Banning facial recognition is missing the point - <AUTHOR> https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2020/01/were_banning_facial_.html <comment><USER4> While he is right I think Bruce is also missing the point here himself: he states that this law is the wrong way to fight surveillance – but that is not the stated goal of the law.

The goal of the law is to prevent the development of a technical reality in Europe, to which a Jurisdiction can only passively react. The technical space moves so fast at times, that reality has been made before the law can even start to think about what is okay and what isn't.

This time they wanted to say: "Yeah it is a shiny new thing, that would definitly come if the law stayed as it was, but it is such a hairy ball of mud that we ban it till we figured out what is allowed." Or phrased differently: it is so obvious for them that this is prone to abuse, they ban it first and then figure out how to deal with it in an adequate fashion.

So Bruce' idea that the goal was to fight surveillance is a tad bit to optimistic in my eyes..

<comment><USER5> _> The technical space moves so fast at times, that reality has been made before the law can even start to think about what is okay and what isn't._

In general I think this is exactly how it should work. You cannot stop all technological developments early on and make rules for imagined problems that may or may not arise.

Imagine it's 1995. The Web gets banned for five years so that a government committee can meet to figure out what could possibly go wrong with that technology.

There are always groups that stand to lose when new technologies are introduced. And these groups are inevitably very powerful at the beginning of any new development. You can be pretty sure that nothing would go ahead without great resistance.

That said, we have to find a balance. Of course there are technologies that are so dangerous that they must be regulated fairly early on. Making some rules for face recognition and similar technologies seems entirely sensible to me.

But as a general principle I think problems should be solved when they arise. Solving imagined problems before they arise is impossible and prone to misuse of power and influence.

<comment><USER6> > _Imagine it 's 1995. The Web gets banned for five years so that a government > committee can meet to figure out what could possibly go wrong with that > technology._

Fortunately we already know what can go wrong with facial recognition technology. We have China, and we have American and Israeli and various Asian marketing startups inventing abuse after abuse after abuse. So there is already a test bed in place; it doesn't have to be the entire world.

As a general principle, it may not be a bad idea itself. Let a part of the world play with the new toys and other part observe, after that either the tech will be exported to holdouts (the control group, if you like), or the regulations will be exported to the experimenters.

<comment><USER7> But the context in those countries is too different to ours to come to any meaningful conclusion about what should be allowed "here" (I'm assuming UK + US mainly).

<comment><USER8> The vector of anglo world isn't too promising right now either.

<comment><USER7> I don't remember stating otherwise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> > These efforts are well intentioned, but facial recognition bans are the > wrong way to fight against modern surveillance. Focusing on one particular > identification method misconstrues the nature of the surveillance society > we're in the process of building. Ubiquitous mass surveillance is > increasingly the norm. In countries like China, a surveillance > infrastructure is being built by the government for social control. In > countries like the United States, it's being built by corporations in order > to influence our buying behavior, and is incidentally used by the > government.

He's right, but we should take every winning battle we can, no? Even a few notable victories could help to change public opinion about whether things are inevitable or not

<comment><USER10> > but we should take every winning battle we can, no?

It's treating the symptoms not the cause though, and this little victory will likely serve to dampen resolve to continue fighting against the root cause: increased surveillance, invasion of privacy, and the overall devaluing of privacy.

Facial recognition may be a battle that gets won, but it could be a key moment that results in the war on ubiquitous surveillance being lost.

Additionally, this is only a 5-year victory. Must we repeat it again every five years? At least the victory in the war for encryption lasted 20-odd years.

<comment><USER11> how do you devour a whale? One bite at a time. I don't think there is any purpose to being caught up in theoretical discussions about privacy. Privacy is won by extending the real rights of people piece by piece and sustaining that effort for a long time. There is no one time, root cause fix that holds forever in a democracy.

>Must we repeat it again every five years?

Yes we must. We live in a society where people over and over negotiate how they want to live together, which means that if we advocate for something we have make our case again and again. That is a good thing. In the Mie Prefecture, Japan the citizens tear down a shrine every 20 years because it is the only way to learn exactly how it was built.

<comment><USER12> > how do you devour a whale? One bite at a time.

Missed a step. You gotta kill it first.

<comment><USER13> Not really, it'll die eventually if you've taken enough bites. Might be a bit more difficult to take the bites if you didn't kill it beforehand, but still ...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I see his point, but practical face recognition is a lot easier to implement and a lot harder to defend against than all the other types of recognition. You could, for example, no carry a phone or turn it off. But your face is expected to be on show (obv exceptions aside).

So no, it's not missing the point. It's a different point. He's right, but action against face recognition is also worthwhile.

<comment><USER9> In Canada, it's now illegal to hide your face during a protest (a gift from the Harper years)

<comment><USER15> Unfortunately this is already illegal in some other western countries for quite some time. In Germany for example since 1985 (one year late though). It's often used as legitimation when the police is using violence against otherwise peaceful protests.

In the aftermath of the G20 summit in Hamburg there were some advancements to even tighten the law while at the same time the police was using illegal face recognition software.

<comment><USER16> What about fake beards and moustaches? I've heard they're the norm in Korea. Imagine thousands of Santa Claus or Paul von Hindenburg protesting.

<comment><USER17> Illegal surveillance technology deployed warrants illegal masks in my opinion. But you should also hide eyes, ears and nose to the highest degree as possible. But even then advanced image processing will probably be able to identify you if you are already on record in some form.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Everyone on HN is no doubt sitting there nodding along sagely but there's also a pretty good bet that 90% of us (nerdy, apparently in-the-know tech types) have done very little to think about cutting down on smartphone use. It's the single biggest surveillance vector (a device that you carry everywhere that knows where you are and reports your habits into a data store we know pretty much nothing about!), but we all now assume - hilariously, in my opinion - that we "couldn't live without our phones".

Personally I think the battle is totally lost until people start actually thinking about the negative impact of these devices, both from a surveillance POV and a wellbeing one.

<comment><USER19> Once Librem 5 is ready, this problem will be solved for many nerdy people here. It's just the lack of choice now.

<comment><USER20> What about the Librem 5 would make you less trackable?

<comment><USER19> At least the lack of built-in tracking. In addition, the (theoretical) possibility to install any anti-tracking apps available for GNU/Linux.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> My fear of facial recognition is not just governments it's criminals. All they have to do is crawl my linkedin on facebook and bam they have my name next to my face.

Worse they know where I work or where I live.

This opens up a world of problems.

Say someone sees a stranger in a situation that the stranger may find embarrassing. Embarrassing enough that they could be extorted. They open their phone and find out who the person is. They can now make contact and threaten to contact your employer or spouse with images of you in this embarrassing situation.

You now have a real life avenue for this sort of thing [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextortion#Webcam_blackmail](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextortion#Webcam_blackmail).

I know the greater problem is that we now share our details online maybe no linkedin no facebook is smarter.

</comment><comment><USER22> We shouldn't ban any technology. However, we should ban a technology when it is used for _____. The ban should cover the use, not the technology itself. It's fine to make building a nuclear bomb illegal, but studying radioactive elements should not be.

Similarly, the technologies this article describes "identification, correlation and discrimination" should not be outright banned, but maybe they should be when their use conflicts with other important values (e.g., due process in criminal prosecution, privacy rights).

Recent targeting of facial recognition does not "miss the point", the reason it has become an issue is because it has started being used in the criminal justice system. No one really gets upset when it's just used to tag your photos.

I know developers love abstractions, but we should not try to build abstractions of technology and regulate those. To borrow from the article, identifying a person based on their "gait" is not nearly as serious an issue as facial recognition, even if abstractly they may seem similar to a developer. Instead, focus on the direct problem at hand, regulate it, and only after the passage of time when commonalities become clear, build an abstraction.

<comment><USER23> Why not? Do people trust the potential uses of that technology? If they/we don't and we all live in working democracies we have the right to ban it if we want.

I don't trust anybody having this technology, and the same goes for having samples of my DNA tagged with my name. BTW, I have no problem with my country's compulsory ID, I'm not showing it all the time and it's kind of reasonable when I have to, but having agents around me tracking what I do or don't 24/7 isn't any kind of future I want to live in. And that's what this technology has been developed for, it's not a science project. You're going to be classified and put in behavioural bins, your scores will be sold and you'll end up living in a corporate version of China. The fact that it won't be your state's agencies the ones doing it doesn't make it right.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Also see the discussion 4 days ago from the same essay published in the nytimes: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098021](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22098021)

</comment><comment><USER25> Schneier is missing the point.

> The whole purpose of this process is for companies — and governments — to > treat individuals differently.

This isn't true. It's about population control, not treating individuals differently. He has an extremely close-minded view of the future here. The point of this isn't to treat people differently, it's to contain the overton window and basically thought-police entire populations. Nothing to do with the individual being treated differently, that is merely the lipstick-pig moment where it _happens_ but isn't really the core problem.

> The point is that it doesn't matter which technology is used to identify > people.

It sure does matter! Bugs in code, hacking the system itself is all 'implementation details' of the 'technology' used to do the tracking. Techniques that are especially susceptible to both of these make a surveillance technology dramatically more dangerous.

The details _do_ matter, because they add up to a larger, unknown future. Schneier has a bizarrely close-minded view of the dangers of facial recognition.

I haven't heard any of the proponents of the ban say that it is the only surveillance that is happening or that should be banned, but that seems a central tenet to his point.

Some progress is better than no progress, especially in this case where things move quickly. I do not think we are at risk of a population thinking that its problems would be solved if we could just ban this one thing. It's a straw-man argument that I haven't even heard elsewhere.

<comment><USER26> > This isn't true. It's about population control

Uhh, why do you think that? So far, I only see evidence that mass surveillance is to catch criminals and for marketing.

"1984" was a work of fiction, and it seems more a warning about perpetual war, totalitarian, and the communism concept of "cult of personality" than just surveillance.

<comment><USER25> I don't see how 1984 is relevant here. The surveillance we have today far surpasses the simple ideas in that book.

> Uhh, why do you think that?

Because the people building the facial recognition pretty much say so? "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" does not sound like marketing opportunities or criminal-catching to me! It sounds like a desire for total corporate control over the physical and digital world.

Not to mention, it is the logical end of using this technology; "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely".

Having such a powerful and omnipotent surveillance system in place enables totalitarian control over populations. This happens through chilling effects, through terrorism, mental boxing-in of populations ceding their free will to the government. Knowing that your own face is tracked everywhere you go and sold off to anyone and owned by your own government or other governments is _dehumanizing_. Do this for decades or centuries and you will have a very humanized and defeated population.

> So far, I only see evidence that mass surveillance is to catch criminals and > for marketing.

I don't see any evidence like you are describing. I feel like we're living in different worlds.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I think the scariest thing is that in a world of unlimited data retention - <USER2> future powerful bad actor will have access to all our past behaviour - <USER3> that's liking the wrong political party, or visiting a gay bar.

</comment><comment><USER28> He's right to an extent, but face recognition is instant, silent, works from a distance, allows near perfect identification of a specific individual in many cases, and is _particularly onerous on the individual to evade_ compared to other forms of tracking.

That makes it entirely reasonable to single out and ban it, whilst also thinking about and pushing for further curbs on surveillance.

<comment><USER29> Is it though? I haven't read about any deployed solution, which would fit "near perfect" identification. I'd be thankful, if you could point me to some "working" solutions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Strange that Schneier omits the new CA privacy law, which looks to have teeth. That said, no law will be sufficient unless it's binding on the state as well as private actors.

</comment><comment><USER31> If you accept that ubiquitous surveillance, for which this is one of several technical enablers, is technically feasible, is being implemented by multiple parties, and is basically happening, the only logical conclusion is that there is going to be way more of this stuff happening in the next years/decades. This will become normal; whether we like it or not.

IMHO trying to stop this or slow it down is an exercise in futility. It may postpone the inevitable outcome for some short time but the outcome is inevitably going to be multiple parties tracking our every move either openly or covertly.

I would like to emphasize the notion that it's not just going to be a handful of parties doing this. This stuff is rapidly becoming a commodity. Just because you are in the US or Germany (in my case) does not mean, Russia, North Korea, Iran, China, etc. are not tracking you (in addition to your 'friendly' local secret service). Assume the worst; you probably are already on file in multiple countries in some form. Also, who says it's just going to be just nation states? Several big corporations exist now that basically have a bigger valuation than the GDP of most countries.

The fact that the parties that are going to do the tracking are mutually hostile (or at least not very friendly), also represents an opportunity: they'll be watching each other. Effectively nobody is excluded from being under surveillance; including those doing the surveillance. That means anyone breaking laws has to worry about being observed doing so and has to assume that he/she is going to be found out in case something inappropriate happens. IMHO this is a good thing and effectively the only defense we'll have against this being abused and enforcing any privacy legislation.

<comment><USER32> Mutually assured destruction?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> Meanwhile in China local governments even install surveillance cameras on the top of 3900 metres mountain [https://twitter.com/kidrulit/status/1216197264202293253?s=21](https://twitter.com/kidrulit/status/1216197264202293253?s=21)

Other than ethical problems cameras cause urban planing and aestheticcal problems.

</comment><comment><USER34> A few years from now, cameras and vision software will be advanced enough to recognize a person just by analyzing the small differences in colors of the clothes, how s/he walks or mapping micro scratches on his/her car without any need to take pictures of either the plate or the face. I'm also pretty sure we could already build a model of a walking person or animal just by having it walk or run on a weight sensors equipped mat, so that after due training recording when someone walks in or out of a place would be doable without cameras.

The ban should be on the final purpose, that is, pervasive generic surveillance. Otherwise it keeps being a moving target in which the most powerful party is constantly one or more steps ahead.

</comment><comment><USER35> I see that these bans regulate use by police.

But how could any of them affect use by federal agencies? Which would then share information with local police.

I mean, police lie to courts about StingRay use, or data from the NSA via SOD,[0,1] and do parallel construction.

I really do think that privacy in meatspace is hopeless.

0) [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod- idUSBRE97409R2013...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-dea-sod- idUSBRE97409R20130805)

1) [https://www.deamuseum.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/08/042215-...](https://www.deamuseum.org/wp- content/uploads/2015/08/042215-DEAMuseum-LectureSeries-MLS-SOD-transcript.pdf)

<comment><USER36> I agree with you, and I'll add that they will simply (continue to) use companies like this Clearview AI:

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview- priv...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/18/technology/clearview-privacy- facial-recognition.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> While most of these systems work well enough to identify a person, there are a number of well-known ways to defeat them. One is simply to apply newer technology to cracking algorithms used inside these devices. Improvements in processing power from one generation to the next, and a proliferation of information about where the vulnerabilities are, applies to biometrics as well as other technologies.How Secure Is Your Face? [https://semiengineering.com/how-secure-is-your- face/](https://semiengineering.com/how-secure-is-your-face/)

</comment><comment><USER38> Some times a technology is so cheap and easy to use that banning it becomes absurd, and you just have to accept the new reality.

Face recognition isn't quite there yet, but in 5 or 10 years every kid with a phone can do this.

<comment><USER17> Technology is never inevitable and I don't put much faith in people that cannot shape their future.

If there is political will, it is pretty easy to ban public cameras for example.

The hardware is already mass produced and as cheap as it gets, but not everyone became as paranoid as Londoners.

<comment><USER38> Would you ban cell phone cameras, cameras in cars (mine came with 3 cameras) and Ring cameras?

They're all used in public.

<comment><USER17> No, I would ban cameras for surveillance purposes. This is pretty easy to legislate and the basic rule. There would be some exceptions to this naturally.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Schneier's points are dead on. One of the few talking sense here. Biometric and related identification technologies are here and multiplying. We need to regulate data sharing and 3rd party data compiling, regardless of the data. Dirty data and incorrect data will haunt people, existing in who knows what databases. This is what needs to be regulated. Not the individual identification technologies. Stop the abuse of new tracking technologies before they are invented. As well as end the advertiser tracking that is out of control. (FYI: I write FR software.)

<comment><USER40> Data compiling is just too easy at this point. Anyone can spin up some instances and run webscrapers to compile profile pictures, writing samples, etc. Many data leaks are available as torrents or hosted on pay-for-access sites likely from a variety of jursidictions.

Even with some kind of global cooperation, can regulations really solve the problem? They might prevent corporations from using the data for advertising, but I don't see them as actually addressing the privacy issue.

<comment><USER39> The regulations would prevent random scraped data from being compiled into official profiles used for official purposes, such as credit checks, security scans, and anything that can legally and official be used as verified information about you. Regulations need to be in place to prevent junk profiles compiled from dirty sources and then used as official information.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> What is your view on the decentralization of facial recognition?

I believe that surveillance cameras can help to decrease physical violence, but the main concern I have that the algorithm and embeddings databases are out of mine control even for validation.

Hence, are there any authorities that publicly disclose the FAR metrics? So far I came around UK case only [https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/all- campaigns/face-off-campai...](https://bigbrotherwatch.org.uk/all- campaigns/face-off-campaign/)

</comment><comment><USER41> > _Finally, we need better rules about when and how it is permissible for > companies to discriminate. Discrimination based on protected characteristics > like race and gender is already illegal..._

This is they key point of the article, but unfortunately he doesn't give any solutions or even hint at them. Does anyone know if he does elsewhere?

It also feels a bit disingenuous for him to use the word "discriminate" here.

"Discrimination" is generally understood to give someone an _unfairly_ negative experience due to inherently _irrelevant_ factors, such as denying someone a job due to the color of their skin.

I think most people would agree that "discrimination" is the wrong word to use when showing different people different ads due to their browsing history, or giving different people different credit card offers based on their credit scores, or charging young people more for car insurance based on their age. All of these are based on what people generally consider to be non- discriminatory, _evidence_ -based distinctions -- and so words like "targeting" or "market segmentation" are more appropriate.

If he wants to argue for a better framework for what is considered legitimate targeting/segmentation or not, I'd love to hear it. Otherwise there's not really much to say?

</comment><comment><USER42> Schneier's title made it seem like we should not be banning facial recognition, but in the blog itself he spent lengthy verbiage arguing there are 3 components we needs do more to fight against of a surveillance state. In other words, we need to do more to ban/regulate those rather than undo the facial recognition ban.

</comment><comment><USER43> Interesting he mentions festivals banning it. There's a startup in LA who's trying to add facial recognition to ticket gates of large venues like stadiums for both security and marketing. I wonder how 50,000 people think about being facially recognized / tracked just to go see the ball game or concert?

</comment><comment><USER44> proves we are in hell. Some geek ape figured out to use a rock as a tool-the rest of the apes started throwing rocks at each other and just took what the other apes made. Some geeks figure out nuclear power and a way to provide endless free energy- the rest of us turn it into a weapon. Some other geeks make a foolproof way to communicate for free-the rest of us weaponize that too. Cant wait for skynet to clean out this crap. Our brains just cannot handle complexity.

</comment><comment><USER45> It took me awhile to grok but I think that people like Schneier want to take the ideology of online anonymity and apply it IRL.

<comment><USER46> What is the ideology of online anonymity?

<comment><USER47> I think there is some expectation of privacy online. No such expectation exists in a public space.

<comment><USER48> >No such expectation exists in a public space.

It sure as hell does in any practical sense. I expect that I can walk around town, and people that I don't know, don't know my name, phone number, purchase history, etc.

Let's say I want to buy a butt plug or something. I could go to the sex shop in town, and make sure nobody I knew was around before I went in, buy it and leave. If I wanted to buy a studded electro-shock butt plug, and wanted to take extra precautions that I was undiscovered, I could drive to another town and drop it off.

Now suppose I'm a government whistle blower trying to expose some really nasty government coverup or conspiracy committed by the FBI. I'd definitely take the same precaution. I could leave my phone, go several cities over, walk up to a public mail drop and drop off my envelope of documentation in the USPS box and historically, could fully expect to remain anonymous in doing so. That's still arguably safer than sending an email and hoping I've perfectly configured all my network VPN or tor settings to try to ensure there aren't any leaks.

That's NOT the case with facial recognition. Particularly when that info can be processed and categorized into a form where someone could just query an identity and get a complete historical tracking of a bunch of places you've been prior to any sort of investigative interest.

<comment><USER49> You walk in and your neighbor is working the cash register. Now he tells everyone you know.

All you've done is try to obtain privacy, but you can't walk into the shop and demand that your neighbor shouldn't be there.

The "expectation of privacy" is really a hope that you've marked your identity well enough, which is really the same thing you do online.

<comment><USER48> >You walk in and your neighbor is working the cash register.

This is a total fantasy.

1\. If I was concerned about it, I probably would have noticed before entering that he was there.

2\. If I knew him, I'd probably know where he worked and could avoid him.

3\. If I didn't catch myself in time, I could walk in and buy something mundane, or nothing at all, or a gift card.

4\. If I was really concerned, I'd go the next town over.

5\. There's a massive difference between taking a very low probability risk of being identified multiplied by further low probabilities of it being spread notable, remembered, and spread around, and a 100% chance of being categorically identified and logged by an automated system.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> Bruce is missing the point too. He does see that the problem with facial recognition is the backend database with data about individuals. The way to index this database is not the problem, and that's where facial recognition comes in.

Facial recognition used _exclusively_ to access my hotel room? Fine! Even fingerprint. No problem. As long at that data _is not linked to other databases_ , and is erased, at minimum when I request it. And, most importantly it needs to be protected against cross-referencing to government databases.

Because that's where the real problem lies. Cross-referencing. Is a store allowed to remember data about me? Sure. That's what store clerks do. The employees at the post office don't ask for my name anymore, they use facial recognition (the wetware kind) and then go look for the packages with my name on it. Great!

I go to a psychiatrist and he proposes that if he diagnoses me with something I can get all the visits paid back. Ok, whatcha got? Well, autism seems somewhat justifiable and is very popular at the moment. Okay. Now this data gets passed to the government in my medical file, cross-referenced to my insurance, passed to them, and now I can't renew my car insurance. There's special cover for that, more expensive, of course. Even worse: it got cross- referenced in the government itself to, and I now have to get approval from a psychiatrist to get my driver's licence renewed, every time.

Okay, so I contact the psychiatrist, and this cannot be removed from my medical file ("because then I could sue medical professionals and they wouldn't be able to defend themselves using the data they have"). Okay, fine, YOU can keep your notes on me if you must, but I want it out of my government medical file. Nope, that system just doesn't support that. We can add some additional explanation if you want, but that's all.

So I feel like the needed laws are: 1) Any medical data is off-limits for cross-referencing of any kind with no exceptions. It is also off-limits for government and cannot be used for traffic, tax, ... purposes. Even law enforcement should not be able to see this data under any circumstances. If such data is needed or important in a case, a judge can call my doctor to testify, to answer specific questions, and that's the absolute limit of government access. 2) Any data you record on me you need to specify what it will be cross-referenced with, for companies, but ESPECIALLY if you are the government. There must not be any consequences for saying "no". And when asking permissions, only explicitly enumerated named companies/departments and databases with clear listing of what that data is used for and nothing outside of that. 3) I want the ability to withdraw that permission at any time, which means ANY system that it was cross-referenced in must delete that reference 4) I want the ability to delete any data about me that was passed on AFTER THE FACT, ESPECIALLY in government databases, even if I initially didn't tell them not to pass it on. 5) I want something like Google's privacy dashboard, but for the entire government. Ideally also including companies' data. Which has buttons to delete this data that actually work.

If you follow these rules, feel free to use facial recognition, fingerprints, heartbeats, ... to index the data you do have on me. Not a problem. I can always demand you delete your data and start from scratch though.

</comment><comment><USER51> Because the conversation is so lopsided, I feel like somebody has to ask: what opportunities are we giving away when banning face recognition tech?

Obvious one would be no more purse snatchers, ever. Almost no rapes, much fewer violent crimes. No lost kids. Lives and wallets saved.

What else? This feels like the kind of tech that creates its own broad fields of use where there were none before. It might take time or imagination to see where it goes.

And if - just saying - if the benefits are good enough to stop and think for a second, aren't there any better ways of skinning this cat than banning tech? Might be worth a brainstorm.

I'm not a big fan of EU's GDPR - I've literally just fired a client last week on an emailing consulting gig because the threat of unpredictable huge fines is too big for me. Plus I freaking hate cookie popups. But I have to admit it's also doing a lot of good - if companies can't store my IP address without my consent, I'm pretty sure they can't store my facial profile and daily movements. Which leaves the choice in the hands of the consumer, where it should be. I have Google Location enabled on my phone - it's creepy accurate, but I like it. Maybe you don't. Let's not chose once for everybody.

<comment><USER52> No street art. No protesting. Social credit. No way to break away from the stigmas assigned you your face. No speeding. No jaywalking. No pissing outside. No way to rebel.

I mean, it wouldn't really stop crime. London has something close to total surveillance, and they have a lot of crime.

But if you really want that sort of thing, you can actually have a taste of it in parts of China.

<comment><USER53> This comment reinforces the OP's point: opponents of facial recognition seem to approach the world with a particular value system that includes a disagreement with several existing laws. Instead of working to get these laws changed, facial recognition opponents advocate bans on technology that would maken these laws easier to enforce. Why should they succeed?

> No street art

Good. Graffiti is a blight.

> No protesting

There's protesting and there's "protesting". Lawful protest will be unaffected. Unlawful protest involving criminal behavior will become much more difficult. Good outcome.

> No way to break away from the stigmas assigned you your face

In an age of background checks, your face is the least of your worries. Are you opposed to background checks?

> No speeding

Speed cameras already exist and don't rely on facial recognition to issue tickets

> No jaywalking > No pissing outside > No way to rebel

Why should people get to break the law?

<comment><USER54> > Why should people get to break the law?

Because laws are made by people and as such can be flawed.

<comment><USER53> Laws can also be unmade by people. What gives random individuals the right to nullify laws made by everyone? Don't like a law? Get it repealed. In the meantime, you have to follow it.

<comment><USER46> > In the meantime, you have to follow it.

You also would like to expect that if the law is unjust, it can't manage to make too much harm while getting repealed.

And repeals can take a long time. If people would easy organize for things like repeal a law or a government which suddenly become despotic according to majority opinion, we'd live in a different world. What we're trying to make here, banning face recognition, is to make mistakes in laws less costly - sometimes way less costly.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


The Deadly Consequences of Solitary with a Cellmate - <AUTHOR> https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/03/24/the-deadly-consequences-of-solitary-with-a-cellmate <comment><USER2> People talk about institutional evil. This is an example of it. You can almost trace their thinking "Oh, so solitary is bad now. We'll fix it. Put two people in a 10x4 cell. See, not solitary anymore, and we doubled the capacity too. Bonuses for everyone".

Ideally you'd think those who made those decision would be disciplined, pensions would be cut, etc. But nothing like that is gonna happen. Even if the family wins the lawsuit, it will be taxpayers paying for it.

One a deeper level, I wouldn't be surprised if many of those involved in running the prison would be thinking things like "well good, less people less worries. So what if he kills another one". Even more perverse, in some countries, prisoners who are known to kill and attack their cellmates are used as a coercion tool. That is effective against political prisoners and other undesirables who need to "confess" or be punished -- "behave or you'll end up in Sesson's cell <wink-wink>". On paper it looks completely by the rules and clean.

<comment><USER3> This is also what happens when well-intentioned people are vastly more successful at fighting prison construction than fighting mass incarceration.

Our prisons are routinely at 1.5x, 2x, 3x capacity. Being against the prison industrial complex feels good, but in doing so you become directly, personally responsible for the fact that there are now 3 people in a cell meant for one, people living on cots in a gymnasium with no privacy whatsoever, in such close quarters that even the most patient people would be at each other's throats.

Until the prison population _actually_ declines, we ought to at least be building prisons fast enough to stay at design capacity.

Google your state - you'll be amazed. Prisons aren't designed to be comfortable, but they sure as hell get a lot less comfortable with too many people in them.

<comment><USER4> There's a simple solution to that, set people free. We don't need to build more prisons, we already imprison more of our population than any other country in the world, we have too many prisons and too many people in them. We need to imprison less people. Release all inmates who committed victim-less crimes, if more room is needed, release all inmates who committed non violent crimes-there are better ways to deal with them than prison. Prison should be for violent criminals only. Release all drug users, release all drug pushers, none of those people belong in jail.

<comment><USER5> According to this site[1], felons incarcerated for drugs comprise 16% of the total prison population. 64.8% are incarcerated for violent offenses and property crimes, both of which have victims.

The most interesting part, to me, is the "public-order" criminals. When my girlfriend worked corrections, she noted that at the state level, the vast majority of prisoners were in for violent crimes - rape, robbery, murder, arson, etc. At the county level, however, a large number of prisoners were in for what she termed as "criminalized insanity." They're too mentally ill to function, so they live on the streets until they get arrested for doing some small crime - loitering, public urination, trespassing, etc. They get locked up for a few days, get a court date, and get released. Then they go right back to the streets, miss their court date, get arrested again for a bench warrant next time they have a run-in with the law, get sentenced to a slightly longer stay, get released on probation, violate probation, get arrested again the next time they have a run-in with the law...

Wash, rinse, repeat. All of this is _really_ short-term... and yet they're forming 13.8% of the incarcerated population. We're spending an _enormous_ amount of resources on what amounts to impromptu, ad-hoc, half-assed mental healthcare, and none of it works. But eliminating it entirely and saying, "Go forth and sin no more" is going to do absolutely nothing unless there are corresponding programs that can actually help such people.

That kind of coordination - saying, "Okay, we're going to have to spend $x million extra dollars extra for a few years until the mental health benefits start to decrease the cost of jails and prisons" \- is extremely difficult, if not impossible to accomplish.

Regarding drug pushers and prison - I constantly swing back and forth on this issue, mostly because they _are_ morally degenerate for exploiting human weakness for profit. If you google Whiteclay, Nebraska and go to images[2], you'll find a whole bunch of pictures of wasted Indians lying in alleyways right outside the (white-owned) liquor stores. It's created an enormous amount of frustration in the community, and the response from the government is "Well, it's not illegal to sell alcohol to alcoholics."

I give pause to the folks who demand unrestricted drug use for everyone, (which is what decriminalization is - if something's restrictions have no teeth, namely incarceration, it's unrestricted. Same exact reason why financial laws are flouted so often - no teeth) because this is the natural result - businesses that exist solely to profit off of human pain and despair and create it on an industrial scale.

The real question, and one that I can't even begin to unravel because there's so much goddamn bullshit on the Internet from agenda-pushers on both sides, is "Is this state of affairs, where a large portion of the population is incarcerated for vice, preferable to a state of affairs where vice is openly permitted?"

Personally, as someone who lives in a relatively affluent suburb, I'd say that legalizing everything would be a massive boon to me. My taxes will go down, and more importantly I'm insulated from the consequences by a lack of public transit and vigilant cops who are, er, unfriendly to the lowlives who occasionally wander away from the city. The folks in the city and poorer towns, who actually get to deal with the massive consequences of widespread addiction, might beg to differ.

[1] [http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=0...](http://felonvoting.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=004339)

[2] [https://www.google.com/search?q=whiteclay+nebraska&client=ub...](https://www.google.com/search?q=whiteclay+nebraska&client=ubuntu&channel=fs&biw=1920&bih=901&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwjf666Lzt7LAhUC1WMKHSmNDEAQ_AUICCgD)

<comment><USER6> > this is the natural result - businesses that exist solely to profit off of > human pain and despair and create it on an industrial scale

There are plenty of middle ground options between criminalization and total freedom. And in fact, if you look at the way alcohol is handled, you see a lot of those. It isn't illegal to possess alcohol in large quantities or to drink to excess, but in some places, public intoxication is illegal (or seen as something of a public nuisance that police are expected to humanely help with). It isn't illegal to sell alcohol, but sometimes it is illegal to knowingly sell it to a drunk person. There are age limits. It's banned at certain events. So forth.

There are a lot of rules, and they vary a lot, and I wouldn't go so far as to say they are _rational_ , exactly, but some are humane. And some do strike a good balance between allowing people to choose to enjoy responsibly (or even irresponsibly), while limiting the danger and nuisance to the rest of society, and while -- on the third hand -- limiting how predatory you can be in selling it and preying on human weakness.

It would probably be naive to suppose that the exact same set of rules would work for all substances, but it does suggest that outright criminalization and junkies on the sidewalk aren't the _only_ options.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Mass Incarceration is truly one of those things I can't think too much about or I just feel an unrelenting hopelessness and rage. It seems absolutely diabolical to me that in the United States we have simply taken away the humanity of so many people (with absolutely egregious racial and class disparities) in the name of keeping "us" "safer". Not only is it an absolute failure from a moral perspective, it doesn't work from any pragmatic perspective either. Costs are high, recidivism is shocking, and prisons seem to be designed to absolutely foster the worst parts of the human-animals locked in cages.

I don't think there's an easy answer. From a systemic perspective we are locked into a socio-political ratchet. It is far easier to argue for harsher treatment for "criminals", with zero political downside, than to argue the opposite. As long as prison seems to be something that happens to other people: darker, poorer, less educated, there is an empathic gap that exists that makes it hard for the average schmo just trying to get by with his 60 hours a week of work to care very much.

I can only hope that someday we'll look back on the fact that the United States had the second highest incarceration rate in the entire world as an absolute black mark, right up there with slavery and genocide, or colonialism.

<comment><USER8> These are two murderers who decided to kill each other. There are good reasons to leave people like that in actual solitary, so that they're unable to hurt others, but killing each other was never a human response. Nor, given their history, can I glibly conclude that prison made them that way, when all evidence is that the causal arrow points in the opposite direction.

I may be somewhat biased. My mother was murdered--brutally and deliberately. The man responsible also threatened grandma. He's serving life in prison now. I have good reason to fear for myself and grandma if well-intentioned people let him free.

If intentional, cold-blooded murder isn't a good reason to keep someone away from others, then I wonder just how society is supposed to integrate that behavior.

<comment><USER9> I don't think most people are arguing that these two guys, or people like them, should have been released. The problem is that we're filling up the prisons with drug users and other non-violent offenders, and as a result everyone gets squeezed, from kids who got caught smoking pot right on up to cold-blooded murderers. Fix the overcrowding on the low end, and the high end has room to expand as needed without reducing the sentences for hardened killers.

<comment><USER8> I should hope at least that is the prevailing sentiment, but I've met enough people who told me otherwise to have reason to worry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Not a godly sort but this passage seems appropriate:

> Then they themselves also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see You hungry, or > thirsty, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not take > care of You?' Then He will answer them, 'Truly I say to you, to the extent > that you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to > Me'. These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into > eternal life.

America has a horrible problem with incarceration. It seems obvious but if the state takes away someone's rights (freedom) the state assumes a duty of care for those individuals. And a duty of care isn't extinguished because it costs too much or would be difficult to comply with or would be politically unpopular.

Specific to costs... if incarceration is costing too much then do something about the underlying root causes that result in incarceration.

</comment><comment><USER11> I don't understand why our society thinks its ok to treat people this way just because they've been convicted of a crime. Being removed from society and put in jail IS the punishment. Why does society suddenly see these people as no longer human, trash that can be dealt with any way, packed like sardines, left helpless to be raped and murdered?

Yes, some of these people have done unspeakable things, but they are being punished already. Does society itself need to continue to do unspeakable things to those convicted? Honestly, I thought we were beyond that, but I guess not. Is it any wonder that we accept torture of foreigners now when we've always accepted torture of citizens?

<comment><USER7> I agree with this, but arguably jail itself is an unreasonable punishment for many/most crimes, especially under the guise of rehabilitation, which it absolutely isn't designed for. Many countries have figured out how to balance public safety, restitution/punishment, and rehabilitation in ways that are empirically more effective on all fronts than the US good-ole-boy culture of "lock em up and let God sort em out". The Scandinavian countries especially come to mind.

<comment><USER11> Of course. Putting non-violent offenders in jail doesn't even make sense when you have options like house arrest, especially jailing them before trial. I agree though, the US has an extremely cruel culture that's always, since before its creation, been based on oppression and enslavement, and it really shows up in the way it treats its citizens and others throughout the world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> It's disgusting that we treat humans like this. A reasonable person can understand perspectives on both sides of many contemporary hot topics, but I see no such leeway here.

Isn't it time we stand up and simply fix something which is so clearly broken?

<comment><USER13> How we should treat the "animal" that kill people then?

<comment><USER14> All humans are capable of horrific acts. It is a part of our humanity, we are apex predators who organize socially. The evolved algorithm in our brain that manages that dissonance is extremely complex and will necessarily fail at times.

We can't tolerate or condone antisocial behavior, but it is a mistake to feel safe in the thought "we" are better than "them."

We are they, they are we.

<comment><USER13> Hmm, I guess I am too much a CS people.

When I say "animal", I mean human as a kind of "animal". In terms of people killing people, that is a reflection of the "animal" side of human. Thus I use "animal".

If you think I mean they are "animal", and I am not "animal"; and I am better then them. Sorry, I do not possess that prejudice.

My question simply is: How we treat the "animal", which are people showing high-degree of animal instinct of a human, who killed other human?

That's not an implication that they should be treated as "animal".

<comment><USER15> i wonder why "animal" surfaced here at all. Animals kill for food or self- defense, it isn't a voluntary act, it is what they have to do. Killing for other reasons, voluntary killings, murders - it is all almost exclusively human trait. In particular, animals don't do murders, it is human invention.

<comment><USER16> Some animals kill far more than they need to for food. They kill one, and instead of eating it or leaving with it, kill many more and then just leave the fresh kills behind. That's not for food, and it's not for self-defence.

<comment><USER15> and just naming such an animal would advance this debate a great length ...

<comment><USER16> Foxes.

I think you could have looked that up yourself, but you're not here for answers. You've already made your mind up.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> One quote stuck with me: "But it's a tough place to do time. People that say cons have it easy, they ain't never been in Menard."

Not an American, but between saying that cons have it easy and the fact of mass incarceration in the first place, it seems that there's a certain mercilessness in American culture.

<comment><USER18> Who exactly says cons have it easy? I've never heard that one before.

<comment><USER19> Google for something like: why do we treat prisoners better than

Lots of results, most highly misinformed. People imagine that most/all prisoners get 3 meals a day, television, etc. Not true.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> A terrible story. The thing that sticks with me is the whole situation was rational. You have a murderer who will never be released (nothing to lose) who wants to live alone. The only way he can get this is to kill someone and we somehow expect anything other than the outcome that resulted.

</comment><comment><USER21> One look at that cell photo in the article and I think I would bash my head into the wall until I was dead. To think about living in those conditions is unimaginable. To do this to another human being, no matter what crime they committed is pure cruelty. I'd like to see the people who voted for these laws spend 10 days in that cell. Absolutely disgusting.

<comment><USER22> If more people thought like you, perhaps more people would think twice before raping, murdering and robbing. I have trouble sympathizing with violent criminals.

<comment><USER23> OK, but what is making the US a more violent place than other comparable countries? [http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/10/02/is_the_u_s...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/10/02/is_the_u_s_more_violent_than_other_countries_what_the_data_shows.html)

<comment><USER24> USA is a historically-colonized nation with a large diverse population. "Comparable" would be Mexico, Brazil, or Nigeria. Comparing USA to Netherlands is a joke.

<comment><USER25> OK then.

In Nigeria, incarceration rate per 100,000 people is 30. In Mexico, 196. In Brazil, 193.

In the US, 737.

<comment><USER24> I don't disagree with you, but my comment addressed 'ljf's question about violence, directly above it. This myth that USA should exactly resemble a tiny homogeneous European nation has been encouraged by the prison-LEO-judicial- industrial complex in order to argue for ever more draconian punishments: "We're not like Holland yet, so let's lock up 100,000 more minorities!"

<comment><USER25> Netherlands are not that homogeneous. In Amsterdam, there are 25-30% of residents who are not Dutch. In Geneva, where I live — more than 50% non-Swiss residents.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> No problem. These guys just need to get together to launch a class-action suit against whoever is responsible alleging unconstitutional cruel and unusual punishment. Shouldn't take more than 15 years to wend its way up to the Supreme Court, at which point all of these guys will get voucher for a MacDonalds Happy Meal.

</comment><comment><USER27> I genuinely wonder what is cheaper. Building a couple of new prisons, or housing these convicts for the extra 30 years for the murders inside the prison due to over-crowding.

I don't understand multiple occupancy cells in prison. Dangerous convicts are in prison usually for something unpleasant or violent that have done to another human being. Putting them side by side in a hen coop sounds like absolute stupidity. Unless of course the whole plan is to have them slowly kill each other off to remove the problem prone from society.

</comment><comment><USER28> Also [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11362269](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11362269).

</comment><comment><USER29> "The only way to alert a guard was to bang on the door and hope the sound could be heard above the din."

Do cells not have cameras? I would think it'd be feasible to detect fights with basic motion detection.

<comment><USER30>
      "The space itself appeared to be decomposing.
       The front wall, next to the door, was made of corroded metal.
       The paint on the wedge-shaped shelf had almost completely chipped away;
         the beds were caked in rust;
         and the floor underneath the toilet was stained brown and black.
       Dust and crumbs accumulated in every corner."

You suppose this was a high tech institution?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> > "If you can come up with a better way to do this, understanding the fact > that we are 162 percent of capacity without double celling, I'm willing to > listen to you"

Introduce less and shorter prison punishments into the laws so that there are simply less inmates?

</comment><comment><USER32> I couldn't bring myself to read the article past the death. Were the prison authorities charged with murder? Did any charges stick?

<comment><USER19> I doubt anything will come of it.

This happened: [http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2013/03/inmate-who- gave-b...](http://thescoopblog.dallasnews.com/2013/03/inmate-who-gave-birth- to-baby-in-toilet-files-suit-alleging-cruel-and-unusual-punishment-at-dawson- state-jail.html/) (tldr, inmate delivers her baby in a cell, with no medical oversight, at all)

No criminal charges. They did shut down the jail, but likely for other reasons.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> The point of solitary confinement is to protect inmates from attacking each other. Putting two attackers into one cell makes the problem even worse.

After the first inmate murder there is no consequence for further murder, you're there for the rest of your life anyway. It doesn't matter if you kill one or twenty cellmates.

For the prison this is probably a boon because their overcrowding problem is "solving itself".

<comment><USER34> Assuming a fixed fee per prisoner-day, for a commercial prison, overcrowding is the boon.

I would also hope a commercial prison would be fined if inmates die while in its care.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> Reminds me of my grad student office

</comment><comment><USER36> Cruel and unusual punishment.

But the US doesn't give a fuck about law, justice, or the Constitution.

The people should stop giving a fuck about their corrupt government. These problems will not be solved politically or non violently.

</comment><comment><USER37> I don't buy the thesis here that 'solitary confinement' is the reason this happened. These guys were both murderers before (including when they were free in the world and totally unconfined) and seemed unbothered by the thought of killing each other. These guys are exceptionally aggressive and with major psychological issues on top. They are going to kill over and over unless they change (not likely) or we simply never let them interact with another human.

This is the consequence of having any person like the two highlighted in this article living and breathing and having the ability to interact with any other human. If you are going to lock them up and never let them interact with anyone ever again, then that is considered torture as well: [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-the- tort...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-the-torture-of- solitary- confinement/2013/02/20/ae115d74-7ac9-11e2-9a75-dab0201670da_story.html)

So the choice is to either let them kill each other (you can try to stop it, but so long as they have physical access to other people they will kill them for no reason), or you don't allow them that access and this is torturing them. Seems like a Catch-22.

For my money putting horrible people like this together is a way of letting them solve societies problems by killing each other. It's certainly not desirable to have this happen, but clearly nobody is solving it in any other way.

<comment><USER38> I don't like the title much either. They weren't actually in solitary confinement anyway. It was just a small cell.</comment></comment>


What to do when the client is 2 days late on payment? - <AUTHOR>

So, I've issued the invoice last Monday, it is now the following Monday. Bare in mind, there is a clause in the contract that states they have 5 days to pay the invoice otherwise they will be charged additional percentage per day late.
The invoice was due to be paid on Saturday, and they are two days late. On the Saturday I sent them a reminder that the payment was due - and I've also just sent a notice that the payment is late, and if there is anything I can do to assist them in making the payment.
I haven't received a response yet - any ideas on what I should do in this case? I've had no problems with them before but I'm getting a bit worried as this is un-like them.
Thanks! <comment><USER2> I generally don't worry until the 7 day late mark. I also exclude weekends from my calculations. Some folks take the weekend off :)

+1 to the phone call; I do that on my 7 day mark.

My general process is: 0 - Send Invoice, due Net10/30 +10 - Invoice is Due Reminder Email +17 - Invoice is Due Reminder Phone Call +25 - Email and Phone again +30 - Add Late Charge, Re-Send Invoice

I repeat this pattern to 90 days, then sell to a collection agency (which has only happened 1 time in 13 years)

</comment><comment><USER3> In the past once I've reached someone who acknowledges they're late on the payment, I've offered to waive late fees if they pay immediately that day. It's usually good incentive for them to actually pay. I'd ping them weekly in different forms for a few weeks. Then I'd wait another few weeks and then file a small claims case and send notice via certified mail. And mention you'll drop the case if they pay prior to trial.

But 5 days isn't very long. I would assume the best and remain cordial throughout.

</comment><comment><USER4> Even if I had a bad feeling about it I would start by assuming this was an honest mistake. Maybe something has happened suddenly in their private life, so thread carefully.

Try contacting your client through some other means; phone or physical mail marked urgent. Maybe someone else at your clients company if not a one man shop.

Make sure to get feedback on the work you've done so far if you get hold on somebody, to make sure it is not a disagreement about the work done.

Good luck!

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! Good advice. I will try contacting someone else at the organization to see if all is OK.</comment></comment>


When a giant brand leaves a hole, what happens next? - <AUTHOR> http://pandodaily.com/2012/11/26/when-a-giant-brand-leaves-a-hole-what-happens-next/

<comment><USER2> I recently discovered some holes in the big social media networks involving the way they promote other business. Now its all about getting the idea a good co-founder who doesnt mind teaching me a thing or two about how this works. I also see what they arent offering the average user & I think that it,may be what sells the whole idea.</comment>


A hangover led to the discovery of ibuprofen - <AUTHOR> http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34798438 <comment><USER2> Based on the other comments in this thread, it's becoming apparent that my experience with ibuprofen and any other OTC pain drug is not typical. Every time I've taken one for pain, the effect is minor. Like I'm not sure if it's doing anything or not. Mostly, I only take them anymore if someone insists.

I wonder if I feel pain less than normal, or pain killers less than normal.

<comment><USER3> I had similar experience, until I realized that my dosage was rather low. You might need 3 pills by 200mg to feel the effects.

<comment><USER4> That's over the recommended dose. Make sure you're comfortable with the long term side effects if you do that regularly.

<comment><USER3> Hard to say: [http://www.drugs.com/dosage/ibuprofen.html#Usual_Adult_Dose_...](http://www.drugs.com/dosage/ibuprofen.html#Usual_Adult_Dose_for_Headache)

`Usual Adult Dose for Headache Study (n=34) - Prevention of Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT)-induced headache: 600 mg orally 90 minutes prior to the initial ECT session`

<comment><USER5> That's a medically supervised dose after a rare event. GP post spoke about long term use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's foolish, but I still buy Advil instead of a generic brand because I like the tasty coating. I can't be the only one, right?

<comment><USER7> It would cost less to get the unbranded kind and a bag of skittles for the sugar and a can of coke for the caffeine they often add (to make it 'fast acting').

In the UK branded ones are often $5 where as unbranded could be as little as $0.35.

<comment><USER6> Are you talking a single dose? At stores like Target or Walmart in the US, you're typically just paying a $2-$5 premium, and that's on 100-250 pills.

<comment><USER7> There is a limit on selling more than ~30 to a person per day or something. Most* packs are 16 or 32.

*Obviously you can get premium products where you get 6 or so because they are in a package with metallic pain and bright colors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Being 33, it has essentially been OTC my whole life and I seriously took for granted how awesome this drug was until I could not take it (or any other NSAID) any longer. Now my choices seem to be generally in the camp of "this hurts so bad I need a narcotic" or "this is inflamed to the point we need to break out the prednisone" or both. It really, really sucks to be sore after something and not be able to down a couple.

<comment><USER9> > Being 33, it has essentially been OTC my whole life and I seriously took for > granted how awesome this drug was until I could not take it (or any other > NSAID) any longer.

Wait. Why could you not take any NSAID any longer?

I am someone who gets a lot of value from the occasional ibuprofen, and you have me worried.

<comment><USER8> I was diagnosed with Ulcerative Colitis at age 22. It's generally accepted that people suffering from Crohn's, colitis, IBD, etc should avoid NSAIDs and COX-2 inhibitors as they can lead to flare ups of their disease. So, it's not that I absolutely can't take them without dire consequences, I just can't take them regularly, or for very long (like a day or two MAX). When my doctor told me this, I shrugged it off and just avoided them until I sprained my ankle so bad they were afraid I tore ligaments. I took Ibuprofin for 4 days when I was trying to avoid narcotic use and get some work done and I wound up with the closest thing to a flare up I've had since I went on Remicade years ago. So yeah, I won't be doing that again, but I'd pop a couple once every so often if my back was extremely sore or something like that.

The upshot is that I am really aware of how Ibuprofin affects me and I can feel it kick in and relieve pain the same way someone who could take it regularly might feel about an opioid.

<comment><USER10> I also have UC and "abused" ibuprofen in my twenties. My body cannot tolerate them at all anymore. I try not to take any pain relief, but when I'm forced to, I've turned back to paracetamol.

What are you using for pain relief? BTW, out of interest, did your UC start after a course of antibiotics?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I wish my hangovers were this productive.

<comment><USER12> You should try working really hard for a decade or so before getting your hangover. You might just have some experimental drug at hand that you can try.

<comment><USER11> +1</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: pkgname, choosing good package names - <AUTHOR> http://www.pkgname.com/

<comment><USER2> Seems to be broken, the list of reasons for a bad package name are blank: [http://i.imgur.com/0U06IGS.png](http://i.imgur.com/0U06IGS.png)

<comment><AUTHOR> Do you have more details? Is JS enabled? Which browser?

<comment><USER3> Common-or-garden Firefox Beta for Android for me, same effect.

<comment><USER4> Sorry! It should be okay now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> "Don't put hyphens, that's ugly"

This is highly subjective, and quite frankly makes me think the whole thing is pointless

<comment><USER6> Well, in the actual package name, you _can 't_ include hyphens. I presume they're talking, then, about the directory name, which would have to differ from the actual package name, and that's a no-no. Their reasoning may be wrong, but the rule is still correct.

<comment><USER5> Right so its only by going to the Github repo and looking through the readme that I discovered

> tells if your idea for a Go package name is shit

and yet nowhere else does it mention about being Go specific.

<comment><AUTHOR> Being Go specific is implicit. If it was about something else than Go, we should have made _that_ explicit.

Go is absolute and infinitesimal.

<comment><USER5> If you believe Go is infinitesimal, why is it also __implicitly __Go-specific?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> "aaaaaaaa is not a shit pkg name"

Ok, let's use that then!

<comment><USER8> Git and foo works too! :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> What's the algorithm? If I use "abc" or "aaa" it prints "is not a shit pkg name".

<comment><AUTHOR> The algorithm is very simple and not meant to be exhaustive or correct. You can see how the filters for validation are done:

[https://github.com/aybabtme/pkgname/blob/master/filters.go](https://github.com/aybabtme/pkgname/blob/master/filters.go)

Overall, this project is meant as joke/smoke test, not a canonical reference. It was pretty fun to build =)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I like the concept. It is subjective so it needs tweaking.</comment>


Ask HN: Developer-Focused CRM with a Solid API? - <AUTHOR> I want to integrate a CRM into a SaaS I'm building - https://kvdb.io - but many of the existing solutions are either too complex or don't provide a nice enough API. I'm looking to enable and record events from this kind of workflow:
1. User signs up on my site
2. User performs an action
3. Transactional email is sent
4. User clicks a link in the email
5. User performs actions in product
etc.
I'd like to see all of this activity in my admin piece, in a kind of timeline fashion to enable measuring product engagement and identifying issues (feature use, abandonment, etc.). I'm not sure if there are third-party services that enable this kind of tracking, but I'd love to pull all this data into my admin site rather than going to another site to view it, so I can enrich the CRM data with my own. I think I'd be reasonably happy with an API-only CRM!
How's everyone else doing customer management and event tracking for their SaaS apps? <comment><USER2> We're really happy with Pipedrive ([https://pipedrive.com](https://pipedrive.com)) and they have a great API (and tons of documentation). They're also more affordable than other CRMs we evaluated with solid APIs.

</comment><comment><USER3> Based on your needs, you can probably build that out yourself relatively easy. The whole point of CRMs is that they're _not_ developer focused, they're sales, marketing, etc focused.

</comment><comment><USER4> These are not hard to build yourself, exactly as you want them. As for email, SendGrid api would cover your needs.

This being said, I'm still curious to find out which CRM you end up using.

</comment><comment><USER5> What did you end up using?</comment>


Ask HN:  Essential books for starting/running a web company - <AUTHOR>

I'm a pretty bright, college educated kid... but unfortunately I lack the knowledge and experience of running a company -- skills that I'm going to need very soon.
In under a month I'll be launching my web service which I know will be huge.  There's no lack of motivation or willingness to continue working hard, but there is a serious lack of knowing how to set-up a business.  I need to know how to compensate early employees, freelancers, cofounders, when there's no funding (something I'm dealing with right now), what I should be journaling during this process, and any other caveats of the web start-up industry.
Ideally this book will be written by someone in the internet industry who has plenty of experience.  Basically, a concise, well-written book by a CEO turned VC would be ideal...
My main issue right now is that I've done all the development of this thing (took several months) and am going to be getting a couple of cofounders / early stage people to help me out.. which is not hard at all once they see the demo of it.  But before I seal the deal with any of them, I want to be sure that there's something set up that's fair to all parties.
Somehow this request for a book has morphed into the true problem I'm having... but a book recommendation would still be great! <comment><USER3> The essays I've been writing about startups are most of what will eventually be roughly what you're looking for.

<comment><USER4> Link at the bottom of the main Hacker News page

<http://ycombinator.com/lib.html>

that includes most of what pg is mentioning in reply to the submitted question.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks, I never noticed this! It'll definitely keep me busy in between coding.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston

<http://www.foundersatwork.com/>

<comment><USER6> I honestly could not get into this book. I mean I bought and own it but I guess the conversation approach just didn't work for me - the stuff people talked about came across as promotional/PR work rather than honest advice.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> When you are not profitable you pay people as little as possible and deal in cash. Give work to friends and friends of friends at below market rates. Do not give out equity or anything that requires paying lawyers to do things. Don't make promises you cannot cash.

Don't get trapped by socialized norms of what it means to be a founder or how one goes about starting a company. Simply launch the business and iterate towards profitability - identify issues and fix those one-by-one. If you need cash to fix some problems, that's a challenge in and of itself. Get a job. Unless you are getting a lot of cash taking investment can be a bad move - <USER2> the point above about lawyers.

In my experience dealing with other people is time-expensive and making commitments to others significantly reduces flexibility in how products can be positioned and sold. You will know how valuable your company is after you understand the problems and time needed to execute. And then you will understand that the notion of fairness is defined by what different parties bring to the table. If you can quantify this and know its value then you know your limits for negotiating. Treat people with respect but ensure you get results for what you give up and that you're trading resources for something that will get you growth and profitability.

</comment><comment><USER8> Check out some books from Nolo Press.

</comment><comment><USER9> Lucky or Smart by Bo Peabody</comment>


TileDB raises $4M to reshape data management for next generation data science - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/tiledb/tiledb-raises-4-million-in-seed-funding-led-by-nexus-venture-partners-to-reshape-data-management-127cfa4ef9ac <comment><AUTHOR> Hey HN, Stavros from TileDB here. We are excited to announce this newest round of funding to help us continue the development on TileDB! There was some excellent discussion about TileDB on HN previously here: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15547749](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15547749). We are happy to answer any questions.</comment>


Police arrested Dutch man with Bitcoin mining farm for money laundering - <AUTHOR> http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftweakers.net%2Fnieuws%2F95169%2Fpolitie-pakt-nederlander-met-bitcoinmining-farm-wegens-witwassen.html

<comment><USER2> By definition if you obtain any monetary benefit from a criminal act then it is Money Laundering. It encompasses a lot of different possible activities. Tax evasion is a crime but if you take that money and transfer it to an overseas account then that is money laundering.

(posted this same comment in the other HN comment thread about this story)

<comment><USER3> Hold on. Isn't BTC property, not money? By that logic this is like stealing corn, making candy corn, then selling it. Still illegal, but not money laundering.

<comment><USER4> This didn't happen in the US. Although maybe the Dutch government has declared it property as well. I'm not sure.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I read an interesting paper not long ago that discussed _exactly_ such a scenario (stealing electricity to mine Bitcoin). The paper is titled, "Bitcoin & Gresham's Law -- The Economic Inevitability of Collapse":

[http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/Bitcoin%20and%20Gres...](http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/Bitcoin%20and%20Gresham%27s%20law%20-%20the%20economic%20inevitability%20of%20collapse%20-%20Ian%20Grigg.pdf)

<comment><USER6> This paper addresses the pre ASIC landscape. Stealing power from standard systems to mine bitcoin right now would be a complete waste of time, you would get almost nothing from the package with even a ridiculous amount of standard systems.

All heavy duty mining nowadays is done by ASICs, even high end dedicated GPU farms can't compete, letalone the kind of machines likely to fall victim to a botnet. If someone did try to hijack those ASICs, you can bet the people running the mining business would notice, assuming it were even possible.

It's interesting how this might apply to an altcoin that actually manages to crack the problem of CPU only mining that a few have tried, however. This particular niche will always have this as a potential problem going forward.

<comment><USER7> > an altcoin that actually manages to crack the problem of CPU only mining

You may be interested in:

[http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/asic- faq.pdf](http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/bitcoin/asic-faq.pdf)

<comment><USER8> I'm not sure I agree with this FAQ. Related discussion from the other day: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7512222](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7512222)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Actually the original title of the article (I speak Dutch) was: Illegal bitcoin producer gets caught (literal translation), then in the first paragraph the article goes on how the guy was 'making' fake bitcoins.

It's also good to know that the newspaper in question is the 'Fox news' of the Netherlands. It's known for sensational, on the edge of fictional journalism. On top of everything they're obviously uneducated on many of the stories they publish.

<comment><USER10> For what it's worth, I think when this comment was made the submission linked to a different article-- Tweakers.net, the current source, is the most respected Dutch language tech news source.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Can we lay it off with the aprils fools already?

<comment><USER12> On a positive note, now I have a full year before online tech media wastes an entire day highlighting products that don't exist, and why they are so funny. They don't seem to have grasped that explaining a joke kills the humor...

<comment><USER13> > _now I have a full year before online tech media wastes an entire day > highlighting products that don 't exist_

One full year? That's too optimistic. We'll soon be flooded with reviews and articles wasted on programs that don't exist: Apple product rumors, half-baked Google non-products, Microsoft prototypes...</comment></comment></comment>


A second collection of interesting links about Kubernetes - <AUTHOR> https://www.hidefsoftware.co.uk/2018/02/02/kubernetes-february-round-up/ <comment><USER2> There is definitely a place for a company focusing on dev workflows for web apps.

This project from the list is very cool:

[https://github.com/vapor-ware/ksync](https://github.com/vapor-ware/ksync)

But it should be even simpler then that, with full integration of npm and python dev cycles to create a full illusion of localhost development but in a fully controlled reproducible environment where every prod service can be swapped for dev version of it, iterated quickly and then committed.

Draft also looks promising, but it's not the same thing.

Projects like telepresence are getting closer to this, anyone knows anything else?

<comment><USER3> Thanks! We (at Datawire) are working towards this with both Telepresence and Forge. Part of the premise is that developers also need self-service features in their operational infrastructure, which is why we also have Ambassador. It's a complex problem!</comment></comment>


About Leadership - <AUTHOR> http://blog.dilbert.com/post/152427079266/about-leadership <comment><USER2> It's as if the author has been living under a rock for the past 20 years. If he is willing to take Trump's words at face value I can't reconcile myself to the author's views. I mean Trump's priorities are good? That's what he is saying. Look at his track record at screwing people over after making promises that were "good" (Trump university, unpaid contractors for his casinos, etc.) What gives the author the confidence that Trump won't screw Americans once elected? Didn't expect this from someone who created such a thoughtful strip as Dilbert.</comment>


South Korean PM just can't say no to NK refugee deportation - <AUTHOR> https://amara.org/ko/videos/7RSc4rMIRgtA/en/2104492/ <comment><AUTHOR> \- a congressman asks "North Korea asked for deportation... will you deport them back to North Korea?"

\- the PM tries to avoid an answer (because the current gov. is pro-North- Korea lol)

\- background wtf sounds

\- the PM gives up (think how bad I'll look!)

\- By grilling the PM, the congressman actually saved the defectors lives</comment>