Show HN: Morning Reader – A simple way to read the news - <AUTHOR> http://morningreader.com

<comment><USER2> 1.) You never set background-color. Not setting background-color results in unintended consequences on any browser configured to have a default other than the expected white background. A good example in your case is visited links become grey on grey (assuming a browser with grey default background).

2\. You need to be cautious of and properly handle notorious webspam/blogspam regurgitation sites like "recode.net":

"Wal-Mart Scammed Into Selling PlayStation 4 for $90" [http://recode.net/2014/11/19/wal-mart-scammed-into- selling-p...](http://recode.net/2014/11/19/wal-mart-scammed-into-selling- playstation-4-for-90/)

Which leads to:

[http://www.cnbc.com/id/102197050](http://www.cnbc.com/id/102197050)

Which leads to:

[http://consumerist.com/2014/11/18/terrible-people-create- fak...](http://consumerist.com/2014/11/18/terrible-people-create-fake-amazon- pages-convince-walmart-to-price-match-them/)

Which leads to:

[http://kotaku.com/people-are-scamming-walmart-with-bogus- che...](http://kotaku.com/people-are-scamming-walmart-with-bogus-cheap- ps4-listin-1660150939)

Finding the original source can be a PITA, but it's still much better than rewarding spam regurgitation sites with traffic.

3.) Having a "sign in" icon link on every single article listing looks odd. Is it the default replacement for some voting mechanism that's only available to logged-in users?

4.) Grey text on a white background is common fare on the web (including hn) to de-emphasize some text, but it's a poor design decision in terms of accessibility. People with even minor visual impairments (i.e. poor vision) have difficulty reading grey text on white backgrounds.

All in all, it looks interesting. Good Luck With It!

<comment><AUTHOR> 1\. Got it. We'll set a background color in the body.

2\. I agree. We will think about ways to handle it. As a last resort we may blacklist those kind of publishers.

3\. Sign in is only needed to favorite stories (using the little bookmark icon below each line). I agree that it is not clear what the sign in is for, we will fix that.

4\. Yup, we will increase the contrast a little.

Thanks for the feedaback!

<comment><USER2> On #2, using binary block/allow lists for sites works, but long term, it can be problematic in the sense of maintenance effort (i.e. _your time_ ;). A less common but more interesting approach is to use site-based weighting. There will still be some manual wrangling involved, but you might be able to automate some of it eventually (analysis of content on the site, dns, linked- from analysis, google page-rank lookup, etc.)

With site-based weighting, you can still block with a threshold, but you gain the benefit of adjusting rankings based on past/known site quality, and the advantage of setting with a "default weight" for unknown sites you've never seen before.

It's really just a different approach that you might want to consider to handle the webspam/blogspam problem.

<comment><AUTHOR> We already have mechanisms like weighting, whitelisting, blacklisting, etc. in place. We generally trust a good quality source (site domain) to produce good quality content, but there are exceptions. Since our popularity scoring algorithm relies heavily on social signals, it trusts the crowd to reward good content, and ultimately good content will rank higher.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I'm curious why you chose the categories that you did. Why focus on business/tech instead of having a broader focus on more mainstream current event news?

<comment><AUTHOR> We decided to start with just a few topics that we are relatively familar with to get a sense of the quality of the curation. We plan to expand to broader and more mainstream topics in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The quality of the curation, at least for my taste and at least at this moment, is exceptional. Maybe the best algorithmic curation I've seen.

I'm curious what inspired you. There are many algorithmically curated news feeds; why add another? Is it because you believe your algorithm is a leap forward? Elsewhere you say it's mostly the same one used by HN.

Regardless, it works well for me. Thank you!

<comment><AUTHOR> > The quality of the curation, at least for my taste and at least at this > moment, is exceptional. Maybe the best algorithmic curation I've seen.

Glad you liked it, thanks!

> There are many algorithmically curated news feeds; why add another? Is it > because you believe your algorithm is a leap forward? Elsewhere you say it's > mostly the same one used by HN.

There are many attempts at "personalized news". Also some niche "community curated" news (influenced by HN and Reddit). And some mostly algorithmic, like the new Digg and Techmeme. We fit on this third group, and are just experimenting to see what we can come up with quality wise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Where and how do you get your news? How do you order them? And why only 30 in each category?

Other than that, nice design. Bookmarked, will see. Btw, I guess comments would be nice.

<comment><AUTHOR> > Where and how do you get your news? How do you order them?

We get the news via data feeds like RSS and social networks. The ranking algorithm is similar to the HN one ([http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574](http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574)), but instead of upvotes it uses our popularity score system.

> And why only 30 in each category?

In the future we may add mechanisms to let users browse more links, like a 'Show more' button below the links list, or an Archive section.

> Other than that, nice design. Bookmarked, will see. Btw, I guess comments > would be nice.

Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> I would consider following the site if categories had RSS feeds.

<comment><AUTHOR> We're considering that. Would you prefer a daily digest with the top x stories, or a stream of hourly posts?

<comment><USER6> Personally I would offer both. I would likely use the stream of hourly posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Thank you for making this, this is exactly what I ever wanted to have and started few times making and did a half assed effort. So thank you. Exactly what I need. Perfect.

<comment><AUTHOR> Glad you liked it! Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> When you add more topics, I would pay for API access to get an hourly list of popular stories in each topic. If this is ever added please let me know :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> We're thinking about doing at least daily digests – with the top x stories of the last 24 hours – for each topic, via email and/or RSS. Thanks for your suggestion!

<comment><USER8> If you offer RSS I wouldn't have to pay (I assume) - if you had an API I would use it for commercial use.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Categories are too generic in my opinion. I would love to have smaller categories like "programming", "unix" and etc.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for your suggestion! We'll add more topics in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Where does your social network data come from? Twitter? Does the popularity depend on how many people are sharing the links?

</comment><comment><USER11> I did something similar at [http://yaxero.com](http://yaxero.com)

</comment><comment><USER12> I wish you could combine topics, example: Design + Tech News.

</comment><comment><USER13> Do you plan to offer custom topics or search in the future?

<comment><AUTHOR> Not sure yet, but we may do something in that direction in the future.

</comment></comment><comment><USER14> How do you define "relevance"?

<comment><AUTHOR> It could be "popularity" or "trending factor" instead. Basically the same way stories are ranked on HN ([http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574](http://amix.dk/blog/post/19574)), but instead of upvotes it uses our popularity score system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> How are the stories selected?

<comment><AUTHOR> The stories are curated and ranked by an algorithm. We give it a list of publishers, and it does most the work, however sometimes a little human moderation is still needed for more clean, on-topic results. The newest and most popular stories appear at the top, like on Hacker News (we use a similar ranking algorithm). To measure the popularity of the stories, the algorithm uses social signals.

<comment><USER15> I think I'd echo what jcr said: it needs an additional human layer, to nail down the original source of articles. Else it's just another random aggregator site with a random set of sources, however pretty.

<comment><AUTHOR> The algorithm is still a work in progress. We are constantly tweaking it to make it more autonomous and better at selecting stories. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Good one.

</comment><comment><USER17> Good looking site!</comment>


Google+ Updates Real Name Policy - <AUTHOR> https://plus.google.com/109179785755319022525/posts/YcvRKqJeiZi <comment><USER2> They didn't actually change the policy, just the enforcement: you'll now get a 4-day grace period to produce ID or change your name before your account is suspended.

There's lots of discussion about this on G+:

Mike Elgan of Computerworld is at [https://plus.google.com/113117251731252114390/posts/e3nC5XyA...](https://plus.google.com/113117251731252114390/posts/e3nC5XyADD9)

Marshall Kirkpatrick of Read Write Web is at [https://plus.google.com/117421021456205115327/posts/BPKvVJm7...](https://plus.google.com/117421021456205115327/posts/BPKvVJm7kiM) and [https://plus.google.com/117421021456205115327/posts/EAMD7Pc9...](https://plus.google.com/117421021456205115327/posts/EAMD7Pc9fmH)

In all of these threads the comments are overwhelmingly pro-nym.

<comment><USER3> I don't understand. I just read the policy and it doesn't say anything about using your legal name (i.e. the one on your ID). It says:

"Your common name is the name your friends, family or co-workers usually call you. For example, if your legal name is Charles Jones Jr. but you normally use Chuck Jones or Junior Jones, any of these would be acceptable."

It doesn't seem like their _policy_ precludes Lady Gaga from calling herself Lady Gaga. I guess I don't quite understand where the criticism you linked to is coming from.

<comment><USER2> The stated policy differs from the reality. If your account is flagged for potentially having a false name, you have to produce government ID or online evidence that it's your name, and they're very selective about what online they accept. And the details of the policy forbid single-word names, names that mix languages, or anything involving a number or punctuation.

<comment><USER4> I have a single word name. I got around the signup code by this: (name) Name. With parentheses.

I've been waiting for the ax. Although now I suppose it's an evite with the executioner.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I left G+ a week ago, deleting my G+ account and profile. I'll be shopping for a gmail alternative as well.

After trying G+ out for a bit, I decided that I just didn't need it. A lot of my less technical friends & family use FB. I don't care much for it, but I've come to regard it as an inherently privacy-free unsafe/insecure zone and treat it accordingly. I stay logged out of it when I'm not using it and keep it out of my usual online activities.

G+ blurred the line too much between regular browsing, search, gmail, my RSS reader, and all these "circles" of FB/Twitter-like social interaction. It just felt like it would be too easy to make a mistake and say the wrong thing in the wrong context, or find that I was sharing in a way I didn't want to. And that's assuming the service works as intended without flaws, without FB-style policy changes.

I've come to realize that fragmented, disconnected identities on separate websites is a feature. Yes, the dots can be connected by someone with significant resources. But why should I make these connections easy to make, or searchable? Doesn't do anything for me.

<comment><USER6> > I've come to realize that fragmented, disconnected identities on separate > websites is a feature. Yes, the dots can be connected by someone with > significant resources. But why should I make these connections easy to make, > or searchable? Doesn't do anything for me.

I've come to a similar realization, and reacted against G+ in much the same way. Maybe the NSA or ONI can figure out who 'revscat' really is -- and honestly, in my case it wouldn't be that difficult -- but Google already knows more about me than I feel comfortable with. The only way I would consider switching from FB to G+ was if Google completely reversed their 'real name' policy and allowed/encouraged pseudonyms.

The internet has a long, long history of anonymity. I will continue to do what I can to support this.

<comment><USER7> > Maybe the NSA or ONI can figure out who 'revscat' really is

I decided to do a little experiment and try to find out who you really are. In about 20 minutes I found out your internet service provider, in which city you live and your username seems to be linked to "Rev. Scatological Warfare". Am I on the right track?

> but Google already knows more about me than I feel comfortable with

But how exactly are they going to link all your google searches to your real identity, if you've always used a pseudonym when using Gmail or any other Google service?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> "We're listening, learning, and iterating to give our users the best experience possible."

No. You're not. Nobody has complained about lack of a grace period. We complain about the policy in the first place. This grace period is almost a little bit insulting. It's like saying "beg for mercy and repent for your sins and we will forgive and let you use our social network."

Perhaps the above is a bit sensational, but the point stands.

<comment><USER9> And if you _can't_ change your policy, at least be honest and make a straightforward, cogent, logical statement as to why.

For me, the policy smells. And I think for many, that's enough to make their decision.

(Even though I decided I was willing to give Plus a try, with restricted participation/circles, until account freeze-out became a concern.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> There are a lot of good comments on that page, too.

Also, the policy page now lists examples of violations. <http://www.google.com/support/+/bin/answer.py?answer=1228271>

</comment><comment><USER11> I know this opinion might not be popular here, but I support the enforcement of real (istic) names. If you are honestly that concerned about your privacy, but still want desperately to join an online social network where you share personal details, why not make up a name that simply sounds realistic? They won't ban an Alfred or a Henry, and you can still enjoy all the anonymity you can handle.

I guess I just don't see the big deal here. If I am missing something, feel free to fill me in.

<comment><USER12> Well, what's your real name and address, 'doctoboggan'?

<comment><USER11> If I friended you on G+, you would know it. (well not my address) But we are not on G+, we are on a site that allows pseudonymous and is designed around that idea.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> > _... we strive ... to make connecting with people on the web more like > connecting with people in the real world_

Oh, man... where do I begin... I am certainly not the only one who specifically does _not_ want to connect to the people on the web like I would connect in the real world.

</comment><comment><USER14> I think I will be closing my Google account. Google won't miss me but that's okay.

</comment><comment><USER15> I would prefer Joanne Rowling, Mauritus Escher and Clive Lewis use their more common monikors than Google compliant ones. I don't even know DMX's real name.

It feels like Google is trying to enforce something most of us associate with our identity. What's surprising is how stubborn they are about it.

It will only lead to people creating fake names that pass the filters, as "Holden tattboy" demonstrates in the comments.

</comment><comment><USER4> The emphasis on "real" life is an absurdly ironic policy for a company that made its billions online, where people have been known by email addresses ("firstname.lastname@example.com") or chosen pseudonyms ("dragonworrier") since before people started asking "are you on email?"

EDIT: Changed "stopped" to "started."

</comment><comment><USER16> The only reason to banish anonominity is to prevent dissenting opinion. Period.

<comment><USER17> That's a ridiculous and paranoid claim, bordering on tinfoil hat territory. There are plenty of practical reasons for why you'd want an online service to be tied to real identities. Reasons that a business would actually care about.

Which isn't to say that real names are necessarily the best choice. There are of course other reasons to be somewhere else on the continuum, like real identities with some freedom of presentation like nicknames, full pseudonymous identities, or full anonymity.

<comment><USER18> I think what google is trying to prevent is not dissenting opinion but rather things like the fact that 80% of newt gingriches twitter followers being fake. They want to create a community based on honesty and real world identities. if you need to post something anonymously on the internet, there are plenty of ways to do that. For instance googles blogger TOS doesn't disallow pseudonyms. So if you need to publish anonymously then maybe G+ just isn't the place to do it.

Real names is obviously a tricky policy to enforce but there is value in it. I think that eventually the policies and enforcement will converge on a better solution. This is probably one of the reasons G+ is still in field trial.

<comment><USER19> _They want to create a community based on honesty_

Often the best way to get an honest opinion is to gauruntee anonymity, not remove it.

<comment><USER18> That is one way to do it, but it is also a way for conversation to devolve (youtube comment threads?). So it is a balance. While anonymity may allow some people more freedom to express themselves in a positive way, it also makes it easier for people to express themselves in a negative way that may be considered harmful as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> The fun part is that, if you are suspended, as I am, you cannot use G+ at all anymore.

You end up with a dialog on all pages that basically tells you to go screw yourself and go elsewhere. Or - change the name. So - delete it is, now.

<http://ben.sh/GoodbyeGPlus.png>

</comment><comment><USER21> Can Lady Gaga join Google+ since it is not her real name?

<comment><USER22> I'm sure they will allow you to use a fake name if you fashion yourself as a brand backed by wealthy investors... :)

<comment><USER4> I suppose celebrities will all use business accounts, once Google implements that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I use Google Plus less because of this system. I got married in May, and would like to display my name in Google Plus the same way I do in Facebook- Smokey Bear Husbandsname. At least for a year or two it would really help people find me. Alas, there's not an option to display middle name, and it is stuck as Smokey Husbandsname.

I don't have an ID in that name yet either, so I guess I'm even at risk of losing my account.

</comment><comment><USER24> What's particularly stunning is this damning peremptory indictment of G+'s "Real Names" policy by some rabidly anti-Google zealot: [http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to- be...](http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2011/02/freedom-to-be-who-you- want-to-be.html)

"Pseudonyms and anonymity are also an established part of many cultures -- for good reason."

</comment><comment><USER25> > As always, Google believes you own your data

joke of the week

</comment><comment><USER26> Google just doesn't get it.

</comment><comment><USER27> Why doesn't Google force you to register with your real name but allow you to display a pseudonym? I usually support Google but this makes little sense. Force me to register with Jamie, but if I decide I want to be displayed as some nickname, who the hell cares.

<comment><USER28> Thats the same thought I had.

After some thought on my latest project I wrote a membership provider for the .net frame work to specifically handle this.

I decided I wanted single sign and opted for oauth via Facebook (maybe more later). I understand users don't there personal details in my system so I've create a hybrid persona construct (or "Actor" as I called the instantiated entities, inherits the system "MembershipUser" class so I can plug it straight into anything .net).

I store a Authentication record from FB for the oauth to work, a few other bits and pieces. Then users can create "Persona" entities, and from the combination of those two the "actor" exists.

Doesn't seem like rocket science to me... and hopefully user testing will show it makes it smooth and seamless for the users and offer them plenty of protection (as in the site involves politics and being anonymous is very important).

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> I've noticed I use Google+ a lot less these days. Stopped when I first heard about this policy. Not in protest, just a whole lot less trusting of them now. Kinda like I stopped using Facebook when they made previously private data public by default. (Only reason I opened a Facebook account in the first place was their strong privacy policy.)

I'm not putting my foot down, but mulling it over, and I think I'm done with google. They did a good job with plus and I had high hopes, but their ... rigidness... shows what I see as a disrespect for their users.

I'll be moving my mail off of gmail onto paid mail hosts, etc, as soon as we get mail setup for the new company.

In the 1990s I removed Microsoft from my life completely. I think I'll keep a company page on Facebook, and maybe the equivalent on google plus if they allow it, but no more for the personal stuff.

I think there's a huge opportunity for a startup that operates a social network that actually caters to people's desire for anonymity and privacy.

<comment><USER4> "I think there's a huge opportunity for a startup that operates a social network that actually caters to people's desire for anonymity and privacy."

The problem here is that any successful endeavor will inevitably turn evil in some way. Once millions and billions are on the table, investors and shareholders will force the proprietors to scrape every bit of money possible off the table. That will usually involve some user-unfriendly behavior, like Google's real name, Facebook's ever changing privacy policy, and LinkedIn's recent emulation of FB.

The only way that social networks can be pro-user is if they are a standards- based commodity like email, where anyone is free to implement the standard and offer the service. You can get the same email service anywhere you want, interoperable with every standards based server on the planet. It should be the same with twitter-like message bursts, and social networks.

As it is now, bursting and socializing is built similar to early telephone networks, where many companies offered networks, they didn't connect to each other, and businesses had to have multiple network accounts to be able to interact with all their customers. That's just wrong.

fastmail.fm offers excellent email service. They should also (be able to) offer standards based bursting and socializing; so should anyone else who wants to.

<comment><USER30> "The only way that social networks can be pro-user is if they are a standards- based commodity like email, where anyone is free to implement the standard and offer the service."

This already exists for social data, it's called The Locker Project. <http://lockerproject.org/#vision>

<comment><USER4> This is great, a great start. But this is an implementation, not a standard.

I think it remains to be seen whether github repos give us anything like the long term stability and stewardship of RFCs. Not to mention the longevity of github.

Yeah I know, you can fork. Everyone can fork.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Google's Gdrive arriving in 2009 - <AUTHOR> http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content-view-41094-140.html <comment><USER2> Also see this related article, from about a year ago, declaring that Gdrive will arrive in 2008.

[http://www.internetbusiness.co.uk/27112007/rumours-of- google...](http://www.internetbusiness.co.uk/27112007/rumours-of-google- gdrive-launch/)

</comment><comment><USER3> "The service has the potential to eclipse even Gmail, Google's second best- known product after their google.com search engine."

YouTube?

<comment><USER4> Don't people already use third party software to turn Gmail into a 'Gdrive'?

<comment><USER5> Yes: <http://www.viksoe.dk/code/gmail.htm>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There doesn't seem to be any content in that article other than rampant speculation.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm willing to bet this won't go anywhere (at least in the US) until residential upload speeds are increased.

</comment><comment><USER8> No offense, but tgdaily really doesn't seem the best source for computer news out there (see also the Linux girl article from the other day). Sure, online storage would be nice, but without really, really high speed internet connections, it seems doubtful that it would replace "local" drives.

<comment><USER9> Also, the way Cable/DSL are structured now with lower upload speeds, this could be painfully slow the first time it's run for people. Also, what happens when you want to sync a ripped DVD or large graphics file?

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Before or after Duke Nukem Forever?

</comment><comment><USER11> I wonder how this competes and changes (in a good way) dropbox.. or perhaps a acquisition :)

<comment><USER12> Not a competitor until they actually release it... but, it probably would make a big dent in dropboxe's sales. Either that or it would make cloud storage more popular and it would make dropbox more popular as a result.

</comment></comment><comment><USER13> Interesting, and I learned Microsoft has SkyDrive which I never knew about.

If I can find enough of these free services I can store more or upload the same stuff to each storage site and use them as a backup in case one of them accidentally loses my stuff.

<comment><USER14> I was pretty interested when I first saw SkyDrive as its capacity (25G) and features seemed actually useful - just what I need to keep a shared drive between a bunch of distributed computers. But mystifyingly, Microsoft do not offer _any_ way to simply map it to a drive letter. You'll have to log on through a web browser and either do traditional file-upload type operations or install some ActiveX junk just to let you do "drag and drop" (which I don't want to do anyway - I want to script stuff from the command line).

Given how obvious mapping to a drive letter is as a feature, and how trivial one must assume it would be for Microsoft to implement, I can only assume they've deliberately crippled it for strategic reasons.

Assuming it's not just a delusional fantasy I hope GDrive gets this right, because this is a service I do want ...

<comment><USER15> Back in the day (mid 90s), you could actually mount ftp.microsoft.com on your desktop, e.g.

        c:\> net use m: \\ftp.microsoft.com\pub

That would have been a security nightmare tho' (SMB over the Internet, WTF) and they stopped it, so I'm guessing they still haven't quite figured it out.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> "What business model, again?"

<comment><USER17> Google wants data. The more data Google has the more money it makes. That's how their business scales (so far).

When there isn't a way to get the information they create the market, e.g., Android. When there is, they use that, e.g., OpenSocial.

Getting people to upload their whole hard drive to Google would be a huge deal for the company.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> Until Google gets significantly better at handling accidental account suspensions, the idea of using this (whenever it arrives) is just too scary for me.

<comment><USER19> I've never heard of 'accidental account suspensions' except for AdSense, which is because it actually costs them money. The only reason it's considered accidental is because it cannot be directly linked to the person owning the account, however all the youtube accounts that get closed are never accidental it's cause someone committed copyright infringement.

<comment><USER18> <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=354593>

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> "bring Google one step closer to dethroning Windows on your desktop."

AUGH

</comment><comment><USER21> This article sounds more fanboyish than an Apple rumor. (FWIW - I love macs).

</comment><comment><USER22> This article is 10 weeks early.</comment>


Magdeburg Hemispheres - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdeburg_hemispheres <comment><USER2> I'm from Magdeburg and both the experiment and Otto-von-Guericke is known to everyone here. Apart from places being called after him (like our university), there are hemisphere statues all over the city. The experiment is also repeated/recreated from time to time on bigger events. I still did not expext my home town to ever appear on HN frontpage :)

<comment><USER3> The city has a weird fascination with people called "Otto". Equally revered is Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor, who a 1000+ years ago made Magdeburg his city of residence.

<comment><USER4> > The city has a weird fascination with people called "Otto". Equally revered > is Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor, who a 1000+ years ago made Magdeburg his city > of residence.

Also the German comedian Otto Waalkes ([https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Otto_Waalkes&oldi...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Otto_Waalkes&oldid=874260876)) and Otto von Bismarck ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck)) - even though in opposite to Otto I and Otto von Guericke these two are not from Magdeburg.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> _It is unclear how strong a vacuum Guericke 's pump was able to achieve, but if it was able to evacuate all of the air from the inside, the hemispheres would have been held together with a force of around 20 000 N (4400 lbf, or 2.2 short tons)_

I'm no expert, but _if it was able to evacuate all of the air from the inside_ sounds unlikely - impossible, even. What's the best we could do nowadays? How total are (practical) vacuums?

<comment><USER6> Simple mechanical vacuum pumps can reach ~1 mbar (0.001 atmosphere).[0] I doubt that Guericke's pump could reach even 100 mbar, but that's only 10% of atmospheric pressure. So the force to separate the hemispheres would have been only ~2 short tons. That's still a lot, however.

The best multistage pumps can reach ~0.0001 mbar.[0]

Generally, attainable vacuum by pumping depends on leakage rate vs pump speed, and also on the vapor pressures of components. Such as oil used for lubrication, grease for sealing, rubber or plastic hoses, etc.

So for a high vacuum system, you want just metal and glass, and you want them to be _very_ clean. Fingerprints are a huge issue. Also, you typically put a cold trap between your pump and the working volume. Both to get lower pressure, and to avoid contamination. For low vacuum, dry ice in acetone is OK. Then liquid nitrogen, and finally liquid helium.

0) [https://cds.cern.ch/record/1046850/files/p43.pdf](https://cds.cern.ch/record/1046850/files/p43.pdf)

Edit: It's important to avoid contamination of the working volume (say, by pump oil) and of the pump (say, by water, or corrosive substances).

<comment><USER7> I think it's more illustrative to think of atoms/molecules per cubic meter. If I remember correctly, 1 or 0.1 µbar is proportional to around 1 atom per cubic meter.

<comment><USER8> That's a lot of pressure made by one tiny little atom. I can't believe that.

<comment><USER9> 3x10^22 atoms per cubic meter of air. That micro is going to make it 3x10^16 atoms.

<comment><USER8> So 1 atom per cubic _micro_ meter is about right for 0.1 microbar.

<comment><USER10> One cubic micrometer is 1mm³ right?

<comment><USER8> One cubic micrometer is 1µm³.

One cubic millimeter is 1mm³.

<comment><USER10> Oh yeah, duh. Thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I have been in Magdeburg for 4 years, and these hemispheres are a big deal here. Fun fact: If you graduate from the CEE department of OvG university as a PhD, people put you on a cart and roll you towards the site where these hemispheres are displayed and celebrate once you are there.</comment>


Computer Virus Hits U.S. Drone Fleet - <AUTHOR> http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/10/virus-hits-drone-fleet/ <comment><AUTHOR> This alternate submission from about the same time seems to have got the attention and discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3085004>

</comment><comment><USER2> My thought is to halt all drone operations until this is solved.

The possibility of a foreign entity taking control of one of these things is scary!

</comment><comment><USER3> What's the over/under on it also being present on the machine they made the master image from?

<comment><USER4> This story is absolutely crazy. I am having serious trouble taking it at face value. But lets say the article is correct, it sounds like a root kit and they don't know how to remove it properly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> If this is Skynet I am going to be very annoyed.

</comment><comment><USER6> The next Real war will have a large component of disrupting the enemies internet.

I say we take all the black hat hackers that are in prison now, and put them in rooms where they try to deface websites, crack into databases, control satellites etc etc. Then when they get into those databases, rather than punishing the hacker who figured out how to do it, you punish the entity that left themselves in a state where they could be hacked.

Making our country resistant and strong against the next online battles starts today, not when congress declares war against china in retaliation for their militaries occupying our country.</comment>


eBay Motors: Accelerating with Flutter - <AUTHOR> https://tech.ebayinc.com/product/ebay-motors-accelerating-with-fluttertm/ <comment><USER2> Is anyone else using Flutter, what's your experience and how does this relate to React Native?</comment>


Continuing the Debate on Slavery and Capitalism - <AUTHOR> http://earlyamericanists.com/2015/10/27/continuing-the-debate-on-slavery-and-capitalism/ <comment><USER2> What's remarkable is that slavery was the norm since the beginning of human culture. It's even mentioned in the Holy Bible and the most Nobel Quran. What's even more remarkable is that it was only prohibited in the west as recently as 1833.</comment>


How Disney became entertainment's apex predator - <AUTHOR> https://www.businessfast.co.uk/how-disney-became-entertainments-apex-predator/ <comment><USER2> At this point I feel like I'm doing the moral thing by pirating Disney movies.</comment>


Benchmark of Regex Libraries (2010) - <AUTHOR> http://lh3lh3.users.sourceforge.net/reb.shtml

<comment><USER2> This is benchmarking Perl-5.8 that was already 3 years old in 2010. With Perl-5.10 there is an optimization for matching alternations (|) that should drastically change the results for the "URI|Email" pattern.

In later versions of Perl (the last stable is 5.20) there are more optimizations in the RE engine and better Unicode support.

</comment><comment><USER3> Firstly, at the end it says "Last modified: 2010-07-21"

Secondly, there's a lot more to regex engines than the paltry features listed here. It's important to look at more complex features and if they are supported and how they perform. Many engines will have multiple regex implementations, some optimized for fewer features, and swap in the best engine for the task at hand. Others will just forego more complex features for a speedy implementation.

This matters. For a regex heavy project, if you choose an system that turns out to be fast but doesn't support a needed later feature, it can be a problem.

</comment><comment><USER4> This brings to mind the fantastic "Regular Expression Matching can be Simple and Fast"[0] article.

[0]: [http://web.archive.org/web/20150315004427/http://swtch.com/~...](http://web.archive.org/web/20150315004427/http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html)</comment>


I'm Sick of Tiny, Tiny Type - <AUTHOR> http://jxnblk.tumblr.com/post/41796724549/im-sick-of-your-tiny-tiny-type <comment><USER2> And what's up with the growing number of websites which take deliberate pains to prevent me from using pinch-to-zoom on iOS?

Surely there's a special ring in Hell for those web anti-designers.

<comment><USER3> While it is inexcusable to do this as a web developer, there is a layout bug in Mobile Safari to which this is the easiest and sometimes only solution. The designers aren't disabling zooming because they hate people who zoom, just because they're inconsiderate of them.

<comment><USER4> What's the layout bug?

<comment><USER3> [http://webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/iphone-safari- viewport-...](http://webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/iphone-safari-viewport- scaling-bug)

Essentially, when you rotate the device to landscape, it doesn't correctly reset your view the content, so you end up zoomed in.

<comment><USER5> It's fixed is iOS6 but here is an additional js fix for this bug: <https://github.com/scottjehl/iOS-Orientationchange-Fix>

From Scott Jehl / Filament Group

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I use a Firefox addon called NoSquint,[1] which lets me set zoom levels globally and per-site. It's one of the most useful Firefox addons I have, and really makes my browsing experience much more pleasant.

I also used to use an addon called Stylish[2] to force a nice CSS style on websites. I've since switched to using a Stylish stylesheet I like directly with Pentadactyl[3], which gives me the same effect of using Stylish but without needing an extra addon (since I'm using Pentadactyl for its other features anyway).

Using the above combination standardizes the look of virtually every website I go to and makes it a pleasant experience for me, where both the font sizes, font colors, and background colors are all quite pleasant and readable.

Unfortunately, this does mean I don't get to see occasionally pleasant original website designs, but it's a sacrifice I'm more than happy to make for a painless websurfing experience.

[1] - <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/nosquint/>

[2] - <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/>

[3] - <https://addons.mozilla.org/en-Us/firefox/addon/pentadactyl/>

<comment><USER7> A simpler solution would be to set the "Minimum Font Size" setting in Firefox's preferences.

<comment><USER6> That is indeed simpler, but not nearly as powerful or as flexible.

As far as I know, no default Firefox setting will allow you to impose different font sizes per website. Also, the setting you mention will change only the font size, and not the zoom level as a whole (NoSquint can change either).

Finally, the setting you mention does not affect font colors or background colors, as the Stylish stylesheet does.

<comment><USER8> With view > zoom > zoom text only, you are just increasing the font size per site, and it is persistent.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I'm glad I'm not the only one who generally surfs the web at 150% magnification.

I also have decent eye-sight and am 29, so I don't think it's an age related thing.

Anecdotally, I find reading large text to be a lot more comfortable. I don't have to strain my eyes to read.

<comment><USER10> The vast majority of sites are designed for horrible low resolution devices - 1366x768 or 1024x768.

When viewed on the screens most people here are using, they're unreadable.

I find that 200% zoom works for Full HD screens (and is acceptable, if a little big, at 1680x1050)

<comment><USER11> It's this. If you look at the stats on the % of visitors to most web sites, 1280x1024 or 1024x768 (and the non-retina Macbook equivalent) remain the dominant approximate screen sizes, so developers optimize for them on the assumption that things will work ok for folks with bigger screens.

I can remember when we used to optimize for 800x600.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> While I too dislike small fonts, I'm particularly rageful of web designers that _force_ this on the user using _-webkit-text-size-adjust:none;_ [1]

That bit of CSS will prevent Chrome and Safari from allowing the text to be resized _at all_.

The Facebook Social Comments plugin is one such occurrence, but I see it all over the web.

 _[1][http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1831922/how-to-prevent- us...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1831922/how-to-prevent-users-from- resizing-the-font-on-my-web-site/12263866#12263866) _

<comment><USER13> i didn't even know about this CSS function. It's so stupid, unbelievable.

I can only imagine all those Designers that don't want to get their "stunning" designs getting destroyed.

<comment><USER14> I suspect (but am too lazy to research) that it's intended for captions on buttons and similar non-content elements. Seems reasonable in that context.

<comment><USER15> Why is the button not growing when I can't read the caption instead?

<comment><USER13> If you're facebook and provide a Like Button, that makes "total sense".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Two comments:

1\. I agree that type is typically too small. Even Bootstrap's 14px default, while better than the popular 12px and 11px, is inferior to the browser's default of 16px. Funnily enough, on the website for my new business which I'm polishing off now, I include no text below 16px. The result? It's always readable.

2\. I personally _have_ complained of text too large: by default, tumblr seems to have this utterly idiotic notion of treating my 10" Android tablet (with Firefox as the browser) as a mobile browser, applying some extremely strange mathematics and winding up displaying massive text, with a line-height of almost an inch. This results in a page that on my laptop fits in one screen (to be fair, at 16px it'd be a page and a half) taking a couple of dozen screenfuls, with my finger needing to work overtime scrolling. All this in spite of the fact that the laptop's viewport's physical size is less than double that of the tablet's. This article's site is one of an extreme minority that don't break on my tablet. Many WordPress blogs are also tedious; I have come to _hate_ WPTouch. (Admittedly, I don't have a phone, so I don't know exactly how it affects the experience there, but far too many sites on the Internet treat a tablet as a third- or even seventy-ninth-class citizen, actively destroying their site for some reason.)

<comment><USER17> Ah! Thanks for mentioning this. I thought the Tumblr massive-font-size thing was just my Galaxy Note.

In a year of using a large-phone / small-tablet, the only site the gets it wrong is Tumblr.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> People keep talking about px. Mac and Windows use different DPI thus a reasonable size on one will be too small on the other.

Don't set a font size. Set anything that needs to be set relative to that; H1 is 200% bigger etc.

You have no idea what monitors people are using, nor what dpi they have, nor what resolution they're using, nor what fonts are on their machine.

Everyone can scroll. Not everyone can hit ctrl +, or install extensions like readbility, or install client side CSS.

</comment><comment><USER19> I'm sick of tiny, tiny type too, but not in my browser....

Rather, almost all modern video games seem to have huge amounts of _insanely_ small type, that's in many cases _literally_ unreadable on my TV because I have a smallish (20") olde-style CRT television with only analogue inputs, not a wall-sized HDTV. The pixels in the characters are blurred into unreadability—even putting my nose 10cm away from the screen and using a magnifying glass, there's text which _cannot_ be deciphered (seriously, I've tried this).

This is particularly bad with CJK text, because it has more fine details, and especially for CJK text translated from English, as they typically don't increase the character size enough to compensate for the differences (I guess they're trying to re-use the same layouts).

I find it hard to believe that even those people who _do_ own wall-sized HDTVs are comfortable reading much of this text, because people generally sit fairly far away from their television. I suppose it's a sign that video game makers are designing for the PC, and then doing a very poor job of adapting for consoles ....

<comment><USER20> Text simply doesn't work very well with SDTV resolutions. You could always use a monitor instead.

<comment><USER21> Text on an SDTV worked perfectly fine through to the PS2 days and on the Wii. The problem is that nowadays with HD consoles taking the forefront, developers are all targeting HDTV resolutions, leaving SDTV users to deal with the unreadable text size.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Put me in the opposite camp: I'm young and nearsighted, which means my close vision is very good. I usually read HN on my iPhone at min zoom, and I find it really frustrating when mobile sites helpfully won't let me zoom out to read more than a paragraph at a time. (In fact, I found hitting ⌘- a few times made this post much more readable.)

<comment><USER23> Your complaint is really the same: designers are imposing their will over users, in a manner which ultimately negatively affects user experience.

I find myself frustrated in both directions: sites whose default font is too small (and isn't resizable), and those whose default fonts are too large, and non-resizable. To say nothing of color choices which negatively impact readability.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> In general, web developers (and the designers commandeering them around) need to stop resetting font sizes on body {} or something similarily silly. The default browser font size should be the base value, and all other fonts should simply be bigger or smaller by some factor. In an ideal world, people would also start using ems instead of pxs for media queries, but alas, we probably won't see that for quite some time.

<comment><USER24> This ought to be stapled to the forehead of every web designer and programmer (and client!) in the world.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> 16px is the new minimum. You START there.

[http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/07/16-pixels-body- co...](http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/10/07/16-pixels-body-copy- anything-less-costly-mistake/)

</comment><comment><USER26> Counterpoint: On a 22", 1680x1050 screen, the text on that website is way too big to be comfortable to read.

I wonder how many comments here are from desktop machines, which ones are notebooks or tablets.

<comment><USER14> I don't personally find it too big to read, but I will go out on a limb and propose that if the main goal of your site is to provide text content to readers, don't set a font size at all.

Unfortunately I don't know of any way to get a mobile browser to display at a normal size. It seems that both Android and iPhone are configured to use microscopic text as default to guarantee a desktop-like layout.

<comment><USER3> Their default text size isn't that small, it's just that they render pages to a larger surface than then display by default, in order to avoid breaking old sites. This can be avoided by adding the appropriate meta tag to the site, but that has to be done by the developer.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> True. But I'm also sick of your giant, giant body font. Fluid layouts are especially bad at this, to the point that I need to resize my browser window every time I load a page, to make the font smaller.

The body font on - for example - this blog is way, way too big for me. My eyes hurt by reading it. I would make it 2px smaller and give it better line- height.

<comment><USER28> Agreed, and I'm surprised there aren't more of us. I don't advocate for 12px font sizes, but somewhere around 14 is probably correct. 16px is typically absurd. I wasn't even able to finish reading this blog post because it hurt so bad. Maybe if my monitor was another foot back or so, but unfortunately I'm in the common position of a cubicle with limited desktop mobility, so that's not an option.

Really, I find myself just not reading any site with absurdly big font sizes, or absurdly small. Keep designing for that 60 year old market if you want, but you're alienating the younger demographics.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The opposite of one man's "tiny-tiny" is another man's "10 lines per screen" in humongous "screw-you-,-i-have-a-retina-mbp" designer typeface.

The solution is there, but it's not working. The CSS 'pt' size measure was supposed to address this exact issue, but in reality it doesn't. "Reality" being the most of Windows world that still runs at 96 DPI (dots-per-inch), regardless of whether one has 1080 scan lines on 12" display or 768 - on 20" one. What's twice as unfortunate is that Windows added mainstream support for higher DPIs starting with Vista. So, in theory, if I were to get a high-res laptop, it'd come with a manufacturer's .inf that sets my DPI to 120 _if_ my display is physically small. In practice - na-da. I've seen this done only on selected ThinkPads, but that's it.

<comment><AUTHOR> The real solution here is to base all font size calculations off the default font in the user's browser (which the user can change). If everyone did this, you would be able to enjoy a consistent font size across most sites. It will probably never happen though.

I just wish all sites used something like the CSS3 rem (root ems) unit so we could at least make it a bit easier for the user to have a say in the font size the site uses.

<comment><USER30> Ohh, thank you so much. I knew of the upcoming viewport-dimension-relative units, but I never heard of _rem_.. I already use _em_ wherever I can, but that sometimes can get a bit hairy when nesting lots of things, so I often wished something like this existed without realizing it does. Thanks again!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I strongly disagree. Provided you have a properly configured system (correct DPI settings), anything above 14-16 font size is large and anything below 9-10 is small.

You have to code your site for the norm and not for the outliers.

There are times I like to sit back and surf, about 0.75m away from the monitor. In this case I just adjust my browser's zoom level.

<comment><USER32> This is the point the author seems to be ignoring. Most users don't have high res displays. Your font size should work well for the majority of your users.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> I'm curious if any other HN readers set their browser to 110% for this site because I do, I find it a lot more readable.

<comment><USER34> yes, and HN is especially bad on mobile because the bad antiquated html code prevents mobile browsers from optimizing it a bit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> At the beginning of my current gig I was a one-person web development shop inside a larger agency. The agency has a team of quite talented print designers who would often be tasked with providing designs for web projects. Every single time I got a design from one of them it would contain impossibly small lorem ipsum. I would make it bigger during implementation, often resulting in comments of me "messing up the design", or having the type look "goofily large".

One of the primary reasons for the small type, I learned, was that they were used to seeing type set on an 8.5"x11" page. If you open up a magazine and hold it as far away from your face as a monitor would be, you'll see some pretty small type. They just wanted the web to work the same way.

</comment><comment><USER36> The real problem here is column width--magnifying doesn't help if the column width is screwed, but it seems nobody gets this on the web for some reason. Why, in 2013, don't people understand that really long lines of text are difficult to read?

</comment><comment><USER37> Its funny that I am currently viewing this page after pressing command + a couple times because this site is guilty of this as well.

<comment><USER38> I know how you feel. I'm partially sight-impaired. I don't necessarily try for larger text in the OS itself (I'm using OS X at the moment, and the text is "just right"), but on some websites I feel the need to constantly zoom every time I visit.

I'm using HackerNew[1] right now, which gives a larger text layout, but is also a bit more flexible when I zoom in. I hope that helps a bit.

[1]: [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlnd...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hackernew/lgoghlndihpmbbgmbpjohilcphbfhddd)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I like massive fonts. This blog's font is about the right size.

The other thing I don't like is Helvetica Neue in a very light weight, especially if it's grey on bright white.

Readability and others fix the problem, but it's weird that some designers get this so wrong.

</comment><comment> B-Con While this is completely true and by far the more prevalent problem, I also dislike the other extreme, large fonts on a narrow layout. I don't see why you need a layout (for a desktop) that only manages to put 7 words per line.

</comment><comment><USER39> I don't get it either. I'd like to hear from a designer on why this ever happens. I used to work with a designer who set h2 to 11px. Boggles my mind. Does tiny type look better? I honestly don't get it.

<comment><USER40> there are a few reasons I can think of to use tiny type. For one, designers who are used to print might not understand that things should be bigger on the web, because you generally read websites at a further distance. Second, most fonts aren't designed for screens; and thus don't look good at larger sizes. 18pt for a font designed for body copy in print can be jarring sometimes. Lastly, and this might sound silly, but smaller type leaves more room for other stuff. Some people think scrolling is a pain.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> I wish I could get a list of every web developer in the world and mail them a copy of this in a holiday card with a cookie attached.

I'd like to see a report that has the age curve of internet users, a projection of that curve over the next 20 years, and that curve in relation to the average decline of eye sight over time.

My hypothesis is that given the declining birth rates all over the world, most users are going to be older and therefore have worse eyesight than younger folks.

Make your fonts bigger!

<comment><USER42> > Make your fonts bigger!

Within a 600px vertical column with 150% line spacing. With gentle contrast. Please.

Or at least test your site on all the big article reformatters.

<comment><USER32> 600px? Are you using a 1024x768 monitor from 2000?

<comment><AUTHOR> Depending on the font size, 600px gets you pretty close to the ideal of 50-75 characters per line: <http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> "More times than I've heard them complain about fonts being too large—wait, I've never heard a user complain about that."

For what it's worth, several people at my office _do_ complain that they can't read my display because the text is often too large (~18pt) for their comfort. I don't have vision problems, but would prefer not to strain my eyes any more than necessary.

</comment><comment><USER44> When I open a print book at the typeface is large, I know I'm either reading a children's book, the elderly version, or something from an author attempting to hide his lack of content.

Certainly I am not the only person who finds large type font hard to read and obnoxious?

If small font is giving you a headache you probably need a better monitor or glasses.

</comment><comment><USER45> Yes to this article. Using small fonts on a website makes too many bad assumptions about the audience.

<comment><USER46> The problem is that using large fonts on a website makes an equally bad batch of assumptions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> The tiny type thing doesn't seem to be such a problem as it used to be. In fact I often find the reverse problem of sites with type so big that it prevents much information fitting on the screen. The early 2000s where everyone used 8pt verdana seem to be behind us.

<comment><USER48> I regularly have my zoom set to 150%-200%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> > _Sometimes I'm on my computer, and Reader doesn't work on your web app. I > hit CMD + two or three times... then the layout falls apart._

In ML, in Safari, double tap a text column with two fingers. It will zoom the text to fill browser width, just like the double tap with one finger on an iPhone or iPad.

The browser will zoom into that column without changing layout, and then re- render the page to make the text full resolution. Scroll will be lightly tied to the newly zoomed column.

Double tap with two fingers again to zoom back out to full page width.

Still, agree with the premise. Designs should anticipate text size of "content" areas being changed by the user, and the layout should support reflow of arbitrary text size changes without breaking.

</comment><comment><USER42> I use "Readability" in Chrome, "Reader" in Safari Mobile, and "Readability" on AlienBlue for reddit. But the best is when I also use the "Alex" voice on Mac OS to read the text aloud. That's how I read nowadays.

Small fonts on mobile devices are a curse.

</comment><comment><USER50> I read Hacker News with 150% zoom. It's the same thing.

</comment><comment><USER51> Personal preference ahead.

I love small type. I love dense information. I prefer the dense gmail layout over the "comfortable" one with huge fonts and gaps between text.

I really dislike how text got larger and more spread out in Windows 7 over Windows XP. I dislike how huge the fonts in Ubuntu are out of the box. It makes it nearly impossible to have even 2 apps on a 1920x1080 screen without them overlapping each other.

</comment><comment><USER52> One of my favorite things about Mac laptops has long been the lower DPI (72 vs 96 for Windows, IIRC). Fonts rendered smaller, and I could fit more of it onto a small laptop screen. But I guess I'm in the minority on this, and MS had it right all along.

Except now people are making more and more sites on Macs, with text that I find overly large whenever I'm on a PC. Sigh.

</comment><comment><USER53> I can only vouch for this. Until I had to get glasses, I didn't mind; I have been zooming in ever since.

16px is a minimum, IMO.

</comment><comment><USER54> I refuse to write anything with less than 18px default font size, for this very reason. It's so infuriating when text is small. I have silly old screens and I still can't read your content!

I've read comments in this about differing DPI sizes, so I'll see if I can take that into consideration as well.

</comment><comment><USER55> The underlying problem is that people are still, to this day, treating presentation as more important than data.

Here's an idea: use the absolute bare-minimum of styling and layout, and let me decide via OS and browser preferences what default font faces and styles to use.

</comment><comment><USER56> I've been convinced that I shouldn't use small font sizes.

Now, re-reading and looking around the further reading section, I can't find the answer to the question this immediately brings up: what font sizes aren't too small?

edit: vbl posted a link that suggests 16px is a good minimum.

<comment><AUTHOR> I posted this further up, but the ideal font size for main body text is supposedly between 50-75 characters per line. The first reference I found was this one: <http://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability> but this is a very common rule of thumb

<comment><USER54> I actually did a bunch of research a while back on this very topic. I put the best links at the bottom of my resulting blog post. [https://explodie.org/writings/researching-longform- styleshee...](https://explodie.org/writings/researching-longform- stylesheet.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Perfect size, font, line height and column width on that post. Kudos!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> I don't even really mind it, since I can manually adjust the size. What drives me up walls in a murderous rage is when they lock it down with CSS, so my zooming has no impact. I'm all for your site looking however you want, but don't force it on me.

</comment><comment><USER58> 1280x800 13" non-retina MBP here, I prefer 12pt when reading, 10pt when writing code.

</comment><comment><USER16> I wonder whether <http://csslint.net/> would be receptive to the idea of warning against a font-size declaration on html/body which led to smaller- than-16px text?

</comment><comment><USER59> It was certainly worse back in the day though ;-) Around 1999-2001 there was an annoying Web design fad of 10px or 11px Verdana or Tahoma (when both were relatively new yet widespread due to Windows 98).

</comment><comment><USER60> I thought it was just me that likes my font to look like Safari's reader at all times. Good thing I know I'm not alone. I designed my blog the same way.

</comment><comment><USER61> Amen bro. If a site has tiny tiny type, I leave.

My pet peeve is low contrast font colors.

If you think you're cool because you have #ddd font on #fff background, YOU'RE NOT. JUST STOP.

<comment><USER62> So like the tiny type and low contrast colors of Hacker News...? Everyone seems to be complaining about other sites but the default font size on Hacker News is difficult to read as well. So much so that I use a custom stylesheet.

<comment><USER61> HN isn't that bad on it. It's a crappy design, but it's readable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> That being said, I ironically found the font type on this blog website too large and I've reduced it, which is sometimes I really rarely do.

</comment><comment><USER13> this is really a problem. as developers we really need to take care of this problem. I think we don't need to build everything "responsive" (sure, it's the best solution, but not every budget makes that possible).

If you're not making your site responsive, take care of font sizes. sure, your design will maybe look terrible, but it really helps.

</comment><comment><USER64> On this same note, why is the font size on HN so damn small?

Comments here are 9px Verdana.

Let's lead by example, all.

<comment><USER65> The answer to your question seems obvious: a larger font would make for poorer information density. I'm always surprised at how the alternative-to-HN websites that people build don't seem to get how important this is. They invariably show fewer posts per page.

<comment><USER64> Based on your logic, a 1 px font would be the best as it conveys the highest density of information. However, that is wrong.

<comment><USER65> My comment originally spelled out that there is a tradeoff between information density and readability, but then I deleted that part as obvious. Anyhow, the point is that HN's font sizes, as well as much of the rest of its design, are clearly an attempt to balance those two values.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> I'm sick of 6 words per line when I'm using my phone to view websites.

<comment><USER67> The design for your phone would have different sizes from the design that is used for the web. After all, the distance between your eyes and the device (monitor or phone) are different when each device is being used. That means the font sizes need to change. The recommendation is 50 to 75 character per line (as mentioned in a previous comment here).

<comment><USER66> 50 to 75 characters would be great but most "mobile optimised" websites don't allow for that. The website linked to in the original post is around 20 per line and takes a paragraph of text and stretches it out over several pages of my phones display.

<comment><USER67> No doubt, and that's a failure of the design, not of the theory of the font size. Don't use bad execution as evidence of a bad idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> I'm also sick of tiny fonts. 14px is way too small.

</comment><comment><USER69> No need to read. You're not missing anything.

</comment><comment><USER70> I think it's important to know who your audience is. Your design speaks to that and so should your font size.

</comment><comment><USER71> This is why Android reflows text on double-tap zoom. No more tiny text or zoom-and-pan. (I didn't know until recently that Mobile Safari has no comparable feature)

By the way, downvotes don't change the fact that this is a non-issue on Android and desktop because double-tap zoom puts the content at a comfortable and _customizable_ font size effectively solving this issue and that desktop browsers have the _same_ ability to set minimum font sizes and zoom levels.

edit: Apparently Mobile Safari now has this as well. I don't know if it also allows you to adjust the font size but it just goes to show that there are existing solutions to this subjective problem.

<comment><USER72> Sadly, this feature has gone away now that I have the latest greatest Nexus phone with Chrome and Jelly Bean.

Why in the world would they get rid of this feature?

<comment><USER73> I suspect they got rid of the feature because users don't like it. I found it extremely frustrating.

<comment><USER71> Instead of manually zooming and constantly having to pan back and forth to read every single line of text? No thanks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> That's actually true about Hacker News on mobile screens. Yes, you can zoom in, but then you have to scroll left and right to see the text. Extremely annoying.

<comment><USER75> Yep, the Hacker News default font size is tiny, period. And I find the 'pro- zoomer croud' pretty odd to be honest. It's more work, and it's tedious. You wouldn't pan around a book.

Personally I use the Hacker Web (web-app) on iOS [1] and Georgify Chrome extension [2] on desktop and couldn't be happier.

[1] <http://hackerwebapp.com>

[2] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/georgify/ofjfdfale...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/georgify/ofjfdfaleomlfanfehgblppafkijjhmi?hl=en)

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> Me too, I hate tiny types, they make my eyes hurt!!!</comment>


How I converted 82% of my traffic to registered users - <AUTHOR> http://alephz.com/blog/5735995932672000/how-i-converted-82-percent-my-traffic-registered-user

<comment><USER2> Hmm I'm a bit confused. Is the article saying "registered users" are just those that have clicked a button and been assigned a username/password? If so, that's a bit of a silly metric. If they've actually entered in their email or something after, then this is great.

</comment><comment><USER3> Your username is "zeek" and your password is "BR549".

100% of the people who view this page are now one of my registered viewers.</comment>


My Bizarre Stint as an Amazon Reviewer for Hire - <AUTHOR> https://onezero.medium.com/my-bizarre-stint-as-an-amazon-reviewer-for-hire-260bd6f7a8fa <comment><USER2> I think the argument that doing fake reviews on Amazon is 'bad behavior' or something to feel guilty about is laughable.

Amazon is one of the most well capitalized businesses in the known history of the universe. Their credibility is not a public good. I think siphoning off value from the Moloch of Bezos's empire is probably a net societal good.

<comment><USER3> > _I think the argument that doing fake reviews on Amazon is 'bad behavior' or > something to feel guilty about is laughable._

People don't think that it's bad behavior because it sullies Amazon's good name. People think that it's bad behavior because it's scamming other regular people so that you can make a quick buck. That's like the definition of anti- social behavior.

> _I think siphoning off value from the Moloch of Bezos 's empire is probably > a net societal good._

"And who cares about all the other fools I'm personally scamming anyway! They should have been born me!" Maybe we could try to think of any other way to contribute to the decline of Amazon that _isn't_ directly scamming our neighbors.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If everyone already assumes reviews on Amazon are fake, is it unethical to make paid reviews on Amazon?

If you lost your job from Covid, this sounds like a good way to make ends meet.

The economics to make this work seem crazy. How many other people are being paid for reviews like this guy on the same product? How many fake reviews do you need to finally have _the edge_ on your competitors who are also pumping their pages with fake reviews or is it endless stream of fake reviews? Where does it end?

<comment><USER3> > _If everyone..._

This is a wildly false assumption based on being inside a tech bubble. In rounded terms, the set of customers who assume that Amazon reviews are fake is closer to nobody than to everybody.

> _is it unethical to make paid reviews on Amazon?_

Yes. The word for this is "fraud". Even if you believed that all of your reviews were 100% honest and objective, you'd just be deceiving yourself too if you didn't bear the cost.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Anybody know whether the kindle book section is also being actively gamed to such an extent?</comment>


Being a Female Programmer: How Is It for You? - <AUTHOR> https://dev.to/ilonacodes/being-a-female-programmer-how-is-it-for-you-i7d <comment><USER2> Genuine question: Does anyone have any anecdotes or similar blog posts about men in women-dominated careers talking about the 'girls club' and deploring being excluded from it?

</comment><comment><USER3> There was a blog post years ago from a stay at home dad who's spouse was a military member. He talked about the friction that he experienced.</comment>


Facial recognition CEO: software is not ready for use by law enforcement - <AUTHOR> https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/facial-recognition-software-is-not-ready-for-use-by-law-enforcement/ <comment><USER3> As in many things, a blanket statement of 'not ready for use' isn't really the most helpful way to look at the situation. There's a range of ways such technology could be usefully deployed, even with current technological problems, that might aid law enforcement officers in the field. It's a very wide continuum from zero to "automatically locking people away for life based on a facial match".

As the article says, there are huge concerns about how such tools might be misused, whether legally or not. So the title might more accurately stated not as 'facial recognition software is not ready for law enforcement', but that 'law enforcement is not ready for facial recognition software'. I'm fairly sure there are countries out there where citizens do not lie awake at night in fear of their government, and where such technologies might be responsibly deployed as a tool in law enforcement.

<comment><USER4> Regardless of how you try to rephrase it, the fact remains the same: the technology doesn't work well enough.

<comment><USER5> Doesn't some kind of facial recognition work well enough for Vegas casinos?

Instead of police being able to scan one face at a time as they walk their beats looking for suspects, an automated system could scan everyone in view and then alert that an suspect has been identified with xx% accuracy.

Every week on next door someone posts a video still of a vagrant or thief etc. either from a broken car window, hit and run, lurker, etc. Automation would help if the perps. We, as a society, might want to adjust the dials on punishment, given the efficiency, but we shouldn't give up the chance to minimize these crimes when reasonable.

<comment><USER6> It is a bit more complex. There are few scientific studies on this topic. See this one: [http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a...](http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a/buolamwini18a.pdf)

"We find that these datasets are overwhelmingly composed of lighter-skinned subjects (79.6% for IJB-A and 86.2% for Adience) and introduce a new facial analysis dataset which is balanced by gender and skin type. We evaluate 3 commercial gender classification systems using our dataset and show that darker-skinned females are the most misclassified group (with error rates of up to 34.7%). The maximum error rate for lighter-skinned males is 0.8%.

<comment><USER5> That's pretty interesting. Given those stats, why can't it be selectively deployed on light skinned perps till the system is trained better on other skin color classifications in order to achieve similar accuracies? And in the mean time catch some baddies.

<comment><USER7> Interesting, so given your implementation only targeting light skinned "suspects" would using this be racist?

<comment><USER5> I don't think so. It would target more skin tones as it became better at identifying suspects accurately. The aim is to reduce crime regardless who commits it. We have a system which can help on a subset but not another. Why should we ignore the potential only because we cannot deploy it against everyone?

It's like saying, well, since we can't successfully prosecute big bankers, well also ignore smaller fry bankers who are sloppier cuz it's not fair to them.

In the end everyone but the criminals benefit. Eventually one hopes the system is well enough trained so it can be deployed for all skin tones.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I dunno. We already had the Orwellian scare when security cameras started getting ubiquitous. We keep kicking that fear can down the road, but we don't have to. We've already seen what security cameras are _really_ good for, watching the watchers.

It doesn't make sense to surveil regular people, but it makes a heck of a lot of sense to surveil public officials while they're doing their jobs. We went from "the police are going to sit back and watch cameras of everybody and show up at our doors to arrest us!" to "Damn cop department won't release his body cam footage because they claim it was out of battery power!"

I think facial recognition is going to follow that same sort of acceptance arc. Nobody except China is going to have the stones to build a bureaucracy around deploying it and we're going to want it to solve a way more pernicious problem once we find a killer app.

If you're really worried about government malfeasance, all you have to do is to actually read some of the Wikileaks dumps and go looking for smoking guns. Everybody else already did that and other than the NSA programs, nobody's found anything really interesting.

<comment><USER9> I agree with you for now. However, these things are going to advance and improve. I think the biggest Orwellian issue is the targeting of dissonance. The government can't watch everyone and process the data but they can target those who disagree with policy X or politician Y or company Z.

<comment><USER8> There's nothing new about government targeting of dissidents. The worst case scenario there played out in the fifties with McCarthy. Society survived.

<comment><USER10> "Society survived" is a pretty low bar to set. Why not aim for "innocent people don't face negative consequences for harmless acts"?

<comment><USER8> The bar is getting ordinary people to be concerned about the possibility for America to turn into dystopia. While yours is a laudable goal, it's well within the ability of our existing political-economic system to ratchet closer to over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> We all know the systems are biased, because we feed them biased information - Cathy ONeil did a great job on this with "Weapons of Math Destruction" What puzzles me is why he doesn't just provide the counterexample to scare the hell out of everyone - if he inverts the racial distributions in the training datasets, then you'd have a system where the shoe was on the other foot, and both argument and fuel for removing bias from the training sets - <USER2> recognition systems only know what they know, and they don't really understand that they might not know, they only know the confidence they have in knowing - hence this is my favorite happy place example of the problem --[https://youtu.be/UFVB5rnqjyY](https://youtu.be/UFVB5rnqjyY)

</comment><comment><USER12> I agree in general with the spirit of the article, at least as I understood it: facial recognition can empower oppression and lead to even more doubtful convictions, for example it could erroneously supply additional rationale to suspect or convict a person, reinforce biases, etc.

However, I do not get the "companies unite against selling X to government" approach. It is, to me, both misguided (restricting gov't from buying something private companies can buy will simply lead to relabeling or minor redesigns of the same technology) and naive (to work, it needs a very broad agreement which IMO will not get enough traction).

An approach that could work better is to inform, not restrict: make sure that all imagery and videos used or considered for use police are _public_ unless there is a short term, limited exception. And make police wear cameras whenever they wear uniforms and make _those_ video streams public, too (maybe with a few hour lag in case there is a tactical need). My 2c.

<comment><USER13> We can't restrict what they do with something once we sell it to them. Only Congress can. So, we can refuse to sell it to them or make it for them.

<comment><USER14> Won't _they_ just buy _it_ from _someone else_?

For whatever values of _they_ , _it_ , and _someone else_ suit the situation.

There is no coherent _we_ to do the _refusing_.

<comment><USER15> The rest of "we" can choose not to do business with the part of "we" that helps government subvert society.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > _We need movement from the top of every single company in this space to put > a stop to these kinds of sales._

What are some historical examples in which industry coalitions of unprovoked top private executives refused government contracts in the name of the civil rights of their fellow citizens?

<comment><USER11> Enhanced radiation weapons, aka neutron bombs - there was initial excitement followed by a mass exodus - the govt held on for a while longer, but they move slowly - the labs and contractors visibly got cold feet over this

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> Would ir LEDs built into sunglasses be effective in combatting this trend. There was an article on hackaday about a person that did that to his license plate holder to deal with red light cameras.

<comment><USER18> Nah, you just need some cool makeup: [https://cvdazzle.com/](https://cvdazzle.com/)

<comment><USER19> This is the best explanation I've ever seen for why hairstyles in sci-fi movies tend to be original to say the least.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> It seems obvious that, regardless of the legality, it will be used in parallel construction. Once these tools are made, they will be used.

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

</comment><comment><USER21> Yet Axon (formally Taser International) is building systems to recognizes faces for law enforcement body cams. [1]

Especially disturbing is that these systems seem to have a much higher rate of misidentifying minorities.

[1] [https://www.npr.org/2018/05/12/610632088/what-artificial- int...](https://www.npr.org/2018/05/12/610632088/what-artificial-intelligence- can-do-for-local-cops?t=1530009904658)

</comment><comment><USER22> >Facial recognition technologies, used in the identification of suspects, negatively affects people of color. To deny this fact would be a lie.

Since, instead of support for this statement, the CEO of this 'company' decided that shaming his reader would be more effective, I'll give you his support. It's an article that he wrote based on studies that show there are significantly higher error rates in gender and race classification in some algorithms, without ever showing why this even matters within the context of how facial recognition algorithms are or would be used by law enforcement. Nor did he show that the specific algorithms being proposed have these biases, and not just some other ones. Nor did he show that race classification is even a result that law enforcement runs.

[1] [https://www.kairos.com/blog/face-off-confronting-bias-in- fac...](https://www.kairos.com/blog/face-off-confronting-bias-in-face- recognition-ai)

</comment><comment><USER23> On a side note - I'm unable to square this fear of watchers with parents happily singing to their kids - "he knows when you've been sleeping .. he knows when you're awake .. he knows when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake"

</comment><comment><USER24> Their FR is not ready for Law Enforcement, because it is weak, poorly designed, and overly expensive. They are smucks trying to capitalize on Amazon's name with generic, low quality FR. Anyone that understands FR knows to go to the NIST web site and use the companies competing to be the best for government contracts. Their algorithm stats are all tested and the results published at NIST.

</comment><comment><USER25> Does Kairos actually produce any useful software or does it just exist so Brackeen gets publicity?

</comment><comment><USER26> decidethefuture.org

</comment><comment><USER27> Why are all of these articles written under the premise that this software sends you automatically to jail? It's just a first step in the vetting process.

<comment><USER28> I think the even bigger problem here is that if face recognition software is malfunctioning those who have been identified by mistake are suddenly subjected to an investigation that can pose serious threat to their privacy.

<comment><USER29> Not just "privacy". I would imagine some judges will issue search or even arrest warrants based on the information ("it's science!"), which might mean in the worst case the police might roll up to your house, shoot your dog, scare your children, take you into custody (even without an arrest warrant if you're somehow deemed "resisting") or even shoot you because they got scared of how you look, you may lose your job because you cannot show up to work while you're in jail, your neighbors will think you're a hardened criminal, etc.

Even if the courts do not convict in the end, a lot of damage might already been done.

The pseudo-scientific hair analysis stuff performed by the FBI showed the dangers of "science" and "tech"[1]. People went to real prison because investigators, judges and juries overestimated the flaky results the sometimes outright negligent pseudo-science produced. I imagine some people were shoot during arrests based on that evidence, died in prison or committed suicide.

There also was the Phantom of Heilbronn here in Germany, where police looked for a master criminal and serial killer for ages (2001 to 2009), but it turned out the materials they used to do DNA swaps at crime scenes were contaminated at the factory by a worker[2]. For years nobody of the many involved in the investigations even considered questioning the DNA results.

So even if the science and tech is sound (which it really isn't in case of facial recognition yet, if ever), wrong application, common mistakes, and misunderstanding the results are real problems.

[1] [https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi- testimo...](https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-testimony-on- microscopic-hair-analysis-contained-errors-in-at-least-90-percent-of-cases-in- ongoing-review)

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

<comment><USER30> There's a lot of assumption about future behavior here.

I think there are a couple reasons to be hopeful about court systems taking a more nuanced view of this technology: 1) it cannot be denied that it _is_ imprecise, and 2) it's pretty easy for laity to understand (at least in principle) how it works. DNA evidence is effectively _magic_ by comparison.

I actually think the imprecision is an asset for this technology. I would much rather this tool be 95% reliable than 99.99% reliable. The former inherently requires law enforcement to work harder; the later tempts "oh the machine said so it must be right".

<comment><USER29> People went to prison over expert testimony from FBI scientists over hair analysis in the past (not just warrants, actual convictions).

Like this guy, who spent 23 years in prison because FBI told the jury some hair they found was his... while it was actually not even human but dog hair.

>An FBI analyst testified that one of the hairs from the stocking mask linked Tribble to the crime and "matched in all microscopic characteristics." >Tribble's attorneys were successful in obtaining mitochondrial DNA testing on the 13 hairs recovered from the stocking mask. None of the hairs—including the alleged match—implicated Tribble or Wright. Further, the analysis revealed FBI analysts' errors, including mistakenly calling a dog hair human. [https://www.innocenceproject.org/cases/santae- tribble/](https://www.innocenceproject.org/cases/santae-tribble/)

As for face recognition, I wonder if you're correct. I'd expect a lot of people think it's very precise. Well, at least the "My Sibling can unlock my iPhone with their face" debacle might have generated some press to combat that misconception.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> lol tell that to china

<comment><USER32> Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> "We lost the contract to Amazon"

</comment><comment><USER34> This is a data retention/sharing issue, not a technology issue. Nobody cares if their face, license plate or cell phone is seen and mapped to their identity as long as the interaction and its metadata is soon forgotten. It's the storage of this information that causes the problem.

When police can accurately determine who they're looking for based on their appearance and can quickly determine whether the person they're bothering is that person they are more limited in how they can harass people in the present. If no records are kept big brother is more limited in his capacity to harass people in the future.

Most people don't have any warrants out, haven't recently been recorded on a security camera robbing a liquor store, etc. Being able to ID people reliably without stopping them is the last thing law enforcement wants (let's ignore the three letter agencies for a minute here) because it makes it much harder to stop people for being "suspicious" or "looking like a drug dealer" (license plates provide similar protection for cars, they can't just stop every silver Camry because a silver Camry was once stolen).

License plates and cell phones almost map 1:1 to your identity. Nobody has a problem with license plates or phones as long as they're not used to stalk people at scale. It's the creation of the data-set that can be used to stalk people. We need to stop creating these data sets in order to prevent the stalking at scale (which is the real issue here, even the article says that).

Imagine a world where the speed limits were followed like normal laws (i.e. they were reasonable enough that most people didn't have to go out of their way to follow them). The police in that world would hate radar guns because they're accurate (and can be audited for accuracy) Big brother would hate them because they don't record metadata for each reading. Facial recognition, ALPRs, need to work like that. History has proven time and again that you can't keep technology in the closet. Better it be used on our terms than theirs.

We're going to have to confront the data retention and government/commercial stalking/surveillance issue eventually. Getting angry over APLRs, stingrays or facial recognition is just playing whack-a-mole. I'm still gonna play whack-a- mole until we solve the big problem though.

Edit: If people disagree I'd love to hear why. This isn't Reddit.

<comment><USER20> I imagine people are disagreeing with the way you describe it as a software problem when the firmware in those devices will be unverifiable, batteries will conveniently run out, and they surely won't be 100% tamper proof.

Just type in 'alexa google recording' and see the news of them being used.

Aside: Everyone I've described the securus scandal to has a problem with phones.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I followed the linked article sited in this post - "Face Off: Confronting Bias in Face Recognition AI" which states:

"Fortunately, the matter of algorithmic ethnic bias, or "the coded gaze" as Buolamwini calls it, can be corrected with a lot of cooperative effort and patience while the AI learns. If you think of machine learning in terms of teaching a child, then consider that you cannot reasonably expect a child to recognize something or someone it has never or seldom seen. Similarly, in the case of algorithmic ethnic bias, the system can only be as diverse in its recognition of ethnicities as the catalogue of photos on which it has been trained."

As this is extremely concerning. I had some questions:

Are the training sets for company's selling facial recognition technology considered proprietary and therefore not verifiable as free from bias?

Is it not possible to develop a standard or criteria that a company's training set has sufficient distribution to be free of racial bias? Is this just not possible for some technical reason?

</comment><comment><USER24> There is not a single statement in that article that is not some type of fear implied concept that fails under observation. The "FR is biased towards people of color" issue was publicized a few years ago, and the industry adjusted - most are no longer biased, and that bias was a mathematical color space issue and nothing racial. It's an empty article cut and pasting fear statements from popular media, and simply Kiaros getting their name in the news.

<comment><USER13> > that bias was a mathematical color space issue and nothing racial.

What is the difference? Bias towards a color? What are you saying?

<comment><USER24> The mathematical bias was the fact that dark skin has less illumination range, therefore less information to separate dark skinned faces. The bias was not such that a darker skinned person would be confused with a different toned person, it would have issues telling the difference between people with the same darker skin tone and similar facial shapes.

<comment><USER36> The bias will also have biased consequences, like for 1 dark skin criminal you search for you will find more suspects with a much higher probability or score then a light skin person, this would mean more arrests/interrogations.

I would also not blame the math but the implementation aka the coding/modeling of the problem.

<comment><USER24> which has been corrected.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> Technically speaking, face recognition has been a solved problem since the early 2000s despite facing few challenges nowadays including non-frontal, tiny or partial real-time detection. The most common algorithm is to output the bounding box (i.e. rectangle) coordinates for each present face, extract the facial landmarks (nose, pupils, mouth, etc.) points for the target face (the more landmarks you have, the more accurate the result is), perform some Euclidean distance calculation (sort of hash) and compare this to the existing face hashes (i.e. police database). The highest score is considered a potential match.

You can develop your own face recognition software providing a good dataset (i.e CelebA, LFW or the fed dataset if you have access to) using our embedded computer vision library[1] that we just released earlier this month or using the PixLab /facecompare HTTP endpoint ([https://pixlab.io/cmd?id=facecompare](https://pixlab.io/cmd?id=facecompare)).

[1]: [https://github.com/symisc/sod](https://github.com/symisc/sod)</comment>


OkCupid Labs Data - Cats will get you laid - <AUTHOR> http://blog.ravelapp.com/post/52812102540/women-like-dogs-more-but-cats-will-get-you-laid

<comment><USER2> It seems cat pictures correlate with longer conversations. They then suggest this means hooking up is more likely (perhaps OkC knows more about the signifiers of hookup than they are publishing here).

Couldn't the opposite also be suggested? Dog pictures mean less talking more meeting up in person, whereas cat lovers are conversationalists?

This entire article strikes me as very sharable though, cats = sex.

[edit]: I initially missed "Ravel is built with love by OkCupid Labs in San Francisco, CA" in the sidebar.

<comment><USER3> >I hate to ignore the actual content, but this is not from OkCupi Labs, nor is it OkC Lab data, it's from Ravel App.

From the page: "Ravel is built with love by OkCupid Labs in San Francisco, CA"

<comment><USER4> it's also got way more speculative bullshit and tired innuendo (and much less raw data) than the okcupid posts.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Dogs also take more time to take care of than cats, which means their owners are less likely the type to go out on dates all the time. I barely know any single men who own dogs, unless they live with their parents, or are involved already. I don't think it directly has anything to do with having a cat or a dog in your photo..

</comment><comment><USER6> Happy thought for the day: toxoplasma gondii can be transmitted via cat feces, and is associated with promiscuity and schizophrenia, among other things.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1764421/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1764421/)

</comment><comment><USER7> Interesting, but I'd like to see a more rigorous experimental methodology.

<comment><USER8> Only on HackerNews...</comment></comment>


Rogue techie owes S.F. nearly $1.5 million - <AUTHOR> http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/crime/detail?entry_id=89240

<comment><USER2> I remember getting a frantic call from someone about this. The SF network was an example of what not to do :)</comment>


Show HN: My first iPhone app - Posing App - <AUTHOR> http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/posing-app/id492085243 Your suggestions for the second version? <comment><USER2> Nice work. I guess this would be also useful for artists (traditional/digital 2D or 3D) for references. Actually, from my point of view, that could be even a larger market to thrive for. Did you draw all the poses yourself?

</comment><comment><USER3> Congrats! I know how tough it can be to get that first app out there. Keep up the great work.

</comment><comment><USER4> Nice job on the app. I'm not a photographer but I think this app will come in handy anyway.</comment>