Yammer pulls down $85 million in venture funding - <AUTHOR> http://www.itworld.com/software/254902/yammer-pulls-down-85-million-venture-funding

<comment><USER2> _The company claims that more than 85% of the Fortune 500 now have Yammer networks, including Thomson Reuters, Shell, Chevron, Nationwide and Ford Motor._

This reminds me of claims that "90% of the Fortune 500 use our software", when in reality "90% of the Fortune 500 have had at least one person download our evaluation version". How much is Yammer _actually used_?

<comment><USER3> We don't throw this figure around lightly. Certainly some companies use Yammer more than others, but every company uses Yammer differently. Some companies even pay us for it.

<comment><USER4> Your reply is a non-statement that sounds like it came straight from the marketing/PR department.

What percentage of Fortune 500 companies have at least five users who posted something on Yammer in the last two weeks?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Oh HN, you never disappoint. So many people scratching their heads not seeing the value in Yammer, and not a single one of them have ever used it.

I've been at a company for a year who uses it extensively, and it is probably my favorite communication tool we have.

Let the down-voting commence!

<comment><USER6> I've used it, and while I see some value in it, I'm not sure I see $142m worth.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What is it about HNers that they have so much trouble understanding the appeal and success of a service like Yammer and the nature of venture investing?

For starters, Yammer is undeniably successful on pretty much every measure, including revenue (something HNers normally value). Yammer sells to businesses after all which have a good ability to pay and in a category where businesses have demonstrated such.

Yammer is executing on a brilliant acquisition model. It is a perfectly constructed freemium model that takes maximum advantage of the characteristics of email addresses (as organizing mechanism and communications tool).

And $100 million may seem like a lot of money to raise (and for what?) but remember that Yammer's founder's previous experience was at PayPal where $225 million was raised. However it's quite apparent where a lot of money could be spent going up against the likes of Salesforce, Oracle, Jive, etc: sales, marketing and product development...globally.

Some HNers need to get over their "build it in a weekend" mentality and start trying to understand how and why services get traction and become successful (if they care).

</comment><comment><USER8> isn't there a time when a company should stop growing via venture funding and start re-investing it's own profits? you know, like a sustainable company? how to determine when this points has come? (i thought yammer was already far beyond that point)

<comment> jim-greer In many cases a round of this size is like a 'private IPO' and provides some liquidity for founders or even early employees. This quote suggest that may be the case here:

<quote>The new funding "is like an IPO without the headaches," he said, adding that the start-up can now "stay private for quite some time."</quote>

<comment><USER9> Someone may need to correct me here, but why would there be a pressure to go IPO? plenty of companies stay out of public market (in private hands), remain strong, build brand, bring profits, etc. IF they havent brought strong numbers already, what would make anyone sure another $85 mil will?

<comment><USER10> There is strong pressure to IPO because that is a liquidity event (opportunity to turn ownership into money) for investors. The other option is acquisition. Recently, IPOs are _hard_ , for a combination of regulatory and market reasons.

One could imagine a hypothetical world where profits paid as dividends to owners would suffice to give investors the return their business model requires but that is very much not standard practice in the US tech industry. To a professional investor (especially a VC firm), a profitable company that cannot be sold/IPOed is a failure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yammer is currently hiring: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3654071>

This link also has some info on what makes us different than facebook/irc/campfire/status.net

<comment><USER12> "Sure, Yammer is just like Facebook, but we're so much more than that. Corporations don't share cat pictures, they turn into efficient business machines."

I was expecting something more substantial.

<comment><USER3> I gave an example in the paragraph right above that. There are many more examples and testimonials from paying customers at the link I posted. I'm happy to answer any more questions.

<comment><USER12> What example? I read it again, and I really don't see any "info on what makes us different than facebook/irc/campfire/status.net"

As I already said <https://www.yammer.com/product/index> does give me some idea of how Yammer is different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I don't understand all the hate on this thread. Use Yammer at my current startup; used Yammer before at bigger companies.

Terrific product. There's a lot of features that I'd love to have, but this is a much-need space.

A social-network for work. i.e. a social network that people will actually _pay_ to use.

Who has perfected that? $142m is really the start here. Looking forward to their future.

</comment><comment><USER14> We use Yammer at our two-person company. It's not like Lotus Notes or other groupware I've used in the past, but there are similarities to Facebook and document-sharing tools.

We find utility in the ability to have asynchronous discussions among a restricted group of people and share links (like Facebook) and also to share documents and other files. A typical use case is someone posts a file, a link, or groups of files or links, and then we discuss them.

We could use email for the asynchronous discussions, or Dropbox or Google Docs for document sharing (and we do, sometimes, for some scenarios). But having all of these resources in a single, searchable, discussable location is very useful for us.

<comment><USER15> We use Yammer at our 300-person company and we've found it really valuable. We're roughly evenly distributed in 4 countries, so having somewhere which is asynchronous where people can see what's happening around the group provides a sense of connection between our staff. Anecdotaly, I've found it particularly valuable amongst IT people who feel more comfortable sharing ideas and opinions on there than they might do in person.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> With the arsenal 37Signals provides, why would any company use Yammer? I found it as useful as Google Wave. Seriously, it could sort-of replace email if everyone in a company used it, and if Dropbox didn't exist...and of course Basecamp had never been dreamed up.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm a Yammer user. I'm not head over heels for it, but it's good especially for decentralized operations. I'm in a consulting company and we don't actually talk about projects as much as advertise articles we wrote, software we created, questions, or water cooler type stuff. I see the utility, but $85 Million valuation?! I don't see that. How will Yammer turn a profit with that debt load? Let's say the exit strategy is selling would anyone want to buy it at $400M? If not is it worth that risk for less?

</comment><comment><USER18> Beyond the fact that this seems like "profit by VC injection" what does Yammer do that couldn't be more easily, more simply and more flexibly solved via Laconi.ca/Status.net?

<comment><USER12> Yammer must have a much, much bigger sales force, so we can start with whatever a vendor sales force actually does for customers.

Speaking of sales forces, isn't Salesforce Chatter the biggest (as in sales [force], at least) corporate-social-media-solution?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> something about this screams "bailout"</comment>


Connected Components – The one Graph Algorithm you need to know - <AUTHOR> https://mlwhiz.com/blog/2018/12/07/connected_components/ <comment><USER2> In case people are wondering, the algorithm is 'connected clustering'

> You can think of Connected Components in very layman's terms as sort of a > hard clustering algorithm which finds clusters/islands in related/connected > data. As a concrete example: Say you have data about roads joining any two > cities in the world. And you need to find out all the continents in the > world and which city they contain.

The article doesn't contain a concise pseudo-code description of the algorithm but instead sneaks up on it by throwing in lots of python that implements various graph operations.

<comment><USER3> > The article doesn't contain a concise pseudo-code description of the > algorithm but instead sneaks up on it by throwing in lots of python that > implements various graph operations.

True, that's really a lot of code while failing to outline the simple algorithm or concisely describe the basic idea. It doesn't mention complexity either, which is linear.

It might also help beginners to mention the image analogue, i.e. connected components of a regular grid graph, which is called 'flood fill'.

> In case people are wondering, the algorithm is 'connected clustering'

FWIW, I've always heard the algorithm called 'connected components', and a quick Google search on both terms gives me more relevant hits for 'connected components'. In fact, I don't get a single directly relevant hit that describes this algorithm on the first page for 'connected clustering'.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I find articles like this interesting. While I have hired plenty of software engineers and data scientists without Computer Science degrees I do think sometimes people without them are at a disadvantage.

Breadth First Search is a freshman year concept at many schools. Sophomore at the latest.

On the other hand it gives me some respect for people who have to learn this all themselves. Having 4 years to take off from work and just learn this stuff is a huge luxury and not necessary in a lot of cases. But at least for me I am very thankful for the structure of a formal degree. I don't think I could have self-taught all of this.

<comment><USER5> I'm a mechatronics engineer working as an embedded software engineer. I've had to rapidly learn and teach myself a whole lot to be able to do my job effectively and correctly.

Given that, I studied many of the standard CS algos when I was brushing up for a FAANG interview. I found this _gem_ of a guide: [https://bradfieldcs.com/algos/](https://bradfieldcs.com/algos/) and after working through the examples, I could understand the behavior and underlying mechanisms of these algorithms. which completely helps when reading about articles like this!

Anyway, I think one would only be at a disadvantage if they are not seeking to continuously learn & satiate one's curiosity.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I guess it's also worth mentioning strongly connected components (SCCs) in this context (i.e. there is a directed path from any node to any other node in a component).

In the context of data analytics a SCC finding algo can be used to identify bottlenecks of communication/transportation networks and fault tolerance of distributed networks. In this case we are particularly interested in edges that connect SCCs. Another application is clustering. For instance, finding clusters of accounts that all follow each other on Twitter. In this case each such cluster is a SCC.

Kosaraju–Sharir algorithm is an easy to understand SCC algorithm with linear running time that basically consists of two BFS passes.

P.S. NetworkX ([https://networkx.github.io/](https://networkx.github.io/)) is a great Python library for working with graphs. It has implementations of many common graph algos including SCC finding algorithm (it is an implementation of Tarjan's algorithm).

</comment><comment><USER7> I did this in a module called decision mathematics at A-level.

This is a nice implementation of classical graph problems.

Stuff like traveling salesman etc. Dijkstras algorithm.

The bit I am missing is how does this help me solve a day to day problem?

how can this be applied in something modern other than say a shortest path / route finding algorithm?

I suppose it's a way to reach an end point most efficiently and that makes it useful for nueral nets which are essentially tree's with weighted edge values.

the easiest path through the tree is something you could find and that might illuminate a route to optimizing your "thing" whatever that is.

Am I getting the idea of this right or not? ....

<comment><USER8> It's actually not even a nice implementation of a classical graph algorithm. They use a Python list as a queue. Python lists are only efficient when used as stacks. calling list.pop(0) or list.remove(list[0]) takes time proportional to the length of the list. This makes the algorithm take quadratic time, when it should be linear.

For this to be a nice implementation, they should use the standard library deque for the BFS or just pop from the end of the list to do a more efficient DFS for the connected component algorithm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> The title is absurdly reductive. Anyone interested in graphs should be encouraged to learn about shortest paths, max flow, spanning trees, etc. and to identify some of the major np-hard graph problems. "Addition - the one Arithmetic Algorithm you need to know".

</comment><comment><USER10> If you find this interesting, you should check out Donald Knuth's latest "The Art of Computer Programming, 4A: Combinatorial Algorithms, Part 1". It goes into a lot of depth about the theory behind all of this. You don't need to have read the first three for 4A to make sense.

</comment><comment> a-dub Also known as union-find. Favorite implementation is Sedgewick's weighted quick union with path compression from the first chapter of his algorithms text. Also cool is an implementation in the graph chapter which actually makes use of DFS instead.</comment>


A course in Machine Learning - <AUTHOR> http://ciml.info

<comment><USER2> Deep learning seems to have a relevant position in the state of the art, does ciml treats it?

Great job! Congrats!</comment>


NASA picks 12 new astronauts from crush of applicants - <AUTHOR> https://phys.org/news/2017-06-nasa-astronauts-applicants.html <comment><USER2> How soon until private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin begin taking "Astronaut" applications on their own careers page?

<comment><USER3> A while. For now, SpaceX's passengers are all contracted passengers launched on behalf of third parties; none of them are SpaceX employees being launched on SpaceX missions. Possibly for future systems like the ITS SpaceX will need in-space maintenance and engineering staff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I've always wanted to be an astronaut but alas, you must be a strong swimmer (for training and misc. events purposes). Note to all, always get your kids to take swimming lessons...

<comment><USER5> Are you sure?

> Requirements include U.S. citizenship; degrees in science, technology, > engineering or math; and at least three years of experience or 1,000 hours > of piloting jets.

<comment><USER4> sorry to kill your dreams...

> As part of the Astronaut Candidate training program, candidates are required > to complete military water survival before beginning their flying syllabus, > and become SCUBA qualified to prepare them for spacewalk training. > Consequently, all Astronaut Candidates are required to pass a swimming test > during their first month of training. They must swim 3 lengths of a 25-meter > pool without stopping, and then swim 3 lengths of the pool in a flight suit > and tennis shoes with no time limit. They must also tread water continuously > for 10 minutes wearing a flight suit.

Source: [https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/606877main_FS-2011-...](https://www.nasa.gov/centers/johnson/pdf/606877main_FS-2011-11-057-JSC- astro_trng.pdf)

I'm actually Canadian and when I looked into applying for CSA, they stated the requirement was a strong swimmer. They did some drills in the Atlantic.

<comment><USER6> > and become SCUBA qualified to prepare them

Uh, sorry, but there's no such qualification!

There are may "qualifications", from the amateur PADI (of which I have a couple of grades), to BSAC 1st class (probably the most stringent and disciplined of qualifications, despite technically being an amateur club); but "SCUBA qualified" is not one of them.

<comment><USER4> I have no idea of any of the qualifications. I simply copied the quote from the NASA source in my comment. Why don't you bring it up with NASA?

<comment><USER6> So you blindly quote something that you have no clue about, then snark when you get called out on it?

Schmuck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > "Under President Donald Trump, America will lead in space once again, and > the world will marvel," he said.

"Making Space Great Again ?" Space exploration is about Mankind, not nations.

<comment><USER8> I tend to just filter out phrases like that when I'm reading. I agree with your premise but as long as there's government funding involved, in any project that's guaranteed to get attention, someone is going to realize that it's advantageous to kill two birds with one stone by steering the positive press towards their party.</comment></comment>


We're almost 5 years after Heartbleed. What is now the best SSL library to use? - forgot-my-pw <comment><AUTHOR> BoringSSL if you can, otherwise most projects still keep using openssl over libressl. LibreSSL API changes were a bit too radical to be widely adopted, and mbedtls or pornin's BearSSL is too different, though much better on recent attacks.

I would summarize Google did a better job than the OpenBSD folks. Pornin's BearSSL is also extremely good.

</comment><comment> coding-columbo I've used mbedtls for a few things but I don't see openssl going anywhere.</comment>


Data Centers in Strange Places - <AUTHOR> http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2010/10/11/data-centers-in-strange-places/

<comment><USER2> Not sure about others but Prairie Bunkers (one of the listed companies) has its domain parked. I guess they went under...

</comment><comment><USER3> Also relevant:

[http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super- de...](http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/11/14/the-worlds-most-super-designed- data-center-fit-for-a-james-bond-villain/)</comment>


Twitter Reports Second Quarter 2014 Results - <AUTHOR> https://investor.twitterinc.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=862505 <comment><USER2> From an investor standpoint I don't get why the stock is up 30%. I could understand if the stock was going to up 1-8%, but 30+%? Is it all the shorts covering? Is it the fact they brought in a wall street insider as CFO (Anthony Noto).

Wall Street was expecting a loss of 1 cent per share, but they surprised on earnings of 2 cents a share. Not a huge surprise.

Other things that irk me about the stock.

 _Management, I don 't feel a warm and fuzzy having a non founder has a CEO. Nothing that Dick Costello has done to show me he has any long term vision. _They fired almost everyone is senior management. Which shows signs of instability. *I haven't seen any product innovations come out of twitter from a end user standpoint organically.

<comment><USER3> Aftermarket activity is not a great indicator or what will happen the next day. I doubt it'll be up that much tomorrow

<comment><USER4> Actually in the case of earnings reports released after hours, aftermarket activity is an outstanding indicator of what will happen tomorrow.

<comment><USER5> Usually, but not always with fast moving momentum stocks like TWTR. The initial movement is triggered by algorithms that try and figure out if the earnings report was good or not. I remember an absolutely wild Facebook swing after an earnings statement that went from huge up to down the next day (once it was mentioned on the conference call that teen usage was down).

There are going to be a ton of sellers tomorrow (if I had any shares I sure would), it will be interesting to watch. You know that some of the bears who got squeezed this afternoon are going to double down and be back on the hunt tomorrow.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> The most important figure to look at here is the cash flow statement. Consider that they are actually cash positive from operations, but are spending more than 1.5x the cash they get from operations on buying companies. Consider also that a lot of their staff are cashing out on their stock options which is the big reason for the GAAP to non-GAAP differences in net income.

<comment><USER5> > Consider also that a lot of their staff are cashing out on their stock > options which is the big reason for the GAAP to non-GAAP differences in net > income.

They're giving away huge sums of investor equity to employees instead of having to pay them what they're worth, it's fair that this is recorded as an expense.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "revenue doubled, but losses tripled"..

There's a reason they brought in that Goldman Sachs guy. And it looks like he has delivered, extracting "profit" out of the numbers.

I'd love to short the stock if I had the spare cash. But as they say, the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. :-(

Also: how much of this jump is due to the World Cup?

<comment><USER8> The funny thing about World Cup is that it happens every four years. Two for Olympics. World series, Stanley Cup and Super Bowl are every year. The bottom line is that people like twitter once they interact with it for any reason (like any of the above.) Once they are in they find a reason to stay. As more people around the world get mobile devices that can interact with Twitter, more people will start using Twitter (and Google and FB, etc.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> You guys are all focusing on the financial numbers. The real news is that TWTR added 16M MAUs, when the bulls forecast 11M, and the bears forecast 6M.

<comment><USER10> Twitter MAU quarterly reporting growth hack: switch from spam account removal to spam account hellban.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I've never been particularly bullish on Twitter's ability to make money, mostly because their business model isn't obvious to me. That being said, the fact that they are going to exceed $1 billion in revenue is really impressive to me. I've heard various bearish news over the years: Rails doesn't scale, they will never make money, user growth is slowing, etc. For a company with so many people betting against them, they seem to be pretty good at overcoming challenge's! It won't surprise me to see them making the big bucks in a year or two. Good luck Twitter!

<comment><USER12> Their business model is advertising seems pretty obvious. Am I naïve?

<comment><USER13> No, you're correct. Their business model has to be and is going to be advertising, just as obviously as Facebook and Google's business models are.

Facebook is printing immense profits now. It wasn't that long ago a lot of people were proclaiming that could never happen. That's not to say Twitter will do the same, but it's entirely plausibly they can reach a modestly profitable ad-based business model off a couple billion dollar sales basis (which it seems they will be able to reach).

<comment><USER5> > Facebook is printing immense profits now. It wasn't that long ago a lot of > people were proclaiming that could never happen. That's not to say Twitter > will do the same, but it's entirely plausibly they can reach a modestly > profitable ad-based business model off a couple billion dollar sales basis > (which it seems they will be able to reach).

I'm not sure I would say immense, but they are certainly making profit. Facebook makes a little more than half the profit of HP (which many HN users may have forgotten still exists).

What is immense is its valuation of 80 times earnings even while the product is literally running out of humans left to be new users (let alone humans who have money).

<comment><USER14> > What is immense is its valuation of 80 times earnings even while the product > is literally running out of humans left to be new users (let alone humans > who have money).

This is what amazes me. The last few humans left without a facebook account are those earning $2 day. What possible business model can sustainably boost earnings 10x from here?

<comment><USER15> Also those that made a few fake facebook accounts to stalk people in highschool, but never had an actual account because they had not more than a handful of friends and did not want to give an american coorporation all their personal details. Oh, also countless variations Jesus and Mohammed accounts giving spiritual advice to strangers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> That revenue number is an increase of 124% over the $139 million revenues from Twitter's second quarter last year.

So yes, Twitter still posted a $145 million loss, but if we extrapolate (never good business practice, but an interesting thought experiment) and they do the same next year, they will be profitable by 2015.

It's unlikely that will happen, but there's light at the end of the tunnel.

<comment><USER17> If we extrapolate, we would need to take into account the fact that Twitter's losses tripled as their revenue doubled.

That light might well be a train.

<comment><USER18> There are a lot of one-time expenses involved with going public, so you'd have to strip those out of any extrapolation. But I'm not going anywhere near TWTR.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I'd just like to point out, their loss was pretty much solely the result of a $158 million dollar compensation expense.

"Net loss – GAAP net loss was $145 million for the second quarter of 2014 compared to a net loss of $42 million in the same period last year. Twitter's GAAP net loss included $158 million of stock-based compensation expense."

Thats probably why the "loss" is mostly irrelevant to the stock price increasing. Depending of course on what you think that business action means for the company.

As well, growth is accelerating (increasing at the margins [i.e. The derivative of growth is increasing]).

... Make of it what you will, that's the magic (investing) part.

</comment><comment><USER20> Can someone who knows more than me explain why tech companies are including non-GAAP figures (that are more flattering)?

<comment><USER21> For the very reason you suggest: [http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-10-04/an- accounti...](http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-10-04/an-accounting- lesson-for-twitter-).

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> Perhaps one of the ways Twitter was able to report MAU increases: subsidized data. Note the lack of geographic breakdown of whence these users came.

[http://adage.com/article/digital/twitter-facebook-rate- telec...](http://adage.com/article/digital/twitter-facebook-rate-telecom- deals-abroad/293741/)

</comment><comment><USER23> [http://adage.com/article/digital/twitter-facebook-rate- telec...](http://adage.com/article/digital/twitter-facebook-rate-telecom- deals-abroad/293741/)

Twitter are doing the old Facebook scam of having telco's freebie data use in return for getting people hooked on posturing and heart on sleeve 'sharing'...

<comment><USER24> Unfortunately, a lot of tweets include links to non-Twitter sites, which would not be included in freebie data. Will be confusing and/or disappointing for users, putting them behind a glass wall of look-but-dont-read.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Millions of dollars, but try to send a DM with a link and you get "internal server error", just like you got a year ago.

</comment><comment><USER26> What is the Goodwill line for (up from 363M in 2013 to 514M in 2014) under the current asset section? What does it mean?

</comment><comment><USER27> This report is worthless by itself. Who cares about Year-over-Year numbers for a high growth company. The results vs the previous quarter are most relevant. Sure, there is a holiday effect in Q4 for ad businesses, but the QoQ comparison is the only thing worth looking at.

</comment><comment><USER28> i keep wondering how they earn money to keep going (honest question)

</comment><comment><USER29> if you read the 8k, they doubled revenues but more than tripled losses. all this nongaap bullshit. read the footnotes. they removed stock based compensation and depreciation. how in the hell are those non operational charges? stock soars. hrm... lets make it look like were profitable so our lottery tickets are worth more. no thanks

<comment><USER30> Both are non-cash expenses, so makes sense to consider financials without them when looking at GAAP vs. Non-GAAP. They're certainly operational charges, but somewhat distort P&L.

<comment><USER29> I'm not even sure what you mean. They come out of shareholder equity, and all public companies use accrual and not cash-basis accounting. It makes zero sense to strip out those operational charges unless you want to _appear_ profitable for some short-term benefit. I realize companies do this kind of crap. It absolutely does not make it right, and the folly of the stock market is just that: believing just because somebody said or did something that it is also correct, or that something is OK because it looks official on a SEC document.

<comment><USER30> Not saying I disagree. I don't think people should be looking at GAAP vs. Non- GAAP if they don't understand that one vs. the other doesn't make the company more or less profitable. My point is it helps better understand the company from an operational perspective when very high SBC or D&A can significantly distort actual expenses.

<comment><USER29> My point to you is that SBC and D&A _are_ actual expenses in every way imaginable. Just because Twitter says not doesn't make it so.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Outsiders (1987) - <AUTHOR> http://www.worlddreambank.org/O/OUTSIDRS.HTM

<comment><USER2> It is known that humans require the company of other human beings or else bad things start happening (think solitary confinement: anxiety, depression, cognitive disturbances, perceptual distortions, and psychosis).

I wonder to what extent it is important to just be around other humans, versus, be around other humans who are similar to us. For the super unique, I imagine it can feel incredibly lonely. It doesn't have to be limited to intelligence, it can be cultural, linguistic, etc. The article even says "He is saying that they are a different kind of mind, _a different kind of human being._ "

It is like humans have a built in mainstream-ification device which inherently punishes those who stand too far from the middle. What is particularly interesting is how good our tools are at connecting people with similar interests. The internet is helping isolated individuals feel like they are part of a community, good or bad.

<comment><USER3> I feel it's important to keep that "good or bad" part in mind. As humanity's drifting away from the external influences that "punish those who stand too far from the middle", we need to start internalizing some of those checks to make sure that the way we're standing far from the middle is a _good_ thing, and not just being an asshole.

<comment><USER4> Since today someone said SMBC is overtaking XKCD as the comic reference king on HN(1), here's another:

[http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2832#comic](http://www.smbc- comics.com/index.php?id=2832#comic)

(1) news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8320741

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I wonder how one differentiates the possibility that exceptional individuals are alienated from others around them by their exceptionality from the possibility that exceptional mental ability is intrinsically accompanied either directly by social difficulties or by social development that is less resilient to negative aspects in one's upbringing. I suspect that both of these happen to some degree, but they seem difficult to disentangle.</comment>


Sine-wave speech audio encoding - <AUTHOR> https://mobile.twitter.com/BrianRoemmele/status/1263583401677746176 <comment><USER2> I love this demo. It's a good example of how much our perception is affected by our priors.

This is a other great example, where speech is synthesized with an acoustic piano (though the keys are controlled digitally, the sound is just from the hammers and strings). Without the subtitles you probably couldn't understand, but it sounds pretty clear when you know what it's saying already.

[https://youtu.be/muCPjK4nGY4](https://youtu.be/muCPjK4nGY4)

<comment><USER3> you hit it on the nose here. This is a stellar example of priming.

Have you also done your fair share of psychophysics? :-D

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Source: [https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/sine-wave- sp...](https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/sine-wave-speech/)

</comment><comment><USER5> ???

All sound is a sum of sine waves. The term "sine wave speech" makes as much sense as "wet water."

The demo is cool, but pick a name that makes sense.

<comment><USER6> > All sound is a sum of sine waves.

No, it's not, though that's a popular way of encoding sound data. A square or triangular wave will still be a sound, with a distinct character to a sine wave of the same frequency.

<comment><USER7> A square or triangular wave is a sum of sine waves.

<comment><USER8> As far as I know, any arbitrary waveform can be represented by an _infinite_ sum of sine waves, and approximated by a finite sum of sine waves. However, I don't know if you can assert that a sine wave is the only fundamental building block for sound that exists. Is there a physical reason for that statement?

<comment><USER9> There's an infinite number of different sets of orthogonal bases that you can construct any signal from. Sine waves (with phase) are a quite natural and convenient choice though, for mathematical reasons (for example, the efficiency of the Fourier transform).

<comment><USER8> Sure, but there may be a reason why non-sinusoidal sound waves cannot exist in practice. For example, if I try to generate a square wave by applying +5V and -5V to a speaker, the diaphragm does not move instantaneously so the resulting pressure wave is not discrete. However, a triangle waveform may be physically realizable. But I'm not sure about that either, because a speaker is ultimately an inductor and hence the current flowing through it is non-linear.

<comment><USER10> I did a deep dive into this, but this just seems to be the case about sinusoids. technically any well behaved periodic functions can be the basis function for all fourier-related stuff (there actually is a FT where a square wave is the basis function, but I can't seem to find it) but there seems to be something special about sin(x) and cos(x) that makes it more convenient to analyze our physical world. They seem to be the result (and the only result) for some class of very simple linear differential equations, which because of its simplicity, happens very often in nature. That's why FT uses sin(x) and cos(x).

<comment><USER11> >there actually is a FT where a square wave is the basis function, but I can't seem to find it

Haar transform? Technically that's a wavelet transform, but that's a distinction without tremendous difference.

<comment><USER10> i meant the walsh transform, but that's also neat</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


What confuses you the most about CSS3? - <AUTHOR>

I'm working on an eBook about CSS3 and I'm wondering what developers find most confusing about using it? Is it browser prefixing, browser support, complex selectors and properties? I'd really appreciate some feedback. I'll also be happy to give a free copy of the eBook to a random user who leaves an answer. Thanks for your input. <comment><USER2> Browser prefixes. I will never understand this.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks Matt I'll be sure to include some info on prefixes.</comment></comment>


Ask HN: Good documentaries for children - <AUTHOR> My daughter is 5 and interested in everything about the universe, the creation of life, dinosaurs, space flight, middle ages, castles etc.  Just about everything.
I would love to show her some good documentaries about those topics but are having a hard time finding the good ones. Can anyone recommend some suited for children?
Thank you and sorry if this has been asked before. <comment><USER2> Vikidia has an english version, it's for 8-13 children though [https://en.vikidia.org/wiki/Main_Page](https://en.vikidia.org/wiki/Main_Page)

</comment><comment><USER3> Not exactly documentaries, but you can try the Beakman's Word show [https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=beakman%27s+wor...](https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=beakman%27s+world)</comment>


We can't leave Grindr under Chinese control - <AUTHOR> https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/04/09/why-we-cant-leave-grindr-under-chinese-control/ <comment><USER2> Gotta give the article credit for the interesting perspective. This is something that I've had to deal with on a personal scale when getting clearance but I would have never thought about it like this on a national scale. A data-set containing information that could be readily used to blackmail US citizens being in the hands of foreign governments is exactly the kind of thing that keeps our government up at night.

</comment><comment><USER3> How can the US tell a Chinese company they need to sell something?

As far as I can tell this was an entirely legitimate business transaction. It is now up to the users to determine if they want to stay with the platform.

Besides, the best way to mitigate this risk is societal change. How would the average person go if their porn viewing history was public knowledge? Poorly, I bet. Perhaps we should "simply" stop judging each other's sexual preferences so harshly. (I realise this is a tall order)

<comment><USER4> Congress can pass laws that do this. For example, there are laws limiting foreign ownership of TV stations.</comment></comment>


Ryuk Ransomware Crew Makes $640,000 in Recent Activity Surge - yaseen-rob https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/ryuk-ransomware-crew-makes-640-000-in-recent-activity-surge/ <comment><AUTHOR> for some reason (hihi), all those computers are Windows PCs.</comment>


Cheaper alternative to AirBnB: CampInMyGarden.com - <AUTHOR> http://campinmygarden.com/

<comment><USER2> To be followed by: "crashinmybasement.com" and "hideinmyattic.com"

<comment><USER3> And finally: "vandownbytheriver.com"

<comment><USER4> If only I could convince the wife

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It's a very British (or perhaps European) thing to reserve someone's garden and pay money for it too.. Camping in someone's garden is great fun if it happens randomly and spontaneously but I wouldn't plan it for the world.

<comment><USER6> So it's not an abnormal thing to wake up and find someone's pitched a tent between the sunflowers , next to the tomato plant?

<comment><USER7> I'm pretty sure he means when you just go round ringing people's doorbells and asking them if you can put up your tent in their garden for a night.

The few times I've done this the people who allowed me to use their garden turned out to be incredibly generous as well. Inviting you to dinner, giving you candy, soda etc...

I don't think either that it would be equally as fun if it weren't spontaneous.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> As a UK guy, this is a great service for us: We always keep a tent, chairs and stove in the boot of our car.

This service will help in finding somewhere to camp if we are in a random area of the UK and want to see a little more of it the next day.

They should have a "Ok to pee in bushes" search option though ;-)

A.

</comment><comment><USER9> I was fully expecting this to be a parody site.

</comment><comment><USER10> All mocking aside, I've had this idea before. We've "car camped" around the U.S. when we were young and broke. I love the idea of having more choices and possibly cheaper campsites. But there's no way that this makes any financial sense for the property owner, especially here in the U.S. Liability concerns, bathroom issues, housing codes / deed restrictions / local laws, etc. all come up and it's hard to justify more than $20 / night. The only way it makes sense is as semi-charity or maybe for special events.

</comment><comment><USER11> Sleepinmybed.com -- get paid for staying in someone else's home

</comment><comment><USER12> Introductory econ courses need to start citing startups as an example of why economic profit is always 0 in the long run.

<comment><USER13> That doesn't make any sense - couchsurfing.com existed long before airbnb, as just one example.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> The site design is hideous and should've made a better attempt at mating Gowala with AirBnb, but I love the idea. I walked across a chunk of Europe a couple of years ago and made good with hostels and such, but many times would've just preferred to pitch a tent overnight and be on my way the next morning. That being said, I'm a quiet, respectful person. Can't wait to read about all-night raves and tweakers gone berserk out in the shed.</comment>


What billionaires want: the secret influence of America's 100 richest - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/30/billionaire-stealth-politics-america-100-richest-what-they-want <comment><USER2> I'm not seeing any reference or source for these claims in the article. Did I just miss it?

<comment><USER3> In the article the authors mention conducting a study:

 _We have come to this conclusion based on an exhaustive, web-based study of everything that the 100 wealthiest US billionaires have said or done, over a 10-year period, concerning several major issues of public policy. For each billionaire we used several dozen carefully selected keywords to find all publicly available information about their specific talk or actions related to any aspect of social security, any type of taxation, or anything related to abortion, same-sex marriage, or immigration policy._

the authors of the article have written a book, coming out soon:

 _Benjamin I Page, Jason Seawright, and Matthew J Lacombe are (respectively) Fulcher professor of decision making, professor of political science, and PhD candidate in political science at Northwestern University. They are co-authors of Billionaires and Stealth Politics, forthcoming in 2018 with the University of Chicago Press._

Perhaps references & the like will be found there. Looks like the book won't be shipping till early December, but you can peruse the table of contents here:

[https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo29...](https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/B/bo29143391.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yet another guardian "the rich are bad" type of article.

<comment><USER5> I personally wouldn't summarize the article as "the rich are bad."

But more as: "A lot of ultra-rich people are secretly advancing agendas that benefit them"</comment></comment>


What application do you use to write technical procedures? - <AUTHOR>

I have been writing procedures using Microsoft Word, but I feel I'm limited by the amount of formatting I can do with Word.<p>Is there anything else out there that is directly geared towards writing procedures, user manuals, step by step tutorials and the like? <comment><USER2> Without knowing (a) how long the deliverables are, (b) how many people will read them, (c) in what form they will be read and (d) the degree to which they will be repurposed, it's sort of hard to give you a single recommendation.

Many fairly large organizations use:

1\. Adobe Framemaker (for long stuff) 2\. Oracle Universal Productivity Kit (very popular if the company is also building documentation or training). 3\. One of the content management suites using DITA (usually HP or IBM).

The two most common-used, however, are Word and (gag) Excel.

</comment><comment><USER3> Emacs org mode -> export to HTML.

(if you can get away with it)

</comment><comment><USER4> Have you tried LaTeX? Or GNU Texinfo, perhaps?</comment>


The Mouse Trap: The dangers of using one lab animal to study every disease - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_mouse_trap/2011/11/lab_mice_are_they_limiting_our_understanding_of_human_disease_.html

<comment><USER2> This problem is only a small subset of the problems inherent with essentialism, which in turn is only a small subset of the problems inherent in allopathy. There are dozens of epistemological and practical problems with modern medicine that run all the way up and down the abstraction layers. There is a good book called The Cult Of Pharmacology that discusses some of these:

<http://www.erowid.org/library/review/review.php?p=269>

edit: This article completely misses out on some of the most interesting problems inherent in the mouse model. For example, the efficacy of drugs is very closely tied to cultural context, so you have all sorts of researchers trying to create cultural experiences for their mice in order to get better results. And because of course their papers won't get published if they include this information even though it's essential that they do these things, it means that none of these experiments are reproducible, i.e. they are no longer within the realm of science. Nor does the author really explain how the market-driven model for drug research is responsible for these distortions, nor does he fully discuss the fact that there are an enormous number of drugs that have been washed out that may actually be effective in humans, etc. I just saw a really good talk on this a few weeks ago, I'll submit it in a couple months when it's posted online.

<comment><USER3> > so you have all sorts of researchers trying to create cultural experiences > for their mice in order to get better results.

Can you give an example please?

<comment><USER2> A good example is that the background noise can apparently have an effect on the mice, including things that people might not even notice like a computer fan running in the corner of the room or whatever. Another example is timing, apparently you can get bad results if you're not running the experiments at the same time each day. A third example is the way the mice are selected for the experiment, apparently you can get better results if you practice picking up the mice and injecting them with saline each day for a week before you start injecting them with the actual drug. Apparently there are even people who will sing to their mice because they think it makes a difference. Not to mention things like whether your mice are waking up to natural light or an artificial light being turned on, how much ability they have to exercise, whether you are petting them each day, how much you're feeding them and how nutritious the food you're giving them is, etc.

Cultural experiences was probably the wrong term, but basically what's happening is that large portions of the protocol, which are apparently essential to obtaining the results, can't actually be written about in the paper, meaning the results can't actually be reproduced. (Although if you actually look at the Rat Park experiments and think of each environmental factor in terms of the larger whole, perhaps culture is the best metaphor after all.)

And even if you completely standardized the handling of the mice, there are all sorts of reasons why they mice model is still dubious beyond the many reasons discussed by the article. For example, some researchers have reported a 'tall left-handed blonde effect', where the results can only be duplicated by tall left-handed blondes. I think this is why historically such a large percentage of our medicine is derived from plants originally used by shamans or that otherwise had a historical ethnobotanical use, and why even today so many of the most promising compounds are also things that come to the attention of scientists based on anecdotal evidence. (E.g. MDMA for PTSD, LSD for cluster headaches, cannabinoids for treating cancer, etc.)

<comment><USER3> Very interesting, thanks.

My problem with this article and sentiment is that there is no good alternative suggested. I don't know enough about mouse research standards, but I would think that all these details should be targets of further research to understand the system better and make better protocols to control it, instead of the marathon of hand-wringing that I see in this article - most of it irrelevant to the model itself. Out of all the things discussed in the article, I literally cannot identify any actionable items. It's just a big discussion of various aspects of modern biology, framed in a contrarian manner.

<comment><USER4> I felt otherwise. I believe the author not only pointed out other alternatives but talked with those people trying to do things differently. Namely the course of action is simply to try different and more varied things.

The whole problem that is being decried is that of following a rigid, fixed formula that tries to generalize for all cases. That of using the mouse model for everything, even those things for which it is not the best fit.

In software terms this is akin to Netflix's implementation of Chaos Monkey. Mainly that one shouldn't only check for certain failure conditions that have been previously specified, but to also create a framework where you try to look for faults in areas that are outside of the expected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> There are some major inaccuracies in the way biomedical research is presented in this article. For one, in nearly every mouse study, confirmatory studies are also carried out in human tissue cultures (Hela cells are a famous example), which are completely absent from their pie chart.

Secondly, the article completely ignores sequencing efforts - an astonishing oversight in my opinion. Obviously, we can't do genetic studies on humans, but inexpensive exome sequencing is rapidly allowing us to do observational studies in humans.

</comment><comment><USER6> Think of it like this: maybe 10 years ago you thought "hey, why are we writing software for Windows when we could be writing it for Mac / Linux where it's so much nicer and easier?" And then you remember that most everyone else uses Windows and you know that if you want to make an impact, you have to use those platforms, until the balance slowly shifts.

The same goes for medical research: if you want others to be able to use and build on your result, it needs to be comparable and reproducible. That is, others have to be able to run your methods (read: software) on their animal models (read: OS).

So when he says:

 _Perhaps the researchers have come to resemble their favored species: So complacent and sedentary in their methods, so well-fed on government grants, that any flaws in the model have gone unnoticed, sliding by like wonky widgets on a conveyor belt._

It's kind of grating. It's not just "easier" and "cheaper" -- it's _fundamentally more useful to other scientists_ and that's worth acknowledging.

<comment><USER2> "it's fundamentally more useful to other scientists and that's worth acknowledging."

But at the end of the day the goal isn't just to produce results that are logically consistent with the results of other scientists, it's also to discover drugs that can be used to cure real human diseases. Using a mice monoculture model is really bad for this, because there are lots of drugs that would work great in humans but that never get tested because they don't work in mice, and similarly there are tons of drugs that we waste millions of dollars testing solely because they were effective in mice. When looking at the results of mice studies is less predictive of what will work in humans than just looking at anecdotal reports from people, then it means that the scientific model of drug development has basically become less effective than 'alternative medicine' as a source for new ideas, which is problematic for obvious reasons. I have no idea what percentage of drugs with a history of enthnobotanical usage end up being able to demonstrate real efficacy, but I can guarantee it's a hell of a lot better than the 10,000 to 1 figure cited by this article as the rate of drugs that successfully go from petri dish to mice to humans.

So then I think we have to ask ourselves, why are we spending our money on mice when actually going out into the rainforest and talking with indigenous people could be literally two orders of magnitude more cost effective. And, much more importantly, why are we genociding indigenous cultures in favor of 'scientific progress', when empirically preserving traditional knowledge is so much more conducive to real progress and understanding. Hundreds of thousands of people throughout history have been willing to die in order to at least try to figure out which drugs work and which don't with the very limited tools they had, so ignoring what they have to teach us is a tragic waste, especially since we probably aren't going to go back to sacrificing millions of people in the name of scientific research any time soon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> In the past many discovery's where made by finding better animal models. For example, Guinea Pigs get scurvy mice don't and once we had a model it was possible to isolate vitamin C. But, today we can probably create mice that could get scurvy... Which suggest for many things tinkering with a mouse DNA may bet the best option because there is no good animal models for things like genetic diseases.

<comment><USER8> On what basis can you possibly conclude that we have exhausted our options in terms of discovering novel animal models? The article itself states that "[i]n 2009, a Japanese team created a transgenic line of marmosets—the first time that had ever been accomplished in a primate species."

My wife does stroke research with mice, but she also has described the importance of using multiple models as a way to expose new facets of the same issue. Animal research is learning by approximation, so it's critical to find new ways to examine similar problems.

<comment><USER7> _for many things_ there is simply no good animal model so you are going to need to alter somethings DNA to get a good approximation of what's going on. Sure you can also alter the DNA of a primate but the downsides are A) we know less about primate systems than mice and B) they cost a lot more.

This is not to say a primate or even a zebra finches may not be a better animal model for many diseases, just that we share a _lot_ of DNA with mice so there is a lot of relevant information we can gain from continuing to study them. Which when combined with their low cost means it's reasonable to spend more time and money looking at mice than our closer relatives.

PS: There is a vary vary large but finite set of useful drugs we can discover. As a first pass approximation being able to consider 30x the candidates at the cost of doubling our false positive and false negative rates is probably worth it (for now). Eventually, I suspect we will be able to accurately simulate many diseases in software based on human DNA or even an individuals DNA at which point we may be able to revisit a lot of these false negatives for lower cost. Between now and then we will probably start looking at a larger array of animal models based on our understanding of an ever more detailed understanding of DNA. But, until we can actually debug diseases the old shotgun approach has a lot of merit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> One of the things that interested me the most about this article was the unintended consequences of various measures used to gauge progress.

For example, researchers seem to be evaluated by the number of papers written, number of publications and peer acknowledgement. These metrics favor the mouse model heavily, with its cheap and fast methodology. It also seems to promote behaviors that seem at odds with what should arguably be the end goal of the work: creating working drugs.

It paints a rather bleak picture of the establishment with that goal in mind, despite the best intentions.

</comment><comment><USER9> One more study to back up Taubes book about calories.

</comment><comment><USER10> No, I didn't RTFA, but I'm going to blow off some steam anyway... experimenting on mice for human-related studies (behavioral, physical etc) is not only lazy, but fraudulent. It's a waste of tax payer money, and its overly cruel on en entire species of animal.

And we constantly reference these studies with lab mice again and again for answers to human problems. It's a fraud.

<comment><USER11> Before a drug can be put on the market it has to be tested for it's efficiency and safety. It starts by giving the drug to volunteers to assess its safety. Would you rather we do not study the effects of the drug on animals before experimenting on humans?

<comment><USER10> Yes.</comment></comment></comment>


What happens when you install the top 10 download.com apps (HTG) - <AUTHOR> http://www.howtogeek.com/198622/heres-what-happens-when-you-install-the-top-10-download.com-apps/

<comment> angry-hacker Toxic software is really killing the Windows platform.

</comment><comment><USER2> glad to be on Mac OS X!

<comment><USER3> Many otherwise intelligent people deal with this nonsense every day, and yet won't buy a Mac because they are "too expensive".</comment></comment>


We don't want no stinkin' website. - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jan2009/tc2009015_031412.htm

<comment><USER2> One of the comments on the article offers an opposing view:

Justin Feb 13, 2009 3:13 PM GMT

DO NOT listen to this guy! This article is nothing but the "opinion" of an uninformed CPA. His opinions are supported by NO credible data. Here are credible stats that completely refute Mr. Marks article: -73% of consumers use search engines to find local businesses from which to buy (WebVisible/Nielsen NetRatings, 2008) -Search engines are the first source to which consumers turn to find local businesses (31%), ahead of even print yellow pages (30%). (TMP Directional Marketing/comScore, 2008) -Over 77% of people said they were more likely to make a purchase from an unfamiliar business with a quality Web site than a poor Web site from a known business (WebVisible/Nielsen NetRatings, 2008) Mr. Marks, next time you are asked to write an article about anything related to marketing, please do your research and support your opinions with credible statistics.</comment>


Serverless Logic with Realm: Introducing Realm Functions - <AUTHOR> http://news.realm.io/news/serverless-logic-with-realm-introducing-realm-functions/ <comment><USER2> Looks useful. Glad there's a dev tier - I won't need to build a rails backend at a hackathon ever again.</comment>


The Girls Around Me App Takes Creepy to a New Level - <AUTHOR> http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/30/girls-around-me-ios-app-takes-creepy-to-a-new-level/

<comment><USER2> This app just shows what we've known, or should have known, about Facebook and Foursquare. When you check in, people know where you are! and every public piece of data on Facebook is available to every frat rat and creepy stalker on the planet. Somehow the author realized that "normal" people don't think about it that way. The article isn't news so much as a PSA.

Odd that whoever wrote the headline decided to directly contradict the author's conclusion at the bottom: this isn't anything new.

<comment><USER3> "Somehow the author realized that "normal" people don't think about it that way."

Could someone with a bit more understanding of "normal" people explain why this is? There are many cases where people seem to throw caution out of the window just because they're on the Internet. It doesn't make sense to me.

<comment><USER4> The concept of a public lifestyle does exist, and I'd say it's a good sign that people do not live in constant fear of their neighbours.

<comment><USER5> The thing is, this is the Internet. _Everyone_ is your neighbor.

And you raise a false dichotomy. Just because someone wants to exercise their right to privacy does not imply one is in "constant fear" of others.

<comment><USER4> I was using neighbour to refer to the concept of the fellow (wo)man. I did not mean to insinuate that people who have concerns over privacy live in fear. Personally, for me, I would more enjoy living in a society where some people are comfortable publicly sharing their identity.

<comment><USER5> But your solution stops being effective at the slightest loss of control of the data. Also, you can't control other people who might get access to it.

How does your public identity being tied to your "real self" helps you if some random person decides to break into your house? How would you feel if people you don't even know started shouting "Happy Birthday" to you on your birthday? How would you feel if those same people started talking about those genital warts you had to treat two years ago?

People will be comfortable sharing anything (identities, actions, personality traits) as long as they feel they have control over who gets access to what is being shared. I fail to see how anyone would feel comfortable sharing _everything_ to _everyone_.

<comment><USER4> It's all fairly easy to manage if you don't take it to a logical extreme.

<comment><USER5> I'd say the examples I gave are far, far from any logical extreme. TFA mentions how just by crossing two (apparently) disparate networks, you get people potentially being harassed by complete strangers.

All I'm trying to say is that I don't see how to reconcile the idea of having a "public lifestyle" (i.e, let personal information be freely available to anyone that bothers to go look for it) and being able to have a controlled disclosure of personal data.

<comment><USER4> Well in my view, "sharing everything with everyone" reaches a vertex on the continuum. Clearly I'm not putting stuff out there that I wouldn't tell to, say, an acquaintance I met at a party.

You raised concerns over someone breaking into my house. I believe we want to stay away from the "you should be afraid of people" argument.

So I suppose your concern is that I would rather some information I leak out remain private. Sure. So what? Then you have to worry about things that you wouldn't want an acquaintance at a party to know. What are those things, how would they get online, how often, and what would the impact be? It's better just not to worry in my opinion, instead of running around putting out fires when a friend of yours on Facebook or Twitter publicly posts that it's your birthday.

<comment><USER5> I guess we are talking about different things. If you are analyzing what it is what you disclose, and the consequences of it being out in the open, the impact etc... then it's no longer a "public lifestyle", it's just that you feel comfortable putting some information online when other people don't. There is no argument to be made.

But the whole point about the OP that started this discussion of ours was not about information that people are comfortable to share with people they trust. It's about how people not realizing about the information leaking to people they don't know. You seem to dismiss that with the idea that it's a false sense of security. We could argue about that, but it's besides the point.

What I wanted to point out is that it's not just about security. It's about _trust_. And trust does not with blacklisting post-facto. It works by whitelisting prior known people. The people who got surprised by discovering they were visible on some creepy website had to learn that the hard way.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Article was recently updated: _After publication of this article, Laura Covington, a Foursquare spokeswoman, said in statement: "This is a violation of our API policy, so we've reached out to the developer and shut off their API access."_

<comment><USER7> > we've reached out to the developer and shut off their API access

That's sounds so ... I don't know ... PR-ish and passive aggressive. I always thought "to reach out" means an attempt to help. In other words the one reaching out has good intentions and intends to help the other party. So in this instance, it is like saying "the police reached out to the family, killed their dog and arrested everyone".

<comment><USER8> It's absolutely PR-ish, and it's a bit annoying that the update could leave the naive reader with the impression that everything's been fixed when actually what's happened is that the visibility of the problem has been removed.

So far I've only once been threatened with being "reached out" to, by Oracle after I tried to ask them about one of their products. I found the expression vaguely sinister and was kind of relieved that they never actually got in touch.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This reminded me of a scene from Greg Egan's SF novel, Zendegi. <http://gareth-rees.livejournal.com/31182.html>

You know AcTrack? It's a reality-mining plug-in that learns about academic networking using physical proximity, along with email and calling patterns. Last semester we put it on everyone's phones.

All right, so I'm running AcTrack. Is everyone else who's running AcTrack appearing on Google Maps?

No, but you know Tinkle? It's a new femtoblogging service going through a beta trial. Like microblogging, only snappier. It tells everyone in your network where you are and how you're feeling, once a minute.

But why am I running it at all, and why is it telling complete strangers where I am?

Oh, I doubt you're actually running a Tinkle client. But on the server side, AcTrack and Tinkle are both application layers that run on a lower-level platform called Murmur. It's possible that there's been some glitch with Murmur -- maybe a server crash that was improperly recovered and ended up corrupting some files. Tinkle does hook into Google Maps, and though it shouldn't be putting anyone on the public database, if you don't belong to any Tinkle Clan it might have inadvertently defaulted you to public.

</comment><comment><USER10> How is /that/ suddenly "creepy"?

I find it creepy that people upload their complete lifes onto Facebook and agree to be stalked 24/7 by Foursquare et al, even actively "checking in" (never understood what for) to publicly broadcast every movement they make.

</comment><comment><USER11> My priorities must be backwards. I'm almost as appalled that the app comes with an "Energy" meter that is fueled by 99-cent in-app purchases.

</comment><comment><USER12> How does this violate 4square's ToS? And how do you distinguish between this app and "legitimate" apps.

<comment><USER13> Hey dfc,

We have a policy against aggregating herenow information across venues using our API, to use like this. You can see it clearly stated here in the description for the endpoint: <https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/venues/herenow>

We also prohibit using our API in any manner that is threatening, invasive of another's privacy, or otherwise inappropriate.

As mentioned in another reply, we do also reserve the right to revoke access to our API for any reason, at our sole discretion. That being said, we aim to be consistent and transparent in our policies and how we enforce them.

Cheers,

~ak, platform evangelist @ foursquare

<comment><USER14> Thanks for the clarification. I felt this app very threatening, btw, and the NYT article says you already revoked their API access.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> How is this techically possible? I was under impression that foursquare doesn't share your full public profile (including your twitter and/or facebook) when you show up in 'x is also here:'. I get it how it can look up girls that are nearby (scan for nearby 4sq venues, than if there are people in them, filter for girls...), but how can it link back to Facebook (unless you're friends with that person on 4sq and/or facebook, which makes whole point of this app moot)?

<comment><USER16> I found it surprising too, but your impression is wrong.

When you query the Foursquare API for a user, Foursquare returns the user's Facebook and Twitter names in their response (if the user has provided them to Foursquare):

<https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/responses/user> (see the "contact" field)

Once you have that, you just query Facebook and Twitter for their publicly available profile, photos, likes, tweets, etc.

<comment><USER17> The Foursquare API explorer is the best demo of an API I have ever seen: <https://developer.foursquare.com/docs/explore>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Whelp, here comes privacy regulation. We were skating a fine line for a while, but I think these guys might have just pushed it into a very concrete, scary- for-normal-people-and-their-legislators territory.

</comment><comment><USER19> New app "Nerds Around Me" lets you stalk via Google+ checkins

</comment><comment><USER20> Maybe this will finally be a wakeup call to privacy.

Too many people do not take this stuff seriously and I'm now convinced that people may only _start_ to do something about it when they start experiencing fear over this. Hopefully, awareness over privacy will one day be taken with the same seriousness as "Don't touch that fire, it will burn you".

</comment><comment><USER21> Sign, maybe it is better apologize later than asking for permissions first.

My company hotlist.com was thinking about similar User Interface as "Grils Around Me" for Hotlist.com on 2008, but we think it was too creepy for users to accept it. Even we just show your acquaintances from Facebook and people already feel uncomfortable about being followed implicitly and we spend a lot of efforts listening to users in user testings to make them feel comfortable.

Well, if you like to see where to go and see what kind of crowd in the location, you can come to check hotlist.com out. And if you like it and have suggestions, please do send us feedback. Thank you so much.

</comment><comment><USER22> If only it wasn't a TOS violation of Foursquare and/or Facebook's API, then maybe people might actually care about their privacy.

</comment><comment><USER23> creepy but solving a real problem, easier to find the women you wanna meet around :P

</comment><comment><USER24> Public is public. I just assume that any public data I have will be indexed, correlated, searched and used for all sorts of things I didn't intend.

</comment><comment><USER14> The Sex Offender Association is calling them "App of the Year"

The next version will correlate profiles from different networks using face- recognition and offer insights on usual itineraries based not only in geotagging of posts but also picture background analysis.

This app is a _very_ bad idea.

Note to downvoters: if you disagree with this assessment, by all means, say why.

<comment><USER25> I didn't feel the need to downvote you but I think the reason is pretty clear. You're making an unhelpful and not very clever joke, and then making up a future 'version' of the app for no discernible reason.

<comment><USER14> I think the idea was to highlight the most obvious use for apps like this. The very idea of how easily one could be made by connecting easily available information such as Foursquare checkins, Facebook profiles, tweets, Instagram photos, all neatly tagged with addresses and geographic coordinates allows anyone with such disturbing inclinations to piece together a fairly accurate picture of whoever they want. This app offers a nice menu of easy targets.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Isn't it also sexist? And by default cutting out a large sector of the market...

<comment><USER27> You can also make it search for guys. But you're right, the default (as also given in the name) is women. (It says so in the article.)

<comment><USER14> I never met a girl who would seriously use an app like this. And I have met my share of crazy stalkers.

<comment><USER28> That is because hot girls are constantly hit on by guys.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Non creepy version? [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/where-the-ladies- at/id4156024...](http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/where-the-ladies- at/id415602400?mt=8)

</comment><comment><USER30> The In-App purchase to recharge the service is frightfully ingenious.

</comment><comment><USER31> People wont learn till kidnappings start happening.

</comment><comment><USER28> The female version of this app would be the sugar daddy locator app. Where annual income is tied to Foursquare checkins.</comment>