Help I'm accidentally stealing people's identities and I don't know how to stop - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/15/help-im-accidentally-stealing-peoples-identities-and-i-dont-know-how-to-stop

<comment><AUTHOR> This happens to me _all the time_. I own the domain jgc.org and there's a domain igc.org and lots and lots of people type the wrong address.

I used to get all the flight itineraries for a senior member of the Hewlett family because of an igc/jgc error. Here's a selection of recent subject lines:

        Ellen Bass + Chana Bloch/ Islamic Cultural Center Show
        Reminder: Prayer event at Hispanic church in Amsterdam, NY on May 16
        Torah Study in Loving Memory of Belda Kaufman Lindenbaum Z"L
        The Magic Flute at Cynthia Woods Mitchell Pavilion
        You are invited to "SPJ Luncheon May 19th - Hon. James McHugh

And that doesn't include the really personal emails where people send photos of their children, vacations, etc. Invite people to dinner, tell them what a great time they had etc. etc.

<comment><USER2> Fifty or sixty years ago, a cousin had a telephone number that was one digit off from a big taxi company's. I suppose that this is modern equivalent.

<comment><USER3> i have the same number but different area code as a taxi cab, and i used to get at least one call or voicemail a week in spanish (which i dont speak) to send a taxi. online translation isnt fast enough for a conversation.

finally saw the taxi one day in front of my office, and they didn't print the area code on the cab.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> There's a balance to be struck between the "easy-to-spell-and-remember" versus the "people-are-unlikely-to-get-this-mixed-up." I've inadvertently gone with the latter, and thereby the main problem is people unable to contact me at all because they can't remember the domain name.

<comment><USER5> I use me [at] m28.io, a lot of people ask "Is that a real email?" when they see it. It's quite amusing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> blackhats have been known to do this. register freshly dropped domains and setup a catch all email for it.</comment>


Solving Intelligence vs. Accelerating Towards AI Winter: Which Goal Is Better? - <AUTHOR> http://www.inference.vc/solve-intelligence/ <comment><USER2> > 1\. winter scenario

> 2\. holy shit scenario

3\. continued enthusiasm, based on actual results

There are so many applications of current deep learning techniques that we have decades of work ahead, and that will keep AI from wintering out. If we applied what we know so far on current problems, in various domains, it would be revolutionary by itself.

The state of AI penetration into the world is like personal computing in 1980's. The really great applications haven't yet been realized, and it's just a matter of applying knowledge.</comment>


HE-Transformer: Deep Learning Inference with Homomorphic Encryption - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/NervanaSystems/he-transformer <comment><USER2> I saw the Intel AI post on this but what I don't get is I thought HE was still too slow for these sorts of use cases? Are they just throwing mind boggling amounts of computer power at it?</comment>


No, Women Don't Make Less Money Than Men - <AUTHOR> http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/02/01/no-women-don-t-make-less-money-than-men.html <comment><USER2> This article assumes that there's nothing affecting or constraining people's career choices besides interest in a particular field. It's not that women choose careers that pay less - it's that careers dominated by women are frequently perceived to be less valuable to society and are therefore paid at a lower rate. Careers in which men historically dominated, but which later become "female professions", pay less when done by women. "Women make less remunerative life choices" seems like a fairly ignorant way to explain wage disparity.

<comment><USER3> I am dubious about this "perceived to be less valuable to society and are therefore paid at a lower rate" idea. Wages are not set according to the social values of jobs. They are set according to how many people want to do the job. (supply) and how much money the employer can make by hiring someone (whence demand).

There are not many people who want to be petroleum engineers, because it is difficult and boring (i imagine, it's all pipes and oil and whatnot). However, oil companies make immense amounts of money from the work they do. Hence, they are paid a lot.

Lots of people want to be early childhood teachers, because it is noble and rewarding, it is, actually, greatly valued by society, and is not that academically demanding (it is tremendously personally demanding, of course). However, primary schools are not exactly profitable. Hence, they are not paid a lot.

So, i think the claim that "women make less remunerative life choices" does hold water. But here's the thing: _that 's not the problem_. The problem is that the choices they happen to make _are_ less remunerative, because of the operation of the above mechanism. The problem that needs fixing here is that people who choose to do work that is socially valuable but not directly connected to a mechanism of profit are not paid as well as those who do. The solution is something far more radical than just getting more women to take up engineering.

<comment><USER4> _They are set according to how many people want to do the job. (supply) and how much money the employer can make by hiring someone (whence demand)._

Not exactly; they are set by what people are willing to pay. Short-term profitability is one factor an employer takes into consideration.

 _...primary schools are not exactly profitable._

They are not profitable at all, which would mean teachers would not get paid at all under your model of supply and demand. I think what critics are getting at is that even ignoring the effects of sexism when men and women hold the same jobs, wages in male-dominated professions are driven by simplistic short- term profit considerations and discount social benefits (which translate ultimately into long-term profit for everyone). This results in systematic undervaluation of the kinds of work which tends to attract more women.

<comment><USER5>
       "simplistic short-term profit considerations" --> "direct profit considerations"

FTFY. For example, Petroleum engineering is anything but short-term. What matters is that there is a very direct attribution of profit to work done. The attribution to profit for work done in all the poorly paid professions is very very indirect.

<comment><USER4> I'd agree with this. Good point.

<comment><USER5> Check out the prediction technique known as scenario planning most recently championed by Pierre Wack and Peter Schwartz at Royal Dutch Shell. There is a great case study of its use by Royal Dutch Shell when planning on whether or not it was a good investment to build an oil platform in the north sea. The conclusions in that particular case study included a pretty solid argument predicting the fall of the soviet union and its causes well before anyone else was predicting such a think.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Fallacy of negation...

The Daily Beast denies Obama's statement A:"Women make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns" and conclude B:"No, Women Don't Make Less Money Than Men," a non sequitur. Unfortunately, A and B aren't mutually exclusive, so not-A doesn't imply B.

Daily Beast refers to a "correction" printed in the Washington Post which says: "Women earn 91 cents for every dollar men earn--if you control for life choices." Source: [http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/women- earn...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/women- earn-91-cents-for-every-dollar-men-earn--if-you-control-for-life- choices/2012/06/04/gJQAqrHkEV_blog.html)

So, Yes, Women Do Make Less Money Than Men (even after controlling for different life-choices). It's just that the wage gap isn't nearly as wide as Obama said. Obama exaggerated the wage gap. But Daily Beast made an invalid argument and reached a false conclusion.

False dilemma seems to be programmed into the US psyche. For instance, they seem to think they need to choose between Democrats and Republicans, and dismiss third parties. This kind of manichean thinking, reinforced by poorly thought out op-ed pieces like this, make civilized conversation and progress in the US difficult.

</comment><comment><USER5> I really wish we could stop focusing on statistics based on a gender binary and instead used a continuous measure for masculine/feminine traits like ring to index finger ratios instead, since that is a pretty solid proxy for the levels of testosterone present in the womb during gestation.

</comment><comment><USER7> Hey, apparently patriarchy costs women 23% of their wages. But I want to ignore 18% of that. That leaves me with 5% which I don't think is a problem. And I'm a woman, so I can't possibly be perpetuating patriarchy, can I?

</comment><comment><USER8> This article is typical of the hateful shit that gets too many HN upvotes. It starts with a headline saying that women don't get paid less than men, but then shows that they do, argues that the gap is less than we think (but still exists) and then argues that it's all the fault of women anyway.

It does have an interesting bit in a tble though:

1\. Petroleum Engineering: 87% male 2\. Pharmacy Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration: 48% male 3\. Mathematics and Computer Science: 67% male 4\. Aerospace Engineering: 88% male 5\. Chemical Engineering: 72% male 6\. Electrical Engineering: 89% male 7\. Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering: 97% male 8\. Mechanical Engineering: 90% male 9\. Metallurgical Engineering: 83% male 10\. Mining and Mineral Engineering: 90% male

Seems like mathematics and computer science are doing reasonably well at recruitin women. Better than anything but pharmacy. That's good.

<comment><USER5> This didn't get upvotes because it's "hateful shit", but because it focuses on facts and statistics (which happen to be pretty hard to argue with in this case), and the population that is HNers like facts and statistics, especially when it helps provide clarity to a controversial topic. I don't know about anyone else, but I upvoted this because those two tables were valuable information which I did not know previously. I didn't upvote it based on the prose around the tables.

Can you instead find a factual/statistical counter argument instead of discounting the entire article because you disagree with the conclusions? Or at the very least, provide a different constructive conclusion based on the facts/statistics presented if you happen to disagree with theirs.

This probably also got upvotes because it promotes "less wrong" and it's an articles correcting someone who was flat out wrong, that someone one is POTUS and the flat out wrong statement was made during POTUS' most important speech of the year, the state of the union address. Duty calls.

[http://xkcd.com/386/](http://xkcd.com/386/)</comment></comment>


Is the Daily Show new? (answering the hard questions...) - <AUTHOR> http://stdio.me/is-tds-new/

<comment><USER2> Typo btw: "Its" should be "It's" (as in it is a repeat).

</comment><comment><USER2> Nice. It should show both Daily show and Colbert Report though. They seem inseparable to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Is that just a scraper?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah, just a ruby script with nokogiri.</comment></comment>


Snowden intelligence docs reveal UK spooks' malware checklist - <AUTHOR> https://boingboing.net/2016/02/02/doxxing-sherlock-3.html <comment><USER2> Interesting documents.

But this is a rare occasion (I normally love his work) when I have to honestly say, Cory's writing is all over the place in this article. It really needs some serious editing to make it properly readable.</comment>


AIRTAME introduces its wireless HDMI stick to the masses - <AUTHOR> http://tech.eu/brief/airtame-launch/

<comment><USER2> Anyone tried it yet? How's the performance? Is it usable for fullHD movie streaming?</comment>


$60 oil will finish Russia's Putin regime - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/ambroseevans-pritchard/100026424/60-oil-will-finish-russias-putin-regime-says-hermitages-browder/

<comment><USER2> B/c Regan's $20 oil to destroy the USSR worked out so well.</comment>


Universal Subtitles: Making online video accessible to all - <AUTHOR> http://www.drumbeat.org/universal-subtitles/

<comment><USER3> The people behind this service should beware of copyright violations - <USER2> because a video has been made accessible to the general public by their authors does not necessarily mean that others have the right to translate the contents of that video.

I remember that a co-worker of mine started translating his favorite math book into his native language, at first just for his private use. But then he thought that others might benefit from his effort, too, so he contacted the publisher of the original book. He was only half-way through with the translations and had kept everything to himself, but the publisher was not amused at all and fired back at him in classic cease-and-desist manner. He stopped translating right away.

Such an attitude sucks, but from a business perspective I can sort of understand that the copyright holders want to keep the option to offer a translated version themselves. And in that case, it's certainly their right to pick the (certified) translator of their choice.

I don't know if the above scenario translates (no pun intended) very well to web videos, especially those that are made available without commercial interest by their authors. But the question of copyrights is ever so present these days.

<comment><USER4> Your co-worker was creating a direct translated copy of the original material, whereas in this case it's a caption which is only really usable in conjunction with the original. I think the problem would be if you were actually distributing the original video along with the caption, but in this case only the user-created caption is changing hands.

See eg Rifftrax

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> An interesting related effort is collaborative subtitling, as done by ViKi: <http://www.viki.com/>

They've got a web interface through which hundreds of people can simultaneously work on the subtitles for one video. They were on TechCrunch a few weeks ago, I think.

</comment><comment><USER6> Its funny that they are targeting end users vs content creators. As a content creator I assume you would enjoy having subtitles for your content.

</comment><comment><USER4> There are about/faq links, but they're all dead. Maybe wait until the site has been finished before posting it.

<comment><AUTHOR> They don't seem to be dead for me.

<comment><USER4> Looks like they hadn't finished posting the new layout at the time, it's all different now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Try the main site: <http://universalsubtitles.org/></comment>


Ask HN: Better to be pretty good at a few things or really good at one thing? - <AUTHOR>

<comment><USER2> If you want to be an entrepreneur you have to be good at as much as you can handle. Not just your technology stack, but marketing, sales, design, finance, recruitment, training, writing, etc.

If you want to be an employee, then by all means, be top 1% of whatever technology you want and you'll always be able to find a job.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I have seem some really talented developers, but they sucked at understanding business or etc. Again if you want to do a startup, you need to be a Jack of all trades, or find a co-founder who is strong where you are weak.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think this really depends on your goal. Do you want to excel in a particular field? If so, you should pick one thing, and focus on it. Do one thing well.

Being a jack of all trades, and master of none is more suitable for managers.

I wrote a blog post about being an expert at something, if you're interested: [http://philipthrasher.com/2010/04/11/want-to-be-an- expert.ht...](http://philipthrasher.com/2010/04/11/want-to-be-an-expert.html)

</comment><comment><USER5> I feel like I am a jack-of-all trades type of person too. Many people say that is a disadvantage, but I recently read an article on entrepreneur.com about some famous guru saying a CEO of a startup needs to be good at a lot of things instead of great at one thing. Made me feel a lot better....

</comment><comment><USER6> Generalists succeed as entrepreneurs (a Stanford study): [http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/entrep_lazear_gene...](http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/entrep_lazear_generalists.shtml)

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm definitely a jack-of-all-trades but a master-of-none. Sometimes I wish I were much better at certain things, but for the most part, I enjoy having a wide range of competencies.

</comment><comment><USER8> This is entirely dependent on what you do and what your goals are.

Generally, I think it's better to be really good at one thing. However, this wouldn't hold true in certain roles (think Enterprise Architect, Systems Consultant, ...). In different roles, it can be extremely valuable to have a broad, not necessarily deep, understanding of the various parts in play.

What are your objectives?

</comment><comment><USER9> Being really good at one thing almost always involves being pretty good at a few things.

</comment><comment><USER10> Leonardo da Vinci has shown that it's possible to master more than one thing.

(mind you, how many Leonardo da Vinci's are there in the world?)

<comment><USER11> The world has easily ten times the population it had in Leonardo's time, and also is probably less than 100% effective at discovering such people.

So at a conservative estimate, I'd say there are hundreds.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> For an entrepreneur: M-shaped: really good at a few things, and not afraid of many other things that need doing.

</comment><comment><USER13> Depends on what you are really good at.</comment>


Ask HN: Called Facebook customer support to retrieve banned page, but - <AUTHOR> The number I dialed is 855-770-7790. The voice is obviously Indian. I know my page was banned for promoting so-called "hate speech," lost it along with 88k followers I painstakingly collected.
Tech support on the phone said that they can bring it back, but I have to pay a $45 fee via PayPal to their technician for the job.
Is this a conjob? <comment><USER2> A web search shows that number posted all over the web... _but never BY Facebook itself_. Looks dodgy to me.

</comment><comment><USER3> Smells fishy.</comment>


The power of Apple's FaceTime commercial - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/10/apple-facetime-commercial/

<comment><USER3> I'm not sure what it is about this commercial, but when I see it, I start thinking about mortality and the ephemeral nature of life. According to the article, the Greek roots of "nostaligia" mean "an old wound." I think that's very appropriate. I get the same background feeling from this commercial that I get from watching the first part of Pixar's "Up." I'd love to see a cinematographer's analysis of both of those pieces.

<comment><USER4> EDIT: Fixed recursion

Up! Director Peter Docter's interview on the "Married Life" scene:

"From a "feel" standpoint, it was the sense of a life lived, and not only the highs, but the lows. That's why we put in a couple of dark moments... It actually feels more real, and I think that's how you remember life being like."

"Strangely, we got a couple of home movies from the Internet -- Michael Giacchino has a collection that I think he ordered from EBay. And we had no idea who the people in them were, but we'd watch their lives progress and piece them together -- we'd note, "Oh, now there's a new kid in the picture. And what happened to that person? I guess they must've moved away." It was strangely compelling."

[http://theenvelope.latimes.com/news/la-etw-pete- docter25-201...](http://theenvelope.latimes.com/news/la-etw-pete- docter25-2010feb25,0,2207449.story)

Interesting and weird academic view on Sam Mendes' FaceTime ad:

"Distance, work, and duty separate these individuals from their primary relationships, but, the film implies, the phone can mediate these contingencies and keep users connected to life's truly important moments."

"But the phone, in turn, obscures these flows and systems to the extent that it mediates between them and the relationships of its users as an object allowing for immediate emotional interconnectivity."

[http://mwnau.posterous.com/absence-mediation-and- emotional-o...](http://mwnau.posterous.com/absence-mediation-and-emotional- objectssam-me/)

<comment><USER5> that last link you gave is the OP ;)

<comment><USER4> Got so caught up in Googling and reading pre-game World Cup analysis. Duh!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> those who are looking at these comments but haven't seen the ad yet, please do so. Irrespective of its marketing merit, its amazingly well done.

</comment><comment><USER7> I've seen it on at bars and heard it openly mocked--the scenarios in the commercial are so narrow that it can easily make it look useless (or unrealistic like the soldier overseas who not only has an iPhone 4 but access to high-speed WiFi without a firewall).

Save for deaf people and gadget reviewers, few people want to see each other during phone calls on a regular basis. At the same time millions of people want to IM each other, but they haven't built that in yet.

<comment><USER8> There's nothing in the commercial, actually, that depicts ordinary, routine phone calls. They're intimate conversations between people with deep relationships to each other, who are separated and cannot be together – sometimes at critical, god-I-wish-I-had-a-teleporter moments.

If you've felt the kind of deep longing that sort of separation can cause, you'll immediately understand what Apple is selling here. A lifeline to the ones you love.

Believe me, at those moments there's not a chance you'd rather just be on IM.

<comment><USER9> "critical" moments?

Not really. I think most people would argue as social animals that being physically present at an event underlines the importance and respect for others. No one sane dials into someone's wedding or funeral right?

For me that's why only the opening sequence of the advert worked - keeping in visual contact with your child. The deaf conversation is thrown in as a calculated validation of the goodness of FaceTime, given this, what cold soul could not understand the importance of this technology?

I'm sure medical staff are buzzing with anticipation about their future arguments with hipsters trying to use their phones in scanning units where such devices are usually prohibited.

<comment><USER10> A video phone isn't for routine phone calls or for marriages or funerals, but there are lots of family events in the middle. It's common for relatives to sometimes be unable to show up for birthdays or Christmas. I have an aunt who bought a video phone to do that when she's in Florida.

<comment><USER9> I agree but I think the criticisms which are being made here are about the inherent mediocrity of FaceTime and whether it's either original or essential.

The advert is clever in that the only good uses bookend the less good ones. You can't blame them, because you hardly want to sell FaceTime as 'FaceTime: For when you can't be arsed to turn up'

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> There is an interesting and applicable point made in "The American Gustation Crisis of 1985" [http://www.damninteresting.com/the-american-gustation- crisis...](http://www.damninteresting.com/the-american-gustation-crisis- of-1985) (aka. How Coca-Cola won the war).

 _In retrospect, some marketers believe that the failure of New Coke may have had something to do with sensation transference, a human oddity first described by Louis Cheskin in the 1940s._ [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Cheskin#Sensation_transfe...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Cheskin#Sensation_transference) _Cheskin demonstrated that people will unconsciously associate imagery, sounds, tastes, aromas, and textures into their general impression of a product, even if such associations are unintended or inaccurate._

What Apple is doing with the commercial, as pointed out by MG Siegler, is using our emotions, specifically our love of our family and friends, to the iPhone, associating that emotion and love _to_ the iPhone. Powerful. Scary.

<comment><USER11> Powerful? Scary? Great advertising you mean! The shared history between ad men & propaganda men is a very fascinating one. Effective advertising is like hacking the human psyche.

<comment><USER12> No, he actually means powerful and scary, in this kind of realization that we, our feelings, our inclinations, our rationality, our subconscious can be accessed and manipulated at will by 60 seconds of video.

Ever since I watched "the century of the self" I can't help but feeling utterly repulsed and violated by marketing in general. And watching the recent apple marketing, is like watching the master puppeteer at work

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I've had video chat on my laptop for years, yet hardly ever use it. Further, if I'm near free WiFi, I'm usually near my laptop too. I suspect most people are the same way.

</comment><comment><USER14> What is the reason they're restricting this to wifi? Would the quality be to low on a 3g network? The only mobile video call I used probably over 5 years ago used a 3g(I assume, definitely not wifi) connection, sure the quality wasn't amazing, but would this still be an issue in built up areas?

<comment><USER15> AT&T is the reason.

<comment><USER14> I guess it's a software limitation at the moment. I doubt carriers in Australia would go down the same path given the choice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The commercial is well done (It pulls lots of heart strings for some people), but it's ridiculous to assume those are the main use cases. 90% use will be for remote sex. But knowing Apple they'll probably detect nude flesh and censor it ;)

</comment><comment><USER17> The only Apple ad that affected me on an emotional level is Think Different. In fact, it's the best commercial I've ever seen.

</comment><comment><USER17> A suggestion to solve the bandwidth and privacy issues for video chat: why not have an avatar whose facial expressions are determined from your facial expressions in real-time?

<comment><USER18> There's a bit of Dave Foster Wallace's ''Infinite Jest'' that talks about precisely this, in considerably more detail, and quite amusingly.

Link: [http://www.martin-brown.net/downloads/DavidFosterWallace- Inf...](http://www.martin-brown.net/downloads/DavidFosterWallace-InfiniteJest- Telephony.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> What's the reach of this ad? I've never seen it. Are they getting tech writers to review the ad itself in an attempt to make people that don't watch TV commercials see it?

<comment><USER20> Actually pretty wide, I barely see any TV and I have seen it a several times. It has been about for about a week as far as I can tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Well, I'm sure Don Draper - the sociopathic lead from Mad Men - _could_ have created this advert. It bypasses the mundane nature of the technology, and shows the human benefit. It's sugar coated, and perhaps too schmaltzy for a UK audience, but I can see why it works.

Unfortunately - in keeping with the work of all sociopathic ad-men - <USER2> has been distorted. This isn't real life, it's fantasy. For a start, a lot of the actors are 'holding it wrong'.

<comment><USER22> _Spoliers_

Draper isn't really sociopathic, you'd notice he's a lot more relaxed when he is with the original mrs.draper, and pretty much any sort of flashback sequence before his current job and marital situation. He is constantly living a lie and must put up a conscious pretense. He feels very guilty about what he done, and as a result he is constantly tense and always having few words and choosing them carefully.

<comment><USER21> (... in your opinion.)

 _spoilers_

Don Draper chooses to lie, he chooses to monopolize on his ability to deceive and he steadfastly places to his own whims above all others. He's manipulative and cunning. He believes he has the right to pay people off to get his own way. He's incredibly secretive - leading double (in some cases, triple lives). He has no true friendships and while he occasionally wrestles with morality, actually cares very little about the majority of those around him. The one person who is closest to a friend (Peggy) has been treated ridiculously badly at times. He fears virtually no situation and has a tendancy to act rashly. He enjoys and seeks out dangerous / risky situations.

Black and white can't be used to paint a full picture, and occasionally his character shows traits which describe another side to his personality. Even so, his character would certainly fit the standard definition of a sociopath / narcissist.

It just happens that the attributes Don Draper has been ascribed, also align with western society's view of 'the perfect man'; which is quite telling itself.

Down-voting based on a difference in opinion would be a little bit Draper-like ;)

<comment><USER23> nit-pick: you are right that he is a narcissist, but due to his apparent capacity for empathy, he is not a sociopath in the clinical sense. That he chooses to disregard this and place himself first above all else in order to preserve his own sense of inner comfort makes him a narcissist.

<comment><USER21> If the advertising industry could be personified, I'm sure the resulting person would lack real empathy - within the industry, empathy is only used as a device to provide people with what they require.

I think the fact Don Draper's character has been written in this way is the crowning glory of Man Men; showing how the modern world has been defined by people who are built a certain way - and showing how the dawn of the advertising industry was pivotal in shaping the world as it is now.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


I launched an app finally on Product Hunt - <AUTHOR> https://www.producthunt.com/tech/some-messenger <comment><AUTHOR> I finally got around to getting an account for Product Hunt and tried launching it! I'm not getting much of a reaction though, is this how it is usually? Anyways, thought I would introduce my app here at the same time :) Have a nice day!

</comment><comment><USER2> Interesting! Congrats and good luck!</comment>


Your job is not to write code  - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@lauraklein/your-job-is-not-to-write-code-d002609b117a

<comment><USER2> It sounds like the author of this article wants an engineer to be a product manager, QA department, and software developer all rolled into one. In my experience, this is almost impossible.

Most of these higher level decisions are figured out with management in meetings and pushed onto the engineers. With un-realistic deadlines looming, user experience usually suffers.</comment>


What Happened When I Tried Talking to Twitter Abusers - <AUTHOR> http://www.everywhereist.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-talking-to-twitter-abusers/ <comment><USER2> Here is the conclusion:

> I spent days trying to talk to the people in my mentions who insulted and > attacked me. I'd have been better off just remembering that when someone > shows you who they are, believe them the first tweet.

It's hard to choose words in some cases; I feel it now. I'm not sure the author's attempt brought successful results. Did the author just study what would happen if she asks those questions? Then she probably succeeded, but the conclusion doesn't seem to support that the goal was just to observe. Did she try to find a common ground? Then she probably failed, in a sense that she found some ways which don't work.</comment>


Journalists Don't Look At Traffic Numbers - <AUTHOR> http://blog.hubspot.com/opinion/journalists-dont-look-at-traffic-numbers

<comment><USER2> I've been listening to a relevant audiobook lately: Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator by Ryan Holiday.

In it, he speaks about his role in manipulating the smaller blogs with over- the-top stories (read: PR stunts), which are then "traded up the chain", used as sources for larger blogs, eventually making their way to the national media.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> I find this attitude bizarre. How can they know what their audience is interested in or not?

I agree that writing silly thinks like "Top 5 Cute Cats That Are Friends With Justin Bieber" to get traffic is absurd, but you need to know where your readers are most interested among genuine topics of interest.

<comment><USER3> Why do they care what the audience is interested in? The Verge writers get to write about what they think is interesting. It's their site, after all.

Anyway, they didn't say _no one_ looks at the numbers. A leader could still direct the journalists to cover certain topics without turning them into traffic whores.</comment></comment>


Radiobox.css – Tiny set of CSS3 animations meant for your radio inputs - <AUTHOR> https://720kb.github.io/radiobox.css/ <comment><USER2> Why all the hate? It's not like you have to use these everywhere just because they exist. The fact that it's possible is good to know as one day it might be a good solution for a problem I'm facing, and then I'll be happy that it exists.

A couple of use cases I can think of:

* Attracting attention to options in a demo

* A game for kids, or otherwise 'wacky' pages

If we restricted web browsers to what developers think we should use, we'd still be using plain green text on black terminals.

<comment><USER3> > _If we restricted web browsers to what developers think we should use, we 'd > still be using plain green text on black terminals._

I'd wager that there are more developers scared of the commandline than are comfortable with it.

<comment><USER4> Now, yes. But you only have to turn the clock back a decade or three to find most devs were comfortable with the command line.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I love these :D A little bit childish, yes, but why so serious? :)

One can use these, for example, as an easter egg or to add some emotion to the selected item. Sparingly, of course. Surprise people when they are bored of all those forms :)

I think you should keep a list of all the sites using these, so that people can get inspired.

<comment><USER6> My first thought was to put these under a random number generator. Make the user do a double take every now and then

<comment><USER7> I work with internal apps that are form intensive and making our users do double take would most certainly piss them off. At the very least it would make them less efficient at their job. I think predictability when designing a form is paramount.

<comment><AUTHOR> It depends on which kind of project you are working on, obviously.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Meta, question for 720kb.

I'm on mobile and wanted to zoom but you've used this in the demo page:

        meta name="viewport" content="initial-scale=1, maximum-scale=1, user-scalable=no, width=device-width"

I'm curious why? The hit targets were too small for me initially, hence the desire to zoom.

On topic: I like them, used sparingly or in the right context I think they'd be very good. Thanks for sharing.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the feedback i'll try asap to enable zoom, you're right.

<comment><USER8> So is that demo page a default from Bootstrap or some such?

<comment><AUTHOR> It is not, we often use own little helper [https://github.com/720kb/csshelper](https://github.com/720kb/csshelper) plus custom classes, but the zoom must be my mess, when you are 24h on a desktop you forgot 99% population is on a phone :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Actually, there is nothing to complaint about, you need it you use it, you don't need it you don't use it. Please be constructive.

<comment><USER9> People like to comment on things because feedback and discussion helps you and others do better work later on.

<comment><AUTHOR> You're right, as soon as they comment constructively: like you do :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like Focus! The others are a little bit much for me, but maybe I've been doing government websites for too long...

</comment><comment><USER11> Animation should convey information. Otherwise, it's just noise. I have no idea what information these animations could carry.

<comment><USER12> For those rare occasions where whimsy for the sake of whimsy is preferred.

Realistically, I may only use something like this in a situation where one of the radio selection options has an effect that you want to call extra attention to.

I can't come up with a representative example right now, but I'm sure there's one out there.

Your point is well taken though... for the vast majority of cases where this could remotely be useful there exist better ways to encode the information you are trying to convey.

It is a fun set of experiments, so I give the author props for that.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's right, no one forces anyone to use it, whether your project is suitable, why not then?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Those are technically very impressive. My only issue is that my mouse covers most of the animation - and there's nothing to indicate when a button is unchecked.

<comment><USER14> I think it's neat that they're all collected in one unified place. But if you look at the actual CSS behind the buttons [1] you'll realize it's not actually that "impressive," but rather something that anyone could implement. It's just basic CSS animation.

[1] [https://github.com/720kb/radiobox.css/blob/master/lib/scss/b...](https://github.com/720kb/radiobox.css/blob/master/lib/scss/boing.scss)

<comment><USER15> What part of "pure CSS animations" led you to believe it could be anything other than that ?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Nice effects, thanks for sharing. To the haters, share some of your stuf.

<comment><USER17> > To the haters, share some of your stuf.

Why?

<comment><USER2> "Any donkey can kick down a barn, but only a skilled carpenter can build one."

<comment><USER17> I don't need to be a carpenter to say that maybe building a barn out of cotton candy and air balloon animals _might_ not be the best idea.

<comment><USER2> Your logic is wrong, because it rests on the assumption that everyone agrees using animated radio buttons is a bad idea. Given the number of GitHub stars, upvotes on here, and general use of animation like this across the internet, it's not universally considered a bad idea.

<comment><USER17> UX design is not a popularity contest, for fuck's sake.

<comment><USER18> There is a popular confusion of "design" and "making things look fun or pretty".

<comment><USER2> There is also a popular confusion that design has _nothing_ to do with "making things look fun or pretty", and that anything done to make a site look more attractive is either a waste of time or counter-productive.

<comment><USER18> No, I don't believe that confusion exists.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Nice to see but please.... don't ever use this in an actual website.

<comment><USER20> And please refrain from running in the corridors, chocolate milk past 9 o clock and dancing of any sort.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Did anyone else misread the title as saying that the "tiny" CSS library was 720kB in size and think "Oh God, why?!"

</comment><comment><USER22> But why?

What about the inconsistency factor? If my radio boxes get animations, all other form fields should get them too.

If not, no one should get them.

You know how it's with kids.

<comment><AUTHOR> You can apply these animations to any :checked element in your page, just, by default, these are designed and meant for radios. I see it difficult to make flash or boing an input field while you focus or check it, don't you think?

<comment><USER23> Just so you know, on the Checkbox page, the animation for "Splash" can be triggered without actually changing the checkbox state, by clicking just below the checkbox. I guess the hit area for the animation is bigger than the checkbox.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Nice! I sent a pull request for a new animation called Ping. It is a simple (read: boring) animation for the more stuck up websites.

<comment><USER17> > the more stuck up websites.

Websites are means to an end, and that end is not staring in amazement at animations (or in frustration at your battery gauge).

<comment><USER2> For some websites, that _is_ the end. Not all websites, but some.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> These are great but to make them really useful I would look into creating a series of more subtle animations.

</comment><comment><USER17> So… why would I use any of them? All (?) OSes animate then anyway, and in a much less obnoxious way.

<comment><USER26> Do you want to :

( ) launch nuclear missile

( ) send flowers

You probably want to really draw attention to which radio button is selected so the user doesn't absentmindedly choose the wrong one.

<comment><USER17> For neither use case I'd use gaudy animations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Now you can use all them (checkbox or radio) with Checked.css [https://720kb.github.io/checked.css/](https://720kb.github.io/checked.css/)

</comment><comment><USER27> This seems to be broken if you're running PrivacyBadger.

</comment><comment><USER28> These are fantastic! I'm totally going to make use of this. Any chance you'll do the same for other input elements? :)

</comment><comment><USER29> I like the concept.

I always find lack of good non-animation css for radio buttons and drop down select elements to be lacking.

</comment><comment><USER30> It looks really weird when the page loads and the radio button is already checked.

</comment><comment><USER31> apparently HN is full of lame-os

</comment><comment><USER32> It's just <blink> all over again

<comment><USER17> Needs more marquee. Put some challenge in ticking the boxes because something something gamification.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> is geocities back?

<comment><USER17> Geocities never died, it just stopped offering services outside Japan.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> None of these work for me, firefox 50.0a2 2016-09-08

<comment><USER35> All of them work for me on FF 48 even with javascript disabled.

<comment><AUTHOR> thanks for the feedback!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Nice but pretty useless for 99% of web users.

</comment><comment><USER37> The one that looks classy and not too distracting is Focus. The one I would consider using someday on a normal website but would probably not use the library for that.

<comment><USER2> With these kind of CSS micro-libraries, I usually make a SASS version with placeholders.

e.g.

        %focus { ... }
        %boing { ... }

        .some-label { @extends %focus; }</comment></comment>


The Science of Success - <AUTHOR> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200912/dobbs-orchid-gene

<comment><USER2> I'm currently reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers: [http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm- Gladwel...](http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm- Gladwell/dp/0316017922)

It's a fascinating account of what makes people successful. Major points I've picked up so far:

* the contribution of IQ to success maxes out at around 120; beyond that, IQ points don't matter much, because you're smart enough to get by.

* What Robert Sternberg nicknames "practical intelligence" (<http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/practicalintelligence.shtml>) is extremely important to overall success. Affluent and middle-class parents tend to be much better at passing this sort of intelligence along to their kids than lower-income ones.

* Seemingly irrelevant details like birthdate play a major role too. He shows how the day you were born has >10% contribution to academic success, because if you don't make the cutoff date for going to school, you'll be one of the older, and thus more mentally mature individuals in your class. Consequently, these individuals are more likely to be selected for gifted programs. And because of the academic grooming, they end up being more likely to go to college. He also shows how, for example, professional Canadian hockey players are almost never born in the later months of the year for similar reasons; if you don't make the cutoff date, you'll be one of the older players on your team, and scouts will confuse your increased maturity for inborn talent and you'll move up the ranks and get better training as a result.

It's a somewhat disturbing book because it shows how success isn't a direct function of an individual's aptitude. But I think it's also important, because, by observing these factors, you can hack your way into success even if the factors are going against you.

</comment><comment><USER3> The author mentions 'key behavioral genes'. Does anyone know more about these?</comment>


The U.S. housing market crash is officially here - <AUTHOR> https://www.ccn.com/u-s-housing-market-crash-officially-here/ <comment><USER2> The article presents evidence for a correction, but not a crash. I'd be interested in a revision that compares data around the housing crash of 2008- to housing data for previous recessions to identify the keys to a housing crash. Was there any smoking gun that gave a clear indication that this was no ordinary housing downturn?

Then, the article could compare the data currently available with the unique features of the 2008 crash and earlier declines.

Otherwise, using the term "crash" doesn't seem justified.</comment>


Shipping nginx access logs to LogStash - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/devops-programming/b01bd0876e82

<comment><USER2> Aggregating, processing and making sense of high-velocity, high-volume application log data from tens, hundreds or sometimes thousands of sources can be very inefficient, expensive, intimidating, stressful and frustrating.

This course talks about how to use logstash to aggregate log data.

[http://kck.st/1bbyDdv](http://kck.st/1bbyDdv)</comment>


What's Your Secondary Language? - <AUTHOR> http://prog21.dadgum.com/215.html <comment><AUTHOR> Mine tends to be python but JS makes a lot of sense for things that need GUIs.</comment>


For HN: Hacker's Help Network - <AUTHOR>

Due to this year's unfortunate events and the increasing number of depressed hackers, me and a couple of friends decided to start a community not only for HN but for anyone seeking help.
I am very sad to hear the stories on HN like far_far_away's and others like him.Not to mention the death of Aaron Swartz which definitely changed the mood for many hackers.I've been through this situation (depression) 5 years ago and it was a living hell.Feeling trapped and no way out.
I want to help these people or at least try and I'm sure many of us want the same thing.This is not about money or business!It is about us.We are humans before anything else, and we have feelings.Judging by the current trend we are not on the right path and some of us don't even know it yet.
So starting from today, I decided to dedicate some of my time specifically for this cause.I am sick of seeing people suffering here when I know I can do something about it.If I can improve someone's life by at least 5% I am happy.
If anyone is interested in joining this cause, I am open to any suggestion.This is not about me and you, it's about all of us.
For anyone interested the mail is this: firstname.lastname@example.com
I had no time to prepare something special but I believe this is the first step in the right direction.
More updates coming soon...
Thank you all. <comment><USER2> I used to volunteer for the Samaritans in the UK (A well known and respected suicide helpline <http://www.samaritans.org/>).

What you are taking on is a laudable thing, and I would honestly suggest talking to these people (or an equivalent US one), and find out their "ways of doing things".

Providing such support alone can take a toll on you, and there is a difference between sacrificing time and sacrificing you. If you can find others who can "man the phones" too, and if you establish good guidelines (policies on abuse, on anonymity, on sharing data between calls and working with other services and oh a thousand things more) you I hope will do some good here.

Oh and one last thing, I learnt you "worked the phones" for a year or for life. If like me you only do this for a yer, do not feel you are abandoning others. And maybe you will leave something that lasts beyond you

Good luck

<comment><AUTHOR> Thank you very much but I think you got the idea somehow wrong. We want to support hackers that can be helped without the aid of the doctor.You can imagine that we could never put someone's life at risk if he has a serious condition.

For those who are really on the verge of distruction, the best we can do is send them to a specialized doctor because only they can help the serious cases.

What we can do is create an environment for us that would help avoid a situation like this and also to help those that can be helped without the aid of a doctor.Even then the situation must be analyzed properly.

But the most important thing is, everyone wants to have a place where they can talk to the others, share their thoughts, everything that bothers them from any aspect of their lives, from business to life and so on.Because then, you know where to go when you have problems.

It will be like "Damn, my gf dumped me and my friend kicked me out of the startup, I definitely need to talk to someone who can understand this, how about i go on xyz website or (whatever place we can create for them) and talk about this, cause they will listen".

So not to be confused with a clinic or some medical/mental facility.We cannot do that.But we can try to create a place for us, sharing whatever we want to share.

Thank you again.

And like i said, for anyone who wants to be part of a united group and helping each other whenever you need, join us by sending a mail to

firstname.lastname@example.com and Hacker's Help Network (community on google+) one is private (mainly for HN users) and one is public</comment></comment>


Show HN: AIsaac – Learning to Beat Bosses. Live Reinforcement Learning on Twitch - <AUTHOR> https://www.twitch.tv/serpent_ai <comment><AUTHOR> This has been my main side-project / hobby for the last few months. I am building a framework to facilitate the creation of agents that can interact with games.

You can think of it as a minimal, one-man OpenAI Universe. The main difference is that you can set it up to interact with native games you own. No VM + VNC setup or depending on available games/environments like Universe! It takes less than 10 minutes to write a plugin to add support for any Steam game.

The framework provides 2 major features: First, it sets up the game agent loop for you. Frames are captured and fed to your agent, you process them the way you want (can be anything from pure computer vision to reinforcement learning) and are able to send actions back to the game. Second, it ships with multiple blackbox implementations of algorithms that are compatible with the architecture of the framework. This second part is a total WIP.

On stream right now, I set up an experiment in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth to see if we can learn to defeat bosses in game using the DQN family of algorithms. The current version uses 2 DDQNs each using Prioritized Experience Replay. 1 controls the movement and the other is in charge of the shooting. This is already v11 so there are a lot of iterations and chat has been great for discussing possible improvements.

Code is in Python. Linux only for now but Windows support is on the roadmap. Pre-release repo: [https://github.com/SerpentAI/Serpent](https://github.com/SerpentAI/Serpent)

Happy to answer any question!</comment>


Ask HN: Bootstrapping my app, tell me what you think? - <AUTHOR> Hi guys,
I'm bootstraping a mobile app that enables long distant couples to virtually interact while timezones apart.
The heartbeat feature will let users hear each other's heart beating in real time and the shared clock will sync differing time zones or busy schedules and send a notification when you're mutually available.
Going to use the lean startup method and build one feature first. I have a site up, would love to know what you think. Does it clearly tell you what the app is about?
www.closerthanapp.com <comment><USER2> I'm hardly a model of success so take anything I say with appropriate weight.

The site is very clear about what it does and looks great. If you have the ability to map a finger in front of the camera to a heart beat that's kind of cool. Seems a bit trivial and useless thing to do to me. However like I said I'm not a model for success and I am 33 year old man / programmer, I still don't understand the success of Instagram, Twitter, cat pictures or almost anything on the internet.

You indicate this will be available for iOS/Android/Windows. Is that necessary? Why not just do one to see if you have any traction. Are you doing this to make money? If so, your pricing seems very low.

I would never use it but I'm not a teenager in love or in a long distance relationship. I'm married with two kids.

A unique idea and wish you success. Just take it easy and focus on one platform I say unless you have friends working with you on different platforms or funding, just don't want to see your burned out like I've been before. Have you got any indication anyone is interested in this?

EDIT: Just noticed the first thing you said is it's bootstrapped. So yes definitely think doing three platforms is a bad idea. Are you doing all that other stuff too? Video, messenger? I can't see how you could run a service like this bootstrapped for that price. Biggest thing: any indication anyone is interested before you develop, any beta users?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi thanks for your response.

I put all platforms to test how many people of each platform decide to click to subscribe for an email update for when the app is out. Though I get what you mean, it's probably misleading.

I was unsure of how to price, especially against my competitors and other apps out there. I plan to eventually have other revenue streams such as selling stickers. I sometimes wonder how some of the biggest apps that sell for such low prices are even surviving.

I've got 500 people signed up to receive an email notification when the app releases so that is promising.

I also wanted opinions on whether I should should state on the website that this app will release as a single feature beta version on iOS and I am building as MVP to begin with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I was in bicoastal relationship for two years, but I don't think we would have used an app like this. It seems like just another place to have messages trapped (is there any way to export? why use this over text messaging or email?). IMHO, the benefit of this app versus the status quo has to be made clearer.

When you're starting out, go with free. I know your price points are very low, but the main friction is deciding what service to use to pay you through, deciding how much I trust that the billing will be honest, getting out my wallet, etc. When you want fast user growth, you need to be free.

The pricing is also confusing, because it isn't immediately clear that the annual pricing is for the same tier as the monthly. I'd swap the order of those two (keep the annual bigger) so that it's more logical for a left-to- right reader. First you introduce the tier (on the left) and then you introduce the annual upsell (in the middle). You could also try a variant of gotomeeting's pricing funnel, where they offer the discount in the second stage, after a user has selected a plan. This would simplify things further without really undermining your low-price message.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your thoughts. Looking back my pricing order and strategy does seem a bit awkward. I've changed it so that FREE comes first with the most popular or value-for-money goes in the middle.

I forgot to mention that I have little coding experience and plan to either outsource or look for a technical cofounder for my startup. So that's about as far as I can stretch to when editing my site.

I do want to start out as a free app but have only kept pricing info to test the click through rate.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've already used a messaging app for couples with my girlfriend. I do remember they had some nice features, like sending kisses and hugs, but we eventually stopped using it. Mainly because we had a lot of messages not being sent.

Currently I'm also bootstrapping my own product and I can see that you might have some problems (like I've):

1\. It's always nice to have an app for each mobile platform... but it costs a lot of energy to keep them running! I'd start supporting only one. Use all the spare time for marketing (it's incredibly hard to sell things...).

2\. We had access to nice features using the app I mentioned, but the chat experience wasn't fluid enough. Sometimes, when we try to do a lot of things, we forget the basics.

3\. The heart beating feature sounds nice... but is it something important to your public? We've added tons of features we loved to our product. It's very disappointing to see that they aren't using them.

</comment><comment><USER5> The use case is clear, it's not one of my use cases at the moment, but it's clear.

Less clear is how the app addresses the hard problems of long distance relationships, which for me were those times when communications were prickly. Cuddly kinda' took care of itself. Scheduling communications was more a matter of routine than checking calendars. Still seems to be the case that we just set aside a certain time of day.

Finally, I think the idea of generating revenue from services product is probably better than pursuing subscription. It's easier to have a high dollar transaction that would take 100 years of subscription revenue to generate. It also keeps the focus on delivering what each individual needs.

Good luck.

<comment><AUTHOR> What do you mean when you say 'services product'? Is that where the person buys the app one off?

EDIT: Forgive my ignorance or how silly of a question that may sound.

<comment><USER5> Sorry, meant "services/product". For example, deriving revenue from jewelry sales or floral delivery rather than subscriptions to the app.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> [https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

<comment><USER7> Yeah, you should submit it as a Show HN.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> I was in a long-distance relationship and would definitely have bought this at that price. The landing page is clear and the photo on it speaks to me.

I wouldn't have actually used the heartbeat feature, but the mutual schedule one is valuable. I might even use that with my wife now occasionally. I would have when I was interviewing to move to the U.K.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks so much for your thoughts :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> It can, but people read things differently. You might want to consider doing multi-variate or even just A/B testing on the landing page wording. A short animation or some cartoon pictures could help to reinforce the concept.</comment>


US satellite intelligence: The Ukrainian flight in Iran shot down by a missile - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessinsider.com/ukrainian-flight-752-shot-down-by-anti-aircraft-missile-2020-1 <comment><USER2> I guess now Justin Trudeau has an opportunity to get Canada a seat on the UN security council. He has a choice between going down the path of sadness and misery or peace and prosperity.

IMHO Lets not allow those killed on this flight deaths be in vane, instead let their legacy be that of true martyrs who enabled a lasting peace in the middle east.</comment>


It's Time for Online Voting (NYTimes Opinion) - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/05/opinion/online-blockchain-voting.html <comment><USER2> I got as far as the subtitle, "Using blockchain technology", and then I realized the author is from the "Blockchain Research Institute" and then closed the tab.

In an era where electronic voting is increasingly shown to be flawed, we are not nearly prepared to be able to vote online. And the blockchain is not going to fix it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm not familiar with "Blockchain Research Institute", so I'm not sure if your comment is critical of them as an organization or not. I am also wary of the blockchain-is-magic hype train, so I generally agree with your assessment that we aren't prepared to vote online.

While I wasn't surprised by the overall lack of technical details given the medium/audience, I did find it odd that the question of privacy was essentially ignored. Do they have a solution in mind that allows me to validate that my vote is in the ledger without the vote being traceable back to me?

<comment><USER2> I have no specific knowledge of the Blockchain Research Institute, but a guy from a blockchain-based organization is claiming we all need to use the blockchain. If you have a hammer, everything else looks like a nail.

And if we're going to use _anything_ for something as important as voting, it better have demonstrated its real, long-term value in something far less crucial.</comment></comment></comment>


DEA authorized to conduct surveillance on protestors - <AUTHOR> https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/jasonleopold/george-floyd-police-brutality-protests-government <comment><USER2> Via Kim Zetter:

> If you're wondering why DEA and US Marshal's Service have been given > authority to conduct covert surveillance of protestors, it's likely because > they have planes outfitted with Dirtboxes - powerful stingray devices that > collect data on phones from the air

[https://twitter.com/KimZetter/status/1267969704259280896](https://twitter.com/KimZetter/status/1267969704259280896)

<comment><USER3> This may explain why the DEA, but not why _protestors_ , as opposed to looters

<comment><USER4> Maybe it is because protesters are more of a threat to those in power than looters

<comment><USER5> Of course, most of the looters are undercover cops anyway.

<comment><USER6> Most? I've seen hundreds of people looting in my neighborhood. Most of them aren't even _adults_ , let alone cops.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> >> "In August 2013, a report by Reuters revealed that the Special Operations Division (SOD) of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration advises DEA agents to practice parallel construction when creating criminal cases against Americans that are based on NSA warrantless surveillance."

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction#By_the_U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction#By_the_United_States_Drug_Enforcement_Administration)

<comment><USER8> How is this relevant to this article?

Parallel construction can occur from any justice department org.

<comment><USER9> Because the DEA has a special unit for it: [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod/exclusive-u-s- dir...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod/exclusive-u-s-directs- agents-to-cover-up-program-used-to-investigate-americans- idUSBRE97409R20130805)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> There was a post on Reddit where a guy found dozens of cameras hidden on poles that he could access with their IP addresses in browser and even control directly and get live feed into people's homes. Some of those said "Property of DEA". Eventually hundreds of people started accessing with the ip addresses that were listed by the OP and the feed was cut off.

[0] [https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy_commons/comments/gin79z/...](https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy_commons/comments/gin79z/i_made_an_alt_because_this_is_sketchy_so_i_can/)

<comment><USER11> We knew years ago that the DEA has cameras all over the place. They do things like hide them in traffic control devices and read license plates with them. They analyze the traffic to look for drug mules and pass off tips to local police so they can execute parallel construction and hide the real source of the evidence. We all talked about it and, like most big brother shit, no one cared and we all moved on. Glad the kids are rediscovering it.

[https://qz.com/1458475/the-dea-and-ice-are-hiding- surveillan...](https://qz.com/1458475/the-dea-and-ice-are-hiding-surveillance- cameras-in-streetlights/)

[https://reason.com/2012/07/11/dea-quietly-builds-its- network...](https://reason.com/2012/07/11/dea-quietly-builds-its-network-of- licens/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I wish we had more opportunities to learn about and highlight the kind of tech that could change or strongly affect this sort of narrative.

Tech isn't always the answer, but here we are on HN reading about a frustrating issue, a bunch of spinning wheels in a sense, and we're good at tech as a group.

I don't even know what it would look like, but currently the typical HN community response to this stuff is hyper-perceptive. From "here we go" to "here's what the article says". This alone is far too limited (we're not just here with our popcorn; we want to _do_) and it creates a pattern that can eventually shut out such news because no traction can be gained--what's the point.

IMO we can build communications environments and frameworks that empower ourselves and others to take creative action, even of the sociopolitical type. And if we can't build 'em, we can share and promote the news.

(Some of you are already doing this--thank you, please keep sharing your work)

<comment><USER13> What exactly do you want to empower people to do? Loot Louis Vuitton and Walmart in the name of stopping police brutality? This violence isn't good for anybody and needs to stop.

<comment><USER14> Well, to be able to spot propaganda like the variety you're spouting right now would be a decent start.

I'm not even sure where to begin worrying about the assets of WALMART AND LOUIS VITTON of all stores over the needs and apparent rage of the local community.

<comment><USER15> Because it's just property, right? No downstream effects on society at all, right?

I'm sure you were out their leading the charge when Justine Damond was shot in the stomach by a cop in Minneapolis, right?

This isn't about race and probably never was. Tragic as it is, looting and riots are going to solve anything. Seriously, if you think that's helpful, then you are the problem. What's happening now is akin to a toddler throwing a tantrum. This behavior won't change anything. It's all virtue signalling until dark when it turns in to chaos.

So how about spouting of some things that will actually make a difference, instead of following the crowd blindly in to the Apple store as you yell, "hands up. don't shoot."

<comment><USER16> You know people can complain about the way they are treated without needing to come up with a solution, right? Your comment is akin to defending a bully whise response to their victim's pleas to stop bullying them is "make me". Besides, there are a variety of actions and reforms the protesters call for, and just because they may differ, or arent being actively chanted in the streets, doesn't mean they aren't being made. At the very least, I'm sure everyone protesting would agree that they want to see real consequences for uncalled-for police violence going forward, instead of the current system which has failed in this regard. You may disagree with that solution but to argue it isn't being proposed at all is just wrong. If you haven't seen the proposals people are making, you aren't paying attention.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> This situation reminds me the beginning of the pandemic: everybody thought it's just a couple cases here and there and would resolve by itself quickly. This won't resolve quickly, partially because the current sketchy administration really needs this kind of protest to justify using more force and implementing the global survelliance - something they've been wanting for long time.

<comment><USER18> I'm also having a similar emotional response that I did in mid March. Fear, anxiety, anger, sleepless nights, and distorted time perception.

<comment><USER19> I'm livid with companies that aren't talking about this with their employees and giving them space and flexibility on deadlines, meetings, telling them to not worry about taking vacation if they need to, etc.

I've talked to so many friends that are stressed out and barely able to work or function right now and they have massive anxiety and stress from world events that are only being compounded by managers and C's not leading by example and telling them to take time for themselves and stopping the unnecessary meetings or TELLING them that they understand their productivity might be gone.

And these are fairly privileged people with the ability to work from home and a stable income.

My wife is a black engineer and she's hanging on the last 2 days still taking client meetings and putting on her "work is still important" face but she's miserable before and after dealing with them. She's also, like a lot of us who haven't been hearing direct empathy from leadership, afraid to take PTO/Vacation right now BECAUSE of the economy and fear of losing her job.

On the flip side I have seen a lot of companies that are giving people Fridays off, 3-4 day weekends to decompress, etc.

I think after this I'll be moving to only working for companies that I find to be very active in social movements.

<comment><USER20> I'm really shocked that this is the case. I work for a big evil company (not entirely by choice, my former company was acquired). I really didn't have anything nice to say about them before the pandemic, but so far through the last couple of months they've been doing everything you're talking about. If my company, with their incredibly damning Wikipedia article can do it, I'm at a loss to why anyone else can't.

<comment><USER19> I've mostly worked for old-timey telco companies not from CA/WA and they're pretty behind the times on empathetic leadership in my experience. I didn't really start even experiencing what I consider empathetic leadership until I started working for CA/WA companies over the last 5 years.

Any remotely awkward event that popped up you likely had a boss who just didn't say a peep about anything because they didn't want to rock the boat.

Thankfully I'm seeing a lot more reports of the opposite this week but there's still a lot of those companies out there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> At the same time that this administration decries the overreach by other government law enforcement bodies such as the FBI.

<comment><USER22> That's because the FBI was investigating them and their buddies. For Trump it's not about principles, it's about power and what they can get away with.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I am starting to wonder if this is what it means to run "government like a business". Corporations are basically authoritarian dictatorships that don't tolerate dissent or only within a narrow range and it seems that government is run the same way.

</comment><comment><USER24> Surveillance of protesters:

Student leaders were put under close surveillance by the authorities, traffic cameras were used to perform surveillance on the square and the restaurants in the nearby area and where students gathered were wiretapped.[108] This surveillance led to the identification, capture and punishment of participants of the protest.[109] After the massacre, the government did thorough interrogations at work units, institutions and schools to identify who had been at the protest.[110]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests#Surveillance_of_protesters)

<comment><USER25> Clearly Trump and his accomplices are huge fans and admirers of Chinese methods. And they've only just started.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Palantir has contracts with these agencies. So you've got Facebook board members, and probably Mark Zuckerberg, profiting from this chaos.

Are you guys figuring out the game yet?

<comment><USER27> Curious: what is Zuck's relation to Palantir?

<comment><USER28> Peter Thiel serving on the board of both Facebook and palantir.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Good to see that any pretense that the drug war was not just another way to enslave minorities and other undesirables is gone with the current government. Now they're bringing in the veteran warriors who have deep experience suppressing the aforementioned. A more hostile and unnecessary police force than the DEA doesn't exist.

</comment><comment><USER30> "The DEA is limited by statute to enforcing drug related federal crimes."

Barely an inconvenience.

<comment><USER14> They just need to sprinkle a little crack before making the arrest.

<comment><USER31> I'm waiting for when "sprinkle a little covid on dead people" becomes a thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> I think this has more profound history and consequences than people realize.

The DEA for a long time has been slowly transforming into this catch all military/police/spy/logistics/legal/intelligence/technical agency. It picks up little bits of responsibility and capability here and there that enable it to do some function in a drug case. But because the funding of drug law enforcement is so crucial for so many government functions in direct and indirect ways, and because individuals in a position often benefit from an increase in scope the pressure is always towards scope creep, to saying yes when permission for more power is asked.

So the DEA has organically expanded and expanded and expanded and the more this is accepted the easier it is for it to creep further and further until it starts to resemble something totally different than how it would have originally been envisioned.

On the other side of this you get someone like Trump, who is looking for tools he can use that have limited restrictions on their powers and a wide scope of arenas in which they can be deployed, and the DEA is an obvious choice.

An you end up with a very dangerous combo of a person who is looking for as much power as he can grab onto and this entity which is incredibly efficient and capturing scope and power within our current system and therefore extremely ripe for abuse.

This is a great argument for strictly defining the scope of these alphabet soup agencies upfront and making the process to change those scopes very restrictive. Unfortunately we've chosen the exact opposite path.

<comment><USER33> As the people say, "Fuck 12".

<comment><USER32> As much as I support not supporting the police, I feel like there are better ways to further that cause than shouting cryptic slogans.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Nothing better captures systemic, institutional, hidden racism than the war on drugs. Why oh why can't we end that already!

<comment><USER25> I don't find that systemic, institutional racism very much hidden.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Before it gets asked...

>The DEA is limited by statute to enforcing drug related federal crimes. But on Sunday, Timothy Shea, a former US Attorney and close confidant of Barr who was named acting administrator of the DEA last month, received approval from Associate Deputy Attorney General G. Bradley Weinsheimer to go beyond the agency's mandate "to perform other law enforcement duties" that Barr may "deem appropriate."

<comment><USER36> How can we repair a system that's been systematically corrupted over several years? As a systems engineer my instinct is to rebuild the system from the ground up. If only politics was that simple.

<comment><USER37> The way we fix legacy software systems: By carefully refactoring it one step at a time and testing and monitoring to make sure our refactoring doesn't break stuff that's working correctly.

The big rewrite is always appealing but almost always doomed to failure. There is 200+ years of painfully learned lessons in the US legal code. If we throw it all out and start over, we'll have to re-learn all of those lessons one tragedy at a time.

<comment><USER38> How far can we push this software analogy...

The government is a PAAS business. They have various customers, both direct B2C, like you and me, and B2B relationships with other companies that run business on their platform. Either way the customers pay quarterly or yearly for the services through a system called taxes.

Political activists and are a type of white /gray hat hacker who seeks to demonstrate exploitable flaws in the platform and may benefit through bug bounties from backers or through getting advantageous features implemented. Lobbyists are a kind of social engineer that also wishes to influence feature decisions.

Legislators are a type of software developer. Their job is complicated by the lack of adequate test and simulation environments, and the presence of competing interests who frequently oppose the suggested features or implementation decisions but whose approval is often needed for the PR to garnish approval.

<comment><USER39> > How far can we push this software analogy...

People used to talk about the "Microsoft tax"... well this system already has Federal, State, and local taxes...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Is there an easy way to detect fake cell towers? A rooted android maybe? Wouldn't be surprised if they're using Stingrays and it would be fun to catch one in the wild.

<comment><USER41> There's already apps for it. You need root if you want to actually be able to avoid the suspicious towers.

<comment><USER42> Most previous versions of iOS are rootable - easy on an older phone that can't be updated.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Hmm... If they want to stop rioting and looting, why are they going after "protestors" rather than the rioters and looters? Someone's torching a mall? No police in sight. People are walking and chanting in the street? That calls for a crowd of 1000 police fully decked out in military gear and tear gas, itching to crush heads.

<comment><USER44> They don't care about rioting or looting. Watch how the police have been arranged, in Los Angeles at least. They are there to make the protest seem dangerous, while intentionally allowing looting to go on 2 streets over.

The idea is to allow scary looking but ultimately meaningless damage to occur while blaming it on protestors.

<comment><USER45> The respond to peaceful protests with violence, which causes rioting, which leads to more power and money for police.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Barr is one of the most dangerous AG's this country has ever had. He believes in extreme executive power. That "secularism" is evil and the downfall of this country. Worst of all imo, is that he believes that the law enforcement of the federal government is there solely to serve the president. Somehow he still calls himself a conservative.

<comment><USER47> Secularism (the sharing of religious space in a pluralistic society) is not a particularly unifying perspective among American Christians so it's not very surprising. For American Christians, secularism is a fancy word for "forfeit the power in your hands."

</comment></comment><comment><USER48> It's interesting how the USA is becoming again a Brzezinski Experiment State.

This time it's all the new fancy tech combined with the military on home soil and a mad head of state.

Did anyone spot those fancy microwave crowd control stuff yet?

<comment><USER49> Can you expand upon that? I'm unfamiliar with the context behind 'Brzezinski Experiment State'.

<comment><USER48> It was a common phrase of Brzezinski during the Cold War era to describe the Soviet Union (or East Block countries) as "Communist Experiments" (vs. USA as the Proto-Capitalist Experiment country). I'm not sure if he'd did that in the english version of his books though.

One of his German ones is called: "Das gescheiterte Experiment: Der Untergang des kommunistischen Systems" (The failed experiment: the fall of the communist system".

<comment><USER49> Ah, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm not sure what the US administration is doing, but I won't be surprised if they are going to manage this as good as the virus pandemic, i.e. that they are completely oblivious to what's happening and what to do with it.

Since it's not in my interests to find one day an angry mob at my house, I'm tempted to give some advice regarding the "crowd management". The nation is like a bowl with liquid: the bowl is the borders that contain it and emotions is the force that drives the liquid particles. The exact equation describing this liquid doesn't matter much. What matters is that just like any liquid like substances contained in something, it has resonance modes and resonance frequencies. If there is an external periodic driving force (emotions in our case), the frequency of the force is going to find one of the resonance modes and once the mode is found, the amplitude grows exponentially. Time to find this mode depends on the strength (amplitude) of the driving force. The way to prevent or even stop the resonance is to keep changing the driving frequency: then the liquid forms steady patterns.

<comment><USER33> Or we could just hold police officers accountable when they break the law.

<comment><USER50> Or we could do both?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Parallel construction in effect!

If you're going to a protest, for the love of god bring a prepaid phone.

</comment><comment><USER24> In Soviet union it was KGB and their black Volga's coming in the early morning hours to pick up the "inconvenient" ones. Early morning hours were picked because there were not many witnesses around. How far away from KGB are any of these 3 letter angencies? DEA, FBI, CIA, NSA...?

</comment><comment><USER51> my cynical take: DEA has been authorized because DOD will not.

B-34 et infra, p.B-6 FM 3-19.15 [https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-15.pdf](https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-19-15.pdf) (esp B-54)

I have no idea what the most recent incarnation of GARDEN PLOT may be, the above is what I found in a quick search. But I'd hope that at this point the DOD is more likely to side with the population than other agencies, and work- to-rule if need be.

Anyone know of an online copy of DA Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2?

</comment><comment><USER52> Many comments here assuming that we can get out of this hole we've fallen into by changing laws or replacing the administration.

Perhaps things are falling apart because of the massive influx of underdeveloped evil egos: they've got a supermajority mostly everywhere and can ignore the few good people. This is what some Hindi manuscripts mean by kali-uga - the dark age.

With this skeptical view in mind, there isn't much we can do to reverse the flow. It's a flood and we can do our part to minimize the damage, but ultimately we have to wait when the weather changes.

<comment><USER45> There aren't that many people with power. We can only assume these underdeveloped evil egos have a supermajority within a group of a few thousand. Numerically, that's not an unmanagable problem, supposing it's the case.

<comment><USER52> It's apparently enough to have just a few people with visible power. I'm just saying, the reason we see so much snow everywhere is because it's the winter of the human civilization. And no, the winter won't end because some good minded folks issued a decree that from now on its summer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> It says for fourteen days. Can you open an very wide investigation and keep it ongoing for longer than that?

<comment><USER54> You can collect a lot of data that will have value long after the window is closed.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> So with the DEA spying on Twitter what messaging apps are truly secure these days for the organizers of the peaceful protests to use?

</comment><comment><USER42> This is the thin edge to a national police action. Crazy how little oversight there is over the executive branch (and this administration in particular).

<comment><USER55> The entire "checks and balances" system breaks down when a handful of Republicans in the Senate are complicit in everything that is going on.

<comment><USER37> _> when a handful of Republicans in the Senate_

This is one of the really brilliant things the GOP has done. They've led us all to believe that it's just McConnell and a couple of other shitbags but that the rest of the Republicans are mostly OK.

That's a deliberate smokescreen. Notice that the "handful of Republicans" always happen to be in red strongholds? McConnell volunteers to be the public face of the GOP's bad policies because they know his seat is secure. Meanwhile, all the other GOP Congresspeople who support those same awful policies but might risk losing an election can stay out of the news and pretend it's not their doing.

McConnell was voted into his seat by a _majority_ of the GOP Senators. They all know what they're doing.

<comment><USER56> Gosh if only the cities that are burning to the ground right now had dem senators, dem congresspeople, dem governors, dem mayor, dem city councils we could solve this thing. Alas!

<comment><USER57> This (inadvertently) highlights a major part of the issue right now. Cops are largely invulnerable to civilian oversight. Democratic elected officials won't save you from the NYPD - they can't really be fired, the police union doxxes the mayor's daughter, they instigate police riots, and they do work stoppages when criticized.

An example from Minneapolis, from a City Council member:

[https://twitter.com/MplsWard3/status/1267891878801915904](https://twitter.com/MplsWard3/status/1267891878801915904)

> Politicians who cross the MPD find slowdowns in their wards. After the first > time I cut money from the proposed police budget, I had an uptick in calls > taking forever to get a response, and MPD officers telling business owners > to call their councilman about why it took so long.

<comment><USER58> This is a result of public unions. Which party caused those to be so strong?

<comment><USER57> Police unions are fairly unique, and heavily supported by the Republican party in recent political history.

[https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gop-and-police-unions-a- lo...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-gop-and-police-unions-a-love-story)

> When Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker cracked down on collective bargaining > rights of public-sector unions, he exempted cops and fire fighters. He > feared the police might go on strike and join the protestors. Videos of that > pairing could have doomed Walker's entire effort. "It's a decision by > politicians not to bite off more than they can chew," explains James Sherk, > a labor policy expert with the conservative Heritage Foundation.

Their impunity to civilian oversight should be concerning to both parties. You're not hearing much concern from the Republicans on this right now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> I doubt they really care to stop or punish retail looting. Probably just testing / practicing their ability to detect more serious terrorism. I hope...

<comment><USER60> I admire your optimism. I don't think you're right, but I admire it.

<comment><USER59> Imagine a virtual protest over zoom where people loot copyrighted media by sharing it with fellow protesters... kind of like a civil disobedience Napster / scihub thing. Bill Gates, and the RIAA and MPAA and the publishers would historically be horrified, but given the transient, justifiable protest, their political message would be accepting. the DEA and NSA would want in again, not because they care to stop retail piracy (free advertising), but corporate espionage and tax evasion by people who have a lot of money.</comment></comment></comment>


My advice for people wanting to try Rejection Therapy - <AUTHOR> http://www.jasonshen.com/2010/so-you-want-to-try-doing-rejection-therapy-eh-heres-my-advice/ <comment><USER2> I used to be a confidence/game coach a couple of years ago, and a common theme would be that socially awkward people generally had a higher tolerance to rejection, and vice versa for more socially 'lubricated' people. In my eyes this was down to socially awkward people's lack of understanding of the whole social matrix (e.g. social norms, how you should act etc.) The catch-22 was that as they faced more rejections - and more importantly more interactions - their confidence & social skills improved, and their rejections started to hurt a lot more.

What I'm trying to get at is that in my experience the actual getting rejected part doesn't really help _on it's own_. Sure, it's great to understand that getting rejected doesn't matter, but beyond that the only thing that is really helping you are the skills you're learning along side the rejection. So in my student's case, a much more productive thing for them to do was to throw themselves into more challenging social situations.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never thought about the fact that the rejections would hurt more as you get more socially aware. I do thing the rejection therapy challenge creates perverse incentives to ask for things outside of what you really want to get to make sure you get rejected, rather than asking for things right at the edge of your comfort zone. Thanks

<comment><USER3> I think introverts or those with social anxiety disorders have more to gain with Rejection Therapy than highly social extroverted people (like yourself).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> You shouldn't do something really stupid?

Cop out:)

Ok, so I've pretty much done this to some insane extremes. Thing is, it's a lot easy to do it as a game than as part of life. Example: go tell a girl she is ugly as hell. A good % will ask you if you've a bet with someone; and indeed it's a lot harder to honestly express that than to do so as a challenge.

For people more interested, I'd check out this book called Radical Honesty. If you do this challenge and want to "graduate" to next level, that book is solid.

</comment><comment><USER5> Jason, I've been keeping up with your Rejection Therapy challenge and it's been highly entertaining so far. Your comfort zone is certainly a lot broader than mine.

And that brings me to my point: you're more of a risk-taker than most, but it seems the game better serves people who are essentially handicapped because of a social anxiety disorder or introvertedness.

Since you're actually played it, and I haven't, you tell me. Am I right or wrong? Or is the game for anyone?

<comment><AUTHOR> Hey Sharktankr - yeah I'd agree. After talking with Jason Comely (rinkjustice on HN) and understanding that he really created the game to push himself, I'd say it's better served for introverted people.

You can see it in his definition of what counts as a "rejection" - <http://rejectiontherapy.com/what-counts-as-rejection/> it's supposed to be outside your comfort zone - so even smiling at a cute girl counts. Since I'm comfortable doing a lot of things, it's hard to for me to find rejections that are in this category that aren't really rude or dumb. Though sometimes I wonder if that is just an excuse I've created to not continue pushing myself. (aka I need to approach more beautiful women =D).

I do think the game can be fun for anyone and a valuable/educational experience. Where do you think you stand on the introvert/extrovert continuum?

<comment><USER5> I'm your classic introvert. I'm living vicariously through you :)

<comment><AUTHOR> Living vicariously just doesn't cut it. You should seriously do it. We can tailor it so it's not too scary - email me: jasonyshen at gmail

<comment><USER5> I'm not ready yet, but it's seriously on the todo list. I'll let you know when I am :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks for pointing this out, I had never seen this rejection therapy before. It's similar to an idea of my own. I've been toying with creating a website for introverted/social phobic people that challenges them to get out and be more social.

</comment><comment><USER7> > YOU MUST BE REJECTED BY ANOTHER PERSON AT LEAST ONCE, EVERY SINGLE DAY.

Being married counts?

<comment><USER3> Having been divorced, I'd say a big YES.</comment></comment>


Best RPGs of 2012-2016 - <AUTHOR> http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10535 <comment><AUTHOR> I just liked the various graphs used in the article, so I wanted to share that.

As for the rest of the site or the thread discussing the result, I don't think you'll miss much by not wading further.</comment>