Also, if you're interested in using it but would like to talk first, don't hesitate to reach me directly: email@example.com
- Website: https://quid.li - Medium blog: https://medium.com/quidli - Product demo: https://youtu.be/050ATDSmQ3k
Thanks <comment><USER2> Looks cool. Really do want to give real equity to my employees. Will check out.

<comment><AUTHOR> Cool, don't hezitate to shoot me a message to give your feedback or if you meet any difficulty in the process</comment></comment>


MoMA Will Make Thousands of Exhibition Images Available Online - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/15/arts/design/moma-will-make-thousands-of-exhibition-images-available-online.html <comment><USER2> Where can I find the images?

All I see are tiny photographs of the exhibition space. [http://moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1220/installation_image...](http://moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1220/installation_images/37?locale=en)

I hoped for each artwork having a deep-zoom, clean, frontal photograph with optional banana/human/car for scale.

Film and Sound would lend itself even better to the internet. (see [http://www.ubuweb.com/](http://www.ubuweb.com/) )

edit: ok, found some. 2000px max, obtrusive viewer (that red close button on the image, ugh) without zoom (just some semi-fullscreen) : [http://moma.org/collection/works/192537?locale=en](http://moma.org/collection/works/192537?locale=en)

How to do it right (try both, "view in room" and zoom: [https://www.artsy.net/artwork/antonio-ballester-moreno- the-s...](https://www.artsy.net/artwork/antonio-ballester-moreno-the-shapes- of-letters-1)

And of course no sound/video, would probably be too good for us or something...

<comment><USER3> Hi anotheryou, For full disclosure, I'm one of the Devs that worked on this project though these opinions are completely my own. We agree that the ugly red X is ugly, it's just part of an old design, that will still be around for a bit, but not too long. We actually used to have a zoom, the problem is that unlike Artsy, we do not have the full rights for these images, even though MoMA might own the artwork. Image rights for modern art are complex, and we removed it not to long ago. We legally can't put out images larger than 2000x2000, so we decided to use tiling to get around that. That was until people started to paste them back together and got a very high res image, so we took it down (for now). In the end, this was an archives project, which means dealing with a lot of old material. We are the first (or at least one of) that opens up our archives in such a way. And as it should be with big IT projects, this was an MVP of course. I really wish I could have been there to take a picture with Audrey Hepburn and a banana for scale :D

<comment><USER2> Thanks for the personal reply. Of course I'm glad you made the effort and it's amazing so much has made it online after all. I suspected rights where an issue and part of my critic was based on the anger about the protective art world in general (I really love the open internet and the art world makes it very hard to share and debate it online).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is the dream of the internet making culture available to the masses. I've loved Google Art Project for a while, and news of more art coming online is fantastic. My wife is an art teacher and this kind of news makes her giddy.

<comment><USER5> Aren't museums open to the masses already? For example I was at the Louvre about a year ago and shocked at the casualness that tourists touched hundreds of years old objects with -- even when these objects had do not touch signs on them. What scares me is that our culture will wind up in the homes and offices of the wealth, truly hidden away from the masses. Seeing the way some museums "guard" their art, I'm really surprised donors still let us mere mortals breathe on their million dollar investments.

<comment><USER6> The masses cannot afford trips to Paris.

<comment><USER5> There are also masses in Europe. About 500 million I believe, and regardless there are art museums near almost everyone in all developed countries.

<comment><USER7> Even if there is _an_ art museum near you, there may not be _the_ art museum that hosts the particular piece of art that will change your life. Your comment sounds to me like it opposes making as much work as possible available to as many people as possible, which surely isn't what you meant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's great that they're making these available, but I hope people don't use this as a substitute for actually going to the museum. Art is something best experienced in person. While a Jackson Pollock seems ridiculous on a computer screen, its scale and grandeur are something else in person.

<comment><USER9> Also I hope people who go to museum would refrain from photographing and actually enjoy the art experience while there. MoMa especially was very bad in this regard and it was very difficult to look at anything and not be asked to move out of way. Some museums ban photography and I think it makes them much more enjoyable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> The dataset of all MoMA exhibition metadata is already public ([https://github.com/MuseumofModernArt/collection](https://github.com/MuseumofModernArt/collection)) so this is a logical progression.

</comment><comment><USER11> Finally, pg's original startup vision of putting art museums online is achieved!

<comment><USER12> [https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/](https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Cool, they should use HoloLens or VR to do a 3D virtual show room. Something like this would be nice: [https://m.reddit.com/r/HoloLens/comments/53lfmt/someone_crea...](https://m.reddit.com/r/HoloLens/comments/53lfmt/someone_created_a_mini_model_of_his_living_room/)

<comment><USER3> I know right! I have in my space time actually played around with something similar for this project, and at least for some exhibitions this is something that could be done in the future. Maybe some next incarnation might include this ;)

ps: For full disclosure, I'm one of the Devs that worked on this project though these opinions are completely my own

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> Good idea, guys.

</comment><comment><USER15> They should.

</comment><comment><USER16> I guess 15 years too late is better than never.</comment>


Ask HN: Do you find it annoying when an external link opens in the same tab? - <AUTHOR> Several sites I use every day (like this very HN and Stack Overflow) don't open external links in a new tab.<p>Sometimes I forget to press the control button, and the page I'm reading is gone when I click on a link. Of course I can get back to where I was with a single click (or button press), but I feel betrayed, every single this happens. <comment><USER2> What? No. The opposite, really. If I want a link to open in a new tab, I will do it myself. It annoys me much more when a site creates a new tab for me.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yep. I even read about some designers adding this to their no-no list. The user _must_ have the choice to when to create a new tab. But living in a country with just 3G on our mobile phones (4G is hopefully coming early next year), it can sometimes be very very annoying.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I don't find it annoying. I use my browser features. It's more annoying if you've types a few hundred words in a text entry box.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's definitely item 2 on my most annoying-stuff-list!

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> A little bit. I think it's considered bad practice to create a link that opens a new tab automatically, one is supposed to let the user decide how they want to follow the link.

</comment><comment><USER5> I only really expect a new tab in apps that would be interupted/broken by opening the page in the same tab or maybe inside long-form texts. Generally pages, esp. aggregators like HN or reddit, shouldn't do it.

If you prefer it for specific pages, things like that are a good use case for userscripts.

</comment><comment><USER6> [https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll](https://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll) awesome HN power user feature

<comment><AUTHOR> Sounds cool, but unfortunately not enough karma to use it. Karma is a b __ __, isn 't?

<comment><USER7> How many karma's does one need to have that feature?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> It does bother me, yes. However, I've gotten in the habit of just middle- clicking on links (opening them in a new tab) regardless of the site I'm on.

<comment><AUTHOR> Using mostly my laptop, I sometimes forget to press the control button, especially when on 'deep focus mode' and, boom :/

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> No.</comment>


Cringely Predicts: Eric Schmidt may replace Steve Ballmer - <AUTHOR> http://www.cringely.com/2012/01/prediction-7-a-new-microsoft-ceo/

<comment><USER2> Cringely's predictions are occasionally fun to read, but I regard him as a fiction author whose genre is West Coast technology firms.

Eric Schmidt's executive experience includes Sun Microsystems, Novell, and Google, and he spent time on Apple's board of directors. How could Microsoft staff and stockholders NOT treat Eric-as-CEO as a middle finger to the last decade's efforts? I imagine the stock price would be savaged by such a choice.

</comment><comment><USER3> Ballmer already stated he's not leaving until 2017. Unless some kind of corporate catastrophe suddenly occurs, I have no reason not to believe him.

</comment><comment><USER4> This would be the best thing Microsoft would never do. I'd sure like to see it happen though.

</comment><comment><USER5> IF Eric Schmidt will do no evil,

AND doing no evil would wreck Microsoft's business,

AND wrecking Microsoft's business would do evil to Microsoft shareholders,

THEN Eric Schmidt cannot be CEO of Microsoft.

</comment><comment><USER6> obviously there will be a new ceo at some point. time passes.

it will not be schmidt.</comment>


What do you dislike about React Native? - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/react-native-community/discussions-and-proposals/issues/64 <comment><USER2> I will probably be heavily downvoted but here goes nothing. I have not used React Native yet, but I followed and was heavily invested in the "write once deploy anywhere" trend between 2009 - 2014.

From phonegap (before it became cordova), to Adobe Air with it's bad performance and "native extensions", to Appcelerator Titanium that put a nodejs server in your phone and even had Windows Phone 7 support, to cordova, to Haxe, to sencha and others. Appcelerator Titanium was the only ones that did real native for some cases like scrollviews, Haxe used custom C++ apis, the rest used webviews, and adobe air was basically flash emulated that ran like shit.

Write once deploy anywhere, meant write once, deploy somewhat anywhere, spend double the time to make that promise true. Kinda like having to do IE6 support in the past. I was deep in that madness up until mid-2014. At that point I decided to buy a macbook and give native development a try (obj-c for ios and java for android -- When I say native I mean real native and not React Native).

What a magical experience! Things that are tough to do in web even today, like real never-ending scroll lists, are a breeze in native with their reusable cells. Things like standard headers and modals, are already built in and a few lines away. And I actually prefer the touch event handlers on both ios and android to the web's "mouse/touch/PointerEvents" ones.

I do not understand why web developers have such a knee jerk reaction to native development. ObjectiveC/Swift and Java are actually easy to write. Tooling (especially for ios) is fantastic. In my experience, it is much faster to write UI interfaces in Objective C and Swift (I never use xcode's UI builder) than html+JS. But the real joy is being able to harness the real power of your phone. I run some C++ algorithms on both ios and android (I guess C/C++ is the original cross platform) that on android are faster than the built-in Java apis themselves! And of course, true multithreading!

But here we are, non-stop chasing the "no! I want javascript in my frontend, and in my servers, and javascript in my ios apps and android too!" dream.

Perhaps React Native accomplishes that. I hope it really does and solves that decade-long promise of "write once deploy anywhere". I guess all what I 'm trying to say is, don't be afraid of native people! Web devs are willing to go through insane hoops and loops instead of just... giving the real thing a go. So weird.

<comment><USER3> Everyone intrinsically understands that native is better, and I'm saying this as somebody who runs a 120k LoC Electron app ([https://getaether.net](https://getaether.net)) myself.

I'm painfully aware that native is better, all day, every day.

The problem is this: I'm a solo founder. I am both the engineer and designer (and PM). The alternative for me would be not to write a Mac app, a Windows app, and a Linux app separately, and have them work.

The alternative would be for Aether to _not exist_.

You're expressing a sentiment that everyone feels, but you're off on why — it's not change aversion, but the simple fact that these technologies make trying new things cheaper, things, by definition, that would be too expensive to try in slower-to-build tech.

In my case, a compromise I found worked was to use JS for just the UI and write all code that does something in Go. Since that code is native binary, it's fast and efficient. Vue in Electron handles the 'client' UI, and interacts with the Go app binaries via gRPC.

<comment><USER4> But why Electron? There are other cross-platform solutions with great performance.

<comment><USER5> There are no equivalents to electron. You either use a browser, or you get stuck in someone else's lacking UI, like qt. Electron just works, and that's why it's everywhere.

<comment><USER6> Qt actually performs better than Electron and works everywhere and

<comment><USER7> What you want is cross-platform:

      - Web (IE, Safari, Firefox, Chrome, and older versions of those browsers)
      - Web responsive (When you access it from small screens or access the web from your phone's browser)
      - Android (old devices to recent ones)
      - iOS (old devices to recent ones)
      - And, eventually, get to a desktop app, ideally on windows, mac and linux.

Say you're the tech lead and you need to make a decision about the stack to support all these platforms, and you're a team of 2-3 devs, yourself included. What stack do you pick?

<comment><USER8> The fact is, only very rarely are you in a team of 2-3 devs and you need to support ALL of these platforms. If that's the case for a small startup, serious strategic errors and lack of focus is being made by the founders!

Even Instagram didn't even have an Android app until they were acquired, and then it still took them another couple of years to support web. Their focus was their success.

<comment><USER9> To be fair, Instagram didn't have an Android app a long while ago. The Android market & demographic has changed a lot since, with high-end Android phones sporting great screens, cameras and costing nearly as much as the iPhone.

An Instagram launching today would see much greater pressure to be on Android sooner rather than later.

<comment><USER8> That's true, and a good point that I should take into account when confronted with this decision in future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Companies and teams don't usually pick non-native solutions because they're better tech. Non-native solutions are picked so that teams can be more efficient with their time/resources. For some teams, that means delivering an app cheaper. For other teams, that means being able to spread resources thinner and stretch budgets. This doesn't have to be a bad thing per se, it's just a business decision.

As a former iOS engineer, I for one really enjoy React Native. But I feel like it's focus is trying to maintain/supersede native development, where it's time and attention would be better served focusing on the efficiency of average developers on average tasks

<comment><USER11> Great insight. How can we use something similar to Interface Builder to create React Native apps?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For me it feels like RN is still not ready for an enjoyable development experience (it feels more around alpha/beta version), which maybe it is because the version is 0.57 or somewhere around that. The main problems I have with RN are:

* Cryptic error messages. Out of maybe hundreds of errors/crashes I had while developing a medium sized app, only a few of them provided useful info about what/where happened.

* Lot's of outdated/abandonware/low-quality libs in the ecosystem. You really have to be careful when picking the dependencies.

* Fragile and complex builds. You'll have to use dependencies to make anything more than a basic app (unless you want to DIY), so get ready for some "fun" when upgrading the project because not all of the dependencies will be upgraded at the same time, might also often have the APK/IPA or development builds fail because of dependencies not properly installing or not playing nicely with one another.

* Lots of little stuff. For example, I had the ios simulator logs not work out of the box when launching with "react-native log-ios", so had to use a third-party solution for that. Metro bundler sometimes just breaks. I still have a problem of the app randomly closing down after some time on iOS, which I did not look deeply into yet but will have to solve before release. Constant issues with nesting scroll views on android. Hard to predict cross-platform inconsistencies in layout behaviour in some places. Can't name everything right now but they played on the nerves throughout the development.

I hope it gets better some day, but until then I'll probably look for alternatives for my next project as I wasn't very happy with RN.

<comment><USER13> This is a good and fair summary. It is a frustrating developer experience for sure - especially Android.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> I tried RN in early 2016 but Android support and documentation were not great.

Honestly, I've always thought that RN (and similar approaches) is kinda a hack. Yes, it solves a problem of reducing developer time across platforms, but it introduces other more obscure problems. A JavaScript engine with it's own set of problems giving orders through some bridge to the native part... I don't know, it's a lot of moving pieces.

I feel Flutter is so much more solid in this respect. The approach has been used countless times by game engines such as Unity, UE, etc. The part where Google has to replicate the UI elements of each platform is not amazing, but otherwise I feel it's a much more solid approach than RN.

<comment><USER15> I got a similar impression from ReactNative: it felt like a hack, and the hack came apart at the seams if you tried to debug it.

Similarly, Flutter felt much more like a cohesive solution compared to RN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> * Javascript

* NPM

* It's still 0.59 or something and things are constantly breaking

* Because of that every piece of information older than 1 month should be distrusted

* App size

* It doesn't play well when you try to gradually replace or add RN screens to an existing application.

* There are multiple ways to do the same thing

* It adds another layer on top of the iOS and Android builds

<comment><USER17> * Javascript

* NPM

* It's still 0.59 or something and things are constantly breaking

* Because of that every piece of information older than 1 month should be distrusted

* App size

* It doesn't play well when you try to gradually replace or add RN screens to an existing application.

* There are multiple ways to do the same thing

* It adds another layer on top of the iOS and Android builds

<comment><USER16> Thanks! Fixed it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> You can develop native apps in languages that range from ok, to really good (Java -> Swift). Javascript is a terrible language for many reasons (lack of a decent standard lib, weak typing, foot guns galore, psychotic build pipeline and tooling...). React Native encourages more JS development so I dislike it for that reason.

<comment><USER19> Thanks for "foot guns". Have never heard it but like it!

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> it'd be cool if there was a simple way to create typescript react-native app, similar to create-react-native-app[1] without a dependency on Babel[2]

[1] [https://facebook.github.io/react- native/blog/2017/03/13/intr...](https://facebook.github.io/react- native/blog/2017/03/13/introducing-create-react-native-app)

[2] [https://facebook.github.io/react- native/blog/2018/05/07/usin...](https://facebook.github.io/react- native/blog/2018/05/07/using-typescript-with-react-native)

</comment><comment><USER21> It would be tight if we could purge from the web all posts and threads related to unsupported and outdated ReactNative versions.

It's actually quite interesting to see the almost in real-time development of ReactNative through the lens of hobbled and broke-ass solutions to problems associated with deprecated RN versions posted on StackOverflow or Medium.

<comment><USER22> This is actually a problem that could be solved by naming actually.

Angular has a similar problem because if you search for an olde version of Angular you get 2.x and they're up to 7 now...

I think at some point it makes sense to rename the project to avoid the cruft of the past when it really deserves it.

<comment><USER17> I'm emphatically _not_ a front end dev, but recently I've needed to do some front end work on an existing AngularJs project. It took me about an hour to realize that AngularJs != Angular. A bunch of examples weren't working and I just couldn't figure out why...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> A few friends and I have noticed that applications that are using React Native, even in the best of situations in optimizing, it still drains battery life faster (sometimes far faster) than something written in Java/Kotlin or ObjC/Swift.

<comment><USER8> Do you have any examples of that, and how do you determine which apps are built with RN?

I've noticed a similar thing, but have nothing to go on but my gut instinct. For instance, I'm pretty sure that the food ordering app Ritual is using RN, it just doesn't feel quite native.

<comment><USER23> I'm a little late to reply. I use Discord and Slack a lot which uses RN but I've noticed that there are frame stutters when scrolling or when viewing gifs, and other chat applications like Telegram (native) do not have this problem. The stuttering is how I notice if they're using RN or not here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> app bloat, the app size is too big for a simple example

</comment><comment><USER25> I think it's constructive to point out that maybe the entire project, being a "hack" of sorts that tends to breed more hacks and more debt, ultimately isn't useful or valuable. The idea is wonderful, but in practice I still have to maintain cross-platform code that has nothing to do with wireup, and honestly think everyone should seriously consider writing portable code and plugging it into truly native projects.

React Native multiplies the complexity of a project so much that IMHO it completely negates its own usefulness.</comment>


Bank of Amer freezing accounts of customers suspected of not being US citizens - <AUTHOR> https://www.sacbee.com/news/business/article217567300.html <comment><USER2> Banks are always like that. They are more than happy to take your money, but unwilling to let you take it out for spurious reasons.

<comment><USER3> The reason being that if they appear insufficiently zealous in acting as a private enforcement arm for the authorities they will suddenly lose their ability to do business.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17879042](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17879042)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17575213](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17575213)</comment>


Scientists create light from vacuum - <AUTHOR> http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-11-scientists-vacuum.html

<comment><USER2> What!?

This is just incorrect. They aren't creating light from vacuum - they are simply creating light in _exactly_ the same way that antennas create light.

Antennas create light (electromagnetic energy) by vibrating electrons at the same frequency of the light they want to create.

Here they are also vibrating electrons at the frequency of light. "several billions of times a second" - frequency of microwaves? Ghz. Exactly the same.

Accelerating an electron (actually any charged particle) creates light. For example: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchrotron_radiation> You can shake the electron, force it to curve, anything and it will radiate light.

I've often thought that this would be an awesome way to make a laser if you could find a material you can vibrate fast enough.

<comment><USER3> Umm, I'd like to give the scientists involved a benefit of the doubt. The probability that they don't know what they're doing is much lower than the probability that a popularized article about their study is incomplete and/or inaccurate.

The actual paper is available at arxiv and is quite readable: <http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.4714>

<comment><USER2> Well the actual experiment was awesome - full credit for that.

I just don't buy that you need to explain it using virtual photons that bounce of the mirror.

They do write:

"A mirror moving in a finite EM field then losses energy as the screening currents will emit EM radiation, as in an antenna."

And then say you need vacuum fluctuations to explain it still happening without an EM field. And explain it as the vacuum having a random EM field that is acting on the mirror.

I guess that's not quite the same as "virtual photons bouncing on a mirror". But since a charged mirror requires no extra field, and since their mirror basically _is_ charge, I really don't see the need to bring in virtual photons here.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> >What happens during the experiment is that the "mirror" transfers some of its kinetic energy to virtual photons, which helps them to materialise.

how is that different from just saying that their vibrating EM field radiated the energy (a vibrating EM field does radiates the energy and this radiation is photons by definition) without bringing in "virtual photons"

</comment><comment><USER5> Is true that the energy put into the system (in the form of the dynamic mirror) must be the same or greater than the energy of the photons taken out? I don't think this is the "zero-point energy" or "reactionless engine" breakthrough that people on that page are hoping it is.

<comment><USER6> Yes. Bear in mind that each individual photons carries very little energy - the energy required to generate the described 'mirror' is enormous by comparison.

The main value of this is further experimental verification of certain aspects of quantum physics, as mentioned at the bottom of the article.

<comment><USER2> The energy is not in generating the mirror, but in shaking it. That energy is directly used to create the photons.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> And the scientists said, "Let there be light!" And there was light.</comment>


What are the happiest jobs in tech? - <AUTHOR> https://towardsdatascience.com/what-are-the-happiest-jobs-in-tech-4c4d33e065f0 <comment><AUTHOR> What I found interesting about this article was that data scientist/machine learning specialist was in the top 3 happiest jobs whereas business/data analyst was dead last. As the article notes there is a lot of overlap. Working with data scientists, I found that many thought they would be doing applied ml and ended up doing mostly data analysis.

Since the role of a data scientist varies dramatically based on the organization and even the needs of a team, it seems like a job with a very broad spectrum of experiences and satisfaction.</comment>


Omega: Fedora For The Rest of Us - <AUTHOR> http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7450 <comment><USER2> That's a terrible headline.

I find it inspiring that someone in India can "remix" Fedora to account for the fact that they have no software patents in their country and often limited bandwidth which means a more up to date install disc makes sense. It's a good expression of what makes FLOSS special.

I'm not sure how you get from there to the headline though.

</comment><comment><USER3> Here's yet another permutation in the perennial struggle to reconcile the overlapping but not identical principals of open and free software with a practical need to deliver an OS that does what users want and expect.

This is the double-edged sword of Linux: the necessary side-effect that comes from the freedom to create a diverse set of distros that support different communities' values and needs is the very fragmentation that keeps potential adopters too paralyzed by the lack of a clear choice to move forward.

Every new distro that doesn't unify the community (and what distro could possibly do this?) simply fragments it further. Yet clearly the search for a distro that everyone can settle on is still ongoing, which means the Linux community _will_ continue releasing new distros.

In the meantime, most desktop consumers will continue to respond by falling back on the familiar.

<comment><USER4> I've found that to be untrue. Ubuntu managed to largely bring together the desktop Linux community. There are plenty of other distributions around, but there has never been a clearer default choice for new users and OEMs.

<comment><USER3> _Ubuntu managed to largely bring together the desktop Linux community._

In my preparation to respond to your comment, I tried to find some statistics - _any_ statistics - on Ubuntu's marketshare among Linux distributions. Maybe my google-fu is having an off day, but I just can't find anything empirical (searches for Ubuntu in Google Trends don't count, since they don't necessarily correlate with installs).

Does anyone know of any research into this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I thought Ubuntu was Fedora for the rest of us?

But seriously, what are the advantages of Red Hat/Fedora over ubuntu?

<comment><USER4> Ubuntu is Debian for the rest of us.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm glad to see that there's a need for something like Omega; it strengthens my faith in Fedora's adherence to its strict Free / Open Source Software policy. If I ever decide to abandon Debian, at least I'll have somewhere to go. Well, somewhere that isn't gNewSense.</comment>


VentureBeat: Creating a killer team - <AUTHOR> http://venturebeat.com/2007/04/17/creating-a-killer-team/ <comment><USER2> Great article. I especially liked this part:

"I have noticed that in technology we're surrounded by very smart people. IQ is virtually a commodity. However, there are those who are analysts - can ask 1 million questions, and be skeptical of everything; then there are doers, people who apply their intellect and resourcefulness to find solutions. Find those people and keep them close to you. Stay a 100 miles away from the former."</comment>


Simple and Easy: a Vocabulary to Describe Software Complexity - <AUTHOR> http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/simple-and-easy-vocabulary-to-describe-software-complexity

<comment><USER2> These are some notes on Rich Hickey's amazing simple made easy presentation.

I've desperately been needing something to link to when trying to get people using this vocabulary, but the only options were the hour-long video, or the slides which lacked a little bit too much context.

This is only some of the most important parts i needed to share in the first half, there's so much more in there. I highly recommend watching the whole thing

[http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made- Easy](http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy)

</comment><comment><USER3> My takeaway regarding easy meaning "near" was closer to "you already know easy" as opposed to having to still learn it. So easy is more like familiar. Like a programming language, library, framework or style you already know vs one you haven't tried out or aren't experienced in yet.

So "hard" is more like something where you have to put in up-front effort in to understand and you might have to step out of your comfort zone.

But I guess we're mostly in agreement.

<comment><USER2> i updated the language, so that it shows examples of the different senses in which easy can mean 'near'.</comment></comment>


Grandmother ordered to delete Facebook photos under GDPR - <AUTHOR> https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52758787 <comment><USER2> Good! I don't post photos of my kids on the internet and I get so annoyed when other people take it upon themselves to post them for me. Clearview AI has made it even more clear than it already was that any data you give these companies can and will be used against you.

<comment><USER3> My wife and I have the same opinion. So far, both sides of our family are complying to our wishes, except that one or two times my in-laws managed to put our kid in a Facebook story by accident - apparently the Messenger app is confusing enough that they don't even realize when it happens.

<comment><USER4> The trick is to ban visitor smartphones and not to have an account, which is the only way to actually disable Messenger.

<comment><USER5> Which world are you living in where banning visitors having their phones is a reasonable thing to happen?

<comment><USER6> I think it is an over-reaction problems that stem from the fact there aren't established cell-phone norms yet.

Some people expect immediate replies to their text messages. This is a big problem with current teens, where their parents will demand this from them. But even some adults do this with other adults. Some people adapt to this by learning they need to respond to every message asap or else! Other people are more willing to treat phone messaging as something that is strictly asynchronous. I think most people are between these two extremes and vary on a case by case basis.

There also isn't consistent norms with how much phone use is acceptable in front of other people. Some tolerate nearly none (see the person you responded to). Some tolerate use motivated by the social situation (eg you look up something directly related to a conversation). Some tolerate only responding to VIPs (spouse, children). Some tolerate any kind of use as long as it isn't too much (I perceive this to be the most common, but it is also the vaguest). Some tolerate unlimited use (I've seen entire tables of people together at a restaurant on their phones the entire time).

One aspect that I find... disappointing is that an individual person's position on the first issue may not be compatible with the second issue. I know some people who would both demand only social motivated phone use when with others, but also demand immediate responses to their messages. To me these seem fundamentally incompatible.

There also doesn't seem to be a social custom of replying that you are with others and won't be particularly responsive for a while.

<comment><USER3> > _One aspect that I find... disappointing is that an individual person 's > position on the first issue may not be compatible with the second issue._

The worst version of it that I've experienced is a person who unilaterally decides to grant themselves unrestricted use of the phone, while simultaneously demanding I stick to minimum/social-situation use only. This assymetry annoys the hell out of me, and I've had some heated arguments about it. I don't mind if someone is glued to their phone, but I expect to be treated no worse than the person expects to be treated themselves.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Why isn't this between the mother and Facebook? Surely Facebook has some responsibility for posts on their platform. That also seems like a much more scalable as it can be part of flagging process.

<comment> kube-system Facebook really isn't in the business of intermediating domestic (or legal) disagreements.

<comment><USER8> hun? They aren't an intermediary. The pictures are posted on Facebook. They are the primary. It doesn't matter who uploaded them to Facebook.

<comment><USER9> Facebook is not in a position (and shouldn't need to be) to determine who has what rights to what images. They deferred to the governing bodies on this issue, and the courts decided that the parents had the right to demand the photo(s) are taken down. The parents could presumably now go to FB with this ruling and have them take the photos down.

If FB did not defer to another party, they would have to determine if the accusing party has the legal grounds to demand the pictures are removed.

How would FB know that those are the parent's kids? Or that the parents have custody? Or any other nuanced edge case?

It's best for everyone if FB defers to the bodies that defined these laws for judgement. Otherwise, you'll end up in a system like YouTube where copyright protections are easily abused against small organizations that can't fight back.

<comment><USER10> In the US, Facebook legally has to remove a picture of a child under thirteen if requested by a legal guardian. The sole proof required seems to be a check box confirming under threat of perjury that you are their legal guardian. And until your eighteen they have to take down any photos of yourself.

The only abuse case I can imagine would be online bullying, there's little financial incentive like in your YouTube example. And for Facebook, refusing a legitimate act could carry fines while deleting a pic involves little risk.

<comment><USER9> There is a big difference between "refusing a legal act" and refusing to act on unverified information. If it was a GDPR complaint, it should go through the GDPR courts. That's how the system is designed.

Deleting a user's picture incorrectly is absolutely a problem. You now have an avenue for malicious actors to effectively DDOS users by removing all of their photographs with these GDPR requests

<comment><USER10> >You now have an avenue for malicious actors to effectively DDOS users by removing all of their photographs with these GDPR requests

My entire post was just detailing the US system already in place, where they have the powers you described. These malicious actors could only target people under the age of thirteen, there would be little incentive to do such except bullying, and the culprit would like face punishment.

I would hate to see it happen to any child personally, but from Facebook's position there is no risk to them taking it down while leaving the picture up could carry a $40,000 fine.

<comment><USER9> How does Facebook know how old people are in pictures? I mean they invest a lot of time and money into AI, but I don't think they're there yet

<comment><USER10> By their Facebook account, it's the persons current age that matters. I don't know what they do if they don't have one, but I doubt many people without accounts would be targeted for an attack.

<comment><USER9> Ah yes. The most accurate and impossible to forge form of identification, the Facebook page

<comment><USER10> The account asking for the removal being tagged (having their listed dependent tagged,) in a bunch of pictures they want removed gives a pretty good hint.

This system has existed for all of Facebook's history, and doesn't seem to he a huge source of problems. It's abusable, but it takes a decent amount of work, the risk is rather high, and there is no payoff for abusing it. No matter how little we like the system, it functions fine

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> awinter-py this despite granny's TOS clause clearly granting perpetual likeness rights in exchange for periodic babysitting

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm not surprised. Parents have ultimate authority over things affecting their children.

If Mom says no, why should Grandma be allowed to publically(!) post photos, for the whole world to see?

Edit: keep in mind that at least in my country you need permission from the person depicted when publishing a photo of him (with exceptions for important events, important people and so on).

And parents act in stead of the child, legally. When the parents say "no", legally the child has said no.

<comment><USER12> Forget all the family drama for a second, the headline is then

> Person A ordered to remove pictures of person B from facebook.

That's legal? That's not a blatant free speech issue?

(This isn't to say Grandma isn't being an asshole by posting them, but generally you have a right to be an asshole)

Edit: I just want to say I'm pretty happy with the discussion this post generated :) Also, it's been bouncing around from -4 to 0 points repeatedly.

<comment><USER11> In my opinion, there is no free speech issue. But I realize that American customs and jurisprudence see free speech in a vastly more expanded way.

In Europe we generally don't. In Germany we certainly don't.

We have a doctrine of "practical concordance" where all basic rights limit each other and have to be weighed such that all basic rights achieve maximal effect. In a way we're looking for a global maximum, not a local "free speech trumps personal rights" solution.

And on another note: I always find it rich when Americans complain about that. America specifically forged our constitution that way. Free speech was not very important post-war, when de-nazification called for banning books, closing all newspapers, licensing newspapers by publishers who were politically "right".

You got that right back then, I'm not complaining about that. But if you had wanted full American Free Speech in Germany, you could have implemented it with a stroke of a pen. Don't blame us now.

<comment><USER13> I don't think anyone in this thread was involved in the construction of the German constitution.

People are allowed to have opinions in opposition to that of the sitting government, including ones that sat well before we were even born.

<comment><USER14> >People are allowed to have opinions in opposition to that of the sitting government, including ones that sat well before we were even born.

Yes, but they need to justify them. Disregarding tradition goes both ways. You can't brush off the German conception of the law and then just go "well that's censorship bro", which is honestly 90% of the discourse on HN on these issues.

The notion of a 'concordance of legal values' is highly intuitive. There's a very strong case to be made that laws are not sacred, that they serve the public good, and thus ought to be balanced. It's the free speech absolutism that is purely an artefact of American culture, practised virtually nowhere else to this degree.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> And the thing that matters isn't mentioned by BBC?

Was it a public post or private?

BBC doesn't even seem to understand the issue at hand.

Public/The court didn't know - [http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2020/05/privacy- rights-and-soci...](http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/2020/05/privacy-rights-and- social-media-can.html?m=1)

<comment><USER16> First, facebook can stil datamine that photo even if it's not public. Second, if it were private, gradma would still be sharing it with people outside the control of the parents (what if gradma was dating a pedophile?). Third, gradma could've easily changed them to public any time.

<comment><USER15> > First, facebook can stil datamine that photo even if it's not public.

This is not relevant to the article, why can't we just talk about the article. There are plenty of other articles on HN about privacy within applications.

The court specifically mentioned the 'general public'

"The court acknowledged that "it cannot be excluded" that placing a picture on a Facebook or Pinterest page might be exempted from GDPR scrutiny on the basis of this provision, but held that it had not been established that A's pages were inaccessible to the general public."

When you publish on Twitter or Facebook publicly you are no different to a newspaper, you are publishing to the public record.

The BBC clearly doesn't get this, which I assume means a lot of the general public doesn't either with such lousy media.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> How can I explore photos that people I've blocked have uploaded, and get facebook to remove them? Seems like that should be possible.

<comment><USER18> > How can I explore photos that people I've blocked have uploaded, and get > facebook to remove them?

Why do you think you should have the right to review the photos that other people uploaded, whether or not you've blocked them?

<comment><USER17> Oh, I would restrict to photos I'm in

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Good. I hope people do not feel I am being overtly critical, but deleting the photos mean nothing. Once something is posted on the internet, especially Facebook, it can not be un-posted. At least, that is what my understanding is.

<comment><USER20> You're not wrong in the sense that things get cached, mirrored, scraped, etc, and probably live forever inside Facebook's datacenters even when "removed", but there is still a valid case for not wanting the pictures posted on a public profile for all eternity.

<comment><USER21> This is exactly the point: it being in FB's "big pile of everything they've ever seen" is entirely different than it being publicly available.

And therefore there _is_ a purpose to having it taken down.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Does this mean that, broadly, under GDPR if _anyone_ in _any_ photo you've ever taken and put on social media complains, you have to take it down?

Or is this because the subjects are minors? Or some other technicality, like whether or not the photos were taken in a public place or similar?

<comment><USER23> >"Does this mean that, broadly, under GDPR if anyone in any photo you've ever taken and put on social media complains, you have to take it down?"

We can only hope. No one has the right to post a picture of me on the internet anywhere ever for any reason.

<comment><USER24> This is silly. You don't retain any claims on images just because they include you. Extrapolating this idea leads to absurd conclusions.

If I take a photo of a crowd at an NBA game and publish it in a book of NBA photos, should any member of that crowd be able to force the publisher to stop selling the book until they've removed the photo? If not, why should it work differently on the internet?

<comment><USER25> Not to be a stickler, but if you're at an NBA game you contractually agree to allow that photo to be taken and displayed (under US law). Obviously it'd be different under EU law though.

<comment><USER26> GDPR consent cannot be a condition of accessing the service. It also has to be revocable.

<comment> kube-system Does anyone know how EU sports handle this? Do they blur faces of people in the crowd on request?

<comment><USER25> It would be a terrible solution if they did that I hope they don't). I imagine they have specified what the legal basis is for collecting and using the photos and have an exemption outlined for when they receive a deletion request.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The verdict [1, Dutch] is somewhat less interesting than it seems since it was a summary proceedings with both lawyers (and the judge) not really versed in GDPR and due to covid quite limited interaction.

The grandmother could have argued legitimate interest (she is a grandmother and took care of one of the children) and have demonstrated limited visibility (now there was no mention of posting publically or not, so the judge went with publically) and the case would have started to get interesting.

Now it was just a slam dunk. No permission, no argument for use case under GDPR, done.

[1] [https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/inziendocument?id=ECLI:NL:...](https://uitspraken.rechtspraak.nl/inziendocument?id=ECLI:NL:RBGEL:2020:2521)

<comment><USER28> What specific Legitimate Interest necessitates processing of personal data in this particular case? Taking care of the children? If there's a way that she can reasonably accomplish that without posting to Facebook, then it's not covered by Legitimate Interest.

<comment><USER8> She doesn't have to argue that the utility exists for some practical purpose like babysitting - she would only need to argue that the pictures were taken by her, and that she uses them personally to look at the images of her grandchildren for her own personal happiness (which has utility).

<comment><USER29> The Legitimate Interests basis for processing personal data is a qualified one, though:

>processing is necessary for the purposes of the legitimate interests pursued by the controller or by a third party, except where such interests are overridden by the interests or fundamental rights and freedoms of the data subject which require protection of personal data, in particular where the data subject is a child.

So where there is any doubt one must test the idea that the data subject's rights outweigh one's legitimate interests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The headline of this is so clickbaity in making it sound like some little old grandma posted pictures of her vacation and big evil government made her remove them.

She posted pictures of grandchildren against their mother's wishes. She's just being selfish, and the fact that she's a grandmother isn't really germane to anything.

<comment><USER31> The description of the defendant as "a grandma" is definitely meant to get you on a particular side of the story before even reading it.

<comment><USER32> She's not called "a grandma" which is folksy and so you would be correct.

She's referred to as "grandmother" to indicate the relationship which is relevant to the story and the presumable toxicity of the situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > The woman must remove the photos or pay a fine of €50 (£45) for every day > that she fails to comply with the order, up to a maximum fine of €1,000

Does that mean you can just write a check to not be covered by the GDPR?

<comment><USER34> Yes, but you'd better have a big checkbook: willful violations of the GDPR scale up to 4% or €20m of annual global revenue - whichever is _higher_.

<comment><USER35> What's grandma's global revenue?

<comment><USER36> In most cases, less than €500M.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Am I the only person to think that even _parents_ should not be able to post - for anything other than a transient period (maybe not even that) - photos of kids in a _public_ web space?

It has always seemed obnoxious to me, the choice being made on somebody else's behalf to consign their privacy to the dustbin for eternity through this method.

<comment><USER36> Social and legal norms give parents _astonishingly_ broad powers over their children's lives; this is indeed an important decision, but not any _more_ important than the other things parents can decide uni-/bi-laterally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Who took the pictures? In a sane legal system it would boil down purely to who owns the copyright, barring an exceptional circumstance like revealing medical information. This privacy stuff has gone to absurd extremes. Soon it will be illegal to say someone's name without written permission over there. What a crazy legal landscape Europe is.

<comment><USER38> What on earth are you on.

My picture is mine. Not the person who took the picture.

I hate family members who think they're somehow entitled to me and my body and my face. Like no. I will be the person deciding what I'm comfortable with.

<comment><USER39> So do you just have a problem with people posting photos of you on social media, or even just having photos with you in them for their own memories? It seems like your critique would apply equally to both.

<comment><USER16> Do you go around projecting your memories on a public display accessible to anyone, any system, any algorithm, any time, possibly forever?

<comment><USER40> Not personally but some people do and it's their right to do so. It's basic right of expression.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Control your local uTorrent, Bittorrent client with Angular.js - <AUTHOR> http://schizoduckie.github.io/DuckieTorrent/

<comment><USER2> I would suggest to SchizoDuckie to remove/redo the screenshot because of self- incriminating info.

<comment><AUTHOR> SchizoDuckie is based in The Netherlands and therefore by law allowed to download movies and stuff for personal use from the internet.

We Dutchies pay a fee on top of every media storage device that's supposed to somehow make it's way back into the entertainment industry.

<comment><AUTHOR> (having said that, i've updated the screenshot with a more up-to-date one that shows the full thing)

<comment><USER3> Always better not to be the tall grass :)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Laid Off or Lonely, You May Be Lucky - <AUTHOR> http://www.startupsopensourced.com/2011/05/26/laid-off-or-lonely-you-may-be-lucky/ <comment><USER2> Am I missing the point here? There are a few people who did get lucky by being laid off or alone. What about all of the other unemployed or lonely people who do these same things and don't get the same breaks?

<comment><USER3> I suspect the intended message is that one should look for opportunity in such things rather than just seeing the bad part. The reference to "luck studies" makes me think that. I tend to be "lucky" in some ways. I also am someone who tries to view life experiences in neutral terms rather than "good" or "bad" and to look for what positives there are in a situation. I don't think those two details are unrelated. Does it suck to be laid off? Sure. Does that mean you have to surrender yourself to just feeling like a victim and loser? No. Those folks who do well in life tend to see opportunity where others only see adversity. Sharing that insight is typically intended to help others succeed, not intended to pooh-pooh their very real suffering and hardships. Unfortunately, it seems to often be interpreted negatively.

Of course, I could just be mistaking my own belly-button for someone else's motives. <shrug>

<comment><USER4> I think you summed it up pretty well. The post started with the idea of "how to find cofounders" as one of the most difficult things founders deal with. I'm challenging the notion that you have to be out there and aggressive about it; instead, take your time with it and allow serendipity to work in your favor. It's a different way of thinking and hopefully something biz students will try out (keep in mind, the main audience for my book is high school and college students).

There's also the idea of negative circumstances happening to you which may end up being positive (back to the serendipity theme). The point of this is to try and show people who are in seemingly negative situations that it could turn out very well for them (Steve Jobs reference to connecting the dots). Bad things happen to good people, but luck still has a big role to play, and sometimes it might be beneficial to experiment here: pause your agenda and just go make some friends and be normal instead of trying to control everything. See if it works out better.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Getting laid off/being unemployed or being depressed by the status quo (your existing job) are all the same. Once you are so desperate, you can take any risk because any risk is better than the bottom line.

<comment><USER6> when you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> Getting laid off cam be a blessing in disguise.</comment>